Facebook Marketing: 3 Steps That Guarantee High Returns

I like to share with you three practical steps you can adopt to start making money with Facebook, with your business page.

Talks about Facebook marketing have proliferated over the past few years such that we’ll be right to call it the song of the moment. That’s not much of a surprise, really. You should expect nothing less of such a global hub with more than 1.5billion people.

It’s a very impressive trend for businesses.

However, this glee has not permeated the entrepreneurship world. Many businesses are yet blind to this potential. While some don’t use Facebook at all, another bunch of businesses are simply squandering money because of ineffective strategies. The funniest majority thinks Facebook is all about status updates.

It’s no use lamenting over that, but we can learn not to fall into these categories. You can choose to repeat the success stories of brands like Moebel, Linxo or POSHme in your own business.

Before we start, I want to believe you either have a website or you are in the middle of creating one. If all you have now is a Facebook page, you should consider having a website also.

Of course, you could get few things done on your business page, but you can only build sustainable web structures on your website.

Having a website is at the heart of any successful digital marketing effort.

See this checklist for an efficient website: Why Your Website Visitors are not Converting to Customers

So, let’s discuss how you can set-up from scratch, build your community and design your strategy for making money from Facebook.

SETUP

This is essential for you, whether you have a Facebook page already or you are just about creating one.

The basic need your business has to meet on Facebook is to have a page. Facebook has a dedicated platform on facebook.com/business where you can easily do that.

Now that you have your name on a page. Here is a list of what to do next.

FIX GRAPHIC ASSETS
These start with your branded image as the page’s profile picture. Then, get a good rectangular (and branded) image as your cover photo. You should make these as appealing as possible. Try using web-based apps like Picmonkey and Canva to optimise your designs. In the best case, I recommend you get an expert for your graphics.

SET-UP BUTTONS
Your audience should be able to easily navigate to your website from your page. You often find buttons like Learn more, Sign Up or Visit Website on pages. So, head to your page’s settings right now and include a button for Call-To-Action. It should lead to your website or any other destination that is close to conversion.

USE INTEGRATIONS
Facebook is doing everything to make the platform work better for businesses. You can add links to other social media channels and tabs for review/rating, events, shop (product showcase), offers and services. It’s quite interesting that you can open up your business to the world completely. More interesting point is that it’s all happening on a single platform.

HAVE A CONTENT STRATEGY
You’ve possibly heard that content is King. It’s still the King.

What’s your industry and what information is related to you? Your answers to those questions define your content map.

So, you now know what to always write or share about.

What will you think of a Facebook page with all these elements in place? Impressive! Right?

COMMUNITY BUILDING

We can say that a virtual community is one of the most amazing benefits social media offers your business.
You get to practically engage with people, in a way similar to day-to-day conversations. But you need to take note of these core strategies to take a full advantage of this feature.

INTEGRATE TOOLS
You can do a little, relying on your Facebook notifications alone to track mentions, sentiments, activities and other engagements. You should consider using tools like Hootsuite or Radia6 to listen to what people are saying about your brand. This helps you understand where to come in, who you should respond to or trends to jump on.

NETWORK WITH YOUR COMMUNITY AND INFLUENCERS
People wants to be reckoned with. That’s the logic of social communities. And the earlier you recognise that, the better and earlier it is to win the loyalty of your audience on Facebook.

Share contents that speak to people’s minds. Engage with their comments. Connect with notable individuals in your industry.

It’s a social network, of course.

You might need a group. As long as you will manage it, what’s stopping you?

LET SOMEONE HANDLE IT
Don’t deceive yourself that you will do it all.

The number of hands depends on the size of your company. While you shouldn’t be stripped of your access and control, you should make it a primary assignment for someone else to manage your business’s social media.

GIVE OFFERS
Sometimes, we doubt the profitability of technology brands. The free services we enjoy sometimes seem to overwhelm the paid ones. But in spite of the freebies you and I use on Google, their worth rose to $109billion in February this year, (Forbes).

You should look at ways to introduce giveaways into your strategies. They infuse new energy into your relationship with your community.

You’ve built the fundamental structures. Now, what do you do with them?

CONVERSION FUNNEL

There’s a reason digital marketing experts place a premium on strategies. We call it funnel. Here, conversion funnel.

Conversion is the goal. Do you want to see your audience doing what you desire: Buying from you? Coming to your event? It’s up to you to decide.

l will outline four stages of the funnel. You could be halfway or just starting.

BRAND AWARENESS
If you’ve not been strategic with your social media management, there are chances people hardly know about you.
I experienced this with VConnect.  VConnect is a business directory in Nigeria, but I did know more about a US-based competitor – Yelp than I do about them. The missing factor is an effective brand awareness strategy.

The initial hurdle you have to cross is brand awareness. Your goal here is to express the credibility and authority that earns public loyalty.

Your contents, promotions and other activities should be all about that. If you are committed to promoting the values of your brand, you can be sure to earn a good impression.

EVALUATION
You can call this the assessment or consideration stage. Your audience has barely known you. Most of the time, thoughts of buying from you don’t cross their mind. You can understand now that you’ve just started.

But that’s no wrong.

The is the first stage to sort your audience. Those who are interested in you on one end and the unbelieving Thomases on the other end. We often use lead magnets to get emails here. This is to follow them up until they convert. You can expect the email relationship to convert to cash someday.

You’re asking, how do we go about this?

It’s still content. But a content deeper than simple read-through or your inspirational articles. You should be delivering on specific promises. You’ve been on a landing page requesting your email to access some content. You’ll agree with me that it was in exchange for meeting a particular need.

I believe I’ll need a more specific promise with this particular article to get most emails. I’m writing too broad here.

Put up a deep need and promise to fill it.

This changed the relationship. But the cash is still ahead.

CONVERSION

What you’ve done before you get here is to build trust. Your brand has been through the credibility test.

However, your score is qualitative. Your audience have their choices and preferences. So, you shouldn’t be disappointed if you couldn’t win money from some people.

Now is the time to put up your sales letter. If the earlier steps have been rightly taken, you can be sure that a satisfactory number of people will purchase from you. See this post also: Conversion on Social Media.

But you still have to be very strategic with this. Yes, you want paying customers already. But you should employ a logic that lowers the barriers to this new relationship. Barriers, such as high cost and complicated products, should be brought down.

We call this tripwire offer. It could be a trial offer. It could be a massive price reduction for a limited time. Your goal is to make them your customers. You should reduce the barriers to encourage massive purchase.

Then, you can focus your profit on the following (last) stage.

UPSELL & CROSS-SELL

You’ve cheated yourself to stay with little or no profit from the previous step. Here’s where you can recover from that.

If you’ve sold out a pen earlier, it’s time to sell a book. If you’ve sold a vacuum cleaner, you should sell a rug now. You could as well sell something entirely different.

That’s the logic. The undeniable fact is that you’ve earned a customer. There’s a bigger potential for repeat buying after the low-barrier entry. This also helps you maximise your customers’ value.

CONCLUSION

These are steps every successful Facebook marketing adopts. The amazing thing about Facebook marketing is that it gives not discrimination as to the size of your business.

We often run ads and all sorts without specific records of revenue. But I can assure you that if you will take to account every strategy outlined here, you can be sure of making substantial returns on every penny you spend on Facebook marketing.

Your Facebook page should stop being for status updates only, but a considerable stream of revenue.

I’m sure there are intricacies I didn’t mention. What do you think still needs to be in place for a successful Facebook marketing?