Are you thinking of dipping your toes into Facebook Marketing for your brand but are unsure about how to go about it? Well, look no further! Here is a complete and comprehensive guide with all you need to know about Facebook Marketing!
What Is Facebook Marketing?
Facebook, an online social media site started to connect people across the globe, has now become one of the largest online marketplaces. Any company that is worth anything is on the site advertising and pushing content to its user base. But what is it? And how does it work?
Facebook is simply a social media platform that companies, firms, and brands can use to advertise and market the products that they are selling. The process of doing so is defined as Facebook Marketing.
Before we delve deep into the nitty-gritty of this space, there are two options available. The first one is to go the organic route. In which the company consistently puts up high-quality content and builds a user base over time. The second one is to take out paid advertisements and promote posts.
In our experience, a mixture of the two approaches works best for companies of all sizes. While it is important to use Facebook ads to get more engagement, it is equally important to develop an organic user base first. In the sections below, we will discuss how to get started.
Marketing With A Facebook Page
The very first step is to create a Facebook page for your brand. As a person creates a unique profile page for themselves, it is important to create one for your brand. This page will be the home page for your company.
Ideally, your Facebook page should provide a good preview of your company and its products. It should also talk about, in detail, services, aims, missions, values, team, goals, vision, and, of course, the products itself.
Since this is your first step, let us see how to create an effective Facebook page for your brand.
How to set up the perfect Facebook Page
Setting up a page for your brand is the single most important step you will take in terms of Facebook digital marketing. It is the simplest task to perform, anybody can do it. But it is extremely important to take your time and do it right.
Anyone can create a Facebook page. A celebrity, a brand, a place, a monument. However, not all of these pages harness their full potential because of silly mistakes and small oversights.
Follow the steps below to avoid them and put your brand on the map!
Profile Photo and Cover Image
This is the make or break of your page. When you see a logo of a large brand, you immediately associate it with their products. For example, McDonald’s iconic cursive M reminds us of a cheeseburger, and Pizza Hut’s hat reminds us of its cheesy, crusty pepperoni pizza.
Your aim should be to create something like that. Heavy and thick with associated imagery. A logo that will tell the customer off the bat, what your company is about.
The profile picture of your Facebook page must be unique, attractive, and engaging. Make sure to take your time with this and weigh your options before zeroing in on one.
As for your cover page, you can take it a little easy. (Not too much!) You can either change your cover page in accordance with your offers, marketing strategy, or new products or keep it as a simple banner with your contact details. (Don’t forget to add a message encouraging potential customers to reach out!)
Make sure to give your creative team ample time and good vision to come up with great and viable options before choosing one.
“About” Section
The first thing a user sees when your marketing strategy redirects them to your page is the “About” section. This section has the most impact on your audience and can directly convert users into customers.
While the about section should be short, sweet, and maybe witty, it has to be informative. The user who reads it has to be able to simultaneously derive value and understand what your company is about from it.
Make sure to include your company’s unique selling points, including details about your team, talk about why your company is different, and most importantly connect with your audience.
Post Useful Information
Once you have got your basics down, you need to concentrate on posting on your page. We have found the best way to do this is to have a schedule, content calendar, and a well-mapped out plan.
You have to post regularly because nobody wants to follow an inactive page. But at the same time you don’t want to post too much and too often because you will be reported as spam in no time.
Develop a content strategy through which you post once a day or once in a few days. Do not load your posts with large captions because your users will simply not read them. Keep it clean and short.
The only exception to excessive posting is when you have a promotional event coming up with a stringent timeline. That is the only time it is okay for you to post more than five times a day.
Make sure that your posts actually deliver value to your user base. Here are some things you can consider posting about on a daily basis;
- Blog and Article Links
- Offers and Sales
- Informative Videos About How to Use Your Products
- Product Introductions and Descriptions
The key to posting on Facebook is being consistent. You have to post often and you have to post things that your customer can derive value from. And you have to keep your posts informative and fun.
Pay Attention to Your Statistics and Results
Now that you have your visual and outward strategy set with respect to posting and page set up, it is time to look inwards.
Every post on a Facebook business page comes with a bucket load of insights. Pay attention to them. The insights usually come as weekly statistics and graphs that show you which of your posts did well and what attracted more audience.
Pay attention to the posts that draw more eyes and try inculcating the strategy and creatives used in that in future posts. This will help you reach more people and thereby increase your user base phenomenally.
Facebook insights and statistics are your company’s greatest allies. Use them well.
How to Use Groups, Marketplaces and Jobs?
Other than Facebook pages for digital marketing, Facebook now also provides Groups, Marketplace and Jobs for companies to use. Including the use of these features in your digital marketing strategy will help your company reach a larger pool of potential customers.
Let’s find out how.
How to market with Facebook Groups
Like Pages, Facebook Groups are also free and easily created. It is similar to a discussion forum and is usually connected to your company’s main page.
You can add and invite potential customers to this group and produce posts and ads for this group to interact with, discuss and brainstorm.
However, unlike with Facebook Pages, you will have to be more active on these groups. You will have to have a dedicated employee who is responsible for posting, commenting, and discussing relevant industry issues.
How to market with Facebook Marketplace
In 2016, Facebook introduced its marketplace. This was a true gamechanger for companies that widely used Facebook digital marketing strategies.
It allows companies to list their products and is searchable from every corner of Facebook. The marketplace is like Amazon and follows a similar page set up.
