Facebook is one of the most used social networking sites in the world, with over 2 billion users. It is a place where businesses can market their brands and keep their customers updated. Facebook is a powerful marketing tool. Businesses can use it to increase brand awareness, broaden reach, and interact with prospective customers. Facebook has emerged as a top medium to market a brand. Hence, it is important to learn basic facebook marketing. This guide is aimed to help you learn the basics of advertising on facebook.
Facebook is a cost effective website to advertise your brand online. It provides you with the ability to target a specific audience. Facebook can be used to build credibility, reputation, get leads, and drive traffic to your website. The facebook ad options help you target the audience better. There are several tools offered by facebook that can be utilized to compliment your overall marketing strategy.
HOW FACEBOOK WORKS?
Facebook lets its users post content, pictures and videos. It also lets its users interact with others, in a number of ways. You can create a profile, add other users as friends, join or create groups, like or create pages, exchange messages etc. To create a profile you need to enter an email and provide the name and other details like interests, about yourself etc.
Groups on Facebook are based on interests, experiences, work fields etc. Businesses can create pages to connect with customers and promote their brand.
Facebook ads can be used to promote pages, boost posts and generate leads. Ads can be targeted towards a specific audience, based upon several factors. Such factors include geographics, demographics and interests. Facebook Ads are placed in the newsfeed and appear after every two to three posts, the right column in desktops, and newsfeed of mobiles, apart from Instagram and the Facebook Audience Network.
ALGORITHM OF FACEBOOK
The facebook algorithm changed in 2018. It now prioritizes active interactions, i.e. commenting and sharing over passive interactions, i.e. likes or clicks. Top ranking factors for Facebook algorithm that can boost your presence are:
- Comments: A post with more comments and comment interactions will reach a wider audience.
- Reactions: Posts that have reactions will reach more people instead of posts that have only likes.
- Sharing: Sharing links on profiles and through messages, will boost posts.
Thus, the bottom line is that posting creative, useful and engaging content is what will help to build your brand presence on Facebook.
If you have a facebook page with 1,000 likes and upload a post, the post is not shown to all the 1,000 people. Instead, it is only shown to those people, who are actively engaged with the page activities. Hence, it becomes important to promote your posts on facebook.
The relevance of promotiong the posts after posting them can be understood by considering the example of the traditional forms of advertising. Let’s say, you get pamphlets printed. But, unless you go out and distribute those pamphlets to the people, they are of no use. In a similar manner, posts on facebook need to be promoted, so that they can reach the desired audience. Promotion can be done through sharing posts in facebook groups or by paid publicity.
BENEFITS OF ADVERTISING ON FACEBOOK
It is advantageous to learn basic facebook marketing as it offers various benefits like:
- Lower cost: Facebook pages are free to create. Also, posting ads on facebook is cheaper than using other paid advertising sites.
- Targeted advertising: Advertising and boosting posts helps you target a custom audience. It is a powerful tool to reach potential customers.
- Customer engagement: Facebook provides businesses with an easy way to engage and interact with present and potential customers. This also increases brand loyalty.
- Website Traffic: Facebook can be used to drive traffic to your website by posting links.
- Advertise according to budget: On facebook, you can set a specific budget for ads. Unlike other advertising platforms, where the budget needs to be high enough to get traffic, you can advertise within a limited budget on Facebook.
HOW TO MARKET ON FACEBOOK?
Through Pages
Facebook pages are the easiest way to start promoting a brand. When used to their full potential, they can be a powerful tool to drive leads or sales. The profile picture should ideally be the logo and the cover page could include artwork, infographics, contact information, etc.
- The about section: The about section is an important element of the page. Here you tell the visitors what you do and provide them information about the various products, details about the brand, etc. A light, conversational tone works best to attract visitors to like your page.
- Post relevant content: Post relevant content on your wall that delivers value to visitors and people who have liked the page. Posting few times a day with links to useful blogs and articles, product announcements, coupons, links to posts on your websites, product demonstration videos, etc. is a good strategy.
