9 Facebook Marketing Ideas That Actually Work
Did you know the total daily circulation of newspapers alone fell nearly 54% from 2004 – 2017? Did you also know Facebook was launched in 2004?
A strong marketing channel that not only kept millions of Americans updated daily but also helped brands market their products eventually fell from an estimated 60+ million daily circulation to a bare bone of 30 million. This left marketers increasingly seeking the golden blueprints of Facebook marketing ideas.
Our 9 Facebook Marketing Ideas That Actually Work
We have put together a simple list of 9 Facebook marketing ideas to showcase how brands can take advantage of the various marketing tactics on a social media channel that engages around 2.2 billion active users monthly.
Facebook Custom Audiences – Creating & Using
Through its suite of business tools, Facebook advertising has given marketers the ability to create custom audiences based on either their past or current behaviors. Below are some Facebook custom audiences that can be created from within this tool and have proven to be a good resource for any marketing arsenal.
- Visitors to your website
- People who have liked your Facebook page
- People who have viewed your video ads and other content on Facebook
- Your customer email lists
- People who have downloaded your app or made a purchase before
- Users with interests & behaviors similar to your brand’s target market
Boosting Facebook Page Posts to Increase Engagement
Whether you use posts filled with content, offers & contests or promote an event on your page, there is only one way to make sure your content reaches your desired audience – A Paid Social Strategy.
Facebook’s latest update for brand advertisers was disappointing in that it cut down a page’s organic post reach drastically unless the posts are shared by customers, friends & family. Good news is you can boost your business posts for as little as $1 per day to make sure they reach the right audience and keep your audience engaged.
Boosting posts not only helps you promote specific page posts to the right audience but also improves the overall health of your business page in terms of followers and reach. This social media tactic also lets you put call-to-action buttons on your posts that can direct users to take a specific action to a website landing page or open up a message window that allows them to contact you directly.
There are other tactics like utilizing Facebook page insights & audience profiles which we will talk about in detail later. Facebook provides enough tools to make sure you are keeping your audience engaged.
Promoting to a Lookalike Audience
With such an enormous & diverse user base, chances are that there are people similar to your customer audience who are active on Facebook and are your potential targets. Facebook’s advertising platform helps match these users with your customer email list. The new audience that is created is called a lookalike audience. Lookalike audiences share similar characteristics & behaviors with your current customers allowing you to promote relevant content, products, and services to this new audience you have created. Chances are, they will be more receptive to your messaging than otherwise less interested users.
Talk to our team of experts to see how you can benefit from this Facebook marketing tactic and get your product in front of an audience that really matters.
Taking Advantage of Facebook’s Pixel Data & Custom Conversions
One of the most useful Facebook business tools is Facebook Pixels. Pixels is a Facebook code that you input in your website’s HTML that triggers every time someone performs an action on your website. The premise of this tool is to let you build custom conversions from actions on your website – think page visits, video views, online orders, and button clicks.
Inside Facebook’s Ad Tool Filled with Analytics & Estimates
While Facebook gives you access to all the above impactful tools, they all come to conjoint at a central – an ad creator tool called Ads Manager.
Using Ads Manager, you can create new ads targeting an interest based audience – people who follow a certain interest group or behave a way that interests your brand. Or, target your custom audiences like past website visitors and lookalike audiences explained above.
The best part about the tool is that depending on your campaign objective and strategy, it gives you daily performance estimates based on your ad spend or duration of the campaign. Small business owners and marketers enjoy being able to see predicted metrics on how many people will see an ad or how many link clicks you can expect out of a campaign before you even start putting a single dollar? Ads Manager does just that and more.
Whether you want to use it for Facebook marketing ideas or just use it as a reporting tool to see campaign progress, chance is, it will never leave you disappointed.
As a bonus feature, expect to see a fitting preview of how our ad looks across devices & formats here. This preview will help you determine how exactly your ads will look before you launch them.
Kinds of posts that work well – Ad formats
Over the years, Facebook has introduced more than 14 updates to its ad formats. While we have seen a shift from desktop traffic to majority mobile consumption, the ad formats too have changed specs to fit smaller devices. With Facebook’s algorithms giving visibility preference to newer ad formats, it is wise to keep testing different ad formats when you think about singling out some Facebook marketing ideas.
Research by a prominent publication outlines how rich media ad formats like carousel and video outperform traditional image ads on Facebook by more than 200%. This may depend from industry to industry, but the availability of newer ad formats on Facebook has helped brands reach their audience in a better way. For this reason, we suggest you create at least 3 different ad formats in each of your campaigns. You will soon notice how newer formats like carousel and collections have a lower cost per result as compared to the traditional image ads.
Video, too, is a great way to bump up your campaign performance. For example, Facebook’s video content has three times the engagement than that of YouTube’s. Historically, ads or posts with videos in them tend to generate greater user engagement which can be a good marketing metric to determine campaign effectiveness.
We once wrote about some fun & engaging social media tactics that can be used to boost your audience engagement. We are following up with this case in point of using newer ad formats across your content.
Facebook page insights in another great way to see which post formats worked best for your audience. From inside posting data, you can see how your audience reacts to different posts on your page. This helps dictate what resonates with your audience type and how they are engaging with your posts.
Using the full power of emojis & hashtags
One of the most prominent features of social media is its adaptability to the changing trends and introduction of stimuli that engages a crowd mentally. This is transformed into the creation of internet slang, emojis, GIFs, and #hashtags.
According to a published study, 74% of people in the U.S. regularly use emojis in their online communications. They are used & responded to as peppers of visual proof inside text. According to scientists it gives a break to the senses in a way that the text becomes more receptive. So much so that the use of emojis in ad campaigns have increased more than 10% in the last year.
As per Facebook researchers, a simple use of an emoji in a post increases engagement & reach by nearly 57%. For this reason, it is no surprise that brands have started using emojis in their advertising campaigns. From Holiday Inn letting customers order for breakfast from their room to Domino’s delivering pizzas to customers who tweet a pizza emoji to them, Emojis are here to stay as long as citizens use them as a short hand.
This process has facilitated in the rise of popular social #hashtag movements by brands & activists that have seen vast organic engagements envied by paid marketers around the world.
Brands using trending #hashtags in their posts have seen a two-fold engagement rate on Facebook due to their posts now being seen by a larger number of users searching for the respective #hashtag on Facebook.
Optimize your campaigns to reach specific goals
Owing to the massive reach of this social media giant, there are thousands of brands out there trying to get in front of their customers on Facebook every day. Each of them employing different Facebook marketing ideas to try and achieve their respective objectives. The Facebook team understands this well and automatically lets you select from a list of available optimizing options. Right from reaching the maximum number of people with a limited budget to engaging users to comment on posts.
This feature allows brands to automatically optimize their ad delivery to meet the desired objective.
With the onset of technological advancement, it is safe to say that Facebook marketing ideas can make or break a brand’s marketing return on investment. But with the above mix of tactics, you definitely have a great foundation for your Facebook marketing strategy.
Learn more about how you can use a social media marketing company to capture your brand’s audience and understand the changing dynamics of Facebook advertising. Contact us so we can discuss your campaign.