The Facebook marketing has been pretty much assumed as Facebook Ads, which is not the right way to describe. It does have a lot of things that brands need to understand. Whether you’re a small business that is a little bit active on Facebook or a business owner that hasn’t even created a Facebook page, you’ll discover the possibilities and deep down you will think that you should have done a lot more with the Facebook.

The purpose of discussing this topic is that every brand that comes across this blog post must look at the Facebook as a social platform, not something to rip the benefits off from. You may have a social media manager in the future or a specialized digital marketing agency that does everything for you but what if you don’t figure out Facebook marketing even when your Facebook would have 10k likes. Would it be okay for your brand? Certainly not.

So, in this blog post, we’re going to look at the possibilities and capabilities that Facebook has to offer and what your brand can grasp out of it.

Following are the key elements of Facebook marketing for brands:

Key Elements of Facebook Marketing For Brands :

Mapping the Target Audience

It’s crucial to your Facebook success. What this means is that you have a clear outline of your target audience. It means ‘who your target audience is’. You can’t reach out to engage and convert someone else’s audience. Let’s not skip past this because these basics will rewrite the destination for you. The idea of mapping the targeting audience begins with the clear perception of your audience.

When brands start to use social media, they don’t ask people whether or not they’re interested in engaging with us but rather they do their stuff and people come to them, and then they take care of them to keep them abreast. If you’re wondering how to attract them, you’ll see that in the next point. But as far as clear perception is concerned, every brand knows who is the right person for them to reach out and talk to. The demographics like age, income, gender are the key to this.

Building the Following

Once the audience identification has been done, the next part is building the fan base. Every brand has a different audience and targeting pattern. Without mapping the target audience, this wouldn’t have been possible. So, in order to build the following, you’d have to adopt a lot of different strategies, for example, you would have to ask existing customers to follow your brand, advertise on Facebook to bring the new audience onboard, and follow the prospective customers to get in touch with them. In the beginning, every brand that starts Facebook doesn’t see much traction. It’s a process and the brand reaches a certain point of a lot of traction by spending some amount of time out there. If the brand stays persistent with the process of showing up, talking to the people, and posting content, it does build the audience along the way.

Understanding Your Audience

You are doing something wrong, if you don’t know the audience of your facebook page and your brand target customers. First you need to know, are you targeting and marketing right? I put conversion at 2nd and targeting at 1st. What’s the point of sending irrelevant traffic?

So first you need to study your brand potential market and match that with your facebook marketing strategies.

Engaging the Audience

One of the key elements of Facebook marketing is ‘engagement’. In order to build the audience, you have to educate them and convince them to take action so that you get a chance to engage them. Now the question is that how to engage the audience. The number one thing a brand should do to engage the audience is by ‘creating useful content’ that is shareable, consumable, and likable. It won’t be possible if you never emphasized on the first two points of this blog post. Secondly, the engagement would be triggered by ‘asking questions’ to the audience through Facebook groups and pages. People don’t always like to see what a brand has to offer. In fact, to spice up things, you can ask about their problems and challenges, and when they reply you back, it begins the engagement. Thirdly, you can ‘provide solutions’ to the problems that you commonly find among the audience. All these ways will help you begin the engagement with your audience.

Consider the example of Pakistani Mobile Telecom Company Jazz :

Let’s say, If i open the Facebook Page of Jazz!

I will be welcomed with an pop-up like :

This gives the feeling of personal engagement, whether you want to ask a question, have any reservations on asking in public or just want to talk with a representative of them, this chat box works like a charm and it was open automatically on my laptop.

Now see, how do they educate there customers :

and how do they handle, when they are wrong?

There can be few learnings from this such as how do they give Respect and Priority given to each and every individual customer. Even further, Level of professionalism maintained, specially when they are wrong. This helps in brand building, getting consumers trust and through this you can learn the importance of deeper interaction with your audience and how it can help you in increasing your following and building more audience.

