You need a strategy to market your business or products on Facebook – and it goes far beyond opening a Facebook page and inviting all your friends to like it. To begin with, Facebook marketing has one of the most complex ad systems – more complex than it even lets on.
In as much as I hate bursting people’s bubbles, there’s nothing simple about it. There’s nothing simple about using their near-endless number of targeting data points.
First of all, you need to learn. After this, you’ll need to sync up what you’ve learned with your creativity and formulate a working strategy.
In other words, there’s no room to wing it or pull a strategy off thin air. While this may work with other platforms – with Facebook, things are a little bit different and more advanced to just jump on it without a plan.
You need to customize a strategy (not whip up one) based on the following list of techniques:
Create Facebook Goals
As with any marketing strategy, the first step to running a successful marketing campaign on Facebook is setting the right goals. These are the things that you wish to achieve at the end of it all, or the roadmap that you’ll be using to determine whether or not your marketing strategy is working.
You have to know if you’re doing the right thing or if you lost track along the way or if your strategy needs some adjusting before you can proceed.
Again, don’t jump at the idea of creating goals without giving it thorough consideration. From what we know, scribbling down some random ideas isn’t what we mean by this.
You need to start by doing some research. Find out if what you purpose to achieve is attainable through the Facebook platform or if you’re better off trying out a different platform.
Example of goals you can come up with:
- Increase your quality of sales: It’s not just about the sales you make, but more to do with the quality of the sales. The size of the fish matters, even though you’re still fishing from the same pool.
Where you wish to start targeting a certain demographic of clients or customers, write it down as one of your goals — after which, you can go ahead and lay down a strategy to help you reach this goal.
This is a goal you set when you’re looking to improve the quality of sales, which is another way of saying you need to improve on your targeting.
- Add Value to Your Organisation: There’s no limit as to what you can achieve with Facebook. You can use the platform to improve the image of your organisation and build more credibility. You can also use it to nurture your customers, improve brand awareness, and offer more resources to your audience.
- Keep an Eye on Your Competitors: Facebook can also help you to spy on your competition and find out what they’re doing and how to beat them at their own game.
What you need to achieve this are a series of social media monitoring tools that you can use to track, listen, and report on the conversations that are happening around you. You can use them to find out what’s happening with your competitors or within your industry.
The trick is simple here: before you open your mouth to speak, learn to open your ears and be an active listener on social media.
- Conduct More Efficient Recruiting: Whenever you’re online shopping for the best talents, it behooves you to do a thorough digging and to never compromise on anything. Social recruiting is fast growing in popularity and could be one of the strategies you need to get the top brains in the country before they’ve been all snagged by your competitors.
- Smarter Growth: You need to grow as a business. In the future, you want to feel bigger and better than the person you are today. So why not use Facebook to realize this goal.
You want to cut on your expenses, reduce churning, and increase your inquisition on almost every aspect of your business.
The good thing with Facebook marketing is that it can help you with all these. Whether it’s reducing your ad spend or bettering your targets, you can always play around with their social settings and inch closer to this goal.
- Tracking Goals: This is another goal that you do not want to take lightly. You want to be sure that you’re doing the right thing, and that despite doing all this, you’re right on track and heading in the right direction. Where this goal hasn’t been realised, that means you should head back to the drawing board and try to readjust everything.
Familiarise Yourself with Facebook Demographic
Find out more about Facebook demographic targerting. Of course, almost everyone you know or are planning to target is on Facebook.
You have to find out more about your audience. What do they look like? What do they enjoy doing on the platform? Where does their interest fall?
The answers you come up with will determine the strategy you use to target them.
Find out more about where your target audience lives. Find out about the language they speak, their age, and their level of education before you can go ahead and work on your marketing strategy.
Engage and Initiate the Interaction
Social media channels are specifically built for socialising. They’re meant to be used for networking and establishing online connections.
So be ready to converse, share ideas, ponder though them, and share content. Don’t approach social media with a stilt mindset. Instead, be more casual and ready to engage your audience on a personal level that they can relate to and be able to chime in. The point is to ensure there’s a flowing interaction – not a one-sided one.
The mindset you adopt should be one of a community, one that’s focused on initiating a discussion or chat, and getting everyone on board to voice their opinions and contribution.
You’re an authority voice in all this. You’re the expert on the ground; someone that your audience looks up to. However, you have an entirely different approach to this. You’re not sitting on a pedestal as many marketers do. You’re on the ground interacting with your audience on a level they understand best – their level.
Figure out the Right Time to Post
Most marketers underestimate the power of advertising on Facebook, and that’s where they go wrong.
Facebook still stands as one of the most complicated social platforms to market on, especially for organic content. It’s not like the Facebook algorithm is making it easier for marketers that are trying to find the most appropriate time to make their posts.
Here are some stats to help you out with the decision you make with regards to the optimal time to post:
- The highest recommended day for posting on Facebook is Wednesday.
