Face book marketing


What is Face book marketing?

Face book marketing is a platform that offers a range of highly targeted paid ads and organic posts, allowing brands to showcase their products and services to a large audience. Over the past decade, Facebook has moved from the most prominent social media on the Internet to one of the largest marketplaces.

Facebook marketing


Why is Face book good for marketing?

Digital marketing offers different channels for building communication with the audience: social media, e-mails, messengers, search engines, SMS, web push notification, etc. Let's a closer look at the reasons why you should consider Face book as a platform to grow your business:

It has global coverage. More than 1.5 billion users visit Face book daily. About 2.3 billion - every month. More than 7 million active companies create ads for this huge audience. 

It offers highly targeted paid ads. With Face book Ads, you can tailor your promotions to specific audiences based on gender, age, location, occupation, interests — any demographic or behavioral data that users willingly share with Face book.

Enables organic reach. If you don't have the resources to use Face book Ads, build relationships organically by sharing content that brings value to people on your Face book page. Your posts will appear in the newsfeed, although the high level of competition will make it difficult to build an audience naturally. 

Allows integration with other marketing channels. Face book marketing is not an isolated system. You can combine it with other marketing channels such as email marketing, mobile marketing, search engine marketing and Face book Messenger ads to create a promotional mix that increases your brand's reach.

Benefits of Face book Marketing:

In this section, we take a deeper dive into the benefits of using Face book in your marketing strategy. You will learn what goals you can achieve with this platform in addition to reaching a large audience.

Precise aiming:

You already know that Face book allows users to deeply segment their audience, but let's take a closer look at the options available. With demographic targeting, you can select an audience with a specific income, education level, life events, relationship, or occupation. You can search for customers based on their interests, such as their preferred entertainment, sports, hobbies and shopping habits. You can also target clients based on purchasing behavior, intent, device usage, etc.

Increased website traffic:

With this platform, you can drive your audience directly to your website. Moreover, these people will be higher quality leads than users who land on your site organically because they already know your company. Hence, you have more credibility in their minds. Encourage your followers to visit your site to find out more about your products. Besides, when linking to a site, Face book generates a full-size image if your site page has one. So, it will attract many users’ attention and help you boost website traffic.

Increase web traffic

Different ad formats:

Face book provides excellent opportunities for businesses to showcase their products from the best angles. Advertisements on this platform include both text and visual formats. You can enhance your post by making it an ad, create stories to show you behind the scenes, create a showcase of your new collection, use carousel ads to showcase up to 10 products linking to matching pages, etc.

Advertisement format 

Customer support:

Many people prefer to connect with a brand through social media. Phone calls have become a thing of the past. Create a chatbot for Face book Messenger that will communicate with users based on their favorite questions - keywords. They can include "price", "delivery", "payment options", "purchase", "booking", etc. Just create a script based on frequently asked questions of users and write the answers. Your chatbot will mimic a real conversation. This frees up your support team for more complex issues and allows you to automate routine tasks. 

Customer service

Positive impact on SEO:

Some marketers claim that social media affects search rankings. It is assumed that robots take into account your data in the About section of the application when evaluating. Additionally, your involvement in social networks contributes a lot. Shares, likes, and comments tell Google that people are interested in and interacting with your brand. Although there is no exact proof, it is not redundant either.

Search engine optimizing

Formats of Face book Marketing:

  1.          Video ads.
  2.          Image ads.
  3.          Carousel ads.
  4.          Collection ads.
  5.          Slideshow ads.
  6.          Lead generation ads.

