How to advertise on Facebook Marketplace

Selling on Facebook Marketplace can open your business up to brand new revenue streams. Unfortunately, it isn’t always as easy as listing your products. 

If your sales need an extra boost, you may want to run some adverts on Facebook Marketplace. These work differently to standard Facebook ads, but are still quite easy to manage.

If you’re interested in learning how to advertise on Facebook Marketplace, then keep reading our guide. 

We’ll go over:

• Why Facebook Marketplace is good for advertising
• How to advertise a business on Facebook Marketplace

Marketplace is a great place to advertise, boasting one billion monthly visitors in 2021. So don’t be afraid to take advantage of Facebook’s hard work and start advertising. 

If you haven’t heard of it before, Marketplace is Facebook’s version of eBay. Users can list products and sell them, using Facebook Marketplace as a ‘broker’ of sorts. 

Facebook Marketplace typically has a range of sellers, from independent users all the way to larger businesses. This is what makes the platform so useful — but it can be competitive. 

When individuals sell on Marketplace, the products are usually sold to local audiences. Larger businesses may have access to various shipping channels, but small businesses might not. 

Of course, if you were able to agree a shipping cost with a buyer, then you may wish to offer shipping and expand your region. 

There are several opportunities available to you through Facebook Marketplace. If you’re interested in learning how your business can benefit, keep reading. 

Facebook Marketplace opens up your products to a larger audience, who may not be aware of your business. By selling your products on Facebook, you’re giving them an opportunity to look at your business, and visit you directly in the future. 

How many times have you second-guessed an online purchase from an independent website? With dramatic increases in cyber-crime, it’s more important than ever to make your customers comfortable with buying online.

Using a trusted service, like Marketplace, can help with that. Almost everyone is aware of, and trusts, Facebook. By using their marketplace, you give up a portion of your revenue in exchange for greater consumer confidence. 

Facebook has its very own ‘Ads Manager’, so you can have complete control over all your advertising. This includes costs and placement. In some cases, you can even have your marketplace ads shared to Instagram too!

To ensure your products sell as well as possible, your ads are ‘targeted’ and appear alongside similar products. This means that customers who are already looking for similar products will see yours more often.

When it comes to advertising on Facebook Marketplace, you can advertise specific products/services or your business as a whole. Viewers can then click on your business’ profile page to see your entire catalogue, or be taken to your website. 

In order to run ads on Marketplace, you first need to start an ad campaign. You do this by opening the ‘ad manager’ and clicking the green ‘Create’ button. 

The ad manager is responsible for controlling all the ads associated with your account. 

The campaign lets you choose different objectives, which are broken down into the following categories:

• Awareness 
• Consideration
• Conversion

Each choice has an “i” icon you can hover over to get more information on the audience it’ll target. 

Once you’ve chosen your campaign objective, just give your campaign a name and click ‘continue’. 

Now it’s time for you to decide where your ads are going to go. If you selected Automatic Placements, it’s possible that your ads will show on the Marketplace. 

If you prefer to choose exactly where your ads go, then you’ll have to make sure your ads are selected manually. 

For example, you can’t currently choose just Marketplace. In order to advertise on Marketplace, you’ll need to select Facebook Feeds too. If you don’t, you’ll receive an error message telling you to select Facebook Feeds. 

You’ve set the campaign up, now all you have to do is upload your advert. While you could stick to uploading an image, it’s better to quickly grab a viewer’s attention. 

How can you do this? By uploading a video advertisement. This video can go over your product’s best features, or announce a special offer. 

The specifics are up to you, but what is important is that you make the advert interesting. A boring advert won’t attract much attention.

At the end of every campaign, you should go over your metrics. Your metrics are detailed statistics that let you know exactly how effective your campaign was.

We mentioned at the start that you could select specific objectives for your ad campaign. Now is when you can check how successful it has been. 

Go over your results and compare it to previous data. Your findings might help you better understand your target audience, or uncover a new audience you hadn’t expected. 

When advertising a service, you might want customers to ‘click through’ to your website instead of stopping at your marketplace. This can change the type of ads you run. 

For example, earlier we mentioned choosing campaign objectives. Getting people to your website would be most effective with the ‘traffic’ objective, but ‘catalogue sales’ might be better for products.

Also remember that people on social media scroll quickly. Whatever you’re advertising, think about how you can make it most desirable to potential customers within a few seconds. 

Whether you’re advertising products or services on Facebook Marketplace, you need to be sure that you’re sticking to their rules. 

There’s a long list of types of products or services that are prohibited, including alcohol and other ‘adult products’. To avoid your advert being taken down, it’s best to give the guidelines a quick read through before you start. 

Social media is a great tool for marketing your business, and it doesn’t always have to cost you money. In fact, when using content marketing strategies, it can be more important to get posts (not adverts) in front of people. 

One solution is to use an Instagram hashtag and get that trending. Big companies do this for their marketing campaigns, but you can do it too. We’ve written a great guide for you to read ‘how to trend a hashtag on Instagram’.

If you’re thinking about other marketing methods that don’t cost you money, there are plenty. We’ve drawn up some of the best in our article ‘6 tactics to grow a social media shop’.

If you’re selling through multiple streams, it can be difficult to follow your money. Instead of spending hours stressing about it, use accounting software to make your life easy.

Countingup is the two-in-one business current account and accounting software app. By combining the two, Countingup has developed a brilliant tool for watching your money with ease.

No more pouring over the computer with spreadsheets, now you can manage all of your finances from your phone.

Download the app for free today.