How to Build an Effective Facebook Marketing Strategy

By David MoceriComments are off

Why Do I Actually Need A Marketing Strategy On Facebook?

Working without a plan is stressful. It also tends to be inefficient and ineffective. Like we’ve said before, “Wing-ing it is not a social media strategy.”

Sometimes it’s enough to simply try different things and see what works. However, without a coordinated strategy, your efforts may feel sporadic and disjointed. Your audience will notice. Strategy makes your efforts intentional. That makes your efforts more likely to succeed.

Source – Facebook Marketing Strategy: Why You Need One (& How to Build It)

Start With a Updating Your Social Media Strategy

Facebook Mobile

According to eMarketer reports, approximately 1 billion users will access Facebook from their mobile devices. That is equivalent to nearly 70 percent of mobile users worldwide, or three-quarters of mobile users by 2018. The US market will play a key role this year, with 80 percent of Facebook users accessing their account via mobile devices.

Mobile ads dominate the company’s ad revenues, accounting for $10.9 billion, or 74 percent of their total revenue.

Try skewing your focus more towards making improvement on your Facebook mobile strategy.

Source – Best Facebook Marketing Strategies: The Latest Tips

Facebook Live

Initially introduced to verified brands in December 2015, allowing them to stream live videos. The share-ability of the platform gives way to larger, more relevant audience interactions before, during, and after events (much more pertinent than the capabilities of YouTube or Periscope).
Why this matters: 85% of web crawlers in the United States watch videos online. When delving into this juicy data further, a wersm.com article summarized, “46% of viewers ‘take action’ following watching a video, and 96% click on links after watching a video.”

Source – 6 Lessons from Brands Utilizing Video in their Facebook Marketing Strategy

Facebook Advertisements

“Over the last two years, the social network has repeatedly tweaked the system to show the top 300 or so items that it predicts each person will want to read,” according to a recent article by the New York Times. “Facebook argues that people prefer to see videos, photos, news articles and updates from their friends and family more than other brands. So over time, posts by businesses have shown up less frequently.” Facebook continues to push for more advertising so if your business wants traction it needs to be advertising. With all of that said you still need to use caution and tread lightly if you’re a budget conscious advertiser because with more and more competition prices are likely to rise. I’d also highly recommend retargeting with platforms like AdRoll because with retargeting you show your ads to people that have already expressed interest in your brand by visiting your site.

Source – 6 Strategies to Add to Your Social Media Marketing Plan for 2015

Define Your Facebook Marketing Goals

Gather Leads

Using Facebook as a lead generator is a great goal. Using some type of email opt-in is a great way to gather leads from people who may be interested in your product or service. You can give away a freebie that relates to your product, host a free webinar that may have an offer at the end or host a contest that gives away your product to the winner.

Source – 4 Easy Steps to Implement a Facebook Marketing Strategy

Focus On Smart Branding

You have multiple opportunities when it comes to branding your Facebook page. One option is to make your Facebook page an extension of your website to spark familiarity when your existing customers visit your page. Another option is to make it different from your own website so your fans experience a sense of exclusivity when they become a fan of your Facebook community.

No matter if you want to create familiarity or a sense of exclusivity, it’s important to make your page dynamic and interesting so it will stand out from the rest. One way to do this is to create custom tabs that showcase your programs, products and services and tie in the look and feel of your brand. The key is to make it obvious who you are and what you’re about. Short videos that tell your fans about your business, mission statements and easily identifiable logos and images are great additions to a branded custom tab.

Source – 9 Facebook Marketing Strategies to Build Super Fans

Choosing the Right Marketing Strategy

Segmentation – How to Target Your Audience

This rule works in all forms of advertising: Try to reach people who are interested in your product.

Then tell your story.

Thanks to the segmentation opportunities in Facebook marketing, you have the opportunity to reach exactly the part of the population you wish, which makes advertising much more effective.

