Let’s face it – the digital world is enough chaos alone. There are many things to keep up with and many things have to be done to make your business stand out from all the noise. To avoid delving in this chaos, planning an online strategy is more critical than ever. It will give you a clear sense of direction in achieving your SMART goals. Moreover, it will shed light on any drawbacks that may appear later in the growth journey of your business. To make this article reach its full potential, we are going to divide it into two posts; today, we will show you how to outline an essential starter strategy for your Facebook Business. We’ll demonstrate the DOs and DONTs of an organized approach that you can start applying to your business NOW.
Before we start, we need to highlight a key fact:
Developing a powerful FB marketing strategy is a very individual thing. Each strategy should be catered to a specific goal for a certain marketing strategy for a specific business. General rules accommodate many businesses, but tailoring a specific strategy to your needs requires knowledge, experience, and usually lots of trial and error till you find your most suitable fit.
1) SET YOUR MAIN, BIG GOAL FOR THIS STRATEGY
Like increasing conversion rates, elevating the quality of leads, raising brand awareness, boosting fan engagement, …..Etc.
2) MAKE IT SMART
If you are not familiar with the term, the SMART acronym stands for “specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely” goals. Let’s apply this to an example. Instead of generally aiming to boost fan engagement, you may define your goal as to reach 10,000 engagements for 3 posts this month.
This is crucial because SMART goals allow you to evaluate your progress and the validity of your marketing strategy.
Don’t create goals that are unmeasurable or irrelevant to your current strategy like accumulating unrelated Followers and Likes.
DO track your progress with proper insight tools found in Facebook and third party websites.
3) DESIGNATE AND ANALYZE YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
Who are you are selling your business/products to? This is your audience. Sketching a rough mental image of your audience characteristics can really help in selecting your audience. However, if you have absolutely no idea where to start and who to select, Facebook Audience Insights tool got your back! You can use Facebook Audience Insights to research the interest of your competitors’ followers and use them as a cheat-sheet on who to select as your audience. Let’s say you own a bakery; you can type the name of popular bakeries in interests section in the insights tool to see what type of audience may be interested in your bakery. Then, check for any demographic pattern among these people and use it to build your target audience. This is a great kick-starter to narrowing down relevant potential customers/clients.
Don’t widen your audience scope aimlessly. This highly increases the probability of reaching an uninterested audience and makes it harder to reach your right audience!
4) PLAN AND MONITOR YOUR PERIODIC BUDGET
Let’s say you decide to make a monthly budget. Start by setting a revenue goal. Why do this? You don’t want the soaring engagement to dazzle you and make you miss that there is no apparent effect on your sales!
Avoid haphazard planning like saying “We’ll use a 2500$ and see how things turn out.” Try to work it out as “We need an $X budget for Facebook ads to generate $Y revenue for this month”. Setting a revenue goal makes your strategy crystal-clear as it demonstrates bold monetary targets and helps you estimate return on ad spend (ROAS) {aka ROI on ads}. By doing so, you can observe and evaluate the cost-effectiveness of this plan.
5) CREATE ENGAGING CONTENT
To keep it simple, engaging content=impactful content. Here, by impactful, we mean that it instigates a response in the audience relevant to the content of the post.
The challenge is that to leave an impression on the average user, you have stricter standards of creating memorable content. Good news is if you are able to nail those standards, you will easily stand out and outshine your competitors.
To put you on the right track, keep these 5 sparkling tips in your mind whenever you start composing your content:
- Put the Customer First
Think of what the customer wants to see, feel, or hear and transcribe every word in your post with that thought in mind.
2. Make your Post Scream Value
Posts are generally deemed worthy by users only if they deem value. However, you must know two things:
- Everyone has his/her own perceived definition of “valuable”. Just because you are a National Geographic fan doesn’t mean that a witty scientific joke in your posts will grab attention Moreover, take a look at memes. They are everywhere, everyone loves them, and they are just sheer entertainment. However, the perceived value of entertainment they give is high enough to be adored and shared by people over and over. Why not? They are usually funny, relatable, and easy to understand. Try to keep those words in mind in the next post you want to go viral ;).
- . Remember the first rule? ALWAYS PUT THE CUSTOMER FIRST.
Check for common interests among your followers and target audience. These are your signal checks for what should actually be in your posts.
3. Sprinkle a bit of emoticons here and there
According to a research, including emoticons in a post increases comments by an average of 33% and likes by about 57%!
4. Run Giveaways and Contests periodically
We all love free stuff. Especially when there is a bit of adrenaline rush in the process. Any posts that drive user interactions naturally drive engagement.
To Be Continued in Part Two…..