Written by ContentPowered.com
Much is said about using Facebook for marketing, but comparatively little is said about just how to do that. You can’t simply register for Facebook, start posting content and rake in the views. You need a plan; a Facebook marketing plan. Here’s how to make one. Consider the five W’s: Who, What, When, Where and Why.
Step 1: Establish Yourself (The Where)
Unfortunately, if you’re following the five W’s, you need to start a bit out of order. The first question you need to ask is Where. Or, rather, pass over. You’re already creating a Facebook marketing plan, so you have the Where already answered.
You need a website of your own and a Facebook Page – not Profile – to be successful with marketing on Facebook. Your website is self-explanatory. Your goal is probably to funnel people to your website, where they are exposed to your calls to action and are more likely to make a purchase. In some cases, you can skip this, but you will need your eCommerce app on Facebook itself. If you’re not using Facebook, well, the advice in this guide is still valid for any sort of marketing plan; it’s just more specific to Facebook.
You need a Facebook Page rather than a Facebook Profile because of the Facebook terms of service. The site itself specifies that, if you’re a business using Facebook for promotion, you need to use a Facebook Page. Of course, Pages have a wide range of options that are unavailable to Profiles, so there’s no reason to choose a Profile over a Page.
Step 2: Define Audience Profiles (The Who)
The second W is the Who. While you could advertise to the band, that’s not quite the right interpretation. You need to think about your audience. Who are you marketing to? Who are the people you want to visit your site? Through your website demographics, you should have a good idea of who might be interested. With Facebook, you can further refine your audience into various profiles.
This has a few benefits. Essentially, what you are doing with this step is creating a handful of archetypes of the people who are interested in your site. One is enough for a given marketing plan – after all, you’re generally targeting one audience at a time – but you may want to create several profiles to hold in reserve. You can create several marketing plans to work in tandem or consecutively if you so desire.
Answer basic questions about who is visiting your site and your Facebook page. Develop a good idea of who they are, so you know what marketing tactics bring in the best response. Some of this will come from trial and error, some from experience and some from educated guessing.
Step 3: Create General Goals (The Why)
Why are you marketing? In this step, answer in broad strokes. Pick one of the basic reasons; growing your conversion rate, broadening your audience, picking up a new audience, growing more traffic. There are any number of possible goals to choose from, but you don’t need to be too specific in this step. Specifics come about in the next step.
Broad goals are reusable when you create other marketing plans. You can craft six different plans with the same end result of “gaining a wider audience,” all of which will have very different tactics, targets and specific goals.
Step 4: Create Specific Goals (The Why 2.0)
You knew it was coming. The second phase of goal setting is to narrow down your broad goals into something that’s measurable and attainable. This is the key; determine a picture of what your success looks like.
To do this, you first need a picture of your current audience. For example, if you want to grow your audience by 20 percent, you need to know how much 20 percent actually is. Some goals you might pick:
• Increase your number of followers by X amount.
• Increase your conversions by X number.
• Increase your traffic by X.
• Gather X amount of valuable leads.
• Increase any other definable metric you could choose to name.
Step 5: Plan Content (The When)
Consider the various types of content you can post to your page.
- Blog posts from your primary website.
- New product announcements or old product spotlights.
- Breaking news and announcements.
- Image or video content.
- Facebook-only deals or contests.
- Text content designed specifically for conversations.
- Shared posts from industry partners.
Every type of content has its place. Some can be combined; start a conversation with a video or new blog post, for example. Your content plan is a general idea of which types of content you will post, how often you will post that type of content and what time of day you will post it.
You’re going to want to strike the right balance of self-promotion and valuable content. Too little promotion and you won’t reach conversion goals. Too much promotion and your audience will shrink while you gain a public image as spam. Your audience comes into play here as well. Some audiences like videos; some hate them. Some will be attracted to images; others will prefer text content. Adjust accordingly.
Step 6: Implement Content (The What)
In step five, you created a general content plan. In this step, you need to fill it out with the actual content. This means writing blog posts, crafting product press releases, coming up with interesting questions and all the rest.
Some content will be harder to produce than the rest. Videos require more production than a blog post, for example. Entire books have been written about optimizing your content, so consult them for the little details. In general:
• Don’t forget SEO on your website and within your Facebook posts.
• Optimize your calls to action to fit the audience profile you’ve created.
• Feel free to write content ahead of time and create an automated queue.
• Make sure you’re engaging your customers; that’s the point of social media.
As far as engagement goes, just dedicate some time after you post to hold a conversation with the people who care enough to comment on your new content. There’s an art to it that you will have to learn over time.
Step 7: Monitor Success
Remember those goals you created? Now’s the time to make use of them. Track how your content is performing in relation to those goals. Is it holding up? Is a particular piece of content surpassing expectations? Is a different piece of content failing to live up to its role? Test variations on content and adjust your strategy to suit your goals. Facebook offers some fairly robust stat tracking, and you can implement any tracking of your own on your site.
Step 8: Iterate
Done? Start over! No single marketing plan lasts forever, and in fact you’re going to want to change them up fairly often. Adjust your plan to suit your goals, adjust your goals to suit your audience. Consider broad, long-term goals running concurrently with narrow, short-term plans.
