Define Your Business Goals
What, exactly, does a successful Facebook campaign mean? That’s something you have to determine yourself. After all, how do you know if it’s successful if you don’t set solid goals and parameters? Even more than with other marketing strategies, it can be nearly impossible to know if a Facebook marketing plan is effective without definitive ideas of what success means.
Here are three steps to a realistic goal:
1. Determine all you want.
2. Prioritize your goals.
3. Measure your results.
What Do You Want?
This point is crucial: take your time and think about what your business wants or needs most from Facebook. Social networking can generate a litany of results, including the following:
• Higher sales
• Better brand recognition
• Appropriate platform for new product/service launch
• Greater revenue
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Overambitious goals can be as destructive as not having any goals at all. If you have 5 percent of the market share and you want your Facebook campaign to garner more than half of the market share within a few months, you’re probably setting yourself up for failure and frustration. Make small, specific goals.
Make your list of objectives as long as you like. Right now, you’re just trying to list all the results you desire from Facebook marketing.
Prioritize
Prioritize your list of objectives in order of importance. It may seem obvious that certain goals supersede others, but prioritizing goals also helps you make quick decisions if the goals conflict.
For example, a Facebook marketing campaign may be great for an upcoming product launch, but doing your dream campaign may cost too much money. You need to make some hard decisions. Here are some questions to ask when your goals conflict:
• Is your company revenue solid enough for it to take a loss this year?
• Will the new product add more revenue in the long run?
• Can the campaign be spread across multiple products, not just the new one?
Answering these questions before beginning enables you to prioritize your goals and make effective decisions quickly.
Show Me the Money
No matter what your priorities, you need to be realistic about how much money you can put into your Facebook marketing campaign. We’ve seen too many businesses—both large and small—go way over their Facebook marketing budget.
The danger here is twofold. First, overextending your marketing money means that you may have to borrow against other, more important departments. Imagine having to cut production expenses to cover marketing, which could lead to shoddy products or, worse, not enough products.
Second, Facebook marketing takes time, so you want to make sure your money will last for several months. Facebook marketing is a commitment. Don’t expect to throw up a Facebook page, watch it for a little while, and count the dollars. Think of your Facebook campaign as more of a marathon than a sprint. Budget your time, money, and energy carefully from the start.