User behavior is ever changing and Facebook is constantly evolving. What Facebook used to be 5 years ago is not what it is today. This is the same with users and customers as well. Social media managers and social media marketers need to regularly find newer ways of attracting new customers and retaining older ones. In the process, they are faced with a few challenges. With Facebook being the top social channel that businesses use to market their products, it is important to be aware of the challenges that you might face (and how you can fix them). Let’s jump into it right away.
Facebook – Top Social Media Channel
#1 NO FACEBOOK MARKETING PLAN
A working plan is the starting point to any kind of marketing, be it online, offline, or on social media. Having a Facebook marketing plan ensures that you can give your brand the opportunity to showcase its products to the right audience. It also helps you define the objectives or goals you wish to achieve through marketing on Facebook.
If you are to compete with over 70 million businesses on Facebook, you sure need a marketing plan. There are two things you need to come up with a marketing plan:
Creating Customer Personas
It is important to know who you are selling to — the people you created your brand and products for, the people who will be interested in and purchase them. To achieve this, you need to get into the specifics of what your ideal customer is like, what their income should be if you were to talk to them about your products, their demographics, etc.
Facebook Marketing Goals
The next step is to chart out the goals you want to achieve through Facebook marketing. This will help you design the activities around your campaign and help you focus your marketing efforts around your target audience.
Facebook Advertising Objectives
Some of the common marketing objectives include
- Build blog subscriber list
- Improve blog readership
- Increase sales-qualified leads
- Create brand awareness
- Drive traffic to your website
- Grow Facebook page followers
- Track and provide customer support
Once you have these two things in place, it gets easy to create a content plan, promotion strategies, etc. Also, Facebook has a detailed help section on advertising that you can take a look at.
#2 NO CONTENT STRATEGY
No matter which kind of ad format you choose, content is essential to marketing. It can be text-based, visual, or audio but it needs to be there. More importantly, your content needs to be in line with your brand values and your Facebook marketing goals. All in all, marketing without content is inefficient. It is not just enough to sell your product on Facebook, you need to sell an experience.
To start with, you will want to know what kind of content works for your brand. There is no one strategy written on stone. So, how do you get around this? Facebook Insights will help you with detailed analytics on what kind of posts work best for your brand and how people are responding to them. Alternatively, you can use a social media reporting software to help you with that data.
Facebook Insights Post Analytics
It is advisable to have content planned for at least 10-12 weeks in advance. You can create a Facebook content calendar that details all the content that you will be publishing on your Facebook page. In order to save time, you can invest in a social media publishing software that will allow you to schedule content well in advance. This will also solve the problem of figuring out the optimal times to post your content. Most of this software comes with an inbuilt analytics feature that you can use to track how your posts are performing.
#3 NOT GENERATING TRAFFIC AND LEADS
With Facebook’s algorithm changing ever so often, marketers find it difficult to create sufficient demand for the content they are producing. The nature of user behavior is also a major cause for this.
Though marketers spend a considerable amount of time creating high-quality content, the leads don’t convert. This could be due to Facebook heading towards laying importance on paid ad content. It could also be due to the right content not being crafted for your target audience. How then would you overcome this challenge?
Improving Click-Through Rate
Organic content is not in vogue right now, particularly on Facebook. This means you need to spend money on paid ads. Some of the points for you to remember when creating Facebook ads are
- Choose the right ad type for your objective
- Keep it simple and straightforward
- Ideal headline length is 4 words and description is 15 words
- Use visual content such as images
- Try Facebook Live and boost the content
- A/B content regularly
Getting Your Content Mix Right
As mentioned earlier, you need to know what type of content will work best for your target audience. This doesn’t mean choosing between text-based and visual content. You also need to know what kind of posts your audience will enjoy and engage with. Does your target audience expect informative blog posts, video tutorials, instant social customer support, or promotional content?
Using a Dedicated Landing Page
This is an important way to secure leads for your brands. You need to have a landing page up when you are running ads on Facebook. You can drive all your traffic from the ads to this landing page. From there you can start nurturing your leads for good conversions.
You can explore this combination using one of the listed methods:
- Contests
- Email-gated content
- Giveaways
- Coupons
Using Facebook Targeting Options
You need to avoid shooting in the dark and expecting people to show up on your website. It’s a waste of time and money. Facebook’s detailed targeting options allow you to reach your brand’s niche audience.
Facebook Targeting Options
There are three ways in which you can target and reach your customers on Facebook.
Core Audience
This type of audience is where you have to manually look through filters that Facebook offers and select the ones that match your customer personas. These filters include demographics, location, interests, behavior, and connections. You can broaden or narrow it as much as you want to meet your marketing goals.
Facebook Core Target Advertising
Custom Audience
These are the people you already know outside Facebook but whom you wish to connect with through Facebook. This option helps in strengthening relationship ties with customers; they can also help you get quicker sales. Facebook offers multiple ways in which you can target these people. Once you have created a custom audience on Facebook, you can set up ads to be shown only to them.
Facebook Custom Audience Targeting
Lookalike Audience
This option helps you expand your target audience without deviating too much from the customer personas you have created for your brand. These are people who are similar to your niche audience and who show promise of becoming a lead or making a purchase.
Facebook Lookalike Audience Targeting
#4 NO ROI ON FACEBOOK MARKETING CAMPAIGNS
Now that you have run a few paid ad campaigns on Facebook, the next logical thing to do is to measure the return on investment (ROI). This has been quite a challenge not because it involves a lot of numbers and data but due to the lack of establishing a correlation between marketing and sales.
Facebook ROI is not measured just by the number of likes or shares your posts get. Facebook does a great job in providing detailed analytics and reports on how each of your campaigns is performing and based on the campaign goals you have set. Here are the top types of insights you can expect to see on Facebook and make use of.
Audience Insights
This gives you information about the people who follow your brand on Facebook and the custom audience that has connected with you outside Facebook. You will get to know their demographics, their lifestyle, interests, etc. With this information, you can create content that resonates with the audience and avoid the guesswork that comes with marketing.
Audience Insights Facebook
Like Audience Insights is for checking the impact for organic content, Adverts reports gives you information of how your ads are doing on Facebook. This helps you understand the kind of impact your brand has on its followers and customers. Using this information you can improve your marketing tactics. You can check if you are targeting the right audience using your ads as well as monitor the results of your campaigns. Verify if your ads are delivering optimum results or you might just have to visit the drawing board again.
Advert Reporting Facebook
Advert Reporting Facebook
Advert Reporting Facebook
Split Testing
As mentioned earlier, A/B testing is one of the key aspects of marketing. You need to constantly test which type of content and creative works for which type of audience demographics. This helps you focus on the better-performing ones resulting in better ROI. Facebook has come a long way in creating one of the best social media marketing platforms for businesses. And you need to take advantage of it.
Split Testing Facebook
Other Facebook Reporting Options
Facebook offers plenty of other options that you can explore for both online and offline reporting. You can insights on which offline events brought what kind of sales, you can cross-market your products and services and see how that has worked, etc. To find out all about it, head over to Facebook’s help section.
CONCLUSION
These are the top four and common challenges that most organizations and business face when marketing on Facebook. A detailed analysis of your marketing strategy combined with its performance will help you identify the areas that need improvement. This will guide your future marketing strategies in the right direction.
So, tell me, did your business face any of these Facebook marketing challenges? What was your approach and how did you solve them? Share your experiences with us as comments. If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them for you.
@nykontym
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