The quickfire guide to building an awesome Facebook marketing strategy

It’s safe to say that Facebook remains one of the most popular social media platforms, which is why, when it comes to Facebook marketing, it can often be harder to get seen amongst all of the competition.

As well as having an overarching social media strategy set up, making sure you have a dedicated Facebook marketing strategy can be key to your business' success. With that in mind, we’re here to provide you with a quickfire guide to make sure your efforts don’t fall short.

Define your Facebook marketing goals

As with every campaign, your very first step must be setting your SMART goals. Before you know what to do, you need to determine why you’re doing it, and it’s much easier to hit a target if you know which target you intend to hit! An example of your high level Facebook goals and ambitions could include:

• Increase brand awareness
• Increase traffic to your website
• Increase lead generation and sales
• Provide customer service
• Build a relationship with your audience
  
  

Determine your Facebook audience

Facebook marketing is pointless if you aren’t reaching the right people. That’s why getting the right target audience is so important! Looking at who’s on Facebook and what your current audience breakdown looks like will help you determine which Facebook marketing strategies will be most effective.

There are a few tactics you can use to do this. The first is to use the buyer personas that you created when setting up your social media strategy as a basis for your audience. Alternatively, you can use tools such as Facebook Insights or your social media management tool to get familiar with your Facebook audience, and discover more about the demographic. Combining these two methods could create an even stronger audience understanding. 

Plan your Facebook content 

Now that your goals and audience have been determined, it’s time to begin curating and creating the content you’ll be posting. 

Types of Facebook post

Each social media platform has forms of content that work best. Facebook has a few different styles of content that you can post to your page, including:

• Text posts
• Image and video posts
• Question posts
• Events
• Facebook Live
• Facebook Stories

The content you produce and post should be well thought out, timely, presentable, and most importantly, valuable to your target audience. 

Posting to Facebook

Planning and strategising your posting schedule is a key part of your strategy and should always be priority. 

A study by SocialBakers found that “5 to 10 posts per week appears to be the optimal Facebook posting frequency”. But perfecting your businesses posting schedule can take a while to perfect, and it’ll come with experimentation. 

The optimum times to post will obviously vary for each business but Sprout Social has put together a great guide for the best times to post on Facebook for each type of business, that may be helpful to follow. Your analytics data will also be useful here. 

Create a Facebook content calendar 

When you start to understand the content that serves your business as well as your audience best, it’s a good idea to implement a social media calendar into your marketing strategy.

Mistakes happen in every sector and marketing is no exception. Even the most organised social media manager can miss things, and campaigns may need to be changed due to external events at a moment's notice. With this in mind, it is advisable to create a social media calendar to organise your posts in advance. A bird's eye view of your upcoming social content can be particularly useful when a reactive campaign is required, ensuring no posts fall through the net. 

A Facebook content calendar can also be useful for: 

• Plotting themes in across your campaigns
• Planning content objectives: determining your mix between educational/curated and promotional content.
• Keeping track of content that has been posted to avoid reposting.
• Identifying content gaps in your posts.

You can download free social media calendar templates online, create your own spreadsheets or use a social media management tool to help keep track of all your posts. 

Develop your Facebook ads strategy

Many of the same strategies that you use to create your organic social content can be re-applied to paid Facebook ads, but taking the time to craft a solid Facebook ad strategy can have serious impact.

Types of Facebook ads

Facebook advertising is now one of the most effective tools out there to help grow your business, create engaged and loyal customers, and generate leads and sales.

There are 9 ad formats available on Facebook (at the time of writing):

• Photo ads
• Video ads
• Carousel ads
• Collection ads
• Dynamic ads
• Instant experience ads
• Slideshow ads
• Lead ads
• Messenger ads

The most appropriate format will depend on your demographics, campaign goals and marketing objectives.

Plan engaging Facebook ads

Experimenting with the different formats will help you determine if one type performs better for your business than another. Bare in mind that audience's change and grow overtime. If you haven't experimented with formats and content in a while, perhaps its time to do so. What worked previously may now be outdated or falling short. And, of course, ensure you are following the ad spec rules, otherwise, you'll find yourself repeating work and wasting time to re-submit ads for approval. .

It often takes time to perfect your marketing strategy, but don’t let that scare you off. Perseverance is key and you will start seeing results if you have a solid strategy and stick to your marketing efforts. Monitoring and analysing your goals, analytics, content, and ad campaigns is key to your overall success on Facebook.

If you’re doing all of these things, you’ll see increased brand awareness, conversions, and engagement in no time.