Facebook is huge. Its reach and influence among audiences across demographics is incomparable. Out of 2.80 billion monthly active users, 1.84 billion of them visit Facebook every single day.
Therefore, needless to say, Facebook offers a massive opportunity for eCommerce marketers to engage their target audience, influence their decision making, and drive sales. But, you are probably well aware of that. This is why, it comes as no surprise that 86% of marketers in the US already leverage Facebook for advertising, and 78% of consumers say that they have discovered products via Facebook.
So, how do you stand out and drive sales for your store?
How do you cut through the clutter and ensure that you reach the right customer at the right time and urge them to convert?
We’ve got you covered!
In this post, we discuss a few high-converting strategies to make sure you get a bang for your buck when it comes to Facebook marketing and advertising.
Creating a Facebook business page is easy. However, building an engaging one that resonates with your target audience can be quite challenging. Make sure you create and follow an actionable Facebook marketing strategy that is perfectly aligned with your goals. Apart from following hygiene tactics like posting regularly, experimenting with various content formats, and inviting user generated content, spend enough time going through your analytics to understand how your audience and followers are responding to your efforts.
Try to slice and dice your audience segment and then create tailored content for Facebook that aligns with your potential customers’ aspirations, motivations, and interests and engages them. Also, whether it comes to private messages or comments, try to be as responsive as possible so your followers feel heard. Try to stay as neutral and positive as possible in your communication via public comments so as to keep away from any negative sentiments.
Make sure your tonality and voice on Facebook strongly align with your brand tonality so that your brand recall is always high among users. Most importantly, keep revisiting and revising your strategy as times change and your audience evolves as what works today might not necessarily work tomorrow.
Omnichannel customer service is all the rage today as customers expect to be able to reach out to your support team via multiple channels. One such popular channel that you need to optimize for is Facebook Messenger. Since your followers anyway spend a lot of time browsing Facebook, you must invite them to share their queries or questions with your team over Messenger. You never know, you might be able to turn a query into a sale via a short conversation over Messenger.
Also, while chatbots are effective in responding ASAP, you also need to add the human touch, meaning customers should also be able to connect with your support agent if they wish to.
TextChat is a robust eCommerce live chat tool that you can integrate with Facebook Messenger and have your support agents resolve customer queries in real time. Upon using TextChat, every time a user pings you over Messenger, your support team receives an SMS notification with a link to join the chat.
And, whichever agent is available to take the conversation ahead can jump right into the conversation from their phone itself, even if they are on the go. This way, you never miss out on any customer query sent over Messenger, greatly reduce your turnaround time, and nudge more and more users to make a purchase in real time.
Here’s an example of the same:
To sell more to your Facebook followers, you needn’t necessarily drive all the traffic from the platform to your online store. Now, Facebook even allows you to set up a Facebook store using your Facebook business page, where visitors can directly view and check out products. This way, you get to convert shoppers then and there without redirecting them to another site or app. Another benefit of doing so is that you can use the same Facebook shop to sell on Instagram as well, thereby leveraging the combined reach of both platforms.
Here’s what a typical Facebook store looks like:
Single post ads are a thing of the past. Carousels are the future. Carousel ads are extremely robust as they allow you to showcase a series of products, a single product in use in multiple ways, and/or an entire process to use a product. Each of the images can have a different CTA or even the same one.
When a Facebook user sees such an ad, their immediate reflex is to swipe to see the rest of the images in the carousel. Therefore, such rich, flexible, and dynamic carousel ads are far more effective in nudging users to shop.
Let’s take a look at a few examples of carousel Facebook ads:
A carousel ad with multiple products but the same CTA
A carousel ad featuring a single product across images
A carousel ad with multiple products and multiple CTAs
If you have managed to create an extensive community of followers on Facebook, it's time you leveraged that. Make your followers feel that they are a part of an exclusive group by offering them special deals upon engaging with your brand on Facebook.
You could offer exclusive discount codes for liking your page, commenting on your posts, tagging friends, and even sharing them. You get to increase the reach and engagement of your page significantly while offering exclusive privileges to your Facebook followers.
