Importance of Facebook Marketing 3 Strategies to Grow Your Facebook Audience

Importance of Facebook Marketing 3 Strategies to Grow Your Facebook Audience When Mark Zuckerberg first created Facebook in 2004, little did he know that in the years to come that brands would be forever indebted to the social-media platform for the rise in their profits. Facebook has a staggering user base of over 2 billion people worldwide. That’s about 1/3rd of the earth’s population that is registered on Facebook. Now that’s a fascinating fact.It’s no wonder that businesses around the globe use Facebook as their ideal marketing strategy to generate an audience for their products. In fact, every popular brand that you’ve heard of has their own Facebook page. So, if you aren’t using Facebook to increase your brand awareness, get out of your rabbit hole.EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT FACEBOOK MARKETINGFirst things first. Why bother with Facebook?Apart from the fact that it’s the most widely used social media platform in the world, here are the top 4 reasons as to why you should use Facebook for your brand.1. Loyal Fan BaseWithout a doubt, ev ery time you post a product or video-link, your Facebook post will be filled with shares and likes. For every share that goes out, you receive new subscribers to your page. Every subscriber is a possible customer that is interested in your product. And if they find your product to their liking, they immediately become a loyal fan of your brand.2. Facebook AdsWe did previously mention that 1/3rd of the earth’s population is registered on Facebook. A single Facebook ad is seen by millions of people at any single given moment. No brand awareness like this exists on the planet that launches your brand to millions of people in less than a minute. 3. Customer InteractionSince Facebook is a social media platform, it doubles up as a place to instantly post queries and complaints. Complaints can be easily resolved in a simple post. It’s easy to reach out to your Facebook audience than it’s to create a manual ticketing system on your website that can take anywhere from 24-48 hours to re solve. Quick resolution means a customer is satisfied and this boosts your after-sales service bringing in more profits in the long run.4. SEOWhat is SEO?Every Facebook post that you make and share is indexed by search engines like Google and Bing. What this means is every time a user searches for relevant products within your criteria, your website shows up in the top results of search engines. Ranking high on search engines translates to bumping up your brand’s popularity in the eyes of the masses.These are just some of the brief advantages of Facebook marketing. The following section below goes in-depth and describes why Facebook is an effective marketing strategyCustom-Targeted AudienceImagine selling hair wax to people that are bald, not a very smart idea, is it? Facebook Ads don’t just randomly target people around the world globally. Facebook uses powerful audience selection tools such as behavioral patterns, demographics, and user interest to gauge how well your product is likely to sell to a specific group of people. This comes with two advantages â€" The first advantage is Facebook targets a custom group of people that are interested in your product and provides awareness of your brand to them. The 2nd advantage is you don’t receive any negative publicity from users that aren’t interested in your products but are still plagued by your ads. To give you better insight here are a few examples of successful Facebook campaigns. AirbnbThe popular hospitality travel site is known for their budget accommodation that caters to travelers looking for a comfortable stay across the globe. Utilizing Facebook campaigns Airbnb has tripled their customer base and reached over to around 238 million people in over 65000 cities and 191 countries worldwide. The Facebook campaign that they ran was just over a month long (June 23rd July 27th, 2017). In just 34 days they were able to achieve the above acquisition numbers at a 47% lower acquisition cost.The metrics t hat Airbnb used via Facebook campaigns were Dynamic Ad system, Core Audience system, user’s decision-making process, and contact customer through Facebook for feedback and after-sales support.ToyotaThe world-famous automobile manufacturer launched a successful Facebook campaign called “Feeling the Street”. The campaign was a callout to all the street musicians in the world to show off their style by linking their videos and images with the hashtag #FeelingtheStreet. The fan-submitted content was later used as source material for their Facebook ads.The campaign generated a shockingly high Facebook engagement rate of up to 440%. Over 1.2 street musicians across the globe had sent their stylish images and videos to Toyota’s Facebook campaign.This campaign also proved the creative space that Facebook offers to its users and how unique your ad can be if you put your mind to it.GameStopA popular name among video game enthusiasts, GameStop was another success story as far as utiliz ing Facebook campaigns was concerned. GameStop ran a Facebook campaign from December 17th to 24th of 2017 as part of the Christmas sale. In just under a week, GameStop was able to acquire a 7.5 times increase in incremental