So, you’re thinking about digital marketing on Facebook and how you can use it to grow your local small business. Because of Facebook’s huge audience clout, it can give you a lot of opportunities to engage with a new audience and extend your company’s reach.
Right now, you may have questions about digital marketing Facebook, which this guide can hopefully clarify. How can I start Facebook marketing, and how can I make it work for my business?
What strategies can I use for effective Facebook marketing? What is the cost of Facebook marketing for my business, and when can I see results from marketing through this platform?
These questions and more are explained to guide you on what you should do to increase consumer and client engagement and website traffic using Facebook.
What is Facebook Marketing?
Facebook marketing is the strategy of promoting brands and maintaining their presence on Facebook. The strategy allows promoting brands via Facebook ads and organic (free) postings and interactions.
You can promote your local business via posting and interaction within the Facebook platform. This approach will cost your business nothing, as using Facebook pages to promote your business is totally free.
It is similar to Facebook users who use the platform to connect with their friends and family and view products that others may be interested in buying.
How Does Facebook Digital Marketing Work?
Consider that Facebook has more than 2.6 billion active users and growing. Facebook pages to promote your business are the gateway for businesses to reach out to this large segment of consumers.
Your Facebook page or pages are essentially the presence you have on the platform to be seen by your target audience and everyone on Facebook. Such a presence allows them to “like” your business or brand or comment on your posts, and you want a large chunk of these people to like your page and eventually engage with you.
In return, your “fans” receive content updates from your page to their News Feed, allowing your business to increase brand awareness, collect audience insights, deploy and track ads, and chat with users who look for information or updates about your business.
Using Facebook for business consists of many steps, including:
Setting up a Page for Your Business
As you may well know, Facebook is more about personal profiles. However, the purpose is different for businesses. Facebook business pages are intended to provide information and updates about a business or organization.
The way to connect with businesses using Facebook is also different. You can connect with a business on the platform by “liking” it and not by requesting to be added as a “friend.”
Thus, your target audience should click the “like” button before they can be considered fans of your business. This action sets the initial stage for engagement between you and your target audience on Facebook.
Note that using a personal account to promote your business on Facebook is unacceptable. Facebook will flag your personal account if it is obvious that you are using it for business purposes.
To play safe, create a Facebook page for your business and do everything business-related on that page.
Add Cover Photo and Profile Picture
Your profile picture will be the primary visual element of your page. Such a picture will appear in search results and together with your content that appears in the News Feed pages of your Facebook followers.
Also, add a cover photo. It is that large image placed horizontally on the topmost part of the page. The purpose is to show your Page’s identity to your fans.
Cover photos can be updated depending on your latest campaigns and promos. Make sure your promos and elements on your Facebook page cater to the needs of your target audience.
Add a Description of the Page and Your Business
Include a short description that shows what your business or organization is all about. Ensure to address the audience that will benefit from engaging with your business.
When you’re done creating Your Facebook page, create content to post on the platform. Always ensure that you create relevant content or useful posts that your target audience will appreciate.
Your content can be in varied forms, such as:
- Videos
- Photos
- Blog posts
- Guides
- How-to articles
- Infographics, etc.
Your goal is to build strong relationships with your fans and convert them into loyal followers. Make sure to place social media buttons on your website. That way, your fans can share your content with their friends and family with one click.
Why Should I Consider Facebook Marketing for My Local Business?
Why do local businesses need to use Facebook marketing as one of their social media strategies? Here’s why.
Facebook Promotes B2C (Business-to-Consumer) Marketing
As an HVAC maintenance repair company or a small company that offers car repair services, your marketing team must focus on B2C marketing. Facebook allows you to do that effectively.
Facebook is the standard for B2C marketing as it allows community engagement, local product promotion, and localizing of brand awareness campaigns.
As a B2C company, your approach is to promote and sell your products directly to your local target audience. Facebook marketing and other forms of social media marketing support this approach for promoting your business.
To be successful in your B2C marketing, you need to trigger an emotional response that will help you attain the desired outcome. You also need to keep track of the trends in your market and purchasing habits of the people you want to engage with and serve.
Facebook Allows You to Collaborate With Other Companies
One Facebook marketing strategy you can use for your local business is the feature called “Partners.” This feature allows you to get your partners on board with your marketing. With the Partners feature, you can access your partners’ followers and share your assets with them.
Use Facebook’s Business Manager Feature
With this feature, you can build multiple custom audiences based on the data that Facebook users provide to the platform.
As Facebook tracks user comments, tags, and groups within its platform, it can better understand its users’ interests and preferences. The gathered insights then allow you to target your audience more effectively. It gives you more than just the simple demographics useful for your campaigns, such as religion, political ideology, and salary ranges.
