Facebook marketing strategy

Facebook is currently exceeding 2.27 billion online users which has more than doubled from 1 billion in 2012.

This has lead to small business owners realising now more than ever that they will need to effectively implement a Facebook marketing strategy.

When it comes to effectively managing your business’s online brand and engaging with your target audience Facebook is definitely your go-to for all of the latest cutting edge digital marketing tactics.

Facebook pages have allowed even big businesses to dig deep into their core values of why they do what they do and as a result, a few fantastic stories have begun to emerge.

With this in mind, let’s dive into a few key features of an effective Facebook marketing strategy.

1: Facebook marketing strategy goal setting

When you’re looking to develop out a Facebook marketing strategy the first crucial step that you will need to take is to set in place an effective set of goals for your business.

When I ask small businesses about their social media goals the responses that I typically get largely revolves around sales. An article by Sprout Social has hit the nail on the head when it comes to the most common goals often outlined by businesses.

Let’s dive into them now:

Meeting sales targets

When I think of meeting sales targets with Facebook my mind is often drawn to a scene from a movie called The Internship.

In this particular scene, they are trying to sell googles Adsense services to a small pizza shop owner.

Sal the owner believed that in order to effectively market online the business would need to completely reshape its brand and it would lose everything that the loyal customers loved about Sal’s pizza.

After a convincing sales pitch from the googlers, Sal realised that his target audience is still who they have always been and that the online environment acts as a digital megaphone to improve your reach.

In conclusion focus on what you know and what your brand stands for and incorporate that into your local SEO strategy

(Image sourced from Mashable)

Injecting value into the business

Facebook is a unique medium in the sense that it puts customers in constant contact with your business.

This can be leveraged by supplying valuable information that answers frequently asks questions about your business’s products and services.

This could include product demonstration videos as well as valuable blog articles that could help enable customers to move further along in their buying process. By enabling effective communication you are able to turn that potential one-off buyer into a long term valued customer.

Traffic building

Ahh yes, traffic building, one of the core reasons that drive businesses to social media platforms.

Statistics show that three in five businesses will focus on social media as the primary mechanism for distributing content, with Facebook being one of the leaders in the pack.

When you are looking to build out a Facebook marketing strategy to drive traffic back to your website it’s important that you use a method I call The Magic In The Measurable Metrics.

This focuses primarily on the following three things:

• Track your page’s analytics on a post by post basis. This allows you to determine which posts are performing and well, to put it bluntly, which posts don’t make the cut. Use the statistics to refine your Facebook marketing strategy down to what works. This allows you to free up space within your strategy to innovate and try new things instead of constantly distributing content that isn’t meshing well with your readership.
• The next step is to drill down into your traffics bounce rate, once users reach your website directly from your Facebook marketing strategy. If you find that your social media leads are resulting in high website bounce rates than you may need to double check that your Facebook content strategy aligns with the goals of your website. For example, if you have a website selling dog walking services and your traffic is coming from a Facebook post on the best new dog collar then you may have a pretty difficult time selling dog walking services to someone who is outside your geographic area who is just looking to buy a new collar. A way around this may be to create a landing page that showcases that specific collar on Amazon. This way you will see a much higher rate of conversion.
• The performance of your lead generating content is an essential component of any Facebook marketing strategy. To effectively generate Facebook leads you will need to design up a few lead generating posts and strategically weave them into your Facebook marketing strategy. The traffic from these lead generating posts will ideally have a high click-through rate combined with a low website bounce rate.

This is an example of a typical lead generating post that could be woven into your social media strategy to effectively drive traffic back to your website.

It’s important to note that it is often beneficial to offer an incentive for the user to click through. Offering digital products such as a free eBook download can often serve as a fantastic incentive.

2: Build your Facebook launch platform

Now that you have set in place a key set of goals for your Facebook marketing strategy you will need to build an effective launch platform before unleashing your content strategy onto the world.

To help small businesses with this component of the marketing strategy I have written an eBook titled Facebook Marketing that focusses entirely on building an attractive launch platform combined with an efficient workflow.

I’m going to give you a sneak preview into a few methods that you can use to build out your digital launch platform.

Bring your page up to scratch

In this day and age, it’s essential to have an appealing brand profile.

This comes down to having a consistent brand colour scheme and message across all of your digital platforms, not just Facebook. I know it can be difficult to create custom image sizes to match every header, post and profile image.

This why I have been using Canva to do all of my image sizings for me. Canva is a free image editing software that allows you to design perfectly sized images for all of your social media profiles without the hassle of cropping and resizing.

This step is essential as it allows your business to develop a level of professionalism online.

