Social media is everywhere and has literally changed our way of life. You just can't deny that social media is now the trusted and largest source of news and information. In addition to bringing the global community closer together, he presented many ways to interact with potential clients across borders. All social media platforms offer great opportunities for sharing brand-generated content in the form of ads, videos and photos.
What is social media marketing (SMM)?
SMM, short for social media marketing, is an advanced form of online marketing that involves leveraging social media platforms to build brand reputation, engage audiences, increase sales, drive traffic to your website, and expand your business outside your local community. The best social marketing platforms like Facebook are used to post great customer engaging content.
SMM also includes listening to your customers, interacting with them, analyzing your brand's online performance, and running social media ads to reach a wider audience.
Why is social media marketing so important?
SMM is evolving at such an astounding pace that every business needs to understand its importance and make the most of every social media platform.
Let's analyze the importance of social media marketing in terms of its impact on modern business:
Social advertisement
Social media advertising may be too new since it was first launched in 2007, but is growing rapidly. An example of social media advertising is Facebook ads. Compared to traditional advertising methods, digital advertising is not only cheap but also reliable.
Traditional advertising doesn't allow you to reach a specific audience, but social media advertising allows you to reach targeted customers, so you can get a higher ROI and increase your conversions at a faster rate.
Social media advertising tools allow you to track your ad campaigns. Offline advertising is like a blindfold. You don't know how many people you've reached, but with online ads, you can analyze your performance in real time, and instantly change ads to see results instantly.
Brand recognition
Social media is a powerful marketing tool when it comes to boosting your brand's reputation and name. Good social media marketing techniques have a direct impact on the growth of your business. You can find an audience more easily through social media conversations, posts, reviews, and lead in leads.
What's more, you can also use visuals in your content like videos and images to engage your audience. This will not only increase engagement, but also increase the number of shares on social media.
Fascinating conversations
Social media is all about talking. You can interact with your audience for both one-way and two-way communication. Discuss, listen and ask for feedback.
Internal traffic
Inbound marketing is a form of SMM that generates relevant traffic to your website. If you ignore the importance of social media marketing, you will only be limited to a small circle that is already familiar with your brand and name. It's important to build inbound links.
Social media marketing goals
An SMM goal is essentially an overall result, and goals are usually not measured. It only gives you an idea for development. In the case of social media marketing, this could be customer engagement or online business expansion.
Here are some of the social media marketing goals that most social media marketers adhere to:
• Increasing brand awareness
Social media platforms are the best place to grab customer attention. Increasing brand awareness is the most common reason marketers use social media. Marketers want to have a quantitative understanding of their company and its presence in the online world. Sharing content, images, and social media ads will help you communicate your brand's presence more accurately.
• Driving traffic to your site
3 out of 5 marketers use social media platforms to drive traffic to their websites by posting quality content. More traffic means more potential customers in the future.
• Attracting new potential customers
Companies with long sales processes use SMM tactics to attract new customers. Their main goal is to warm up potential customers with information and, ultimately, force them to make a purchase decision.
• Increased income
By increasing sales through social media pages, marketers are increasing revenue day by day. The main goal of this social media marketing strategy is to convert visitors into paying customers.
• Increased brand engagement
The ultimate goal of SMM is to increase brand engagement. From a marketer's perspective, the best way to engage with customers is to publish engaging content to keep customers interested.
How effective is social media marketing?
Here are some examples of how social media marketing is effective for both large and small businesses:
• Posts published as part of an SMM strategy attract targeted traffic.
• Using social media marketing tactics will help boost the SEO of your business website.
• SMM allows you to communicate with your audience so that you can understand them in the best possible way.
• Active SMM campaigns strengthen relationships with your customers.
• SMM allows you to place ads with targeting and retargeting to potential customers.
• It will help you get noticed at major events and also ensure media coverage.
• SMM is effective enough to improve customer service for a brand.
• It builds reputation and brand loyalty.
• It can make your new PR strategy a success.
What is Facebook Marketing?
Facebook Marketing is a platform that offers a variety of highly targeted paid advertisements and regular publications, allowing brands to market their products and services to a wide audience. Over the past decade, Facebook has grown from being the most famous social network on the Internet to one of the largest marketplaces.
Why is Facebook good for marketing?
• Has a global reach
• Offers highly targeted paid advertising
• Allows integration with other marketing channels
Digital marketing offers many channels for building communication with your audience: social media, email, instant messengers, search engines, SMS, web push notifications, etc. Let's take a closer look at the reasons why you should consider Facebook as a platform for growth. Your business:
1. Has a global reach. More than 1.5 billion users visit Facebook every day. About 2.3 billion monthly. More than 7 million active companies create ads for this huge audience.
2. Offers highly targeted paid advertising. With Facebook Ads, you can tailor your promotions to specific audiences based on gender, age, location, job, interests - any demographic or behavioral data that users are willing to share with Facebook.
3. Allows you to integrate with other marketing channels. Facebook marketing is not a single, isolated system. You can combine it with other marketing channels such as email marketing, mobile marketing, search engine marketing, and Facebook Messenger advertising to design a set of promotions that will increase your brand's reach.
