Using Facebook for Marketing

“My Clients Are Not on Facebook”

Business owners, listen up! If you’ve ever said this, you’re not alone. You might not be correct in this statement, but don’t worry—you’re certainly not alone in that either.

You’ve seen it, we’ve seen it: the marketing world is changing. The days of print advertisements in newspapers, direct mailings, and telemarketing phone calls have, well, bitten the dust. Methods and tools such as the Internet and social media have replaced these traditional forms of marketing and continue to transform the business world, even as you read this.

Facebook is among the most popular social media networks in the world—and that is not likely to change any time soon. There are a billion Facebook users worldwide, and guess what? Almost all of these users are consumers of some sort, and many are probably your ideal customers.

Skeptical?

Perhaps you’ve tried to bring your company into the digital marketing environment, but you’re just frustrated with all of the things you’ve been trying—SEO strategies, pay-per-click, presence on social media without results, mass email newsletters, etc. Chances are that these random acts of online marketing have been unproductive and wasteful. So you’re probably asking yourself: Why should you establish a Facebook presence or improve your pre-existing page when you’re already so exasperated with online marketing?

What should you do? Step one: keep reading. Here, we’ll tell you the importance and benefits of a strong, marketing-based presence on Facebook. Then we’ll explain what your company can do to decide whether Facebook is the right fit for your marketing strategy.

Welcome to the Age of Consumer Control

Even with competitors such as Twitter and Google+, Facebook—with over one billion users worldwide—still emerges as the leader among the social networks.

And in today’s business world, the consumers are the ones with all of the power in the purchasing process. They choose when, why, and how they choose to interact with the companies that they purchase from. Facebook, which allows users to search and find out about the things that they’re interested in, is one medium through which consumers are provided with this freedom and power.

Why We’re Facebook Fans

Though it may be an unfamiliar concept for some business owners and marketing teams, there are so many benefits to using Facebook for your company. Here are some of the perks to using Facebook as a part of your marketing strategy:

1. A Facebook page can be used as a FREE marketing tool! We know how much your company’s revenue means to you—after all, it’s why you do what you do. When something this valuable is also FREE, you should take advantage.
2. Facebook is a platform (like Google, for instance) which people can use to search for your product or service, providing you with the opportunity to get your name out there.
3. Facebook allows you to present a personality for your company, bringing your company and its values to life. You can customize your page by sharing links, photos, and messages to showcase your organization’s character in a way that traditional forms of marketing (a newspaper ad, for example) cannot. Feel free to share content that would be appealing to your target customer.
4. You can use your Facebook page as an informal way to tell visitors about your product or service and promote your marketing offers, before directing them to your website and eventually your sales team.
5. Facebook is a great way to prompt the spread of awareness about your company through “word of mouth,” which often plays an important role in the contemporary purchasing process of buyers.
6. Once your page has followers, you can post questions or polls for consumer feedback on a variety of aspects of your company. You can also launch contests or sweepstakes to attract people to your page. By inviting visitors to participate, you’ll excite and engage your followers as well as gain deeper insights into what the consumer wants to see from your company.
7. You can use Facebook to create your own community of people—people who are interested in you, current users of your product or service, those who have purchased from you in the past, and, most importantly, potential leads that may be converted into customers with a little dedication.

Still Not Convinced?

Here are some statistics that might just do the trick…

~Of the over 950 million worldwide Facebook users, 500 million log into Facebook on a daily basis.

~5 new Facebook profiles are created every second.

~The average time users spend on Facebook is 20 minutes per visit.

~Every 60 seconds, 136,000 photos are uploaded; 510,000 comments are posted; and 293,000 statuses are updated.

~42% of marketers say that Facebook is either important or critical to their business.

~According to recent studies, 43% of B2B companies and 77% of B2C companies have acquired a customer from Facebook.

~80% of social media users in the United States prefer to connect to brands and businesses through Facebook.

To “Facebook,” Or Not to “Facebook”?

Now, the moment you’ve been waiting for: the solution to your Facebook problem. The first thing you should do, before going out and creating a Facebook page and customizing it and filling it with compelling content and all of these exciting things, is find out more about your buyers.

At the beginning of this post, you were thinking, “My clients aren’t on Facebook.” Well, now that you’ve learned a little bit more about how Facebook can be used for your business, it’s time to think a little bit more about that statement you made earlier. Are your clients on Facebook? How do you know that they aren’t? These are the types of questions that should be examined and answered first, before you incorporate Facebook or any other method into your company’s marketing strategy.

When you know whether your buyers use Facebook to make purchasing decisions or find out more about companies like you, you’ll be able to decide whether investing your time in Facebook will be helpful for your marketing plan. If you find that your ideal customers do in fact use Facebook, you’ll have to get to know your audience in a more in-depth way in order to attract them to your website, engage them through the buying process, and ultimately convert them into loyal leads.

In order to do all of this, we recommend creating a buyer persona for your company. A

buyer persona is a fictional character in your marketing story, with all of the same

needs, pain points, goals—and Facebook use preferences—as your real-life, ideal

buyer. By creating a buyer persona, you’ll probably find out a lot of surprising things about who your buyers are, what they care about, and where they spend their time.

Who knows? They may even spend their time on Facebook!

To find out more about buyer personas, how to create them, and how they can benefit your business in many more ways than this, take a look at our Buyer Persona Guide.