With over two billion people using Facebook every month, Facebook needs to be a big part of your marketing plan. There is a massive market out there just waiting to buy your product or use your services.

“I’m already advertising on Facebook—I boost posts.”

We hear this a lot. So let’s clear up this up: boosting is not advertising. Sure, you can improve your post’s reach with boosting. But your targeting options are extremely limited. Yes, you can choose behaviors and interests, demographics, and geography. But, you can’t use your custom audiences. Once you have a pixel installed on your website (it’s a snippet of code), you can build custom audiences based on your website traffic, your Facebook page and post engagement, your Instagram traffic, and your email lists. By creating Lookalike Audiences, you’ll see real results with Facebook Ads. Boosting does not allow you to use any of these audience options!

Let’s show you the limitations with boosting. It only gives you two options for your objective—website visits and engagement. With a Facebook ad, we can pick an objective and maximize it: awareness, reach, traffic, engagement, conversions and so more.

Ads offer more objectives

Here’s another key reason ads are much better – Facebook Ads Offer More Objectives Than Boosted Posts. There’s 11 objectives that you can choose from opposed to the 2 objectives that the boost post option provides you.

The reason why you want to have more objectives at your disposal when advertising on Facebook is because you are defining what actions you want audiences to take when they see your ad. You can also follow your buyer’s journey directly, to better optimize your campaigns towards your audience’s specific needs. By choosing certain objectives you are spending your advertising dollars more efficiently at an audience that is likely to convert into a lead or an eventual sale.

Here’s  the 11 Facebook ad objectives and what they cater to:

• Brand Awareness – Increases the of awareness of your brand by reaching more people who are more likely to be interested and pay attention to your ads.
• Reach – Show your ad to the maximum amount of people as possible.
• Traffic – Optimize your ads to lead your potential customers to a destination on or off Facebook such as your website or app.
• Engagement – Can get mistaken for the boost post option. This objective gets more people to engage with your page or your post. With ads you can target more engagement to not only specific posts but also events, offers, and page likes.
• App Install – Get more people to download your app by sending them to the app store.
• Video Views – Promote your videos to get more people to view your video content such as product launches, brand stories, and behind the scenes footage.
• Lead Generation – Drive and capture more lead information such as e-mail addresses and phone numbers.
• Messages – Invite people to send you messages or have conversations with your business on messenger.
• Conversion – Have more people take actions on your website, app, or messenger such as making a purchase or filling out a form. You can also add a Facebook pixel to track these actions.
• Catalog Sales – Create tailored ads that show items from your catalog or e-commerce store based on your targeted audience.
• Store Visits – Promote multi-location brick and mortar businesses that drive more traffic to your locations.

Which option looks like you have more opportunities to maximize your Facebook spend? We’ve only scratched the surface here but we hope it’s clear. No more boosting. Get real results with Facebook ads!

If you would like to learn more about how your business can use social media marketing to grow your business, don’t hesitate to speak with one of our marketing experts at Harper.

Contact us today to get the conversation started!

About the Author: Steve Harper

Radio/TV and media personality Steve Harper leads Harper Marketing – a premier, full service marketing agency on Long Island, NY.  Harper Marketing specializes in digital and traditional marketing for businesses of all sizes.