Benefits of Facebook Marketing
• Precise aiming
• Increase site traffic
• Variety of ad formats
• Support
• Positive impact on SEO
In our courses, we'll take a closer look at the benefits of using Facebook in your marketing strategy. You will find out what goals you can achieve with this platform, in addition to reaching a wide audience.
1. Precise guidance. You already know that Facebook allows users to deeply segment their audience, but let's take a closer look at the options available. With demographic targeting, you can select an audience with a specific income, education level, life events, relationship status, or job. You can search for customers based on their interests, such as preferred entertainment, sports, hobbies, and shopping habits. Plus, you can reach out to customers based on purchasing behavior, intent, device usage, and more.
2. Increase in website traffic. With this platform, you can direct your audience directly to your website. What's more, these people will be better quality leads than users who land on your site because they already know your company. Hence, they have more confidence in you. Encourage your subscribers to visit your site to learn more about your products. In addition, when you click on a link to a website, Facebook generates a full-size image, if there is one on your website page. Thus, it will grab the attention of many users and help you increase your website traffic.
3. Variety of ad formats. Facebook provides great opportunities for companies to showcase their products in the best possible way. Ads on this platform include both text and visual formats. You can promote your post by turning it into an ad, create stories to show your behind-the-scenes scripts, make a slideshow from your new collection, use carousel ads to showcase up to 10 products linking to relevant pages, and more.
4. Support service. Many people prefer to communicate with the brand through social media. Phone calls are a thing of the past. Create a chatbot for Facebook Messenger to chat with users based on their popular keywords. These can include “price,” “shipping,” “payment options,” “purchase,” and so on. You just need to develop a script based on the users' frequently asked questions and write the answers. Your chatbot will simulate a real conversation. As a result, your support team will have time to solve more complex issues, and you will be able to automate routine tasks.
5. Positive impact on SEO. Some marketers claim that social media influences search rankings. Robots are considered to consider your data in the "About Us" section when ranking. Moreover, your participation in social media helps a lot. Posts, likes, and comments tell Google that people are interested in and interact with your brand.
Facebook Marketing Formats
Facebook is not only the leader in social media, but also a fast-growing company with half a million new accounts created a day. Over time, Facebook developers have come up with new ad formats to meet today's Facebook ad funnel requirements, optimizing time-tested ads. Here's a list of Facebook marketing formats:
1. Video advertising
This is a great way to showcase your product's capabilities in action. Facebook allows you to use different types of videos to achieve specific goals: short videos and GIFs to quickly grab attention on the go, or in-stream videos for longer viewing, just like on TV.
2. Image ads
If your budget is too tight to create videos, image ads are a good idea for creating high-quality ads quickly and easily. This format will help you build brand awareness and drive people to your site.
3. Carousel ads
This format allows you to display up to ten images or videos in a single ad - each with a link to a specific product page. It provides ample scope for creativity and interactivity as you can detail a single product or multiple different products, or tell a story shared by these carousel cards.
4. Collage
It's like a small catalog of your products right in your Facebook feed post. The ad consists of one original video or image and four smaller images, shown in a grid below.
5. Slideshow
It is a video format that displays well even with low internet connection speeds. You can create these ads using various stock images, some handy video editing tools, and even music.
6. Ads to attract leads
This format was designed to help you attract leads, especially for mobile users. When a user clicks on an image in such an ad, the opt-in form is displayed directly in the ad, making a few clicks enough to subscribe to your newsletters.
There are also three types of engagement ads - post engagement, event responses, and page likes.
How to Create an Effective Facebook Marketing Strategy
It doesn't matter which channel you use, you need to develop a strategy. This will help you clearly define your goals, choose the best methods to achieve them, define your target audience, measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and improve them. Below we outline a plan that is universal for any business looking to develop a Facebook marketing strategy.
Step 1. Set your goals
It all starts with setting a goal. Regardless of your type of business, the overall goals of every company are the same. Facebook offers opportunities to achieve the following goals:
• generation of leads;
• engagement and classification of your potential customers;
• attracting traffic to the site;
• increase in conversion and sales;
• improving customer support;
• increasing brand awareness;
• increasing customer engagement;
• recruitment.
Your goal dictates the methods, messages and ad formats that you will use to achieve it. You can break your goal down into small, intermediate tasks. Thus, achieving each of them will bring you closer to achieving your big goal. Finally, create a list of KPIs that you will use to measure the effectiveness of each method.
Step 2. Determine your target audience
Analyzing your target audience is a high priority because your ad methods and formats depend on it.
To collect and store all the data about your target audience and make the whole process more efficient, create a customer profile. It should include information about their location, age, gender, job title and income level. In our course, you will learn how to properly create a customer profile.
Facebook audience statistics are a treasure trove of information about your customers. Use all available tools to analyze your audience.
Step 3. Select content formats and schedule publications.
