If building your customer base and improving your brand image are top priorities for you, Facebook advertising can be a powerful tool in your digital marketing arsenal. Facebook has over 2.7 billion active users, which means massive potential for growing your brand.
It’s important to approach your marketing efforts from the right direction though. When it comes to running ads on social media, you can easily get lost in all of the options and end up wasting money targeting the wrong audience or making the wrong impression.
What makes Facebook in particular so useful for eCommerce businesses is that the platform itself is so versatile. Once you have a solid foundation, you can easily transition from brand cultivation to product marketing without missing a beat. Because Facebook gives you so much control over the nature of your ads and what kinds of content you can include in them, as well as who sees them, the door really is wide open in terms of what you may be able to accomplish with the right direction.
With that being said, the following tips will help you determine the best course of action for building your customer base so you are best able to take advantage of what Facebook has to offer.
Is Facebook Ad Manager Necessary?
Every digital marketing platform has its strengths and weaknesses. Knowing how best to use one platform over another is important if you want your eCommerce store to succeed. Facebook actually offers several different avenues in terms of running paid ads, that can generally be split into two groups that serve two very different purposes.
If you are new to Facebook advertising, you might be wondering whether you should be running all of your campaigns through the Facebook Ad Manager or if Boosted Posts will suffice. The truth is, it depends on what you are trying to accomplish.
The Facebook Ad Manager has everything you need to run large-scale digital marketing campaigns, but has a steep learning curve and may not be necessary in many cases. On the other hand, boosted posts offer limited functionality in exchange for ease and efficiency.
Popular sentiment says that you absolutely need Facebook Ad Manager and that boosted posts are just a waste of time and money. This may be true in certain circumstances, but for purposes of building a following and improving brand awareness, this is flat out incorrect. Boosted posts can easily be utilized to get one of your popular posts in front of more eyes or to simply make announcements or get your name out there to users who might be interested in what you are selling.
Boosted Posts offer limited options but are designed to increase brand awareness and help users contact you or engage with your content.
While you wouldn’t want to run a comprehensive product advertising campaign through boosted posts alone, which would be needlessly complicated and inefficient, they are an excellent tool for connecting with users, which makes sense if you actually pay attention to what Facebook wants you to use its platform for.
Whenever you opt to boost a post, you will be met with a variety of options as to the angle or purpose of your advertisement.
You can set a goal for your boosted post that will help you get the right results. This changes how users interact with your post, and can be used specifically for building your Facebook following.
This is an important part of the Facebook marketing process that seems to get overlooked. Not every kind of ad you run on the platform is supposed to drive traffic to a product or service in hopes of a conversion. This is an extremely shortsighted understanding of you can potentially accomplish through social media marketing, and Facebook in particular.
If you are already creating quality content on your Facebook business page, you can strategically boost posts to increase engagement and get your brand in front of more eyes. Once you begin to build up a following in this way, it will be easier for you to promote your products and connect with potential customers without spending a cent.
Facebook Marketing Tips to Keep in Mind
- You can run a boosted post campaign specifically for Facebook “page likes.”
- Not every post is boost-worthy. Pay attention to your engagement metrics and focus on boosting posts that you know are already performing well.
- Plan your posts with an intent to boost them in the future.
- Use call to action phrases such as “join our community” to encourage users to follow your page.
- Emojis work exceptionally well in Facebook ads. Use them to draw attention to your posts.
- Give your users something to follow for. Your Facebook page should have at least one or two quality posts on it per day. This may seem like a tall order if you are busy but this is the bare minimum if you are serious about creating a dedicated following.
- Make sure if you do boost a post that has a link back to your website, that the Open Graph (OG) metadata is correct so that the image and description display correctly.
- You can boost multiple posts at once for easy split tests or for different purposes.
- Use only high-quality images and videos for the best results.
If you follow these general guidelines you will be able to draw more attention to your page and grow your base with relative ease. It’s important to keep in mind here that unlike with a traditional PPC campaign where you put in a certain amount of money with expectations of ROI, these tactics don’t directly translate into sales.
The purpose of a brand awareness campaign is just that, to get more users interested in your brand or company, with hopes that they will become a customer sometime down the road. Your goals here are more page likes, more post likes, comments, page messages, and post clicks, not necessarily conversions.
Taking Your Facebook Advertising to the Next Level
While building your customer base through a few boosted posts every now and then may seem simple enough, if you want to get the best possible results for your eCommerce store, you are going to want to consider a professional touch.
Here at Genius eCommerce®, eCommerce digital marketing campaigns are one of our specialties. We’ve seen the shift in the industry and how important platforms like Facebook have become in the world of online shopping. Our marketing experts know how to put together ads that get clicks and page follows, and can construct an action plan for you that will reliably grow your customer base.
In the right hands, Facebook advertising can completely renew your online presence. If you are looking for a way to get your store in front of more eyes and ultimately elevate your brand, get in touch with our team at 888-982-8269. We know what works and what doesn’t in terms of eCommerce marketing and will be able to steer your business in the right direction, no matter what your particular needs are.
