Why Should Your Agency Use The Facebook Business Manager

When Facebook first started, it’s only goal was to connect people who know each other or want to know each other. However, with time, it has evolved to become the number one social media marketing sites for businesses and brands. 

However, it wasn’t until the summer of 2014 that Facebook provided a solution for marketing agencies to connect with the pages of their clients in a practical, easy, and secure manner. 

Until then, agencies had to use several sketchy techniques to find a way to get access to the accounts of their clients quickly. It was not only fraught with security risks but also involved unnecessary work for both the agency and the client. But, when Facebook introduced the Business Manager in 2014, they could finally breathe a sigh of relief. Or so they thought.

Who Should Use Facebook Business Manager?

The first Business Manager, unfortunately, seemed more of an experiment than a final solution. The UI was confusing, the features unpolished, and overall, it was not smooth sailing for the target users.

However, with time and attention to the feedback by people, Facebook has come a long way in improving the design and usability of their Business Manager. Today, it has become an indispensable tool for Facebook marketing agencies and businesses with multiple pages and ad accounts to utilize this handy tool to manage their Facebook marketing requirements.

The Facebook Business Manager is essentially a platform allowing the intended management of campaigns, assets, and data without requiring an intimate level of access beyond the requirements.

It was the primary concern for companies before the Business Manager was introduced. This tool is mainly for those who need such a granular level of control over their accounts and data. It includes:

• Facebook marketing agencies – These agencies have a large number of clients whose Facebook accounts and pages they need to manage. It becomes a highly time and effort-intensive process to have to work with different clients from different dashboards and to switch between them continually. 

Moreover, it introduces the chance of human error where the data or action meant for one client mistakenly gets assigned to another. By providing a single interface with optimized account control, the Facebook Business Manager eliminates these issues.

• Businesses With Complex Hierarchies – A lot of companies, especially parent organizations with subsidiaries, sister concerns, franchises, and similar acquisitions, have complicated employee, office, and department hierarchies in their business structure. 

While each entity may require separate Facebook ad accounts and assets, there might be areas of operation that are managed by a single team. This team would require access to only the data and assets that need to provide their service for all the entities, but not resources in their accounts unrelated to their work. The Facebook Business Manager makes this possible for the team.

• Collaborations – It so often happens that businesses collaborate with other companies or persons and require joint activity on ads or pages to manage the campaign for the products or services they are working on together. 

Now, neither party would want the other to have unrestricted access to the entirety of their marketing operations. Defining user access permissions via the Facebook Business Manager will let both to allow access to only the required part of each other’s campaigns.

• Companies With Multiple Ad Accounts and Pages – Maybe your company is not a conglomerate or chain. It can still have multiple Facebook ad accounts and pages. It is especially true when a business starts a new line of products or services or gets an overhaul and decides to keep this new side of the Business distinct from the old one. 

In that case, the Facebook Business Manager provides a single portal from which the marketing team can manage the entire operations for the Business.

• Businesses With Multiple Teams/Employees Requiring Access – While it goes by default that Facebook marketing will be handled by the marketing team of the company only, it is not a hard and fast rule. 

Businesses that are highly customer-centric or market-dependent, those with multiple branches, product types, and client categories will have multiple teams or employees requiring various levels of access to your assets, accounts, and data. You will be able to manage these permissions and rules better from the Facebook Business Manager.  

• Organizations That Outsource Products and Services – Just like an agency needs the Facebook Business Manager to handle their many clients, these clients will also need it to manage all their partners and hired agencies in a streamlined manner. 

They need to define who gets access to which part of their data and assets, which can be done using the Business Manager.

Why Your Agency Use Facebook Business Manager?

Using the Facebook Business Manager has many benefits, especially for an agency. After all, its entire job is managing the Facebook marketing needs of a large number of clients. Using the Manager helps them in the ways given below.

Structuring Assets On Facebook

Facebook marketing agencies deal with loads of assets like Facebook ad accounts, pages, Instagram accounts, catalogs, apps, Pixels, and business asset groups. If the agency employees needed to continually log in and out of the dashboards of their clients each time they wanted to work on their marketing operations, there were bound to be mistakes committed. 

Moreover, it would result in unnecessary hassle and wastage of time. The Facebook Business Manager provides a central, unified interface with complete visibility and organization capabilities for all of these assets.

You can segregate and group them, access them, control them, and manage them, all from a single dashboard and without the fear of errors. You do not have to have multiple Business accounts for each client. 

The Manager acts like a single-window from which you can provide your services to many without a mix-up.

Keep Business and Personal Facebook Activities Separate

One of the many problems that agencies used to face before the Business Manager was developed was that they had to work directly via Facebook with their clients. As a result, the activities and notifications from the account held by the Business itself often got in the way of their work for the client. It was disturbing in the least. But in the worst, there was the chance of mix-ups. 

Agencies often had to create multiple accounts to work with different clients. Sometimes they even had to connect their accounts when there was no other way out. It meant that their personal life often got mixed up with their professional activities. At best, this would cause embarrassment; at worst, it could lead to the loss of the client, unfair leverages, or even lawsuits.

Manage Permissions For Business Safety

Even if an agency was entirely successful in maintaining the accounts of their clients separate and avoiding the overlap of personal profiles into business ones, there was still one problem.

It was user permissions. Facebook pages by themselves do not provide much functionality in terms of control of access and activity permissions. It means that, from people who needed admin-level access to those who only required, say, a small piece of data, would have to be given full access to the Facebook page. 

It is a nightmare no one wants to deal with; after all, you do not want people to lay their hands on and take advantage of critical data. That left only one other alternative – someone would have to transfer the data each time a lower-level employee required manually.

