Posted by How to plan your Facebook Marketing strategy effectively
Anyone can try Facebook promotion, but it doesn’t mean that anyone can do it well. From creating posts to more advanced things, such as ads created with Business Manager, Facebook offers many options, depending on your goals.
The key to not being overwhelmed by so many features and getting good results from Facebook promotion is planning everything in detail before you start working.
Research your audience
Firstly, you should find out what your audience is, so you know what type of posts or Facebook Ads you create. On Facebook, you can find all types of audiences you need. You just have to know how to find them. When it comes to ads, you can build an audience directly from the Business Manager, or for more information you can do some research on Facebook Audience Insights.
Set goals
Secondly, you should set goals before you start working on Facebook promotion.
Decide what is your goal for promoting on Facebook. Maybe you want to increase brand awareness, create more engagement, or increase sales.
Also, establish what are the most important metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Set goals and analyze results regularly.
Key Performance Indicators are values that show if a campaign brings the expected results. Some examples of Facebook KPIs are:
- Impressions
- Reach
- Followers growth
- Reactions
- Shares
- Comments
- Engagement rate
- CTR (Click-Through-Rate)
- CPC (Cost Per Click)
- CPP (Cost Per Purchase)
- ROAS (Return On Ad Spend)
Create a social media calendar
Plan when you are going to post and keep track of the content you have created. A social media calendar will help you do that. You can create it in Excel, or you can use templates or tools specially designed for content management.
Schedule posts
Facebook offers the option to schedule posts and ads, but if you use a social media automation tool you can not only schedule posts but also manage all your social media accounts so you can better plan content for each of them. Also, these types of tools can help you discover new content ideas and create specific posts for each social network.
Schedule content for the whole year for one or multiple social media accounts. Choose the right hour to post and have everything calculated.
Correlate it with the content from your blog, website, Instagram, and other social media channels.
What types of strategies you should use
On Facebook and almost all social media channels, you can generate both organic and paid traffic. You will have to choose if you are going to use both or only the one that works best for your company and that fits your budget.
Facebook Organic Marketing
Here are some strategies that you can use to generate organic traffic to your social media channel:
- Create engagement posting questions and responding to comments
- Post quotes that people would like and share
- Create video content
- Post daily or at least 2-3 days a week
- Share your posts in social media groups
- Get a verified badge to make more people trust you
- Try different types of Facebook Ads (Image, Video, Carousel, Instant Experience ads, Collection Ads, Retargeting Ads, etc.)
- Do A/B testing
- Do influencer marketing campaigns with discount promo codes
- Start a contest/giveaway to generate engagement
When you are planning your Facebook strategy for organic traffic, you can take into account three stages:
- Preparation
- Content creation
- Automation
Preparation stage
In this stage, you think about ideas for posts and create a list with them. You can use a mind map like the one from the picture below to boost your creativity, generate new ideas and keep them in order.
Content creation stage
In this stage, you create the text and visuals for posts. Even if you are a marketer with no design skills, many design tools can help you create images or videos. After a post is ready, you can add it to your social media calendar.
Automation stage
This is the stage where you have everything prepared, you have already thought about the results you expect for the next year and you are ready to schedule posts using a social media automation tool.
Facebook Paid Marketing
When you are doing this type of marketing on Facebook, you have to make sure you spend money carefully, to test different types of campaigns and see what works best for your company to improve your statistics over time. Here are some strategies that will bring you great results:
When you are planning your Facebook Ads strategy you can take into account four stages:
- Preparation
- Content creation
- Technical execution
- Monitorization and optimization
Preparation stage
You have to decide from the beginning what type of ad you are going to implement.
You have to set an objective (conversion, traffic, app install, etc.). Also, you should establish what is your audience and its demographics (location, age, interests, job, etc.).
Content creation stage
In this stage, you will have to come with different ideas for ads, you will need to create text, visuals and find a suitable CTA (Call-to-Action).
Ads ideas
In this stage, you collect ideas to promote your product using Facebook Ads. Think about types of ads that will delight your audience and show them how awesome your product is!
Text, visual and Call-to-action
Think about the structure, dimension, and topic of the text. It is usually recommended to write a short text, but you can try several options until you find one that works well with your brand.
For the visual, you can have an image, a short video, a series of images (carousel), etc.
You should find an effective Call-to-action that is well suited to your ad objective. For example, if your objective is more traffic, think about a call-to-action that will make your target audience click on the link from your ad and get to your website. Some examples are: “Learn more”, “Shop now”, “Try it for free”, “Install now” etc.
You can think about something that you can offer for free, like a demo, some templates, some text documents, a video, etc. It is something that interests your audience, it will make them curious about your product and they will click on your ad.
Technical execution stage
Make sure you have the Facebook Pixel installed and have created events for the important actions that you want people to take on your website.
Now that you have everything prepared from the other stages, you can create the ads and use A/B testing to find the types of ads and content that bring you the best results.
Monitorization and optimization stage
New ads will need a learning stage to find the most favourable situations in which they can be displayed to obtain the desired results.
You should monitor your ads constantly, but it is preferable to check performance indicators (Impressions, Reach, Engagement rate, Click-Through rate, etc.) after two weeks. This is the minimum period you should let your ads run until you scale them. After you see the results and know your audience better, you can also try retargeting ads. After your ads run for a while, they collect results about your audience like the demographics from the chart below.
Don’t rush when it comes to content. You should better use your time to create content and then automate your posts. In this way, you can keep track of each of your posts and ads and manage all your social media accounts in a way that will help you achieve your long-term goals.
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