Best Facebook Marketing Strategies: The Latest Tips

What is Facebook marketing?

Facebook marketing includes several effective social media marketing vehicles and methods that help businesses use the platform to reach potential customers. Creating a Facebook Business Page is the first element of Facebook marketing, followed by paid advertising and its accompanying tools. 

Facebook Business Page

If your company isn’t on Facebook, start by setting up a Facebook Business Page with your company’s name, logo and details. The more information you complete on the profile, the more robust your page will appear to visitors. Include keywords in your product descriptions and About section to make your listing more likely to appear when people search those terms.

Although a Facebook business page isn’t strictly necessary to advertise on the platform, businesses without one have limited options. Additionally, a Business Page lets you access the Facebook Ads Manager, a tool that makes it much easier to monitor your ads’ effectiveness, create new ads and bid on keywords.

Here are some tips for your Facebook Business Page: 

• Post on your Facebook Business Page frequently: You should post on your Facebook Business Page consistently and frequently with a combination of promotional and informative content, such as how-tos. If you have a local business, include community posts.
• Be consistent with your brand on your Facebook Business Page: Your social media posts should be consistent with your brand visually and content-wise.
• Create helpful content for your Facebook Business Page: Create interesting content your target market will find valuable. Your content should prompt prospects to take action, such as buying your product or service, making an appointment, going to your website, writing a review or sharing your posts.

Facebook advertising 

Creating and posting on your Facebook Business Page is free. However, Facebook’s organic reach is limited. Spending money on targeted ads can boost your results significantly. 

Facebook understands its users; the platform can identify them by ZIP code, gender, income, education, age, interests, brand preferences, device type and Facebook engagement frequency. Businesses can use this information to target promising prospects and tailor ads to appeal to them. 

Getting started with Facebook advertising is straightforward:

1. Set a goal: Choosing your goal is your first step. You may want to:
   1. Boost brand awareness
   2. Increase your reach
   3. Create web traffic
   4. Generate sales leads
   5. Increase general audience engagement
   6. Up your video marketing views
   7. Convert leads to sales
   8. Generate store traffic
   9. Build an audience 
2. Decide on a budget and dates: Next, set a budget and specify your campaign’s schedule, including start and stop dates.
3. Determine your ad audience: You can include or exclude people based on their history with your company. For example, send a new customer promotion to those who haven’t yet liked your Page, target friends of people who’ve liked your Page or show ads to people already familiar with your brand. You can narrow ad placement further by choosing users by device type, platform placement and operating systems.

Facebook offers numerous ad formats, including the following: 

• Boosted post: With a boosted post, Facebook takes an existing post and shows it to more people.
• Static image: A static image ad is a photo or image with a headline.
• Video: A short video advertisement on Facebook must adhere to preset specifications.
• Carousel: This ad type is a series of images users click through, each with a call to action (CTA).
• Slideshow: A slideshow is a series of images that are played automatically.
• Collection: A collection is a hybrid mobile format with a combination of video, slideshow and images. When clicked, it becomes an Instant Experience (see below).
• Instant Experience: An Instant Experience is a great way to highlight your brand. A full-screen Experience opens after a user taps your ad on a mobile device.
• Stories ad: In your Facebook Story, ads are full-screen images or videos that disappear after 24 hours unless saved.
• Messenger ad: A Messenger ad includes text and images that appear in users’ inboxes while on Facebook or Messenger.
• Lead ad: When clicked, a lead ad shows additional text and displays a contact form with the user’s information prefilled.
• Dynamic ad: A dynamic ad targets people who have already been on your website, retargeting them by showing them a product they’ve already browsed.
• Link ad: A link ad is a static image ad; every part of these ads is clickable because the goal is to drive web traffic.

Top Facebook marketing strategies

Facebook can be part of a solid e-commerce marketing strategy ― or become a waste of money. To increase your success rate, consider the following strategies for using Facebook marketing effectively.

1. Create a baseline audience on Facebook. 

If you’re just starting with Facebook marketing, you have a blank slate. While you could start advertising immediately, building a baseline audience by getting people who already like your company to like your Facebook Business Page is more cost-effective.