It is not a practical solution. But, in the Business Manager, you can define various access and control permissions for different people and decide which assets will be available to whom.

Collaborate With Third Parties

In the age of globalization and specialization, it is impossible to work by yourself. You need the services and products of other organizations; in fact, it is a far more profitable way to conduct business.

However, the problem with this in the pre-Business Manager age was that it meant giving access to your Business Facebook page to an external party. If you did not want to do that, it said, just like before, that data and resource transfers would have had to be done manually. 

It often slowed down work and made it impossible to streamline collaborative efforts. But, the Facebook Business Manager allows you to not only add people as partners but can also define exactly how deep and wide you want their access and control over your assets can be.

Create Custom Facebook Audiences

One of the most useful benefits of the Facebook Business Manager is the ability to define custom audiences for your ads. Nowadays, every customer wants to be served what they want in an intuitive manner without them having to spell it out explicitly.

It means marketers have to use the right data from the reliable source to assign customer segments correctly, find out what every customer segment needs, and offer it to them at the right time and place for optimum impact. 

The same goes for Facebook ads. The ability to define such custom audiences and target them with specific campaigns or ads is one of the many benefits of using the Facebook Business Manager. 

Create Rich Ads

The first impression defines how a customer will perceive a business for the rest of their journey. Thus, you need to be sure that the ad a potential customer comes across shows them precisely the elements required to convince them to convert.

Creating and managing ads is very easy from the Facebook Business Manager. You can get access quickly to all the campaigns you are running for each of your clients and modulate them to reach the right audience. 

Moreover, you can create similar ads with different texts at the bottom so that you can show a range of desired products in the very first encounter. You can also create different versions of ads for different customer segments and use A/B testing to see what works and what does not for each.

Use A Variety Of Payment Methods Securely

The Facebook Business Manager allows you to add several payment methods like credit and co-branded debit cards and PayPal. You can also set up the primary billing method for your ad campaigns from among the payment methods added in the Business Manager. 

Facebook ensures the security of all confidential financial information for data at rest and in transit. Having the ability to add, manage, and view your payments from the Business Manager itself means that you do not have to keep track of all your expenses and register them manually. 

Ensure Privacy And Security

For any business, privacy and security of their assets is the biggest concern at any point. They want to ensure that data and resources do not fall into the wrong hands or that fraud, stealing, or identity theft does not happen. For this, one needs to be able to control which asset is available to whom for what kind of actions. 

In the pre-Business Manager era, due to the lack of this level of control, it so often happened that employees of marketing agencies misused the data and resources of the client or used their accounts for personal reasons.

It was often difficult to determine who did it as there was no way to define separate users. But the Business Manager not only allows you to add users individually, but you can also control what level of access they get, what actions they are authorized to perform. You can track the movements of every user too so that you stay on top of exactly what each user is doing to the asset. 

It helps bring responsibility and accountability among employees. Facebook also has the provision for two-factor authentication to provide an extra level of security for the account holder.

Streamline Analytics And reporting

The Facebook Business Manager provides better data analytics support than you get directly from your Facebook page. There are several in-built analytics tools that you can use to make a better sense of the level of reach, engagement, and conversion that your client’s Facebook brand is garnering.

You can use the Ads Manager to get a more in-depth insight into how each of your campaigns is performing and use split testing to determine which ad has tremendous promise. 

Using Facebook Pixel, you can obtain data about customer engagement on your site and target a section of the audience who would otherwise have been invisible to you from Facebook.

You can customize dashboards and management reports for every campaign or client directly from the Manager and share them with the right people. 

Challenges You Have To Overcome

The Facebook Business Manager has been a lifesaver for marketing agencies working on Facebook ad campaigns for different clients. That being said, one must keep in mind that it is still a work in progress.

There are several places where the Manager can do some improvement. Some examples are listed below:

• You cannot delete an ad account that you have linked to your Facebook Business Manager account. There are provisions to deactivate or disable an ad account, but there is no way to remove it once it is added ultimately. 
• Thus, no matter how old or obsolete an account is, it will remain on your Business Manager account as long as your Facebook identity remains the same.
• There is a limit on the number of ad accounts as well as the number of users you can add to an ad account. Your Facebook Business Manager account cannot have more than 25 ad accounts associated with it; neither can each ad account have more than 25 users, including all admins, advertisers, and analysts.
• The UI of the Business Manager is still not as user-friendly and intuitive as you would expect it to be. It can be confusing at times and only with sufficient experience can you get the hang of it enough to utilize it to the fullest. 

• The longer-than-desired learning curve also means that you might have to provide veritable training and onboarding for new users. Otherwise, they may end up taking action unwittingly that causes completely avoidable problems.
• The Facebook Business Manager also does not have an extensive enough roster of features to replace a full-fledged marketing tool that you use entirely. 
• While it has made the management of Facebook ad campaigns far more accessible and more transparent, it is in no way a tool that can rival the software applications businesses, and agencies use for their overall marketing needs.
• There is not enough documentation or community support for using the Facebook Business Manager. It does not have a large enough customer base yet. As a result, you will not find a lot of resources or information online to help make your work easy. 
• It is undeniable that the Business Manager does contain some bugs. It can become incredibly challenging to determine if an issue you are facing is a result of a bug or some mistake in what you are doing because there is no highly active community or forum you can get help from immediately.

Conclusion

It would be foolish to challenge the advantages that the Facebook Business Manager lends to marketing agencies looking after the promotional activities of brands on Facebook. Sure, it has a few flaws, but the Facebook team works night and day to improve the platform.

But most importantly, agencies no longer have to dance around with questionable measures or security issues to get their job done. They can easily manage all their resources and tasks and have better control over access rights and privacy. Every Business can benefit from this handy tool, but agencies especially so.