Marketing Plan: Generate Sales Using Facebook
Efficiently increase your income
I am sure all of you are keep hearing stories about those businesses who use social media as part of their marketing plan to successfully increase sales. Well, let me say that it is possible. Social media can bring enough direct sales if used correctly.
In this article, I will share with you some of the promotion strategies I have previously used to position the product where I wanted in the people’s eyes. Brand awareness has a very important role in this marketing strategy plan.
Social marketing has to be used in a specific way to bring results. Firstly, we should discuss more the role of social media. Where does social media find its place in your marketing plan? What online marketing strategies can assist you in achieving your final goals?
Build your online community and increase brand awareness
According to the Sprout Social Index, Edition XIV: Realign & Redefine, 80% of social marketers say increasing brand awareness is their primary goal on social. Social marketers should realign and redefine their marketing strategy plans, and how serving audiences contribute to the bottom line. Their main activity should be to create a long-term relationship with people, not to find a quick fix.
If you manage to build an online community, they will act as ambassadors for your brand. They will be your champions, helping you spread the word about your business. There is nothing more important than real people opinion and recommendations. The advocates of your business will inspire trust among other people and will position your product to a particular target audience, by sharing the benefits of using it.
Tips for increasing online community
Now that we discussed the long-term benefits of having a community of people that appreciate your brand, let’s see some online marketing strategies that will help you get there.
- Define your audience:
This is the first thing you should start with and the most important. Who is your audience? How should you address them? What are the problems they need help with? What are they interested in? These are some questions that will help you get to know your target audience a little better. Start by defining buyer personas that fit your business. What is the point of having a community if it’s not the right one? Better to have fewer people that are interested in what you have to offer, than a lot of followers that won’t help your business in any way.
Digital Marketing Institute created a guide that will show you how to define buyer personas by analyzing your site analytics and conduct market research.
- Define your personality:
Your audience wants to know what you believe in, what are your USPs, how they can benefit from using your product or service. Don’t market yourself. Share useful information in your unique style, and you will manage to be remembered. Define your brand guidelines: style, language, tone, colours, etc., and always use them when creating content for your social channels.
- Engage with your audience
The main purpose of social media is to start conversations and have an active audience that interacts with your posts. So, part of your social marketing strategy should be to make people like share and comment. You can do that by sharing inside info, photos behind the curtains. Show them some real people work as a team behind a business, and they are having fun doing it. Ask them questions, ask their opinion on certain matters. Thank people who gave you a nice review and show your appreciation.
- Join relevant groups
Join groups will not only help you plan for future marketing efforts, by getting insights in what topics people are interested in, and their current problems or needs, but also you can use them as a medium to give people solutions. This will make you a thought leader in your industry, a person who is informed and can be trusted. This kind of activity will sooner or later bring more leads to your business and will increase sales.
- Create offers
You have the possibility to create special offers to gain more customers. You can offer special discounts or other benefits for people who follow you. You can find a step by step guide on how to create an offer on Facebook Help Center.
- It’s competition time
This is my favourite part and most effective in my experience. Organize a competition to offer free products to the winner. It can be also a discount, a free trial or anything that will catch their attention. Very important, don’t forget to ask them to like, share and tag friends to spread the word and also bring in new people to your page.
Generate sales with Facebook Ads
Let’s see what are the steps that will help you get conversions using Facebook Ads. How a marketing plan should look like if its final goal is to generate sales?
So, what you need to do is move potential leads from the awareness and interest stage in the buyer’s journey to consideration, and finally conversion. Forbes explains how sales funnels address stages of a customer’s buy cycle with touchpoints, marketing channels and key metrics that go into a purchase decision.
Use Google Analytics to get more information about how your potential customers interact with your product/service and create targeted, focused and personalized content, that suits the right audience at the right stage.
Now, let’s say that you want to increase the brand awareness of your business or you just launched a new product and want people to find out about that. You will start that by creating a campaign with a reach/awareness objective. Once you consider your desired goal is reached, in this case, measured by frequency and impressions metrics, you can get to the next step.
The consideration objective of a facebook campaign can be used to bring more website traffic or to send people to a certain landing page that is important to your business. This type of campaign will also generate some sales, but not enough. Once people arrive on your website, you can track what actions they take and how they practically interact with your website. They can add products to wishlist, add to cart, visit some specific sections of your website, etc. Use this information in your remarketing campaigns, and you will see a big difference at the end of the day.
The next and final stage is the conversion objective. Use Facebook Ads to create a conversion campaign where you will retarget with personalised offers and messages people who took different action on your website. But first, you need to create a custom audience for your remarketing campaigns. For example, you can create a custom audience that includes people who added products to cart in the last 180 days and also lookalikes.
If you need assistance, here is a step-by-step guide to creating Custom Audiences from a customer list for use in advertising on Facebook.
“Your basic marketing strategy should always include activities targeted to all levels of your customer funnel” — Ellen Dunne, Senior Product Manager
Final thoughts
It is very important to follow a natural order when you want to sell your products using Facebook. Your marketing plan should include online strategies that will help you grow your audience and increase brand affinity, both organically and also with paid ads. Learn how to use effectively Facebook Ads to target people with the right message. Try to move your prospects from the top of the funnel to the bottom, from awareness and interest stage to consideration and conversion stage.
Thanks for reading!
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