Do you want to successfully promote your business on social media? If YES, here are 14 best result oriented Facebook marketing strategies & tips for beginners. If you look at successful brands that have built a formidable brand over the years, then you would agree with the fact that marketing is a very essential part of a business. It is no doubt one of the steps that you must be willing to strategize on properly so that you can reap the results.
Social media has over time become a major tool used by many organizations to market and promote their goods and service. The reason is not far fetch; if you put up your promo / adverts on any social media platform, anybody in any part of the world can access the adverts and in most cases it can be far cheaper to advertise on social media platforms than other electronic or print media.
There are various online social media platforms that you can market your business and facebook happens to be amongst those leading the pack. A recent research states that if Facebook were to be a country it will be the second largest country in the world just after China.
As a matter of fact, the total numbers of facebook users as at 31st December, 2014 is 1.39 billion people and facebook has over 9,000 employees in its payroll. When Mark Zuckerberg started facebook in February 2004, most people never expected the business to grow this big.
Over the years, we have come to see that the social media is being adopted by both small and big businesses to get their products to be in the faces of people and one of the platforms they have successfully done this via facebook. Facebook can rightly be said to be the largest social network on the internet; with over 1 billions users around the globe and over 500 millions active users.
Therefore, entrepreneurs and business owners are leveraging on this opportunity to turn Facebook into a money making palace instead of just a social media. This article will provide top 10 Facebook marketing tips that can make professionals and amateurs to utilize the Facebook platform for their businesses.
14 Result Oriented Facebook Marketing Strategies & Tips for Beginners
1. Set a Goal
As a business owner or entrepreneur that wants to utilise the Facebook platform, you don’t just jump in and start placing adverts and building audiences without having a goal of what you wish to accomplish from your Facebook adverts.
You have got to have a plan or an idea of the purpose you wish to achieve using the Facebook site. For instance; your goal may be to drive 500 visitors to your website from Facebook, or you wish to grow your email list using the Facebook platform, or it may be to rightly sell your products and services. Setting a goal will guide your actions towards its achievement.
2. Choose a Niche or Topic
You need a specific niche or topic so that you can build a brand around it. It is important that you narrow down your niche, so that you can reach out to a smaller number of people. You will have more success if you focus on a narrow niche than when you widen out your niche.
For instance; health is a very wide niche and will be difficult for you to build a brand around it. Weight loss is a niche in health but also wide; if you can narrow it down to weight loss for ladies in their twenties, you are going to have a well defined audience and better success, than when you focus on health, as a niche.
3. Open a Facebook Account
The first step to follow in other for you to be able to market your business on facebook is to open a facebook account. As a matter of fact, you won’t be able to access the facebook community until you own your own facebook account. The process of opening a facebook account is simple and it is absolutely free.
Once you open your account, ensure that you make use of a picture that depicts your business as your profile picture and also you can then send invites to people on your mailing list to hook up with you on facebook. In most cases most of them would have been on facebook before you.
4. Create a Facebook Page
Once you are able to open a facebook account, the next step to follow is to create a facebook page for your business and then invite your friends and the entire facebook public to like your page. The truth is that, the numbers of people that like your page, the wider your promo will go.
Some people drive traffic from Facebook straight to their sales page with this. This is all wrong and the conversion rate you will get from this method will be very low. The right way to go about it is to drive traffic from Facebook ads to your fan or business page and introduce your sales offer later. Your business page has to be built around your niche, and in your About Us page. You have to be very specific with the niche you have built your page on.
So once you have created a facebook page, ensure that you make use of a good graphics and well edited write – up whenever you want to post a comment to promote your business. It is free if you are sending it within your network (your friends and your fans) and if you want to boost your post to get to a wider reach, then you would have to pay facebook to help you do that. One good thing about promoting your business on facebook is that you can monitor the progress of the advert from your facebook page and your email.
