How to use Facebook for marketing your business in 2025

You already know your business is great. However, convincing potential customers can feel like an uphill battle, especially if you don’t have the time and money to build your own website, or launch an exhaustive marketing campaign. 

The good news? With Facebook, you don’t need to break the bank to market your business effectively. Facebook remains the world’s largest social network, offering unparalleled reach to small businesses, as well as a treasure trove of free marketing tools. 

If you aren’t sure how to promote your business using Facebook, we will guide you through the process in nine simple steps. We also explain why the social media platform is more relevant than ever in 2025, and offer advice on how to make the most of the network without draining your wallet.

Is Facebook still a marketing tool in 2025? 

While it’s true that apps like TikTok and Instagram have become the social network du jour for many young users, don’t be swayed by talk of Facebook’s decline. The platform holds the title of the largest social network in the world, and continues to be a powerful ally for businesses, due to its wealth of free marketing tools designed to help them improve their reach. 

In fact, with surveys finding that 91% of organisations use Facebook to market their business and connect with customers, the platform is proving to be more popular than ever in 2025. 

Key advantages of Facebook marketing for small businesses

Still not convinced? Here are some reasons why Facebook continues to be a powerful marketing tool for businesses. 

• Free to get started: it’s completely free to create a Business Page with the platform. This means you can give your business a digital storefront, display your products and services, and connect with customers without spending a penny.
• Easy to reach existing local customers: Facebook’s advanced algorithms connect you to people in your local area, helping to drive digital foot traffic to your business.
• Useful tools built-in: Meta’s Business Suite provides businesses access to detailed analytics, content scheduling tools, and ad managers, preventing them from having to manage these processes with external software.
• Great test-bed before launching your own site: Facebook offers startups or small businesses a low-risk environment to test ideas and gauge customer interest before investing more heavily in an online store. 
• Effective way to close leads – Facebook’s organic and paid marketing strategies can also be extremely lucrative, with 30% of UK businesses revealing that the platform is crucial for revenue generation. 

9 steps to create a Facebook marketing strategy

Facebook is one of the best marketing tools out there, if you know how to use it right. Learn how to make the most of the social media platform in nine steps. 

1. Set up a Facebook Business Page

Before you do anything else, you need to make your business ‘Facebook official’. Luckily, setting up a Facebook Business page is simple; all you need to do is:

• Log in to your personal Facebook account
• Select “Create New Page” under the “Pages” section 
• Add in basic information like your business name, industry, and a short description
• Upload a profile picture and cover photo
• Add contact details, your physical location (if applicable), and business hours
• Start prompting your page by posting and building a network

For a more detailed rundown, learn how to set up a Facebook Business Page in simple, easy-to-follow steps.

2. Set goals

Marketing your business on Facebook without a clear vision is a recipe for disaster. So, before you steam ahead with your strategy, you need to set out what you want to achieve with clear and measurable goals.

We recommend making the goals SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. By applying this popular framework, your objectives will be well-defined, trackable, and more likely to be successfully achieved. For example, some SMART goals could be:

• Increase Facebook page reach by 15% in Q1 2026
• Achieve an average of 5 comments per post by the end of January

Another useful framework is OKRs: Objectives and Key Results. This method focuses on measurable results and will help you align your marketing efforts with your broader business goals. An example of an OKR goal could be:

• Objective: Foster a highly engaged and interactive community on our Facebook page
• Key Result: Increase average post engagement rate (likes, comments, shares) to 10% by March 20, 2026

3. Know your target audience

To avoid wasting money by misdirecting your marketing campaign, you’ll have to learn how to identify your target audience. 

If you haven’t pinpointed your audience already, Facebook’s Audience Insights tool within Meta Business Suite makes light work of this task. The platform provides you with detailed demographic data like age, gender, location, and language, as well as interests, behaviours, and Page likes, to help you analyse your existing audience or explore new segments. 

You can use these insights to boost the efficiency of your campaign by refining your ad targeting, creating more relevant content, and ultimately, optimising your marketing campaigns to reach the most receptive demographics.

4. Create a content calendar

A content calendar helps relieve a lot of stress. It also makes your marketing strategy much more likely to achieve its goals, with recent polling revealing that 64% of the most successful companies have a documented content calendar to help plan out content in advance.

Start by choosing your platform of choice: this could be a simple spreadsheet, a calendar app, or a project management tool like monday.com or Asana. Then, use your goals to establish which core themes and categories your content revolves around. You can then brainstorm content ideas to get the ball rolling, before determining what key information each post will include.

