Facebook has long been the dominant social media platform, making it a fertile ground for businesses to connect with existing and potential customers. It is also ideal for showcasing quality content that will be of interest and use to viewers. For many businesses, Facebook marketing is now an integral part of their marketing strategy. But what is it and how does it work?
What Is Facebook Marketing
Facebook marketing refers to efforts that businesses make to promote their brands on social media. They use it to target and connect with current and potential customers through creative content and messaging.
A variety of free, or organic, and paid promotional activities may be undertaken to promote brand awareness and communicate with Facebook users. Marketers run social media campaigns on Facebook with specific goals in mind like launching a product, boosting a following, and collecting leads.
How It Works
Facebook marketing begins with setting up a Facebook page. Businesses can build their profile here by adding information about themselves. This is different from personal profiles where you are seeking to connect with friends. With business pages, the intention is to get people to like and become a fan. You will however need to start the process from your personal page even though this information will not be shared on the business page.
When businesses create a page, they should select the business or brand option. They need to provide the name of the business and select which category it falls under. There are many options to choose from including retail company, wholesale store, retail bank and so on. Just choose the option that is the closest fit.
From here you will be prompted to add certain information like a profile photo and cover photo. You will also need to add a short description that lets users know what your business is about. It will act as an introduction or welcome message. You can add this in the About section and include such details as contact information, your vision, and your mission. Finally, you will need to create a username that will appear in your Facebook URL. It should be something easily memorable and relatable.
Once you have done the basic setup of your page, you will also want to assign roles to whoever else will help in running the page. You can choose who to add as an admin, editor, moderator, and more. Each role will have different powers and functions that will be indicated.
From here you can customise your page in various ways including setting up how notifications should be sent to you, the appearance of page tabs, and adding a call to action button.
You can then turn towards creating content that you will be posting on your page. The goal is to build a large following by encouraging people to like the page. Once they do this, your posts will appear in their feed and they can click through for more.
Making Content for Facebook Marketing
When developing content for Facebook, you need to ensure it will appeal to an audience. You can choose to make it inspiring, instructional, entertaining and more. The goal is simply to captivate the audience and elicit a response from them. This could be to click through to your blog or e-commerce site, like the content or share it.
To stimulate a larger following, you will need to ensure your content gets to be seen. This visibility is difficult to grow organically from scratch. Hence the use of Facebook Ads that will provide this much-needed news feed exposure.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads are paid promotions. You will need to set a budget for each campaign and bid through the ads auction system to have your content shown in front of your target audience. The pricing of the ads will be determined by such factors as the audiences you are targeting, sizing, quality and bidding type and amount.
Customizing Your Audience
Once you have set up your business page, you need to target and attract an audience. This will require creating and showing ads to people that would be most interested in what your business has to offer.
Facebook allows you to target audiences based on demographics, location, behaviour, connections, and interests. You can also build your audience from lists of people that have previously interacted or transacted with your business on platforms outside of Facebook.
You can use this to create core, custom, and lookalike audiences. This will ensure your ads only appear to the particular audience you want.
Choosing Ad Content
There are several formats of ads you can use to market to your audiences. They can be in the form of written text, images, and video content. You can also have carousel ads that allow you to show multiple images or videos as a single advertisement. A user can click on an image and then be taken to a dedicated product page.
Collection ads are another option that allows you to create a catalogue of your products, with a single image or video on top and four smaller images below appearing as a grid. Slideshow ads are a great option for more interactive media. Your choice of ad content will be dictated by various factors including budget, type of business, and products.
Conclusion
Facebook pages and ads are a direct means to connecting with targeted audiences you can seek to convert into paying customers. Facebook provides various tools to help manage your social media campaigns, some of which are free, while others require payment. However, with over 2 billion active users on this platform, no business can afford not to be making this part of their marketing strategy.