Facebook is one of the oldest social media platforms that is still widely popular today. And over the past few years, they have introduced numerous features that have made it lucrative for brands and marketers.
However, with so many brands flocking to Facebook to market their products and services, it has become really difficult to make your content stand out. But, don’t worry because we are here to help you overcome that challenge.
Here are some of the most effective tactics to help you formulate a winning Facebook marketing strategy and beat your competitors.
Facebook Marketing Strategy:
1. Set Your Facebook Marketing Goals
The first step that you need to take before formulating your Facebook marketing strategy is to set your goals and objectives. This is the basis on which you will formulate your entire strategy and measure the success of your initiatives.
Here are some of the most common Facebook marketing goals that marketers set:
Image via Sprout Social
No matter what your goals are, you need to write them down and also decide on the KPIs that you will use to determine whether or not those goals are met.
2. Understand Your Audience
Just like with any other marketing strategy, you need to understand your audience before you decide what marketing tactics to use. Everything from your content to the choice of format will depend on whom you’re targeting.
Luckily, with Facebook, it is actually quite convenient to get these audience insights if you have a Facebook business page.
Create And Optimise Your Facebook Business Page
To create a Facebook business page, all you need to do is click on the “Create” option at the top right of your Facebook page. Then select “page” option under it.
Then you click on the “business or brand” page option from the given options and follow the instructions to create your page.
You can also select the type of business you have and can name your page. Be sure to select the right business category and an appropriate name that represents your business.
Also, once you have created the page, don’t forget to add an appropriate bio, profile picture, and your website link.
Use Facebook Page Insights to Understand Your Audience
When you have a Facebook business page that has been up and running for some time, you can check your page insights and audience demographics. To do that, go to your page and click on “Insights” at the top centre of the page. Then select “People” from the sidebar, to see your audience demographics.
You can find out where most of your audience live and information about their age groups and genders. You can also use third-party analytics tools to get more detailed audience analytics and insights. If you use Google Analytics, then you can gain valuable audience insights from there as well.
3. Formulate Your Content Strategy
The main part of formulating your Facebook marketing strategy is to decide what kind of messaging and content types you will use.
Once you have a fair idea of whom you’re going to target, it’s time to decide what type of content you will use to target them.
Here are some of the key elements of a Facebook content strategy that you need to figure out.
Decide on Your Tone or Brand Voice
Different brands have different tones of voices. And the ones that have distinct and clear brand voices stand out in the crowd. You can select from some of the most popular types of tones—humorous, serious, and casual.
What tone you choose also depends on which industry you’re in. For example, a humorous tone might not work for an organisation dealing with serious social issues. They would be better off using a serious tone.
Select Your Content Mix
There are different types of content options on Facebook that you can experiment with. Each can be used for a variety of purposes and you should use a good content mix instead of just sticking with Facebook posts.
Video Posts
Videos are the most engaging of all content types and should definitely be a big part of your content mix. This is especially true for native videos, which are videos uploaded directly on Facebook, instead of sharing them from another source.
Per a Quintly study, native video content gets 168% more engagement than any other form of content on Facebook. The study analysed 187,000 Facebook pages and over 7.5 million posts to get this insight.
Additionally, Facebook users watch more than 100 million hours of video content in a day, making it one of the most popular types of Facebook content.
Therefore, native Facebook video content should be a priority in your content mix.
Image Posts
Facebook posts that have an image attached are inherently better than all-text posts because of the visual factor. As a rule of thumb, remember that visual content is always more engaging than all-text content.
Use a good-quality image and use text sparingly to describe the image or convey your message.
Facebook Stories
This is a new feature that Facebook launched. It is similar to Instagram Stories. When you open Facebook on a desktop, you will see the Facebook Stories of your friends and the pages you follow on the right sidebar.
Since these stories are featured right at the top, they get better visibility than posts that are shown in a person’s feed and are visible if you scroll down. So, you can use this format to promote your posts, contests, offers, or anything that you want to bring to your followers’ attention.
Facebook Watch
This is another fairly new and lesser-known feature from Facebook which provides a platform to share your marketing videos. Facebook Watch is Facebook’s effort to replace or at least compete with YouTube.
The reason you should leverage this is that this platform is exclusively for videos and you have a better chance of getting your video noticed here than from a post in users’ crowded feeds.
Text Posts
These are the traditional, all-text Facebook posts that show up in your followers’ feeds. You can use these to share short text content or links to other content.
4. Create a Content Calendar and Schedule Posts
Whatever type of content you decide to post, you need to plan your content in advance, preferably using a content calendar. Use this to plan ahead and decide what kind of post will be posted on which days and at what times.
This will help you maintain a good posting frequency and consistency, which are both very important for maintaining an active Facebook presence.
You can only expect a large follower base if you keep delivering relevant content to your audience on a regular basis.
However, it can be a real hassle if you have to post content manually on designated days and at specific times. For that, you can use a content posting and scheduling tool like Buffer.
Also, you need to make sure that you schedule posts at the right times - when you have higher chances of getting engagement. Per a study, Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to post on Facebook, during the morning and afternoon hours (9 am to 3 pm).
5. Leverage Facebook Ads
Facebook advertisements are a must have if you want to take your Facebook marketing to the next level and reach a larger audience. With all other types of content, you can only reach and market to people who follow your page.
However, Facebook ads let you reach a much larger and yet, relevant audience. Facebook provides advanced audience targeting options that you can use to show your ads only to people who might actually be interested in them.
You can use features like “lookalike audiences” to target your ads. This feature helps you target an audience that exactly mirrors your current audience. This means you can target people with similar psychographics and demographics as your current audience. You can select your Facebook followers as your current audience or can use any other source, like an email list of your website visitors.
You just need to add the source of your current audience and a location, and Facebook will create a lookalike audience for you to target via your ads.
The audience size can be set according to your budget. The bigger your budget, the more people you can reach.
So, use Facebook ads to reach a larger audience and target them with relevant ads. This will help you get multifold returns than you would get without advertising.
Conclusion
Facebook is a popular social media platform with millions of active users. Numerous brands and marketers use the platform for marketing and for engaging their audiences. Use these tips to create a winning Facebook marketing strategy and engage your audience. These will help you boost your Facebook marketing initiatives and meet your marketing goals.
