Facebook Marketing Guide 2021

July 23, 2021/Vivan Gerald/No Comments

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This is the ultimate guide to Facebook marketing in 2021.

This guide is meant for you if you want to:

Increase Facebook social media engagement
Improve the quality of your content
Create content that converts your audience to make a purchase.
Grow your Facebook presence.
Leverage Facebook promotion in a relevant way.

If this sounds like you, then let’s dive right in.

Facebook Marketing Fundamentals: Relevance of Facebook for Businesses.
Facebook Ad Features
Advanced Facebook Marketing Strategies

Facebook marketing fundamentals

In this chapter, we will focus on the fundamentals of Facebook, why it’s necessary for your business and how you can effectively manage it to convert your audience from prospects to paying customers.

Why Facebook is important for businesses

1. Increase brand awareness

Facebook is the most popular social media platform with over 2.8 billion monthly active users. That’s over one-third of the total Earth’s population. Which means one out of someone on the Earth has. This means that the reach of new customers and audiences for your business is high.

2. Build trust between audiences

Like most social media platforms, Facebook enables you to build trust and loyalty within your audiences. It’s more than just a platform to promote your services or products. Consumers are conscious now more than ever about the brands they patronize.

According to Marketing Drive, more than 60% of consumers prefer brands that stand for the same values and beliefs that they do. With Facebook, you can connect with consumers in ways that align not only with their external needs but their internal expectations.

3. Run comprehensive ad campaigns

Facebook’s Ad Manager is an all-in-tool tool that allows you to run ads on Facebook, Instagram, and messenger. It’s a robust tool for creating multiple campaigns simultaneously, managing when and where those campaigns will appear, and tracking how those campaigns are performing.

4. Target specific customers:

Facebook makes it easier for you to target customers relevant to your brand. When running campaigns, you have the option of targeting customers based on demographics, such as occupation, gender, financial status, location, major life events, marital status, and others.

It even goes into detailed options like allowing you to target customers based on ownership,(people who recently bought a car, who own a house or rent, etc.), people celebrating an anniversary, friends of newly wedded people, people who recently landed a new job, gamers, and so on.

Facebook is a mine of data that, if used correctly, will enhance and simplify marketing efforts with very positive results.

5. Link and Analyze Ads on the website pages

Facebook Pixels is an analytical tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your ad campaigns by giving you insight into the actions people take when they visit your website.

What Pixels do is remove the uncertainty of your ad campaigns’ performance. With this tool, when users click on your ad via Facebook, Instagram or Messenger, you understand how many people took the desired action such as clicking on a shopping cart, checking out, or subscribing now, as the case may be.

If you run an E-commerce store, you can tell how many people came on the site, and left at your landing page, people who carded items to their cart but didn’t proceed to check out (which ultimately is the real success).

The tool also enables you to retarget customers that previously click on the ads, irrespective of the actions they took.

Why do Pixels help your brand?

Removes the uncertainty of campaign performance
Tracks the success of ad campaigns by knowing what actions your customers took.
Helps you retarget customers back to your website
Drive sales and conversion.

6. Low cost of promotion and advertising

One of the best perks of Facebook marketing is the relatively low cost of advertising compared to traditional forms of advertising.

Although the ad spends will determine to a large extent the effectiveness of your campaigns, for a reasonable budget of $10-50 per day, a lot can be accomplished.

Facebook Ad Features

1. Facebook marketplace

Facebook time and again, introduces new ways of enabling businesses to thrive and connect better with their customers. By launching the Facebook marketplace in 2016, they presented a unique platform that would help the shopping experience for people to buy and sell from local businesses.

The platform enables you to select between various categories under which you can place your products.

Facebook marketplace is built on the idea of making the shopping experience more accessible. Since thousands of e-commerce stores and businesses already transact on the site, Marketplace is a way to cut down on an additional step, making the purchase easy for all customers.

In addition, when Facebook ads are set to automatic placement, Facebook places your ads on their sister platforms including the Marketplace. By placing ads where people willingly go shopping, it increased the chances of reception and conversion.

Testimonials by several brands have shown that Ads placement on Marketplace has increased the conversation rate of their marketing campaigns.

