5 Ways to Improve Your Facebook Marketing Strategy for Online Stores

Article by Tomas Laurinavicius 6 Oct, 2016

Recently, Facebook announced that around 1.7 billion people in the world are actively using Facebook, and the number is increasing day by day. Now, is better than ever before to focus on your Facebook marketing strategy.

This enormous growing audience makes Facebook a valuable marketing platform for eCommerce brands looking to reach a massive source of traffic on social media. It now even has a name: F-commerce.

But hey, 67% of eCommerce retailers use Facebook to drive traffic to their websites. Looking at this number, do you think it’s easy to stand out from the crowd? Of course not, because an outstanding Facebook marketing strategy will require a lot of effort taken in smart ways.

In this post, we’re not going to ramble about general tools or tips that Facebook marketers already know. Instead, let us unveil 5 little-known but proven tactics that online sellers can take advantage of to improve their Facebook marketing strategy.

Make the most out of the Audience Insights tool

Knowing your customers well allows you to target people who need your products, and who will spend money on your store to get them.

Conducting surveys, talking to potential customers, or stalking your competitors’ events or campaigns are probably good ways to learn your target customers, but in quite small samples.

When it comes to getting a big picture of who your customers might be, how old they mostly are, what they’re interested in, and what they normally do, Facebook Audience Insights is one of the best analytics tool to help you draw the most precise customer personas to your business.

In Facebook Audience Insights, you can select one of three audiences from which to dig for information: Everyone on Facebook, People connected to your page, or a Custom Audience.

As Facebook seems to know everything about its users, you can gather any parameters of the audience that exemplify your target customer: location, age, gender, job industry, relationship status, interest, activity, page likes…

Facebook marketing strategy: audience insights

Tips: To make the most out of the Facebook Audience Insights tool, know that the more you narrow down a target audience to analyze, the more precise statistics you can gather, and the closer you’ll be to finding the right customer personas to reach.

Target Facebook Ads at the right audience

Of every 10 online sellers, approximately 7 invest quite a large portion of their budget into Facebook Ads to attract traffic, but 4-5 will stop running Facebook Ads after a while, because “it is not efficient and too costly” – the most popular reason online sellers will give if asked. The people who click on the ads end up abandoning the site without purchasing. In reality, these sellers aren’t wasting money on Facebook, but they’re not targeting their ads at the right users.

One of the main advantages of Facebook is that it provides you with lots of insightful information so you can target your ads at people who are keen on your offer. Audience Insights mentioned above is a powerful tool to help with that.

Tips: If you want to create cost-saving and highly converting Facebook ads, avoid poor targeting by:

Knowing who your ideal customers are, and using any qualitative and quantitative analytical methods at your disposal
Defining the custom audience as specifically as possible so Facebook can show your ads to the users most similar to your ideal customers

By properly targeting the audience for your ads, not only will you avoid unworthy clicks from the wrong users (which prevents you from wasting expenses), but you will also attract high quality traffic who probably need your products.

Promote video on Facebook

The most-viewed video of this Buzzfeed Tasty page generated 50 million views in the first 7 days, and 2.4 million engagements. The video, which captured the real moment that kid footballers consoled their competitors in the 2016 Rio Olympics, posted by NowThis, had 89 million views in the first 3 days and 3.5 million engagements.

Viral videos are taking over the Facebook newsfeed, and brands successful at spreading their content in the form of video on Facebook are enjoying greater engagement (likes, shares, comments) from the community than ever.

Facebook users are switching to videos from text content and images. Video – the new trend in content building – is a Facebook marketing strategy you should focus on.

Tips: How do you know which kinds of video to post on Facebook in order to get the best engagement?

The bottom line is that understanding your customers is of the utmost importance. Get to learn what kinds of content your target audience is most likely to be interested in, then you can either create original videos (if you have enough in your budget and the resources) or share existing videos. Use boosted posts, sponsored posts, or page ads to promote your videos to reach the largest targeted audience and get the best engagement.

Influencer marketing on Facebook

About 30% of marketing influencers in the US are citing Facebook as their favorite social influencing platform, followed by Instagram. This is not surprising though, because many influencers are using images and videos to promote brands they’re working with.

When you first open your store you’ll have quite a small size of followers on Facebook; look for some influencers who are popular among your target customers to partner with. With their video, photos, and product reviews of content sponsored by you, they will draw a lot of traffic from their followers to your page and website.

Here are some effective ways for brands to reach a target audience in a large scale through influencer marketing initiatives:

Livestream videos posted by an influencer: a tutorial or review about the product
Hashtag campaigns, giveaways, exclusive promotional codes for an influencer’s fans
Product placements within photos and video content posted by an influencer
Boosted posts to reach an even wider audience: friends of followers of an influencer
Content that links to another piece of sponsored content on other channels an influencer is active in, such as Instagram, Youtube, a blog, and so on
Offline events hosted by an influencer to promote products of sponsoring brands
Posts by an influencer in online forums and Facebook groups

Probably a costly Facebook marketing strategy, influencer sponsorship is a proven tactic to generate target traffic for eCommerce sellers, especially dropshippers.

A Facebook marketing strategy of paramount importance: Be data-driven

Nobody can tell which ads set, video, or influencer can generate the best conversion for your business. Only the numbers have the best say here.

How many reaches and clicks an ads gets, how many views, likes and shares a video generates, how many traffic an influencer can draw to your site… Those numbers are critical to determining whether the strategy is working for your business.

Tips: For any marketing strategy you plan to execute on Facebook, make sure you define its metrics clearly to measure results. Best metrics are specific, straightforward, simple (because complicated metrics means they are not broken down to the root ones), and gearing towards your final conversion goal.

Make a habit of being data-driven in any tactic you implement, keep testing different versions, and make decisions based on the real numbers – that’s the best headlight to tell you what works best for your business on Facebook.

Conclusion

“It’s a matter of time – within the next five or so years – before more business will be done on Facebook than Amazon.” Stated by Sumeet Jain, Principal, CMEA Capital.

You’re joining such an exciting and challenging game – the globally explosive eCommerce industry. If you’re not taking it to Facebook, your falling behind is just a matter of time. And even if you are, doing it the wrong way without a smart Facebook marketing strategy will just slow down the process.

Instead, clearly understand your customers by making the most out of the Audience Insights tool, put your investments toward the right targeted users, catch up with the new video trend, partner with influencers who can bring valuable traffic to your brand, and be data-driven.

By following those 5 proven tactics, it will also be a matter of time that Facebook will drive valuable targeted traffic to your site, and bring potentially large revenue to your eCommerce store.