Posting regularly to drive organic traffic from Facebook isn’t enough. To make sure that your brand reaches users that might be interested in buying from you, you need to invest in Facebook ads. Ads are extremely versatile, highly targeted, and greatly influential in driving footfall to your relevant landing pages. Compelling ads comprise an attractive visual, irresistible copy, and a clear and crisp CTA that invites users to get clicking.
Remember to target your ads smartly so as to maximize reach among your potential buyers. Also, Facebook ads can also be used for remarketing to visitors who browsed your store, maybe added a product to their cart, but ended up abandoning it. Facebook ads are a great way to remind them of the products that are waiting in their carts.
Apart from Facebook ads, it also makes sense to spend a part of your Facebook marketing budget on sponsoring your important posts to maximize their reach. You not only get to reach a far wider audience pool, but also get to granularly target them so that they are shown to followers for whom the posts are most relevant. Unlike Facebook ads, these posts look just like regular posts, except for a small tag that says “sponsored”.
Contests and giveaways are a great way to engage your followers and draw attention towards your brand. Not just that, you also get to leverage user generated content by hosting contests on Facebook. Since your followers are likely to be interested in your products, they would be more than happy to participate to win free goodies.
Some interesting ideas around giveaways and contests that you could try out are:
- Inviting followers to share a post or story around them using your product and tagging your page as well as their friends. Shortlisted entries can be shared on the official channel from which followers can vote to choose the ultimate winner
- Inviting followers to share why they love the particular product in the comments section by tagging 3-5 friends. Winners can be chosen basis the creativity and authenticity of answers
- Conducting a quiz around your brand or products wherein followers are required to submit the correct answer in the comments section. The first ones to do so win exclusive merchandise
- Inviting followers to complete a series of steps in order to win store credits or exclusive discount coupons, including following your Facebook page, tagging a required number of friends, sharing their fondest memory of buying from your store, and so on
Contests make your followers realize that you care about your customers and that your brand is completely customer centric. Moreover, seeing so many users share praises about a product and fight hard to win it automatically urges your new followers to try out your offerings.
Here’s a look at some interesting examples of contests and giveaways on Facebook:
Not every brand in your category is your competitor. In fact, there are brands whose target audience would overlap with yours, but not in a competitive way. Identify such brands and offer to cross promote each others’ products so that you can win over one another’s followers and the partnership is beneficial for both.
For example, if you sell artisanal coffee on your online store, look for brands that would have a similar target audience. You could partner with a gourmet food eCommerce company that specializes in low cal snacks. It’s obvious that both your brands would have a similar target audience. So, come up with interesting ways to promote each others’ products to introduce your brand to their followers. You could host a combined giveaway or contest wherein the winner takes home an exclusive hamper consisting of both your products. Such strategies allow users to open themselves up to similar brands that they automatically find interesting.
Let’s take a look at an example of the same:
Building a Facebook community allows you to have a forum to regularly interact and engage your like-minded followers and customers. Depending on your vertical, you could either create a private or public group, or even join a pre-existing one.
But, before you do any of that, make sure you have a solid content strategy in place for what you are going to be posting on it. Make sure that the content is not centered around your business, but the needs, motivation, interests, aspirations, and challenges of the members of your community.
Try to create a platform where people can freely share their thoughts, promote their expertise, ask questions, and get their queries and apprehensions. Later, you can try and position your content as the ideal solution to the problems that the group collectively faces. This way, you can build trust and credibility among that community who will slowly begin to realize the potential in your offerings.
Facebook lives are another way to engage with your always-on followers who love interacting with your brand and want to stay updated with what you are up to. You can use Facebook lives to conduct AMA sessions with experts that answer your followers’ questions while giving an in-depth analysis of your products.
You can even live stream events using Facebook live so your followers get to travel to various prestigious events with you. Very popular among young audiences today, Facebook live is a huge opportunity for generating interactive content on the platform and winning over your audience.
Here’s an excellent example of the same from Sephora:
Well, if statistics are to be believed, being an active brand on Facebook still offers a number of benefits. Be it in terms of the ability to reach a wide audience or simply tapping into the platform’s native features!
As the eCommerce industry grows, being present where your audience is, is of utmost importance.
Don’t lose that chance, especially when it’s about Facebook Messenger!
