Social media marketing shouldn’t have to be something you’re afraid to conquer. In fact, with the right tools, a little bit of knowledge, and a good understanding of who you are as a brand, marketing on social media can be easy. Here are Mack Media’s 10 best tips to marketing your brand on Facebook:
In a rush? Click here to skip to the corresponding topic!
1. Set Goals
2. Mix Organic and Paid Posts
3. Understand Your Market
4. Develop a Voice that Sounds Like Your Customers
5. Engage Your Followers After the First ‘Like’
6. Embrace Visual Content
7. Be Consistent With What and When You Post
8. Don’t Forget Your Bio
9. Keep Track of Your Results
10. Choose the Right Partners
1. Set Goals
You’re familiar with marketing basics. These still apply on Facebook; they just need some extra tailoring to make your plan happen online. First, you need to know who you’re reaching on Facebook. Facebook’s Ads Manager allows you to input the demographics, location, interests, and behaviors of your target market. This means you can target people by age or gender, by proximity to your business, hobbies or entertainment they enjoy, or how they browse – meaning, you can target mobile or desktop users separately.
You can even customize your audiences for remarketing. If someone has visited your site, used your app, or purchased from you before, you can target these users specifically using custom audiences. And, beyond custom audiences, you can use lookalike audiences to target other users that are similar in behaviors and interests to your current customers by importing your own customer data.
Now that we’ve gone over Facebook’s unique targeting tools, it’s time to decide what you want your Facebook ads to do. Are you trying to increase web traffic? Make sure your ad includes a link to your website. Are you trying to generate sales for a particular item? Consider including a special offer – like a discount – if a user buys that item using a code in your Facebook ad.
Finally, consider how much you’re willing to spend. Salesforce suggests that your marketing budget should be between 5 and 15% of your total revenue – and 10 to 50% of your marketing budget should be digital. This includes social media, PPC, SEO, and content marketing. Elements of your digital marketing budget can include some or all of these:
- Content Creation – such as video and graphic design
- Follower Growth
- Social Advertising
- Strategy
- Employees – either in-house or agency
2. Mix Organic and Paid Posts
We’ve talked about setting targeting and spending goals for Facebook ads, which appear in or next to your audience’s newsfeed. However, you don’t want to just bombard your followers with ads. You might even lose followers this way!
Instead, use organic posts to engage your followers. These are posts that share photos and videos to engage or interact with your followers, making the experience more personalized for your customers. Are you a daycare center? You might want to share photos of your students’ crafts. Are you a landscaping company? Share a quick video tour of your best designs! You could also consider asking your followers to share photos or ideas on a topic related to your business.
3. Understand Your Market
As we discussed in section one, all markets have segments. Your marketing will become more powerful as you begin to seek and define these segments, because you will be able to speak directly to them and tell them what they want to hear. You’re marketing to people in a certain age group, income bracket, and location who have a need for your product. Maybe you’re a landscaping company, so you’re after local homeowners. But, did you know that you can probably segment that market further, and market to each segment better?
When managing your business’ page, Facebook offers a tool called audience insights. This tool is powerful, as it can show you markets that you aren’t communicating well enough with, or might not be targeting at all. Audience insights provides information about lifestyles, interests, and behaviors, which can help you target your customers more deeply than just demographic information would.
Consider the landscaping business again. Insights could show you that one of your followers is a mother who is also interested in Facebook pages and groups related to entertaining, cooking, and kids’ activities. Your business offers landscape design services, so she might like to see an ad for the backyard she’s always dreamed of hosting parties and playdates in. This ad doesn’t apply to the young couple planning to sell their home and upgrade to a larger space, since they won’t be entertaining at their current home. Because you see that they’re interested in fixing up their property to sell, you might target a lawn cleanup ad to their accounts.
Every customer is on a journey. Not just in the process of recognizing, considering, and purchasing your product – but also in their own lives. More specialized targeting puts you in the right place at the right time for your customers, so you and your products can be there right when your customers need them.
4. Develop a Voice that Sounds Like Your Customers
You already know that your company’s culture and values should be in line with the values your customers hold. You know what message you want to convey to your customers, but how do you communicate that over Facebook?
Part of your Facebook branding should include a clear message. That message is best summed up in one to three words that are catchy, easy to remember, and easy to convert into a hashtag. Hashtags should reflect either your brand, your content, or both.
For example, Coke’s #ShareACoke campaign was successful because the brand name was included in the hashtag, and the hashtag reflected what the campaign was: a call to action for customers to share a soda with friends and family. This hashtag was also successful because the branding was reflective of the product’s packaging: bottles sported labels calling customers to “Share a Coke with…”.
