Developing a Facebook marketing strategy is challenging, but the rewards are lucrative when executed correctly.
There are currently over 6 million advertisers on Facebook and the reality is, not everyone is getting a positive ROI from Facebook marketing.
Some have given up, while some are still spending money on Facebook ads without seeing any returns.
With over 2.2 Billion active users, Facebook is still one of the best social media marketing channels to help businesses generate leads and drive sales.
If you want to succeed in Facebook marketing, you need a proven framework and strategy to convert these Facebook users into customers for your business.
In this article, you will discover the 5 proven Facebook marketing strategies that work for ALL types of businesses, whether you are a local business, online business, E-commerce, Saas, or startups.
Let’s do this.
5 Effective Facebook Marketing Strategies
1. The Cold to Warm Hook
2. Direct Close
3. Increase Existing Customer Value
4. Build Long-Term Branding
5. Create an Irresistible Giveaway
Facebook Marketing Strategy 1: The Cold to Warm Hook
Before we explain how this strategy work, let’s break down the difference between a cold audience and a warm audience.
Cold audience – People who have NEVER heard of your brand before.
Warm audience – People who have interacted with your brand at least once, either by reading a blog post or watching a video from your brand.
It’s difficult to sell to a cold audience since they have never heard of you.
You need a hook to turn these cold audience into warm audience that will eventually buy your products. The hook can be in the form of a blog post and/or video.
Here is the step by step process of The Cold to Warm Hook:
Step 1: Identify Customers’ Pain Points and Frustrations
To create your hook, ask yourself, what are the pain points and frustrations your ideal customers are currently facing?
If you don’t know your customers’ pain points, your Facebook ad will never work as you couldn’t relate or understand their frustrations.
For example, say you are running a local gym, what are the common frustrations faced by your ideal customers?
Probably it’s about how to lose weight or build muscles.
Step 2: Produce Content Hook to Educate and Grab Attention
Once you have figured out your customers’ pain points, produce content as the hook to educate these cold audience and turn them into warm audience.
This will also position your brand as the authority and expert in the industry.
Back to the gym example, you can then produce content (blog or video) such as:
- How to Lose Weight Fast (Step by Step Guide)
- The Ultimate Training Blueprint to Build Solid Muscles
These contents will act as the hook to capture the cold audience’s attention on Facebook and give them a solution to their pain points.
Step 3: Run Ads on Facebook to Targeted Cold Audience
Here comes the fun part.
Once the content is ready, run the ads on Facebook. You may go for image ads, video ads, or both.
You can target your cold audience based on their interest and behaviour patterns. Test and get started with a budget of $5 – $20 a day.
Install the Facebook pixel on your website to track people who have clicked on the ad to visit your website. Here is a guide from Facebook on how to install the pixel.
You can then use the data to retarget these people on Facebook with a retargeting ad on step 4.
Step 4: Set Up Retargeting for Cold Audience Who Had Expressed Interest
If someone has read your blog post or watched your video, that person has turned from a cold audience to a warm audience.
They have already seen your content AND gotten some value from the content since you are educating them on how to solve their pain points.
And the fact that they clicked on the ad means they have raised their hand and say “hey I am interested in this content”.
The next step then is to get them to take action and turn these warm audience into buyers.
There are two types of retargeting:
1. Blog Post
If you have the pixel on your website, it would have captured the data of the person who read the blog post.
Create a custom audience to retarget these warm audience. Here is a guide from Facebook on creating the custom audience.
2. Video
If you are using video ad, Facebook will know how long has your target audience watched your video.
If they have watched at least 50% of your video, we want to retarget them since they have taken the time to watch your video for more than 50% of the video duration.
Here is a step by step guide to set up the 50% video retargeting list.
Step 5: Create Offer to Warm Retargeting Lists
Finally, we have reached the last piece of the puzzle.
As you have turned these cold audience into warm audience, now you can create offers and sell to the warm audience.
Create an enticing offer such as:
- 20% off Product X
- Free trial for 30 days (once the 30 days is up, you can charge a monthly fee)
- Buy 1 Free 1 for Product Y
Facebook Marketing Strategy 2: Direct Close
The Direct Close is a hit and miss strategy.
Sometimes it works great, sometimes it’s like throwing money to the drain.
With the Direct Close strategy, you would ask the cold audience to buy immediately without providing any content upfront.
The direct close is great to help you test fast and requires fewer steps as compared to the Cold to Warm Hook.
So what are the chances of this succeeding with direct close?
You will only find out by testing.
This strategy is like giving out flyers to people and expect them to buy from you. While the chances are low, you can increase your chances of closing the sale if you are targeting the right audience on Facebook.
For example, if you sell cosmetic products, you can target people on Facebook who likes cosmetic product through the detailed targeting segment of Facebook Ads Manager:
Since these group of people have told Facebook they like cosmetic products, your Direct Close ads will have a higher chance of closing the sale as compared to just giving out flyers to everyone.
Instead of the longer 5 steps of the Cold to Warm Hook, these are the shorter steps for the Direct Close strategy:
Step 1: Create Offer to Cold Audience
Step 2: Set Up Retargeting for Cold Audience Who Had Expressed Interest
Step 3: Retarget Again With Same Offer as Step 1 or Create A Better Offer
Facebook Marketing Strategy 3: Increase Existing Customer Value
While the first two strategy revolves around selling to cold and warm audience, this strategy is much easier as you are selling to your existing customers.
A customer that has purchased once from you are more likely to purchase again.
These group of people are not cold or warm audience who are still considering if they should buy your product.
They have ALREADY bought from you and have passed the consideration stage.
Instead of just selling one product or service to your customers, use Facebook ads to promote a different product or service to your existing customers. This will greatly increase your average customer value.
