Facebook marketing demystified

Looking to market or advertise on Facebook?

Whether you’re a small, medium or large business, Facebook can help you reach your business goals. Facebook is a prime channel to increase brand awareness, drive online sales, boost local sales, promote your app, and generate business leads and much more.

According to statistics, Facebook is still by far the biggest social network in the world, with over 1.5 billion global monthly active users and a staggering 1.09 billion active users visiting the platform on a daily basis.

Why Advertise On Facebook

Here are some more statistics to help you understand the potential for marketing and advertising on Facebook:

• There are 20,000 people on Facebook every second

• 40 minutes – the average time spent on Facebook per day by Americans

• Facebook users view more than 4 billion videos a day, with 75% of those video views occurring on mobile devices

• 49% of users like a Facebook page to support the brand

• Posts with video get 62% more engagement than photos

• Brands that post 1-2 times a day get 73% more comments and 32% more likes

• Facebook ads with call-to-action (CTA) buttons get 2.85x higher click-through rate compared to ads that don’t have a CTA

• According to Shareaholic data, Facebook drives about 25% of all social referral traffic

With such powerful statistics, it’s clear that Facebook is not only the largest social network around, but also the greatest marketing resource globally. When used correctly, it presents a huge opportunity to build long-lasting relationships with the people that matter to your brand and acquire new customers.

Read on to discover strategies, tools and best practices to help you get the best results from your Facebook marketing and advertising efforts.

Getting started

Before you start marketing or advertising on Facebook, you need to have a strategy with goals in place. This will ensure you have a clear plan of action and help you know whether or not you’re getting a positive return on your social media endeavors.

Begin by identifying your goals. What are you looking to achieve from your Facebook marketing and advertising?

Here are some typical goals to consider:

• Increasing online sales – Facebook can help you reach relevant people and boost sales for your online business. You can track and measure the results of your efforts as well.

• Increasing local awareness and sales– Facebook can help you reach people in your geographic area and boost sales for your local business.

• Promoting your mobile app and games – Reach the right people and keep them engaged with your apps. You can measure this goal by tracking app installs, sales and more.

• Increasing brand awareness – Facebook is the perfect place to reach the right audience and let people discover your brand. You can measure the success of this goal using engagement metrics like the number of page likes, page & post views, clicks, as well as comments received.

• Generating leads – Facebook presents an effective way to collect leads for your business or client. You can let people request quotes or demos, sign up for your newsletter, download a freebie and more.

Of course, the goals you set will depend on your specific type of business. You should, however, make sure you attach a timeframe and have a way of measuring your goals.

Set up an Optimized Facebook Page

A Facebook page is the focal point for your brand on Facebook. It allows you to establish a presence for your brand or business and connect with new and existing customers.

An optimized business page will make it easy for people to discover you and learn what your brand is about. Facebook allows you to feature your website, opening hours and contact information, business description, products, services, menu, directions, etc on your business page. So leverage this valuable real estate.

Make sure you have an appealing and keyword-rich description, a link to your website, a good cover photo and a call to action to help customers reach you faster.

Promote Your Facebook Page

After setting up a Facebook page for your business, you’ll need to make people aware of it. There are many ways you can spread the word about your page and build an audience.

Here are some ideas to go about it:

• Have friends who could be interested in your business? Invite them to like your page.

• Send a message to your email list asking them to check out your Facebook page

• Add your Facebook URL in your email signature

• Ask your Twitter followers to check out your page

• Write about your fan page on your blog

• Add a fan page widget on your blog or website

• Promote your fan page in-store

• Invest in Facebook page like ads to reach even more people

Keep Your Fans Engaged

With over 4.7 billion items being shared by Facebook users each day, you need to share really interesting and compelling updates to get noticed and keep your fans engaged with your brand. This means posting content that is relevant, captivating and personal.

Here are some ways to increase your Facebook page engagement:

• Ask questions to get people to respond to your posts.

• Post at the right times when people are likely to check for updates on their Facebook. Studies have shown that the best time to post on Facebook is between noon and 3 PM, and slightly after 7 PM.

• Post photos as they stand out compared to text updates

• Post videos to gain the highest rate of engagement. Studies have shown videos result in significantly higher engagement.

• Interact with your Facebook community to build lasting relationships, trust, and loyalty. Respond to your notifications, comments, and messages

• Create Facebook contests. According to a study by Syncapse, 35% of Facebook users like a page to participate in contests. Contests are a great way to get people to engage with your brand on Facebook.

• Share coupon and discount details - The same study by Syncapse discovered that 42% of Facebook users like a brand page to get a coupon or discount.

• Join Facebook groups and engage with other business pages as well

Streamline Your Facebook Marketing Activity

To get the most from your Facebook marketing, you’ll need to have good content and maintain consistency in your posting.

Set up a social media editorial calendar to guide you on what you should be posting on what day and time. You should also plan and schedule your daily, weekly and monthly activity to ensure you use your time on Facebook efficiently.

