Many small business owners claim that Facebook is a waste of time. Let’s take a look at some insights and examples from experts to show how Facebook can be one of the best marketing platforms for your business.

Facebook marketing for small businesses on a limited budget can be a rollercoaster ride. Businesses either feel that it is not for them, or they report very high returns. What if we told you that any small business can have exponential growth from Facebook? 

Yes, yours included. This article will cover the top Facebook insights needed for your local business. You don't need a billion dollar ad expenditure to succeed on Facebook; you just need to know what you are doing.

Differences Between Organic and Paid Social

Are you using both paid and organic strategies for growing your business? If you run ads on social media, paid social is the way to go. Organic growth, on the other hand, gives you long-term development and exposure for your brand.

Organic and paid social media tactics can both be useful in helping you achieve your goals. The differences lie in the scope of exposure your content gets and the immediacy of results.

Organic Social Media Marketing

With organic methods, you’ll have to invest a little more time, but results can be longer-lasting. Organic strategies take time to take effect, but they’re also more cost-effective in the long run. 

A great strategy for implementing this is to build relationships by utilizing Facebook’s Many-to-Many features.

Paid Social media Marketing:

Paid social is an excellent way to get results shortly after placing your ad or paying to boost your Facebook post. With paid social, as soon as the allotted budget runs out, your exposure ends. 

However, with earned social media you have a chance at extending the paid time frame by using engaging content and participative actions (tweets, likes, and comments).

Prerequisites:

Before we jump into our list of tips, there are some prerequisites you will need. You should already have a 

• Facebook ad account
• Setup a Facebook pixel 
• Add The Facebook Pixel to your website
• Create Custom Event for your website
• Payment method set up

 If these things aren’t set up yet, then bookmark this page so you can refer back to it once you’ve finished the steps.

Let's take a deep dive into the effective Facebook marketing tips for small businesses recommended by experts:

How to market a small business on Facebook?

Like with any other social media platform, there are specific things you should and shouldn't do on Facebook.

1. Know your customer

Before taking action on Facebook, make sure you know exactly who your customers are. You can gather a lot of information about your ideal audience by creating a Facebook "Lookalike Audience." Use a tool like Audience Insights to find out who your most engaged users are and then create an audience based on their traits and interests. This will help you focus your Facebook marketing efforts and get the most bang for your buck by targeting the people most likely to buy from you.

2. Engage, engage, engage!

The best thing about social media is that it allows you to form relationships with people. And the best part about Facebook is how easy it is to start engaging with people. Engagement on Facebook comes in many forms: liking posts, commenting on posts, sharing posts, leaving reviews, etc. As long as you're showing up in the news feeds of people who have indicated they're interested in what you have to say or sell, you'll be engaging with them even if it's simply by showing up in their newsfeeds!**

3. Create value for your customers—not just for yourself**

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Actionable Facebook Marketing Tips For Small Businesses

Try look-alike audience as a cold audience

When you start with ads on your Facebook page, you already have an idea of what kind of people to target. Often, it happens that when you are defining the audience of your Facebook ad, you realize that your audience definition is too broad. 

Or you may be reaching a lot of people, but your engagement and conversions are very low than what you expected.

When you are creating a look-alike audience, Facebook will try to find other active users on Facebook that share similar traits or have similar interests to your custom audience. 

The first step is to build the custom audience, which can be done by clicking on ads manager and then managed assets >create a custom audience from your current ones.

As mentioned, look-alike audience is one of the strategies that we can use to reach new customers. It uses the information of a group of people as a source audience and target an advertisement to other people who look like them. As you already know, Facebook’s algorithm is smart and provides us with better boosted reach and more conversions.

Using lookalikes is a great way to improve your current, new and untargeted ads. Lookalikes will allow you to improve your conversion rates by targeting more people who look like your customers.

