Facebook Marketing Plan

As with any business endeavor, you would like an idea and particularly for your marketing strategy since you've got numerous options hospitable you that you simply would be hard-pressed to repose track of everything without a plan to make secure you are heading in the right way.

The Target Market

As already mentioned, the Facebook demographic is extremely diverse and you've got the added advantage of having the ability to use people’s profiles to further narrow your target market down.
For example, if you would like to focus on women aged 24 – 35 who sleep in the Midwest and like to crochet; Facebook makes it extremely easy to try to.
The advantage? You can be sure you aren’t wasting resources, whether money or time, on reaching a good audience of which only a little the percentage is really your target market, as was often the case with traditional marketing channels.
Remember that the key to building a successful business is to have an excellent understanding of your target market. The more you know about them, the easier it will be to build a relationship with them.
Consumer behavior, in simple terms, is driven mainly by two desires, the primary is to avoid pain and therefore the second is to realize pleasure. 
However, pain avoidance carries much more weight. Therefore, the more you know of your audience and what pains them, the more you will be able to meet their needs by providing a solution to their pain. In fact, if you are doing your marketing research properly, you'll be ready to create a product that sells itself. This is where the facility of knowing your target market truly lies.

What better thanks to building a relationship together with your target market than through a social media platform that permits for therefore much interaction, like Facebook?
There are a couple of tools you'll use to locate your target market. One of these is that the Facebook Insight tool which provides information on the people visiting your page, including information like their age and sex.


Establishing Your Marketing Goals


Facebook is an important marketing tool that you simply got to integrate into your overall marketing strategy for the straightforward reason that you can glean tons of data from your market. From product creation to feedback on your service, Facebook is often the last word marketing research tool, and you'll achieve all this without paying a penny.

In essence, the core goal of any marketing campaign is to extend sales. However, there are other aspects to increase your sales which, initially, might not appear to be directly linked to increasing your profitability. But there, and may boost your sales more effectively than even an excellent Bowl ad campaign.
These four aspects are vital to putting together a sustainable business model which will generate an income for you for several years.

The Power of Branding

A brand is essentially the image of your business. It’s what sets you apart from your competition in the mind of your target market. Thus, the key to branding is finding your USP (unique sales position/proposition), which you'll actually do with the assistance of existing customers. 

If you are doing not yet have a product and are just starting your business, then you ought to analyze your competition and identify what their USP is. 
This will offer you some idea of what you'll do to feature extra value and find your USP. Remember never to use price as a USP as this will backfire.

Driving Sales with Facebook

Facebook is a perfect tool to drive sales because it offers a superb medium to tell your audience about special offers, product launches, discounts and more. You can easily provide a link so people can access your website or you can even build a store right there on Facebook.
Facebook is additionally a highly cost-efficient advertising medium as you'll run highly targeted campaigns that have a high ROI because of it has been proven that social media audiences have a higher conversion rate than organic traffic.

Additionally, you'll also use Facebook Events to drive sales and increase brand awareness.

Building Your Community

Building a community is significant to your online business success, especially if you would like that success to be long-lasting. Facebook Groups give you that option but remember that your group can’t be built around your product or nobody is going to be interested. 
You need to specialize in building a gaggle centered around a cause or interest that ties in together with your goals yet has social importance to draw people to hitch.

Customer Service and Feedback

Providing excellent customer service and listening to feedback from your customers is vital to the success of any product or business. The more feedback you receive, the more you can improve and meet the needs of your prospects. You can receive feedback directly from a Facebook group or by running a manual search on the platform to find any mentions of your brand.

The more responsive you're to your market’s needs, the more they're going to appreciate your brand and therefore the more they're going to advertise for you thru referrals and proposals. 
There is nothing more valuable during a social media setting than having your Facebook fans recommending your business as this is often the place people come to research before they make their purchase decision.

Creating a Message

This is the instant once you got to forget all you learned in your power-selling and advertising courses about hard selling. This simply doesn't add a social media setting. 
You would like to be honest and open together with your market and in particular, you would like to supply value first and ask later. In other words, don’t attempt to push sales messages down the throat of your Facebook followers because you'll soon end up alone.
Facebook is primarily a social platform, which you would like to recollect when implementing your marketing strategy. this suggests that you simply got to engage your audience instead of merely trying to push offers at all of them the time. The more value you provide, the more your audience will trust you and therefore the higher your profits will climb.