To do this, you need to have the following details:
- Customers name
- Phone number
- Email address
Upload the information to Facebook’s custom audience:
Once you have upload your customers’ data to Facebook, you can now run ads to these customers.
Here’s how:
Step 1: Create Offer to Customers (Video or Blog Posts) For Your Other Products/Services
Step 2: Set Up Retargeting for Customers Who Had Expressed Interest
Step 3: Retarget Again With Same Offer as Step 1 or Create A Better Offer
Facebook Marketing Strategy 4: Build Long-Term Branding
What is the first brand that comes into your mind when you think of….
Coffee?
Sports shoe?
Mobile phone?
Soft drink?
Chances are you will answer Starbucks, Nike, Apple/Samsung, and Coca-cola.
We are so familiar with these brands as we often see ads from these companies. As time goes by, their brand will tap into our subconscious mind and we will associate these products with a brand.
However, building a brand requires time, and you probably won’t see a clear-cut ROI from Facebook ads in the short term.
In fact, it could even take years for people to start knowing your brand if you are just starting out.
That being said, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is NOW!
Here’s how you can build your brand online using Facebook Marketing:
Step 1: Create Video Ads
Facebook is the new TV.
Instead of having to splash a 6-figure sum on TV ads, you can spend few hundred or few thousand a month on Facebook to reach your targeted audience.
For examples, if you are a shoe brand, you can target people on Facebook with interest in shoes. With TV or billboard ads, you can’t do that AND it’s significantly more expensive.
Use video ads for branding as this will increase audience engagement and videos are more memorable. Image ads will not work as well if your brand is still new.
Short video ads of 30 seconds to 1 minute will work well on both Facebook and Instagram.
Step 2: Select Brand Awareness Objective
In your Facebook ads manager, select the brand awareness objective.
This will let Facebook know you are looking to increase awareness of your brand and Facebook will show your ads to people who are more likely to recall your brand.
Step 3: Run Ads to Targeted Cold Audience
This step is simple.
We will target cold audience and select a broad interest in the detailed targeting section.
For example, if you would like to build your brand on Men’s fitness products, you can target people on Facebook with interest in Men’s Fitness through the detailed targeting segment of Facebook Ads Manager:
Quality is often perceived by strong branding. In the long run, branding will be the difference between a mediocre company and a great company.
Facebook Marketing strategy 5: Create an Irresistible Giveaway
This is probably the easiest way to see results immediately using Facebook ads because you are giving away something everyone loves.
FREE stuff!
So the question is, why would you give away your product for free?
Because this giveaway will act as bait for them to try your product and if your product is good, they will return again and again.
It’s the first step of pulling people in that is difficult.
For example, if a restaurant giveaway free dinner in their local area, and assuming the food is good, people will definitely return again and again. If the food quality is bad, the restaurant won’t survive for long anyway.
A gym could giveaway 14 days access pass to use all facilities and equipment for free. Interested people can then convert into paid members after the 14 days access.
A dentist could giveaway free teeth cleaning service to the first 50 sign-ups. Again, if your service is good, they will come to your clinic again and perhaps even opt for higher priced services such as teeth whitening or orthodontic treatment. If you are a dentist, here’s an in-depth guide on dental marketing.
If you run an e-commerce store, think about the product you can giveaway.
No matter what business you are in, there will always be something that you can giveaway in exchange for the customers’ contact information.
You will then make your money back through lifetime value of the customer as they purchase from you again.
Best Practice for A Successful Giveaway Campaign:
Here is some best practice to implement in your giveaway campaign:
1. Select the right audience targeting on Facebook based on your customers’ interest.
2. Ask participants to share your post to qualify for the giveaway. This has the potential to make your brand grow viral as each participant share the post on their Facebook feeds.
3. Collect their email address. Once you have their emails, you can engage the customers and email them for future offers. Use a tool like Kyvio to collect email and promote future offers.
4. Always send your audience to a landing page like Kyvio. That is where you can collect their email address and ask them to share to enter the giveaway (Facebook hates it when you ask people to share the post on their platform as they deem it as “engagement bait”).
Here’s an example of our digital marketing landing page used to collect emails for people interested in learning digital marketing.
5. Have an event to associate with the giveaway. For example, maybe it’s your business 2 years anniversary, Christmas giveaway, new product launch, or your fan page has reached 1,000 likes.
If you are struggling to find an event, use these dates of every month:
1.1, 2.2, 3.3, 4.4, 5.5, 6.6, 7.7, 8.8, 9.9, 10.10, 11.11, or 12.12 giveaway.
In this noisy digital world, you have to compete with everyone to grab your customer’s attention. Having an irresistible giveaway will make you stand out right away when people are scrolling their Facebook news feed.
Giveaways are simple to implement and crazily effective.
Conclusion
And that’s a wrap!
Implement the strategies above and you will see a substantial improvement in your Facebook marketing campaign.
Here’s a recap of the 5 Facebook marketing strategies:
1. The Cold to Warm Hook
2. Direct Close
3. Increase Existing Customer Value
4. Build Long-Term Branding
5. Create an Irresistible Giveaway
Being a Facebook marketing agency in Malaysia, we apply these strategies on a daily basis and these are the exact strategies we frequently use to generate results for our clients.
All of these strategies can be run concurrently and it depends on your monthly budget. Ultimately, you will want to test all the strategies to find out the strategies that work best for your business.
Facebook marketing is not magic, it’s a testing game. But once you have found the winning strategy, you can then scale your business quickly, skyrocket sales, and make a healthy return on investment.
We hope you have enjoyed reading this guide, and if you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below or email us at info@axceldigital.com