• Your ad will only target people from a specific country so that you don't end up spending on non targeted ads
• You can create up to 500 lookalike audiences from a single source
• People in your source will be excluded so that you only spend for new customers
• You can use multiple lookalikes for the same ad

Try to create thumb-stopping ad creatives

Remember the good old days when you would catch up with your faraway friends and schoolmates on social media by visiting their Facebook pages? Times have changed. I mean, people visit Facebook but not in the same way they used to, right? You see a lot of people swiping through their newsfeeds these days.

 To get the most out of marketing on your Facebook page, you need to make sure that your content is capable of breaking this pattern and stop people from swiping.

Here are the 10 tips you need to know to get the most out of your content for your social strategy:

• Start with an attention grabber. This element could stop the scrollers and invite them to spend more time in your ad — which is exactly what you want! You can also add a live chat or telephone option so people have the option of contacting you that way as well.

• Use bright colors on your social media marketing. Bright colors are proven to drive up engagement, so utilize them in a way that will help spark communications among your followers.

• If you haven’t heard of using text overlays on your videos, we suggest giving it a try. Text overlays help make sure that the viewers of your video are actually able to understand what the message or point of your video is. And not only that, but it also helps ensure that they absorb what you’re saying as well!
• Use motion graphics to catch the wandering eyes of your users. Human eyes are involuntarily drawn towards motion. Use this as an eyeball magnet to trigger emotional responses that will make your content resonate with viewers

• Post content that entertains your audience. The main reason they are on your channel is to enjoy the content you post - so it needs to keep them coming back for more.

• Add a Call to Action (CTA) to all of your headlines. This will help you get people who don't care about reading content through to the end and then, hopefully, beyond it.

• Bakers are always looking for the best deal for their ingredients. So if you have content that has to do with something that is closely related to a marketing topic (and not just an article of interest), then include words like "free" in your title so that more people will take notice!

• Show real people that utilize your product. Individuals who believe they have discovered something user-friendly have no hesitation in showing it off to their family and friends.

• Use the video from your Facebook business page as a lead magnet and get more subscribers. The video will be eye catching to people who visit a lot of different pages on Facebook. Also, Feedburner shows videos in their feeds.

• Try to show off what your business does in your cover photo. Your visitors must be able to get a sense of where you're taking them at a glance, otherwise they won't want to engage with you just yet.

 3. Experiment with your creatives

Bexon is an international firm that provides unique online marketing solutions to help companies grow their business. We are a team based in the BD and we offer bespoke solutions for all our clients regardless of your location or budget, so don't hesitate to get in touch.

You've designed Facebook ads before. But maybe you're wondering: How can I get even better results than my last campaign? Try adjusting your creatives (your imagery, text and link destination) in just one or two places. Be sure to test this change on a small budget first. Then scale it once you find what works!

For example, P&G, one of our clients, wanted to run an ad campaign for their recyclable plastic Ariel bottles. We recommended them to change their creatives for their Facebook ads and it resulted in 44% and 63% gains respectively. Take a look for yourself:

You might think that P&G is a big brand and it is easier for them to implement these changes. This tip does not apply to my small business. Let me stop you right there.

4. Use testimonials

Having a testimonial ad or affiliation with another small business is a great way to 'humbly brag' about your business. Such ads act as social proof of your business' and brand's worth. 

Testimonials show that other people have tried your product or service and had a positive experience, so those new visitors to your website will be more confident that they'll have an equally good experience whether signing up for an emailed newsletter, engaging in an e-commerce transaction, or checking out a competitor comparison page on your site!

A study has found that businesses can increase their revenue by as much as 62% simply by offering testimonials. Not only does this make customers more trusting of your business, but 92% of all consumers check on the reviews before making a purchase from you for the first time! Be sure you provide potential customers with what they need before they even think to ask.

Here are some other reasons why you should post testimonials on your Facebook business page:

• Positive reviews and testimonials help customers build trust in a brand.
• A positive testimonial of a new product can help people feel that.
• Having a higher number of reviews can help improve conversion rates.
• Testimonials can lead to higher purchase volume from individual customers.
• Better testimonials help in improving the search traffic of the brand content.
• It proves that your business has great customer service and a fast response time.