2. Facebook Ad manager:

We previously explained what Facebook ad manager is and why it’s important. Now we’ll dive into how you can set up various campaigns, review and adjust your campaigns, and measure the effectiveness for maximum conversion and success.

Create a new campaign

Here, we’ll create a brand new campaign for a fictional eyewear brand named, theEyeWear. We’ll define its audience, placements, reach, set up a budget, choose formats (images, text, links and video) and publish.

Create your campaign: From Facebook Business Manager, go to the menu by the left corner of the window, click on create ad.

You have the option of selecting automated ads or creating a custom campaign based on your selections.

How to Create Automated Campaign

With the automated ads, Facebook asks you a set of questions that will personalize the ads and tests up to six different variations to see which performs best.

This is a good option if you recently launched your brand, so you might be unsure of who your specific target audience is.

Next, you choose among a list of audience interests with a maximum limit of 10.

Next, you choose the media formats you have created, whether it’s an image or a video. Automated ads let you create up to 6 variations of the same ad, then it tests for which one performs best.

After that you can proceed to promote page.

In this window, you have to:

a. Choose your goals

Do you want to drive website traffic, get more shoppers to visit your website, get more customers to contact you for information about your products by phone or through messenger?

b. Edit Ad versions

Here you can decide to add more versions of the ad, by using different pictures, videos, and ad descriptions for testing.

c. Edit Settings

You can edit your daily spend according to budget requirements.

Also you can edit placements between Facebook, Instagram, and messenger, and define audience due to demographics as well.

Next, input the payment option and click on the promote button. Your ad will go live immediately.

However, if your audience is clearly defined, then you can go ahead to choose a custom campaign.

How to Create Custom Campaign

From the ads manager, you have to select a campaign objective from a list of options depending on what you want to achieve. The objectives are categorized into awareness, consideration and conversion.

Custom campaigns are segmented into three:

1. Campaign creation

This includes campaign objectives, the option of A/B testing, and optimizing your budget spend.

2. Ad set level

At this level, the campaign is further broken down into specific details. Here, you can set the audience specifications, ad placements, budget and schedule.

3. Ad level

The ad level is the part where all the creative settings will be defined. This includes the content format (video, image, or carousel), headlines, description, added links, and call-to-action (CTA). You can also preview all the ad placements on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, and make changes according to your preferences.

In addition, You can set tracking events that enable you to track specific actions and behaviors of your audiences when they visit your website, download an app, or even shop on physical stores.

Offline event is a feature that enables you to measure how effective Facebook ad is at influencing offline sales or conversions. How? With offline conversions, you can compare the number of conversions offline with the number of people who clicked on your ads.

Because you might be running separate campaigns at the same time, you should give it a name that will enable you to easily identify each one based on the purpose.

The next window will take you to the campaign page, where you can make changes or adjustments to the campaign name, budget optimization, which either allows you to limit the budget spend or get recommendations from Facebook for the best budget that will perform best (based on reach and ad spend/day).

The Ad set

In the ad set level, these are the parameters to define:

Lead Method

How do you plan on connecting with people who interact with your ads? You can decide on instant forms, automated chats, or direct calls to your number provided.

Budget & Schedule

Just like the automated campaign, you can also set a start and end date for the campaigns in addition to budget limits. Alternatively, you can decide on not including a budget limit or end date.

Audience Selection

The Ad manager provides the option of creating a new audience, including people who have previously interacted with your business, or lookalike audiences.

Lookalike audiences are people who have great similarities to your ideal customers. Conversely, you can create a custom audience based on a detailed selection of demographics, interests and behaviors.

Placements

Placements can either be automatic or manual based on your preference.

Automatic placements are recommended by the Ad manager because of Facebook’s delivery system. The algorithm is programmed to allocate your ad budget across multiple platforms based on where it is most likely to perform best. In essence, automatic placements remove the guesswork if you’re ensured of what platforms to place your ad sets.

Alternatively, manual placements enable you to select between Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, including the unique features of each platform such as stories, explore page, group feed, Facebook marketplace, IGTV, in-stream videos, and others.

