How to do Facebook Marketing

If you want to learn how to do Facebook marketing successfully, there are some actionable steps you can take to get you there. Facebook continues to outshine above many other social networks especially in advertising power.

With nearly 2 billion active daily users and more and more opportunities to reach your target audience on Facebook, they are winning in the marketing world.

Whether you’re a small startup or a large organization, Facebook marketing can benefit you. It’s the perfect place to share your brand message with prospects, make a hub for news around your company, engage with your customers, and grow your presence online.

1. Create your Facebook marketing strategy

When you set up your Facebook marketing strategy, it can be broken down into 4 key steps:

Define your audience
Goal setting and content planning
Page engagement
Exploring other Facebook tools

Define your Facebook audience

The key to this is knowing who your audience is. Think about their demographics like age and gender, where they live, where they work, what their interests and behaviors are, and other factors, like how they use Facebook.

Next, look at Facebook Audience Insights.

Facebook Audience Insights is a free tool which you can use to identify your target audience better.

There are four tabs in Audience Insights: demographics, page likes, location, and activity. Here’s what each one means:

Demographics: This tab shows audience demographics including age, gender, relationship status, education level, and job title.
Page likes: You’ll find the top pages across different categories like food & beverage and shopping & retail.
Location: The top cities and top countries people live, and top languages people speak.
Activity: This shows the frequency of activity like posts shared, ads clicked, etc. And, it also shows the devices Facebook users are using.

Set goals and plan your content

In this step, you’re going to hash out your plans to set goals and a content plan.

What goals do you have? Increase leads, improve conversions to your site, grow your engagement?

Once you’ve figured out what you want to accomplish, create a plan to get you to that goal. This plan should be actionable and measurable.

Planning your content means that you’ll need to figure out your content mix. What portion of your content will be videos, images, educational content, entertaining posts, etc.?

Mixing up your content is an excellent strategy to employ because it means that your audience won’t get bored with what you’re posting.

If you post the same kind of stuff on your page all the time, that can get monotonous and lead to lower levels of engagement and disinterested customers. Instead, change it up posting different things at different times. Planning your content in a content calendar can help you do this.

More on content planning and creating a content calendar down below!

Optimize for page engagement

Engagement is so important. Your job will be to get people to land on your Facebook page and then to engage with your content.

Create highly shareable content, engage with your audience, be responsive, shoutout fans, and have fun making awesome content for Facebook!

All these activities can lead to higher levels of engagement on your Facebook page.

Explore Facebook tools

This next one is the real deal. Make sure you’re exploring all of Facebook’s tools including Facebook groups, Facebook Marketplace, Business Manager, and the Facebook Messenger bot.

Groups are an opportunity to spread brand awareness. You can join Facebook groups and you can create your own Facebook groups.

When you join groups, you’ll be the face of your brand so be helpful, add value, and be friendly and responsive with peers in the group. Create your own brand Facebook group too, or multiple groups!

This group does that well, with the owner offering a free and paid version of the group for her customers. This gives everyone a chance to connect with the brand through a Facebook group and it gives the company more chances to convert prospects in the free group to paying customers in the paid group.

This is just one interesting way to monetize Facebook groups.

There’s something special about cultivating a talkative and engaged Facebook group then, growing it over time, which many groups on the platform fail to do. This can be another way for you to grow your company.

For more on this, check out our step-by-step guide how to grow a Facebook group.

Marketplace, Business Manager, and the Facebook Messenger bot should all be taken advantage of too. These are free tools that can help grow your business. Use them!

2. Use your Facebook fan page

Facebook fan pages are free digital real estate. They are an excellent opportunity to reach your audience and engage with fans. Your fan page lets you connect with consumers one on one so you can get their feedback, share announcements, and let your brand image shine.

Don’t be afraid to be silly here and let your brand identity come across to your audience. Funny videos, behind the scenes footage, photos of your warehouse and workspace are all awesome things to post on your Facebook fan page.

It doesn’t have to be all work and no play. You’ll find that customers may form a better connection with your company and identify more with you when you show your work side and personal side of the brand.

Bottom line, you have an opportunity to have a brand presence on Facebook (and it’s free) so take advantage!

3. Host a contest or giveaway

Contests can be a lot of fun for customers and they can get you excited about giving away an awesome prize to a loyal fan of your company. Giveaways can stir up a lot of engagement and get customers excited about your company, too.