5. Design a Good and Attractive Graphic That Clearly State Your Business
No doubt, picture messages sell faster hence you must be willing to pay a graphic artist to help you design a good and attractive graphics for your business. This graphic can be used as a banner on your page, it can also be used as a profile picture and whenever you make a post.
Just ensure that any graphic that you intend using to promote your business on facebook carries details of your product and services, your website and your contact numbers et al. If you make use of a very good graphics in promoting your business on facebook, you will be amaze to see the numbers of likes that you will get within a short period of posting the picture.
6. Create You Own Website
It is important that you create your own company’s website if you want to truly maximize your promo on facebook. This is so because you might not be able to put all the details that you would need on facebook. All you need is just a link that will direct people to your website especially when you want people to make purchase from your website or if you want them to fill a form or something else that can’t be done on your facebook page.
Another important reason why you would need your own website is to ensure that you collect contact numbers or email from your clients and potential clients. You can easily send bulk sms or email to these contacts whenever you want to promote a new product or just to keep them posted on what you are into.
7. Build an Audience
After setting up your business page, you need to build your audience. Facebook allows you to invite your friends to like your Facebook page; and the best way to go about building a target audience is to set up a Facebook advert. A Facebook advert allows you to narrow down your advert to reach your specific audience. You can narrow down your audiences based on location, sex, age bracket or occupation. You have to out write out details of your target audience to allow you narrow them out via Facebook ads.
8. Create Value on Your Business Page
It is one thing to get people to visit your business page and like it, it is yet another thing to keep them as your fans for a long time. The best way to retain your fans is to fill your business page with valuable information that will add value to their lives.
If you are running a weight loss fan page; you can share daily health tips for weight loss and some home exercises people can try at home. You can also provide a food timetable for people that want to manage their diet; this will give your fan reasons to come remain fans of your page.
9. Engage Your Audience
Your audience are human beings with feelings and all that, and because you don’t see them one on one doesn’t mean that you should treat as though distance is a barrier. You can find a way to keep your page interesting by engaging your audience all the time as though they were near. You can ask engaging questions, organise minor contest where the winner gets to have any of your products.
10. Pictures and Videos
Your business page should be not just be about writing long articles or tips because this could bore out your fans. You can spice up your page with lots of pictures relating to your niche, infographics and short video clips or link to some YouTube videos.
11. Reward Your Loyal Fans
Once in a while, you can single out fans that have been loyal to your page and have made reasonable contributions towards it growth and reward them. You can send them gift cards for popular e-commerce sites like Amazon for them to do their shopping.
12. Encourage Your Fans to Share your Page
Don’t be shy to ask your fans to share the valuable info and tips they are getting on your business page with others. Shared comments appear on the person’s timeline where friends can see it. If your audience make it a habit to share your posts, it will help increase your audience.
13. Have a Call to Action
All these other tips mentioned above is to help build your audience and get them engaged. If you can win the trust of your audience, they will sure purchase any product or service you introduce to them. After a while, you should start putting a call to action that will link to products and services you have for sale. Always make sure that you test run any product or service before you introduce them to your fans because a bad product will definitely make them loose their trust in you.
14. Pay Facebook To Promote Your Business
The fastest way to get your products or services to get to all the nooks and crannies of the internet world is to pay facebook to help you promote the business. Just ensure that you have a good graphic that clearly state what you are selling. Once you pay facebook to help you promote your business, your adverts can be seen by a large percentage of facebook users although this is dependent on the category of advert you subscribe to.
The net income of facebook in 2014 is 2.94 Billion US Dollars, this clearly indicates that loads of business people patronize facebook to promote their business and they are getting good returns on their investment. So if you want to make good returns on your investment as a business man or woman, then you should consider marketing your products and services via the facebook platform.
There you have it; the tips need to be able to effectively market your goods and services via the facebook platform. Do all these and your facebook marketing would be a huge success. You would also be amazed at the number of potential customers you would convert to repeat customers.