5. Post regularly

Now you’ve finessed your content calendar, it’s time to get your posts out into the world!

In order to please the algorithmic gods, it’s best practice to start out posting two to three times a week. This way, you’ll be able to build a consistent presence and maximise your visibility, without overwhelming your existing followers. 

The optimal time to post will vary on your audience, but general trends for 2025 suggest that content performs the best when it’s posted on weekday mornings (e.g., 9am-12pm Monday-Friday). Some data also indicates good engagement during lunch breaks and early evenings, while Sunday afternoons and late-night posts generally see lower reach.

6. Use Facebook advertising

Launching ads on Facebook lets you market to targeted audiences without breaking the bank. There are also lots of ad formats to choose from, including video, collections and carousel, giving you full creative control over your message. 

To start with, we recommend having a modest budget of around £5 to £10 per day to test the waters. You can then perform A/B testing to see which type of advertisement performs better with your target audience. By following this iterative process, you’ll be able to steadily fine-tune your campaign without wasting precious ad spend. 

If you want to keep initial costs even lower, that’s possible too, as one of the best things about Facebook ads is that they can be tailored to any budget. Learn about how much Facebook ads cost in our comprehensive guide.

7. Share customer feedback

The voice of one happy customer can trump the most curated marketing campaign. So, another way you can effectively attract potential customers is by sharing positive reviews on your Facebook Page.

This can be done easily by checking that the “Reviews” in the “Recommendations” tab is active on your Facebook Business Page settings. You can also highlight some positive reviews by taking screenshots of them and sharing them as a post. 

It’s important to bear in mind, however, that not every customer review will be glowing. But while some reviews might be negative, they will help you identify some areas you need to improve. The way you respond to these reviews is crucial too, so if the review is justified, always apologise and offer to take steps to resolve the situation. 

8. Engage with customers

Engagement on Facebook isn’t a one-way street. When your posts start to gain traction, reply to every message with a reaction or comment. Doing so will make your business seem more human, and it will assure customers that you value their input. 

You can also level up your engagement by using creative methods like asking questions and creating polls, going live with a Q&A session or behind-the-scenes exclusive, or running contests and giveaways to generate some buzz around your business.

9. Use Facebook insights

Your Facebook marketing campaign should never be static. You should always be reviewing the performance of your strategy and adapting it accordingly.

Data-driven insights from Facebook’s built-in Insight tools take away the guesswork by providing you with concrete information on what works and what doesn’t. The feature, which is available within the Meta Business Suite, helps you measure a huge crop of metrics, including post engagement, impressions, reach, click rates, and follows and likes, to give you a deep understanding of your content performance. 

You can then use this information to refine your content strategy, allocate your budget more effectively, and ultimately achieve better results from your Facebook marketing efforts.

Facebook marketing tools that won’t stretch your budget

Facebook acts as a true Swiss army knife for marketing, giving businesses access to a raft of features to help them boost their visibility and reach more customers.

While Meta Business Suite reserves a lot of its features for paying customers (including advanced ad creation, automated targeting, and AI performance tracking), if you’re keen on scaling back overheads without compromising results, here are some marketing features you can use without spending a penny. 

• Page insights: track what’s working by analysing audience demographics, content performance, and peak engagement times to refine your strategy.
• Facebook Events: promote launches, workshops, or pop-ups with Facebook’s dedicated event pages, driving attendance and building buzz.
• Groups: build niche communities around your brand, fostering deeper engagement and loyalty with your most passionate customers.
• Messager automation: set up instant replies, FAQs, and even lead capture sequences to provide 24/7 basic customer service and streamline inquiries.

Is it easier to market your business with a website?

As we’ve explored throughout this article, Facebook offers a breadth of ways to help you grow and develop your business. But for many entrepreneurs, the platform will be better suited as a springboard to developing their own website, rather than a final destination. 

Compared to using Facebook, building a dedicated website gives businesses more creative freedom over their online image, ownership over their brand, greater access to useful SEO, lead generation and ecommerce tools. So, while it involves a slightly higher learning curve than navigating Facebook, it is generally easier to market your business through a website. 

But rest assured, most of the best website builders for small businesses boast intuitive drag-and-drop functionality, allowing you to bring your vision to life without fussing around with code. If you’re ready to level up your marketing strategy with your own site, but aren’t sure where to start, you can learn how to create a business website here.