One platform that over time has increasingly quadrupled its previous user subscription is Facebook – therefore using it (Facebook marketing) as a tool won’t be out of place to say.
With 1.65 billion daily users as of June 2016, Facebook remains the top social media destination.
It’s no wonder businesses are aggressively building their presence on such social network platforms. Imagine the market reach you can gain if you turn to Facebook for marketing and promotions.
Image Courtesy: buy-facebooklikes
As a social networking site, Facebook is loaded with useful information that can be used for market research.
Just by looking at a person’s Facebook profile, you already have access to their location, preferences, style, hobbies and other relevant data.
You will appreciate the possibilities of tapping into a rich reservoir of data to monetize them—which means bigger financial haul for business owners regardless of industry.
The Facebook page and the marketing activities you carry out on Facebook’s eco-system should be viewed as an extension of your blog.
So tactics you maybe already doing on your blog can be enhanced and synergized by replicating some of those blogging platform activities on Facebook that are relevant ad appropriate to the Facebook culture. According to Neil Patel, Facebook alone accounts for 24.63% of this traffic.
Image Courtesy: nigeriatrends
Also, Neil suggests that Facebook has over 40 M active small business pages on its platform. This means that these businesses have active pages where they regularly share business updates about their services, products and also republish their blog posts on Facebook.
Facebook is a marketer’s dream come true. Never before has it been so easy to build an audience for your brand and interact with customers. But it’s not always that simple.
Even if you’re sharing content that connects with your audience, it can be difficult to turn those fans into paying customers.
All the “likes” and comments in the world won’t help keep the lights on. At the end of the day, the goal of Facebook marketing is the same as any other form of marketing: to increase sales.
Engagement first
Your first goal when posting to your page should be catching the attention of your followers & getting them to engage with your posts.
If you fail at this you’ll probably fail at running your page. Sure you want to market your products — and yes, you want people to click thru to your website.
The page only has about 700 Likes — and yet, nearly 80 people Liked this post! I think any of us would take a 10% engagement rate any day!
Image Courtesy: tellyouall
Remember — people don’t want to just be sold to all the time. They will let you sell to them it sometimes, but only after you build some rapport.
Start by posting interesting content, including:
photos
facts
questions
fill-in-the-blanks
links to interesting & inspiring articles
Build trust with your followers & get them talking on your posts. Then, once you’ve built this relationship, mix in link posts to your products or website.
Remember — with the way Facebook’s page algorithm works, your fans only see posts from pages they engage with.
For example, on Post Planner, we make sure that only 50% of our posts are links back to our blog. The other posts are created purely to get engagement from fans — so we can make sure all our posts continue to show up in the news feeds of our fans.
If all you post is salesy content, eventually engagement will die off — and you’ll just be talking to yourself.
I’m focusing here on local, small businesses — those that have tangible products.
Image Courtesy: tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress
The power of suggestion is very strong on Facebook — especially with images that ignite the senses & passions of people. With about 1,500 fans on this page, this post got more than 100 Likes — not too shabby!
Facebook marketing entails getting more likes
To get engagement on your posts, you have to have fans! So get more Likes! Many small business owners get their first burst of Likes by inviting friends & family to Like the page — either by: posting about it on their profile, inviting friends via their page.
This is great, as long as your family & friends are potential customers who will engage with your posts.
There is no need to have people Like the page who will never engage — and in fact, having too many non-engaged fans will hurt your page in the long run.
Image Courtesy: webknowledgefree
I have pages that I will never recommend to my friends — because they aren’t the target demographic of the page. As a small, local business, the best way to get Likes is to use the Promoted Page Likes feature on your page.
I’ve successfully used this feature on local pages & seen great results — both an increase in Likes & sales related to those Likes. You’ll find this feature just above your cover photo on the left hand side.
Boost your posts
I’m a huge fan of the Boost Post feature on local Facebook pages. Here’s why: it’s simple, it gets results, it’s easy to measure the results.
Could you get better results by using more powerful ad apps — like Power Editor or Facebook Ads Manager?
Image Courtesy: undullify
Maybe. But as a small business owner you don’t need to waste time on those things. You’re probably only going to spend $20 to 50 per month on ads — and you don’t need to get bogged down in advanced tools that just make numbers geeks giddy! Boosting a post is simple.
Run a Facebook offer
Facebook Offers are another great way to increase your sales using Facebook. Unfortunately, they’re no longer free to run on your page.
Image Courtesy: i1.wp
But they can be a great way to offer a discount or time-limited incentive to your fans & their friends. To redeem the offer they’ll need to come into your store — thus spending money!
