Imagine you are in the food business. You have a nice quirky little corner side street food stall where the granny of your house is the chef serving your family specialities. Every day she assembles a couple of dry twigs and strikes stones together until she can light a fire on which she can cook the meal your customer ordered. Everything was working out well for you until another guy set up a stall where he cooks on an automatic microwave which doesn’t need the effort to light a fire. Things are still okay for you, only you realize that your grandmother has to continuously monitor the fire, while this other guy just leaves the meal in the microwave to cook by itself, while he spends time humouring his customers, or starting to prepare another meal. His business is doing much better – he serves more meals a day, customers like him because he spends time with them and that makes them keep coming back to him. His business is growing while you are, well, you get the point. The same goes for using automated ads to run your marketplace.
The Difference that automated ads can bring for your Facebook Marketplace
Let us explore in more detail why exactly you need automated ads to run you marketplace and what is the advantage they give you.
Precise Targeting
When it comes to getting the biggest bang for the bucks you put into advertising, just reaching out to a huge audience is not enough. You grandma’s chicken pot pie can be quite a
Lip-smacker, but you certainly don’t want to serve it to a vegetarian. Hence, you need to be very precise about who are the people who want to see your ad. Facebook does help you in this regard by being a database with the entire data of what people’s interest and inclinations are, what their spending habits etc. are. When you automate your ad, you will be able to automatically assign filters to exclude people who won’t be interested in your product, or people who have recently bought it. If you think you don’t want this precise targeting, you may as well try sending out a second serving of grandma’s chicken pot pie to the same customer and see if he’ll have it.
Audience segmentation
With automation you will also be able to create various audience sets according to their personal preferences. That way you will know, which customer is here for your chicken pot pie, who’s the one who stops by for desserts, and the ones who bring their kids for those kiddy meals. In other words, you keep the waiter from mixing up the order, show each customer exactly what they want and spike their interest into walking into grandma’s little kitchen.
Split Testing
Let’s say your grandma has churned out a couple of new recipes creating different flavours of the classic pot pie and you want to see how your customers are going to welcome it. With automated ads, you will be able to run split tests on how well your customers are receiving each version and decide if you want to have different versions being sent out to different customers or just put one of them permanently on the menu.
Pushing customers through the conversion funnel
You are using all of the above tactics and business seems to be going better now. But when you want your business to grow, you want new customers to come in. Using Facebook automation, you will be able to generate referrals rewards for people who are your biggest fans (when you use automation, you will know who these people are), ie the people who are most likely to recommend you to others. With referral rewards, not only do you push your biggest fans to do the marketing for you by activation their reward behaviour, you are more likely to get more customers easily because people will show more inclination towards information coming from people they know.
Let’s say there are a couple of people who have always shown interest in your business. They seem to be liking and commenting on the ads which show the behind the screen action in your grandma’s kitchen, ads of today’s menu etc. But they have never really tried your food. Using precise targeting you can send out special offers for such customers or inform them about the upcoming Christmas menu to push them further to walk in through your doors.
These are only a few examples of how automated ads can be a game changer for your Facebook marketplace. There is a lot more that you can do with automated ads, for example interact with customers, and understand their interest better, so you can offer them a customised product. That’s the whole lot of opportunities that Facebook automation holds for you. However, if you still feel that you could still do it old school, you aren’t wrong. After all businesses did survive in the 19th century too when digitalization and automation hadn’t swept in. But when you start weighing the performance of your business in an automated ads environment vs one without automation, you will know which way to go.
