10 Facebook Marketing Tips: Take your small business beyond basic online marketing to exceptional.

Use Facebook Manager. 

1. Stay in control even when you are giving some away with Facebook manager.

Facebook manager allows you to customize your permissions for marketing agencies, copywriters, employees, or tech-support/accountant (AKA: sister). Audit and Edit your permission list often to prevent errors or mistakes.

Types of access:

• Admin- all access’ including adding a deleting people
  • Employee- work on assigned or specific projects and tools.
  • Finance analysis- ability to view specific financial details
  • Finance editor- can edit the financial details.

Managing Ads and Campaigns.

2. Use paid ads to reach customers outside your friend’s lists.

Stop relying on your posts on Facebook and Instagram to reach new audiences. Facebook Ad Manager coordinates all your Instagram and Facebook ad campaigns. It will ensure that you are not missing one or doubling your efforts. It will also help you ensure that your audience is correct for each ad (see tip #7).

Pixel FB

3. Setup Pixel on your website. Every business is in the “Cookie” business.

Cookies, or as Facebook has branded, “Pixels” are tracking codes for your website visitors. Adding Pixel to your webpage will give you insights into ALL your web traffic. Facebook analytics is powerful and versatile. Just a few years ago, this level of marketing was accessible by big brands and bigger data (see tip #6). With this info, you can leverage (see tip #4).

Pixels track some of these items:

• Page visited on your site
• Length of time on the pages
• What time they visited
• What country they are in
• Their demographic info in FB.
• Items added to shopping cart
• Making a purchase

4. Leverage your Pixels.

Once Pixels are activated on your website, you can use the data to create custom conversions. These custom conversions can be made from standard Pixel events. Some areas of focus include incomplete purchases or specific landing page visits.

Some custom events to consider and why:

• Items added to cart but not purchased. Retarget customer and incentivize to complete the transaction.
• Purchase complete. Send thank you and look to upsell another product.
• Purchase complete. Referral request.
• Track specific purchases like colour or size. Measure customer preference.

5. Re-target customers that almost purchased (loaded cart but didn’t buy).

Retarget site visits without purchase. Retarget past customers for referrals or up-sales.  It takes a tremendous effort to drive traffic to your site, store, service, or product. Filtering through all the people that don’t want or need your stuff is a struggle. Once you know a person is interested, it’s now just a negotiation between you and them. Keep asking for the sale.

6. Analyze your data to gain insights and ADJUST!

Facebook’s analytics is a powerful and versatile measuring tool. Not long ago, it was only available to the elite products and tech giants. With this tool, you can adapt and adjust your marketing and tailor it to focus your message. You can understand your customers better, like where and when they visit and purchase. You can also understand what campaigns they like better and ones that miss the mark.

There are plenty of reasons to adjust your marketing and fine-tune your message. Tweaking marketing campaigns is often the difference between success and failure.

Custom Audience.

7. Know thy self, audience.

Discovering your customers (audience) is difficult without a tracking cookie. In the past, it was often trial and error. The most successful predictors seen as marketing psychics. Today, you have access to this mystical foresight if you load your customer data in as an audience.
Custom audiences can be added with data from your Facebook page, Instagram page, website (with Pixel), offline lists (customer contact info from the draw), past customer lists (uploaded via excel template).

8. Double down with a Look-a-Like.

Facebook look-a-like audiences create a customer “double.” from your existing audience data. Facebook targets similar behaviours, likes, demographics, and interests. Building a look-a-like audience finds more customers like your current customers. If one bought the other should too!

Advance advertising techniques.

9. Use Split testing (A/B testing).

Would you love to know if the ad with the red background is better than the black one? Or if your headline for one is better than another before you commit to a full campaign? Split testing is a feature that is built right into the Facebook ad manager. Selecting split testing will allow you to create an ad and change one variable. Set your test time and then compare results. Split testing can test creative, the audience, and placement (type of ad). Don’t over do it, use only 2-3 options more will just confuse the results.

10. Use Dynamic ads.

Dynamic ads customize to the person seeing them. By utilizing Pixel data, your customers can receive customized ads. Options include; Viewed or added but not purchased, Added to cart but not purchased, Upsell products, Cross-sell products. You can load your catalogue of items with partner sites. Once the catalogue is uploaded, several options for customization are available. Customizations include the headline and images.

Conclusion.

Bringing your small business from basic to exceptional takes some work, but the tools are available.

Don’t underestimate the value of your data. A friend of mine has a small business that gets almost all his new customers through referred. This friend has 10+ years of past customers that he has done very little to ask for referrals. Building a custom audience (importing an excel), we made a targeted campaign to request referrals. Filtering this custom audience, we created three personas Foodie, Adventurer, Relaxation. These three personas allow us to customize a referral incentive (that is not money) and would interest each audience. We are developing a split test for headlines and will be launching a campaign after we analyze the results. Signup to my blog to stay up to date.

For custom support solutions, contact me here.

References.

Adams, M. (2020). Advertising on Facebook: Advanced. LinkedIn Learning https://www.linkedin.com/learning-login/share?forceAccount=false&redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Flearning%2Fadvertising-on-facebook-advanced-3%3Ftrk%3Dshare_ent_url%26shareId%3D%252BQvbYVWORImL0LfQVIpxvA%253D%253D&account=2109516

[FB Logos] Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

[Money] Photo by Michael Longmire on Unsplash

[Binoculars] Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

[Target] Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

[Raised hands] Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

[Mushroom] Photo by Geeky Shots on Unsplash

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Keywords: marketing for small business ideas, digital marketing for small business, social media, Facebook Marketing, marketing for small business, online marketing for small business