We’re not sure where the marketing industry would be without Facebook. It might not be the super-cool up-and-coming social media company that it was back in 2010, but it’s still the world’s most powerful advertising platform, and it’s likely to remain that way until its billions of users decide to delete their accounts and go somewhere else.
While they’re all still there, they and their data are ripe meat for marketers and advertisers with a product to sell. Facebook might be deeply unpopular with the public, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still use it – and if they use it, anyone who wants to succeed in marketing should use it too.
If social media isn’t part of your marketing strategy, your marketing strategy is flawed. If your social media marketing plans don’t include Facebook, your strategy is even worse. Every company that does business online can and should advertise on Facebook, but most of them get it wrong. We don’t want our readers to get it wrong, so we’re sharing these little-known tips and tricks of the trade. They’ve worked for some of the biggest companies in the world, so there’s no reason why they can’t also work for you and your business.
Understand Who Your Perfect Buyer Is
Except for food, water, and clothing, there is no such thing as a universal product. Whatever you’re selling is more likely to appeal to some people than it is to others, so who should you target and who shouldn’t you? If you’re spending money on advertising to people based on nothing but their age group or their location, you’re wasting your cash. That’s not marketing – that’s gambling. It’s throwing money into an online slots game, hoping that something bigger will come back out of it again and then blaming the online casino you’re playing at when it doesn’t happen. If you were to visit Sister-Site.co.uk and spend a few minutes reading the casino reviews there, you’d know that the most successful casinos are the ones that not only know how to target players but also know what kind of players target them.
You need to think like these casinos. Ask yourself not how old your ideal customer is but what they look like. Are they single? Do they have children? How much do they earn? Do they drive? What do they drive? The more of these questions you can answer, the more you can create a realistic buyer persona and then target that persona. You’re probably going to have to do some market research with your existing customers to find this out.
Target Facebook Messenger
Facebook isn’t just Facebook. There’s a whole secondary aspect of Facebook called Facebook Messenger, and the thing about Facebook Messenger is that you don’t even need to have an active Facebook account to use it. People who deleted their Facebook profiles years ago still use Facebook Messenger to stay in touch with friends.
There are even a few thousand Facebook Messenger users who’ve never had full Facebook accounts at all. Messenger allows you to market to and interact with potential customers right to their faces. A typical approach would be to pay for a pop-up message that asks a customer a question, with a tailored, pre-programmed series of responses to their responses until they’re led to a clickable link to buy whatever product it is you’re trying to sell them. The direct approach might turn some people off, but it works.
Divide And Conquer
We know that the personalised approach to marketing works. We’ve known it for years. It’s a total mystery why so many of us know this but fail to do anything about it, but you can use that to your advantage. Your rivals probably aren’t using personalised marketing, but you can. We talked earlier about creating accurate, detailed buyer personas. If you’ve identified more than one buyer persona, it stands to reason that each of those personas needs to be approached in a different way on account of their different personalities.
You can run more than one Facebook marketing campaign at once, and each of those marketing campaigns can target a totally different demographic of people. In each case, design an advert that addresses a specific need those people are likely to have. If you have a good product, you should be able to sell or pitch it in several different ways, and that ought to be reflected in your social media marketing strategy.
Include Your Current Customers
This is one of the biggest mistakes that people make with social media marketing. For reasons that will never make sense to us, they leave out people who have “liked” or interacted with their brand or company in the past. They think of spending money on attempting to reach those people as a waste of advertising budget that could be spent on attracting new customers instead. That isn’t very smart. People who’ve bought from you before are far more likely to buy from you again than people who’ve never placed an order with you. They’re also more likely to spend big with you than someone who’s yet to make their first order.
A lot of the time, all it takes to persuade them to make a purchase is a little gentle reminder that you exist – and that’s exactly what a well-placed Facebook advert can do. Don’t leave your existing customers out of your campaign. If anything, target them harder than new customers. Your existing client base is far more likely to provide you with a substantial income stream.
Advertising on social media will always be a lottery to some extent. You could follow every piece of advice that we’ve just given you and still make a disappointing return. That’s just the nature of doing business. It makes sense to give yourself the best possible chance of landing your adverts well, though, and we believe the advice we’ve listed above will help you to do that.
Be smart when you advertise on social media, and you’re more likely to find smart, reliable people to buy from you. Don’t burn through your marketing budget hoping that someone will see the flames and come to take a closer look – spend it only in the places where it makes sense for it to be spent, and so long as your product is good enough, the rest should take care of itself.
