While, for the moment, the social media platform that sparks the highest interest and is on every marketer’s lips is TikTok, the more consolidated, longer-living networks are still crucial for a brand’s visibility boost.
Facebook, for example, besides being the most used social media channel, also integrates the widest variety of features that facilitate communication between brands and their social audiences.
From the Facebook Marketplace that allows direct selling and simplifies the buyer’s journey to chatbots that are extremely helpful for customer support, Facebook marketing remains a tactic that can have a significant impact on sales generation.
To discover the ins and outs of an effective Facebook marketing strategy, buckle up and read our in-depth guide below.
Facebook marketing: an A to Z guide
1. What is Facebook marketing?
2. Benefits of Facebook marketing
3. How to use Facebook for marketing?
4. How to create a Facebook marketing strategy?
5. How and when to leverage Facebook ads?
6. Facebook marketing costs
7. Facebook marketing examples
8. Facebook marketing tips
9. Facebook marketing tools
10. How to track your Facebook marketing performance
1. What is Facebook marketing?
Facebook marketing refers to brands’ strategies for using the social platform to facilitate their products and services promotion. It implies a series of tactics and tools, starting with the creation of a Facebook Page, followed by content meant to be leveraged for promotion.
Extensively, Facebook social media marketing encompasses community management, paid advertising, and the usage of multiple of the platform’s versatile features that enable customer support and outreach, such as Facebook Messenger or Facebook Groups, or direct selling, such as Facebook Marketplace.
Ultimately, successful Facebook marketing is also based on performance analysis, which provides insights into strategy optimization.
As for goals, through a Facebook social media marketing strategy, businesses aim to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, generate leads, boost sales, or achieve other business-specific objectives.
2. Benefits of Facebook marketing
Using Facebook as a marketing tool involves a lot of strategic planning, which, despite the sweat and tears, usually results in tremendous gains.
Even with TikTok being so popular nowadays, Facebook remains the social media platform with the highest number of users. Therefore, with the network offering a great reach potential, the benefits of leveraging Facebook marketing are plenty.
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Improves brand’s visibility
By building a presence on Facebook for your company, you get to widen your horizon while more users will have the chance to find out about your business’ products and services.
Enlarging your audience means that you can also extend your sales. Once you get in front of your target audience, if your posts are engaging enough, they will become curious to learn more about your brand and products or services.
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Facilitates connections with target audiences
Being the social media platform with the highest number of users, Facebook offers great exposure potential in the case of multiple demographics.
According to data, the largest segment of Facebook’s users consists of the 25-34 age group, which also represents the second most active buyers category.
The numbers speak for themselves when it comes to proving why using Facebook for marketing is a great idea. Now all that’s left to do is to come up with the right creative concepts for your Facebook marketing campaigns. Look into what your target audiences are interested in and get the ball rolling.
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Direct sales that are easy to initiate
With Facebook allowing the creation of online stores directly within the platform, users’ buying journeys are shortened and streamlined, which leads to a win-win customer-brand relationship. While the consumers spend less time on the purchase process, brands increase their sales and revenue.
3. How to use Facebook for marketing?
To get started with Facebook marketing, you first have to create your business’ Facebook Page. To do that, you initially have to own a personal profile.
The first thing you need to do when creating a Facebook Business Page will be to log in to Facebook and choose “Pages” from your left-sided menu, then click on the “Create New Page” button displayed.
Then you’ll have to:
- Select your page name and business category
- Fill in your contact information
- Add design elements that include your profile and cover image.
- Additionally, you can even integrate CTAs, such as ”Call Now”, “Shop” or “Message”
TIP: don’t forget to verify your page (which means getting that blue check mark) that will appear near your page’s name. A verified page enables an increased level of trust within your business, which is extremely important for purchase initiation in today’s social media world.
Secondly, you might think about experimenting with some ads to expand your brand’s visibility and get closer to your target audience. For that to be possible, you need first to set up a Facebook ad account.
TIP: With Facebook being the social media platform with the highest ROI among all the paid marketing channels available, you should consider leveraging this promotion type when creating your Facebook marketing strategy.