The best hashtag campaigns are those that engage your followers, as Facebook advertising is most powerful when it involves more than a simple like on a page. Communication with your followers is the key to creating a powerful brand image that keeps customers coming back for more.
5. Engage Your Followers After the First ‘Like’
Your Facebook followers will expect frequent, relevant status updates from you. These posts are what we referred to as ‘organic posts’ in section two, and they won’t cost you anything but a few minutes of your time to write and, if you choose to, schedule using a program like HootSuite. This type of program allows you to pick a specific day and time for your organic posts to be published on a connected account, so you don’t have to remember to post them yourself.
What kind of content do your followers want to engage with, though?
Sprout Social reports that there is a thin line between what followers find cool and what’s dismissed as annoying. In 2017, video content and responding to questions were both considered cool by 83% of respondents. Thinking about using the kind of slang millennials are associated with? It isn’t recommended: 69% of respondents thought this was annoying.
However, note that these figures change if you’re targeting millennials: slang is only uncool 44% of the time, and cheekily making fun of competitors is cool 53% of the time.
Overall, followers value your honesty. Show off your products, answer questions, and be available when followers use social media to reach out.
6. Embrace Visual Content
Visual content draws in your audience so much that Adobe reported a 650% increase in click-through-rates on posts accompanied by visuals, as compared to simple text posts. Further, images get more engagement than videos, and this is likely because your followers will only spend a few seconds on your post.
It’s a hard truth, but your followers aren’t going to your page for content. They’re receiving content by scrolling through their newsfeeds, and few of them are going to stop and read a text post or watch a video when content is coming from many, potentially irrelevant, sources. An image post is the perfect solution: a visual message that followers can absorb in a few seconds.
The unsung hero of visual posts, however, is the infographic. These are also referred to as flow charts, and are a visual way to convey a message through related text, graphs, and graphics. Infographics are simple to make using PowerPoint or one of the many online infographic makers available. These draw followers in, and convey a lot of information in a short amount of time. Nielsen Norman Group reports that these are shared 3x as often as any other type of content.
Consider sharing photos of your completed work, short videos that show off your products, or an infographic that teaches your followers about something related to your business. The key is to be engaging!
7. Be Consistent With What and When You Post
Part of the honesty your followers desire comes from your consistency. This is the ‘what’ of how we suggest you should be consistent, as your followers will expect a certain tone and type of message from you. So, you should establish who you are and what you sound like on Facebook early on – then stick to it. This doesn’t mean that you must post only videos or only infogrpahics; it’s important to know how to convey the same message in different ways, so your content is varied, but your message is not.
To get the most clicks and shares, be consistent about when you post. This may take some trial and error by posting at different days and times to figure out when your audience is the most active, but a general rule is that Thursday through Sunday at 9am, 1pm, and 3pm are the best times for Facebook.
8. Don’t Forget Your Bio
We’ve talked extensively about choosing the right content for your posts, but another extremely important aspect of your Facebook branding is on your profile itself. Make sure that your profile is complete: add a profile and cover photo, fill out your business’ address and hours, and include contact information.
Even more important is the about section of your profile. This is the part of your profile visitors to your page will look to see who you are, what you do, and what you care about. Make sure you tell them!
9. Keep Track of Your Results
Hashtags are not only memorable for your customers, but can help you track the impact of your campaign with a social media monitoring tool, such as Brand24. Tools like these allow you to track growth, mentions, and impressions of your hashtags, which are vital key performance indicators (KPIs) in social media campaigns.
And your hashtags are not just for Facebook, either. Your Facebook campaign’s hashtags can be used on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media to create cohesive, integrated branding across many platforms. This helps your customers recognize and communicate with you no matter where they’re reaching out to you.
The hashtag method works well when your goal is to achieve brand awareness on Facebook, but it won’t help you when measuring how often your links are clicked. This is where the Google Analytics tool can be useful: you can track page views, interactions, and conversions on your website that came from a link you posted or advertised on Facebook.
10. Choose the Right Partners
You don’t always have to go it alone in marketing. Many agencies are available to help you build your Facebook page, develop ads and organic posts to create a profit for your brand, measure your success, and manage your campaigns. Not just any agency will do, however. Your business deserves quality service and expertise in its new social media marketing partner.
Mack Media has many years of experience in this area and a clear understanding of what makes for effective social media marketing (or simply digital marketing in general). We have a customer service focus and are determined to provide you the greatest ROI possible. At Mack Media, you can rest assured that the client really does come first.
Call today to learn how we can help your business harness the power of Social Media Marketing! 203-778-1120
