Ultimate Guide To Using Facebook Marketing For Your Business

When it comes to building your online brand, you should know that social media marketing is essential in helping you establish a strong online presence. And with over 2.6 billion active users worldwide, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be including Facebook in your marketing strategy.

This popular social media platform is more than just a place for people to connect with friends and family; it is where businesses can find new customers and build lasting relationships with them. With a variety of advertising tools offered in Facebook, you can reach your desired audience and craft a strong online presence to increase conversions and traffic to your website – and it all starts by creating a Facebook Page for your business.

How to set up your Facebook business page

As Facebook puts it, the Page is a “cornerstone of your business’ online identity”, where you can connect people with your products and services, keep your customers updated, reach a larger audience with boosted posts, and much more.

Create your Facebook Business Page
Pages look similar to profile pages, but they act as a digital shopfront for your business, showing information such as your telephone number, opening hours, address.

Head over to facebook.com/pages/create and enter your page name (this is usually your brand name) and the category of your business. Use the About section to tell people what your business does. You will also need to create a unique username for your Page, which will appear in your custom Facebook URL for people to easily find or message your Page.

Upload brand images
Choose your profile and cover photos to upload. Many businesses often use their logo as a profile photo, while they use an image of their shop, products or a current marketing promotion for the cover photo. Make sure that you are using the optimum image sizes for Facebook so they won’t appear pixelated and will look high-quality. The size dimensions also vary for smartphones and computer desktops – for instance, your Page’s profile picture displays at 128×128 pixels on smartphones and 170×170 pixels on computers. You may also get a better result for photos that contain logos or texts by using a PNG file.

Add a call-to-action button
You can add a call-to-action (CTA) button at the top of your Page that gives people a quick and easy way to reach out to your business, such as booking appointments or shopping on your website.

Depending on your business goals, there are several CTA categories you can select. For instance, “Contact Us” if you want people to contact you on Facebook Messenger or other forms of contact, or “Shop Now” to direct visitors to shop on your website.

Types of Facebook posts

Once your Facebook Page is up, it’s time to build an active and engaged audience for your business. You need to publish and share quality content to extend your reach and let potential customers see what your business is all about. Through posts, visitors can also leave their “likes”, post a comment, and share it on their timeline.

Facebook provides numerous tools to develop your brand and manage your advertising strategy – here are some of the different post types you can use:

Images
Designed to create awareness or spark engagement, photo posts are great for showing off your products, especially if they are visually appealing. But you can also use photos for informative content, such as an infographic and illustration, which will still generate interest. If you’re promoting your services, there are free stock photo sites to help illustrate your posts.

Videos
If you’re looking to tell a story, video posts can be compelling and attract higher engagement rates. Videos start to play automatically in the News Feed, so the first 5 seconds count to hook viewers from the start. You can use videos to introduce your brand, show off your latest product offering, promote an upcoming sale and more.

Links
This type of post links to content outside of Facebook – all you need to do is copy and paste a link into the status box. The meta description and photo will be automatically populated, but you can still include additional text to draw readers into clicking the link. It’s a great way to share your own content and direct visitors to your site to increase website traffic.

Stories
Facebook Stories is a recently added photo or short video post format that disappears after 24 hours. Photos are visible for five seconds and videos can be 20 seconds long. With 500 million people using Facebook Stories daily, it offers a powerful way to connect with your fans, provide updates and bring users to your Page.

Which type of Facebook post to engage your audience with

So the question is, which one to use? Figure out what types of post that are best for your business and content based on your audience. Engage in social listening to help you learn what existing customers love about your brand or products, the challenges that your product could help to solve, and how to make your brand stand out from the competition.

Consider the features of each type – you can always mix and match your posts but monitor which ones your audience engages with the most. At the same time, get creative with authentic, insightful content to build real connections and draw engagement.

How to create a Facebook marketing strategy

Now that your Page is where people can discover and connect with your business seamlessly, it’s time to implement the best Facebook marketing strategy to help you get the most out of this powerful social media platform.

Identify your Facebook audience
While you can potentially reach millions of users, the first step is to understand who your target audience is. Use the Facebook Audience Insights to obtain demographic and behavioural data about your audience. This tool offers in-depth details such as age, gender, and location.

You can also take a closer look at aspects such as device type and the frequency of engagement on Facebook. All this data will help you create more meaningful content that will be shown to the right people, and to find more in your targeted audience.

Create a social media content calendar
It’s important to post consistently so you can gain views and drive engagement in your Facebook Page. Plan your calendar to help you keep your posting schedule on track and manage your Facebook content mix. While Facebook has its own Creator Studio, you can also explore other social media scheduling tools like Hootsuite to plan and schedule your content in advance.

Knowing the best timing to post takes some trial and error, using engagement data gleaned from Facebook Page Insights. A good rule of thumb is weekday afternoons, but when your target audience is online to interact must be accounted for to determine the best times to post.

Generating leads on Facebook
Turn your Facebook fans into paying customers. This can be done in a number of ways such as posting landing pages for offers, high-performing blog posts, offering contests and hosting events. These posts can generate higher engagement rates which turn into lead generation opportunities, directing visitors to a landing page and fill out a form.

You can also use Facebook Lead Ads to capture lead information from the Facebook platform. The benefit is it offers a seamless user experience – customers can complete and submit your lead form on your Page without being redirected elsewhere. It avoids the friction of a longer click-through path for the lead, allowing you to acquire leads that have higher level of intent and interest in your product, and boost conversions.

Track and measure results
You won’t know how successful your Facebook marketing strategy is without tracking and measuring results. With its Page Insights tool, you can analyse your Page, even down to specific posts. There are different metrics to look at, including Likes, Reach, and Page Views. You can also see a breakdown of the engagement your post has garnered, like reactions, comments and average watch time (for videos).

Measuring your social return on investment (ROI) is important to inform whether your efforts are working. Set goals and key performance indicators, such as views, engagement, and lead generation, so you can determine which social media posts are impacting the bottom line of your business.

Tips on using Facebook to market your business

With such a massive and diverse collection of users, there is a unique opportunity in Facebook for marketers to drive awareness for their brands. Below are some tips you can use to market your business on this platform.

Run Facebook ads
If you’re struggling with organic reach, turn to Facebook Ads to share content with a specific, targeted audience and achieve your conversion goals. Whether it’s to increase brand awareness, boost traffic or improve lead generation, there is a number of advertisements options including lead ads, carousel ads, and dynamic product ads.

Facebook Ads Manager also allows for detailed targeting, where you get to build the ideal target audience for your ads and maximise your ROI. You can then set a daily or lifetime budget, schedule your start and end dates, and select your ad format before it gets approved by Facebook.

Link sharing options
It’s easy to share content on Facebook where you can link out to your website or other landing pages. Linking is also an important factor, particularly when you are also running Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to boost your site’s ranking in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) and increase online visibility.

For instance, posting your blog articles on Facebook will direct visitors to your site, grow website traffic and increase conversions. You should also consider the appearance of your links – long, complicated URLS can make site visitors wary and discourage clicks. Use URL shorteners, like Goo.gl and Bitly, that won’t only make your links shorter, but also track and measure data about how your links are performing.

Conclusion

There is a lot to learn when it comes to Facebook marketing – you will need to continuously measure results and tweak your strategy to improve performance over time. If you need some help from the pros, you can work with a digital marketing agency in Singapore to plan winning strategies.

At Impossible Marketing, we are also a verified Facebook Preferred Marketing Partner, which speaks for our expertise and grants us exclusive access to enhanced solutions and resources on the platform to ensure success for our clients!