Face book is not only a leader in social networks, but also a fast-growing company with half a million new accounts created daily. As time goes by, Face book developers come up with new ad formats that meet modern requirements for creating Face book Ads funnels and optimize time-tested ads. Here is a list of Face book marketing formats:

Video advertising:

It's a great way to demonstrate your product's features in action. Face book allows you to use different types of videos to meet specific goals: short videos and GIFs for quick attention on the go or In-Stream videos for longer viewing like on TV. 

video advertising

Image advertising:

If your budget is too small to create a video, a display ad is a good idea to create a high-quality ad quickly and easily. This format will help you increase brand awareness and drive people to your website.

image advertising


Carousel advertising:

This format allows you to showcase up to ten images or videos in one ad - each with a link to a specific product page. It provides a wide field for creativity and interactivity, as you can present one product or several different products in detail or tell a story separated by these carousel cards.

carousel advertising 


Collection advertising:

It's like a little catalog of your products right in your Face book post. An ad collection consists of one original video or image and four smaller images below in a grid format.

collection advertising


Slideshow advertising:

It is a video-like format that displays well even when the internet connection speed is low. You can create such an ad using a variety of images, some useful video editing tools, and even music.


Lead generating advertising:

This format was developed to help generate leads, especially when it comes to mobile users. When a user clicks on an image in such an ad, an opt-in form will appear directly in the ad, so it only takes a few clicks to sign up for your newsletters.

lead generation advertising


There are also three ad types for increasing engagement — Post engagement, Event responses, and Page likes.

How to Create an Effective Face book Marketing Strategy?

No matter which channel you use, you need to create a strategy. This will help you clearly set your goals, choose the best techniques to achieve them, define your target audience, measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and improve. Below is a plan that is universal for all businesses looking to develop a Face book marketing strategy.

Step 1. Set your goals

It all starts with setting a goal. Regardless of the type of business you run, the general goals for any company are the same. Face book offers opportunities to achieve the following goals:

  1.          lead generation;
  2.          nurturing and qualifying your prospects;
  3.          driving traffic to the Website;
  4.          increase conversions and sales;
  5.         improving customer support;
  6.          raising brand awareness;
  7.          enhancing customer engagement;
  8.          Recruitment.

Your goal determines the techniques, posts and advertising formats you use to achieve it. You can break your goal down into small sub-goals. Accomplishing each of them will therefore bring you closer to achieving your big goal. Finally, create a list of KPIs that you will use to measure the effectiveness of each technique.

Step 2. Define your target audience:

Analyzing your target audience is a high-priority task, as it will determine techniques, ad formats and your tone of voice. First, we recommend that you answer the following questions:

  •       Is your product for men or women?
  •       How old are your customers?
  •        What are their most common jobs?
  •        What problem do they have in common?
  •        Why should they use your product?
  •       What outcomes do they want to achieve with it?

To collect and store all the data about your target group and streamline the whole process, create a customer profile. It should contain information about their location, age, gender, job position and income level. Read our blog post to learn how to create a customer profile.

Another source of information about your audience is Face book Audience Insights. Use this tool to get information about people connected to your page, people in your own audience, and people on Face book. You can find out what your existing audience likes, where your customers live and what language they speak, track their past shopping activities, the devices they use, etc.

This is a storehouse of information about your customers. Make use of every tool available to analyze your audience.

Step 3. Choose content formats and schedule posts: 

Now that you've defined your audience and set your goals, it's time to think about a content strategy that will help you achieve them. A content marketing strategy means you should create a step-by-step plan that includes the types and formats of content you will produce. Remember, the more content you create, the higher your conversions will be. Using different formats, consistent publishing and communication with customers will skyrocket the level of user engagement.

You should also consider using the right content mix. Promotional content alone will not help you build trusting relationships with your audience. Additionally, Face book can penalize over-ambitious marketers for their sales promotions. So combine educational, informative, entertaining and promotional content. If you manage to provide quality and relevant content, customers will love to learn more about your product.

If you want to create engaging content, you probably need a content creator. He is the person responsible for creativity. This specialist knows which content formats will best help you achieve your goals. Use images, text posts, videos, stories and links in your strategy. When using images, keep in mind that they should be professional and high resolution. Avoid using stock images. Videos usually attract and engage users the most. Keep in mind that most users watch videos with the sound off, so make sure it gets your point across even without the sound. Stick to 3 sentences using the text. Your job is to use them to your advantage: attract, provide value, and drive action. When adding a link to your website, pay special attention to the image.

