Facebook All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition (2014)

Book V. Marketing Your Business

Chapter 5. Identifying Your Target Audience

In This Chapter

Marketing business pages offline

Why online and traditional marketing are important

Other online marketing tools used for Facebook

You might be reading this minibook to get a better understanding of how you can use Facebook to market your business. If this is the case, we would be remiss if we didn’t offer you balanced advice.

Facebook is one of the most important places to market your business in the Internet age for many reasons. The driving reason to use Facebook for marketing is not because of how dynamic and interactive you can get with your market. It’s not because of the two-way conversation and the ability to respond to your customers in real time. These are secondary reasons. The primary reason is its user base. Millions of potential customers are on Facebook.

In this chapter, we discuss marketing your Facebook presence using a healthy mix of traditional and online tools.

Using Insights to Identify Your Audience

To effectively market to the right audience, you need to identify who that appropriate audience is — that is, the people who will buy your product and are a good fit to be your customers. The way to determine this might be to identify who your customers are today. In addition to looking at your company and customer list, identify your audience on Facebook by using the analytics tools in Insights, as shown in Figure 5-1.

Facebook Insights tells you not just how many people you reach with your business page but also their demographics. You can discover the balance of male versus female, the age range, and many more details. This data tells you who has shown an interest in your business page, but you can dissect the information even more and see the demographics of people who are talking about your business page.

Figure 5-1: Facebook Insights tells you who your audience is.

Insights is designed to give you a better understanding of your Facebook audience so that you can refine your marketing on and offline.

For example, if it’s time to promote your Pilates studio and build your Facebook following by advertising offline, you don’t want to buy an offline ad in a men’s magazine if your Facebook Insights shows that women make up 70 percent of your Facebook audience. Furthermore, although 30 percent of your friends and followers are men, suppose you find that 100 percent of those talking about your business page are women. This statistic would suggest that your true target audience is women.

Although this example is simplistic, you can apply these principles across multiple demographic factors. If you get the right message to the right audience, you can attract the right kind of people to expand your business without wasting time and money on the wrong crowd.

You can read more about Insights and how to use its data in Chapter 3 of this minibook.

Understanding Why Online and TraditionalMarketing Are Necessary

When your advertising method is more of an experience, your results are likely to be higher. And how can you offer a more interactive marketing experience? Online. Depending on your goals and campaigns, you can ask your audience to participate as you market to them (via polls, games, and other things). Of course, you can only get so many people to take that high level of action, but that’s okay because in the end, you want to spend time reaching only those customers who are right for your business and who are going to buy your product or service.

With all this talk about reaching the right customers, it’s important to remember that a healthy mix of marketing tactics will yield the greatest results. Traditional marketing (such as print, TV, and radio advertising) is tried and true. It’s never going away, but it is changing. Traditional marketing is the foundation of your messaging. Choosing which forms of traditional marketing are right for your business (and which forms are worthless) is easy when you know your audience and their lifestyle. But remember this: No matter what their lifestyle, there is a good chance they are on Facebook!

Marketing Facebook Offline

Offline (or traditional) marketing has just as much room for innovation as online marketing. By including your business page information on your traditional marketing materials, you may expand your reach to those you have not been able to connect with on Facebook. This integration also enables you to add an interactive element to the traditional advertising campaign.

Facebook plays the role of a lead capturing method when it’s integrated in traditional marketing. This means that every Like is a lead that you now have subscribed to further marketing messages.

Several studies have shown that when Facebook users Like a business page, they do not consider that action consent to be marketed to. Remember the advice we’ve given throughout this book, and don’t overdo the hard sell. If your friends and followers feel like you’re invading their space with too much marketing, they stop listening — by ignoring your updates, Unliking your page, hiding your updates, or possibly even reporting your updates as spam.

Offline marketing comes in many forms, and they all have their respective strengths and limitations. The way that you effectively use them to market your business page will vary with each example.

Direct mail marketing

Direct mail can be one of the most powerful or one of the weakest forms of marketing. The reason for the variation is that people ignore messages that appear to be an advertisement. When customers receive something from someone they trust, however, the story is different. Direct mail is always more successful when it has some context, meaning the recipients have some reason to expect what is sent to them. Using direct mail with this principle in mind can lead to powerful results.