As soon as your Page is set up and populated with some posts, reach out to your personal Facebook friends (via the free tool on your Business Page) and ask them to like your Page. In addition, ask your current customers to like your Facebook Page (provide a link to make it easy).

Building a baseline audience is free and provides the following advantages: 

• You’re exposed to friends of friends: When someone likes your Facebook Business Page, you gain exposure to people in that person’s friend group, some of whom may visit your Page and like it.
• You set up a “lookalike audience”: Facebook uses your baseline audience to build “lookalike” audiences for future advertising. Facebook evaluates your baseline audience’s characteristics and looks for similar people to help identify your target audience.

2. Target your Facebook ads audience as narrowly as possible.

Facebook lets you get extremely granular in your audience targeting. The more specific you get, the less money you’ll waste and the more engagement your ads will generate. 

Consider the following effective targeting tactics: 

• Understand your current customers: To determine whom to target, analyze your current customer base and determine commonalities.
• Find a local angle: If you have a local business with a customer base within a limited area, you should advertise only in that area.
• Target by income or interests: Some products or services are more commonly purchased by people in a specific group. For example, target luxury products to people based on higher income or luxury interests. You can target people whose interests include competitive or complementary brands.
• Vary your message by audience: Since you can use Facebook advertising at any stage of the customer journey ― from brand awareness, engagement and lead generation to conversion and repurchase ― it makes sense to target different groups with different ad messages.
• Designate custom audiences: Use the Facebook Ads Manager’s custom audiences feature to create lists of people at different stages. For example, create a custom audience for people who liked your Facebook Page, one for people who clicked on a previous ad, another for people on your email list and yet another for current customers from your customer relationship management software. Custom audiences make it easy to send relevant promotions, increasing the odds of engagement and moving leads through the sales funnel toward purchase (and repurchase). 
• Use retargeting: The Facebook Pixel ― code you include on your website ― is a great tool for boosting conversions. This code tracks website visitors and the pages they visit on your site so you can retarget them with a dynamic ad when they’re on Facebook. The Facebook Pixel can also provide data to create a custom audience of people who have visited your website in the past 30 days so that you can send them an ad promoting a new product or deal. For example, if someone looked at a shirt on your website, show them an ad with the same shirt along with a free shipping offer to increase conversions. You could also show them a carousel ad with images of other products that complement the shirt to boost upselling and cross-selling.

3. Try video advertising and posts on Facebook.

Facebook’s research found that people spend five times more time with video than static content and nearly a third of mobile shoppers say they use video to discover new products. 

In addition to creating video ads, consider video posts. Video posts should be short (no longer than 90 seconds) and grab the viewer’s attention within the first three seconds. Create videos with the highest possible resolution and include text captions because users often play video ads on mute. 

Consider using Reels on Facebook (also available on Instagram). Reels are like TikToks ― short videos you can sync with music or audio clips. They appear in the poster’s profile and users’ feeds (on Instagram, they also appear on the Discover page). You can even create a Reel on Instagram and share it on Facebook.

Reels help you create fun content that highlights your brand’s personality. You can show off your products or services or give educational tips or quick tutorials.

4. Test, analyze and adjust your Facebook advertising.

Your first ads won’t necessarily be your most effective. It takes time and experience to identify the correct audiences, ad formats and messages that resonate with prospects. 

Luckily, Facebook provides robust analytics tools to offer insight into what’s working and what’s not. You can see which ads are most effective and give you the most bang for your buck.

To find what works the best, use A/B testing. With A/B testing, you create and run two or more ads at the same time that have everything in common except for the variable you’re testing.

 Here are some examples of elements to A/B test:

• Headline: Statement vs. question, punctuation and use of emoji
• Image: Concrete vs. conceptual, different angles and different products
• CTA: “Buy now” vs. “learn more” vs. “save now”
• Type of ad: Static image vs. video and slideshow
• Audience: Segments based on age group, gender, location and interests

The Ads Manager shows each ad’s results. If you install the Facebook Pixel, you can see purchases attributed to your ads. Other key metrics include your relevance score, click-through rate (CTR), cost per thousand impressions (CPM), cost per action (CPA) and cost per lead. 

Continually test and monitor your results, dropping underperforming ads and increasing your use of successful ads and ad characteristics, such as targeting, format and headlines, to optimize your ad spend. 

