Many companies think it is enough to open a page on Facebook and publish content with a certain frequency to obtain visibility and economic returns. To do business and use this platform as a real asset for our company, we must have a solid marketing strategy.
Winning strategies for facebook marketing
We have summarized in this article 7 steps to take to build it effectively, which are:
1 – Identify the objectives
The first thing to do is to define why we want to use Facebook. We need to clarify, especially to ourselves, if we are trying to make our brand known or increase traffic on our website if we want to collect new leads or sell more products. Outlining goals is the best way to evaluate and measure the results we will achieve.
We have been talking about SMART strategy for some time now, but what does this expression mean? In practice, a SMART goal must be:
Specific (Specific)
Measurable (Measurable)
Reachable (Attainable)
Relevant (Relevant)
With a defined time limit (Time based)
For example, instead of stating that our goal is generally to increase leads and sales, we set to get 50 leads with a conversion cost of less than $ 5 by the end of the following month. This is a SMART goal because it is specific. It is easily measurable and traceable; it is realistic and has precise timing.
2 – Choose the right audience
Our Facebook marketing strategy is useless if we don’t reach the right people. But how to identify them? In this sense, it can help to build an audience from the Facebook Business Manager. We can work for interests: we define people based on their characteristics and their interests, geolocation, and personal description.
But we can also choose to build a custom audience, using the different options offered to us by the platform. We have the opportunity to select people who have already visited our website and therefore potentially interested, or ask Facebook to create a personalized audience based on a list of information from our previous customers, including name, telephone number, and email address.
If we are not yet clear what our target is, we can use Facebook Audience Insights. It is a tool that conducts demographic research on its followers on the platform, allowing us to start creating our personalized audience.
For example, suppose our company sells doors and windows. In that case, we can write the names of brands specialized in the door and window sector, so we will address especially those who are building a house or have to change the doors and windows and by filling in the necessary fields, we could create our audience. The information we obtain will also be used to create useful content for users and promotions.
3 – Define the budget
The next step in drafting our strategy is to plan the budget. It is useless to deny it: the more we invest in posts and Ads, the more Facebook will put our page in front of the people it might be interested in.
With Facebook’s current algorithm, only a very small percentage of our followers will actually see our page posts. In some cases, less than 2%. This is why it is strategic to allocate a budget to sponsor posts and show them to a wider audience.
The best way to determine if your budget is appropriate is to test our listings over a full month to determine your return on investment (ROI). If it is positive, we are on the right track. If it is negative, we may need some adjustments.
An important note: While we don’t plan to use Facebook ads right away, it’s a good idea to set up a conversion pixel on our website to access important data when we launch paid campaigns.
A Facebook pixel is simply a piece of code used to track conversions, remarketing to people who have already visited our site and creating customized audiences in a targeted manner. The pixel will start collecting data as soon as it is placed on the site. The detailed information on the audience (remarketing and personalized) will be available when we start the actual advertising campaigns.
4 – Plan engaging content
Defining goals, targets and budget is essential, but now we need to think about the posts’ content on our Facebook page. A good rule of thumb is to have an editorial plan with a calendar at least one month in advance. Furthermore, it would be advisable to publish four or five posts a week regularly.
On the other hand, a rather widespread practice of hastily deciding what to publish the same day, with the anxiety of not having adequate content or topic, should be avoided. Platforms (such as Hootsuite) that allow you to plan content ahead of time and not post it manually and monitor reports on activity can help.
The written part of our posts should be short but not too short. People have a limited attention span, but a well-written caption helps the reader understand what they see and the message we want to get across. It is advisable to include three sentences in the text: one to attract attention, add value, and one with the call to action.
And the images?
Photos and videos are certainly the most popular content on a platform born for entertainment like Facebook. So let’s use them abundantly, but keeping in mind some simple rules:
Brightness and high resolution of the images are fundamental;
Better to avoid photos taken from generic image banks (unless we have alternatives);
The images in which faces are seen attract the attention of our eyes more;
Audio will very rarely be heard, so we make sure that the videos work even without volume.
5 – Develop a plan for advertising campaigns
The Facebook Ads system isn’t exactly trivial to use, but it offers tons of possibilities. The power editor divides the objectives into 3 groups, each with its own sub-objectives.
Increase the awareness of the brand or your company:
Make your posts stand out
Promote your page
Reach people close to your company
Finding potential customers for your company:
Direct people to your website
Get installations of your application
Increase participation in your event
Get video views
Collect leads for your company
Increase conversions or sales for your business:
Increase conversions on your website
Increase interaction with your application
Get people to ask for your offer.
Having established the objectives will also help us define our campaigns to be set on the Facebook Business Manager.
In addition to the classic basic settings, Facebook also makes another powerful tool available to advertisers: retargeting. When setting up a retargeting campaign with dynamic ads, users can automatically review products and services they have already shown interest in on a website or app.
With retargeting (or remarketing), we can find the users we had temporarily lost and direct them to purchase or to a specific conversion action, more difficult to obtain at the first attempt.
In this way, we can also set specific announcements for those who already know us and have expressed an interest in our products or services.
6 – Monitor the results
On Facebook, and more generally in online marketing, there is no exact science and the same rules for everyone. This is why it is essential to continuously study and monitor the situation to understand how to optimize our actions and improve the strategy.
We can use Facebook’s Insights system and its Analitycs or use external platforms to obtain statistics and reporting. The important thing is to keep everything under control with daily monitoring of the page, moderation of comments, response to questions and reviews, interaction with our followers.
7 – Do tests
Once all these activities have been set up, we can say that we are on the right track. With one recommendation, though: always experiment with tests and trials.
By making more engaging images or videos, more engaging texts, creating different audiences to reach, we may realize what works best for our audience. This will help us make more consistent decisions to improve our Facebook marketing strategy constantly.
