By Kathryn Smith
If you’re depending on a single marketing channel to reach prospective customers, it may be costing your business more than you think.
According to Bob Fabbio, CEO of marketing automation service provider eRelevance, “Relying exclusively on a single channel like email will make it hard to grow because most of your contacts will never get your message.”
That’s because the average email open rate across all industries in the US is about 20 percent. So while your email message may reach up to 20 percent of your contacts, you’re missing a whopping 80 percent.
Multi-channel social media marketing has become the go-to marketing method for the modern-day business. However, as the number of social networks and their complexity increase day-by-day, this strategy is proving to be extremely challenging, especially for small- and medium-sized (SMB) businesses.
While a multi-channel approach is great, what is more important is to target the right audience with the right messages. There is no point in approaching a bunch of social media networks with generic or boring ads. If you do not customize and personalize your ad or neglect prospective social media communities, you may never see significant growth.
In this article, we will talk about the best practices to target your customers using Facebook ads. These tips may also help you target your audience on other social networks.
#1. Observing a Customer’s Purchasing Behavior Is Key to “Targeted Marketing”
Facebook was once criticized by marketing analysts as just a fun platform for hanging out. They believed it had no commercial value or consumer insights. But that scenario has changed now. Today, the social media giant has a lot more to offer than just Candy Crush Saga or Farmville. Thanks to its partnership with data brokers like Acxiom, Epsilon, and Datalogix, Facebook knows where its visitors spend time online.
Facebook’s ability to monitor customer behavior gives you the ability to reach beyond your contact database. You can use different insights and customer data to filter your market segments and also study thousands of different customer shopping behaviors.
As a new business, you can learn the different purchasing behaviors of customers, including buyer profiles and which customers are looking for what. You can target people based on their interest in electronics, clothing, health and beauty products, food and drink, and a lot more. Within the available subcategories, you can also filter different behaviors and target foodies, fashionistas or DIY buyers.
You’ll benefit from targeting customers with specific interests, and the options are unlimited. Use Facebook to explore different communities and very soon you will see your ROI jump up in multiples.
#2. Using Life Events to Make Creative Ads Can Enhance Your Personal Touch with the Audience
It is effective to connect to your audience when they are experiencing important life events. For example, if you are selling wedding gowns or wedding gifts, it would make sense to target individuals planning to get married soon or looking to gift brides or bridegrooms. Movers and packers would benefit from targeting people who have recently bought new homes.
Facebook is one place where people reveal important events of their lives, right on their timelines. Facebook’s life event parameter is a helpful resource for marketers looking to target people during important moments of their lives. So whether you are a jewelry seller wanting to target people celebrating their first anniversaries or a wedding invitation designer wanting to target individuals just as they get engaged, this special Facebook tool can be extremely handy.
#3. Do Not Bore Your Audience after Working so Hard to Find Them
Now that you have found two great ways to filter your audience, it’s important to present them with an appealing and clickable message.
Consider this: How many commercials and ads do you come across every day in newspapers and magazines, and on television and the Internet? And how many of them do you think actually convert to sales?
While getting your ads out to the right demographics is one part of the success story, making them fun, useful, and highly clickable and shareable is another. Always keep it short, and tell your story within the title, short body message and image. It is important to test different ads multiple times if you really want to become a successful Facebook marketer.
Here are some good and bad practices for Facebook ad content creation:
Try this:
- Spending enough time tweaking and testing your content will help you determine which content works best. There is no secret formula or a killer format because what is great for one product may not work for another. Try to have a CTA within the content.
- Consider using an image that is not only attention-grabbing but speaks a lot about the service you offer. Try to make a personal connection and avoid images that are too generic.
- Try to get your visitors involved with a question or an emotional discussion. It does a world of good to your ‘customer engagement strategy’. Even better, organize a contest that encourages your visitors to participate and be a part of your business. It gives them a feeling of being part of a community.
- Study the different content used by successful Facebook marketers, especially your competitors, and adapt them for your business.
Don’t try this:
- Do not mislead your audience. You may be successful in tricking your audience, making them click and landing them in the targeted webpages. But what is more important is to make them buy. So honesty is the best policy here. Try attracting them by talking about real features of your service.
- Avoid using all uppercase or lowercase in the content. This creates a distraction from your message.
Use the Qawaya tool to test different headings, body messages and images with many different demographics.
You can make a collection of data to help yourself determine what works best. This will help you refine the best ads and optimize the best Facebook marketing plan. The Qawaya Tool can help you get rid of ads that are draining your money and performing poorly. By understanding which ones convert better, you can shift your budget to the high-performing ones.
Your multi-channel social media marketing strategy is never going to be complete without using the Facebook platform and all the tools and insights it provides. There is no one-fit solution for all Facebook marketers. You need to consider different ideas and tweak them to suit the kind of service you provide and your target market segment.
With these factors in mind, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to consider investing in experts for your social media marketing. Marketing experts, with the right knowledge and proven track records, can help you succeed. By identifying the best people to reach out, they can make the most of what social media networks provide and help you save time and money.