You can run an Offer directly from your page’s Publisher — where you normally post status updates.
Sell products online with stories
Even the most interesting products are boring on their own. Take GoPro as an example. The product is a camera.
It’s a nice camera, but it’s still just a camera. Even the average GoPro customer is not going to get that excited about a camera.
But they will get excited about what that camera can do. Look at GoPro’s Facebook Photo Stream. Every picture there tells a story about the adventure the user had.
Image Courtesy: upandcomingcristinadunning.files.wordpress
GoPro is selling a lifestyle that is adventurous, fun and exciting. The images capture those moments and inspire fans to have adventures and memories of their own.
Oh yeah, and now they know that the best way to capture those memories is with a GoPro. Not every company is GoPro though. If your brand isn’t as exciting, you can still use this technique.
Take a moment and image that you sell knives. Posting a picture of your new knife isn’t going to set the Internet on fire.
It might not even get your most ardent supporters to take notice. But, take that knife and use it to turn a watermelon into a margarita glass and people will take notice. Get creative with your content and let stories sell the product.
Incentisize purchases with coupons
Coupons have always been a great way to reward loyal customers and attract new ones. If you’re looking for a surefire way to turn fans into customers, offering a coupon is one of the best places to start.
Coupons are also a great way to get new fans.
According to a 2013 white paper from consulting company Syncapse, 42% of survey respondents had “liked” a Facebook page in order to get a coupon or discount.
There are two ways you can handle coupons on Facebook. You can make them available to everyone or you can create fan-only coupons.
Image Courtesy: moneymatterswithnimi
Making coupons available to everyone can increase one-time sales, but if users don’t like your page, it’s possible they’ll never see another one of your posts.
Alternatively, you could use coupons to drive sales and grow your fan count by offering a coupon in exchange for liking a post or becoming a fan of your page.
This encourages first-time purchases and gives you the opportunity to market to those new fans in the future.
Offer gift cards for effective Facebook marketing
Sometimes, increasing sales is as simple as giving people what they want. People love gift cards.
According to the National Retail Federation, 81% of shoppers buy at least one gift card during the holiday season.
Now figure in all the birthdays and other holidays throughout the course of the year where gifts are exchanged. That adds up to a lot of gift cards being purchased throughout the year.
Image Courtesy: images.dailytrust
The same survey found that 70% of gift card recipients spend more than the value on the card, leading even more sales for you.
Offering gift cards on Facebook is a great way to increase your sales. At the same time, it leads to your fans introducing their friends and families to your products.
Run a flash sale
Flash sales are a great way to drive sales and spread the word about your brand. Flash sales create a sense of urgency among buyers.
That urgency, along with the sale price, can lead to customers making a purchase they otherwise wouldn’t have made.
It also gets people excited enough to share the news of the sale. That means more potential customers — and sales — for you.
Image Courtesy: katrinagarnes
If you’re considering holding a flash sale, it’s a good idea to “leak” the information well beforehand. In the days and weeks leading up the sale, announce that you’ll be holding a flash sale in the coming days.
Don’t announce the specific date of the sale, this will keep people interested and prime them to pounce on the sale when it happens. Plus, it keeps them checking out your feed in the days leading up to the sale.
Make use of Facebook ads
Nobody likes to spend money when they don’t have to, but Facebook ads can be a great way to grow your fandom and give your sales numbers a boost.
Even though the cost of advertising on Facebook has increased in recent years, it’s still less expensive than advertising in other forms of media. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll drive traffic and revenue from Facebook’s ad platform.
Image Courtesy: bufferblog-wpengine.netdna-ssl
Facebook helps you create ad campaigns based on your goals. Depending on what you want to achieve,
Facebook can guide you through setting up ad campaigns designed to:
• Increase engagement with Facebook Page
• Increase Facebook audience
• Get users to visit your website
• Get users to take a specific action on your website
• Install your app
• Increase activity on your app
• Promote events
• Claim an offer you have created on Facebook
Conclusion
Over social media, it is all about engaging the customers. However, prior to that, businesses must be able to reach the prospective clients. The mentioned ideas will surely come in handy for reaching out to the untargeted customer base.
Facebook, apart from being a social platform is also a highly accessible tool and can be leveraged exhaustively for a better outreach.
Generating sales from Facebook doesn’t have to be as difficult as many businesses make it. If you’re having trouble generating sales with your current marketing strategy, give the five ideas above a try.
They may not all work for you, but a couple of them are bound to give your sales numbers a shot in the arm.
The post How to amplify your Facebook marketing to generate sales appeared first on NATIVEDGE.