Originally launched as FaceMash in 2004 by a Harvard sophomore student, Mark Zuckerberg, the social portal Facebook as it is now, made waves and became the most popular social platform worldwide.  It is used by a whopping 2.9 billion registered users globally which is almost 40% of the world population. As everything evolved, so did Facebook and is not limited to only a place where people meet, interact and exchange views. It became a business hub of sorts when Facebook introduced “Business Pages” by the end of 2007 and 100,000 businesses signed up almost immediately. It made life easier for smaller businesses and they could advertise their wares in the same arena as big brands. Facebook revealed that 2/3rd of its users visit business pages once a week. 

What is Facebook marketing?
Every business, whether big or small, has a budget for Social Media Marketing. Traditionally, it took logistics to get through to the audience. Facebook came, saw and conquered in a way that no one had until 2008. It brought everyone to the same page literally and made the economics more bearable as the middlemen were also not needed anymore. The manufacturer could sell directly to the consumer making the product prices extremely cost-effective.

There are various ways to market a product on Facebook:

• Video ads
• Image ads
• Carousel ads
• Collection ads
• Slideshow ads
• Lead generation ads
• Business branding ads
• Targeted ads
• Facebook marketplace ads
• Facebook job ads

Facebook is as much a social platform as it has become a preferred business model for brand promotion and other marketing activities. For this purpose, Facebook has many marketing tools that make sales and marketing easier. 
Facebook marketing strategies depend upon a business’s target audience. For example, if a brand wants complete engagement, consistency in targeted ads gives the best results. However, there are multiple ways to grow a brand on Facebook.

Why use Facebook marketing, you say?

The following points validate why:

• In an analysis worldwide, Facebook marketing has proved to be excellent in brand promotion.
• Facebook’s targeted ads are the best moneymaker.
• Organically, Facebook has the highest reach. 
• Brands can expand their reach by integrating with other platforms.

And why is Facebook marketing so important?

• International exposure: 1/3rd of the world’s population is on the Facebook app. This is good news for businesses as they can use this platform to share in groups, make business pages and run ads. The brands get to interact with a diverse audience via communication thus. Facebook ads have gigantic outreach and for marketing and sales, the world is your oyster. 
• Possible target audience: There is an opportunity for marketers that Facebook paid ads to provide, to use the demographics and interests to target the relevant audience. Super-specific targeting as well as re-targeting of the users helps narrow down the target audience and interact with them in the best way possible. Strategies ensure you can meet them at their own turf and hard sell. 500 million people watch Facebook ads on a daily basis, helping brands promote effectively.
• Regulation of B2B and B2C businesses efficiently: While Facebook is popular with B2C, it is very effective with B2B as well. Did you know that the stats show that the decision-makers of businesses spend almost 74% of their time on Facebook? This makes the competition level high for B2B. With the right strategy consisting of good ad formats, targeting, messaging and user experience, success is quick. B2B businesses can target new users with the following segments – job designation and title, name of employer, the industry of employment, company size, the industry of interest, travelers for business purposes etc. Also, with the current metrics like website visitors, client base, email list etc, lookalike audience lists can be made. 
• Boost brand loyalty: Quick interactions for a business with their customers, Facebook is the best platform.  These conversations help build and nurture brand loyalty. The customer persona is a type that needs quick answers and results for them to have faith and become repeat customers. And for this to happen, a brand must show that they care and invest time in building trust. Facebook is downloaded every second globally and most brands are turning to this platform for marketing.
• Targeting psychographically: Psychographics is research on consumer behaviour consisting of their activities, interests and opinions.  Within Facebook, targeting is easy but Facebook also has a feature that allows one to target outside its demographics. Facebook facilitates targeting according to distinctive configurations such as milestones, hobbies, interests, temperaments etc. Psychographic targeting enables specific, meticulous and precise results. Subsequently, the alignment between a business’s digital marketing strategy and offline marketing strategy synchronises to make sure the same criterion is applicable throughout the multiple marketing channels used. 
• Gain more website traffic: Website traffic can be increased monumentally by utilising Facebook marketing. It allows sharing links to your website and landing pages on your Facebook page. By clicking on these links, the audience is transported to the desired website. CTAs (Call To Action) buttons on the landing pages make them more susceptible to becoming more receptive.

