This is a video tutorial course on essential strategies required for marketing on Facebook.
First, let’s look at some of the concepts behind Facebook Marketing.
So, Facebook Marketing is about creating ads on the Facebook platform to get the word out on your products, services and other promotional messages to the audience that lives on the Facebook platform, and its other partners to achieve a healthy ROI. So 4 things to note here :
- It’s about creating ads about your messages
- You’re creating ads on the Facebook platform. So that means you have to have a business account on Facebook to be able to do that
- Facebook allows you to define and create audiences which is a very powerful feature of Facebook and we’ll look at that in a second
- The whole idea about Facebook marketing is to be able to achieve a healthy ROI from your marketing activities and we’ll look at that in a second
So before we start discussing the marketing activities and marketing strategies for Facebook, let’s get a better insight on the Facebook universe. (Get Facebook Marketing Training here)
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Facebook is a very large platform. It supports a collective audience of about 2 billion people and is constantly growing, and that’s a very large platform. It gives you a tremendous opportunity to get your message out, so if we look at the Facebook universe, it comprises of the core Facebook platform. This is it. This is the main website, to log in at www.facebook.com. Facebook had also acquired Instagram and so that has its own audience of hundreds of millions of people. We also have the Facebook Messenger where people log in to chat with each other and so there is an opportunity to show your marketing messages on the Facebook Messenger. Then there is this audience network of Facebook which is basically a network of apps and external websites so you can get your message on the audience network itself. Also there are others which Facebook is constantly adding to its portfolio, but the whole point is that you would login to the Facebook platform and then Facebook helps you to get your message out on Instagram, the audience network, Facebook Messenger and so on.
So again, there is a tremendous opportunity to get your message out on Facebook and on to its partners and it gives you a very large and expanded reach. Now, we’ll look at the 6 success strategies for marketing on Facebook.
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First we’ll look at a summary of those 6 strategies after which we’ll get into more details for each one of them.The first strategy has to do with defining clear sales and marketing goals. This is a mistake that many marketers do which they do not set their goals upfront, yes, and this is quite important because unless you set goals you won’t be able to measure your progress. Number 2 – it has to do with defining and controlling your budget. Again another important thing – do not start your marketing with an open budget. Make sure you define your budget and align them with the goals that you have defined earlier. Strategy number 3 has to do with defining a precise target audience. This is the audience that you would be showing your ads to, so defining the audience is quite important because if you’re showing your ads to the wrong audience, obviously you’re not going to get the expected ROI. The 4th strategy has to do with designing effective Facebook ads – obviously with a better edge, you can create the higher click-through rates that you can expect from those ads and we’ll look into this a bit later. Strategy number 5 has to do with selecting the right placements. Placements are areas where Facebook actually places the ad, so a newsfeed would be a placement or the sidebar of Facebook could be another placement so your job as a marketer is to decide where do you want to place your ads. Strategy number 6 has to do with monitoring your ads and then looking at the insights and analytics and then based on those analytics, adjusting your marketing campaign. Now, we’ll look into details for each one of those next.
Now, we’ll look at the first strategy, which has to do with defining clear sales and marketing goals.
The overall goal of marketing we know is to show ads to the most relevant people at the cheapest price possible and achieve a healthy ROI, but in our case we need to go a little bit deeper in identifying our marketing goals. So for example, one of the goals could be increasing our brand awareness. So if you would simply want to get the name of your organization out, you want to get the name of your product out you know, that’s a goal by itself. Or another goal could be just simply to get more traffic to your destination site, the goal could be to get more traffic to your Facebook page or it could be to a URL which is external to Facebook, but whatever that is, whatever the case may be, you need to define that goal. Another goal could be to increase online engagement which is basically simply that you have posted a content piece on Facebook and you’re looking for more comments; you’re looking for page likes and so on. So that could be one of your goals. Another goal could be simply to increase app installs. So if you have an app and you’re looking to increase the installs for that app, that could be a goal. Another goal could be to have increased video views. So if you have the posted video, you may simply be looking to increase the views for that video. Another one is lead generation, you could post a content or some piece of content on Facebook for example, simply to collect leads and like email addresses, and that could be a goal. Another goal could be that you simply want to go and get some sales and increase conversions for your marketing campaign. Another goal could be, if you have a local store, you could be looking to increase local store traffic or event visits and that could be a goal. So as we have seen, there could be many goals for your marketing campaigns and it’s important to define those goals up front, because on one hand, it does tell Facebook how to show your ads and how to place your ad. So it’s important for you to tell Facebook what your goals are and there is a mechanism when you’re creating marketing campaigns that Facebook asks you, what your goals are? So that’s number 1. Another one is that unless you said your goals, it would be difficult for you to measure progress, to measure success. So if your goal is lead generation, you’re going to measure success by the number of email addresses for example, that you have collected over time or if you are looking simply for brand awareness then you know your metric is going to be to see how many views has your content gotten by being on Facebook you know. And also once you create a marketing goal, then that can help you in creating ads appropriately.
The next strategy has to do with defining and controlling your costs and budget.
