Facebook is uniting efforts with several partners, including email marketing platform Mailchimp, to help small and medium businesses take advantage of their digital potential. On June 4th, the Boost Your Business with Facebook half-day conference stopped in San Diego. And of course Mindgruve had to be there!
Expert panelists, guests, partners and the Facebook team shared their experience and best practices for Facebook and email. Here are some takeaways which we believe can be applied not only to SMBs, but also to nation-wide brands when developing their social and email marketing strategies.
Facebook Marketing Best Practices
- 3 Steps of a Successful Campaign:
- Define your objectives
- Define your audience
- Measure results and repeat
- Tell an Authentic Story: Social media is a way to have a more “personal” connection with customers. Authenticity goes a long way in creating lasting connections between brands and their consumers.
- Reach the Right People: Segmenting your audience by interests, locations or age can help you reach out to people that are interested in your product or service. Think in terms of quality rather than quantity.
- Develop your Buyer Persona: Identify in detail the characteristics of your ideal customer. This will help you find new quality followers on social media and potential future clients.
- Understand the Power of Advanced Advertising Tools: Create lookalike audiences, custom audiences and upload your email list. All these tools will help you reach the people that really matter to you.
- Boost your Facebook Posts: Your organic efforts will help you identify your best performing posts. Then you can give them a boost to reach more users.
- Measure Results: Understanding what your users like the most in your ads will allow you to maintain the connections (and transactions!).
- Content, Content and more Content: Create, share, curate and repurpose your content. But more importantly, always make sure anything you share is quality and up to your brand’s standards. Nowadays, users like to educate themselves and they are consuming more content than ever before. You, as an expert in your niche, are here to help them learn more and engage with your brand.
- Follow the 80/20 Rule: You should share a mix of approximately 80% educational and engaging posts alongside 20% promotional posts. This breakout doesn’t necessary apply to every case, but it’s important that education and engagement is more prominent than the promotional posts.
- Use High Quality Images: Powerful and high quality visuals are an important tool in your branding arsenal. Every post should come with a compelling visual that will help your brand and content stand out.
- Use Calls To Action: Help your users get to where they want and make taking action easy and fast.
- Use A/B testing: Try different images, titles, posting times and audiences to understand what works best for you, your users and potential clients. Try to make only one change at a time so you can evaluate results accurately.
Email Marketing Best Practices
- Define Goals for your Email Campaigns: Some common goals include lead acquisition, awareness, sales, building loyalty, product announcement, events and company updates.
- Be consistent: Whether you choose to send daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly emails, stick to it. Users like consistency.
- Subject Line Best Practices:
- Your subject line should let people know immediately what is inside the email.
- Avoid repeating subject lines in different emails.
- Try to not go over 50 characters.
- Avoid ALL CAPS or excessive exclamation marks!!!!!!!!!
- And most importantly, test your subject lines.
- Email Content Best Practices:
- Focus your message and be concise.
- Consider your reader’s frame of mind.
- Read every email out loud before you send it.
- Adapt your tone based on the message and your goals.
- Measure and Analyze: We can’t say it enough, the only way to really know if your email campaigns are successful is to track performance and measure results.
This was an information-packed seminar with lots of great actionable tips. If you are interested in attending Boost Your Business with Facebook, check out their event calendar at https://boostyourbusiness.eventfarm.com/
