From a modest social media platform to a social media behemoth, Facebook’s journey is nothing short of impressive. Today, around 200 million businesses from around the globe use Facebook for marketing [1]. We expect that number to grow further in the upcoming years which makes it critical to understand how Facebook marketing works. Do you want to be among the front runners or lag behind?
We know that Facebook marketing is not as straightforward as it seems. That is why we have created this easy-to-understand Facebook marketing guide for beginners. In this guide, you will learn about Facebook marketing, how it works, and why your business needs it today.
So, what are you waiting for? Let’s get started.
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What exactly is Facebook marketing?
Facebook marketing is the process of using Facebook to promote, market, and create awareness about your products and services. There are two main types of Facebook marketing – organic and paid marketing.
As the name suggests, organic Facebook marketing means that your audience is engaging with your posts and Facebook content organically. In paid Facebook marketing, you run paid campaigns to boost engagement and ultimately generate new leads and acquire new customers.
Facebook marketing is one of the best ways to connect, engage, and interact with your current and potential customers. At present, it is almost a cardinal sin to ignore Facebook marketing. Wondering why?
Learn about the benefits of Facebook marketing in the next section.
Overview of benefits of Facebook marketing
There are countless benefits of Facebook marketing. We have listed some of the main benefits below. If you want to dive deeper, you can also go through our blog which elaborates on the key benefits of Facebook advertising for businesses.
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Larger audience
Nearly 3 billion people use Facebook today. A significant number of people use Facebook multiple times a day. Your business has immense potential to shine and reach your target audience with Facebook marketing. This guide to Facebook marketing will help you do exactly that.
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Ad formats
Facebook supports a plethora of advertising formats. You have the freedom to create images, carousels, videos, and several other types of ads to interact with and engage users effectively.
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Advanced targeting options
Facebook has an upper hand over all other social media platforms due to its advanced targeting options. Businesses can target users based on their interests, past behaviour, characteristics, demographics, and more. Besides, Facebook also makes remarketing to previous customers a breeze.
Facebook marketing guide: Learn how to craft successful strategies
Facebook marketing is booming, and stats support that statement. Nearly 87% of marketers in the U.S. use Facebook for marketing [2]. As businesses scramble to stay ahead of the curve, Facebook marketing has become more competitive than ever before.
As the competition continues to grow, it is a good idea to learn a few things about Facebook marketing to gain an advantage. We hope this Facebook marketing guide helps you understand the ins and outs of Facebook marketing and more importantly, attract more customers.
Let us dive straight in.
1. Create and set up a Facebook page
If you are starting from scratch, your first step toward Facebook marketing would be to create a Facebook business page. This page is the main profile of your brand where your business can connect with customers by posting content, updating statuses, and sharing contact information.
The good news is that it is easy to set up a Facebook business page. That said, you need to understand the little things that will make your page stand out from the rest of the competition.
Before we look at those tiny details, here is a quick run-through of the different steps you need to take to create a Facebook Business page. You can start by visiting facebook.com/pages/create. Now, you can add a brief description of your business. Do not ignore this space as it provides important information pertaining to your business. Once you write a description, select a category for your page. You can view how your page will look by clicking on the “preview page” option.
Once you update all the key information, add a company logo and a cover photo. It is also a good practice to add your contact information so that your customers know how they can get in touch with you.
2. It is a good idea to create a Facebook content calendar
After creating your company’s Facebook page or profile, you need to come up with a game plan. At this stage, it is a good idea to create a Facebook content calendar for your company’s Facebook page. A content calendar paints a clear picture of how you wish to proceed and when and what you are supposed to post on Facebook.
A content calendar also helps you establish a process and gets you closer to running the show on autopilot. In short, it plays an important role in boosting the efficiency of your Facebook marketing content creation process. You can also use a bunch of tools that allow you to bulk schedule Facebook posts, giving you the freedom to perform other tasks without worrying about Facebook marketing.
