7 Secrets to Making Facebook Marketing Work for Your Businesses
With over 2.5 billion people using the platform every month and 1.6 billion daily active users, Facebook is the biggest social media platform out there. Business owners and marketers have long seen the importance of leveraging the platform to capture the attention of consumers and improve their bottom line.
No business can claim that their target audience is not on Facebook, so neglecting to include it in your marketing strategy or not putting your presence on the platform to good use can impact the success and reach of your brand.
No doubt, investing in Facebook marketing is one of the best decisions that you can make for your business. About 93% of marketers regularly use Facebook for advertising purposes, and they don’t intend to stop anytime soon.
Some of the benefits that Facebook has over other social media marketing platforms include:
- Advanced tools for targeting the right kind of audience.
- Massive user base, which increases the likelihood of finding and reaching your target market.
- Availability of a vast array of specialized features designed to help businesses get the most out of their investment.
- Comprehensive data analysis and detailed insights on campaigns to help you improve upon them.
Whether you are a small business or a large corporation, Facebook is one of the most powerful marketing tools at your disposal. It’s a great medium to interact with customers, strengthen your brand presence and identity, expand your reach, and maximize your ROI.
Getting your Facebook marketing efforts off the ground can seem daunting, but there are measures you can take to set things up and get the most out of this super platform.
- Set your marketing goals for Facebook: Businesses want to see different results from their Facebook marketing efforts. The first step to achieving set goals is determining what those goals are. Do you want increased community engagement, sales and lead generation, or brand awareness?
- Get to know your audience: Your Facebook marketing will yield better results if you understand your audience and what makes them tick. This information will guide your interactions with them and ensure you’re giving them exactly what they want. There are several resources on the platform that can help you gain valuable insight about your audience.
- Make the most of your Facebook pages: Your page is a free tool for marketing your brand. You can list your product offerings and share all sorts of content on it to better develop the character and identity of your business.
- Blend in and engage with your audience proactively: It’s more effective to talk with your audience instead of at them. While promoting your brand is your main aim, you cannot spend all the time selling your products. Consumers can’t stand that. Try to spark engagement around your brand by being unique, funny, or informative.
- Consistently share great content: Diversify your content. Don’t just post the one thing. Nobody is going to engage with your posts if they are dull or cliched. The way to keep followers coming back is to put out exciting new content that they would enjoy continually. Incorporate visuals, videos, and text into the content you share.
- Invest in targeted Facebook ads: Facebook makes billions of dollars each year from advertising, which would not be possible if businesses didn’t believe that their ads work. Facebook knows a lot about its users, and it can use that information to help you break through to the right customers.
- Monitor and analyze your results: Analyzing your marketing efforts lets you know the type of content that’s underperforming or bringing in the most impressions and clicks. You can then optimize your future Facebook strategies to boost engagement and other metrics.
By taking a careful and calculated approach to Facebook marketing, you can get better returns and grow your business even with limited resources at your disposal. These seven tips will transform the impact of Facebook marketing on your brand and put you ahead of your competitors.
1. Set your marketing goals for Facebook
You need a roadmap that shows what you aim to achieve with Facebook marketing so you can measure success according to what it means for your business. Your plan should be ambitious but remain realistic and achievable.
These are common goals that businesses have, which an effective Facebook marketing strategy can help accomplish:
- Added value to the company: Nurturing consumer relationships, raising brand awareness, and providing essential resources to new and existing customers are things that Facebook does incredibly well. While these benefits may not lead directly to sales, they are still extremely valuable.
- Quality lead generation and increased sales: Just because Facebook has a large user base, doesn’t mean you can do whatever you like and still see impressive results. You need to use a strategy that has been thought out to target and reach your intended customer.
- Improved knowledge of the industry: Using social media monitoring tools, you can stay up to date on the latest trends in your industry. You can find out what your competition is doing, the kind of conversations your audience is having, and adapt your approaches to meet or address them.
- Smarter business growth: Facebook can help you reduce your marketing expenses, scale your brand reach, increase customer acquisition, and reduce or eliminate churn. You can utilize boosted posts, targeted ads, sponsored content, and social selling to execute these objectives and accelerate growth.
2. Get to know your audience
When you understand what your target and current customer demographic on Facebook looks like, you can devise the perfect strategies to capture their attention and perform other actions that could result in them opening up their wallets for you.
Spend time getting to know your audience with Facebook Ads Manager. Even if you’re not preparing to pay for ads yet, it’s still a useful tool to have in your corner. Use it to segment your audience to the kinds of people that follow your business.
To get started, simply navigate to Audience Insights in your Facebook Ads Manager and select “Create New.” To discover more about your current follower base, select the second option. It will give you a comprehensive breakdown of their essential information, such as academic qualifications, gender, age, employment status, and job title.
Use this insight to tailor your content and campaigns to meet their expectations and satisfy their needs. You can also use it to attract and connect with new audiences.
Third-party social listening tools like Mention and Sprout allow you to learn more about your audience by monitoring keywords on all Facebook pages. You can keep an eye on essential terms in your niche and how your competitors and audience are using them.
Other vital information you need to know about your audience include:
- What platforms and channels appeal to them or are mostly used by them.
- The kind of content they prefer and how they engage with it.
- How they interact with each other (their mannerisms and tone).