Placements can also be shared in external mobile apps and websites. This provides a wider reach than Facebook’s shared platforms.

Ad Level

This is the final stage of defining the specifics of your ad.

Step 1: Connect Instagram account

Your brand’s Instagram account must be linked here to the ad for it to be displayed across the platform.

Step 2: Select the ad format

Next, choose whether you want to use a single image or a carousel post.

Using Carousel requires you to add two or three different sets of headlines, descriptions, and links.

However, with a single post, you can have one set of copies, and choose to include different options for A/B testing. A/B testing helps you measure which headlines or descriptions perform best. We recommend having at least two (2) options when setting up the setting for your creatives.

Step 3: Set a call to action (CTA)

You can chose from Facebook already-made CTA buttons to give your prospects direction on the next step.

Step 4: Review the ad placements on the preview tab

Always check the dimension of videos or images, ensuring that they fit properly into all placements on different platforms. You can also review the copies of the ads, ensuring description and headlines are concise, persuasive, relatable to the audience and direct.

Step 5: Proceed to publish

Your account is all set. Now you can review the campaign and adjust based on how it performs.

Ad Manager features Analysis and Reporting that allows you to measure how each ad is performing.

Metrics such as reach, number of impressions, cost per result on each campaign and ad set gives you insight into what should be adjusted or promoted fiercely.

Facebook’s reporting system is robust. It gives you different reporting tools such as creative reporting, A/B testing and brand survey reports, insights, traffic analysis reports for websites or apps, and reports for general ad campaigns.

Advanced Facebook Marketing Strategies

In this chapter, we will highlight some strategies that enable you to create immersive content for your audiences. Thousands of posts are uploaded every second on the platform.

Therefore content should not be created for the sake of content creation. Rather, it should be relevant, exciting and most importantly created differently and uniquely.

1. Quarterly campaigns to stir conversations

Campaigns that work best are the ones that dig into the actual problems of customers in a bid to solve those needs. They can clever, brilliant, heartwarming or funny. Whatever campaign that is being run, must be birthed from an insight for your audience to connect with it.

Dove’s Real Beauty campaign is one of such socially relevant campaigns. This is because they understood the problems that women face in dealing with their natural beauty and the world’s perception of the true meaning of beauty. Each campaign always addresses that problem, which is why the campaigns are always so successful.

2. Special days marketing

Launching marketing campaigns on special days or holidays such as Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Pride month, International Women’s Day, Easter is effective and rewarding in achieving your marketing objectives.

This is a trend that has yielded positive results in terms of building brand stickiness in the minds of your existing and potential customers.

What to do:

Have a list of all the national and international holidays and observances in your country.
Create a unique campaign or content around the holiday that ties into your brand.
Don’t be generic with content as it will wade your customers off.
Try not to make the holiday about your brand. Rather make the customers the hero of the story.

3. Leveraging trends

Trends always come and go. Some might not be appropriate or relevant to your brand. However, trends are also a way to easily tap into what customers are already talking about. For example, every year, SuperBowl is a major event and audiences rave about the ads and the sport. You can tie that into what your brand stands to offer to customers.

It could be an event, a meme, an award show, a movie. Whatever the trend, make sure it fits into your brand archetype and tone of voice.

4. Gamification

Facebook has more content formats than most platforms available. That includes gaming options. More than 800 million people use gaming every month. That’s a huge market to leverage.

Doritos created a game called Roulette to promote their new hot and spicy chips. The brand dared customers to try the new bag of nachos and take the gamble of landing on one hot chip in every handful.

This resulted in a lot of engagement from their customers. That’s a great way to introduce a new product.

Conclusion

Facebook’s marketing tools are robust enough to accommodate your marketing needs and goals. Unlike some platforms like TikTok, a large demographic of your target audiences can be found on the platform. With

Gaining success on Facebook requires some research of your target audience, understanding their unique peculiarities and how your brand is relevant to them, enough to listen to your promotions and convert to paying customers.

To learn more about crafting a full-proof social media strategy, see our guide on Social Media Marketing 101: The Ultimate Guide

You can also increase the effectiveness of other social media accounts by reading our comprehensive Step-by-step Guides:

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