Using the Growth Strategies

Different brands utilize different strategies. Facebook Advertising is one of the hottest commodities in the online marketing field. Google Adwords is still a leader in search advertising but Facebook Advertising has started creating a huge impact in the online marketing world.

Learn : How to Get Google Ads Certified?

When it comes to Facebook marketing, it is inevitable to discuss the Facebook Ad. It could go to a whole new topic because Facebook Advertising itself a huge topic to discuss but we will keep this short here.

As far as growth strategies are concerned in Facebook marketing, Ads play a vital role. One of the misconceptions about ‘Facebook ads’, the more you spend, the better you get the results. It is not like that. In fact, the more smartly you spend the money, the better the output would be.  Secondly, brands do ‘Giveaways’ on Facebook to keep the audience engaged and bring the new faces onboard. Moreover, third-party apps and integrations do help the brands in engaging and attracting the audience on Facebook.

One of the major difference i felt between adwords and facebook ads is, when you search on Google about particular query, you are very much interested in that product or service, but not thats the same case with facebook, because you open facebook primarily for newsfeed, seeing what your friends are doing etc, so matching CTR should be out of question.

Additionally I feel, following growth strategies can work to increase your reach over facebook social media network.

• Initiating Contests Regularly with aim to get more shares, likes and awareness for your brand.
• Customised Event Oriented Activities.
• Limited Time Deals and Offers Exclusively for your Facebook audience
• Regularly Updating Your Social Media Profile.
• Encourage people to like your facebook page via your website, email list and personal recommendation/encouragement.

The above mentioned points are not a rocking science but simple points which i experienced personally and these are just to give you an idea, think out-of-the box and sky is the limit for you, isn’t it? 🙂

Analysis and Testing

This might be boring, because in almost every of marketing post, you will find something similar to Analysis or Testing because i believe that a brand can’t achieve by just focusing on the marketing strategies and not looking up at the statistics and data.

The key to success is, Analyze, Analyze and Analyze!

In order to analyze the Facebook marketing campaign performance, you need to do an audit monthly or quarterly but if you are starting out, let me say, it’s better to do it weekly or even daily. But dont put too much stress, if you are doing daily. A/B testing between the strategies could be a splendid idea to find out what works for your brand. It could include or based on different criteria such as new likes, comments, shares, website visitors, or conversion into paying customers. Facebook does have a lot of features in the ‘Page Insights’ as well as in the ‘Ads Manager’ to look at and figure out what’s going on with your Facebook strategies.

For your convenience, I recommend you to take a look on the following factors while doing a/b testing.

• Campaign performance over different hours of the day and find out your off peak and on peak hours.
• Day to Day Performance like Monday vs Tuesday.
• Ad A vs Ad B vs Ad C testing, which gains more interest, relevancy, CTR and business for you?
• Trying new group of people, i recommend to start with small set of people every time.
• Analyze your facebook engagement, likes and audience.

Andrew Hubbard In his post at ConversionXl, recommended to put importance to 4 things when it comes to ad targeting.

• Country
• Gender
• Interest
• Age

So you should also give importance to these 4 things but remember, your ultimate strategy is Never Stop Testing, Tweaking, and  Keep on Trying.

Recommended Readings :

• Facebook Ads For Newbies – A Complete Guide to Start Advertising on Facebook
• 5 Mistakes You are Making with Your Facebook Ads Marketing Strategy
• How to Create the Custom Audience of Email Subscribers for Facebook Ads?

Conclusion

Facebook marketing isn’t just about the Facebook Ads. This is exactly we’ve tried to acknowledge here.

Facebook marketing is a wide arena to get into and discover a lot of pillars. Advertising is just one of them.

If you’re trying to win at Facebook marketing and not focusing on either a Facebook group or a Facebook Page of your brand, then you’re doing it wrong.

What’s the point of playing around without establishing a ground?

In this blog post, I’ve tried to share the essence of Facebook engagement and value-driven attention to the audience so that you get to know the basics of Facebook marketing and start over without doing the same old mistakes again.

What would you do from now on with your Facebook marketing?