Facebook Marketing Guide: 9 Strategies to Succeed

Throughout the years, we’ve seen various social media platforms have their rises and falls—but through it all, Facebook has remained a powerhouse. With nearly 3 billion monthly active users, Facebook is by far and wide the most-used social media network.

This means it’s a great place for your business to have a presence. However, you need to understand how to create a Facebook marketing strategy that will succeed.

In this article, we’re going to touch on various Facebook marketing tactics you should employ within your overarching social media strategy, and how to get started.

Let’s dig in.

What is Facebook marketing?

Facebook marketing is the act of promoting a business and its products/services on Facebook via a business page. By fully optimizing your business page, brands can create a second website of sorts, even making sales directly on Facebook.

While newer platforms like Instagram and TikTok improve overall viral potential, Facebook is still a good home base for many businesses—plus, its ad platform is one of the most sophisticated of its kind. With the ability to create various Facebook post types (i.e., photos, carousels, videos, links), create a shop and advertise products and services directly to your target audience, you don’t want to sleep on Facebook.

Creating a Facebook business page is easy:

• Head to Facebook.com and log into your personal account
• Click the menu icon in the top navigation bar
• Click Page under the Create menu
• Input your business name and information
• Brand the Page with your logo, a cover photo and other pertinent information

Then you’re ready to get started creating your Facebook marketing strategy.

How to create a Facebook marketing strategy

Once you have your Facebook business page set up, you need to start marketing it to increase the number of people who like the page as well as the number of people who see and interact with your page content. Consistently creating content that engages your audience is key—as well as these top 9 tactics to employ within your strategy.

1. Set goals for your Facebook marketing

The first step to any marketing strategy is setting the right goals. This roadmap will be an essential reference to measure against to make sure your Facebook strategy is successful. But to set goals, you’ll first want to do a little research to ensure your plan is attainable through the platform.

In the 2021 Sprout Social Index, we found that marketers and consumers still prefer Facebook as their primary social platform for connecting with their target audience.

• 83% of marketers are currently using Facebook
• 60% of consumers wanted brands to use Facebook more

So, if you don’t have Facebook goals of your own yet, these survey results are a great place to start. Additionally, if your company has already set general goals, look for how these overlap with your own plans for marketing on Facebook.

Here are some common yearly goals for businesses and how an effective Facebook strategy can help you:

• Increasing quality of sales: Improving the quality of sales starts with better targeting. Through a well-planned Facebook marketing strategy, you reach your target audience more efficiently. Just because the pond is bigger, doesn’t mean you’ll get bigger fish. Work on what you know best and use Facebook as a source to improve your reach.
• Adding more value to the organization: Facebook can better nurture customers, improve awareness and provide more resources to you audience. Make Facebook your go-to source of information.
• Better pulse on the industry: Are your competitors always one step ahead? With the help of social media monitoring tools, you can track, listen and report on all social conversations revolving around you, your competitors or the industry. Always try to increase your listening powers before speaking.
• More efficient recruiting: No one said social recruiting is easy, but it’s only growing in popularity. Social can be a great source for increasing recruiting efforts and reaching top talent faster. Working your employees’ social networks for a higher social reach makes your chances of recruiting higher quality employees better.
• Smarter growth: Reducing churn, limiting spend and increasing acquisition are all parts of a successful business, but Facebook can help you in each of these areas. Whether it’s through ad spend, increased targeting or more social selling, addressing your Facebook marketing strategy can help you get closer to these goals.
• Tracking progress: Of course, making sure you’re on pace to accomplish these goals is essential, and with a tool like Sprout, you can easily keep tabs on all your Facebook reporting such as displayed in the picture below.

2. Know your Facebook audience

Understanding who is on Facebook and what your current audience breakdown looks like will be important in determining which Facebook marketing strategies you should employ and how.

Sprout Social’s deep dive into social media demographics is a great starting point for getting a general sense of who is using the platform and how.

Once you’ve studied up on that, spend some time getting familiar with your own Facebook demographics using either Facebook Page Insights or a tool like Sprout.

3. Publish a mix of content to your Facebook feed

We briefly touched on the variety of post types you can create on Facebook. To make sure you create an engaging feed with exciting content, you want to publish a good mix of content. This way your feed isn’t boring and predictable—it’s fun and interesting to follow.

This showcases just a few different pieces of media you can add to a Facebook post:

• Allow your followers to message you directly through WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger
• Tag products in your photos for followers to immediately make a purchase
• Support local charity organizations by adding fundraisers
• Create humorous content by attaching GIFs to engage your audience

There are many different ways to create a solid mix of content for your Facebook followers—make sure you’re fleshing out a full editorial calendar so you can balance out the types of content you create.

4. Post when your followers are most active

Facebook is still one of the most difficult social networks to use for organic content. Again, algorithms make it a challenge for businesses trying to find optimal posting times. However, our guide on the best times to post on Facebook outlines the do’s and don’ts of posting on Facebook:

5. Schedule your Facebook content

Content creation and curation are important components of any social media strategy. On Facebook, you have many more choices on the types of posts you can use. This ranges from Stories to status to Group posts.

With the selection of options comes the specific types of content your audience is interested in, which should also be kept in mind while evaluating the techniques for marketing on Facebook that will work best for you. Our 2018 Index analyzed what type of posts consumers want from brands. Thirty percent said they would like links to more information and 18% want more images. Videos came in a close third with 17% of people surveyed.

