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Develop a strong online presence through social media, a website, and search engine optimisation.
- Conveying your brand identity, values, vision and mission to your audience is of course a complex and precious endeavour, which has to stem from your customer, culture and purpose.
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Offer exceptional customer service and build positive relationships with customers.
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Network and collaborate with other businesses and industry leaders.
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Continuously gather and analyse data on customers, sales, and market trends.
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Offer unique and innovative products or services.
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Invest in employee development and fostering a positive company culture.
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Implement efficient and effective internal systems and processes.
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Utilise targeted marketing and advertising strategies.
- Brand strengths, key callouts, with lifestyle or abstract imagery and a strong typeface are all part of your identity which will enable you to have consistent communication with your customers.
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Consider expanding through franchising or partnerships.
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Continuously review and adapt business strategies to stay competitive.
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When considering Facebook (or other digital) Strategy, we must understand and map out these elements:
Content Strategies from Audience understanding and data insight
What data is available, across customer, transaction, behaviour, and emotion?
How did they get here – through what channel – how did they behave? how long did they spend with us? Are they a Customer or New Prospect?
Look at Traditional funnel – purchasing? Using Customer history? Were they led through prediction, propensity or promotion analytics models?
Did we attain through savvy retargeting – creating marketing efficiencies?
Do we have a Unique Customer Identifier – so we can track against their spending, web visits?
How can we use the various customer entry points to develop relationships?
How do we retain customers and ensure they do not migrate to other sources?
All this is aided with regular list cleansing.
Asking these questions of your data will provide you with clusters of customers and segmentation models to start generating your content strategy and messaging engines.
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- Content Strategy
Be engaging and ensure your brand identity is consistent through each content element and interaction.
What is your tone of voice, your USP, your purpose, your vision, your goals, your objectives?
Posts perform well with:
- Questions ???
- Fill-in-the-blanks ----
- Photos that bring a lifestyle to life
- Tutorials
- Top tips
- Competitions - some of the most successful marketing campaigns by Facebook Pages are contests
- Videos, of course, catch attention so they should be an integral part of your posting strategy
Leverage Facebook ads
Ads are a vital part of best practices on Facebook & your marketing strategy, so as we are seeking to grow a successful and targeted active page, which aims to attract qualified, legitimate and potential customers, we need to spend budget on Facebook ads.
We go into more detail on measuring and costing later.
Plan, plan and plan again - you must have a posting strategy
We must determine:
- What kind of identity, imagery, photography, style & tone would you like your page to have?
- Who is your target audience, who are you trying to reach in this space and in this channel?
- What content gets the best reaction from potential customers & fans and how best to frame the conversation?
Be human & make it personal
- Reply to comments using the person's first name
- Demonstrate Empathy
- Treat people with kindness
- Always be respectful
What ideas do you have for my first campaign?
First Campaign
Promote your business with an ad via an engagement campaign.
The goal of an engagement ad is to have the audience engage with the post. Facebook’s algorithm will optimise the ad to get the maximum number of people to react to the post.
However, to go a step further, we would recommend creating an engagement campaign and split testing the same ad but on different audiences through Ads Manager.
This way, instead of locking the ad into one audience, you can test the ad with each of the custom audiences created to see which generates the best engagement.
You can also use Ads Manager to test different ad creative and copy but to the same audience.
Test, test and test again is the key!
Second Campaign
Deliver a website conversion campaign.
Website conversion campaigns are optimised for the audience to actually leave Facebook and go to the website, this is a more expensive campaign to run, however, it is built to drive people to purchase.
So what about measurement?
Naturally, you must measure the performance of your marketing efforts using Facebook tools or Google Analytics tools - Facebook Insights, Pixels, etc.
Remember the main objective is to develop a strong organic profile that becomes further established and is building in popularity all the time.
Measure which of your mix of content types (static images, videos, quotes, aspirations, life moments, true stories, etc) are engaging most with your audience.
Stay on top of your responsiveness since creating a dialogue with your community will inevitably maintain a clean and relevant profile.
What do I measure?
Depending on your brand goals, a few metrics you should consider are:
Reach is the number of people who saw your content on Facebook - either paid or organic efforts.
Impressions measure the number of times your posts were seen whether the post was seen multiple times by a single user. We know of the 'Rule of 7' in marketing which stipulates that a prospect usually sees a message 7 times before they take action.
Facebook referral traffic is the number of visitors your website gets through Facebook from people clicking links in posts, traffic from other people sharing your articles or visits from clicks on your profile link.
Page likes are those who liked your page or opted in to follow your brand on Facebook and they are your fans or subscribers. You can see a total number of 'Likes' or 'Follows' on your Facebook page.
Video Retention helps you measure what percentage of your videos people watch, so you can find tips to cut videos down. Just check the post details section in your page insights.
Video Engagement consists of likes, shares and comments. These are important as they do not take autoplay into account.
Facebook Ad Metrics:
Click-through rate (CTR) shows % of people seeing your ad & click through to your landing page.
Facebook gives you a few options for how you’re charged for ads and 2 of the most popular are Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) or Cost Per Click (CPC).
CPM is great for multiple ad variations and a quick (and less expensive) way to find out which ads are winning or losing.
CPC is charged every time someone clicks on your ads.
Cost Per Action (CPA) measures your costs based on a specific action be it app download, email subscribe or even purchase, hence you can calculate your ROI.
Ad frequency is the average number of times people see a specific ad.
As a view from an agency and a Martech/Adtech expert, you’ll understand our belief that social is great for lots of things. From planning weekends away to tracking teenage children.
With social ads accounting for more than half the UK’s £11.6 billion online ad market, it is also critical at a business level. But here the relationship gets a bit more complicated. With many brands now past the stick-it-on-social bit of the learning curve, questions around visibility and accountability have got louder (with the looming changes from Google, etc this year) and that’s where our measurement and digital strategy programmes shine.
We have previously demonstrated the correlation between social and net promoter scores (NPS) based on 4 years of data to prove to a client’s board that social is a valuable channel.
For businesses today, we would advise strengthening their profile with trust and helpfulness. A great way to a fast start on this is by opening a dialogue. Empower employees to learn from the voice of the customer whether through surveys, polls or reviews, if possible. Invest in advertising but establish the right measurement rhythm for adaptability and effectiveness.
We hope you enjoyed our run down to the best practices of Facebook for SMEs.
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