Thursday 12 February 2015

How to Create a 5-Step Marketing Strategy for Facebook

Bloggers are starting to wake up to the fact that a Facebook page is now a necessity for marketing their brand and spreading their ideas to a global audience.
Facebook is often seen as a the marketing channel that in the majority is mainly used by B2C brands which focus on consumers.
How to Create a 5 Step Facebook Marketing Strategy for Your Blog
It is only recently that bloggers have started to embrace Facebook as a legitimate marketing platform for engaging and selling their services and products and communicate with their fans and followers.

Bloggers in the past were very much email marketing centric in their approach to aggregate and build their subscriber database.

Over the last 2 years bloggers realized that Twitter was also a very effective and highly leveraged social media marketing platform to link back to their blog and engage with a highly targeted audience.


The Facebook Page as an Extension of Your Blog

A blogger who wants to be serious about using social media to market their blog should think of their Facebook page as an “extension of their blog“.

A Facebook page is where you can upload most of your content that is already on your blog such as:

  • Blog posts that should published on Facebook as updates
  • Videos that you may be already hosted on your blog
  • Images from your blog
The first step is to set up your Facebook page. You will need to have a current Facebook profile to do this.

After setting up your Facebook page it is worthwhile sitting down and creating a strategy that will then translate into marketing tactics with traction that achieve your goals.

The Facebook marketing strategy plan is the glue that binds your Facebook marketing tactics together and provides focus and discipline.  It stops you implementing tactics that are random and chaotic.

5 Step Facebook Marketing Strategy

1. Define Target Audience


Defining your target audience is the foundation of any business marketing plan and strategy. Examples of a target audience could include small businesses that want to learn more about marketing their business online, it could be females 18-30 who love fashion if you are a fashion blogger. 

The target market may be geographically focused and include other demographics such as age, gender and income. This will be driven by your business plan and goals that should already have been defined.


2. Determine Goals and Objectives


You need to decide what you are trying to achieve with your Facebook presence. Some examples of the types of goals you may want to achieve with your Facebook marketing campaign
  • Increase traffic to the blog
  • Improve the “call to action” conversion rates
  • Enhance customer service
  • Increase sales whether it is company products or blogger income from ebooks, speaking engagement, consulting or affiliate income.
  • Save money on traditional marketing costs
  • Engage with customers and potential prospects
  • Deepen the relationship with prospects and customers
  • Grow the brands Facebook ‘likes’
  • Increase email subscriptions to the blog
  • Enhance and promote the brand

What does Success Look Like?


What will success look like for these goals?
  • Will you be looking to increase sales by 20%,
  • Reduce marketing costs by 30%,
  • Grow Facebook ‘likes’ by 50% per month.
So putting specific metrics in place for goals, allows you to gauge degrees of success or failure and allows you monitor and adjust your tactics that you implement to achieve those goals.

The Social Media Examiner Facebook page shows how strategy goals translate into tactics with two calls to action that are about achieving two goals on the Facebook landing page 

1. Increasing Facebook likes
2. Acquiring new email subscribers

SocialMedia Examiner Facebook Page showing 2 Call to Actions

3. Design, Develop and Implement Tactics to Achieve Goals


This is where the tactics will be implemented to achieve your goals.
This could include posting to the Facebook page with the latest blog posts and other types of updates.

There are 4 major types of updates:

1. Conversation – is designed to stimulate conversation with the fan base by asking thought provoking questions that encourages short succinct answers from fans. This could include a Facebook poll using the native Facebook question app.

2. Pictures – upload images that the that you want to expose potential customers to this is especially important for a bloggers such as photographers or art or any of the creative disciplines. (A good example is Aqua Bumps blog and Aqua Bumps Facebook page)

3. Link – Deep linked updates that that drives traffic away from Facebook to your other online properties such as website, online store, blog or YouTube channel

4. Product – spotlight a new product that is releasing or will release. You can test new designs and get feedback on possible new items or even headlines for an upcoming eBook
  • Sending out an email to let people know you have a Facebook page and to connect with you there and like your page
  • Designing, developing and implementing a landing page on your Facebook welcome tab that provides a call to action as simple as ..”Click ‘Like’ to discover how you can attract hundreds of people to your business each week!
Example of an obvious demonstration of a singular tactic to increase Facebook likes on Rachael Mcgregor’s Facebook page to achieve one of her Facebook strategy marketing goals.
Call to action to like the Facebook page of Rachael Mcgregor

4. Monitoring, Measuring & Reporting


Monitoring is not about hard core metrics and is not specific or easy to measure as measuring as you need to be checking for sentiment whether positive or negative. These are what you call the subjective soft metrics that are subjective.


Monitoring


This is looking at the comments and feedback to see if you are getting , no feedback, positive feedback or negative comments. These are soft metrics and measuring tone is still an inexact science so you will need to manually read and monitor this feedback to ensure that the tone is positive and engaged.


Measuring


There are a few tools you should have in your toolbox that will give you the metrics you need to measure traffic, conversions, landing page hits and other discrete objectives.

The three tools worth considering are Facebook Insights, Google Analytics and AllFacebookStats.com


1. Facebook Insights


Facebook Insights provides Facebook Page owners and Facebook Platform developers with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners and Platform developers are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook.

Example of part of a report from my Facebook page
JeffBullas.com Facebook Insights Graph

2. Google Analytics


If you have a self  hosted blog (not on blogger.com or WordPress.com) but hosted on a platform like GoDaddy.com then load Google Analytics (free) to your blog site and this can provide you  extensive details on traffic to specific pages. You could measure hits to landing pages and whether people are then going to the registration page and converting

3. AllFacebookStats.com


This site provides a range measurements with the free entry package providing an entry level statistics showing
  • Fancount statistics
  • Advanced statistics
The entry level package allows you to see the statistics for the last 30 days and other premium paid packages starting from $69 a month provide greater detail over longer timeframes.


Reporting


Reporting the weekly results from your Facebook marketing campaign provides you with the numbers in black and white and can be as simple as
  • Increase in fans for the week
  • Increase in Fans for the month

You can also combine statistics for Facebook insights and AllFacebook Stats to provide a comprehensive report if required for a corporate environment
Example of a report
Facebook report

5. Modify, Rinse and Repeat

The monitoring and measuring enables you to assess your progress and adapt and change your tactics. You may need to modify the landing page or even spend some of the marketing budget on Facebook advertising that targets your  target audience to achieve your goals. You may find comments on Facebook may not be that postive about your updates or blog posts or you are receiving no interaction. 

This is telling you that you need to work on making the content more compelling.
So adapt, test and keep testing.

What success have you had with your Facebook marketing? I look forward to hearing your stories.

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