Great Facebook marketing is not a one size fits all approach, but one piece of strategy advice I give all my clients is that social media marketing must be an integral component of your web marketing campaign.
Social media is the better, faster way to reach customers because social media sites have become the newspapers, backyard fences, and water coolers of our daily life.
At the top of our social media communication list is Facebook marketing.
Here are few shocking Facebook marketing statistics to illustrate the importance of including Facebook in your marketing mix:
- Facebook Monthly Active Users: Facebook monthly active users totaled 2.80 billion as of December 31, 2020. This represents an increase of 12% year-over-year.
- Leading Social Media Engagement Platform: eMarketer reports that Facebook is the leading social platform and business marketplace. It reaches 59% of social media users, and is projected to continue its domination at least through 2024. Interestingly enough, the pandemic renewed curiosity about Facebook’s outreach capabilities.
- Great for Small Business Marketing: There must be some pretty strong reasons over 200 million small businesses from around the world include Facebook tools as part of their marketing strategy.
What this means is that your business needs top-notch Facebook marketing to achieve its goals in this highly-competitive, attention-grabbing medium. You can use Facebook marketing to share business information, increase your online presence, build your audience, and connect with prospects and customers.
I created an easy-to-understand Facebook marketing infographic which you can download here.
What is Facebook Marketing?
Facebook marketing offers a variety of highly targeted paid advertisements and organic posts which help your business put its products and services in front of a targeted audience.
A slew of ad formats is available, including video, image, carousel, collection, slideshow and lead generation.
Start by establishing a goal, then define your target audience, upload your images and content, set a duration, and set your budget.
If needed, Facebook will create a personalized ad plan focused on your goal.
Below are some useful ideas for your next Facebook marketing campaign:
- Target an Insanely Specific Audience: You might think you know your audience but is “people over 35 who live within 25 miles of my business” really helpful? Hone in and drill down to those people who have the best opportunity of becoming customers. Would you be shocked to find out that about 85% of Facebook advertisements are targeted by country instead of a specific location? And only about 45% of these advertisements use Interest Targeting! Facebook has targeting options for location, behavior, demographics, connections and interests that deliver your ads to people who will love your business.
- Run a Simple Contest to Boost Engagement: A contest is a great way to attract attention and introduce your business to potential new customers. In one example a start-up with no marketing budget generated some 30,000 new likes over six weeks using a simple Facebook contest. Align the prize with your brand, follow all of Facebook’s rules for promotions, and make sure it is a true, legal contest.
- Create Short, Enticing Video Posts: Videos get all the attention these days. In 2018, 54% of consumers said they wanted more video content from brands or businesses they support. And that was before COVID kept everybody inside using social media for a year! Video ads have high click-through rates, and Facebook helps you reach your audience with videos created using photos and footage you already have, or with a selection of free stock images.
- Use Eye Contact in Your Images to Direct Attention: Eye contact draws viewers into your photo and creates a bond. It demonstrates that your brand is open and willing to look viewers “in the eye.” Cornell University research showed that eye contact, even with an inanimate object such as the Trix cereal rabbit, produces a powerful, subconscious sense of connection.
- Post Adorable Images of Puppies: Puppies just make people feel good – who can resist those adorable puppy eyes? Android’s “Friends Furever” commercial showing unlikely animal pairings has been watched and shared more than 22 million times. Heck, even the gecko commercials have been watched over 25 million times, more than any other car insurance company!
- Target the Leads You Already Have on Facebook: Use lead ads to encourage people to contact your business for more information. Make it easy and user-friendly, especially for your mobile-savvy prospects. Lead ads allow viewers to request specific information, and they help you capture customer details for later targeting. Facebook lead ads can be used to collect newsletter sign-ups, follow-up calls, price estimates, and other business information.
- Clone Your Main Revenue-Generating Audience: If you really know your customer base, and simply want to expand it, find more people exactly like them by creating a lookalike audience. Here Facebook works to match the people in your existing audience to profiles of potential prospects from its database of over 1.1 billion people.