5. Always use subtitles for your ads

Although it's always a good idea to use testimonial posts on your Facebook business page, we suggest that you update your text-based testimonials with video testimonials. You can attract and engage more customers with video content since it's more relatable and gives them the opportunity to ask questions!

As stated above, swiping on social media has become a habit. Many of us find ourselves going through social media feeds while feeling bored in transit or even when we feel like procrastinating from work. Our brains are wired to make these mindless decisions so it’s very hard to resist the temptation but for this habit to become worthwhile we suggest you turn on your phone’s Airplane mode and focus on something productive instead!

You can show your audience that subtitles are available by adding the subtitles to your cover picture. People tend to focus on the picture and decide what they want to watch, so having the subtitles displayed will encourage them to play your video instead of leaving it paused.

In the past, it was a bit difficult for deaf people to use Facebook stories. But now, many people can take advantage of subtitles on the videos that get generated after their posts go live.

In addition to that, you can also use subtitled videos for your video content strategy. These will allow you to target audiences from a number of different cultures who speak a variety of languages. It's better to have one in the hand than two in the bush, but why not secure all three by having a large net at your disposal?

6.Create visuals in horizontal and vertical

Facebook marketing is no longer only about timeline posts. Reach a larger audience with story posts, stay fresh in the minds of your follower base by ensuring that their newsfeeds are never empty and increase awareness of your brand through the use of branded content including video.

You've now learned that not all images are created horizontally, but also need to be considered vertically. You'll also notice from the points we've illustrated above that your value proposition acts as a short and compelling summary of your product or service's primary benefit. It’s what sets you apart from competitors, and it's what speaks directly to your prospects' needs by saying in one line how your company will solve a problem they're currently enduring.

Here are the top value proposition tips that you should adopt:

• Less is more. Make your business interesting in 4-6 words
• Involve your reader, don't just throw a value proposition at them
• Talk less about the product, but more about the value that your products bring
• Write with conviction. Instead of saying "we help", try "it's how"
• Call to action button is great, but call to values are better
• Don't exaggerate, people love honest lines
• Write in a conversational tone. Be casual, colloquial and don't shy away from pronouns
• Be more specific. "37.2% savings" is better than "more savings"
• Make it sound more human and humorous
• Make it more memorable rather than like-able
• Be clear, don't complicate the originality of your business

8. Target specific Facebook groups with your ads

This one little tip won't even involve you telling anyone! Approach a few people who really know their stuff about the topic that you're writing about and ask that they be your guinea pigs for this article since it is mainly written to help them - we're sure they'll readily accept. You need to create buyer personas as a marketer, and you can learn how with our guide here:

Posting advertisements on Facebook can be a great way to get new business for your company's front door. To make it as efficient a tool as possible, here is an example of how you can target specific Facebook groups with your ads.

Step 1: Post the content of your Facebook ad on your business page and hide it

When you make a post using your Facebook business page, then it will show to everyone. To prevent this from happening, you will have to hide this post from your timeline.

Step 2: Share this post in the groups with the audience you want to target

Note: Facebook will only let you share this post using your personal account. That's alright, do it.

Step 3: Try to boost your engagement

Reply to all your comments, try asking questions and maximize the interactions. This will be important for your next step.

Step 4: Create a custom audience using this post

This is where the tip gets interesting. The people who interacted with your post are the people who are most likely to be interested in your business' offerings. It is smart to only target these people.

So all you have to do now is go to your ad manager > Audience > create a custom audience based on video engagement > select the videos you shared in step 2 Finally, use this audience to target your ad for your audience moving on to the next level. More about levels in the next tip.

9. Create a customer journey

Last but not least you need to take things step by step. You don't greet your best friends the same way you greet people you've never met before, and neither should you approach all of your buyers the same way, who started out as cold leads and eventually become regulars. Ideally, from someone's first visit to your Facebook page or even their Google search for your product or service, through their fifth time visiting it, you have made them a customer so that they are no longer a stranger.

Bottom line

I hope this blog has given you a tip, trick, or strategy that you could use to positively affect your campaigns. If you need help with your Facebook advertising feel free to contact us and we will be happy to do so free of charge.