It wasn’t a long time ago when businesses were skeptical of whether they could use Facebook to increase their business. Even if businesses knew the potential of Facebook to reach across to their customers, they would be reluctant to spend their marketing dollars.
How are we going to measure the ROI of social media? Is there a successfully proven marketing strategy on Facebook? How can I be active on Facebook when I have a business to run?
These were some of the questions that would trouble the minds of many businesses owners, entrepreneurs and company board of directors.
According to Facebook’s recent quarterly results, there are 60 million businesses that are using Facebook pages to promote their business. Facebook made a smart move to acquire Instagram because Facebook and Instagram have become the mobile presence for business.
So many businesses have seen an increase in revenue due to the successful execution of Facebook marketing strategies. This would not have been possible by randomly doing some posts on Facebook.
After you have read this article you will have some of the best-proven ways to improve your Facebook marketing strategies.
Related:
1. How To Run Facebook Ads (Beginner’s Guide)
2. Is Facebook Advertising Really Worth It?
3. How to Design Facebook Ads in GetResponse (New Feature Update)
1) Describe objectives and key results
The most important part of any journey is to know the destination that we want to go from where we are present. Say we have packed our bags, loaded our stuff in the car and ready to go. But till the time we do not know the destination we cannot go ahead. We will be lost.
So, before you start your social media marketing journey, first it is important to define clearly where you want to go and the results you want to reach. If you do not know where you want to drive your business with this awesome marketing vehicle of Facebook, then your efforts are doomed.
Every brand is unique and you might have unique objectives for your brand. Some common key objectives and results of a company that might help you to define yours are:
- Building brand awareness
- Get leads and drive sales
- Customer feedback
- Product familiarization
- Online reputation management
- Be closer to the customer
Once you have defined objectives for your brand, you can move ahead to understand your customer avatar.
2) Understand your target audience
You cannot sell an Xbox to a busy housewife who might barely have time to watch her favorite TV series after she has prepared dinner for the family. Similarly, you cannot sell a dishwasher to a 12-year-old kid who probably loves skateboarding. This will only waste your time and money.
To be successful in your Facebook marketing strategy you need to know your audience. Your product or service have to reach the attention of the right customers.
Hence we clearly need to define who is our target audience. Once you know your audience, you can stay relevant and provide valuable content to your customer.
3) Perfectly time your content
Nothing is more important than timing in your marketing. Your content might fail to capture the viewer’s attention if you fail to reach the audience during the relevant time.
Timing your Facebook content depends on the time your audience is online. There are various suitable timings for scheduling social media content based on the social media platform you have chosen.
For Facebook, the best times to post are on Thursday and Friday. The engagement level of Facebook users with the content is low from Monday through Wednesday. Also, it is best to avoid posting during the weekends.
Early afternoon is the best time to post with 1pm-4pm being the ideal time. Traffic builds after 9am and peaks at 3pm. During or after lunch is the favorable time to post because people generally are lazy after food. At work, people feel sleepy so they get on Facebook to have some fun.
4) Provide valuable content
The very best method many marketers use to gain trust and confidence of the audience is by sharing valuable content. The content is shared for free and with no-strings attached.
Your audience will not only be hooked to your awesome free content but he will be coming back for more. You content needs to be fun, interactive and valuable.
Try sharing a visually attractive image, visual content is seen to have more engagement than posts without any visuals. Even if you are sharing updates to your audience about your industry, visual content seen to have higher interaction level.
Take newsletters, pdfs, eBooks and other marketing collaterals to create a series of how-to tips that adds value to the audience. Keep a planned way to post valuable content on a regular basis and the user will be hooked.
5) Create interactive posts
You will need to know the most important keywords that are relevant to your business and create highly interactive posts on them.
To get your audience talking on the core topics of your business you need to create very highly interactive posts that will give people something to talk about.
While your goal is to provide an entertaining space for the audience, you want to get the valuable feedback from the customer. Interactive posts can be fun and you can show the benefits or uses of your product in a fun, interactive way that your customers will love.
Be careful, though, as the engagement can easily turn into a negative one, like in the example below. Sometimes it will be irrelevant to the post. But, most of the time, you can predict it and come up with responses (or ways to avoid it) beforehand.
The Facebook page of Oreo does really well while creating fun, interactive posts, where you might want to get some inspiration to get your creative juices flowing. But, sometimes it can go awry.
6) Crowdsource your answers
One of the key benefits of crowdsourcing your answers is that they help to drive customer engagement of the Facebook page. You will not only increase your customer engagement but in the process also create crowdsourced content for your brand.
Create a poll or a photo contest and ask your Facebook fans for their feedback. People love to talk about themselves, as soon as you ask the users point of view, the user is excited to draw his opinion.
You can use to get valuable feedback on your product, get testimonials, photos with your products. A simple photo contest, executed correctly, can drive results.
7) Run Facebook contests
Similar to crowdsourcing your answers, you can run a Facebook contest to increase the engagement of your page with your customers.
You can give out free giveaways to a few winners of the contest. Who doesn’t like free things? This will lure the customers to participate in the contest and at the end of the contest, you will have a lot of user-generated content. The cost of the giveaway will be much lesser to the revenue you will be able to generate or the Page engagement level you will receive.
The Paris Hilton’s public page hosted this contest to increase the engagement of her page.
8) Use Facebook ads
Another quick way to reach your desired target audience is to use Facebook advertising. You will be able to quickly show your most important content to the targeted audience and drive the required conversions within a specified time period of the campaign.
The amount of marketing dollars you spent is directly related to the number of views or impressions you want to receive.
Facebook ads is clearly a favorite of many marketers to promote their business pages. Also, the audience mapping of Facebook is really good to target your audience very specifically.
9. Measure the effectiveness of your Facebook campaign
After you have put all the effort in creating and posting your content, you will need to measure the success of your Facebook campaign.
A really effective way to measuring your results is to create a landing page for your campaign and drive the traffic to your page to get the required conversion.
Once you analyze the results of your campaign using the analytics on your landing page you will be able to scope the success of your efforts.
10. Create a strategy, a system, and automate your Facebook marketing
Last but not least, after you have executed, measured and seen the results of your marketing efforts, you need to make a organize what has worked for you and optimize your plan each time.
However, Wednesday and Thursday being the ideal days to post are the selected days for posting in the above schedule. Wednesday has four posts scheduled because Wednesday gets the most number of engagements.
The timing of your post is essential, hence scheduling your posts on Facebook is an ideal way to get engagement on your posts. By scheduling your posts you will be able to post at the very specific times and not miss out on any posts. You will be able to monitor the posts and analyze the engagement on your posts.
Finally
As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Similarly, to be successful in Facebook marketing will take some time and effort. But, with these proven ways to improve your Facebook Marketing Strategies you can start your journey right now and you’re on your way to create the buzz you need for your business.
Back to you
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