How to Create an Effective Facebook Marketing Strategy

Follow this guide to help you create an effective Facebook marketing strategy in simple 7 steps. Read more to know about the Facebook marketing trends for 2020

Set goals for Facebook

The first step to any marketing strategy is setting the right goals. This roadmap will be an essential reference to measure against to make sure your Facebook strategy is successful. But to set goals, you’ll first want to do a little research to ensure your plan is attainable through the platform.

Below are a few goals marketers wanted to achieve through Facebook:

• 34% wanted to increase brand awareness
• 21% wanted to increase community engagement
• 11% wanted to increase sales and lead generation

Know your Facebook audience

Understanding who is on Facebook and what your current audience breakdown looks like will be important in determining which Facebook marketing strategies you should employ and how.

Sprout Social’s 2019 deep dive into social media demographics is a great starting point for getting a general sense of things like where Facebook users live, languages are spoken, education and plenty more key findings from the Pew Research Center.

Engage proactively with your audience

Like most social media channels, they’re built as networks to converse, discuss and share content. As a brand, you can’t forget that basic idea of what makes a social media network. That means conversation and engagement should never be put on the back burner.

Instead, try to be a community for your audience. Facebook is a great place to hold industry chats or discussions, whether it’s with a different audience or your own customers. While Twitter often gets all the limelight of being a social customer care mecca, don’t forget about Facebook too.

You can help drive Facebook engagement by asking people to simply engage in the first place.

Schedule your Facebook content

Content creation and curation are important components of any social media strategy. On Facebook, you have many more choices on the types of posts you can use. This ranges from Stories to status to Group posts. With the selection of options comes the specific types of content your audience is interested in, which should also be kept in mind while evaluating the techniques for marketing on Facebook that will work best for you. Our 2018 Index analyzed what type of posts consumers want from brands. Thirty percent said they would like links to more information and 18% want more images. Videos came in a close third with 17% of people surveyed.

Determine your Facebook ads strategy

Whether you’re just starting out on Facebook or you’ve been on it for a while, it’s difficult to escape the need to pay for brand exposure. You need to have a clear understanding of your core business offering & your target audience, in order to sync your ad strategy with your business goals & generate leads. However, growing your audience and brand loyalty doesn’t happen overnight. You have to earn it.

Encourage employee advocacy

Your employees should be your biggest cheerleaders. Reports state, 72% of people reported feeling more connected with a brand when its employees shared information about it on social media. Employees put faces to the brands, making them more relatable to consumers.

While you can try to wrangle employee advocates using company announcement emails, a solution such as Bambu is specifically designed to streamline the process and make it easy to transform employees into brand ambassadors.

Your employees are an invaluable asset when it comes to messaging amplification, social selling, and authentic engagement. And unlike industry influencers, their services on social are free.

Track & analyze your results

The last step of your strategy is to keep an eye on the metrics you identified earlier in goal setting and analyze the results. This also includes determining your ROI.

Measure Page impressions, Fan growth and how your Facebook content is performing using intuitive, interactive reports that can be downloaded and shared with stakeholders in seconds. And don’t forget to see how you measure up against the competition. With premium services like Sprout, you can directly compare your performance against industry averages and competitor data to ensure your Facebook marketing strategy is on the right track.