The 5 Musts for Facebook Marketing

New to Facebook marketing and wondering how to best leverage the platform to your advantage? Or perhaps you’ve been thumping for a while promoting your brand on Facebook but without much success. Either way, success can be found when you stick to these five essential tips.

1. Understand Your Audience

Every good marketing campaign starts with an understanding of your audience. Because even a great product is set to fail if it doesn’t reach the right audience. But who is your audience composed of, what are their problems and what do they want or need? Answering these questions takes research, and thankfully, the answer isn’t far away. Facebook’s Insight tool allows you to see a variety of information about the kinds of people who engage with your Facebook content. This includes their ages, jobs, educational background and location — essential information that you’ll need in order to piece together an accurate picture of your target audience.

To gather even more intel about what works and what doesn’t in Facebook marketing, turn to social listening tools like Hootsuite. Social listening will help you understand your audience’s needs and expectations, as well as what works for them and what doesn’t, allowing you to tailor your messaging to them and their needs. Also, consider taking some time to read comments on your posts and those of your competitors. For extra credit, you can also post contests or quizzes to engage your audience and receive valuable feedback.

2. Set Objectives

Now that you know who you’re targeting and you’ve tailored your messaging to them, it’s time to determine what you’d like to accomplish with your Facebook marketing strategy. Having objectives helps you establish clearly defined goals, which in turn helps you focus your efforts and reap better results. In addition, it also helps keep your goals realistic, since you can’t expect to go viral often enough to bank on it. Indeed, getting caught up in the euphoria of likes, comments and shares can be distracting when the results you’re looking for are, say, page views or newsletter sign-ups. So whatever goals you choose, ask yourself whether they help drive sales or raise brand awareness. If they don’t, they’re probably not worth your time.

Once your campaign is up and running, use your original objectives as a benchmark to monitor your campaign’s performance. Is it hitting the mark or falling short? Can it be improved? How? By sticking to clearly defined objectives, you can easily measure the success of your marketing efforts. On Facebook, you’ll want to use Insights to measure brand awareness and engagement through shares, comments, likes, and reactions, and for engagement on your website, use Google Analytics.

3. Create the Right Content for Your Audience and Goals

When deciding what content to create, the key word is strategy. Without it, your marketing efforts are unlikely to go anywhere. Sure, you might have a hit here or there, but your success won’t be sustained. One easy way to create a winning strategy is to start by creating a content calendar. Doing this will help you take control of some things that you might have otherwise overlooked. Should you go for quantity or quality? How often should you post? What kind of content should you post? Video, infographics, articles, memes? Setting up a calendar lets you research what works before you waste your time on content that might not connect with your particular audience. And it also allows you to decide what you want to post and how you want to execute it without the pressure of having to press publish as soon as you’re done.

One more thing to consider is the ratio of salesy posts to content that is informative, useful and/or entertaining. If you’re constantly trying to sell your products or services on Facebook, people will tune you out. But if you only offer useful content without driving anyone to your website, you won’t get much from your Facebook marketing campaigns, either.

One interesting way to help drive sales through Facebook is with influencer marketing. It can be an effective marketing tool, since people are more likely to buy a product when they are referred to it by a human being they trust. The trick is finding an influencer who shares roughly the same audience that you do. Doing this will be much more productive than choosing someone with millions of followers but who has nothing in common with your brand.

4. Utilize Specialized Features

Depending on what your brand is looking to accomplish, some of Facebook’s special features could be helpful to your campaigns. To engage with your customers and potential customers directly, Messenger is obviously an invaluable tool. And to extend your interaction without increasing your workforce, consider utilizing AI and chatbots, which are becoming more and more powerful these days.

Be sure to create a Facebook Business Manager and Ads Manager account for your Facebook page. There you will be able to easily create extremely targeted advertising campaigns using custom audiences, where you can import customer email lists, create your retargeting pixel (more on that in step #5) and look-alike audiences, plus lots more!

Timing is, as they say, everything, so be sure to post your Facebook content at optimal times. To make this easy, make use of Facebook’s scheduling tool. That way you can schedule your posts to publish a day, a week or however long you’d like in advance. You can always reschedule your posts before they go live or edit them or delete them if you’ve come up with something better in the meantime.

If your content efforts include video, consider Facebook Live, which Facebook promotes more than other kinds of video. But whatever kind of video that you choose, be sure to read our guide to succeeding with video on Facebook first.

5. Install Facebook Pixel

Lastly, you’ll also want to use Facebook Pixel. This small but mighty tool is a bit of code that you put into the backend of your website to help you determine and improve your ROI from the social media platform. Specifically, it can help you you build customer audiences, drive sales and measure the results of your organic posts and Facebook Ads. In terms of defining audiences, Facebook’s pixel doesn’t break them down by interests or demographics, but compiles them with people who have interacted with pages on your website that you put the pixel on. That makes pixel-created demographics more useful than any demographic you could create with Facebook’s Ad tool or find on Insights alone — because this group is interested in your offerings regardless of their alleged interests. You can also use pixels to drive more sales by setting up automatic bidding to reach people who are more likely to take actions you care about, like making a purchase. And it can also help you clarify the impact of your ads by measuring the direct results of your ad. You can learn how to add pixels to your web pages here.

Incorporating these five tips into your next Facebook marketing campaign should see definitely improvements and set you on the path to marketing mastery.

Need help getting there? Reach out to us here at Mediaplanet. We’d be delighted to help!