Optimize Your Facebook Ads

You can spend a lot of time changing, tweaking and testing your ads and often this is time well spent.

Always:

Use proper grammar and punctuation.
Use an image that represents your product and draws attention.
Tell the truth (in the end you don’t want just the click, you want the buy).

Never:

Capitalize all letters or have all in lower case.
Use too generic stock photos; a personal touch often works better.

Try To:

Have a “call to action” in the text.
Have a question or speak to the visitors’ emotions if a clear “call to action” doesn’t work.
Look at your competitors and try to stand out.

Scheduling Your Campaigns

Not All Hours Are the Same
Depending on what kind of campaign you are running, a good Facebook marketing tip is that you investigate and test to run your ads on different days and on different times of the day to identify when they are most profitable.

Managing Your Budget Wisely

In any case, we have found that it is risky to lower the max bid too much since you might lose all bidding with a too low max bid price.

Bid Size Affect Click-Through Rate
Furthermore, the quality of clicks is affected by who see your ads. People who spend a lot of time every day on Facebook generate a lot of impressions to Facebook, and consequently these users are less receptive to your ads since they see a lot of ads all the time.

Source – Facebook Marketing Strategy and Tips

You May also Like: Facebook Graph Search

Always Keep Track of How Well Your Facebook Marketing Strategy Working

Measure Your Results

Analyze key metrics on Facebook such as paid reach, actions, photo clicks, page likes and post clicks. If you sent people to your website or a landing page, make sure to track conversions to see whether the UT student actually downloaded the 10 percent off coupon to your pizza shop.

Also, dig into Google Analytics to see if the Austin millennial who clicked on your Facebook ad interacted on your website. Was the average time onsite 15 seconds or did they visit an average of seven pages and stay on the site longer than two minutes?

Source – Dominate Facebook with This $5 Marketing Strategy

If you’re new to social media analytics or are looking for a few new ideas to add to your tracking arsenal, consider these areas for monitoring and tracking.

Here are a few areas you might consider monitoring:

The names of key people in your company
Your company name
All brand names associated with your company
Product and service names
Competitor names
Industry- or niche-specific keywords

Here are a few areas you might consider measuring and tracking:

Engagement
Brand awareness
Influence
Sentiment
New Likes/unsubscribes
Click activity
Financial return
Conversion rates

Source – 9 Facebook Marketing Strategies to Build Super Fans

Here is a selection top picks for Facebook Marketing Tools:

Agora Pulse (link)

Price: Free trial, then plans starting at $29 per month

Alternative Facebook app and campaign tools:

EdgeRank Checker (link)

Price: Free score, free for two weeks, then

ShortStack (link)

Price: Free

Alternative Facebook contest tools:

Facebook Page Barometer (link)

Price: Free

AgoraPulse Contest (link)

Price: Free

Conversation Score (link)

Price: Free

Likealyzer (link)

Price: Free

FanPage Karma (link)

Price: Free

Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics (link)

Price: Free

Postplanner (link)

Price: Free, with paid plans starting at $29 per month

Pagemodo (link)

Price: Free, with paid plans starting at $3 per month

+ 3 more tools to jumpstart your Facebook advertising

Many people are turning to Facebook advertising to get more bang for their buck on Facebook. Good news is there are a handful of neat tools that can help with this marketing focus. Here are three of the best:

AdRoll – Retargeted Facebook ads in the sidebar and in the Facebook News Feed
Perfect Audience – Facebook retargeting (Twitter, too!)
Qwaya – Create, optimize, and organize Facebook campaigns

Bonus: A pair of unique Facebook tools, built by Facebook

You can accomplish a huge number of marketing tasks using nothing but Facebook’s built-in analytics and tools. Beyond Facebook page insights and basic advertising, here are a couple advanced tools that might be new to you.

Source – How to Run a Facebook Contest, Analyze Your Page, and More: 11 Ideal Facebook Tools for Marketers