The same report also discussed what social marketers need to succeed. For Facebook, the top priorities included video and a budget for ads, which we’ll go into next.

For scheduling content, you have both free and paid options available to you. Facebook’s Page controls allow you to schedule your posts right from your own page. Sprout’s ViralPost feature will pick the best times for you based on your highest expected audience engagement.

Scheduling and planning your Facebook posts make it easier for you to see where gaps are in your social calendar. Using a tool like this will save you time in the long run.

6. Engage proactively with your audience

Like most social media channels, they’re built as networks to converse, discuss and share content. As a brand, you can’t forget that basic idea of what makes a social media network. That means conversation and engagement should never be put on the back burner.

Instead, try to be a community for your audience. Facebook is a great place to hold industry chats or discussions, whether it’s with a different audience or your own customers. While Twitter often gets all the limelight of being a social customer care mecca, don’t forget about Facebook too.

You can help drive Facebook engagement by asking people to simply engage in the first place. However, you can’t sit back and wait for your followers to interact. You can’t reach everyone, but there are ways to increase engagement.

For example, Bath & Body Works will respond to comments left on their Facebook posts, even going so far as to offer product recommendations. This is a great way to increase engagement—as we can see, this post has 207 comments overall.

7. Use Messenger to build relationships with customers

Facebook Messenger can help you build relationships, make sales and even improve customer service. Adding a button for someone to message you directly is one of the many options of media you can add to a Facebook post. You can also make the CTA button at the top of your business page a CTA to message your brand.

Then, you can easily have someone on your social team man the Messenger inbox or you can set up an automated Facebook Messenger bot. If you choose to set up a bot, you can easily add premade questions and answers, allow users to shop via Messenger and more.

Here’s a great example of what a bot might look like from monday.com:

There are four questions that users can ask and get an immediate, automated response. However, users can also message with other questions or concerns and get a customer success manager’s response in real time.

Messenger gives you a unique opportunity to have a direct conversation with individual consumers. Make sure to add this to your Facebook marketing strategy in whatever capacity makes sense for your brand.

8. Determine your Facebook ads strategy

Whether you’re just starting out on Facebook or you’ve been on it for a while, it’s difficult to escape the need to pay for brand exposure. Our comprehensive guide to creating your Facebook advertising strategy is a great place to start learning more about Facebook ads.

However, growing your audience and brand loyalty doesn’t happen overnight. You have to earn it.

But there is one shortcut to get there a bit faster–social media advertising. Specifically on Facebook, there are more than four million advertisers with just an average click-through rate of 9%. Advertising on Facebook is simpler, but not easier. You still have to effectively build your brand and showcase it perfectly with ads.

Aim for higher brand awareness

Your Facebook ad campaigns should always be focused on two things:

1. Cost-effective
2. Relevant

For starters, you want to stay within your allocated weekly or monthly spend with Facebook to avoid overexposure and useless clicks. Ad spend can shoot up in a hurry when you’re targeting isn’t effective or set appropriately, which brings us to the next step.

Your Facebook ad has to be relevant. Targeting a broad audience isn’t a bad thing. At first, you want to actually see what works best to build awareness. However, relevance is crucial for great Facebook ads.

Try to build custom audiences and address customers who would best fit your Facebook content. If it’s a retargeting measure, make sure the content provides something recognizable but also something new.

Decide on creative content

Earlier in this post, we did a deep dive into the types of content on Facebook. Now it’s time to choose which pieces of content you think are worth advertising in front of a much larger audience.

Some of the best aspects of your ad content should include:

• Identity: Does it relate to your brand and effectively showcase your product/service? Are your logo and business colors correctly displayed?
• Reward: What do viewers get out of it? Is it a deal, promotion, offer code, whitepaper or industry guide?
• Tone: Does your content maintain the same tone across your entire Facebook page or business in general?
• Action: Your content must drive an action, which goes back to your Facebook goals. A clear and precise call to action is best.

Keep Facebook ad content fresh

Facebook ad content is literally squeezed between your friends and family feed, which means it’s seen often. Have you ever deemed a TV commercial the worst ever and seen it replayed endlessly through your favorite show? This is the same thing.

Don’t let your content get stale with viewers, so make sure to update and repurpose your ad content every week or two. The whole purpose is to drive users to a specific site or purchasing page. So don’t let old content ruin your Facebook retargeting or remarketing efforts.

Create a spreadsheet and document your core metrics. Each metric will provide you with unique insights into what you specifically want to achieve with your ad:

• Click-through Rate: If traffic is essential, track CTR and see where you can improve.
• Impressions: Having trouble with visibility? Revisit your image or content and see what can drive more impressions.
• Cost to Acquire: If your purpose is to limit spend and budget more effectively, track cost to acquire and set weekly or monthly goals.

9. Track & analyze your results

The last step of your strategy is to keep an eye on the metrics you identified earlier in goal setting and analyze the results. This also includes determining your ROI.

And don’t forget to see how you measure up against the competition. With Sprout, you can directly compare your performance against industry averages and competitor’s data to ensure your Facebook marketing strategy is on the right track.

Get started with Facebook marketing today

Start promoting your business with a comprehensive Facebook marketing strategy. To help you get started, take advantage of our free social media templates. Learn even more about increasing engagement, reach and, ultimately, sales through your social media platforms.

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