Facebook Marketing Tips

Creating Fabulous Marketing Campaigns on Facebook
In our present digital world, Facebook Marketing is a primary component of the marketing mix and it has proven to deliver efficient and effective results for so many businesses. Facebook is regarded as the first social media platform to launch ads with systemized algorithms, and other social sites have since followed suit.  

It has over 2 billion monthly active users, with 1 billion active users per day. Over 95% marketers are believed to be using Facebook advertising on a regular basis today, and that number is growing steadfastly.

Facebook is a virtual global social-marketplace where you can advertise your products or services to the right masses in a few clicks. But before jumping into the deep, here are some pointers to get you started on the right path. 

 

Capturing your audience 
One way to narrow down your audience better is by using the Audience Insight feature within your Facebook Ads Manager. Under Audience Insight:
- You can learn more about the folks that are connected to your page - here you have information pertaining to the people who are already connected to your Facebook page.
- You can learn more about everyone on Facebook 

The idea is to familiarize yourself with this tool in order to connect with the specific audience profile for your brand/product/service. You can also make use of Facebook’s Graph Search to uncover more on your audience.

Facebook’s search is a lot more potent than people may know. With Graph Search, you can locate people, posts, pages that are related to your keywords. It’s another good way to discover more targeting options for the ads you are creating. 

 

Your “Cheese”: Facebook Contest
Create a contest that will attract your target audience and that is also relevant to the product(s) or service(s) you are promoting. If the prize (cheese) and contest idea is fabulous enough, your contest will tend to draw attention and create some buzz for your brand. Get creative with the mechanics and prizes, you want to make it easy but fun enough so more of your target audience will feel compelled to join in. 

Set your objectives for your Facebook Contest, for example:
1. Collect email addresses for your CRM and other marketing activities - if so, make it a contest entry requirement to have participants provide their emails and other useful data - but keep it to a minimum, you don’t want to turn off the participants by making them complete a lengthy, boring form.
2. Attract new customers - offer discounts or special offers to new customers who join your contest. 
3. Get more followers - this is an often used contest requirement where participants are required to like your Facebook page and share the contest post, so their friends may do the same. 

 

Entertain vs Bore: Posting Videos 
Over 8 billion videos or 100 million hours of videos are watched on Facebook without fail each day. This finding suggests two considerations: 1. FB users love watching videos. 2. Your video needs to stand out more. Always bear in mind, you only have 3 seconds or less to wow your audience: the first frame (thumbnail) before anyone even clicks to play your video, is often taken for granted. 

We are visually driven creatures, because it is the fastest way to gauge what passes our eyes as we scroll down the newsfeed. Image/caption headline is the next element a person will make an effort to read once the visual has captured his/her attention. Then, and only then, will your audience consider playing the video post.
The theme or the key message of the contest should be unexpected and ‘extraordinary’ if you want to attract entries and engagements - it should give your audience an idea of what’s installed for them, in short.

 

Budget for Micro KOLs/influencers: The Next Big Thing
By now, most of the world knows the terms KOLs and influencers are synonymous with social media. But just to give some of us a simple introduction to who these folks are, Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs)/influencers are the digital world’s version of yesterday’s brand ambassadors. 

However, unlike traditional brand ambassadors who consisted mostly of established celebrities such as sports stars, movie stars and famous singers/bands, KOLs/influencers consist mostly of everyday people who have managed to attract big numbers of followers on their Instagram page, subscribers on YouTube, likes on Facebook page, and so on, because of their content and personalities mainly. 

Some of these everyday influencers even compete with rock stars in terms of the number of followers they have amassed (by the millions) and volume of engagements they generate. 

There are generally two categories of KOLs/influencers - micro and macro. Micros have 3k to below 10k followers, whereas macros have 10k to above a million followers on their social media page (usually on their IG, which is also linked to their YouTube channel and/or Facebook page. 

For quite some time now, most of the brands, big to small, prefer engaging micro KOLs/influencers because it is evident that macro KOLs/influencers who tend to have millions of followers are unable to connect with their audiences in a more personalised manner. 
Also, macro influencers have followers with too diversified psychographics and demographics, so targeting won’t be so effective and efficient for your brand campaign. 
On the other hand, micro-influencers have a more focused interest domain and are known to have a more “intimate” or personalised connection with their followers. This allows you to align your brand with a more defined, precise audience profile that would fit your campaign requirements.
Just like brand ambassadors, you will need to work out the role your preferred micro KOL/influencer will play in your Facebook marketing campaign. It may be as simple as promoting your contest to generate more leads, or something more critical such as being the face(s) of your new service/product/etc. The fees for a micro KOL/influencer will usually be significantly lower than a macro KOL/influencer, and definitely much lower than a traditional brand ambassador. 

 

Basics: Customer Service and User Experience is Everything
No matter how effective or grand your Facebook marketing campaign may be, it all comes down to how good your customer service is in the end. How you respond to your audience feedback/enquiries/complains can put you in the spotlight for the wrong reasons. So at all cost, you want to avoid any issue from snowballing into a sizable PR conflict for your company/brand. 
It doesn’t matter what type of business you are in, competition is always close behind. The audience has options, and all they need is a reason to move onto another product/service brand. You competitors are aware of this, and as the saying goes “one man’s failure, is another man’s success.”  
This makes it essential that you give enough focus on customer service and offer a better user experience. Here are some tips:
● Add a description for your Facebook cover to let your audience know who you are and what you do.
● Add a call-to-action button so that users can quickly complete a goal.
● Facebook is an excellent platform to host a weekly Q&A session to give an update.
● Make sure that you have a dedicated and trained social media customer service person to manage this role on your Facebook page. 
There are so much more pointers on getting started or for improving your Facebook marketing campaigns, but in general the brands and companies who perform well tend to be the ones who constantly monitor their campaign performances, looking and analysing for trends that they can capitalise on for their next marketing campaign efforts. 

 

Above all, just as in the physical world, your company’s reputation is everything, so be sure to give as much attention to customer service/user experience as you would to other elements of your Facebook marketing campaign.