Whether you are just starting out your adventure as an Entrepreneur or have already been operating for a while, chances are that you have a dedicated Facebook page. After all, practically every business has a Facebook page. The difference between Facebook pages is massive, some use it occasionally, others use it frantically.
The problem with Facebook is that “not every business is as suited for advertising with it as another”. Restaurants, Gadgets, Video games, Sports teams, Artists, all of these have massive potential on Facebook. They rely heavily on fan-interactions and feedback, other companies are not as active and only use Facebook as a side project. That is a mistake.
One of the primary rules that have established itself on social media over the last few years is the fact that engagement is not something that happens by itself. If you want your social media followers to be engaged on your Facebook page you will have to stimulate them, you will have to engage them before they will engage you. If you post a post on Facebook once a week it does not suffice, have you ever noticed which pages on Facebook get a lot of likes, comments, shares, and tweets? Pages that are active, pages that engage their followers. People will read your posts, they might not instantly leave a like or a comment, but they will read.
Few things to consider beforehand, a lot of social media advertising tips talk about ‘engagement’ and ‘target your audience’, but if you are just starting out you will have no idea as to how your audience looks. Keep in mind that your regular customers do not necessarily have to be engaged with your business on Facebook. With that in mind let us go through a hypothetical situation in which you set out on your Facebook marketing adventure.
#1 Identify your audience
Identifying your audience is the first step that must be taken if you want your Facebook advertising to be relevant. The good thing about Facebook is that it already enables you to access this information without a hassle. Simply opening your Facebook and navigating to Insights will give you a heap of information about your audience. We will be specifically looking at the ‘People’ section of this part. This section is divided into four subsections; ‘Your Fans’, ‘Your Followers’, ‘People reached’ and ‘People Engaged’. Naturally, Fans and Followers speaks for itself, it will show you information about the demographics of the people that either ‘Like’ or ‘Follow’ your page or both.
In our hypothetical situation, we are running a pizzeria in a major city. A quick look at our Followers and Fans shows us that a vast majority of our audience is male, between the ages of 18-24, an astonishing 38% (see picture 1). The same thing is confirmed by our ‘People reached’ tab, as an even larger percentage (43%) is male and aged 18-24.
You will now have a better understanding of your audience on Facebook. It might just happen that your audience on Facebook is completely different from your actual customers. Keep in mind that information is often the key to success.
#2 Engage your audience
Upon identifying your audience you are now prepared to engage with them. With that being said, you might be more interested in growing your audience or targeting other groups outside of your main audience. All of it is perfectly viable, as long as you do it right. For now, the focus is on the biggest audience, 18-24-year-old males. As we are a pizzeria, in a major city, it highly likely that the majority of our customers are students. If you were doing offline marketing, you would probably offer these students discounts on your products, the same reasoning applies online.
Create a special image, preferably an original one (not a stock photo!), add some catchy text (make sure it does not exceed 20% of the image space), and decide on a good moment to publish the post (more on that later). The reason that we want our picture not to exceed 20% of the image space is as we will want to boost the post. Make sure that your post links to your web page (if that is where you are running most of your business).
Monitor the success of your post, you can view your posts in Insights. Repeat the process a few times, every time changing something else. If you want to see the difference between a not boosted post and one that has between promoted just do it!
#3 Diversify your marketing
If after a while you have discovered that your audience is positively responding to your engagements, the time has come to diversify your efforts. If your target audience from the above steps is also the main part of your customer base, throwing more and more marketing their way will yield smaller results, marketing also adheres to the law of diminishing returns.
So, instead of spending all of your marketing efforts on the same group, the times has come to expand your audience. In our case, we could prepare a campaign that targets young females, as they only made up a small percentage of our audience. Prepare multiple posts that target this group specifically, by offering something that is unique to them. For instance, you could choose to create a ‘Girls pizza night’. When creating the post make sure to highlight these aspects, add hashtags and target females.
Never forget about your other audience though. When you go on a campaign to broaden your audience never abandon those who were already there. Make sure that if you run posts/ads that are directing a specific group that you also still regularly post your normal content.
Conclusion
The first few steps to establishing a successful Facebook audience and marketing campaign have to be completed. Keep in mind that the so called ‘critical mass’ is not easily achieved. If you feel that your campaign is not working out, do not be hesitant to change or adapt your strategy. Remember to be consistent and persistent, success accompanies effort.
Next time we will look into successful Facebook posts, planning ahead on social media and reusing content.