return on their ads. 4% increase in people making a valid purchase and 6% incremental lift in overall sales of games on their website.All of this was done without spamming any of their Facebook followers with ads and other disruptive popups. In fact, during the campaign users were checking out deals on the Facebook page by refreshing to ensure they don’t miss out on crazy video game deals.The following 3 examples provide ample evidence on how even top brands can increase their user base by staggering numbers. Gone are the days when brands used to use traditional campaigns to spark up a debate among the community. Facebook has become the new name in brand awareness and without it, you lose out on making a ton of profit.Cost Factor â€" Facebook Ads vs Google SEO vs YouTubeIf the cost factor of Facebook ads has been keeping you away from advertising your brand on the social media platform, then let’s put an end to that ruse right away with some stunning facts. Let’s compare two well-known behemoths to show you just how advantageous Facebook ads are over other means of marketing.Facebook Ads Vs Google SEOSEO results from Google take over 5-6 months before the brand begins to see traffic. Facebook ads, on the other hand, are instantaneous. You’ll see traffic the moment the ad goes live.Facebook ads are moderately priced at $0.01 per click while Google SEO requires technical knowledge and if you hire a firm, they charge a whopping $700-$1000 dollars for SEO content.Facebook ads have incredible precision in targeting the audience. What this means is you’ll be able to target the type of audience conveniently as per your business. Google SEO has very little control over the type of traffic that is driven to your brand.Facebook Ads are used by 84% of businesses worldwide and people spend the most time on Facebook as per a global survey. 81% of the B2B purchase is conducted via web search through Google.As you can see, the clear winner is Facebook in terms of creating brand awareness for small businesses. Facebook also comes out cheaper than Google SEO and it takes extremely little time for your customers to start connecting to you. Always remember â€" “Time is money.”Let’s do a comparison test between Facebook Ads and YouTube to give you a full analysis.Facebook Ads vs Youtube VideosWolfgang Digital conducted a complete analysis to rank the best social media platform for e-commerce. Let’s see the results.Facebook was found to bring in 334% more business than YouTube’s videos. This is mostly because Facebook’s advertising is extremely budget-friendly and prices 1000 impressions at $1.14 whereas YouTube for the same amount of advertising charges $5.02. Facebook Ads received 3 times the audience compared to t hat of YouTube’s videos. Another issue with YouTube advertising is that ads generated by the company can be skipped and the company will still charge the user, thereby netting the company no profits. Facebook charges its customers only based on Cost per impression, which means a brand is charged only if a user enters the website for a full 3 seconds.The success rate of a user clicking a Facebook Ad is much higher compared to the success rate of a user watching the entire YouTube video for 30 seconds.For businesses that are starting out, it makes more sense to put their ad on Facebook due to the time the audience spend on Facebook as compared to Youtube.The winner is as clear as day. In both comparisons, businesses worldwide prefer Facebook over Google SEO or YouTube videos. While it’s great for your business to use all 3 as an advertising tactic, if you were left to choose just one among the 3 due to budget constraints, the choice is obvious â€" Facebook!Exponential Growth Throu gh New FeaturesWith over a billion people using Facebook as their preferred social media service. There is little surprise in why businesses love to use Facebook as their primary advertising tool. Facebook also regularly updates itself with brand new features and services that come out frequently. With every new update, brands can expect a new way to conquer their advertising campaigns.  Here are the top 5 Facebook features that every business should know about.1. Workplace by FacebookThis nifty feature is used by millions of businesses worldwide to keep their team and colleagues connected via an online network. The online network is accessed via the Workplace application. Once connected there are so many things to do â€" Here’s a list of them.You can say goodbye to sending newsletters and mailing lists. With the workplace app, all you need to do is add all your peers and clients onto the network and simply send them your marketing campaigns via a click of a button The app is user -friendly and assists many companies in saving thousands of dollars of annual revenue used in training employees. The convenient design is easy for employees to learn the basics within a few hours. Workplace offers two-way communication. Which means everyone gets to provide their ideas and share real-time discussions. The app is completely secure and so your online network is free from hacking intrusions Want to use bots to wish your clients birthdays or remind your clients to pay on time? No problem! The Workplace apps have plenty of bots that can be automated Workplace is efficient for smaller businesses looking for a budget pricing model to connect to an online networkEvery week or month, Facebook adds something new to the Workplace app. The best part is the standard version of Workplace is completely free, you only pay to access the premium features, which comes with a 90-day long trial to ensure you are well satisfied before paying upfront. 