4. How to create a Facebook marketing strategy?
After creating your Facebook Business Page, you have to start with the posting. It may seem easy in the beginning, but for your Facebook marketing efforts to be successful, you’ll have to do a bit more than publish a few pieces of content every now and then. Truth be told, in the social media marketing world, consistency is key.
To have a good ROI, you’ll have to create a Facebook marketing plan, starting with a strategic view, which means setting some specific goals, understanding your audience’s needs, and narrowing down to the type of messages and content formats you’ll leverage.
As overwhelming as this might get, don’t worry, we’re here for you. If you feel stuck, just follow this Facebook marketing guide we’ve put together for you to understand how to create your strategy.
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Set your Facebook marketing goals
For this part, you should start by asking yourself what you are trying to achieve by leveraging Facebook marketing.
Needless to say that any business’ end goal is to increase sales, but in the case of specific channels, such as Facebook, brands could establish goals that extend through the whole marketing funnel, from getting more brand awareness to loyalizing customers to generating direct sales.
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Understand your audience
With Facebook itself having a specific core audience, you have to think which particular segments represent your brand’s group of interest.
You can start by creating a couple of buyer personas, which represent fictional characters, portraying your ideal customers, based on a series of socio-demographic criteria. Then, once identified their needs and pain points, you can leverage the insights you got to create relevant posts, that will make your followers resonate with your content, which is the first step toward achieving the goals you’ve set.
PS: While you float away with Facebook marketing, it’s recommended to keep an eye on your Facebook audience analytics, to see if the content you’ve created so far was successful in reaching your target audience. If not, some changes are in order.
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Plan your content
When creating your Facebook content strategy, you need to think of a couple of themes that your posts will cover.
Having multiple content pillars, like product promotion, behind-the-scenes moments, or posts highlighting the company’s values, for example, will ensure diversity, which will help you keep your audience’s interest alive for a longer time.
You can start by thinking about what kind of information is relevant to your audience and corresponds with your brand’s line of operation, positioning, and mission. Then try to identify what post formats would make the best option to portray each content topic found.
To discover more about how to set up content pillars for your Facebook marketing strategy and which are the most popular ones in different industries, check out our article - content pillars for social media: tips and ideas to improve your marketing game.
If you’re looking for inspiration, a great starting point would be to spy on your competitors’ strategies, discover what content topics are they leveraging and adopt the ones that are suited for your brand as well.
Here’s an in-depth guide on how to conduct a Facebook competitive analysis, in case you want to know what Facebook marketing tactics are your competitors using.
Furthermore, leveraging the latest social media trends is also a smart Facebook marketing move that can skyrocket your brand.
Now for the last part, after establishing your content pillars, you need to also establish a postig frequency and timeline. Then all that’s left to do is to craft the actual posts, and make sure consistency is kept at all times.
5. How and when to leverage Facebook ads?
When talking about how to use Facebook as a marketing tool, you need to understand there are two main directions, each with its specific set of strategies, and those are organic Facebook marketing and paid Facebook marketing.
For optimized results, it’s recommended to mix these Facebook marketing tactics.
While organic Facebook marketing represents the foundation for building your presence within the app, portraying consistency in addressing your community’s needs, which, in the long run, is crucial for brand perception, paid Facebook marketing provides you with extended reach. And by putting you in front of more people that belong to your target audience, paid Facebook advertising can help you boost sales more rapidly.
However, when deciding to leverage paid Facebook marketing to increase your chances of getting the results you’re looking for, you should make sure you checked off the following milestones of your list:
- You have a complete Facebook Business Page
- You gained at least 1000 followers
- You’ve been posting consistently for a while (try to have at least 20 posts)
- You have created multiple creative assets for each ad you’re planning on running
- You thought about an A/B testing strategy.
Another important aspect you have to keep in mind when creating your paid Facebook marketing strategy is that the platform enables multiple options for paid advertising, and you should carefully choose the formats that benefit you the most.
The basic level of paid Facebook ads is the boosted post option, which consists of investing some money in an already published post to (guess what) boost its performance.
The more advanced Facebook paid advertising feature consists of ad campaigns, which implies creating a particular set of ads for a specific campaign, such as a product launch, and it requires more handling and supervision.
