7 Facebook Marketing Tips To Get New Customers

Effective Facebook Marketing Tips To Spruce Up Your Social Media Strategy

In recent years social media networks have risen to the top of every savvy marketers list of useful marketing tools.

Facebook and its fellow networks are no longer just about sharing your latest holiday snaps or connecting with long lost friends. They’ve made the transition into the world of business, becoming viable sources of revenue and the ideal grounds for sourcing new customers.

This development isn’t exactly a secret, however, knowing exactly what to do to get the most out of them is. Despite every marketers efforts to make the most out of their social media following, very few are able to run a successful campaign.

Part of this failure is down to time. There are now so many different networks that trying to run a campaign across them all just isn’t feasible.

Some companies will be better served with a visual network like Instagram whilst others will see better results through the quick updates of Twitter. However, regardless of the business you run or the products you sell, there’s one network that always performs well. Facebook.

Why You Should Be Using Facebook

Despite the growing popularity of other networks, Facebook still reigns supreme. Below you’ll see the statistics for all of the various social networks and their estimated user numbers from Statista.com.

Facebook is by far the largest network which gives you a far better size customer base to draw from.

It’s also one of the better ways to quickly extend the reach and influence of your brand. Every time a happy customer likes your page or product, it’s shown on the wall of all of their friends.

If we take Pew Research at their word, that means that for every single like your product could be seen by around 338 new prospects.

Finally, and most importantly, social media sites allow for a far more personal relationship with your prospects. Large faceless companies are given a more recognisable and trustworthy voice.

With trust playing a major role in purchase decisions, the ability to form a connection with your prospects is not to be underestimated.

However, the questions isn’t why should you be using Facebook to find new customers, but rather how.

Well, thankfully we’ve got an answer for that as well. Here are 7 Facebook marketing tips to help you get new customers:

1. It All Starts With A Goal

As with any marketing strategy you first need to establish what exactly it is you want to achieve.Without a goal you lack direction and without direction you’ll make no progress. In this case, our goal is to find new customers and for that we need to do a little preparation work.

Setting up a Facebook page and gathering likes is all well and good. Unfortunately you can’t take your likes to the bank so you need to set up a proper funnel which originates at your Facebook page.

A dedicated landing page with an irresistible offer or product page that simply cannot be ignored. Of all the Facebook marketing tips we’ve written, this one is of most importance. This is the page where you’re going to convert traffic into customers so it has to be absolutely amazing.

However, your product or landing page won’t work by itself. Now we need to turn our attention onto our goal of attracting great prospects to convert into customers. The next step?

2. Digging Into Audience Research

One goal of your Facebook marketing strategy should be to get your Facebook fans away from Facebook and onto your own site. There’s no point having thousands of fans and likes if it results in zero leads and sales.

You can take one of two approaches with this.

No prizes for guessing which method brings the best ROI!

We’re really fortunate in this case as Facebook provides it’s own comprehensive analytics suite, Facebook Insights.

Our goal is to create Facebook updates that resonate well with your audience. Facebook updates that your audience like build trust and create pre qualified traffic back to your primary product/landing page.

Working out what kind of updates are going to do well isn’t easy, to really get the best start you should be looking at the below Insight metrics.

3. Engagement

Facebook classifies engagement as ‘the number of people who click anywhere within your post’

When your audience is commenting, liking or sharing your post, it’s doing what it’s supposed to. You need to find the posts that rank highly for engagement and work out what makes them so appealing.

I’d argue that engagement is the most important metric to measure. Having your content in front of huge amounts of people is useless if it doesn’t engage them. Finding out what works is the base for effective marketing.

4. CTR

Having audience members comment, share and like is great for creating an active community. But at the end of it all, you want them to click through to your own website.

Measuring the CTR (click-through rate) for various posts allows you to see what content helps garner the largest amount of traffic back to your own site.

5. Negative Feedback

Negative feedback reports the basic negative actions audience members take such as hiding posts, unliking items or reporting you as spam.

Sometimes knowing what works isn’t enough, you’ve also got to know what to avoid.

Collect as much data as possible on the above areas to get an idea of the kind of content your audience enjoys engaging with and gets you a high CTR.

6. Use Your Data to Create Similar Posts

With a comprehensive list of top performing posts, it’s time to start looking into what makes them so popular.

You want to find what makes these posts popular so need to look out for any recurring themes, language or ideas. The more often a specific element occurs, the more likely it is to contribute to the success of the post.

Once you’ve identified the patterns and recurring themes that make a post successful, it’s time to start creating new posts that utilise these success building elements.

When you’ve developed your new posts, it’s time to…

7. Promote It Like a Pro

After taking so much time to research your audience and understand the elements that best resonate with them it would be a shame to have it all fall apart at the end.

The primary problem many face with social media promotion is the lack of visibility. For you to make the biggest impact with your posts you need to focus on two elements.

The first is posting updates at the optimal time. Facebook Insights gives a comprehensive breakdown of the day and hour when your audience are most active. Before you roll out a share campaign you want to make sure that you’re posting when your audience are online and engaged. If you post when everyone’s away from their computer, you’re going to have a tough time making an impact.

However, posting at the busiest times isn’t a foolproof method for success.

The problem you’ll have when posting at peak hours is standing out. You’ll be competing with all of your audience members and also the competition in your niche.

Your audience’s walls will be extremely busy and there’s a high chance the majority of your audience won’t even see your updates before they’re buried below everyone else’s. Facebook estimates that only 16% of your fans will actually see your posts.

So, what can you do to increase that percentage? Paid promotion.

With even a modest budget you can effectively promote your posts so they stand out to your audience. You’re able to choose the demographic it shows to, your total and daily budget as well as length of the campaign.

Promoted posts have proven to be an excellent way to increase reach an impact. However, it’s also a method that you need to stay on top of if you want it to work. You simply can’t start a campaign, let it run for a week or two and expect the effect to continue.

Many marketing managers take a laissez-faire approach to social media. It’s often seen as an easy way to increase traffic and reach new customers. It;s an option which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Facebook can be an incredible way for you to gather new customers but, just like your content marketing strategy, you need to have a solid plan. The basic formula for attracting new customers through Facebook is simple in their, but complicated in execution.

At its very foundation, a Facebook campaign for new customers needs to follow the steps outlined in this article:

Of course this is an over simplification. For you to get the best results you’re going to have to test every stage and see exactly how you can squeeze that extra little bit of qualified traffic from your Facebook funnel.

It’s not easy, but done well, the results can be game changing.

If you’ve found any other Facebook marketing tips or tricks to add to this strategy, drop a comment below and let us know what works.