2. Facebook Professional ServicesEver y time a customer is looking for products that your business excels at, they use Facebook Professional Services to get in touch with you. The way it works is, the customer logs on to the Facebook professional services homepage and begins to search for their required services. They input the specific category and other details of the local businesses. Once they click the search button, it gives them a list of services they can access based on their search preferences. Easy, peasy!Now let’s get down to the exciting part of setting up your own Facebook Professional page for your business. Step by Step Guide to Setting Your Facebook Business page.Step 1: Head over to the Facebook business page or click here.Step 2: On the top right corner, click the “Create a Page” option.Step 3: Choose between “Business/Brand” or “Community/Public figure” options. For this example, we’ll choose “Business/Brand”.Step 4: The “Page Name” should be your Startup name and the “Categ ory” section is to describe your business. For E.g. if you’re running a delivery startup. Simply enter “Food Delivery”.Step 5: Provide your residential details and other important information such as contact number, postal code, etc.Step 6: Add a profile picture and a Cover photo. These steps are optional and can be skipped if you want to come back later. Step 7: Voila! Your Facebook page is now completed and live. All you need to do is add regular posts and invite your colleagues, friends, and family and you have an active Facebook business page.On the off chance, you wish to delete your Facebook business page, it’ll take 14 days of time to completely delete the page from the records. 3. Royalty-Free MusicOne of the hidden features of Facebook that isn’t widely known is attaching music to your Facebook videos, without the risk of copyright violation. All Facebook background music is royalty-free and is extremely easy to use. Here’s how to do it. Head over to your “P ublishing Tools” tab found on your main Facebook pageClick the “Sound Collection” optionYou’ll have a list of music tracks to choose from. You can listen to these tracks by clicking the play symbol before attaching them to your video.Isn’t this a useful feature for just about anyone that doesn’t have time to produce music or spend tons of money just to license them?4. Facebook 360 Gone are the days when you spammed your clients with 100 images of a single room just to give them a view of every aspect of the house. With Facebook 360, you can take a complete 360 photo of your home and send it to your clients. They’ll be able to see the image while swiping around to have a good view of the entire home without having to swipe through multiple images on their phone. The Facebook 360 is a huge roaring success with over 25 million photos and over 1 million videos being posted and shared within a few weeks from launch. If you’ve got a VR device such as the Oculus Rift, you c an even connect to the virtual world and have multiple users connected at a single 360 video. In terms of marketing Facebook 360 is a huge step forward in providing services that customers can visualize instead of browsing through videos and images uploaded by someone else. Facebook 360 gives marketers the chance for their customers to avail the product with a sneak peek attached to it. The possibilities of Facebook 360 are endless. Some of the many uses are â€" A real estate agent showing customers the view of the entire house using VR tech without visiting the location and saving time/money.A car salesman can instantly connect with his customers and provide them with a full interior and exterior view of the automobile they’d like to viewA travel guide can provide sneak peeks to tourists about the city and why they should visit it.Adventure enthusiasts can provide visual simulations of travel gear such as Bungee ropes, Gliders, Scuba equipment, etc. to their customers Those are j ust a tiny speck of examples with what one can do using the Facebook 360 to market their business.5. Facebook Dynamic AdsDynamic ads are a new advertising approach used by Facebook to help brands publish a series of products instead of individually listing a single product. To better understand Dynamic ads, lets break down why marketers would use a Dynamic ad over an individual ad. No individual configuration needed. All dynamic ads are promoted alongside each other to the same user After setting up your dynamic ad once, the ad will continuously reach other people. Unlike an individual ad, that you need to keep updating to target a specific audience Universal reach. Can be configured to reach between platforms â€" tablet, mobile, desktop, etc. Chances of people receiving ads for their preferred products are higher with dynamic ads. This increases profits for a brand and reduces the negative buzz of advertising spamSo now, that you understand that a Dynamic ad is way more interesting than an individual ad, you’re