Facebook Marketing Strategy To Make Your Business Succeed

Facebook marketing is an effective way to make your business succeed. It is absurd to be doing business in Ghana but not have a Facebook marketing strategy. This post is to help you have one or refine what you already have. Facebook is the second most used social media platform in Ghana. Number one is WhatsApp. Facebook Messenger occupies fifth place.

Why You Need A Facebook Marketing Strategy

Facebook marketing is to promote your brand on Facebook. There are both Free (organic) and Paid (ads) ways to market your brand on Facebook. Facebook marketing falls under social media marketing which is also a subset of digital marketing.

Facebook marketing helps businesses to reach more people on Facebook, increase brand awareness, get new customers, offer support to existing customers, drive traffic to their website, assess their competitor’s social media marketing strategy, engage their audience, and so on. In addition, you can measure the performance of Facebook’s (and social media) marketing strategy. If you advertise on TV or radio, you may not know the exact number of people who watched or listened. But it is not so with Facebook (and social media) marketing.

According to the Digital 2021: Ghana report, out of Ghana’s 31.4 million population 15.7 million are internet users. That is half of the country’s population. Moreover, there are 8.2 million active social media users in Ghana. This means roughly 26% of Ghana’s population energetically uses social media. Furthermore, the report stated that 98.7% of Ghana’s population use smartphones. And these people spend an average of 4 hours and 20 minutes on the internet per day. And 3 hours 8 minutes of this time is spent on social media sites.

But most importantly, Facebook has an average of 7.7 million visits per month in Ghana. And 75.1% of Ghanaian internet users use social media as the main source when researching brands. So with whatever you are selling (goods or services), there are about 7 million people on Facebook that you can reach with your business. And a majority of internet users in Ghana use social media to learn more about brands before they buy from them. All you need is the right Facebook marketing strategy that will connect your business to these searchers.

How To Build a Facebook Marketing Strategy

So how do you build an effective Facebook marketing strategy? In order to build a Facebook marketing strategy, you must know two things: 1) Facebook for Business and 2) Facebook’s unique social media marketing characteristics. Facebook for Business is about how you can set up your business on Facebook. Also, each social media platform has its own distinct features. You need to know both of these to have an effective Facebook marketing strategy.

Facebook For Business 2023

A Facebook Page is what you need to set up your business on Facebook. Without it, you cannot do anything on Facebook regarding your business. A Facebook personal account (or profile) is different from a page. The profile is for you personally, the one you use, for example, to send friend requests and post your after-church and fufu pictures. But the page is what you will use solely for your business. See the page as a shop Facebook has freely given your business for its operations.

Here are 6 steps to go through to use Facebook for business in 2023. If you do not already have a Facebook page for your business, commence with Step 1. But if you already have a page, kindly skip to Step 4 and go to your page.

Creating Your Facebook Page from Scratch

Step 1. Log in to your personal Facebook account. Using the three lines at the top right (i.e. on mobile), go to Pages. Tap on Create.
Step 2. Enter the name of your business (i.e. the name you want to use for the page).
Step 3. Choose the category that best describes your page (e.g. food delivery service, education, design & fashion, etc.)

Editing Your Facebook Page

Use the following steps to edit your Facebook page to get the best results for your business.

Step 4. Click Edit Page. This will give you options such as Template, Page header, Page Info, Settings, and so forth.
Under Current Template click Edit. Choose the template that fits your business (e.g. Shopping, Venues, Non-profit, Services, Standard). Each template has its own features. So choose the appropriate one.

Go to Page Header. Add a cover photo or slideshow. Also, add a profile photo. Recommended sizes are 400×400 pixels for the profile photo and 820×360 pixels for the cover image. To make things easy, visit Canva and use their tools to make your own profile and cover images.

On the same Page Header page, tap on the name of the page. The Create Page username page will open. Enter the name of your business after the @ sign. This will create a custom URL for your page (e.g. @ghyellowpages). This is what you will use to share as the Facebook link to your page. The link will look something like this facebook.com/ghyellowpages or fb.me/ghyellowpages. This custom link is also called the Facebook vanity URL.