How to use Facebook marketing strategically?

1. Set up a business page – This is free of charge and can boost your marketing strategy tremendously. Go to the “Facebook page create” from your personal profile page and there will be two options given, business or brand AND community or public figure, choose the first one. Then, fill in the relevant information required in the “Create a page” section. Next, choose your “Big” category and then Facebook will ask for three fields of information that are required to be filled: page name, category and description. Once this is done, click on the “Create page” link and you’re ready. Next, put up good and relevant images or creatives,  add a page username, add a CTA and you’re good to go. 
2. The different types of Facebook posts – So now the business page is ready, what next? Well, naturally one wants to get into the action with Facebook for marketing and start understanding the nitty-gritty of it. But before that let’s check out what kind of Facebook posts exist. There are basic posts with text only, and while some may argue that only text is obsolete, that’s not entirely true. Text posts asking a question and making the audience think are very valuable. Next, there are posts that are only to share links. This one is typically to share beautiful content from the website and it has shown to help increase footfall too. Now, the more popular one is the image posts, but you already knew that. The audience loves pictures so why not give them images that have intent and content and keep them hooked? Keep them pretty much self-explanatory with prices, promotional offers, discounts etc. Similarly, video posts have a higher engagement ratio as well. In fact, it is higher than image posts. Post your video ads, there are many how-to tutorials available online. Then there is “Live”, which was not used much on Facebook until recently, but now it is the most loved feature because of the level of authenticity attached to it. Also, “stories” is another feature that has been overlooked up until now due to the popularity it has on Instagram. But as of now, there are 500 million people viewing stories every day on Facebook and it is only growing rapidly. The Facebook algorithms do not affect the stories feature making them an absolute must-to-do in your Facebook marketing strategy. Stories are a constant on the top of a user’s feed and stay for 24 hours making them a viable approach. 
3. Facebook marketing strategy – It is time to get a winning marketing game plan. Firstly, in order to understand your audience, build buyer personas. This helps make the posts for the page easy. Audience insights are a great tool that can help you achieve that. This will also help you define your next goal, may it be retargeting or rebranding, the choice is yours. Next, set your mission, vision and goals. That way it is almost always pretty clear how to navigate through the roadblocks if any. And to stay true to the core of your brand values. This one is a complete must, make a calendar for each week keeping the current news and write down informative content to keep them engaged. Facebook has ads that keep appearing on one’s feed constantly and people are so done with it, and to top that if you try to hard-sell your product directly, the customers may get iffy about it. What you need to do is build a story, an idea or a conversation around your product and post at the correct times keeping the demographics in mind.  And while we are talking about ads, let’s talk about Facebook ads. A great way to bump up your brand is by running Facebook ads. The great thing is that Facebook ad spending can vary from high to low which means everyone can afford it.

Let’s sum up some quick tips for assured success.

• Define a goal for your Facebook marketing strategy
• Determine your target audience
• Design your content and make a calendar
• Engage your audience optimally
• Make a “Call to action”
• Post consistently, but wisely
• Keep your audience interested and engaged
• Make customised post content for different audiences
• Relevant and timely updates
• Tell your story through visual content
• Use all the other social platforms for brand promotion
• Integrate FacebookPixel and Facebook ads
• Use as many Facebook tools as necessary

There you go!

This is all the knowledge you need to be armed with. Stand out with curated content and get a strong game on. Facebook marketing is important and to make it work, you have to have a sharp business page, to begin with.  Devise that strategy and make super-interesting posts. You are good to go. 

Social networks aren’t about Websites. They’re about experiences.

– Mike DeLorenzo.