For budget optimization, it is recommended to start your journey into the world of paid Facebook advertising with the simpler versions and gradually invest more into ad campaigns as you gain insights into how the platform’s algorithm works.
Depending on your business’ needs, you’ll have to focus your Facebook ads campaigns on the objectives you’re trying to achieve. For different goals, you’ll have to create different campaigns.
Now, based on your brand’s marketing plan, think about how Facebook ads can help you achieve the goals you’ve set. Facebook ads can be leveraged for multiple purposes, from awareness, engagement, and traffic to leads and sales.
6. Facebook marketing costs
As mentioned earlier, marketing on Facebook can be divided into “free” and paid tactics.
While organic Facebook marketing efforts don’t imply any costs (except what you’re paying to your social media agency, if the case, obviously), in the case of paid Facebook, there are no restraints on the budget you can spend.
When you’re setting up your Facebook campaigns, you’re in total control of the money you put on the line, as there is no threshold on either the lower or the upper limits.
To give you a hand when creating your Facebook marketing budget for paid ads, we’ve gathered below the average Facebook ads costs nowadays:
- Facebook Ads CPM (Cost Per 1,000 views) – $14.9
- Facebook Ads CPC (Cost Per Click) – $0.44
7. Facebook marketing examples
To give you a bit of help when it comes to choosing the Facebook marketing strategies you should leverage for successful results, we took a peek at how some of the world’s most beloved brands handle their Facebook presence.
Starbucks
When it comes to gaining some inspiration for your Facebook marketing plan, one of the most creative and fresh brands you can check out is Starbucks. First and foremost, the brand’s marketing strategy for Facebook is centered around its core mission - that of creating a feeling of belongingness, a community whose members share the same values.
What makes the brand’s Facebook marketing campaigns stand out is its authentic, human vibe, which is achieved through relatable messages and also user generated content.
Last but not least, another reason why Starbucks is a great example of Facebook marketing done right lies in its strategy of creating diversified content. From Reels to GIFS and albums to the more classical formats, such as status, or image post types, Starbucks’s Facebook page has a highly dynamic and entertaining nature.
Booking.com
The brand’s Facebook success is based on its highly storytelling nature. By highlighting its holiday destination and accommodation options through vibrant creatives, altogether with suggestions of dream scenarios for travelers, Booking.com does an amazing job of charming and engaging its Facebook community.
8. Facebook marketing tips
Speaking earlier about content diversity, integrating multiple post formats in your Facebook content calendar is recommended for a number of reasons. Firstly, it will keep your page dynamic by entertaining your community in different ways, which will allow you to keep your audience surprised and hooked for a longer period of time.
Secondly, diversity within your content will help you befriend the platform’s algorithm, which rewards the post’s creativity for exactly the same reason mentioned above.
From a content format perspective, Facebook is actually the platform that offers the widest range. On Facebook, you can leverage post types such as:
- text/status
- image
- link
- video
- album
- Story
- Reel
Social media platforms have always rewarded early adopters of new features with increased engagement. Being the best-performing content type on Facebook at the moment, Reels’ integration within your Facebook content calendar makes for a great strategy for boosting your page’s performance.
Ultimately, Facebook offers an extended list of features that you can use to market your business, aside from the multiple post formats.
Through Facebook events, for example, you can attract more eyes to different initiatives your business is launching, such as the opening of a new franchise.
By leveraging your brand’s Facebook visibility to gain more awareness for your offline marketing efforts, you increase your chances of getting closer to your audiences, offering them more chances to connect with your brand.
Facebook events and Facebook lives are two features that can be interconnected. Taking the example mentioned earlier, your Facebook event can consist of a Facebook live that presents how the opening of a new location looks like.
Additionally, Q&A sessions also represent one of the most popular live formats, which may stir your audience’s attention. This Facebook live type makes for a great Facebook marketing tool, as it will show your audience your brand is interested in learning about their pain points and needs. The insights you can get from your community are most valuable since they can lead to product/service improvement, which will only enhance your brand during the buying decision.
9. Facebook marketing tools
Implying analysis, ideas brainstorming, and budget optimization techniques, Facebook marketing is not an easy job. Luckily, to simplify a bit marketer’s already challenging life, Facebook has come up with a couple of tools that might come in handy when handling Facebook for marketing.