Facebook Allows You to Have a Wider Reach
According to Statista, Facebook had 2.6 billion users as of 2020. Such a large number of users spans many demographics.
Out of all Facebook users, 62% fall between 18 and 34 years old, and the remaining chunk consists of users 35 years old and older. If you are targeting the group of Baby Boomers or the Silent Generation using Facebook, you are in luck.
According to the Pew Research Center, these groups are the fastest-growing segments of users on the Facebook platform.
Facebook Has Built-in Marketing Tools for Evaluating the Success of Your Local Facebook Marketing Campaigns
You want to understand many things while doing your marketing on Facebook, including:
- The performance of your marketing content
- Audience responses to your messages
- What you can do to improve your Facebook campaigns
Here are two Facebook analytics tools to use for this purpose:
Creator Studio
You can use this tool to give you details about the performance of your content on Facebook. With this tool, you can measure the sentiment and attitude of your audience towards your brand.
Meta Business Suite (formerly Facebook Business Suite)
Use the Facebook Business Suite as a marketing strategy Facebook and Instagram. It is an all-in-one tool for managing all your Facebook and Instagram accounts. With this tool, you can get lots of insights from both organic and sponsored content.
For additional information about the benefits of marketing on Facebook and marketing on other social media platforms, click here.
Best Ways to Market Your Business on Facebook for Free
You may want to use Facebook Ads as one of your Facebook strategies. You can do so, but you need to set a budget for it. For those who want to use the platform for free, check the below Facebook marketing strategies that you can use without any out-of-pocket expense.
Optimize Your FB Page
Help your audience easily find the information you want to get from your page. One way you can do that is by organizing the tabs on your page. Including the most important tabs and restructuring their hierarchy will ensure a smoother experience for your users.
Post content with intent in mind – Be mindful about how you communicate with your Facebook audience, and avoid the habit of just throwing things there and hoping your audience will see them.
Instead, post with your intention conveyed clearly and decide whether you need to boost your content with a budget. For this purpose, you may use the Facebook Insights tool on the platform. It can help you identify the right posting rhythm and blending of content.
Try Establishing a Facebook Community Page
Marketing experts say that community pages allow for better organic reach compared to commercial pages on the platform.
If you can make community pages to invite people, your users will feel special and appreciative for receiving your invitation. Plus, community pages are effective spaces to maintain relationships with your existing clients, one on one.
Keep the Story Going for Continuous Engagement
Keep adding to your story on Facebook to ensure your audience continuously engages with you.
Stories do not have to be always about your company or products. Things like interesting links and fun questions are great materials to keep your target audience engaged. The more your audience is engaged with you, the higher the chance for your profile to get clicks is.
Also, use Live feeds for telling your story. This approach is gaining popularity among social marketers recently. From car paint tutorials to proper cooling equipment maintenance, companies can go live to engage with their audience. Live feeds can be shared, saved, and have a “replay” advantage, too.
Use Facebook for Customer Service
Facebook allows you to use the platform for on-the-go engagement with your audience. It is the same tactic bigger companies use when they employ bots to connect and communicate with their clients online.
The best thing is it is free. You can use Facebook to deal with any customer service issues at any time without spending money on it. With Facebook, you can reply to queries or complaints within minutes.
Your audience wants that their issues are resolved quickly or appreciates your gesture to thank them for the positive review they have given about your service. You have Facebook to use to meet such an expectation from your audience.
How to Market Your Small Business on Facebook Effectively
To explore the matter of effective social media marketing on Facebook, ask these two questions first:
- What type of business are you promoting on the platform?
- What are your objectives for Facebook marketing?
If you run a consumer goods business, your aim for using Facebook is to generate traffic to your website by using numerous media and content to build awareness and interest in a new product or offer. This approach can result in more frequent visits to your website.
If your business is a service business, your goal for using Facebook is to build relationships with followers and current clients on the platform. You can do a great job of blending your brand message and engagement.
Developing a voice for your brand on the Facebook platform is also important. How do you develop your brand’s voice on the platform?
First, what is a brand’s voice? A brand’s voice is a brand’s personality. Such a voice must run consistently through all communication channels (emails, advertisements, blog posts, website, social media, etc.). No matter who is in charge of communications in your company, your brand voice must not change.
Take Coca-Cola, for example. Its brand’s voice is friendly and positive. It is why their advertisements are full of happy lives supported by a drink of Coke. Over time, the company built a strong connection between the “good times”, their cola, and consumers who use the product.