Now that you've identified your audience and set goals, it's time to start thinking about a content strategy that will help you achieve them. A content marketing strategy means that you have to create a step-by-step plan that includes the types and formats of content that you will be creating. Remember, the more content you create, the higher your conversion rates will be. Using a variety of formats, consistent posting and customer interactions will dramatically increase user engagement.
You should also consider using the right mix of content. Advertising content alone will not help you build trust with your audience. Plus, Facebook can punish overly annoying marketers for their promotions. So, mix educational, informative, entertaining, and promotional content. If you can manage to provide quality and relevant content, customers will be happy to learn more about your product.
The last important issue is the consistency and frequency of posting. We recommend that you publish 5 posts per week. This way, you don't overwhelm customers with your posts and can create quality content without tight deadlines. To do this, use the content calendar. With it, you will get a clear understanding of your content marketing strategy. Take care of all the marketing channels you use, align each goal with the content format, and distribute them across all channels.
So, to create an effective content marketing calendar, include the following information:
• all the channels that you use;
• the types of content you are using;
• date and time of publication;
• subject of your message;
• URL;
• link to the image;
• message status.
Fortunately, Facebook gives you the ability to schedule posts and set up automatic posting. So there is no need to worry about human error.
Step 4. Boost Your Post With Facebook Ads
Facebook is a great advertising platform. This allows brands to reach a wide audience, provides a variety of targeting options, tools for successful reach, and relatively low prices. It is based on a bidding strategy. You choose the timing, ad placement and target audience.
The ad center interface is intuitive and pretty simple, so it won't give you any hassle.
Step 5.Use Facebook tools
Facebook provides much more value than you might expect. There are many useful tools that will make your work with this channel more efficient and profitable.
Step 6. Measure your performance
Your strategy alone will not work. Its effectiveness primarily depends on how well your audience interacts with your brand. Watching them participate can help you get a clear idea of the methods that work best for you and the ones that scare away your followers.
Fortunately, you don't need third-party services to track your performance as Facebook offers its own tool called Insights. You will learn which formats work best and if your content was mixed correctly. You can check page views, post engagement, story reach, page activity, analyze your followers, and more.
Facebook and email marketing
We have a variety of marketing channels to choose from: Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Advertising, Messenger, Email Marketing and many more. It's great that you can combine these platforms to achieve specific marketing goals with precision never seen before.
Find out the best proportions of email and Facebook marketing in your overall strategy. Let's see how these channels can complement each other.
What can Facebook add to email marketing?
With lead ads, Facebook allows people to subscribe to your email newsletter right in a Facebook post. In addition to lead ads, you can use the positive user reviews collected on Facebook into your email campaigns to build trust through social proof.
Try SendPulse's Facebook integration to ensure that all users who subscribe to your Facebook page are automatically added to your mailing list.
How can you combine email marketing with Facebook?
Email marketing is a platform where the central communication element is email - a message containing text, suggestions and calls to action. It aims to drive sales and build long-term relationships with your audience. In the footer of each email, you can add social media buttons and invite followers to interact with your brand on Facebook. You can also create free emails offering bonuses for posting about your brand on social media.
With SendPulse, you can collect user email addresses and allow them to join your Facebook Messenger chatbot with a single subscription form. To create a multi-channel form, you need to add a link to your chatbot.
Facebook Marketing Tips
There are many tricks that can help you make your Facebook marketing strategy more effective. In this article, we will share a few tips.
1. Choose the best time. Marketers are always interested in the optimal timing for their publications. You can also check the effectiveness of any post and find out the best times. Plus, you'll know when your audience is most active. Plus, you can experiment and publish different types of content both during peak and off-peak hours to find the optimal times.
2. Promote your Facebook page on other channels. To drive traffic to your page, you need to make sure as many of your potential customers as possible know about it. You are definitely on other digital marketing channels, so why not take advantage of this opportunity? If you're in the email marketing business, add a Facebook button to each of your campaigns so users can easily follow the link. If you have a blog, let your readers share articles with their friends on Facebook.
3. Use the appropriate URL for your page. By Relevant URL, we mean using your brand. This way, you can easily share your link on other channels, it will be easy to recognize and remember, and it will look more professional. The most important benefit is that your URL will contain your keyword, which will make your SEO strategy more effective and your page more searchable on Google.
4. Add a CTA button. This easy-to-use method will help you increase conversions, increase engagement, and drive traffic to any page. It all depends on your goal. Review your page and think about what action a regular user might want to take after viewing it.
5. Support customers through the Facebook Messenger bot. Customers expect brands to answer their questions immediately. Doing it manually is not an easy task. Build a chatbot that will answer FAQs, help customers place orders, detect shipping issues, and simply learn more about your brand.
6. Use the Facebook pixel. It is an analytics tool that gives you more insight into customer actions. With the Facebook Pixel, you can create targeted ads for your future campaigns. Plus, you can track the performance of your ads. After the user buys something or takes any other action, this will be reported. So, you can find out if your ads are delivering the results you want, and then you can connect with that client.
With our courses, you can create an effective Facebook marketing strategy.