The last important issue is the consistency and frequency of posting. We recommend creating 5 posts per week. This way, you won't bombard customers with your publications, and you'll be able to create high-quality content without brutal deadlines. Use the content calendar for this purpose. With its help, you will have a clear idea of ​​your content marketing strategy. Take care of all the marketing channels you use, align each goal with a content format and distribute it across all channels.

So, to create an effective content marketing calendar, include the following information:

  •         any channels you use;
  •        the types of content you use;
  •        date and time of publication;
  •        the subject of your post;
  •        URL;
  •        link to image;
  •       post status.

Fortunately, Face book provides the opportunity to schedule posts and set up automatic publishing. So there is no need to worry about any human errors.

To schedule a post, go to the Publishing Tool.

There, you can choose the necessary options for your post. Click the drop-down menu next to the “Publish” button, and select the date and time.

Step 4. Boost your post with Face book Ads:

Face book is a great advertising platform. It allows brands to reach a wide audience, provides various targeting options, tools for successful outreach and relatively cheap prices. It is based on a bidding strategy. You choose the timing, placement of the ad and target audience.

To start creating an ad, go to Ad Center and click Create Ad.

The interface of the ad center is intuitive and pretty simple, so it won’t cause you any trouble. Creating an ad takes 6 steps. Follow this detailed guide to creating your advice.

Step 5. Make use of Face book tools:

Face book provides much more value than you might expect. There are a lot of useful tools that will make your work with this channel more efficient and lucrative. Check out the list of several tools below.

Face book Messenger:

It's an app built to stay close to your customers through text, video, and voice communication. With this app, you can engage your audience, provide them with personalized experiences, and provide support.

Send Pulse chatbot builder allows you to create a chatbot for Face book Messenger. It will help you deliver personalized messages to your clients, mass messages and auto responder flows.



messenger advertising
 

The flow mimics a live conversation with a client. Delegate your routine tasks like handling orders and reservations, answering frequently asked questions and providing important information to a chatbot. You can create a flow based on the buttons that customers click. Use text, images, product cards, galleries, files, lists and other formats. The message will be sent after the user enters the keyword you used when creating the bot, such as "price", "shipping", "purchase", "refund", etc.

To create a Face book Messenger chatbot, follow these 3 simple steps:

  1.            Link your Face book profile to your Send Pulse account.
  2.           Select a Face book page.
  3.          Create a widget to collect followers.

See our guide for more detailed instructions.

Check out an example of an automated flow for a travel agency built using the Send Pulse chatbot builder.

The Easy Travels bot allows users to get information about the changes caused by COVID in the country they are going to visit. So the client selects a country and is then offered travel tips and COVID updates. Each message depends on the previous choice of the client. The good thing is that customers are aware that they are interacting with a bot and can talk to a customer care agent right from the start.

Send Pulse chatbot for travel agency

To learn more about chatbots for tourism, read our blog post.

Want to start building your flow? Follow this comprehensive guide.

Click-to-Messenger ads:

With this type of ad, you can not only increase CTR and conversions, but also allow customers to interact with your brand through Face book Messenger. Click-to-Messenger ads mean you bring users to Messenger instead of a landing page.

It looks like this: the user clicks "Send message" and is redirected to Messenger.

This is a great tool that helps companies convert users into leads instantly. A well-designed chatbot is a kind of sales funnel. If you can develop it wisely through lead nurturing, you will get a lot of new customers.

Creating a click-to-messenger ad is the same as creating any ad. The only difference is that you have to choose the goal “Get more messages.

Sites to watch:

You can use this tool to analyze the performance of your competitors and the engagement of their followers. You can track the total number of page likes, posting frequency and growth rate. This information will motivate you to improve and develop. You can analyze the strategy of your competitors and understand what they are doing better.