Below you’ll find the most popular tools for Facebook marketing that social media people leverage to make the most of their strategies.
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Meta Business Suite
Meta Business Suite is a Facebook marketing tool that can help you in a number of cases. Firstly, it enables content scheduling so that you don't have to worry that you forgot to post when having a busy day.
Within the tool, you can also directly create your Reels, Stories, and even Lives. Furthermore, it also offers analytics data, highlighting how your posts are performing.
To ease the navigation between tools for different needs, Meta Business Suite has also integrated ad creation.
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Facebook Commerce Manager
Facebook Commerce Manager is another useful tool that can make the process of building your Facebook presence more effective - by enabling you to create a shop or catalog to advertise your brand's services or products.
First, you'll need to determine which is the promotion type that best suits your business. Secondly, you'll need to learn how to efficiently upload your product's info, which should be creative, detailed, and descriptive in order to attract your customers to add them to their cart.
Lastly, you should select what category best describes what your brand sells. Make sure you complete everything as accurately as possible.
And there you have it. Through just a couple of steps, you've simplified your customers' buying journey. By leveraging this Facebook feature, your audience won’t need to click on your website and add to the cart there. They will be able to directly purchase from Facebook what their heart desires through the platform's e-commerce integrated feature.
10. How to track your Facebook marketing performance
To understand how successful your Facebook marketing efforts are, you need to track your post’s performance and see how much the tactics you’ve been leveraging so far have helped you achieve your goals.
Based on the data, you can identify insights that you can use to further optimize your strategy and increase your gains from Facebook marketing.
- Level one reporting
You can start your Facebook marketing analysis by taking a look at your overall page performance and main KPIs, such as fan growth, engagement, reach, and impressions. This type of data is available within Meta’s Business Suite Insights section.
- Level two reporting
For more in-depth Facebook marketing analytics, you can leverage a third-party analytics tool, such as Socialinsider, that provides extensive metrics that allow you to better understand the social media landscape.
From competitive insights and industry benchmarks to campaign-level performance data, Facebook analytics can help you gain content ideas that will offer you a competitive advantage.
Let me show you what I mean by taking Elf Comestics as an example.
By using Socialinsider, I analyzed the performance of Elf Comstics's Facebook posts covering two of the brand's most leveraged topics: skincare and lips makeup.
To do so, I introduced the brand's Facebook profile within Socialinsider by adding the URL.
Then, within the Strategy feature, I tagged the posts mentioning "skin" and "lips".
Ultimately, to compare the performance of these two content pillars, I went to the Campaigns Benchmarks section.
Now let's look at the data and see what we can discover:
- Facebook posts related to skincare generate more engagement and therefore have a heavier integration within the brand's Facebook calendar
- Within the last 12 months, Elf Cosmetic's skin-related Facebook posts generated over one million reach and over one million impressions, while the lips-related posts gained only 4 thousand reach and impressions.
So, how can these kinds of insights be of help? Well, if Elf Cosmetics had to choose between these two content categories for an ad, for example, the brand would know a better choice would be skin-related content, as this is what their audience is more interested in.
If you want to learn more about how can Socialinsider help you improve your Facebook marketing game, start your 14-day free trial!
Final thoughts
If you're just starting with Facebook marketing, you should know there will probably be a lot of trial and error until you discover your successful content formula.
But at the end of the day, with the help of data and in-depth competitive research, you can get a lot of optimization ideas and insights that you can leverage to get better results with your Facebook marketing campaigns.
Just prepare your marketer's creative and analytical hats, and you're good to go.
FAQs on Facebook marketing
1.How important is it to leverage Facebook video marketing?
Video marketing makes for an important element of a Facebook strategy, as most social media users nowadays appreciate the most this information-delivery method. In the form of Reels, or regular, in-feed posts, video content is one of the top-performing post types.
2.What does marketing in Facebook Groups mean?
Facebook Groups marketing refers to promoting your business in Facebook's private spaces, where the communities gathered around a certain topic are named groups. This can be done by creating special promotions for the members of a Facebook Group or simply providing the members of a group with information about how your brand's products or services can represent a solution (where the case) to various needs they may have.