While contests can’t be hosted on Facebook directly, you can use an outside platform like KingSumo who can host your giveaway or contest, then just share it on Facebook.

A successful contest or giveaway can earn you as many as 5,000 page likes or more plus, other added perks like increasing your email list size, getting you more fans on other social networks you’re on, etc.

Pat Flynn has a guest post from someone who increased their email list by more than 3,400% in less than 2 weeks with a giveaway!

They can be an incredibly useful way to cultivate your audience and broaden your reach. Try it!

4. Post often

Facebook ads can be successful and get you amazing results alone (more on that below) but don’t discount the power of posting regularly to Facebook.

First, when you start running ads, it’s not uncommon for prospective clients to check you out before they commit to buying. That means they may research you on Google, check out your ratings online (if any), and also look at your Facebook page.

If they land on a Facebook page with no content, no engagement, and no page likes, that may make them weary to work with you.

To counter this, you’ve got to post to your Facebook page on a regular basis.

How to establish a schedule for Facebook posting

Setting up a schedule for Facebook posting is absolutely necessary.

It can keep you organized and ensure that you have a steady stream of content going out on Facebook on a recurring basis. Some companies do this themselves in house and others will outsource to a social media manager. You decide.

First, create a content calendar.

Your content calendar will organize all your content for the month on Facebook. You can list what you’ll post on what days and this is pretty easy to batch out for long periods of time, like months out, etc.

Next, create content!

This can be material that you already use for your business like product photos, videos from your Tik Tok page, etc. You’ll save a lot of time if you can batch out your content as well.

Then, put it all together. You’ve got content and you’ve got your calendar so now, put it into play so you can begin to churn out content to your Facebook fan page on a regular basis.

Pro Tip: When you receive questions or comments on your page, reply quickly (within 15 minutes). This will help you earn the “Very Responsive” badge.

Ideas of what kind of content to post on Facebook:

Contests or giveaways
Trending topics related to your company or industry
Behind the scenes shots of your business
Selfies
Random thoughts or motivational quotes
Viral photos
Polls
Online events like grab bags, mystery boxes, be the buyer days, etc.
Photos/videos of your product in use
Testimonials

5. Build relationships

Make connections that matter and nurture relationships with the help of Facebook marketing. It can take time to create brand loyalty among customers so be patient here.

Continue to post often, share your brand message, and connect with customers on Facebook and through other means (your website, other social media platforms, your email list, etc.).

6. Run Facebook ads

Running ads on Facebook is an awesome way of broadening your reach. You can meet your marketing goals, find new customers, and grow your sales and traffic.

When running Facebook ads, you’ll discover more about your customers, helping you create a better experience for them and offer products that perfectly fit and exceed their needs. You will become more experienced with A/B testing and learn what kind of copy and images/video resonate best with your target customers. And, the more you run ads, the better you can get at them.

We have a ton of helpful resources that can improve your knowledge and understanding of ads on Facebook:

Regardless of the type of business you run, Facebook ads should be a tool in marketing toolkit.

For a more in depth education and training surrounding Facebook ads, check out our Facebook Side Hustle course. You’ll learn how to run Facebook ads for local businesses which will be perfect for expanding your knowledge around Facebook ads for your own company!

7. Track your results

Marketing is only as good as what you can learn from your efforts.

All this work you’re putting into this, growing your Facebook fan page, engaging with customers, and running ads. You don’t want this to be a wasted effort so it’s absolutely crucial that you track your results.

How do you measure the success of your Facebook marketing strategy?

First, understand that Facebook marketing requires maintenance. As automated as you can make the process, you’ll still need to check in to see how the progress of the campaign is going and make tweaks to your plan, as needed.

There’s no set it and forget it with Facebook marketing.

Measure your Facebook marketing strategy using Facebook tools.

First, check out Facebook Audience Insights to look at engagement. You’ll be able to review metrics like page likes, reach, comments, shares, etc. With this data you can determine what kind of content does best on your Facebook page. And, you can adjust your marketing plan to include more of those kinds of content.

Next, head to your Ads Manager on Facebook and take a look at how your ads are performing. From here you can do things like:

Duplicate ads
Edit settings
Pause ads
Edit your ad budget

Then, there are third-party tools you can utilize to measure your Facebook marketing performance like Google Analytics, Hootsuite, and other tools.