Your guide on how to use Canva

Finding your brand identity

Before any artist begins to put the brush to canvas the artist first plans out what it is that he would like to paint. Finding your brand identity works in a similar way.

Before you launch into your Facebook marketing strategy you need to determine what it really means to be part of your brand. A great way to discover your identity is to describe your business to someone who knows nothing about your industry.

This will force you to really distil down your business’s core values and what problems you solve for your customers. Once identified, write these down as they will serve as the bones for not only your Facebook marketing strategy but your entire content strategy.

3: Build your product showcase

Facebook offers an amazing tool that allows you to create a showcase for your product or service.

Quite often people use this section to list exactly what they are offering on their website.

This is such a lost opportunity as you will be much better off leveraging this section to have some fun with your product advertising.

A few creative product ideas may include:

• A loot crate subscription if you are a giftware or gaming shop where you send out a $30 mystery bundle every month.
• A Christmas themed service bundle designed to best prepare a business for the Christmas rush.
• A launch pad package designed to best help small businesses in building their digital launch platform.

Lootcrate does a fantastic job with this

The more creative you get the more traffic your weird and wonderful idea will generate for your business.

4: Create shareable content

So now that we have our Facebook marketing strategy established and our digital launch platform is locked into place, all systems go.

It’s time to build out your content management strategy.

To continue with the rocket analogies if your website and Facebook page is the launch platform and rocket ship then your content would definitely have to be the fuel.

To effectively fuel your Facebook management strategy a great rule of thumb to use is the 70:20:10 rule.

• 70% of your content should be proven shareable content that is the very essence of your brand. This content will largely be based around solving problems for your customers and creating content that is within your comfort zone so to speak.
• 20% of your content will need to be the more left field stuff that provides your readership with that something new. A great content idea for this section is documenting any guerilla marketing tactics that your company may be doing. This will be your content that creates buzz and excitement on your Facebook page so don’t be afraid to have a little fun when creating content within this area.  Combine this with sharing articles from other sources and you will be geared perfectly to succeed on Facebook.
• 10% of your content will need to be promotional. Make sure you are making the most out of your promotional content by designing well thought out lead pages and buyer opt-ins. To quote Neil Patel the magic is really in the list building. Make sure that you are effectively capturing emails to continue to sell your products to users.

Sourced from Neil Patel’s blog

Included above is a fantastic post by Target that is practically begging for user engagement and you can bet your bottom dollar that users will often say something hilarious that could send your post viral.

These types of posts are fantastic ways to engage with your Facebook community and can often make users a lot more receptive to your promotional content by increasing the level of post engagement.

5: Engage with your community

Lucky last but certainly not least it is important that you regularly engage with your online community by answering questions and ensuring that your online content is as shareable as possible.

To achieve this let’s take a look at a fantastic list provided by Buffer.

What makes shareable content?

• Entertainment: This is where you will need to show your quirky/funny side in your Facebook marketing strategy. This is often conveyed through sharing eye-catching imagery or by sharing short and punchy updates that really strike a rapport with your readers.
• Identity: To use a young and hip term this is where you need to be REAL with your customers. Share content that explains why you do what you do and share your passions with your community. The more authentic the better.
• Relationships: It is important that you build relationships with people within your community by engaging in discussion and responding to comments. Who knows they may end up becoming one of your biggest brand advocates one day.
• Self Fulfilment: Be honest about your brand’s ambitions and motivations for the betterment of your readership.
• Provide exclusive information: Providing exclusive information about upcoming products and events is a fantastic way to make your readers really feel like they are part of a community and are on the cutting edge of product innovation. Gaming and software companies are by far the best at this strategy by providing loyal customers with exclusive early releases and game beta tests that aren’t always open to the general public. This creates a huge level of product hype and is a fantastic way to add value to your customers. You also get valuable customer feedback prior to release to help ensure that your product will be a success.

Conclusion

To sum things up it is essential that you build out an effective digital launch platform prior to starting your Facebook management strategy.

This will include setting in place clear social media goals for your business and ensuring that you are clear about the desired outcomes of your Facebook marketing strategy.

From here you can begin to develop a content strategy that will help you achieve what you set out to do while building out an engaged Facebook community.

Now just remember you can’t manage what you don’t measure. So make sure that you are keeping track of your Facebook bounce and engagement rates to ensure that you are making the most out of your promotional content.

As long as what you are posting adds value and answers questions for your customer base you will see success in your Facebook marketing strategy. If you need a hand implementing your strategy or even have the odd SEO question we run a organic SEO studio so feel free to reach out.