With Facebook aiming to show its users content that is most interesting and relevant, there has been a noticeable decline in organic reach. Some even claim that organic reach is completely extinct. This makes things much harder for smaller businesses. Unlike larger corporations, smaller businesses don’t have the advertising budget available to tide them over with sponsored posts.
Rest assured, small businesses, there is still hope for success. Here are 10 tactics that can help you with targeting the right audience as well as presenting them content that aligns with their interests, all while spending very little.
What is Facebook marketing?
Facebook marketing encompasses the promotion of a brand, business, or its products via a dedicated Facebook business page. By optimizing business pages, brands turn these pages into semi-websites where products and services can be displayed, marketed, and sold to the designated audience.
Besides organic marketing, you can also promote with advertisements using Facebook’s ad system. You can create sponsored posts in various forms such as pictures, carousels, videos, and links to increase interaction.
With ad campaigns structured properly, Facebook can be used to facilitate the entire customer journey, from brand discovery to purchase, and even foster brand loyalty.
What Are The Advantages Of Marketing Your Brand On Facebook?
Approximately 91% of businesses all over the globe have created a Facebook page. The app has nearly 2 billion active users who log on at least once a day. 59% of those users have interacted with a business on the app.
To put it simply, businesses are competing and successfully getting customers through this social media app. If you are not building your presence and actively engaging on the app, you are missing out. In addition, 20% of the United States consumers use the platform to shop. By promoting your products on Facebook, you can easily get more consumers to take notice.
Facebook Ad Types
The great thing about Facebook ads is that one can choose from several options depending on their budget, goals, and brand strategy. Therefore, Facebook is flexible with the type and number of ads a single user can create.
- Image ads: These are Facebook ads with only a single image, a headline, and a short description. These ads are perfect for increasing sales and engagement since they can be used to promote products and services.
- Video ads: Illustration grabs users attention, and videos can be used to show demonstrations or give tours. They can greatly benefit a wide range of industries, such as real estate, where one can show a house through video tours.
- Carousel ads: Users can scroll through images or videos showcasing different angles of a single product or multiple products. This ad type is particularly useful in marketing for e-commerce businesses.
- Collection ads: These have a grid format with one main image or video at the top and three smaller images below it, which lets you show several different images at the same time. Collection ads are ideal for displaying items in your product catalog.
- Slideshow ads: You can design a video advertisement from a sequence of still images, text, or short video clips. They require five times less data than video clips, ensuring their effectiveness across different network speeds.
- Instant Experience ads: Previously Canvas ads, these ads for mobile devices are interactive and utilize images, carousels, text, and video. They are ideal for engaging potential customers and enabling them to learn more about your products or services.
- Lead ads: Users can tap on the advertisement and a form that has been filled in by the user will appear, ready to capture leads and sign-ups easily.
- Dynamic ads: These automatically display relevant products or services to users depending on their previous activities on the site, providing an excellent option for retargeting purposes.
- Messenger ads: This type of advertisement appears on the Messenger app & encourages the users to take some action.
- Stories ads: These ads are located between the users’ videos on Facebook & Instagram, offering a captivating full-screen advertisement that can be viewed as a video.
Top 10 Facebook Marketing Strategies
1. Set up the goals of marketing on Facebook
Almost every “how-to” article on Facebook advertising strategies starts off with goal setting. Unfortunately, we have to say this, but without a defined success criterion, your advertising campaign will struggle to carry any value. So, the question is, do you want:
- Enhance brand recognition?
- Cultivate a relatively large fan base?
- Increase the sales in your online/offline store?
- Obtain business-to-business leads?
- Create customer communities from which feedback can be received?
- None of the responses is wrong because any goal is acceptable.
Integrate your Facebook advertising efforts with your business goals, and you can rest assured that you will receive better feedback from customer interactions.
2. Define your target audience
As with any other marketing strategy, targeting specific users is very important in Facebook marketing too.
When building your target audience, start with broad demographics like gender, age, location, and language. After defining your ad range, you can further refine your audience to specific user behaviors and interests for better ad hit probability.