When developing a brand voice, you identify ways and strategies that will make people want to connect with your product and company.
Now, as for your objective for using Facebook, knowing your goals is important for many reasons:
- You want to know if your Facebook campaign works.
- How to modify to improve results
- You want to know if your Facebook content is driving traffic to your website.
Based on the marketing goals, you can also install apps on your Facebook page and drive engagement. There are apps that can help you collect email addresses or get your audience to sign up for a free sample.
Tips for Your Facebook Marketing to Stand Out
It is essential for businesses to have a Facebook page, but business competition on the platform is getting fierce. Thus, with your effective Facebook marketing strategies, your goal is to stand above the crowd.
It can be difficult to compete, but it is not impossible for you to achieve such a feat if you know what works and what does not. Check the tips below.
Seek Specialist Coaching
Look for a professional and experienced marketing agency that can help you with the ins and outs of Facebook marketing and map out things you need to do.
Invest some money in consultation sessions. The quality one-on-one session will teach you lots of optimization strategies and other approaches that include aspects such as:
- Audience targeting
- Copywriting
- Budgeting
- Photo design
- Tracking analytics, etc.
Expect professional teaching sessions to improve your website traffic, brand awareness, and sales.
Hold Simple Contests on the Platform
One of the best strategies to boost audience engagement is by running contests, which you can do on Facebook. It starts with identifying your goal, the giveaway prize, and your Facebook giveaway entry method.
If your contest on Facebook is successful, more people will interact with your content on the platform. Consumers like fun events, and with the contests you run, they have a chance to win something of value.
Contests also have the power to encourage user-generated content because participants will talk and comment about the event and share them with their friends and family.
Create contests that your audience cannot forget and will encourage people to talk about you on their own networks.
Here are examples of giveaways to give through contests:
- Gift cards
- Gym membership
- Dinner vouchers
- Holidays (travel-related prizes)
- Toys and vacation trips for kids, etc.
Post Videos on Your Facebook Page
According to Facebook, businesses using the platform can use videos to show their products, services, and brands in new ways. You can use videos to show your unique features or tell your brand story.
Here are some Facebook video tips for more views, engagement, and shares:
- Create square videos. – Square videos take up more space on the feed. If your videos are square in shape, your audience can see only your video playing on the screen.
- In contrast, horizontal videos are shown on the screen with other videos. In that setup, it is easy for the viewer of your video to be distracted by someone else’s content.
- Catch the attention of viewers to your video within three seconds. – You can do this by getting your points across as quickly as possible. Also, inspire emotion as soon as possible.
- Craft your video title so that it encourages people to view the content. Also, add captions to explain the gist of your video content.
Target Existing Clients or Leads
If you have an email list containing the addresses of your existing clients, you can upload it on Facebook and then target these people with your Facebook content.
Capture those leads by remarketing to them. Also, tailor your content to the clients you already have an engagement with. However, try your best to personalize your message as much as possible.
Use Emojis in Your Facebook Content
When planning your textual content to engage with your Facebook fans, craft it in such a way that it includes emojis. Not only do many social media users use emojis themselves, but they use them to express their thoughts more effectively.
Now, marketers are also encouraged to use emojis on the Facebook platform and other social media sites. That is because using emojis helps to show the personality and emotion of the author of the content.
Try to experiment if your copies will perform better when incorporating emojis. You can also check if such an approach can help you express your message more clearly.
Tips to Thrive Well on Facebook
Those who want to minimize their Facebook marketing expense must focus on increasing their organic reach. However, the rules on the platform have been changing, and everyone must abide by the rules so that their efforts put in their Facebook marketing work for them and not against them.
Three reminders you must keep in mind so that your Facebook page does not get punished:
- Avoid using memes too much.
- Avoid using call-to-action on the platform too much.
- Avoid using links.
Instead, follow these tips from Moz:
- Focus most of your efforts on engagement within the platform. Anything you post that takes Facebook users away from the platform will be flagged. So, avoid links and CTAs that direct the Facebook audience to go to another website.
- Study why your fans click the thumbs-up button for your content. Most of the time, it is because the content you provide is what your Facebook audience wants to engage in.
- If they see a lot of stuff they do not want to engage in, they will leave your page and might not want to deal with you anymore.
- Increase the frequency of your posts. The ideal frequency is one post per day, but Facebook supports over-posting. According to Facebook, the goal of the News Feed is to show users the most relevant story or content. So, only your most relevant posts are shown to your target audience. Facebook suggests, “Post frequently.”
If you need a marketing agency to help your local business grow by managing your online presence and improving your social media marketing results, contact Cube Creative Design.
