Facebook Marketing: Things you should know

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Marketing is a process by which you make your product popular among the customers. It is a form of communication between you and your customers with the intent of selling the product or the services to the consumers. While marketing any product or a service, the coordination of the 4 P’s becomes very essential.

Now you may be wondering about what are those 4 P’s?

Well, they are Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.

Nowadays promotion has become an important part of marketing the products. If you are not promoting your product well, then you might be missing out on reaching your target audience.

Also apart from the promotion, the quality of the product is also important. You need to maintain a level of quality that is not only acceptable to the audience but should be really good that your customer themselves should become the promoter of your product.

In order to reach a large target consumer base for your product, the price of the product plays a key role in comparison to its quality. Also, the platform/place of promoting/selling your product becomes when it comes to making a good profit.

Hence, marketing becomes an integral part of the success of any business products/services.

What is Facebook Marketing?

Facebook is an online social-networking site that has the world’s largest user base.

It continues to be the reigning champ of social networking sites.

People connect with each other and share with each other on Facebook.

It is not only the place where people connect but gradually has turned into a media through which many businesses are marketing their products today.

Amazon, Flipkart, Jabong, etc. all these companies have been marketing their products on the Facebook through advertisements.

Facebook has grown into a venue for businesses to market themselves through interaction with customers and self-promotion.

Facebook marketing is a feature by Facebook offers its own form of advertising with Facebook ads, which appear in the side columns of the Facebook site.

These classic ads are referred to more specifically as Marketplace Ads. They include a headline with a copy, an image, and a click-through link to a Facebook page, a Facebook app, or an outside website.

##How to market and promote the product/business on Facebook?

There are multiple ways in which you can market or promote your business on Facebook.

It only depends on your creativity to find the best way to do that. But before promoting your business on Facebook, first, you need to find that whether your maximum customer base available on Facebook or not.

It is also important to know whether they expect to find your business there.

If you run any kind of consumer-facing enterprises, such as a cafe, a shop, a plumbing business or an e-commerce website, many of your customers will want to keep in touch on Facebook.

Below are few ways in which you can do marketing of your product/service on Facebook

1. Facebook ads:

You can use the feature of Facebook ads that appear In the right side columns of the Facebook site.

Facebook advertising features include:

  • Demographic targeting by Facebook user data on age, location, education, and interests.
  • The ability to set ad budget.
  • Ad testing, in which multiple ad versions can be run simultaneously in order to compare ad designs and setup.
  • Built-in ad performance measurement tools.

*2. Hosting Facebook Contests:

  • Running Facebook contests, sweepstakes, or promotions is another Facebook marketing tactic that can increase fans and brand awareness.
  • When conducting a Facebook contest, be aware that contests can’t be hosted through Facebook itself (meaning you can’t ask for likes as entries, have people write answers in the comments, etc.) Businesses must use a third-party app for creating their Facebook contest, then direct users to the app from their Facebook page.

3. Facebook promoted posts:

Facebook Promoted Posts let Facebook page owners pay a flat rate in order to have their individual Facebook posts reach a certain number of users, increasing a specific post’s reach and impressions.

4. Sponsored Stories:

Sponsored Stories are a type of Facebook ad that shows a user’s interactions, such as a Facebook like, to the user’s friends.

Sponsored Stories seeks to capitalize on the “word of mouth” marketing concept.

If a user sees that three of his friends like a certain page, he is more inclined to pay attention. The goal of Sponsored Stories is to have a user take the same action as their friends.

Advertisers can choose to show friends “likes” if they want more page likes, show friends who have “claimed this offer” if a business wants more users to claim offers, etc.

Points to follow for promoting your business on Facebook

  1. Identify your customer base on Facebook.
  2. Register for a free account: You can create your own business page on Facebook through free online registration.
  3. You can also refer to Facebook for the business page for advice. It contains various case studies featuring different types of businesses.
  4. Once your business page on Facebook is ready, you need to make people aware of it. You can use other social networking sites to do that. You can post the link of your Facebook page on other social media like Twitter and invite people to join your Facebook community page.
  5. Make your profile unique and attractive

Include the appropriate picture that well defines your product/service.

The best picture serves as an effective way to attract a huge number of users.

Also give a short, simple and attractive overview of your company and a description of your product/service on your Facebook page.

  • Post content that people typically enjoy on Facebook:

For e.g. images, in particular, tend to attract most likes, shares, and comments. But make sure that the content that you are posting depicts your business in line with your brand and human values and does not hamper your reputation.

  • Engage with your users:

Facebook users love to interact with real people and share their views and news. They love to get feedback on their queries they raise to you through posts and comments.

  • Direct your Facebook page followers to your blog or website. You can share the link of your website or blog and direct the target audience to see your blog or website.
  • Reward your Facebook followers.

You can arrange for some online competitions/quests and reward the winner with some gifts or online shopping coupons which will attract other users in return.

Advantages of Facebook marketing

  1. Your Business attracts a large number of consumer bases through social networking.
  2. Facebook marketing also helps to cut down on costs that incur in real life physical marketing. It reduces the costs of banners and hoardings. And also the cost of renting the space to place the banners/hoardings is removed.
  3. You can also up-sell your product/services to the customers who recently purchased a specific product/service. Like on most of the online shopping sites they give you an option displaying that the “customers who bought this item also bought this” as below:
  4. You also create marketing campaigns on Facebook.
  5. You can also place the ads and campaigns demographically based on the location that you want to target.
  6. Once someone likes your page through your ad, this fact shows up on the Facebook news feeds of all their friends. And because people tend to trust recommendations from their friends, they may well click like too.

The disadvantage of Facebook marketing

  1. Social media marketing carries several risks. Unless you have someone check your social media accounts several times a day, disgruntled customers or employees can publish negative comments that are not always removable.
  2. It’s difficult to catch people’s attention. People are so busy on Facebook that they often don’t pay any attention to the ads. They are far more interested in chatting with their friends.
  3. Updating your social media accounts takes time and effort. A senior person with knowledge about the company and products should handle your social media presence, and the cost in time means the media is not completely free.
  4. Since people on Facebook are more interested in chatting with their friends, looking for images and other stuff their friends have posted and shared, there is the low conversion rate for the e-Commerce on Facebook as the users on Facebook are rarely thinking about buying something.
  5. There are many advertising campaigns that are wrongly created on the Facebook page which are completely irrelevant and weird and are, at times, off-putting to users of the system. Free giveaways, reward programs, and humor sites have continued to flood the system, giving the ads less relevance when the consumer is viewing them.

Conclusion

Facebook has come a long way since first releasing their advertising engine. When it first came out, people were very skeptical of the low-quality ads that were being displayed and how effective they were at converting. But if you can get the right mix of demographics, copy an image, then you can really make Facebook advertising work for you.

Get Started with your own Marketing Campaign on Facebook, Contact Us Now!