Creating a Page

A Facebook Page is actually an equivalent as a Facebook profile except that it's business-centric. this is often where members can become your fans and stay up-to-date with everything that your business is doing. they will also write of your Wall, study any special promotions you're running, upload photos and ask other members. it's where you'll provide your fans with updates and have interaction with your audience.
The advantage of having a Facebook Page for your business is that you simply aren't limited to the number of fans your business can have, unlike Facebook profiles which are limited to five,000 friends. Additionally, Facebook Pages are often easily found with an inquiry engine as they're visible to the general public by default. you'll also add a spread of applications to further engage your audience.

Tips for Effective Page Design

While we won’t be going into the technicalities of making a Facebook Page, we'll check out some critical tips that you simply should confine mind when designing it.
Customers come first. you would like to form sure that you simply are designing your page together with your customers in mind, which suggests that each component of your page should offer them value.
Don’t overdo it. While you'll be tempted to feature every application under the sun to form a leading-edge Facebook page, a touch restraint is so as. Remember that you simply want your brand to face out and applications should only increase the experience, not take the spotlight off your business.

Staying on topic and updating. you would like to form sure that whatever you post on your Facebook Page has relevance to your business. So, if you're promoting an online marketing product, you shouldn’t be posting about your love for sushi. Likewise, if you continuously update the content on your Page, you're giving fans a reason to return back. So, confirm that you simply are always posting fresh content.

Brand yourself as an authority with personality. First of all, your Facebook Page advertises your business to the planet, so you would like to be seen as an authority in your industry. 
Therefore, confirm that your content showcases your expertise. At an equivalent time, Facebook may be a social media site that suggests you would like to let your personality come through a touch. While having a touch fun is great, confirm that you simply still act professionally, though.

Feedback is critical to your success. the most important mistake you'll make is to overlook the feedback you receive on your Facebook Page. In fact, you ought to be encouraging it by posting surveys, polls and thru discussions. it's highly valuable because it is often wont to improve your business and it’s all free of charge.

However, the foremost critical aspect of an efficient Facebook Page, like the other presence you'll wear online, is posting relevant and interesting content. 
The more you update with interesting content, the more reasons people will need to visit your page, become fans then return. Your job doesn’t end once you've got built a following. It only begins.


Promoting Your Page

People won't become instant fans of your brand, albeit it’s a product they adore and use regularly if you don’t offer them a reason to. In other words, you would like to interact with people and offer them an incentive to become your fans.

Some of the foremost common tactics include contests that need users to check in to require spare prizes starting from products to gift certificates, or offering discount coupons to those that join. 

The advantage of those methods are that when a customer agrees to input their Facebook information, a link to the competition will then be published on their wall also, which results in the competition becoming viral.

If you can't afford to supply discounts or giveaways, an alternative choice is to easily ask your customers to become your Facebook fans. you'll do that by advertising your social media pages on all of your outgoing emails, existing websites and other advertising mediums you'll already be using. you would possibly be surprised how effective this approach is.

Remember that having an outsized following on Facebook isn't simply about increasing sales but about increasing brand awareness also. 

The more people are talking about your brand, the more sales you'll eventually make because word of mouth advertising is one among the foremost powerful sales tools within the world.

Another interesting strategy is to use social media sites during a loyalty program. for instance, you'll offer customers two points for each purchase they create from you and another point if they become a lover and post about their purchase on their Facebook account. 

Once they reach a particular number of points you'll offer them a freebie of some sort. The traffic and sales you generate will quite offset the prices of running the campaign and you'll have the added advantage of getting built a loyal following also.

Tips to Help You Find and Connect to Your Target Market

The first step to putting together your fan-base on Facebook is to ask your friends and existing clients to hitch up. Even if your friends aren’t what you'll consider prospects, you never know who in their networks could be interested. Some other techniques you can use include:

Leveraging thought leaders in your industry. By becoming a lover of thought leaders with large fan bases in your industry you'll begin to interact with prospects on their pages. If you provide value through good content, you'll find that folks will want to seek out out more about you and your brand.
Use other social media platforms and sites. 

Do you have a following on Twitter? Then invite them to hitch you on Facebook for a more interactive experience. Additionally, you'll also pull content from sites like Youtube and Flickr which can keep your page fresh with new content while also promoting your page on these other sites.

Leverage your email list. If you've got an email list, offer your subscribers an incentive to become a lover of your Facebook page. Remember that your main goal is that the viral effect Facebook provides and albeit these customers are already on your list, you never skills more new leads they will generate through their own Facebook networks.