- Humanize Your Brand with Fun Employee Photos: If you want to make an instant connection, employee photos can add a nice “face” to your business. Don’t just use headshots of smiling people standing in front of your building or logo, though. Use fun photos of your team in action, helping customers, or just running a good business others want to know, but make sure you have signed permission to do so.
- Only Pay to Promote Your Best Content: You can use your Facebook stream to share different information about your business to an existing audience at no cost, but you should only pay to promote your best content to a bigger audience. Use the metrics at your disposal to identify your top-performing content, and then take advantage of Facebook’s highly specific audience-targeting to boost your top posts with a paid promotion.
- Use Emojis in Your Facebook Marketing: Have a little fun, and add some of today’s quirky emojis to your Facebook marketing. Most millennials believe emojis communicate thoughts and feelings better than words do. You will even see better engagement and a higher click-through rate on the same ads with and without them.
Energize your Facebook marketing results with Search Engine Pros, a full-service, multi-touch online marketing services agency. Call 800-605-4988 or schedule a consultation and learn how the experts at SEP can incorporate these ideas into your marketing strategy!
Facebook is now a go-to marketing channel for businesses of all sizes, especially since they keep coming out with new features that are on top of marketing trends. The granular targeting is what I like most about it because it really helps zero in on a niche audience. Even if you go about it using a trial and error method, the analytics you get from Facebook is extremely helpful and easy to understand, which makes adjusting strategies as painless as possible.
Good point on humanizing brands with fun content, too! Brands need to find more ways to connect if they want to keep their audiences engaged after all.
Something to keep in mind is that a lot of college students use Facebook. Facebook is used by just about every organization on each college campus along with roommate selection also being often done through Facebook. This means college students go on Facebook for what they need to do, but this gives marketers an opportunity at a younger audience. I see Facebook users as mostly from older generations, but due to college organizations, this is not completely the case. Though I do think Facebook is excellent for small businesses, I think businesses would be smartest to also move to Instagram as well. Many people, especially younger generations, have switched to Instagram. I think a stronger social media presence makes a business look more competent. Though posting videos does bring attention, now reels and gifs catch people’s attention I think even more. Tik Toks/reels can be posted on Facebook (and Instagram) and really catch an audience and younger generations more than a lengthy video. I think emojis also help, but what people underestimate is the use of strange or almost not-fitting emojis to grab attention. This works especially well when direct messaging a customer as a sort of advertisement.
Facebook is an interesting platform to say the least. As a consumer I can see where it’s a great marking place. Something sellers and businesses need to keep in mind is that there’s a lot of competition, and a lot of bad competition at that. The thing to keep in mind is that you’ll be competing with a lot of scam ads. They make their services look cheap and inciting, and unfortunately a lot of people fall for them. You essentially have to do better than people who are basically selling air. It’s all about finding the balance of looking good, but not better than you can afford.
When you pair videos and fun emojis, something magical happens on Facebook! This strategy has helped create strong bonds with our audience. Next time you post a caption, add a relatable emoji. For example, when I posted about a bridal tea party, I used the ☕️ and 👰♀️ emojis. This helps grab the attention of fast scrollers.
You made an extremely important point from the very first sentence of this post in that Facebook marketing is not a “one size fits all” approach. And to go along with that, it should also be noted that Facebook or any social media based strategies should remain very fluid, as what attracts eyes one day may not the next.
I appreciated your infographic included in this post, as it shows some simple, quick changes that marketers can use tomorrow, like emojis! 🙂 These quick-fixes combined with more in-depth strategic ideas I think would lay a great foundation for a company’s Facebook marketing plan.
These ideas are great! Taylor thanks for making a powerful and usable list. I completely believe that Facebook has the target audience for local businesses. Generating fun and engaging content brings in a homey feel. I love the idea of having a contest. Not only does it bring engagement, but it gives a down the street feel. Posting photos of the winners can bring in that new ‘clone’ target audience.
Great tips!
Hey Taylor,
Good to be here again. It’s not easy getting noticed on your Facebook page, especially if you have a business. A lot of what you said in this article can be very helpful for anyone starting out. Some of the things you mentioned I wouldn’t have thought of. Posting adorable dog photos sounds like a smart idea. Who doesn’t like dogs? That’s a sure-fire way to get more views on your Facebook page. I did disagree with posting emojis. Sometimes emojis can seem a little goofy or silly, so for businesses, I don’t think that would be a good idea if they want to be taken seriously.
