Ways to Improve Your Facebook Marketing
Facebook marketing can be a supplement to your search engine optimization (SEO) and branding efforts or it can be a stand-alone campaign. Whatever its standing, if your company invests enough resources into the campaign, it could boost your sales in the long run through greater customer satisfaction and brand recognition. So with a CPC for paid ads varying between $0.71 and $3.791, the Facebook campaign quickly becomes a viable option.
To fully utilize the marketing opportunities of Facebook, you must integrate the social platform with your main website. Clearly position “Like” and “Share” buttons where your users can see them and highlight their corresponding calls to action. For example, “A Like will get you a 5% discount, a Share – 10%” will greatly improve the visibility of your brand. Furthermore, make joining and liking the company profile easy by creating links where users can see them. If there are articles or comments, consider implementing auto sharing on profile walls. For example, 9gag.com automatically shares the pages its users have read on their walls.
Naturally, brand pages should focus on the company and the services it offers. However, people are interested in the staff and their interests as well. Therefore, to make the company seem more people-oriented and friendly, it pays to share engaging content unrelated to the brand. To further increase the human feel of your page, pay particular attention to how you interact with the users; make the tone extremely polite by adopting the saying “the customer is always right.” Beware, though, that reaching customers can easily be a double-edged sword and if not done properly, it can result in public disgrace. Take a look at Nestle’s PR failure2.
Engaging with customers is the best way to turn them from passive fans into fervent advocates and customers. Usually, just 1% of your fans will actively engage with your posts3, but even this is a good number. Image 100 people trying to post every single day; it will be impossible to get your message across through all of this noise. Nevertheless, try to ask questions and polls regularly to get a discussion rolling. Do your best to reply to most posts and messages.
The ultimate aim of any marketing campaign is to increase sales, so improving the call to action will directly impact on your conversion ratios. Try to position and phrase these so that they are not intrusive or repetitive. The wisest strategy is to start with little commitment from fans, by just liking comments steadily, you may get them to share their name and personal information, and finally make a sale. The important point is to strike a good balance, not to be too frequent to lose fans, nor too infrequent as to have no effect.
The page itself must be designed as a natural extension of your website and overall branding. Build the company page with similar colors, similar backgrounds and cleverly positioned logos. As well as linking to your Facebook, page you should consider linking back to the company webpage, as the sales usually happen there. When posting content or real world problems, think of which of your products or services can best solve them, and mention these in comments. This smart sell tactic will increase the conversion ratio by convincing users of their usefulness.
Finally, for retailers it will be easy to boost their Facebook marketing campaign with tools like Payvment4, which can help turn the social buzz about a specific brand into easily realizable sales. However, do not flood the company page with this these offers as users will consider them spam and leave it.
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