probably wondering what you’ll need to set up your own Dynamic ad. Here are the following requirements â€" Business Manager account accessA filled-up Facebook Business PageAccess to an advertising accountA series catalog of products you want to appear on the Dynamic adThe Facebook PixelOnce you’ve got the following, you could also add in the Pixel Helper Chrome Extension to monitor your pixel. From here on, you can visit the Dynamic ads page and follow the user-friendly instructions to set up your first Dynamic ad in less than a minute.And there we go, the list of the 5 biggest tools to increase your brand’s awareness. While Facebook Ads is more than adequate for a lot of small businesses, the remaining tools used here complement your existing tools to get the best out of your Facebook marketing experience.Now that we’ve learned on the type of Facebook features and tools that are available to us. It’s time to follow guidelines to get the be st out of your digital marketing strategies by using the below guide.3 EXCEPTIONAL STRATEGIES TO INCREASE YOUR FACEBOOK AUDIENCEEvery business wants the exact same thing out of their Facebook business account. How to maximize their reach with the least budget possible. While setting up a Facebook page and the other optional features that come with it, takes a little more than 5 minutes, the tactics you employ here will be the difference between seeing success in a few months or a few years. So, let’s proceed with our first one â€"1. Exclusive Content Time and again, you’ve heard the phrase “Content is King” repeated in articles, blog posts, Facebook posts, etc. You’re probably fed up of hearing the phrase and feel that it’s an overrated term that’s used by fancy digital marketers to mislead beginning startups. The truth is â€" Original content always takes the prime spot over recreated ones. Let’s provide some statistics to prove this point. If your Facebook post is less than 300-500 posts, it won’t be considered under search indexing sites such as Google and Bing. Hence, you receive lesser users that search for your product. 3 in 10 people that visit your page are likely to promote that content further to their friends and family. If your content is unique, the sharing success rate is higher. In-depth original content is hard to come by. Facebook articles that offer complete product breakdown listing advantages and disadvantages, complete size chart, fitting instructions, and other relevant data to the customer has a better chance of converting a lead into sales. An average user visits Facebook over 8 times a day. That’s 8 tries in a day to gain a single user’s attention. If your content is bogus and littered with irrelevant copied content, expect them to lose interest and find the next product See how Facebook users tend to gravitate towards original and in-depth content over incomplete and copied articles. Here’s are 3 unique ways to dish out exclusive Facebook content for your customers.Share Fan ContentIf your Facebook page has followers, they love your product enough to join your Facebook page. Hence, hold a contest for the top 10 Facebook followers to win a prize if they write and post amazing content using your product. Once you’ve received all the entries, select the best entries and reward the user. Now you’ve got exclusive fan-created content using your products. In this way, you’ve just created exclusive content that will run well with others as it’s coming from a customer’s perspective and not just the company’s own advertising campaign.DIY tipsPlease refrain from posting cat images on your Facebook page just because you’re bored and want to have some fun with your followers. You’ll end up destroying the seriousness of your page by posting trivial content. Here’s another great way to post exclusive content by posting DIY (Do It Yourself) articles, images, or videos. For E.g. â€" You are in the cosmetic industry and sell makeup products as a brand. Create posts on the best way to apply the makeup in different styles and add different posts such as “The top 5 makeup brushes that go well with your makeup kit”. Engage your audience by giving them something to do every week. Provide tutorials on how to apply makeup for beginners or provide tips on how to maintain a healthy skin. When it comes to DIY, the options are endless as you share plenty of exclusive content with your followers. High-Quality ImagesOne of the biggest blunders businesses do is utilize low-quality images to promote their products. Many of them take Facebook posts lightly and believe that since it’s not their main website, the images can be of low quality. Wrong! Every high-quality image serves as an exclusive content that will help connect with your Facebook users. You can caption a pair of sunglasses glittering in the sun or a cupcake wonderfully baked and just out of the oven. Investing i n high-quality images is key to impressing your followers. Every impressed follower has a high chance of clicking your product link and making a purchase. 