- What languages they speak.
- Where they reside.
- Their general preferences, likes, and dislikes.
A more precise, more robust understanding of who you are marketing to is indispensable to the success of your efforts on Facebook.
3. Make the most of your Facebook pages
Facebook pages are the first and most common Facebook marketing tool for brands, and it’s free to use. It’s like a personal profile but better because people can like and follow your page without having to send a friend request. There is also no limit to the number of people who can follow your page.
Encourage people who like your page to follow you and enable the option to view your posts first. Otherwise, they may end up not seeing it at all because Facebook prioritizes visibility and reach for brands that pay to boost their posts.
Setting up a professional-looking Facebook page only takes a few minutes. The hard work is getting a lot of people to like and follow it. Here are some tips to help unlock the full potential of your Facebook page and enhance brand credibility:
- Perfect your profile photo and cover image: Your profile picture is one of the first things potential followers will notice. It should be a high-quality image of your business logo and should be compatible with Facebook’s 180 x 180 pixels requirement. You have more freedom to experiment with your cover image, but whatever image you choose should be within the 820 x 312 pixel, and able to limit uplift your page and impress visitors.
- Craft an interesting about page: This section is where you can introduce your business. It should be concise and contain all the crucial details about your brand―what you do, contact information, business location, and a few highlights. Try to keep the tone casual and friendly.
- Share useful information on your timeline by posting stuff that your audience would want to see that is also relevant to your business. Use links to blog posts, product announcements, useful online resources, customized videos, discount codes, contests, giveaways, and anything else that can add value to your customer interactions.
4. Blend in and engage with your audience proactively
Don’t get carried away with selling your product or service that you forget to engage with your followers and potential customers properly. You need to keep them interested in your page even if they’re not patronizing your business right away.
Hold contests, quizzes, polls, and share other engaging content formats that will encourage them to comment on it or interact with you. Highlight the human side of your business. When your audience reaches out, respond quickly.
Creating a Facebook group is another excellent way to bring your audience together so they can discuss relevant topics amongst themselves, and you can promote your brand from time to time.
Being a community for your audience and fostering engagement will increase their trust in your brand, boost loyalty, and increase your following, which can, in turn, lead to more sales.
5. Consistently share great content
An effective Facebook marketing strategy is built around content. Feel free to try out different formats and take note of how your audience responds to them.
The goal is to keep your followers returning to your page to find interesting posts that they will want to share with others, which involves creating and posting original content, as well as sharing content created by other people.
Try to mix various formats into your content strategy. Share infographics, short videos, and links to written content. It’s perfectly okay to post third-party content on your page as well. Tools like Buzzsumo and Mention can help you find popular and trending web or social content that you can recommend or draw inspiration from.
Ensure that you consistently put out content your audience will love, create a content calendar ahead of time, and use Facebook or a scheduling tool like Buffer to schedule when the posts go live. That way, even when you are preoccupied, you can rest easy knowing your content won’t suffer.
Discover the best times to post on Facebook to secure the most engagement from your audience using Facebook Insights. Simply click on that tab, scroll to posts, and you will find a tab called “When Your Fans Are Online.” It should tell you all you need to know about your optimum posting times.
The size of your following can limit how much you learn from Facebook Insights, but you can easily overcome that hurdle by following this guide for choosing the best time and frequency for sharing your content.
6. Invest in targeted Facebook ads
Regardless of how big or small, your business is, paying for brand exposure on Facebook is almost unavoidable. To get started, you need to determine what your budget is, what you want to achieve with your ad, and choose the pieces of content you want to promote.
There are a variety of Facebook ad formats―photo, video, stories, messenger, carousel, slideshow, collection, and playables― that you can try to see which works best with your intent and target audience.
Facebook allows you to target your ads based on specific criteria like age, location, interests, devices, and education. Using the ad testing feature, you can run multiple ads side by side to compare their effectiveness.
Ads can run on a per-click or per-impression basis, and you can set a limit for your ad spend. When customizing and optimizing Facebook ads, many people make the mistake of trying to reach too many people with their ads instead of targeting a narrow audience that is the right fit for the campaign.
Targeting a smaller group is how you get more conversions and ultimately grow your business. It also helps you cut down on ad spend.
You can retarget audiences who have visited your website or performed specific actions on your shared content with unique ads to recapture their attention and send them further down the sales path.
The key features your Facebook ads should have to achieve the desired results are:
- Visual appeal.
- Relevance to your target audience.
- A tempting value proposition.
- A clear call-to-action.
Boosted posts can also offer tremendous value to your Facebook marketing efforts. It’s a great way to put your content in the faces of prospects who are already highly engaged and qualified.
Think of it as a way to recoup the organic reach you lose due to Facebook’s changing algorithm. The downside to boosted posts is that they have less pricing, bidding, and targeting options.
7. Monitor and analyze your results
The final step to ensuring Facebook marketing works for your business is to stay on top of your data and analytics. It’s the only way you can figure out if you are meeting set goals and what tweaks you need to make to produce better results.
Measure impressions, click-through rates, video views, fan growth, and other metrics to see how your Facebook content is performing across the board.
It may take a while to get used to all the features Facebook offers to help you market your business effectively and efficiently, but you’ll soon come to master them when you spend more time using them. Take your business to the next level with Facebook.