Measure Your Performance

Just like in any other form of marketing, you should measure the performance of your Facebook marketing to know whether or not you’re getting the desired results. To see how people respond to your Facebook marketing, you should measure the performance of your Facebook page.

Use Page Insights to see how many likes and new likes your page has received and the number of people who’ve seen your page and posts. You can also see the number of clicks, likes, comments and shares your page and posts receive. With these data, you’ll be able to improve how you market to and reach your fans.

Best Facebook Advertising Techniques

Facebook adverts are an effective way to reach people who are interested in your business or brand and the products or services you offer. When done correctly, they present huge potential to drive real customers to your landing pages.

Whether your goal is to get people to download your app, direct them to your local shop, get views for your video, or get people to take action on your website; Facebook is one of the best platforms around to get real business results.

Aiming for a Conversion-Based Facebook ad Campaign

Rather than just generating traffic, you most likely want to drive potential customers to your landing pages and ultimately make sales.

Therefore, make sure you’ve researched your audience thoroughly and that your landing page is optimized for conversions. You want to be certain you’re targeting your ideal customers otherwise you’ll most likely struggle to get effective results from your Facebook advertising.

Here are some strategies and techniques to run an effective Facebook ad campaign that’ll help you reach your bottom line.

Target Your Advertising

With over 1.5 billion Facebook users, it’s absolutely important to target the people who are most likely interested in your business or products.

Facebook offers targeting options that allow you to reach the audiences that matter to you. You can target people by location, age, gender, interests, demographics, behaviors, connections, education, relationship status and more.

For example, if you’re a local business and your main customers are around your shop, you could target your ads to a certain radius within your business. You can also use interest-based targeting to reach people who’re interested in your topic. For instance, you could target people who are interested in your competitors or blogs in your niche.

Custom Audiences

Custom audiences, a relatively new feature in Facebook advertising, are an extremely effective tool to target users who’ve already shown an interest in your brand or product. You can create a custom audience from a list of email subscribers, phone numbers, Facebook ids and more.

Custom audiences offer endless opportunities. For instance, you could target your email subscribers to convert them into customers, or existing customers to upsell new products.

With custom audiences, you could also target your ads to people who’ve visited your website before. This can be useful in many scenarios. For example, you can run an ad targeting people who visited your product page but didn’t buy to encourage them to come back to your website and complete the purchase.

Optimize Your Ads

There are more than 50 million business pages on Facebook with over 2.5 million of those paying to be “active advertisers”. Also, 75% of brands on Facebook will pay to promote posts. With such huge competition, you have to present an appealing story to your potential customers to get them to click your ads.

• Design great adverts - To grab the attention of users, design ads that are catchy and address the specific needs of your target audience with different prepositions.

• Maintain consistency between your ads and the landing page for a better conversion rate. For instance, if someone clicks on an ad for “red official women dress”, you don’t want them to end up on a generic clothing e-commerce page with no official women dresses.

• Explain to the user exactly what you want them to do. Whether you want them to like your page, fill out a form, purchase a product, or try out your product.

• Use social proof to eliminate any fears the user might have by letting them know other users have made the same choice.

• Use images with people your customers can identify with.

Once you’ve gathered some data, you’ll have an idea of what works and what doesn’t. You can then delete poor performing ads and move the budget to those performing well.

Track Your Ad Performance

Once you have your Facebook ads running, you need to monitor the campaigns to understand how they’re performing.

Use Facebook’s ad reporting tool to get important insights like ad campaign status, a number of people who see your advert and engage with it, the cost per action, conversation rates, amount spent and more. The information from the advert manager will help you edit your ads based on their performance and create more effective campaigns.

You can also enable conversion tracking in Google analytics to see how the people who clicked on your Facebook ads interacted on your website. How long did they stay on your site? How many pages did they visit? Did they complete a purchase?

With this kind of measuring, you’ll be able to know what return on investment you get from advertising on Facebook.

Summary of Facebook Marketing and Advertising Tools

The following tools are designed to help enhance your Facebook marketing and advertisement, save time and get more out of your campaigns.

• Facebook Ads Manager – Create, view, make changes and see the results from your campaigns, ad sets, and ads.

• Facebook Power Editor – Tailored to large-scale advertisers, the power editor is a powerful tool for creating and managing bulk ads. The tool makes it easy to search and filter through ads, create and edit multiple ads, as well as navigating through campaigns, ad sets, and individual ads.

• Business Manager – Makes it possible for advertisers to manage all their ad accounts, pages and apps from a central place.

• Facebook Audience Insights – Provides valuable information about the people who matter to the business. Learn where your audience is located; what interests them; their behaviors and more.

• Facebook Page Insights – A powerful tool for tracking how users interact with your fan page

Conclusion

Facebook marketing isn't difficult once you get hang of it. The new features are included every day in facebook.