How Small Business Should Use Facebook for Marketing

As competition gets tougher, how small businesses should use Facebook for marketing demands further discussion.

Facebook still holds the top spot for social media platforms widely used by adults. A huge number of its users are using it daily which continuously opens limitless opportunities for brands and businesses to increase online visibility when and while executing strategies on Facebook marketing for local business.

Getting started with your marketing plans is often the toughest challenge, but we are here to share seven steps that will help kick start your digital marketing.

Find out how to make an easy and strategic start to get the most out of this impactful social media platform.

Clever FB Marketing Tips for Small Business

When used correctly, Facebook can be both an offensive and defensive tool in online marketing. You have to have the right set of tools and resources for your page to achieve growth and for your business to flourish.

1. Set Business Goals for Facebook

Out of the many marketing strategies available and known to man, setting the right goals for your business is always the first step.

In a survey of local business owners, SproutSocial found that:

• • 34% wanted to increase brand awareness
  • 21% wanted to increase community engagement
  • 11% wanted to increase sales and lead generation

2. Proactively Engage with Your Audience

What makes social media work? Start with the basics – social media is a place for conversation and engagement for people anywhere in the world. As a brand, be an instigator of discussions and conversations, become a community for your audience. Give them a place to interact and engage with their fellow audience and with your brand. Facebook is a great place for business-related chats or interesting general information about your industry with your customers or with a new audience.

3. Create an Elevator Pitch

Marketing can be done anywhere, anytime, and all the time. Therefore, be prepared and have a compelling elevator pitch ready.

Once there is engagement with your target audience, you have a little over a minute to make a sale. With so much competition around you, you’ll have a little over a minute to make them want your product or service. A good elevator pitch will become an offensive tool to push your marketing strategies. The ROI is potentially big when you successfully create business opportunities in these short but crucial minutes.

4. Leverage Your Community

No need to go too far when it comes to your marketing efforts. Target local markets. Check what is going on in your community. Pay attention to events that can attract locals. Organize a charity walk or a 5k fun run, sponsor a local school’s basketball team, or hand-out personalized bookmarks and donate them in public libraries. Do a little research about your prospects, what interests them, how they spend their free time, and what activities they normally will enjoy.

5. Collaborate with Other Business

How does collaborating with other local businesses sound? The marketing idea here is to put together a group of non-competitive local businesses in your area to help each other by cross-promoting each other’s business. You can go with an old school promotion like giving coupons or fliers. Or maybe cross-linking of website links, tie-up bundle promotion of a service or product, or sharing of social media posts. By collaborating with other locals, you are helping local businesses grow with you and at the same time reaching out to new customer base and new audience groups.

6. Networking

Networking works. What’s the best way to grow your business other than going out to meet new people, create new connections and make engagements, and extend your circle of friends and acquaintances? The hard part of networking is it requires time and total commitment. It won’t give you instantaneous results, you’ll have to continuously build your network of people and turn them into business assets.

7. Make Some Noise

Have you heard of Help a Reporter Out? If you haven’t yet then visit the site and subscribe to it. You can respond to reporters’ inquiries when they look for new story ideas and resources. With luck and perseverance, you’ll find small media firms that offer a good number of opportunities or major media outlets that can open wider doors for your business. By having access to these media outlets, you may never have to hire professionals to market for you.

8. Ask for Referrals

A lot of people are willing to provide a referral to a business, especially when they are satisfied with your service or product. But only a few of them will proactively do a referral for a business on their own. Referrals are another way to reach out to new customers so if you aren’t using this strategy to gain more customers, then you might be missing out on a lot out of a simple but effective marketing strategy.

9. Always Build Relationships

Starting from scratch always requires more time and effort. The same goes for keeping existing customers. Investing in acquiring new customers is more costly than keeping loyal customers. Therefore, strengthen your relationship with existing customers, keep them loyal to your brand. You can do this by staying in touch with them through email marketing. Ask for your customers’ email address when they visit your store or website. Make sure that your email communications remain informative, helpful, interesting, and professional. Give them something to look forward to.

10. Give Freebies

If a person is satisfied with his purchase, he’ll definitely want to buy again from the same store or brand. This gives brands a better opportunity to retain customers. And make sure that customers remain happy, don’t be afraid to give away freebies or free samples. People are more likely to trust a brand when their first experience exceeds expectations.

What Happens When You Correctly Use Facebook Marketing for Your Local Business?

The ultimate goal is to reach more people, increase audience reach and following, and eventually growth in sales. But by correctly using Facebook marketing for your local business, you’ll be able to:

Increase the quality of sales. Improved sales quality often starts with better targeting plans. A well-planned Facebook marketing effort will give you a better chance of reaching your target audience. Don’t stray from what you know. Focus on your resources and practices that have worked before and use the Facebook platform to maximize your reach.

Add more value to your brand. Treat Facebook as your go-to source of information so it’s easier for your audience to stay informed about your brand and your industry in general and easily access the information they may need at any day.

Know the mechanics of your industry. Ever wonder why your competitors are always one step ahead? That’s probably because they are maximizing the resources provided by social media monitoring tools. With these tools, you can track, monitor, listen, understand, and even report social conversations happening around you and your business, your competitors, or the industry as a whole. Always listen to what is happening around you before speaking up as a brand.

Shoot for smarter growth. Put a limit to your expenditures and take every opportunity to increase acquisitions – a formula that works for every successful business. Social media platforms, especially Facebook, can help you in each of these areas. Your ad spending, social media selling, audience reach, or improving targeting, the right Facebook marketing strategy will lead you to your business goals.

This post on how to use Facebook business page offers fantastic tips. Check it out!

Learn more about the importance of social media on your business with this checklist. Or if you want more traffic from social media and Google, look into our Social Media course.

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