3. Develop a Facebook content marketing strategy
Creating a strategy on how you plan to use Facebook as a marketing tool is very important to track progress and know what works and what doesn’t. Have a well-planned posting strategy on Facebook or any other platform. Being regular and creating a posting routine will help increase your visibility on Facebook and other platforms.
An easy way to track your updates on Facebook is to create a content calendar where you can list or plan out the content you wish to post along with specific dates to host contests, giveaways, and other events for your followers.
Consistency encourages the growth of active followers. Without followers, a Facebook page will seldom appear on the newsfeeds of other users and thus has little to no engagement, which means less popularity. If your page takes too long without posting, it will get buried under the algorithm’s radar and won’t be shown too much.
4. Set Your Marketing Budget For Facebook
Ads or promotions may be for influencers, but depending on your other marketing activities, you may want to achieve a partnership with Facebook.
On the other hand, every brand is free to determine their budget. In fact, there are findings that state companies allocate 27.1% of their total marketing budget on social media ads.
Do you need assistance? Read how to set your Facebook ads budget first and then check out the free calculator we provide or evaluate your budget using our Facebook ad budgeting template.
5. Know when you should be posting
Posting on Facebook is not just clicking the “post” button and it is much more complicated than that. Many digital marketers understand that choosing when to update social media accounts, including Facebook, is very crucial.
- Post best days: Tuesday to Friday stand out as the best days for brands that want to post updates on Facebook since that is when users are most active on the platform.
- Best times to post: Posting times on the platform include midweek from Monday to Friday at 3 am Eastern Time, Tuesday at 10 am and noon Eastern Time.
- No matter the time of day, avoid posting anything on Saturdays, as engagement with Facebook is at its lowest.
6. Utilize Facebook Marketing Services
With Facebook Ads, you can greatly improve your visibility online to any audience you wish to target.
When used alongside Facebook Ads, professionally edited photos and visually appealing graphics can help you reach a larger audience. Make sure to set a budget for every individual campaign if you want to track the ROI of your Facebook Ads.
7. Ad Placement Selection
Choose the locations where you want your advertisement to be shown. For Facebook marketing tips aimed at novices, placing your ads on Advantage+ placement helps Facebook figure out where you would perform best.
You can also opt to customize placement and select whether you want your ads to show on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, or on all three at the same time.
8. Starting Your Advertising Initiatives
To finish off, have a look at your advertising settings. You also have the option of seeing your advertisement in advance by selecting a thumbnail.
If nothing requires any alterations, click the “Publish” button. Keep in mind, Facebook reviews the advertisements to confirm they comply with their policies. To monitor if your ad is online, look at the Delivery section of Ads Manager.
Good job! Now you have included advertisements in your Facebook marketing strategies.
9. Monitor and Optimize Your Campaign
Facebook is an ever-changing platform, and adjusting your approach based on performance monitoring guarantees that you gain the best return on investment.
Ad Manager gives a full breakdown of ad performance, including the number of clicks, performance by age group, and performance by gender, among other details.
If the results are far from return expectations, a shift in image, advertising types, or ad content may be necessary to improve optimization to achieve the desired metrics.
10. Engage Frequently
Having a successful page on Facebook requires consistency and active participation. Whichever business or brand you represent, engagement is the hallmark of a successful Facebook page because the platform appreciates users who engage with their pages. High levels of user engagement automatically boost the likelihood of their content being shown in the news feeds of their followers.
The algorithm on Facebook is not the only thing that allows for effective engagement with users. Establishing positive working relationships with clients or customers improves customer experience.
With Facebook, you are able to form strategic alliances between yourself and other relevant businesses or brands that share similar followings. Connecting with other renowned pages on the platform using Facebook can tremendously improve the exposure and attention your own page receives without putting any more money into your Facebook Ads programs.
When Should You Start Investing in Facebook Ads?
Trying out Facebook ads right after creating your new business page isn’t a good idea. Letting someone else arbitrarily decide when else you are ready is also not ideal. As you may have guessed, there’s no one answer—or single KPI—to define the “right” moment to start experimenting with ads.
We would argue that primary focus should go towards the following:
- Completing your page (be sure to include your profile picture!)
