As social media and mobile become ever growing presences in our lives, it only makes sense that marketing efforts in turn begin to adopt the same trends. This ultimately means you need to be where your users are. And with user journeys spanning multiple channels and devices and alternating between the online and offline world, it’s important to make sure you’re making the most of every micro-moment that exists in that journey.
With nearly 1.8 billion people using Facebook every month and nearly 1.2 billion using it every day, Facebook has become the go-to source for engaging with users at every stage of the funnel. So how can you make use of this channel for your business? Below are 5 tips for utilizing Facebook to drive digital success for your business.
- The Pixel
First and foremost: any digital marketing plan on Facebook needs to be utilizing Facebook’s pixel. The pixel itself is a small snippet of code that exists on your website or landing pages that allows for tracking offsite user behavior, provide measuring capabilities that are paramount for driving success, and helps you build unique Custom Audiences.
- The Audiences
Marketing on Facebook is inherently different from channels like Paid Search. Instead of targeting intent-based keywords, Facebook is solely focused on audiences – on people. There are two main audience types that should be the cornerstones of any Facebook marketing plan: Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences.- Custom Audiences allow for retargeting using things like e-mails, phone numbers, past website traffic, app activity, engagement on your Facebook page or posts and any data gathered from the Facebook pixel.
- Lookalike Audiences are just that: audiences that look like a seed list you upload. For example, you can take a list of users confirmed to have completed a hard conversion and find other users who look just like them.
- The Conversions
The Facebook pixel is only the first step in understanding how your customers are engaging with your website. Next, you need to build custom conversion events to measure engagement from all stages of the funnel. Not only are these events useful for measuring success, but you can also create Custom Audiences from them and then use them as seed lists for Lookalike Audiences, which can then be used to create new prospecting opportunities.
- The Relevancy
Quality vs. quantity. It’s a saying we’re all familiar with and one that Facebook lives by. To measure ad quality and how it relates to the audience you’re serving it to, Facebook gives every ad that’s garnered 500 or more impressions a Relevancy Score on a scale of 1-10. The higher your score, the more relevant your ad is to the audience you’re targeting. And the higher your score, the cheaper your costs. Building strong Relevance Scores ensures you’re making the most of your budget and driving quality content to contextually relevant users.
- The Insights
How do you really know who you’re targeting? An individual campaign can sometimes target hundreds of thousands of people. To gain better insights into who your exact audience is, Facebook offers a handy tool called Audience Insights that gives you in-depth knowledge about your targeted audience. This includes your usual demographic info (age/gender) but also lifestyles, job titles, top pages they like, how many pages they like, how often they engage with ads, household income, whether they rent or own their home, and even their spending methods. The more you know about your audience, the more informed you can be about your marketing.