The best use of a Facebook direct mail marketing campaign is giving people something worth responding to. Don’t just direct people to a contest or ask for followers. Instead, consider that when people get their mail and look through it, they’re at home. They may not be on the computer, but they likely have one close by. Getting someone to take a moment to log in to Facebook might be realistic if you give them a good enough reason. You may want to create follower-only discount codes via an application. (See Book VI for information about creating and using apps.) Just remember to make the discount large enough to entice your customer to stop what they’re doing and log in to Facebook to find your page.

A permission-based marketing response always works best when you give the customer some value. For example, if the people you send a message to are already your customers, direct mail could be the contact they need to consider connecting with you another way (such as on your business page).

Always make sure that with any print campaign that you give customers an easy-to-remember URL. That way, you don’t lose a potential opportunity because the web address is just too long to type. You may want to use a custom URL that forwards to a custom tab on your business page.

TV ads focused on Facebook

Some time ago, TGI Fridays created a campaign to increase its Facebook following. The restaurant did a series of TV commercials as well as other marketing tactics in which a fictional character named Woody asked friends to join him for a free burger. In the commercials, Woody stated he was the restaurant’s biggest fan. This character fronted the commercials and print ads to implore you to become a fan so that the restaurant could give everyone a free burger. The company offered a burger to the first half million fans. This allowed the restaurant to increase its Facebook page followers to nearly one million. The restaurant realized the value of having a connection to its customers through Facebook.

The restaurant didn’t hide the fact that it was trying to increase the number of Facebook business page fans: That was the topic of discussion. The approach was that if the restaurant’s business page hit 500,000 fans, every fan would get a coupon for a free signature burger.

The restaurant’s fanbase is over 1.3 million at the time of this writing. Each fan (eligible for the free burger) gave his or her e-mail address (via a third-party app) so that the restaurant could send the coupon. In this way, the restaurant created a strong database to regularly connect with customers, and it used Facebook as way to strengthen customer loyalty. Those who Liked the business page and shared their contact information considered it worth their time. (Even though Liking a business page and providing contact information isn’t a big step, it’s just enough that you’re more likely to get a response from people who are in your true market.)

With a campaign like this, the restaurant made the best of its investment in TV commercials. With every advertising investment, make sure you get the most out of your investment by giving your audience a call to action with which you can bridge a sustained relationship with them. This philosophy also poses a significant argument for using both paid Facebook ads and your business page in tandem. This way, you’re building your audience but also sustaining it with a continued connection.

Radio ads focused on Facebook

Radio can be the hardest tool to use to promote Facebook for many companies because you don’t have the benefit of visual aids or the option of click-throughs. If you use the radio to promote your business page, make sure that you know how easy or difficult it is to find your business page for the first time, and prepare for that with your copy (the commercial’s script). If your URL isn’t easy to spell correctly, you should create a custom redirect URL that’s easier to spell. You might even want to be sure that you have a prominent ad on your own website that links to your business page so that people have several ways to find you on Facebook.

You should take note of the way people search for you in the search box on Facebook. For example, if your business page name is A.B.C. Pilates Studio and people typically type ABC Pilates, they may have trouble finding you! If you haven’t already set your name, change it to something that works well when searching.

Radio works best when the ads are frequent. Make sure that the station and time you choose is consistent and targeted at the right audience. Finally, make sure that your call to action clearly states how to find you.

Online Marketing Resources

Facebook is not a standalone online spot for marketing your business. Although Facebook is one of the most visited sites on the Internet, for many, it’s a place to connect with people, discover interesting news, blogs, and more. Facebook acts as a portal to the rest of the Internet.

Don't forget to use other marketing tools on the web. When people are on the Internet catching up on TV shows, checking e-mail, searching for products, or even visiting your website, they’re only a click or two away from becoming a fan of your business page. The following sections describe a few ways to use some of the most common tools for marketing your business page on the rest of the web.

E-mail marketing

Of all marketing channels, e-mail marketing is credited with delivering the highest return on investment. From our experience, we’ve found that the most successful Facebook promotions are supported by a permission marketing e-mail distribution list. This tells us that e-mail marketing must be a strong way to build your social media audience and drive them to engagement.