- Gaining a minimum of 100 likes
- Setting up a Meta Pixel
- Making no less than 20 posts on the page (25 to 30 is ideal)
- Having several creatives for each ad
- An ad strategy that includes A/B testing
Finally, it’s important to ensure that you are advertising on Facebook in a way that makes sense for your social media objectives. Do you want to broaden your outreach? Are you curious about digital advertising? Looking for new customers? Interested in looking deeper at what that customer’s data tells you?
If your answer is yes to any one of these, then you are good to jump in. Do you want to do this the easy way… or the hard way?
Benefits of Facebook marketing for your business
Facebook should be included in your social media marketing strategy with good reason. It helps with brand visibility, customer interaction, and penetrating new target groups. Given that over 62% of U.S. social commerce buyers use the platform, there is great brand visibility and ROI potential.
Don’t believe us? Let us give you five reasons Facebook marketing should be prioritized in your marketing strategy.
1. Enhance Your Brand Recognition
72% of Facebook users access the platform primarily to connect with family and friends. Nonetheless, a good number do so for customer service, entertainment, and even brand promotion. This provides a golden opportunity for businesses to market their products to potential clients who, to varying extents, may be willing to make a purchase. Facebook’s average conversion rate across sales in all industries is 8.25%.
2. Use Facebook to Foster Greater Audience Interaction
Facebook is a great platform for businesses to engage with their audiences, and engagement can come in many forms depending on the specific industry and the business type.
For example, retailers can utilize carousels and stories to promote new product lines, while B2B brands can publish video testimonials. A food brand wishing to maintain the interest of their followers can even poll them to vote for a new flavor.
There is no individual answer to marketing on Facebook. From interactive content, images, and videos, marketers can use many different forms of content. Facebook allows organic content, video ads, and image ads to be uploaded as collections or in a carousel. That means marketers can use visuals in at least four different formats to attract potential clients.
3. Tailoring content to Upper Primary Ad Target Audience
Facebook Analytics has all the information about your performance metrics and preferences. Use this data to align content with your engagements to shift brand perception. Sophisticated Facebook ads market segmentation tools include:
- Geographic: Define a region or range by population.
- Demographic: Select age, gender, marital status, family structure, and occupation.
- Behavioral: Define brand loyalty or user class from non-user to regular user.
- Income: Choose lower, middle, or upper class.
- Lifestyle: Segment by interest keywords search.
- Interest: Select interests that overlap with the pre-set profile of the group.
Using these parameters to define the target audience guarantees maximum return on ad spend (ROAS) for every ad campaign.
4. Measure results with precision
Facebook provides the most sophisticated social media analytics. With our detailed guide to Facebook analytics, we will focus only on the basics.
Facebook provides metrics and KPIs for page likes, comments, shares, and page views. By analyzing customers’ pathways to your page, you can determine which strategies are working best. Use Facebook’s analytics suite to also understand:
- Reach: Ascertain the total number of unique individuals who interacted with your posts, including disinterested interactions, such as hiding or reporting posts as inappropriate.
- Engagement: Users that clicked on your post or created a story about your post are considered engaged users. Monitoring your Facebook engagement allows you to track the growth of your page and its development.
- Likes: The number of likes tells you whether your content is being engaged with by the audience. Find what sticks about the posts that get the highest or the lowest likes, and there is likely a reason behind it.
- E-commerce: Facebook provides insights through its Meta Page Insights tool and Meta Ads Manager for post engagement reach and engagements. Other benchmarks include ad click-through rates as well as conversion rates. Accessing more granular e-commerce data, such as sales performance metrics, product views, and customer demographics, may require additional resources.
When using Facebook for off-platform activities, Facebook Pixel helps you track interactions and conversions that happen on your website outside Facebook.
Conclusion
As we have seen, marketing effectively on Facebook requires captivating content tailored to engage specific audiences. Businesses can promote themselves on the platform using organic posts and ads to expand their visibility. Measuring the engagement level helps in making decisions that inform relevance and interest.
The use of Facebook’s analytical tools can greatly assist in understanding the behavior of the audience and the effectiveness of campaigns. In the rapidly changing landscape of social media, businesses need to be prepared to remain competitive. Use these methods to deepen the connections with your audience while achieving desired outcomes.
