Facebook without a doubt has been the worlds most frequently used social media platform since 2004. But other than that, multiple businesses and brands are curating content for posts and engaging with their audiences on a regular basis!
We’ll be looking at a few marketing ideas to help increase brand awareness and at the same time build a concrete social media strategy for your business page on Facebook!
1) Defining Your Audience
Before you start engaging with your audience productively, you need to understand who your target audience is.
Get answers to these questions:
- Which kind of people are interested in your business?
- Which age bracket does your target audience fall into?
- Is majority of your target audience on Facebook?
- How active is your audience on Facebook?
- What are the demographics and similar interests of your target audience?
Getting answers to such complex questions might seem like a heavy and bulky task for you to do. But Facebook has its own tool to help you identify your target audience and help steer your business in the right direction!
Having clear, defined goals will help you in curating more effective content that stays consistent in voicing out your brand image.
Facebook Audience Insights is a free Facebook tool that helps learn more about your potential customers. You can find out general information about your potential audience such as:
- Gender
- Location
- Age
- Preferred Language
- Buying Behavior
- In-app usage
Although this information may be quite basic and generic, it’s super effective and will give you a clearer idea on exactly who you’d want to reach out to on Facebook!
2. Have Clear Goals
What are your long term goals from creating brand presence on social media? Most businesses immediately respond to this question with “More posts, more likes, more followers” etc. Even though these answers are partially right when we come into the light of brand awareness on online platforms, they’re not going to provide you with a great return.
For your marketing strategy on Facebook, your goals need to be closely tied with real business objectives.
Every business defines their goals differently depending on numerous factors, but the bottom line is that all these actions and goals should have a solid, positive impact on your brand. For example:
- increasing conversions on your website
- generating more leads
- enhancing customer service
Every comment, like, shared post on your Facebook timeline should work towards supporting your goals in the long run.
Having clear, defined goals will help you in curating more effective content that stays consistent in voicing out your brand image.
3. Creating A Content Plan
Once you have a fair idea about what your goals are, you need to implement strategies in an organized fashion in order to achieve them. When drawing up content plans for your brand, you need to keep in mind the two kinds of content which will essentially build your brands presence online.
- Educational, informational and entertaining content (70%)
- Promotional content pertaining to your brand (30%)
A balanced mix of using both valuable content and promotional content is advisable for most businesses. Using Facebook for business is more than just self-promotion. Providing value to your audience gives you a higher chance that they’ll be open to learning more about your products and services which will drive sales.
Use these strategies in a 70:30 ratio and you’re guaranteed to up your follower engagement in no time!
The final stage of your content plan concludes with determining when and how often to post on your page. Using your Page Insights is a great way to understand when your audience is most active on Facebook.
Posting consistently plays an important factor in updating your audience frequently. Create a content calendar that ranges from a week to a month with your post content and schedule them. You can use Publishing Tools on Facebook to schedule your posts or a third party app such as Hootsuite which gives you more insights about your engagement levels.
4. Using Facebook Ads
There’s a high chance that when you post, all your followers may not necessarily see it. Facebook prioritizes users news feeds to more posts from friends and family.
Facebook Ads typically works like any other type of advertising platform - you pay to share your content with a targeted audience.
Facebook Ads cater to all sorts of business goals such as Brand Awareness, Post Engagement, App Installs, Website Visits, Conversions etc.
Choosing the right kind of campaign goal, targeting the right kind of people and allocating a good budget will help you reach out to new followers and expand your pool for potential customers.
Facebook marketing may come across as too overwhelming or puzzling. But the good news is that you can start running your business page without any costs and then in time branching out to more strategies and paid advertisements as you learn the ropes.