Offer interesting content on a regular basis. You need to form sure you retain your page updated with interesting content on a daily basis. 
You want fans to go to your page and have interaction together with your brand on a daily basis and therefore the only thanks to doing this is to supply fresh, interesting content.

Interact with your fans. Don’t simply post content then forget to go to your page. You need to interact together with your fans the maximum amount as possible which incorporates answering comments and even sending new fans a welcome message can do wonders to show them into lifelong, loyal customers. This is because you're showing them that there's a person's behind the brand which you care about. You would be surprised how much people want to help someone who is interested in them.

The Power of Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups are often started up by anyone, on any topic of interest to them and that they function a haunt for members to debate the subject and share thoughts and opinions. Facebook Pages leave more interaction though thanks to the addition of applications, while Facebook Groups can’t have applications.

You have a choice of either joining an existing Facebook Group on a subject that's relevant to your business so you'll promote your brand or create your own group. If you opt to hitch an existing group, remember that it's still a social media platform then bombarding members with commercial messages will only serve to alienate them. Additionally, if you are trying to advertise yourself an excessive amount of, you'll find yourself being reported as a spammer and have your profile or page pack up by Facebook. They have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to spammers so you need to be extremely careful.

What you ought to specialize in, though, is building yourself up as an authority and someone people want to follow. You can achieve this by posting relevant content that they're going to find interesting. Likewise, don’t post only content that's on your blog in an effort to drive traffic because people will still think you're spamming.

Remember to combine it up by posting content from your own blog or website alongside other interesting content from the online. Finding content to post isn’t as difficult because it could seem as there are many content aggregators on the online, like AllTop.com or Technorati, which aggregate the most popular content on the net.

You can start your own group, but you ought to first make certain you've got a radical understanding of how groups work which you'll only treat joining other groups and watching how people interact and participate. You manage your group a bit like you'd your Facebook page by posting fresh content to form sure that folks are joining all the time. 
The more people you've got joining your group, the more others will come and join also because this acts sort of a sort of third-party validation.

You may be asking yourself what the point of creating a group is if you have to do the same things as you would on your Facebook Page. You need to know, though, that your group shouldn’t be supported your brand, it should only support it. 

This means that you simply got to create a gaggle that supported a subject that's of social interest but is additionally relevant to your brand. So, for instance, if you sell wedding gowns, you'll begin a gaggle for brides trying to reduce before the large day. 

While it isn’t an immediate promotion of your brand, it's a subject that will garner tons of interest and can increase brand awareness while drawing in your target market.

However, even as together with your Facebook Page, you would like to post interesting content and even sometimes controversial ideas to spark discussions, while also engaging your members the maximum amount as possible. So, if someone comments, then comment back. The more you engage members, the more people will trust you and therefore the more activity your group will have. A highly active group on a stimulating topic will always draw new members in.


Facebook Events

Facebook Events are a superb thanks to increasing brand awareness by bringing together people virtually or face to face. You can use Facebook Events to plug a product launch or to market an existing product by offering attendees a bonus within the sort of a reduction coupon.

The value of hosting a Facebook Event lies within the incontrovertible fact that you'll invite all of your fans with one click of the button. Additionally, if you'll host a live event your credibility increases a thousand-fold because online interaction still cannot replace meeting someone face to face. 
However, if you are feeling your product isn't fitted to life the event, you'll still host a web event.
Many marketers feel that online events aren’t well worth the hassle because the return in sales is pretty low for the work required to take care of interest within the event then keep the event going. 

However, if you look at the issue from the perspective of building relationships with your prospects, then events can be invaluable. After all, while your ultimate goal is to drive sales, building relationships together with your customers should even be high on your priority list because this, alongside providing high value is what is going to turn simple prospects into customers who are raving fans.

The latter will generate a way better ROI over the future since you don’t need to expend as many resources on finding new customers. In fact, a study showed that repeat customers cost a business 6 times but acquiring new customers and that they also spend 33% more.

Another interesting aspect is that sites such as Meetup.com, which is basically a social site for groups focused on varied interests, have an application that allows Meetup groups to promote their events on Facebook.

The best thanks to studying hosting events are to attend a couple of yourself and see how others do it. You can find events by running an inquiry within the Applications – Events tab.

