Are you looking for a much easier and cheaper way to promote your business than print ads? Well, look no further than Facebook. With 1.32 billion daily active users, Facebook is quite clearly the most widely used social media platform.
If you’re looking at advertising on Facebook, here are 15 awesome advertising techniques that are guaranteed to skyrocket your sales.
1. Keep your posts between 50 – 150 characters
Less is indeed best when it comes to character count on Facebook.
This graph from Buzzsumo confirms that posts with 50 characters or less receive the most interactions. Furthermore, the number of interactions gradually gets lessers as more characters are added so try not to get too carried away.
2. Post something between 10 p.m. and midnight
If you’re an online marketer, you would know by now that timing is essential to get more audience engagement.
According to Buzzsumo, the best time to actually post something is between 10 p.m. and midnight.
Why so late you may ask?
Well, because there should still be enough people who are still active on Facebook during these times and you have fewer people posting content which means its less competition.
3. Post images on Instagram instead of Facebook
According to a study done by Buzzsumo, apparently “images posted via Instagram get 23% more engagement.” If you’re thinking of posting photos to promote your brand, you’re better off posting them on Instagram rather than on Facebook.
Or at least have a couple of versions of a photo you want to post about your brand so that you can post on both Facebook and Instagram. Even Brand Watch confirms that “Engagement with brands on Instagram is 10 times higher than Facebook, 54 times higher than Pinterest and 84 times higher than Twitter.”
4. Set Up A/B Tests
For the newbies out there, you’re probably wondering what an A/B Test is? Well, in a nutshell, it’s an abbreviation for Facebook Ads Split Test.
A split test refers to a marketing strategy where two elements of a marketing campaign are tested against each other to analyze which element can deliver the best result.
Split testing can be used in a number of marketing tools such as emails, landing pages, blog posts as well as Facebook Ads.
A good split test can result in reliable data that’ll help convert your ads into actual sales so it’s only smart to run a split test first before you start splurging an obscene amount of money on a Facebook ad campaign that can’t deliver results in the long run.
5. Use audience Insights to laser-focus on your audience
The “Audience Insights” feature in Facebook can assist you in getting a rather detailed look at your audience so that you can engage them more towards your posts.
You can actually get information on their gender, age, lifestyle and even job title so why not use this feature when it’s totally free anyway??
If you want more detailed instructions regarding Facebook Audience Insights then click on this link: Facebook Audience Insights
6. Incorporate video into your marketing strategy
According to Wordstream, “videos earn the highest engagement rate, despite making up only 3% of the content.”
They also discovered that “Facebook gets over 8 billion average daily video views.”
The interesting thing about this data is that video accounts for only 3% of all content on Facebook.
Therefore, why not post a number of high-quality video content to engage your customers?
7. Embed Facebook videos rather than YouTube videos
Social media analytics provider Quintly apparently analyzed 6.2 million posts by 167,000 Facebook profiles and eventually discovered that Facebook native videos received a 1055.41% higher average share rate than Youtube videos.”
This massive difference should be enough to persuade any entrepreneur to focus on Facebook videos instead of YouTube videos for maximum engagement.
8. Ensure you have a CTA button on your Facebook ads
According to Brandwatch “The average advertising click-through rate on Facebook is 0.9% ” but then “adding a CTA button can lift your click-through rate by 2.85 times.”
Therefore, it’s quite obvious that CTA buttons are a MUST if you want your ad to be successful. This guide from Facebook on how to create a CTA button should come in handy.
9. Try using “Pages to Watch”
Did you know that you can compile a list of pages you’re interested in including other pages’ analytics on your Facebook account?
If you have a competitor who has a highly engaging Facebook page, you can look up other Facebook pages related to your industry, find the post that had the most audience engagement and that should help you figure out what you want to post in your own page.
Just click on Insights on your Facebook page:
Then scroll down to Facebook Watch. An article that was written by Buffer provides a more detailed explanation on Facebook Watches.
10. Try creating “Facebook Groups” to strengthen your brand
One powerful resource a number of businesses are not taking advantage of is “Facebook Groups.”
Basically, it’s creating a particular group based on a specific topic of interest that revolves around your specific industry.
Creating Facebook groups is a big help to your brand because it connects you to your audience on a more personal level and you can get valuable insight from other like-minded individuals.
11. Pin your best post
A pinned post is an option that you can manually select for your chosen post to stay at the top of your timeline, meaning, it won’t actually slip down your timeline as you continue to add other posts to your page.
You can only pin one post at a time and the pinned post is located at the top of your Facebook post in the right column.
To pin a post you need to go to the post on your Facebook page’s timeline, click on the top right of the post then select Pin to Top of Page.
12. Zero in on Your Competitors’ Fans
If you’re just a small business trying to compete with the big companies then the best way to zero in on their market is to target their actual fans.
If you target your competitors’ Facebook fans then you can hopefully steal away some of their customers.
If you want to target your competitors’ fans when you create a Facebook ad, just go to Facebook Saved Audience and under the Interests category, enter the names of competing brands. It’s the best way to create a marketing audience who are already familiar with your product.
13. Promote Limited-time Offers
If you want to win more customers then you need to create a sense of urgency.
Bottomline: If you give people too much time to make up their minds, then they’re most probably going to postpone making a decision about your product so their excitement will disappear. However, if you present them with a limited time offer, your prospective customer might get worried about missing out on an amazing offer from you.
14. Combine Facebook Ads with quality content from your blog
Most companies create Facebook ads with the focus on turning leads into customers.
The thing is, if you start selling to potential customers straight away then that could potentially turn them off because you’re in that person’s face way too much.
Instead of jumping in like a hungry salesman with an offer straight away, why not start slowly and share valuable and authoritative content with your target audiences.
Later on, if a prospective customer has read your valuable blog articles then you can move to target them with a more sales-oriented Facebook ad.
15. Create a Free Giveaway Campaign
Let’s face it, everyone loves freebies.
If you want people to react positively to your Facebook ads, you need to offer them something of decent value.
Facebook giveaways and contests is definitely a great way to engage your customers.
Keep in mind that your Facebook competition does not necessarily have to be focused on selling to people. Instead, focus on long-term benefits such as increasing your brand awareness and making it more fun for your customers.
16. Using hashtags is useless
Hashtags may be useful to social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter but it’s not such a big deal on Facebook.
Buzzsumo discovered that posts that included hashtags received less engagement than posts without them so save yourself the effort of typing hashtags in your post an forget about them.
Takeaway
There will always be a newer and cooler social media platform that people would consider as the “next big thing.
But with a whopping 2.13 billion monthly active users – whatever your business goal is whether it’s traffic, brand exposure or lead generation, Facebook should always be at the top of your list.