Learn to Create a Great Facebook Marketing Strategy
When it comes to social media marketing, Facebook has always grabbed the lion share of all the campaigns. This social media giant had 1.71 billion actively monthly users as of July 2016. To any marketer, this figure is a real gold mine that is available for the taking. But wait. You just can’t get a piece of the pie without a meaningful and effective plan.
Of course, you already know your target, but how exactly are you going to ensure your message gets to them? That’s why you need a robust and unforgettable Facebook marketing strategy. Luckily, I’m here to help. In a jiff, you will learn how to create and implement a plan that works for you. Let’s get right to it.
1. Define Your Goals
What do you want to use Facebook for? Is it to boost your sales, grow your followers, increase brand awareness or acquire new customers?
A proper marketing strategy begins with goals. For most people, increasing sales is usually the primary goal. However, it helps to know that there are secondary goals you can use in tandem to fuel growth.
These secondary goals may include:
- Drive referral traffic to your site
- Build relationship with your customers
- Provide alternative customer service channel
- Generate conversions and leads
- Showcase your knowledge to establish authority
Whatever goals you set, ensure they are practical and reasonable. Also, try to come up with numbers and deadlines for each goal as this will help in tracking your progress. Facebook provides useful insights that you can use to measure the important metrics.
2. Research Is Important
People don’t spend all their time on Facebook. Your competition might be doing something different. You need to keep abreast of the latest developments in Facebook marketing. These instances rely on research to give you the relevant and actionable information you can use to make sound decisions.
Identify your target audience and find out the time when most of them are online. Check the demographics of any Facebook page to see the popular age group and time when posts have high engagement.
Spying on the competition helps to get useful information. Visit the pages of your competitors to see if they’re doing anything new. Determine their strengths of Facebook and use the Facebook Open Graph to view their raw data.
If possible subscribe to industry experts or authoritative niche sites to learn new techniques in Facebook marketing. Keeping up with current Facebook trends will help you to know what’s working for others and what’s not.
3. Determine Your Voice and Tone
When it comes to creating content, having a consistent and focused voice, and tone for your Facebook marketing strategy is important right off the bat. Most marketers are usually tempted to jump right in and start posting content. No, that’s not right. Instead, take the time to create personas, which can help you to determine your ideal targets. First, you need to understand the personality, needs, interests, and job position of your targets.
How do you want them to think about your brand, company, products or services? When looking for the right voice, determine the right adjectives that describe your brand. Examine your culture, community, and conversation to understand the right approach for defining the voice and tone. These two elements may seem basic in marketing, but they help to humanize your brand and make conversations natural. In the long run, it becomes easier for you to engage with your followers and customers on Facebook.
4. Plan Your Content Mix
With Facebook, there are four different types of contents that you can share with your audience, including links, text, videos, and photos. You can use all of these options depending on the resources you have. But then, your choice of content types may also depend on what your audience like and your business type.
When sharing video, you can upload one natively to Facebook or post a YouTube link. Today, Facebook Live Video has made it even more feasible for businesses to share real-time content with the customers. If your product is profoundly visual, then videos and photos are the great post types to use. Plain texts are ideal if you want to start a conversation with your audience. Whatever the case, ensure you have selected the right post types and focus more on what works for you.
5. Create a Facebook Content Calendar
As humans, it’s normal to forget something, especially during those times when you’re really hard-pressed. So, as a marketer, creating a content calendar will help you to ensure consistency in your Facebook sharing.
Determine the number of times you want to share posts daily and the times you will share them. Also, for each post type, make sure to identify the number of posts you will create. Create a monthly social media schedule that will allow you to coordinate and plan all the moving parts of your social media marketing. Additionally, remember always to create your next posts early enough. Nowadays, there are tools, such as Buffer, that allow you to create posts and pre-schedule them for automatic sharing.
The key tip here is always to plan ahead, and a content calendar gives you that power.
6. Implement Your Facebook Marketing Strategy
After creating your strategy, you will need to put it in action. At this point, you know what to do and the right approach to take. Facebook marketing is all about your individual experience. So, what works for your competitor may not work for you. That’s while you need to pay close attention to how you implement your strategy.
Create amazing content that resonates with your audience. Your content should be actionable and shareworthy. If you’re using social media tools, remember to schedule the posts at the ideal time when your audience is online. Create a pattern for sharing and followers will know what to expect from you.
The Bottom Line on Creating a Great Facebook Marketing Strategy
Facebook marketing is not a one-time thing. It’s a continuous process that you need to analyze, test and change to suit your marketing needs. Also, bear in mind that you will need to revisit your Facebook marketing strategy whenever there are new changes, updates, or technologies. Facebook can be quite overwhelming, so it helps to start with a plan to see what’s ahead of you and engage your audience in the right way.
Do you have any thoughts or questions? Feel free to contact us for any help or for a free consultation.