Developing a Marketing Program
As you read the next few sections, start jotting down answers to the questions we ask, and use these answers to begin crafting your own social media marketing plan. Also start writing down your Facebook goals, promotional content, and design ideas. Use these notes to develop a full-blown marketing plan.
Mapping Out Your Goals
So what are your Facebook marketing goals? Here are some examples of goals for various types of businesses:
• A business owner or president might want to make more money.
• A marketing director might want to get more brand exposure.
• A nonprofit organization might want to increase the number of volunteers and get more donations.
• An association might want to use Facebook as a networking medium for their members.
All of these are legitimate goals, and you can use Facebook to achieve them. Think of Facebook as a means to an end. It’s not just a marketing tool for promoting your brand, but a window into the wants and needs of your audience.
To begin the process of developing your Facebook marketing plan, list your immediate goals, your goals for three months from now, and your goals for a year from now. Here’s a sample list to get you thinking in the right direction:
• Immediate goals: Set up a Facebook page, launch it, and invite everyone on your email list to join you.
• Three-month goals: Acquire 250 fans, have your posts prewritten for the following month’s marketing, and launch your first advertising campaign.
• One-year goal: Have 500+ active fans who provide you with feedback on the research questions you ask each month.
Other common Facebook goals for businesses include the following:
• Generating more brand exposure
• Driving traffic to your website
• Providing customer service
• Identifying new customers
• Retaining existing customers
• Performing market research
• Selling products and services on Facebook
• Using Facebook as a communications tool
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Map out your goals before proceeding with this book. When you have completed them, prioritize them and make sure they are measurable, realistic, and can be accomplished within a specific timeline.
Choosing Which Products and Services to Feature
Identify what products and services you want to promote on Facebook. Define these products or services and identify their key attributes and benefits. If you sell hundreds of products or services, select a few of them to focus on at any given time. Think of Facebook as a homepage of a website. In effect, it’s a portal into your larger offerings. If you have too much going on up front, you’re going to confuse your users, and they might leave. Instead, feature no more than 10 products or services. In fact, the fewer products or services you feature, the better, as your page will be clearer and easier to use. If you only have one or two products or services, that’s to your advantage when marketing on Facebook.
The following figures show how businesses are using Facebook to display a limited number of products and services. Review these to see which model fits your business.
The Geneva Cleaners Facebook Fan page (see Figure 3.1) features a simple call to action. All the customer has to do is sign up for the business’s email club.
The National Wildlife Federation (NWF; see Figure 3.2) keeps it simple by dividing its Fan page into three sections. Two of the sections link to the website, where fans can learn more about the organization or purchase a product. The third option encourages users to share the Fan page with their friends. The page is simple, inspiring, and to the point.
Similarly, the American Association of Medical Assistants (AAMA) Fan page is divided into seven sections (see Figure 3.3).
The fewer areas and actions you feature on your Fan page, the easier it will be for your audience to use. AAMA and the NWF are businesses with a lot of products, yet they concentrate on just a few areas of their business to make the display more manageable for Facebook users. The Geneva Cleaners Fan page is even simpler. The business wants you to Like its page and fill out a form to receive more information. Smaller service-based businesses should take Geneva Cleaners’ lead when developing their Facebook page.
By keeping your Fan page simple, you’re making it easier to market your business on Facebook. If you sell more than 10 products or services, feature the additional products or services on your business website, not on Facebook.
Choosing Your Promotion Strategies
For any business to grow, it needs to make itself known to more people. To generate awareness, you need to run promotions. Facebook offers several promotional tools for getting your marketing message out to your current fans, friends of your fans, and people who fit the description of your target market.
Facebook offers the following promotional opportunities:
• Facebook ads: You can purchase ads that appear in the right-hand column of pages throughout Facebook. They are delivered to targeted audiences based on users’ Profiles. A Facebook ad can include an image and text, and it’s sometimes paired with news about social actions (such as Liking a page) that a user’s friends may have taken. Chapter 15 explores ads in detail.
• Sponsored stories: These are a type of Facebook ad where your friends’ and fans’ activities are turned into promotions. These fee-based stories also show up on the right column of pages on Facebook. They are more subtle than ads and potentially have greater impact. Find out more about Sponsored Stories in Chapter 15.
• Contests, sweepstakes, trivia, and coupons: Facebook doesn’t have apps for these features, but you can use third-party apps to run these sorts of promotions. See Chapter 10 for details on contests.
• Facebook Deals: Deals are based on people’s Facebook check-ins when they visit your business. You can run check-in deals across multiple store locations and create different types of deals to achieve different business objectives. Find out more about deals in Chapter 18.
• Facebook Marketplace: The Marketplace is a Facebook site dedicated to selling personal goods and services; it’s similar to a classified ad site, where you can find cars, rentals, real estate, and even fish tanks. Turn to Chapter 17 for more details about the Facebook Marketplace.
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Vary your promotions each month to get the most out of your Facebook marketing campaign. Facebook ads and contests are very effective in growing a large fan base.
All of these promotional options offer great opportunities to get more exposure to your fans. In strategizing which ones make sense for your company, refer back to your goals. The following table lists various goals and the best promotional tool for achieving that goal.
Choosing the Right Promotional Tool for Your Goals
| Goal | Promotional Tool |
| Drive targeted traffic to your Fan page | Facebook ads |
| Drive targeted traffic to your Fan page from the friends of the people who are already fans | Sponsored stories |
| Drive traffic to your Fan page and get people to tell their friends about your page | Contests, sweepstakes, trivia, and coupons |
| Drive on-foot traffic to your retail location | Facebook Deals |
| Sell personal items | Facebook Marketplace |
Users get tired of seeing the same promotions. Mix them up so that you’re not always doing the same thing over and over. In Chapter 4, we talk about how to use these promotional strategies to maximize them in your marketing campaigns.