Click Page Info. The Update Page Info page has the following sections: About, Contact, Action Button, Location, Hours, and others. The Name section should have the name of your business. In Category, type the category of your business (e.g. food delivery service, education, design & fashion, etc.) and select it. You can choose up to three (3) categories. Add your website if you have one. Describe your business in a few words in the Description. Under Contact, add the business phone number, email address, and WhatsApp number.  Under Action Button, click Add Button and choose the button you want to appear on your page for visitors to see (e.g. Book Now, Shop on Website, Call Now, Send Message, Contact Us, etc.). Under Location, enter your business’ primary location. Under Hours, choose your working hours or leave it if it does not apply to your business. Make sure the information you provide in these sections is accurate. You don’t want to put a wrong phone number or a broken website link in your page’s info.

Click Settings. Settings will give you options such as General, Messaging, Page roles, Instagram, WhatsApp, and so on. Go to General and make sure Messenger, Allow post and story sharing to stories, Allow Facebook stories shared from Instagram to tag my Page, and Similar Pages Suggestions are checked on.

Click Messaging. Make sure the Greeting Message and the Away message are turned on. Then type in their respective boxes how you prefer the messages to be.

Click Page roles. Click Add Person to Page. Your password will be required. Add anyone you would want to add to help manage your page. The page roles are Admin, Editor, Moderator, Advertiser, Analyst, and Jobs Manager.

Click Instagram. Connect your business’ Facebook page to its Instagram account. The password to the Instagram account will be required. When you connect your Facebook and Instagram accounts, you can post to both platforms with a single post at once.

Click WhatsApp to connect the Facebook page for the business to the WhatsApp number you have used for the business.

Managing a Facebook Page

Step 5. Install Meta Business Suite (formerly Facebook Business suite). You will use this app to manage your page.

Step 6: Create a Facebook post. You are going to use the Meta Business Suite to create the post. There are different types of Facebook posts. These are texts, photos, videos, live videos, link posts, and stories.

Texts are posts that contain nothing but only texts; no photos, videos, links, and so on. Always check your text posts for grammatical errors. Photos are posts with pictures. They have a higher engagement than texts. Recommended Facebook timeline or photo post size for 2023 is 1200×630 pixels. Videos have higher engagements than photos and texts. The recommended dimensions for Facebook video posts are 1280 x 720 pixels. The Facebook Live video is a live-streamed broadcast on your Facebook page.

The Link posts are posts that contain links (e.g. links to blog posts from your website). Facebook stories are vertical short videos that last for 24 hours and disappear afterwards. They are displayed above the News Feed and are growing in popularity. Lots of people watch Facebook stories or reels these days. When it comes to the right post format, you may have to use all of them. The best practice is to consistently post all the different types of Facebook posts on your page.

Using the menu at the bottom, click on the + sign. Choose the type of post you want to create. Type, upload or do as necessary and tap on Next at the top right. You can choose to Publish now, Save as Draft or Schedule for later. And you’re done. Congratulations, you made a post.

Facebook Social Media Marketing

Your Facebook social media marketing must have the following: goals, target audience, content, ads, and other Facebook tools.

Goal

Your Facebook marketing strategy should begin with your goal. What do you want to achieve? Is it creating brand awareness, increasing website traffic, engaging with your customers or fans, educating your audience, generating leads, making sales, encouraging people to attend your event, getting people to install an app, or improving customer service? Your goal should be clearly stated at the beginning of your marketing campaign. If you want your Facebook marketing strategy to succeed, every post and ad should serve the goal(s) you have set.

Target Audience

These are the exact people you are trying to reach. If you don’t define your target audience, you will waste your time, effort, and money. A target audience helps you to understand the attitudes, behaviour, and interests of your prospective buyers. This is how Facebook marketing works; that is, targeting a group based on their interests, demographics, and behaviour.

Either you describe your own target audience or you use the Insights page in the Meta Business Suite to know more about your audience. Either way, the following demographics are key in identifying your target audience: their age (e.g. 25-44), gender (e.g. male), location (e.g. Accra or Kumasi), job, relationship status (e.g. single), and education. The time they come on Facebook (e.g. 6 pm), the Facebook pages they have liked (e.g. TV3 Ghana), and so on are also needed to form your target audience. If possible, try and break down your target audience into sub-categories. This is important and they will inform you on the content to produce and the targeting to use in Facebook Ads. As a side note, you can use more indicators in addition to the examples stated to define your target group.

Content

Your Facebook content is what you are going to use to market to your target audience to achieve your goals. Therefore, you must have engaging content. You have to plan your posts because you have to use a variety of posts. The different types of Facebook posts have been discussed above. You should be posting regularly to your Facebook business page. This will help the page to grow and accomplish your goals.