- Engage followers with questions, surveys and polls: Engaging the audience is important to build brand loyalty and enhance visibility. Open ended questions, surveys and polls are a good way to do so. This also helps brands to gain insights about the market.
- Page insights: Facebook allows you to check the statistics for a page. It offers good page insights. You can use the analytics to make changes to the overall strategy and know about the audience interacting with your page.
Ads
Ads on facebook are divided into three categories: Awareness, consideration, and conversion.
Awareness ads are aimed at increasing visibility on facebook. This can be done by:
- Boosting posts: Advertisers pay to boost a post i.e. make the posts available on the newsfeed of followers.
- Promoting page: This aims to increase the number of page likes and followers. Though a large audience doesn’t necessarily mean that more people will see your posts. You will have to increase your budget to make them more visible.
- Reach people near business: These types of ads are shown to people who are in a close range of your business. This not only increases facebook audience but also increases footfall.
- Increase brand awareness: The facebook algorithm shows ads on the newsfeed of various people. In this case, the objective is to reach a maximum number of people, showing them the ads once.
Consideration ads are aimed at compelling users to take a particular action.
- Send people to website: These ad are aimed at navigating people to a website or any other external link. You can choose a landing page according to the campaign goals.
- Get app installations: This is aimed at increasing installations of an app if you have one.
- Get more people in events: The event page of a particular event can be promoted using this tool. Once the people show interest, they would then get notifications every time something is posted.
- Generate leads: Lead generation ads can be used to generate leads. You can ask viewers to sign up for something, submit their contact details, etc. and follow up to turn them into customers. The leads are collected via a pre filled form on Facebook. This acts as one of the most important ways of generating leads on Facebook.
Conversion ads are aimed at turning visitors into customers. The objectives of ads in this category include encouraging the viewer to take a desirable action, which is of commercial value.
- Increase conversion on website: With these ads you can check conversion activity and run A/B tests to ensure that conversions happen accordingly. Facebook pixels are required to be integrated on the website.
- Increase engagement on app: These ads can be used to increase user engagements by the users of your app.
- Get people to claim an offer: These ads are used to promote discount codes to users, which can be redeemed to get discounts.
- Advertise a product catalogue: Advertisers can upload a catalogue of their products and advertise them on facebook.
It is a good option to use facebook ads for advertising because:
- Various types of facebook ads: Facebook gives you a number of facebook ad options. Domain ads are ads with an image, product description and a link to your website. Multi-product ads showcase a number of products to the audience. Offer ads give the audience online coupon codes or codes that can be used to avail discounts for walk in stores. Video ads are good for retargeting, showcasing products, etc. Lead ads help in generation of leads. Canvas ads are interactive ads.
- Powerful targeting options: You can use the customize audience option in the ads manager to decide who to target. Facebook provides targeting options based on location, age, workplace, education, interests, etc.
- Customization: Advertising on facebook gives you the option to customize ads based on who you are targeting. You can run ads for the same product in different ways for different audiences.
- Insight through hide ads option: Viewers can choose to hide your ads. They usually give a reason to why this action was performed. This gives insights to why the ad wasn’t received well and you can make changes to it.
Groups
- Provide valuable content: Create groups for specific set of customers based on their buying behaviour and interests. Post content that provides value to them. You can even use groups to do follow ups and answer customers’ questions.
- Challenges: Challenges are a popular method to increase customer engagement. You can create challenges and give the winners coupon codes, freebies, chance to work with the brand, etc.
- Tutorials: You should post tutorial and demonstration videos in groups regularly. This increases trust of customers.
- Quizzes: Quizzes are a great way to engage customers, entertain them and gain insights to what they want. You can get content ideas, product ideas etc. from these quizzes.
Facebook is a powerful and flexible marketing tool that can be used by every kind of businesses. Facebook ad options can be used to tailor the strategy according to campaign goals. The social networking site can be used to engage customers, establish an online presence, increase brand awareness, drive sales, get leads etc. As the popularity of facebook keeps growing, it is worth to do advertising on facebook to compliment your overall digital marketing strategy.