Leading brands often focus on building an emotional connection with their customers and their products. Through social media, marketers can develop a more intimate relationship with their target audience, without the need to always be promoting their products.

As a result, marketing campaigns shouldn’t overlook connecting with users on multiple levels. This increases the chances of reaching a wider audience. With this approach, marketing campaigns tell a story or narrate a journey to convey their message.

Many brands consider effective marketing strategies as an opportunity to convey a strong message of how their products improve their users’ everyday lives.

Social media allows brands to develop a personal relationship with their potential customers. Businesses of all sizes advertise on social media sites to create buzz.

Is there a more widely available option to reach users around the world than Facebook? All you needed to get started is some creativity and marketing spend to drive traffic back to your site.

Not every business has a dedicated creative team to handle the day-to-day responsibilities of managing a Facebook page. However, you could hire an in-house team or take advantage of a marketing agency’s services.

In today’s gig economy, it makes perfect sense to entrust an expert like Martin Ochwat to look after your marketing efforts. The decision to hire or work with the right set of individuals can ensure your success from an early stage.

Facebook has over two billion monthly active users. Businesses looking to strengthen their brand reputation should prioritize building an effective marketing strategy. To get started, I’ve created this 7-step guide to help brands master Facebook marketing.

1. Understand & Targeting the Right Audience

 

How many times have you seen an innovative product or concept does not reach its potential? One of the several reasons products fail is their lack of understanding of their core customer.

 

The first step to an effective Facebook marketing strategy is to understand your customers and their pain points. Once you have some preliminary data on this, you can reach them on Facebook.

 

To get started, you can visit Facebook’s Ads Manager and select the section called Ad Sets. Upon creating an Ad Set, you will find Audience as the fourth sub-option. You can find an example here:

Custom Audiences refers to lists of users you can target on Facebook based on data you upload to the platform.

 

When you create a new Custom Audience, you’ll see different options available as the primary data source. Facebook’s system can even match your customer data with other users that share similar interests. We call these Lookalike Audiences.

When selecting who to target, you can always review the “Audience Meter” for suggestions to narrow or expand your audience. It is on the right-hand side of your screen.

 

Ideally, you have an audience in the green slider section; one that’s neither too specific nor broad for Facebook to target.

2. Defined Goals, Refined Approach

 

Your marketing strategy should align with your campaign goals. Brands can often differentiate between a successful and unsuccessful campaign by defining their goals at the beginning of a campaign.

 

You should set the goals based on current marketing data, positioning, brand identity, and future growth projections. Goals can be set by asking ‘ACHIEVE’ questions:

 

• Act: Does your campaign focus on the user, enticing them to act?
• Calculate: How are you calculating ROI? Is it based on building a fan following, or perhaps driving traffic back to your website?
• Highlight: Did the campaign highlight your primary or secondary goals?
• Interest: What level of user interest do you want to be generated as part of the campaign?
• Encourage: After connecting users with your product or service, how will you encourage them to make a purchase?
• Verify: What tools are you using to verify your data?
• Evaluate: How will you test the results of your campaign?

 

3. Running Facebook Ads

 

At some point, you will need to invest money in Facebook ads.

 

Setting the right budget will allow you to generate more likes, comments, shares, or even purchases. You can boost posts from time to time or run week/month-long campaigns.

 

Another benefit of ads is gaining new followers who might not have heard about your brand or re-engage abandoned visitors. Facebook ads can be a worthwhile investment considering you can reach an audience base looking to connect with a product/service provider to solve their current needs.

 

Most leading brands have been able to keep and attract a new set of social media followers by promoting the right content. You’re responsible to win the trust of your followers and should consider a customer acquisition program as a core part of this strategy.

 

4. Content Must Exhibit Intent

 

Your content, both image, text & video-based, is the lifeline of your marketing campaigns. The success of a Facebook campaign depends on your content’s diversity, tone, consistency and social appeal.

 

General best practices:

1. You should post several times per day with consistency
2. Images should convey your message directly and compliment your copy.
3. Your videos, with and without audio, should be able to communicate your message to generate more views, likes & shares.

 

Brands can develop a weekly content calendar using tools like Buffer. The idea is to encourage users to engage and share views.

 

Your marketing strategy should focus on creating a dialogue between your brand and your followers. It’s recommended to stick to your schedule of posting daily to maximize user engagement.

 

5. Maximize Facebook Ad Potential

 

A strategically planned Facebook ad campaign could open new opportunities. For this, you need to pick the right ad campaign.

 

Ads promoting your business page or specific page posts help spread brand awareness. A conversion campaign would generate more followers.

 

Facebook offers different options to promote business on its network. You may look to advertise app installs or generate traffic to your website. There’s a marketing plan for every business-related opportunity on Facebook.

6. Analyze & Check for Accuracy

 

Brands need to handle customer communication; responding to complaints and commenting on feedback from followers.

 

Your team should stay alert on every opportunity to engage your audience. Audiences prefer a pro-active approach to resolving the situations. They expect a high level of attention.

 

Another advantage is you could resolve any negative situations or limit reputational risk by actively responding to customers on social media.

 

7. Experimentation and Improvisation

 

The best part of engaging on Facebook is that there are no pre-defined rules. It doesn’t mean you should stop monitoring and challenging marketing strategies.

 

Some of the most successful brands have been experimenting and changing their approach to maintaining brand reputation online.

 

For example, you can analyze which posts work the best, which encourages the audience to engage, and more. It’s another way to know your audience and stay ahead of the competition.

 

This 7-step marketing strategy should help you improve your brand’s image on social media.

 

By understanding your audience, determining the right Facebook ads strategy for your business, and always experiment, you should be able to help your brand grow to the next level.