To view your competitors, go to the Statistics section, scroll down and you will see the Pages to Watch section. Add your competitors' pages and see their activities.

Sites to watch:

Some people may view, like or share your posts from time to time without being your fans. You can manually invite them to follow your brand. This way, you will be able to communicate with engaged users and turn them into potential customers with a well-designed strategy.



Invite active users:

Another chance to increase engagement in a group is to send an invitation directly to your friends in Messenger.

Sending invitations to your friends:

Click "Invite Friends" and you can choose friends from your list to like your page. If you enable this option, the invitation will be sent directly to Messenger.

Invite friends:

These are some of the valuable tools that Face book offers. You can get the most out of Face book by exploring the Ad Center and Insights features.

Step 6. Measure your effectiveness:

Your strategy won't work on its own. Its effectiveness depends primarily on how well your audience interacts with your brand. Tracking their engagement will help you get a clear idea of ​​the techniques that work best for you and the techniques that scare off your followers.

Fortunately, you don't need any third-party services to track your performance, as Face book offers its own tool called Insights. Find out which formats work best and if your content mix has been created correctly. You can look at page views, post engagement, story reach, page actions, analyze your followers and much more valuable data.

Face book Insights:

If you want to track conversions outside of Face book, such as bookings and purchases, use Google Analytics, UTM parameters, Hoot suite Insights, etc.



Face book and Email Marketing:

We have a variety of marketing channels to choose from: social media marketing, search engine advertising, messenger, and email marketing, to name a few. It’s great that you can combine these platforms to reach particular marketing goals with the accuracy that had never been available before.

Find out the best proportions of email marketing and Face book marketing in your overall strategy. Let’s review the ways these channels can complement each other.



What can Face book add to email marketing?

With Lead Ads, Face book allows people to sign up for your email newsletters right in a Face book post. In addition to lead ads, you can incorporate positive user feedback collected on Face book into your email campaigns and build trust with social proof.

Try Send Pulse’s Face book integration to ensure that all users who subscribe to your Face book page are automatically added to your mailing list.

How can email marketing combine with Face book?

Email marketing is a platform where the central communication unit is an email – a message that contains text, offers and calls to action. Its goal is to promote sales and build long-term relationships with the audience. You can add social media buttons to the footer of each email and invite subscribers to engage with your brand on Face book. You can also create promotional emails that provide bonuses for posting about your brand on social media.

With Send Pulse, you can collect users' email addresses and have them join your Face book Messenger Chatbot from a single subscription form. To create a multi-channel form, you need to add a link to your chatbot.

Face book Marketing Tips

  •        Choose the best timing
  •        Promote your Face book page on other channels
  •        Use a relevant URL for your page
  •        Add a CTA button
  •        Support customers via a Face book Messenger Chatbot
  •        Use a Face book pixel
  •        Create lookalike audiences

There are many hacks that will help you make your Face book marketing strategy more efficient. In this section, we’re going to share several tips.

Choose the best timing. Marketers are always interested in the optimal timing of their publications. Sure, there's no one-size-fits-all approach, but you can find valuable data in Face book Insights. Here you can find information about when your followers are online. You can also check the performance of any post and see the best timing. You will also find out when your audience is most active. Additionally, you can experiment and publish different types of content during and after peak times to find the optimal timing.

Promote your Face book page on other channels. If you want to drive traffic to your site, you should make sure that as many of your potential customers as possible know about it. You are certainly present on other digital marketing channels, so why not miss this opportunity? If you're doing email marketing, add a Face book button to each of your campaigns so users can easily follow the link. If you're active on Instagram, you can add a link to your Face book page directly in your bio. If you have a blog, allow readers to share articles with their friends on Face book. 

Use the relevant URL for your page. This element may not seem as important as it is. By relevant URL we mean using your brand name. This way, you can easily share your link on other channels, it will be easy to recognize and remember, and it will look more professional. The most important benefit is that your URL will contain your keyword, so you will strengthen your SEO strategy and make your page more searchable on Google.