You should have answers to important questions such as what to post when to post, and how often to post.
3. Promote, promote, promote – focus on promotion to increase page likes and engagement
Now that you have a Facebook page for your business in place, it is time to rope in efforts to increase its visibility. At the end of the day, your target audience should know your page exists. In this guide to Facebook marketing, you will learn why you should concentrate all your efforts on increasing the number of your Facebook followers in the initial stages.
Here are a few reasons why this is an effective way to carry out Facebook marketing. One of the most obvious reasons is that the more followers you have, the higher the total number of people who will see your posts on your feed. This is critical to improving engagement.
Besides, your business is considered trustworthy if your page has a decent number of followers. Therefore, people are more likely to explore your business’s Facebook page and show interest in your company’s products and services.
Expanding the reach of your organic content is another reason why a decent Facebook following becomes so essential. Just like Google, Facebook’s algorithm typically prefers showing content from more authoritative pages. This means that if your Facebook page has a good amount of followers and engagement, your posts are more likely to appear on a user’s feed.
So, how can you increase the number of likes or followers for your new Facebook page? You can start by sharing relevant content, launching paid ad campaigns, and more. One of the most effective ways to increase your Facebook followers is to boost one of your most popular posts. When you boost a post, even people who do not follow your page will see it. Further, such ads are very affordable and a good way to increase followers.
4. Learn and understand different ad formats
When Facebook first released the Facebook Business feature, the idea was simple – give businesses a platform to promote their products and services. It was much easier to reach a wider audience organically back in the day. Over the past few years, Facebook has updated its platform and placed more importance on paid ads. As a result, Facebook ads are the most effective way to expand your business on Facebook today.
Image ads, video ads, and carousel ads are some of the most popular ad formats on Facebook.
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Image ads
Image ads are arguably one of the most basic Facebook ad formats. As the name suggests, an image ad includes images, descriptive text, and a call to action button. Since they are easy to create and set up, image ads should ideally become an important component of your Facebook marketing strategy.
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Video ads
Video ads allow businesses to showcase their product and service offerings through short-form videos.
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Carousel ads
Carousel ads are one of the best ways to show a group of videos or images. Businesses can talk about multiple products or one product in different ways using carousels. Every image can include its own link, directing users to the relevant page.
We have only spoken about the video, image, and carousel ads in this article. It is worth noting some of the other ad formats also create an impact depending on the nature of the campaign. These include dynamic product ads, polls ads, slideshow ads, instant experience ads, and collection ads to name a few.
5. Define your Facebook marketing goals
By now, we hope you have a fair idea about how advertisements work. Now, it is time to get the ball rolling by building a Facebook strategy and defining your marketing goals.
Why do you need a goal? It is simple – you can plan better once you know what you want to achieve and also measure the success of your marketing strategy. In this Facebook marketing guide, we will talk about some of the most common goals businesses set while creating a Facebook strategy.
Some of the most common goals include boosting website traffic, improving lead generation, increasing revenue and sales, creating brand awareness, and re-engaging with past customers. Regardless of your end-goal
6. Determine your target audience
One of the major benefits of Facebook marketing is the wide range of audience segmentation options. When we speak about Facebook ads, audience means a group of people that you target while running an ad campaign. Businesses can use Facebook’s targeting options to reach the most relevant audience members.
Some of the most popular targeting options include location, gender, age, work, education, life events, interests, past behaviour, connections, and financials to name a few.
This completes the first chapter of our Facebook marketing guide. Stay tuned for the second and the last chapter on this subject only on iTMunch!
Wondering how our Facebook marketing services help clients? Schedule a quick call with us to know more!
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Image 1 Source: rawpixel.com
Image 2 Source: Photo by Will Francis on Unsplash
Sources:
[1] [2] Bagardia. J (2022) “70+ Facebook Statistics for Every Marketer in 2023” SocialPilot [online] Available from: https://www.socialpilot.co/facebook-marketing/facebook-statistics [Accessed January 2023]