We used Facebook marketing to build a wider audience that was targeted to our niche. It truly increased our reach and brought us more organic traffic than we ever imagined possible. However, it wasn’t an easy road – it took several months to nail down the perfect ad setup.
So if somebody is trying this for the first time, they need to factor in some lost funds in the initial phase. If done correctly, it can make up the difference in the long run. We did benefit from the leads ads, which in my opinion helped us build a substantial base.
This is absolutely helpful.
I was aware Facebook had a lot of users and it’s a truly powerful tool but I had my doubts on whether the marketing on there was worth the money or useful. Nowadays there are so many online marketing tools and platforms it’s hard to know which will yield results. On top of figuring out how to yield results it’s hard to know HOW to reach your intended audience in an effective way. As a small business owner I don’t have a bunch of extra money for a PR and marketing team. Online everyone is supposedly a marketing expert so this article was great to see from a trusted, reliable and successful source. I downloaded your graphic and will be implementing this on my own Facebook social media and I’m excited to see what results will occur. It’s interesting to see things that many gurus would label as unprofessional is exactly why draws people to professionals. Videos, funny photos, and emojis didn’t cross my mind but after some thought I can see why they humanize a business and how they can be attractive to customers. As someone delivering services that are intimate and personal this humanization with a side of vulnerability could be exactly whats needed.
This blog post is extremely helpful to those wanting to start marketing their business on Facebook. It can be very overwhelming, especially if one does not know exactly how to go about successful marketing on Facebook. You covered great points and ideas. I particularly loved the “Post Adorable Images of Puppies” section. You are completely right! Cute animals are attention grabbers.
I’ve been skimming through Facebook marketing blogs and I resonate with yours the most. When I was first starting out, I considered myself an “old-school” guy, doing my business the “old-fashioned” way. But with Facebook and the tools they have to market your business nowadays, why would you keep doing it the old way? That is asinine and people really should consider these FB marketing tips when it comes to boosting their online presence. That tool where FB creates a clone audience is out of this world!
This article is perfect for those who are just starting out with a Facebook business page. Now for people who are already at an intermediate level, What would you tell us about other optimization methods that can be programmed into our Facebook business pages?
There are some good ideas on here that I never considered before. For example, I never knew that eye contact in photo or video ads was so important. As a consumer, it’s not something I ever (deliberately) focus on when I’m consuming advertisements.
There are some things on here that I have to question, though. Is putting your staff in advertising REALLY necessary? It’s true that social media encourages people to put their entire lives out on the internet for everyone to devour, but a lot of people still want to keep their professional and private lives separate on places like Facebook and Twitter, going so far as to create separate profiles, use aliases, or set their social media to “private” or “friends only;” especially since it’s no secret that employers look into the private lives of potential hires by combing through their social media pages. You correctly point out that participants need to provide permission to have their image used, but should they even be put in the position of being asked to compromise their online privacy for the company’s profits to begin with? That seems like an ethical grey area to me, even if they’re given the option to say no.
I also question marketability effectiveness of emojis, as well. Putting emojis, or other overly-cartoony images, into advertising seems very childish and unprofessional in my view (unless your target audience is kids, of course). I know they’re cute and fun, and I know that the under-30s use them in their everyday texts and emails, but I’ve always looked at them the same way as I do “text/chat speak:” just because you can abbreviate something in informal communications doesn’t mean you should do it in professional settings. Is that an Old-Fashioned mind-set now? Or have things “relaxed” enough that professional business standards aren’t as high as they used to be?
I think a deeper dive into these issues, and a look at how to effectively balance fun and professionalism in advertising and business communication, would be helpful. Social media is constantly shifting the line of what’s acceptable when it comes to effectiveness in marketing, and some concrete guidelines on how to avoid going too far in one direction would really be a benefit.
~Cory S.
Very helpful tips! Facebook is the go-to social media platform nowadays and being able to incorporate them into your marketing will surely open a whole new audience pool and target prospects.