2. Engage Audience with Polls and User FeedbackObviously, if a Facebook post isn’t good enough, you’ll receive fewer likes than you’d prefer. There’s no magical way to engage an audience without being interesting as a brand and throwing out excellent products for your users to be impressed. However, if you’d like to gain their interest and turn them into returning customers, it’s important to ask them for their feedback frequently. You can do it directly by providing a feedback form after a purchase is made or you can do it indirectly by utilizing these means â€"Fill in the Blanks PostsFill in the Blank posts are highly interactive to your customers and they’ll always choose to respond to it when given the chance. Sample questions include â€"My favorite product of [YOUR BRAND] that I’ve used is ______If I had $15 d ollars with me, the product I’d buy from [YOUR BRAND] is ______Emotionally, the latest chain of products released by [YOUR BRAND] has made me very ______The product from [YOUR BRAND] that disappointed me the most is ________The product from [YOUR BRAND] that I’m looking forward to this year the most is _______By providing the entire statement, you can receive answers from your customers without using up too much of their time. One-word answers are the best way to get them to answer about your products and once you’ve got a great understanding on the type of product that’s doing well and not doing well, you’ll be able to build better products for future releases. Post Sneak Peek ImagesA great way to surprise your audience is by releasing an early image of your product and not revealing it completely. Don’t caption it, instead just put a “?”. This way you’ll find out just how excited your customers are for an upcoming product release. They’ll be all sorts of guessi ng games going on and your customers will interact with one another. This type of audience engagement creates buzz. From here on, you can either choose to directly launch the product or release another sneak peek image of the product to generate even more publicity for your product and engage your audience in a lot more conversations. But don’t make the mistake of building up the hype for too long or your audience will lose interest in your product. Always ensure to maintain a schedule and don’t just spam images. A good rule of the thumb is to reveal a sneak peek image a month before your product launch and another image 15 days before the launch. This will get your customers excited.Show your company’s workplaceSurely, your customers are just as curious to know how the operations go on behind closed doors. By revealing a video every month on different sections of operations, you’ll get your audience’s attention and they’ll be fascinated by the way your employees work an d get a full-on exposure on the type of work culture you breed. An inside look of the company is a great way to deeply connect with your most loyal fans. Post videos of your employees giving their own feedback on how they feel working with the company and why it’s great. Audience love interacting with companies that let them into their sacred space.  3. Facebook LiveA good percentage of the global population has access to high-speed internet access. Hence, high-quality videos and streaming are accessible to the general audience without any interference. Facebook Live is a live-streaming broadcasting service that allows brands to get personal with the audience by interacting with them in real-time. One of the biggest advantages of Facebook Live is connecting with the audience just before a product launch and providing various information to the customers. So, let’s say you’re launching a new juicer to your audience in less than 1 hour, by having an expert from the team logon to Facebook Live and connect with your audience, you build publicity for the brand. You also inform buyers before they purchase the product on what they can expect with your latest release. Demonstrate the product over Facebook live by showing all its features and usability. Discuss how and where the product has its greatest merits and the type of users who’ll enjoy it the most. Many customers tend to log in to Facebook Live sessions to get a glimpse of the product they intend to buy. The more you explain about the product the larger the hype train becomes.Provide AMA via Facebook LiveAnother great use for Facebook Live is to interact with your audience using “Ask Me Anything or AMA”. AMA is an interactive session where you allow the audience to ask you any questions that they want to about the product and your team directly provides a response in real-time. AMA is a great way to solve user queries and to show a confident company that isn’t afraid to answer questions in real t ime. It’s important to provide the dates of your AMA a week or fortnight before setting up the AMA. Also, ensure the best experts are qualified enough to answer the questions. Users don’t like vague answers that don’t give them any information. Ensure you put your best person who understands your product/service to interact with the audience.CLOSING WORDSA schedule must be maintained for effective Facebook engagement. Maintain a time zone that you can stick to. More posts don’t equal a better engagement, a timely frequency with high-quality engaging content is the right way to promote your brand. Don’t forget to collect data for every interaction that you have. Have the statisticians map out a report utilizing flow charts to determine whether the arrow is soaring or crashing down. Every little statistic makes an impact when marketing, so don’t underestimate them.