Direct Advertising on Facebook

Facebook offers an advertising system similar to Google’s Adwords platform. You can easily select who your audience is, set a daily budget and also measure your results. You also have the option of choosing to pay based on the number of times your ad appears or to pay for clicks.

However, unlike Google, Facebook ads are more interactive allowing people to try everything from becoming a lover of a Page, watching a video or answer an occasion all from within the ad unit without having to navigate to a different page. 
This is extremely powerful because, if your goal is to extend the number of fans for your Page, it's much easier to urge people to agree if they don’t have to authorization the page they are now on.

You have a choice of three sorts of advertisements, namely the regular PPC text ad, a graphic display ad which also includes a picture or their unique interactive ads which are known as engagement ads. You will need to order the latter through an advertising sales rep as they aren’t available within the automatic system, though.

Good Advertising Practices on Facebook

Just as with any ad campaign, confirm that users receive what the ad promises them once they click through. Additionally, confirm to stay it a social and interesting experience because that's why they're on Facebook, after all.
Facebook gives you the choice to link to a different Facebook page, profile, group or event in your ad or to an external website. You don’t have to prove that you are the owner of the website, which means that you can use affiliate links in your ads. This can be a strong way of testing conversion rates of varied products you're considering promoting also because of the effectiveness of landing pages.
However, it's considered good practice to link to an indoor Facebook page as users is on Facebook for the social experience. For this reason, you ought to also consider crafting your message during a familiar and conversational tone because you would like to take care of the social aspect of the experience. However, if you specialize in the social aspect and building a relationship you'll be ready to slowly break down those automatic defenses and your prospects are going to be much more open to your commercial messages.

The Power of Facebook Ads

The biggest advantage of Facebook ads is that the degree to which you'll narrow your target market. Facebook allows you to create a campaign that targets users by location, age, relationship status, interests, and even language because the platform is out there in over 40 languages. You can essentially reach your exact audience and build a really powerful list of highly qualified and targeted leads with a couple of ads. This is far more cost-effective than using traditional PPC since you recognize that the people you're targeting are going to be curious about what you've got to mention.

Common Ad Mistakes

Just as there are good advertising practices, so too there are mistakes that you simply got to avoid. Facebook has very strict guidelines when it involves ads because they need to take care of a high-quality standard, so confirm to avoid making the subsequent mistakes so your ads can pass the review process and you'll have your campaign up and running in no quite 24 hours.

Bad grammar, spelling, punctuation, and slang. This is you are the business you're promoting in any case so what is going to your inability to write down a brief ad show your prospects? While you would like to take care of the social aspect of the location that doesn’t mean you ought to be unprofessional.

Bait and switch may be a common practice that results in disaster. Don’t tell your prospects one thing to trick them into visiting your page or website then offer them something completely different. Not only will your ads never pass the review but if they are doing slip through you'll create a nasty name for yourself. While it's going to add the short term, it isn’t a technique that you simply can use to create a long-term, sustainable business.

Inappropriate images. Again, everything you post will brand your business so confirm that the pictures in your ad maintain the professionalism you'd expect from a business you'd like to work with.
Advertising ROI – Test, Measure, Optimize
Direct Facebook advertising should be treated like all PPC the ad campaign, meaning that you simply got to test different variations of your ad before you spend the bulk of your advertising money on an approach which will not be effective. Facebook offers a good range of tools that allow you to simply found out different campaigns, set individual budgets for every and also track their effectiveness.
The reports the Facebook Ad system offers are quite comprehensive and offer dates on everything from what percentage times you are the advertisement has been shown, to the number of clicks and therefore the average cost per click. This information is significant to testing and optimizing your ads for a better return on investment.

Additionally, you would like to check the effectiveness of your Facebook Page also, which you'll do through Facebook Insights. The latter offers information like the degree to which fans interact together with your page, how loyal your fans are, which is measured consistent with the number of fans who have unsubscribed over a particular period and other valuable demographics on your fans. All this information is often wont to test and tweak different approaches to enhance the performance of your Facebook page.

Conclusion

Facebook may be a very powerful marketing tool if used properly. The most important aspect to recollect is that it's a social platform first and wishes to be treated intrinsically. In other words, don’t expect people to reply to commercial messages but rather build a relationship with them first. Then, they're going to generate sales for you without you even having to ask.

As long as you specialize in the requirements of your prospects and customers and supply them with value, your sales will increase exponentially and your brand will spread like wildfire. Such is the power of My all content.