Monday Morning Coffee Reading: Facebook Marketing In-Depth

A guide for small business owners on the power of Facebook as a marketing tool and how to make it work for their business.

With 2.23 billion users, Facebook is the largest social media platform in existence and it’s certainly not a new phenomenon for small businesses to be using it to increase brand awareness and expand their business. 

From hosting live videos to showcasing products and services to now being able to retail products directly via the platform, the choice to use Facebook as the prime digital location of a business is becoming very popular. 

But what are the benefits of using Facebook to market the business? Who has proven this with great success? And how exactly can businesses use the platform to their advantage? In this week’s Monday morning blog; we’re going to address all of these points above and hopefully give some SMEs the advice they need when turning to Facebook as a marketing tool.

The Power Of Facebook As A Marketing Tool

Of its 2.23 billion users, around 1.56 billion are active daily on the platform consuming all kinds of different content. This creates a real opportunity in generating serious awareness of a business as well as linking with the other social media platforms used by a business to increase sales/referrals for a business. 

It’s not just the sheer number of users that can convert to sales through the law of averages, it’s been seen that the average time spent on Facebook per day for a person is around 1 hour. Think for example of TV advertising; the average advert runs for 30 seconds. Now it can be seen just how powerful Facebook is, if a business can capture a users attention for up to an hour per day, then the ability to increase awareness and sales far out performs more traditional forms of advertising.

In fact, 78% of salespeople have found that effectively using Facebook as a marketing tool has led to them outselling their competitors. Now, most people will attribute this to only being successful for those selling physical products, but using social media as a ‘social proof’ can also increase conversions for B2B service providers. The reason being that whilst negotiating a tender or contract it has been found that in up to 57% of cases the buying party will look at the bidding party across social media as part of their decision making process.

Whatever a business does, it has become increasingly clear that Facebook is the most important platform to consider when turning to social media as a marketing tool. The reason being is it’s simplicity and sheer number of users. No matter if a business is actively using the platform to attract new customers or wants to use it as a social proof to retain current ones, Facebook is the place where the majority of people are going to turn in comparison with other platforms. With that being said let’s take a look at a business that has really made the platform work for them.

   

A Success Story Of Facebook Marketing

Wish. A name that has become synonymous in recent years with a bizarre yet effective Facebook marketing strategy that has led the ecommerce platform to surpassing $1 billion in revenue. 

The business, founded in 2010, took the Ecommerce model of Amazon and used its own cheaply priced products to create a platform for people to buy different items from all over the world without paying the high prices associated with Amazon products.

But this didn’t just happen overnight. The brand used targeted and effective social media marketing strategies to create huge popularity with their app and products. Notably their Facebook ad campaigns have been some of the most successful ever undertaken by a huge brand.

To say that the Facebook content created by Wish is engaging, is somewhat of an understatement. There will be many people reading this who have encountered their fair share of Wish’s bizarre Facebook ads. But the complete weirdness of some of these products make them great for Facebook marketing.

Of those who have seen these ads, it’s pretty certain that many of them will have stopped to look through these crazy products. Yet once they have started doing this they’re already engaged with the content and will therefore be much more likely to see something that they will actually buy.

Once a user goes through the process of investigating further and clicking onto the ad, they’re then prompted to download the shopping app, and this is the real genius. Once installed, the app is able to bombard mobile users with notifications prompting them to buy and buy again. Something, which due to their cheap prices, can become addictive for the user.

This strategy, all beginning from simple yet effective Facebook marketing, has led to the app being the #1 shopping app in 42 countries nationwide and the #1 downloaded app in the U.S in 2017. All of this has been achieved in 10 years, simply highlighting the power of Facebook as a marketing tool.

Assured Marketing’s Top Tips For Facebook Marketing

  • Consistency

Make sure that the Facebook Business page is consistent with the brand. A social media presence needs to be consistent across all platforms, using the same branding, fonts and language as is used in other platforms and on the website is critical. A user who has just discovered the business will want to be certain that the page they are looking at is definitely the same as the pages elsewhere. Simply making sure that everything looks the same here is actually one of the most important things to do for any business.

  • Make Sure Content Is Engaging

As mentioned above with Wish. The key to their success was creating content that was weird and wonderful to intrigue the user’s attention. Now that’s not going to work for many people, especially those trying to convey luxury or professionalism. But simply asking questions in your posts, having graphics/videos that stand out and look the part will ensure that users stop scrolling and look at what’s going on. Once they do this then the door has already been opened for them to start actively engaging with posts and committing to purchasing/enquiring from the business.

  • Post To A Schedule

Facebook likes consistency from a page. That means if a business puts out content at the same times each week/day then the platform will begin to recognise this as the time the page’s followers want to engage with the posts. This will lead to the platform’s algorithm pushing posts higher in people’s feeds and to a wider number of people who follow the page resulting in a hugely positive impact on both the reach and engagement levels of the posts. Not only this but it also makes the running of a social media page for a business much more manageable as they are able to set aside the times in which they want to spend on looking after the social media accounts.

  • The 80-20 Rule

Yes Facebook is a great way to advertise and push people towards purchasing/enquiring from a business. But. People hate being bombarded with sales content all of the time and they’re much less likely to pay attention to a page if all it does is put out post after post asking for sales/enquiries. Being able to naturally garner engagement, following and trust in the page makes users much more likely to purchase when the time is right. For this, we suggest sticking to the 80-20 rule when posting content. Make 80% of the posts be natural conversation starters and use the 20% of the rest to produce sales based posts with more pushy calls to action.

  • Take Advantage Of hashtags For Increased Reach

Hashtags are a great way to get posts in front of non-following users without paying for the luxury. Making sure that the hashtags being used for the page reflect what the business does. Not only this, but try not to use hashtags that are too common, as there will be thousands of posts under this hashtag that will not be seen for very long by people following it. The use of hashtags needs to be strategic. Think about your businesses SEO strategy and how there are specific keywords that the business is aiming to rank for on Google. Well when it comes to hashtags on Facebook, taking the same approach is definitely the best way to go about it.

4 Comments

  1. Christina W

    All the help I was looking for! Great read and thank you for all of the advice.

    Reply
    • admin

      Thanks for the positive feedback Christina! Always happy to have helped.

      Reply
  2. Billy C.

    I like it when individuals get together and share opinions.
    Great blog, stick with it!

    Reply
    • admin

      Thanks Billy, glad you found the advice helpful!

      Reply

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