Add a call to action button. This easy-to-implement technique will help you increase conversions, increase engagement, and drive traffic to any page. It all depends on your goal. Look at your page and think about the action the average user might want to take after viewing it. It can be 'Contact Us', 'Register', 'Book Now', 'Shop Now', 'Track', 'Call Now' etc. To add a call to action, click the '+Add Button' below its front page.

Support customers through the Face book Messenger bot. Customers expect brands to respond immediately. Doing it manually is a daunting task. Create a Chabot to answer frequently asked questions, help customers place orders, detect delivery issues, and simply learn more about your brand. With Send Pulse, you can create a Chabot for Face book Messenger without any technical skills. You just need to develop conversational logic using keywords.

Use the Face book pixel. It is an analytics tool that gives you more information about customer activities. With the Face book pixel, you can create highly targeted ads for your future campaigns. In addition, you can monitor the effectiveness of your ads. After the user buys something or takes any other action, it will be reported. So you can see if your ads are getting the results you need and then target that client with a Custom Audience.

Create lookalike audiences. It's a great way to reach a new audience on Face book. These are people who know nothing about your brand but could become your clients because they are similar to your current customers.

Use these powerful tips to create an effective Face book marketing strategy and boost it with Send Pulse Chatbots.



Disadvantages of Face book Marketing:

The hype of face book as a marketing tool that could skyrocket a business is quickly dying down. Running a face book business page, while presenting scope of an online presence, may not be as efficient in reaching your customers as you have been led to believe. With certain pros that may make marketing easy and effective, there is a whole other side to it that must be brought to business owners’ attention. Here are the major disadvantages of Face book marketing.

Not “IN” Anymore:

In this day and age, who even uses face book anymore? With the new generation hopping on the bandwagon of Instagram and Twitter, face book is no longer the go-to social media platform. While it may be too harsh to call it obsolete, face book does have a much lower log-in rate than other platforms, making it a disadvantage for face book marketing reach.

 
Media Junk:


Spam leads are a major disadvantage of face book marketing and require careful and time-consuming navigation. Cost-per-click ads on face book might give you the illusion that several clicks mean money well-spent but that would be far from true. More than half the leads that face book may claim to provide you with its ad promotion are highly likely to be fake profiles or spam accounts, which are not worth pursuing.


Poor Engagement, Poor Results:

Logging in to check in with your friends when an ad pops in. Social media platforms, then, are a space where ads are not only unwelcome but considered a bother more often than not. This would result in negligible engagement, which translates to low reach. A major disadvantage of face book marketing is how active are “active” users of Face book when it comes to your content? Social media runs on the fuel of engagement – how people react to your ads, their likes and shares. Unless your marketing strategy and content can rope in the audience with relevance and captivating meaningfulness, there isn’t much that Face book marketing can do for you.


Not Reaching the Target Audience:


Targeting your audience, those with an interest and resources to buy your products, is a must when looking to convert leads to sales. However, face book has switched its algorithm to make feeds relevant for users which may have made this difficult. An ad aiming to reach the young female population may actually be receiving likes and shares among the male community, indicating poor targeting. Failing to reach those who might be interested in buying, despite high engagement then, would make sales targets tough to achieve.


All About The Money:

It all boils down to a monetary rat race, doesn’t it? Face book too, has given in to the bidding war where the quality of the content may be superseded by the money paid by the competition. This is certainly bad news for small businesses with a limited advertising budget who only have a knife to bring in this gunfight against large corporations.

These disadvantages of face book marketing are hard to override, given that they markedly impact how a business is perceived in the social media market in this era where social media is steering commerce to a capacious extent. The epoch of face book as an advertising platform, in my opinion, and the opinion of several large corporations too, has run its course with better alternatives just around the corner. It is worth looking around to match with the best means of your business ad campaign because face book is most likely not it.