Content is king. And it is the same for Facebook. The best way is to plan ahead and schedule the posts. You need to have a content creation calendar that shows what type of content will be posted and when. Your content must fulfil the goals you set at the beginning of the marketing campaign. For example, a brand awareness post should be about how your business solves the problem your prospective customer faces.

Also, mind you that posts are all about engagement. Be sure to respond to customers so you can have a high response rate. Don’t post and go and sleep. Be active in the conversations that are happening on your page and in your inbox.

In addition, the percentage of your content that promotes your brand should be about 30% of your posts. The remaining 70% should be posts that educate, entertain, and inspire your audience. Give your audience content that will build them up or will be beneficial to them in some ways. For example, if you sell clothing, you can create posts about how to choose matching colours for an outfit for specific events. Your posts should not always be about the goods you are selling.

When producing content, think about how you want the customer to feel after watching or reading your post. It should have something that captures attention. Also, there should be a call to action in the post; that is what they should do after seeing your post (e.g. Shop Now, Register Now, Call Now).

Ads

Are Facebook ads worth it? Yes, they are. Facebook ads are one of the effective means to promote your content. As a business, you need to find money to run Facebook ads. Facebook ads start from as little as one dollar ($1). Facebook ads are worth it because there is so much noise on Facebook that you may have to spend some money on ads in order to get in front of your target audience. Moreover, it is difficult to have organic growth (growth that did not come from ads) on Facebook. Also, less than 2% of your Facebook page followers will see your content on their News Feed. Hence, be willing to boost your content with ads. So you can grow your followers on Facebook and also ensure more of your followers will see your posts. Don’t forget, that Facebook ads have a potential audience of 7.1 million in Ghana.

Other Facebook Tools

There are other Facebook tools you need to add to your Facebook marketing strategy. These are these is the Meta Business Suite already discussed above and some others.

Meta Ads manager (formerly Facebook Ads Manager)

Meta Ads Manager is what you use to create ads for both Facebook and Instagram. The most effective Facebook ads depend on your ad campaign objective and the type of content you will be promoting. When you install the Meta Ads Manager, you can create ads such as the following:

Post engagement ads: These ads are used to boost your Facebook and Instagram posts to get more people to engage with the post. Such posts can be texts, images, videos, and link posts.

Video views: They are ads you use to promote videos to get people’s attention. They appear in the News feed; before, during, or at the end of other videos; beneath other videos, in Instagram stories, in Messenger. If you use a Post engagement ad to promote a video, it may not show in these places.

Website Traffic ads: You use these ads to send more people to your website. A single image, a carousel (two or more images), a single video, or a post can be used for this purpose. Also, it will show in Facebook stories.

Reach ads: In order to promote your business to the maximum number of people, use this ad. Just like website traffic ads, a single image, a carousel (two or more images), a single video, or a post can be used for this purpose. This type of ad is also shown in Facebook stories.

Messages Ads: These ads are used to get people to send you messages in Messenger, WhatsApp, or in your Instagram direct message. This one also has a single image, a carousel (two or more images), a single video, or a post as its formats.

Pages Like ads: In case you want to grow the number of your page’s likes, this is the ad to use. The ad format for Page likes is either a single image or a single video.

Event responses ads: This is used to promote your events to get more people to attend (if it is free) or buy tickets (if it is not free). Before you can use this ad type, you should create the event on Facebook first.

Facebook Groups

These can also be used to create engagement with your brand. You can create a Facebook Group for your brand. Moreover, you can also join Facebook groups on your page and be commenting in there. If you are lucky, your fans may even create several Facebook Groups in your brand’s name.

Facebook Messenger

Some customers will be sending messages on Facebook Messenger. Do well to respond to them promptly. You can set automatic questions and answers (FAQs) in your messenger. This will answer questions most people usually ask your business.

Facebook Pixel

If you have a website, you can make use of Facebook Pixel. It is a piece of code you insert on your website. Then when people move from Facebook to your website, their activities are tracked. And when you do Facebook Ads, Facebook will be able to show your ads to these people. Many times, it takes more than one encounter for a customer to buy. The fact that they visited your website does not mean they will buy something from you. But as they keep seeing your ad, they will be influenced to finally make a purchase. That is the main aim of Facebook Pixel.

Conclusion

Facebook marketing is part of the broad spectrum of digital marketing. Adding your business to a business directory website is also a component of digital marketing strategy. Be sure to list your business on ghanayellopages.com for free.