One of the biggest benefits of e-mail marketing is that you can communicate with your Facebook friends and followers directly, even if they miss your updates in the news feed. Figure 5-2 shows an e-mail newsletter that reminds subscribers to enter a contest on a business page.

Figure 5-2: Pairing e-mail marketing with Facebook.

Your e-mail marketing software should allow you to efficiently track the success of your campaign. Tracking is what makes e-mail marketing so powerful; you can measure how many people opened your e-mail, as well as how many people clicked the links in it. E-mail marketing software is also generally required to deliver an e-mail in full HTML formatting. This means that you can send an e-mail message that has a fully designed layout, much like you see in Figure 5-2. E-mail marketing software also manages unsubscribes from people who do not want to receive your e-mails any longer. MailChimp (http://mailchimp.com), Constant Contact (http://constantcontact.com), A Weber (http://aweber.com), and ExactTarget (http://exacttarget.com) are some of the most popular options.

Although you can create e-mails in plain-text format, marketing e-mails tend to be more effective when they have images to help communicate your message in a simple manner. It’s easy to create a template for your e-mail that resembles the design of a business page tab. We suggest including a distinctive graphical button in your e-mail (refer to Figure 5-2) that makes it easy to click directly to the destination.

E-mails typically have a short life span. Make sure that you follow two important tips in an e-mail marketing campaign:

· Don’t give away too much information in your e-mail. Make sure you share just enough to get your readers interested. Make them visit your business page to get the rest of the details. If you satisfy their interest in the e-mail, they may forget to click over to Facebook later.

· Send your e-mail when you have something notable to share with customers. You will get more traffic if you offer something particularly interesting, so it’s always better to tie e-mails to a specific campaign (such as a special promotion or contest) rather than just an invitation to check out your business page. With campaigns, it usually makes sense to send an e-mail at the beginning and another towards the end of the campaign as a reminder.

E-mail can be tied into your Facebook marketing in reverse as well. We suggest installing an app on your business page that allows your friends and followers to sign up for your e-mail list. (Most e-mail marketing software has an app; check their website’s FAQ section.) After you install the app, you can post a status update reminding your friends and followers to sign up (be sure to provide the link to the signup tab). Or if friends and followers are perusing your business page, they may see your app and sign up on their own — but don’t count on it; 90 percent of friends and followers don’t return to your business page unless you tell them to.

Search marketing with PPC

PPC (pay per click) ads typically appear at the top of search results in Google and other search engines. These ads are paid out based on how many times the ad is clicked. In other words, the advertiser is charged when someone clicks the ad, not on how many times it’s displayed. PPC is a great way to create advertising directed at the right audience (anyone who is searching for your product or service), and you can do it on almost any budget. With PPC ads, you define what you’re willing to spend, and that amount is applied to ad appearances until the budget is exhausted.

Because all Facebook users are Internet users, it makes sense to use the Internet to promote your business page. In this case, you use search results to draw relevant traffic to your business page. (See Figure 5-3.) For example, if you owned a restaurant in the Old Market district of Omaha and people searched for Omaha Restaurants Old Market in a search engine, PPC allows them to see an ad at the top of their results page that links directly to whatever page is defined by the advertiser.

Figure 5-3: Promoting Facebook with Google PPC.

When people search for a product you sell, you don’t want to miss the opportunity to capture their purchase. If you promote a business page with a PPC ad, make sure you can take orders in a custom tab or direct people to where they can place an order.

Integrated Campaigns

Using a mix of tactics including both online and offline channels is the ideal situation. If your goal is to increase your Facebook audience by drawing your customers there, make sure that your call to action is clear in every portion of your campaign. It helps to use the Facebook logo and colors in your advertising because the Facebook logo is easily recognizable.

Using custom page apps (tabs) is the most important element of your Facebook promotions, even if your initial goal is simply to increase Likes on your business page. All promotions are conducted on a Facebook tab. Giving your audience something to see that is unique to them is important. For example, BMW customized its business page with an interactive page app (tab) that allowed visitors to assemble a car with the custom options they prefer. Visitors had to Like the business page to use the interactive page app. For more information on business page apps, see Book VI.