If you are a company selling physical products, plugging your products into Facebook’s marketplace is a great addition to your marketing strategy.
How to use Facebook Jobs
This feature isn’t directly related to digital marketing. But it is a great way to hire new employees for your company. It is also a way to make sure that more people know about your company, etc.
It is a relatively new feature on Facebook and helps find new talent that your company may be in requirement of.
Targeted Advertisement
Targeted advertisement options is one of Facebook’s most controversial features. However, it is one of the best features from a business point of view.
Types of Facebook Ads
Now a company looking to advertise can create advertisements tailor-made to their preferred demographic. You can decide what age group, gender, interests, or even type of device used by the user to target your advertisements. It is a very powerful feature and there are many ways to utilize it.
Video Advertisements
As a generation of impatient people, your users will be more inclined to watch a quick informative video than read about what you have to say, irrespective of how well it is written.
Create short videos of valuable information and post them regularly. While posting them be sure to use the correct thumbnail, choose an appropriate title and write an engaging corresponding description.
Offers
Nothing attracts potential customers to look at your products like a large banner with the word ‘SALE’ plastered on it in bold font. Advertise your offers, sales and giveaways meticulously.
Because nobody ever said no to something that is free.
Leads
Lead ads are a great way to get to know your audience better. When a user clicks on a lead ad, it directs them to a form that they have to fill out.
The best part about Lead ads is that they are optimized to fit on a mobile screen. And since we all use our mobiles more than our laptops or desktops, it is a great option to reach a greater audience.
If you are a new company and you’re trying to get to know your audience better by building email lists and collecting information, lead ads are your go-to.
Canvas
A new feature that has appeared across the board on Facebook is the stories option. A person viewing their stories feed invariably sees an advertisement once in every two or three stories. The infographic that they see is a plain, screen-wide advertisement that showcases your company and has a call-to-action button at the top.
These are again a great option for companies starting out because they are optimized to a phone screen and therefore can reach a larger audience.
Make sure to have gripping imagery and easily spottable call-to-action buttons.
Carousel
Facebook also allows companies now to showcase more than one product in one advertisement. This is the carousel feature.
Through this carousel feature of advertisements, it becomes easy for a company or brand to showcase a range of products that they are selling. The ad itself presents as a simple image with a swipe feature to see multiple pictures.
Targeting Options
On Facebook you can use almost any piece of information available to target your advertisements. From location to age demographics and everything in between.
This is particularly useful for local businesses because they can use this feature to focus on their locality or city or even zip code.
What these targeting options offer to companies is a more focused subset of people to whom they can advertise. By narrowing down to a focused subset of people, the chances of your company attracting new customers is also higher because you already know what they want.
Use this feature carefully when using Facebook ads. Because when used well, it can yield really good results.
Customize your Ads
Targeting advertisements also have the unique option of customizing. If you are selling an interest-specific product, you can easily launch advertisements to people on Facebook with that specific interest.
Properly targeted and customized advertisements are more likely to convert to sales and long term clientele because people like to see what they want.
Understand the demographic that your products fall into and use that information to target ads wisely.
Facebook Digital Marketing Strategy
Until now in this guide, we have discussed all that you need to do to get your brand a social media presence and how to advertise your products. A common factor in all of the topics above is the need for a strategy. In this section, let us discuss how you as a brand can develop a marketing strategy.
Set goals
The first and foremost thing you need to do for your company is to set social media and marketing goals. Put a number to these goals. For example, write down that ‘by the end of this month I want my page to have 200 subscribers or followers’ or ‘by the end of the next month I want 500’, ‘by the end of the year I want to have sold 1000 products’, etc.
Make sure all the decisions you take in that month are focused on achieving this goal.
Determine Your Target Audience
Find your audience sweet spot. Based on the products that you are selling, narrow down to a demographic that you think will engage with your content, and buy your products.
Once you have a specific target audience, your advertisements, posts, articles and links can be determined based on what interests this demographic. It will make your life a whole lot easier.
Conduct a competitive analysis
Make a list of companies that sell or deal in the same space as you. Look at what they do, understand their audience, check out their website. And most importantly learn from their mistakes.
Read customer reviews, see which of their posts have larger views and replicate the same on your page and website.
By doing this, you will know what your company is lacking and how to bring it up to a point where it is lacking no more.
Configure an editorial calendar
Have a content calendar for at least two months. Creating a content calendar is an arduous process and takes a lot of planning and time. Put in the effort because this will help your company have a consistent posting schedule that both you and your customers can depend on.
Give your users something to look forward to.
Build a consistent brand on Instagram
If your demographic is millennials, your brand needs to have a corresponding Instagram page. More and more users are now attracted to Instagram because of its visual outlook and appeal.
To really put your brand on the map, have a corresponding Instagram page for your brand and redirect people to and from your website, Facebook page, and Instagram account.
Grow your Instagram follower base
Using your Facebook page and its user base that you have already worked on amassing, grow your Instagram follower base as well. The same rules apply here in terms of posting and consistency.
Instagram is the new catalog and it is important to make your mark on it.
Convert your Facebook followers into customers
By inculcating all of the above tips into your day to day business and its social media presence, you will be able to surely convert your followers and user base into customers who will actually buy and consume your products.
Remember you have to be consistent with your posting and messaging and you have to remain patient.
Top 5 Tips And tricks
- Pay attention to your insights; they are your biggest strength
- Know your audience
- Post constantly and consistently
- Pay attention to design
- Reach out to experts in the field for help
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