- Facebook users are most active between 11 am and 1 pm on Wednesday. This is the most preferred time of the day to engage them.
- It’s okay to post on weekdays from 9 am to 3 pm.
- Facebook users are thought to be least active on Sundays. This is the worst day of the week to engage them.
- The least recommended time to post on Facebook is early mornings and late nights.
Curate Content and Schedule it
This is the most important part of your social media marketing strategy. Keep in mind that you can only grow your audience and nurture their interest with the right content.
The good thing is that you don’t have to be 100% original with what you post. Plus, you’re not restricted in any way. You can write stories, update your status, or share group posts – whatever floats your boat at that particular instance.
You have options aplenty, but your audience is only interested in specific content. You have to keep that in mind with every single post you come up with.
Plus, you have to strike a balance between what your audience is interested in and what’s best for your business, and the goals you have.
Much has been written about the type of posts that your audience might be interested in. Several studies have also explored this particular concern and provided some study findings that might prove to be useful.
Here are a few of these study findings:
- 30% of Facebook users have admitted to preferring posts that have a link to more info.
- 18% prefer content with images
- 17% prefer watching videos
The same studies have also given suggestions on what you need to do in order to succeed on these platforms. For Facebook, you’re better off targeting your users with videos and an allocated budget for ads.
Read this bearing in mind that you have both paid and free options to choose from. Also, with Facebook Page Controls, you can schedule your posts from your Facebook page, without using an external tool.
One good thing with planning and scheduling your calendar is that it makes it a whole lot easier to spot the gaps in your posts and make necessary adjustments. Plus, it can save you lots of your valuable time in the long run when you come to think about it.
Lay Down Your Facebook Ad Strategy
At this point, you’re free to work on your ad strategy. It doesn’t matter if you’re new to this or if you have years of experience – there’s no way around paying for brand exposure. While the free option can get you far, there’s a limit to how far you can go, and the only way to break this limit and extend your reach is by throwing in some ad money.
You need to grow your brand and increase brand loyalty. But that’s not going to happen overnight. You need to invest in it and grow everything gradually until you’re finally able to hit your goals.
The only shortcut you’ve got in all these is social media advertising – Facebook advertising to be more specific.
It’s worth noting that you have over 4 million advertisers to compete with on this platform. Your demographic, of course, vary, but that’s not to say you should approach it without a proper plan.
At 9%, the Click-through Rate isn’t impressive either. That leaves no room for chances. Instead, you have to be strategic with every move you make. Your primary focus should be on building your brand. Best of all; remember to showcase your ads in the best way possible to increase your CTR.
Aim to Increase Brand Awareness
The ads you run on Facebook should focus on two key things.
- What’s relevant
- What’s cost-effective
You want to make the most out of your budget. So you’re operating on an allocated weekly or monthly spend that you plan not to exceed. You also want to avoid useless clicks that come with overexposure.
Where your ‘targeting’ isn’t up to snuff, that means the bulk of your Facebook spend will be going to waste. You also risk seeing it shoot drastically.
In other words, your Facebook ads have to be relevant to drive results. There’s nothing wrong with targeting a broad audience. But how relevant is it with regards to what you’re looking to achieve? Is it in any way helping you build brand awareness?
With every piece of content you come up with, try building a custom audience for it. Find the most fitting customers for it instead of mass shooting it to everyone on your list. The same can be said about retargeting. The content you use to retarget prospects that fell out should be not only recognisable, but also new to spark new interest.
What Type of Content Are Worth Advertising on Facebook?
The content you choose to advertise will always vary depending on the goal at hand. Also, there are certain aspects of the content that you’d want to address while crafting it. They include:
- Identity: Does the content relate to your brand in any way? Will your target audience be able to associate it with your brand? If so, how?
Does it showcase your products or services? Does it bear your colour scheme or logo?
- Reward: You’re not asking your audience to view your content and not gain anything from it. There has to be something that they’ll be looking to get out of it. Is it some offer code, deal, promotion, industry guide, or whitepaper?
- Tone: Is your tone consistent with the rest of the posts that you make? What about the voice? How easy is it for your past customers or clients to associate it with your brand?
- Action: The content must trigger some action, which should align with the goals that you earlier on set for your business.
Track and Analyse Everything
The last stage of your Facebook advertising strategy should be tracking and analysing everything.
Be sure to measure everything, starting with your page impressions. Remember to measure fan growth, as well. Most importantly, find out about how your content is doing and prepare a downloadable intuitive report that you’ll be sharing with all the stakeholders involved.
Final Thoughts
There goes a complete step-by-step guide on how to plot your Facebook marketing strategy.
You’re welcomed to talk to the Facebook marketing professionals at MediaOne in case you feel like we’ve missed anything important. Talk to us about digital marketing, social media marketing, or if you need any help with marketing or building your website.
