Facebook marketing isn’t new—neither is the idea that every business needs a Facebook presence.
In fact, when businesses seek social media presence, Facebook is the first platform that strikes the mind. After all, it’s the world’s most powerful site where friends connect and share online. Statistics say:
- In the USA alone, Facebook has over 190 million users (Statista).
- The social network reaches 59% of the world social networking population (eMarketer)
- The platform is the third most visited site in the world (Semrush)
- Facebook is the second most downloaded app (Forbes)
- Average American Facebook users spend 34 minutes per day using the platform (Statista)
More than just a platform where people meet friends, Facebook has grown into a venue for businesses to market themselves through interaction with customers and self-promotion.
The social platform has unique benefits that few other advertising platforms can offer. However, the big question is:
How do you drive demand, create loyal fans, and grow your business on Facebook?
#1. Create a Facebook Business page and Make the Most Out of it
All of the most successful businesses online have strong brand equity and have value to people’s lives—and a Facebook page is a great free social media marketing strategy for businesses to grow brand equity.
Rather than sell, sell, sell, you should first focus on building your brand and adding continuous free value to your customers and fans on the page.
Once you make this your primary focus, the sales will come. In fact, If you do a great job, your customers will sell, sell, sell for you.
The secret lies in creating useful, meaningful, interesting, or entertaining content that your target audience wants to see but connects to your business. Use Facebook Audience Insights to learn more about the people that matter to your business.
The tool will help you learn aggregate information about geography, demographics, purchase behaviors, and more. As a result, you’ll be more equipped to deliver meaningful messages to people and separate yourself from the competition.
It’s an excellent spot to develop your brand identity and show the human side of your business. Facebook is where you can loosen the tie a bit and be funny.
On the page, you can identify the unique strand of your business using:
- Product listing
- Sharing website links
- Sharing images
- Videos
The key to a successful Facebook page is digging deep to find your audience’s pain points, then drill down hard until your content or offer becomes a no-brainer. Then create tight, so-human content that keeps you visitors reading or viewing even in the face of the most distracting notification.
After creating engagement, you’ll need to turn your audience into buyers. Create an intriguing copy that explodes your conversion and gets your leads to buy from you.
#2. Tap Into Facebook Advertising
Email marketing is old but a powerful way to reach customers and make sales for nearly every business.
Fortunately, Facebook marketing Ads presents excellent ways to capture highly relevant leads and email addresses daily at a low cost. It offers an advanced targeting system that allows you to capture highly relevant leads by specifically targeting those who liked your page, visit your site, or liked your competitors’ pages.
The best part?
It’s easy to get started. In fact, you can start directly on the platform with Facebook’s build-in Lead Capture campaign, which directly pulls customer’s email from Facebook, meaning it’s probably their best email—not spam or secondary account.
The built-in Facebook marketing tool then sends the emails straight to your email server (such as Mail Chimp or Aweber), just like the old-fashioned opt-in box you would have on your website.
Alternatively, you can set a lead capture page on your site, which provides something valuable to customers like a free plan, a product, a pdf, or a trial in return for their email. Then promote the lead-capture page using Facebook advertising.
Depending on your industry and targeting specifics, you can capture emails for around $1 by running Facebook ads to this page.
The secret is to start now
Then focus on growing your email list with the most qualified lead. It’s one of the best investments you will make, and you can easily earn back thousands in revenue every time you do a big email promotion or launch a product or service using your email list.
Apart from building an email list, Facebook marketing ads allow you to present content to your fans daily, which is critical in building authority and creating brand awareness.
For instance, classic Facebook ads appear in the side column of the Facebook site—which is well known as Marketplace Ads.
The ads entail a headline, an image, and a click-through-link to either your Facebook page, a Facebook app, or your official website.
This type of ad is excellent in boosting videos, informative posts, and blog posts from your site, broadcasting Facebook lives, etc.
However, it’s the great content that people love, not sales ads. Great content gets high relevance scores and only costs a couple of cents per view, watch or click. Your main job should be creating excellent social media content.
Then use Facebook advertising features which include:
- Demographic targeting by Facebook user data on age, location education, and interest
- The ability to set ads budget
- Ad testing—you can run multiple ad versions simultaneously to compare ads design and setup
- Build-in ad performance measurement tools
- Local advertising—advertising for your particular area
Facebook does not release information about its ad click-through rate (CTR), so it’s difficult to know how successful Facebook ads are.
Using Facebook advertising to increase your likes is highly beneficial because once users like your page, they essentially become followers of your business page. Your post will appear on their Facebook news feed.
This results in more users’ interaction with you and your brand, forming relationships that may translate to conversion in the future.
#3. Create Facebook Promoted Post
Facebook Promoted Posts let Facebook page owners pay a flat rate so that their Facebook posts reach a certain number of already-subscribed users, increasing a specific post’s reach and impressions.
It is easy to wonder:
Why should you pay to ensure your followers see your post in their news feed? Shouldn’t they automatically see it?
The answer is simple—your followers do not spend every waking moment of their life on Facebook’s news feed.
Suppose a follower happens to be looking at their news feed when you post your story, they are likely to see it, but even then, there is no guarantee if their news feed is swamped by other posts.
