Even if your target market is not particularly facebook friendly, you can apply these tools and ideas to email marketing, website articles and day to day interactions.
Create an effective strategy:
- Know your audience. Understand demographics of your customers, their likes and preferences, needs and desires. Gain knowledge about your followers through leading questions. Use this to target discussions, marketing and other customer interactions more effectively.
- Increase your audience. Increase your marketing pool through traditional marketing methods. Add a facebook tag to your website, business cards, restaurant menus or brochures, and on print advertisements.
- Encourage interaction. Any post followers make on your page will also show up on their network, telling all of their friends about their experience with you.
- Mix it up. Use different methods at the same time. Intersperse responses, competitions and announcements. Different marketing methods will appeal to different people.
- Keep it steady. Use Facebook regularly, even if it’s only half an hour once or twice a week. A constant stream of reminders will keep you on their mind better than a few big bursts.
- Mod it up! Create a custom landing page and profile picture with calls to actions which will drive “likes” into sales.
- Don’t over-sell. Your primary focus should be on creating and maintaining an active community of fans discussing ideas related to your product or service. This encourages sharing with their networks. Content which is too sales-heavy will drive people away.
What to say, what to do?
- Learn by example. Find other businesses that use Facebook well. Check out their activities and get ideas for your own campaign.
- Respond to your followers. Answer all the questions and comments you can personally. Thank them for testimonials and constructively comment on criticism.
- Share content. If you’re a restaurant, tell your followers what is fresh on the menu. If you’re a retailer, tell them about the new stock you’ve just gotten in. If you’re a service business, give them tips on doing things yourself. In tourism? The whales have arrived, or perfect summer weather.
- Suggest “other items you’ll love.” You have a captive audience who loves your product. They are also likely to enjoy other related products. Share these ideas with your fans.
- Get product feedback. Ask simple leading questions to get valuable feedback from your biggest fans. E.g. “What is your favourite?” “What would they like to see in the future?” Feedback on a new product or service
- Exclusive promotions. Reward your followers with a deal which is just for them. E.g. a small free reward with every purchase over $50 next month.
- Run a competition. Photo contests, Photo caption contests, 25 words competitions and “like” drives (where you reward followers for meeting a goal of followers) all will encourage your followers to engage with you.
- Cross promotion. Use Facebook to direct people back to your website for more information. Convert facebook fans into followers on other platforms – link to your email newsletter subscriptions, twitter feed, Instagram or blog on your Facebook page, and encourage fans to follow these links.
Kapow Interactive has a range of Training workshops available. Facebook for business, Advanced Facebook techniques, Email marketing for business, Instagram for business, Managing your website, Writing Webpages for SEO, Understanding your audience and Business Keywords . Click on the links to register your interest today.