Here are 10 tips to ensure that your Facebook marketing strategy is as effective as possible.
1. Use Chatbots
Marketing on Facebook Messenger with chatbots is a great way for brands to interact with potential and current customers. Designed to mimic human responses and interaction, chatbots are an automated way for brands to give individualized attention to each and every one of their consumers. There are plenty of resources out there to provide guidance on how to set up an effective chatbot campaign. Additionally, platforms like Octane AI automate the process to make it even easier for marketers.
Chatbots should be considered a two-way marketing, communications, and even customer-care channel. If the chatbot cannot be programmed to provide the correct, complete response a user needs, or the user has a specific or complicated question, the user should be directed to another customer-care channel, such as the FAQ pages on your website, or be encouraged to leave an email address so that someone can respond to them. In this manner, your chatbot can collect additional, valuable information about prospective customers, and your attention in this channel demonstrates excellent customer service.
2. Optimize Ads by Increasing Your Facebook Relevance Score
Buying ad space on Facebook isn’t getting any cheaper. To get the most bang for your buck, then, your ads need to be optimized — reaching the right people at the right time. One way to ensure that your Facebook ads are doing just that is to keep track of their Relevance Scores. These determine how often an ad is shown and how much it’s going to cost to keep it being shown. Use Facebook marketing best practices to make sure you’re keeping those Facebook Relevance Scores as high as possible, optimizing your ROI.
This might require a lot of testing, but the more relevant your ad is, the higher your score and the more likely that the ad will be shown.
3. Use Your Email Lists!
Email lists aren’t just for email sends! You can use them to create specialized audiences on Facebook as well.
In addition to email addresses, you may also have phone numbers or street addresses for your customers. This information can be fed into Facebook to create specialized audiences, such as Customized Audiences and Lookalike Audiences, to whom you can present content and ads.
To make a Custom Audience from a customer list, you provide Facebook with information about your existing customers and Facebook matches this information with current Facebook profiles. The information on a customer list, such as email or phone numbers, is known as identifiers; Facebook uses these to help create the audiences you want your ads to reach.
Don’t worry about data privacy: during the matching process, Facebook hashes the data. Once the list is ready, you can create an ad to reach this Custom Audience or you can create a Lookalike Audience to find new people who share similar behaviors and interests with your existing customers.
4. Use Data From Third-Party Analytics
Use indicators from third-party analytics, like Google Analytics, to help create a custom audience to market or remarket to on Facebook, keeping yourself top of mind. Keep an eye on things like high rates of return visits to your homepage and specific URLs with high page values.
These third-party analytics providers offer important data on your website traffic, which can provide you with insights as to which types of content are working better than others. If a Facebook post or ad delivers clicks to your website but then no further clicks or engagement (such as a newsletter sign-up or a purchase), a reevaluation of that post or ad is in order.
5. Remember To Think About the Big Picture
When planning your Facebook marketing strategy, remember to think long- term and plan ahead. Understand what type of seasonal campaigns work best for your product, be aware of upcoming holidays, and recognize new trends in your industry. Get a look at the big picture and think contextually, crafting your campaigns to align with what’s trending but also what makes sense for your product.
6. Understand Your Purchase Cycle and Customer Journey
To help with budgeting, prospecting, and retargeting, make sure you have a good understanding of your brand’s purchase cycle and customer journey. This allows you to optimize each stage of your funnel. For example, if you have a shorter sales cycle, you can designate more budget for prospecting and attracting new customers. If you have a longer sales cycle, you’ll want to rely more on remarketing and creating multiple touch points.
7. Incorporate Native Video
Video is attention-grabbing and entertaining. Now that so many platforms offer native videos, native advertising is a non-disruptive way to market to potential consumers. It’s called “native” because it’s specifically formatted to the platform. Create entertaining or educational videos to incorporate into your Facebook marketing strategy.
Native videos are videos that are uploaded directly to a platform and played in a feed. The most widely used format, these videos are the best means of increasing organic traffic.
Native videos are one of the most effective strategies for increasing engagement in your Facebook marketing efforts. A study by Quintly and reported by the social media management platform Agorapulse revealed that native videos generate 477% more shares than videos hosted on YouTube and other platforms.
8. Experiment
Don’t be afraid to try new things! Experiment with different ad formats — carousel ads, static ads, videos, infographics, and so on. See what works best with your customers and your specific campaigns. Here’s a great beginner’s guide to all the different ad formats that Facebook offers.
Do what works for your brand and your budget. There might be best practices in your industry, but you are the only one who knows your customers and is capable of creating successful, profitable campaigns.
9. Update Your Cover Photo
This is perhaps one of the easiest things you can do to showcase your brand on Facebook. Be sure you’re updating your cover photo frequently to showcase new products, promotions, and seasonal content.
In these updated photos, consider incorporating keywords, taglines, coupon codes, and other CTA language. This cover photo can be created, then reused later as a post and then a boosted post or ad. Facebook used to have a 20% text rule, in which ads could not have more than 20% text relative to the image. However, in late Q3 of 2020, advertisers began to notice leniency in this rule, perhaps due to the pandemic and the need to share important health-and-safety-related information in whatever format, even in images that might become ads.
10. Incorporate User-Generated Content and Testimonials
User-generated content (UGC) is incredibly powerful: 93% of consumers seek out this type of content when making a purchasing decision. It adds to your brand’s trustworthiness and creates connections. Incorporate UGC into your Facebook marketing strategy to increase brand trust, build a sense of community, and save yourself some time and money.
According to the social media management platform Sprout Social, half of consumers wish that brands would tell them what type of content to create and share. If you’re not telling your audience to participate with UGC — and more importantly, the steps they need to take to participate — how will they know what to do?
Whether you’re asking for images or short testimonials, your loyal customers can become loyal brand advocates when provided with the proper guidance. Be transparent with brand rules and regulations about UGC. There are countless ways to encourage UGC — campaign hashtags, unboxing videos, posing with your products. The more excited and engaged you are with the campaign, the more your audience will be too.