5. Use Facebook Live.

While Facebook users buy items and engage with brands, Facebook isn’t primarily a platform where people go to shop. Facebook users often want to be informed or entertained and using Facebook Live can accomplish these goals. Facebook Live is a free feature of your Business Page that allows you to create a real-time online video webinar, demonstration or talk, complete with audience interactivity. 

Create an event, like a Facebook Live Q&A and publicize it to your target audience ahead of time. When you’re ready, interact with viewers in real time, acknowledging them by name. 

At the end of your Facebook Live presentation, give viewers a CTA. As a bonus, you can record the entire Facebook Live presentation to use later as a video post on your Business Page or website, all at no cost.

6. Tell stories and connect on Facebook.

Facebook isn’t the place to use hard-selling techniques; it’s a platform where you can let people see the humans behind the business. Who are the company founders and what is important to them? How are the products created and who makes them? What is the company’s history and what does it say about company values? 

Consider creating posts and ads featuring company employees and owners to foster this sense of connection. When potential customers see real people’s faces instead of actors, they feel more connected to the company. They also value handmade products and family-owned firms highly, so share this information on Facebook posts and ads.

When followers comment on your posts or reach out to you via Messenger, be sure to reply promptly and thoughtfully. Within a day or so of a new person liking your page, acknowledge that person and let them know you appreciate their support.

Telling your story and creating authentic connections takes time, so don’t expect your Facebook marketing to result in immediate lead generation or sales (although it’s possible). Keep posting, interacting and advertising with quality content and you will build a strong Facebook following and potentially gain a few brand ambassadors.

Cost of Facebook marketing

You’ll set a budget (daily or total cost) at the start of a campaign and it will never exceed that amount unless you change it. You can also set an overall budget that covers the total cost of all your campaigns. So, what do you get for that amount? 

To understand Facebook pricing, you must be familiar with several terms:

• CPM: The CPM is the amount it takes to show your ad to 1,000 people.
• CTR: Your CTR is the percentage of people who see your ad and click on it to go to your website or landing page. Your ad’s relevance and effectiveness to your selected audience determine your CTR. (Your CTR can also refer to people who click to like or comment on a post, click to like your Business Page or click to view a video.)
• Cost per click (CPC): CPC refers to the amount of money divided by the number of clicks.

Advertising prices on Facebook are set by auction, so they’re primarily driven by demand. According to WordStream, the average CPC across all industries and ad objectives is $1.92; however, this number varies widely. More competitive industries and keywords are more expensive because Facebook limits the number of total ads and has advertisers compete by bidding. 

In addition to your budget amount and keyword competition, several other criteria factor into your Facebook ad costs, including campaign objectives, ad quality, relevance and seasonality. 

Campaign objectives

When you initially set up your campaign, Facebook asks you to identify your campaign objective. The further away your objective is from a sale, the cheaper it will be. For example, objectives, such as engagement (Page likes, video views and post likes) are relatively inexpensive, while lead generation and conversion are at the higher end. 

For all objectives, the average CPM was $7.19. However, when you look at it by objective, the average CPM for lead generation was $11.30, compared with $2.29 for brand awareness. 

That said, the CPC has more or less the opposite order since objectives that are closer to a sale have higher CTRs. 

Here’s a look at average CPCs and CPMs by objective as of February 2024: 

Ad quality and relevance

Facebook charges a premium because there’s limited advertising space and users get annoyed by bad or irrelevant ads. If your CTR is too low, examine your ads and determine how to improve them. Try more A/B testing, get feedback from your customers about what’s important to them and try different things. 

A lack of ad success could also be a mismatch between the ad and your chosen audience. Gear your message to your audience for the best results; you’ll see your CTR increase and your CPC decrease. As a rule of thumb, 2 percent is a good CTR.

Seasonality

Generally, costs tend to increase in the third and fourth quarters as many businesses increase their budgets for the holiday season. You may also see fluctuations if you sell seasonal goods such as bathing suits, school supplies and Christmas ornaments.

When you are in the Ads Manager setting up your campaign, you’ll see the estimated CPC given your audience and other parameters. Play around with the audience and other factors and see how they impact costs. Try the automatic placement setting, so Facebook optimizes your advertising to give you the best results for your budget.