The first thing you want to do is to define budgets for your campaigns and align them to your goals and objectives. So for example, you may decide that you want to spend $300 on a convergent campaign, or let’s say $200 for a lead generation campaign. But it is important that you define those budgets based on the goals and objectives and if you have a budget, you’re running multiple campaigns, then you may want to assign different budgets to each of those campaigns so that you have clarity as to how much money you’re supposed to spend for each type of campaign, and then you can measure your success. The second thing is that, you want to define your Return On Investment (ROI) and other metrics thresholds. So for example, if you have a lead generation campaign and your goal is to get 3 email addresses for each dollar, so you want to make sure that you define those thresholds upfront and then measure your campaigns accordingly. The next one is to identify Facebook related budget and ROI related metrics, Facebook has a number of metrics and you want to make sure that you look at those before you actually start the campaign. So as an example, that this is on the right side, you can see an example of some of the metrics that Facebook provides related to cost. So for example you can see there are cost results. Cost per 1000 people reached or down here is cost per page, like cost per post comment. Again all these costs are for different actions and these would be relevant once you define what your goals are. So basically, what we’re trying to do is, we want to go and understand each of these metrics and see which ones would be relevant because Facebook provides a number of metrics and it would be kind of impossible to know all of them and to track all of them. So you may want to just pick some of them which are more relevant to your campaigns into your goals. And then, once you start running your campaigns to monitor those, the final step in this for this strategy is to monitor ROI and other cost and budget related metrics. So once you start running your campaign, you want to make sure that you’re constantly monitoring the metrics and constantly monitoring your ROI and basically you’re monitoring the success of your marketing campaigns and if they’re off then you want to go back and adjust the variables to get the results that you want.
The next strategy has to do with designing effective Facebook Ads
So when you’re creating ads you could create text-based ads or image based ads, or you could have video based ads, or you could combine multiple images in a slideshow, or you can have images and videos combined in a carousel. So you could have all kinds of media types that you can use to define Facebook Ads. The better your ads look, the greater the chances that your audience would click on it. So the click-through rates would be higher and you would get more clicks, and the more clicks you get from your audience, the better the chances are that they would act on those ads. Also make sure when you’re designing your ads, you choose the right keywords to attract your audience. So for example, if you’re selling Rolex watches you know you want to mention the word Rolex, you don’t just say “buy watches”. So, by mentioning the word Rolex, which is a keyword, you could get your audience who are interested in Rolex watches to click on those ads.
Also, if you are offering a promotion for example, you want to mention the right keywords related to those promotions such as 30% off or 30% discounts and so forth. So think through all those keywords, all the right keywords which would be relevant to your audience to increase the chances of your audience clicking on your ads. Also try to look and think of choosing the right power words to influence and persuade audiences. There are certain words which work more in advertising such as the word ‘saved’ or you could use the word ‘discover’ over things such as you could use the word ‘guarantee’ and so on. So think of those power words and include them when you’re creating your ads. So use the right media types, use the right keywords, use the right pattern of power words and use all these to package your ad and to create your Facebook ad to make them more effective.
The next strategy has to do with selecting the right placements.
Once you have created the right arrows, you want to make sure that they are placed correctly. So placements are the different places where Facebook ads can be shown, as an example you could place your ads on Facebook news feeds, on Facebook In-stream videos, or on the right column for Facebook. If you have chosen Instagram, you could be placing your ads in the Instagram feeds or on the new stories on Instagram. If you have chosen Audience Network, you could place your ads on the mobile apps and websites and also on the Facebook Messenger. So you have flexibility and after you’ve created your ad, to specify where actually you want to have your ads appear. Facebook does recommend usually that you select automatic placements because based on your audience that you have selected, they have a better insight as to where your ads would be more effective. So in many cases, Facebook recommends that you choose the automatic placements. But sometimes, for example, if you have a better insight from history that your ads appear that your ads get a better ROI for example, if you place your ads on In-stream videos that you’re more than welcome to actually, just pick that option and leave the rest out and for all these options, for all these placements, you can specify whether these ads should appear on desktops or on mobile, or basically both so you have that flexibility.
The next and final strategy has to do with monitoring your ads and monitoring the insights and analytics.
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So after your campaign, after your ad starts running, you want to basically monitor the results of your ads. So you could be sure, and again all this has to be aligned to your goals and objectives, so you could be monitoring to see whether your ads have resulted in the increase of your online audiences, such as new users or active users. You could then look at the increase in revenue metrics and number of purchases or average purchase per user etc. You could look at average cost per result and depending on the result that you have chosen, which could be convergence or lead generation or brand awareness and so on. You can get insights into your sales and marketing funnels, so you could define those funnels within Facebook and then see exactly how those funnels are performing and then nick in the necessary adjustments. You can get a detailed analysis by audience type directions, and then based on the reactions, you can match with the results and if that doesn’t work, you can always adjust the audience type. You can also get insights into multiple activities such as clicks, shares, clicks with shares, page views, initiating check hours, purchases, etc. So you can see exactly what users are doing on Facebook and see how your ads are performing and finally you want to make sure that you measure on all this against your goals and objectives, because you want to make sure, because you’re measuring success and against your goals and objectives and basically you want to repeat the process, depending on your results.
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