That’s where a promoted post comes in. It ups the chances of your user seeing you in their news feeds. Facebook shows promoted posts to existing fans, with the added option to reach friends of fans.
The best part?
You can readily set up Promoted Posts—just click the button beneath any of your page posts. The flat rate will simplify the process. However, Promoted Posts lack the targeting options that other Facebook ads offer.
#4. Create Sponsored Stories
500 million people use Facebook stories daily.
Facebook Story is different from the typical Facebook page. Stories are where people share and discover content they care about in fast and fun ways.
Sponsored Stories are unique among Facebook ads because they show users’ interactions—like Facebook likes—to the user’s friends.
Sponsored Stories seek to capitalize on the word-of-mouth marketing concept. Suppose a user sees that three of his friends like a specific page, he is more inclined to pay attention. The goal of Sponsored Stories is to have a user take the same action as their friends.
As an advertiser, you can choose to show friends likes when you want more page likes or show friends who have “claimed this offer” when you want more users to claim offers.
While Facebook automatically posts the action performed by a friend liking a page or claiming an offer in the user’s news feed, people easily overlook these posts. However, Sponsored stories get preferred positioning capable of appearing in the news feed and the right sidebar.
Sponsored stories are also the only ad format available on mobile devices.
Sponsored Stories don’t only apply to likes or offer—you can use them with any Facebook Open Graph app. For instance, if a friend has just installed a gaming app with friends on Facebook, Sponsored Stories can show users that their friend has just played the game, with an invite to challenge them to play with them, or any similar variation.
Facebook claims that Sponsored Stories have 46% higher CTRs and 20% lower CPC than regular Facebook ads, making them a very serious strategy for marketing on Facebook.
You can create Sponsored stories through the Facebook ad create flow. Open Graph Sponsored Stories with customized calls to action to require advertisers to use a third-party provider.
#5. Host Facebook Contests
Running Facebook contests, sweepstakes, or promotions is another Facebook marketing strategy to attract leads and increase fan and brand awareness.
Contests can be one of the best offers to your audience, but to attract the right leads, you need to design a contest to serve your business goals. One critical decision is the prize you’ll give away.
It should identify the need for your product so that it makes sense for them to buy when you present the offer.
When the contest is over, follow up with prospects through the customer journey.
One problem, though?
You can’t host Facebook contests on Facebook itself. For that reason, you can’t ask for page likes as entries or have people write answers in the comment, etc. Your business must use a third-party app for creating your Facebook contest, then direct users to the app from your Facebook page.
You’ll find plenty of paid tools to help you host FB contests as well as free ones. For instance, Shortstack presents several free contest templates so long as your page has under 2,000 likes. Another free option is Pagemodo.
Plenty of third-party Facebook contest apps offer free versions, but they limit your options.
Keywords:
#6. Tap Into Facebook Exchange (FBX)
FBX is a Facebook marketing tool that allows you to take advantage of Facebook marketing ad retargeting through real-time bidding. This social media marketing strategy taps into a system where Facebook marks visitors to third-party websites with a cookie that shows in real-time bid ads related to their web browsing when they return to Facebook.
You can target your audience based on web history—when a user visits your product page or website but fails to make a purchase, you can then display an ad for that exact product on their Facebook with Facebook Exchange.
While Facebook relegated the retargeting ads to the side column, the social giant recently started to allow retargeting ads to appear in the news feeds—one of the most valuable Facebook real-estate.
The response rate of news feeds is 10 to 50 times higher than Facebook marketing ads placed in the right column.
Should You Get a Facebook Marketing Agency to Market Your Business?
2.85 billion.
That’s the monthly total number of people on Facebook today.
This also mean you get direct access to 2.85 billion people on a single platform. Why not make the most of this opportunity and use Facebook to market your products and services—for generating leads and driving sales?
You can customize advertising on Facebook to suit your brand image and business goals. You can focus your efforts on a specific target audience and create the right traction for your offerings—all without breaking the bank.
While all this sounds fun and dandy, all your efforts can still backfire when you don’t have an efficient Facebook ad campaign in place. What’s more, you need to support your ad strategy with agility and in-depth knowledge to keep up with Facebook’s best practices and fast-evolving changes.
And that’s where the world’s best Facebook marketing agency steps in. You leverage:
- Hardcore marketers who know the art of marketing like the back of their hands
- Top-level expertise—intertwined with experience that can take your business to the heights you’re aiming for
- A team that understands the nuances of creating unique, impactful ads that drive Facebook users to take immediate action
- People that shoulder all the heavy Facebook marketing for you—executing paid Facebook ads, customer targeting, sending them messages, and recommending the best practices
At GetKnowticed, we are a performance-based, full-service agency that does more than sale and branding. We speak fluent internet. We create images that stop the scrolling, words that get people thinking, and Facebook marketing strategies that ensure your business doesn’t get lost into the abyss.
From personal brands to software companies, online stores to real estate, every industry works with us to get results.
Contact us; we talk about how you can harness the power of Facebook to build an audience, create social media content that creates a spark and drive sales to your business.
