Small enterprise marketing is a cutthroat arena, particularly for small brands competing at the local level. This gets tougher as those companies go omnichannel and have to contend in digital space with bigger dominant brands. It seems difficult to succeed without a big budget but you don’t need a massive Facebook marketing budget to make waves.
Facebook had 2.23 billion active monthly users as from the second quarter of 2018. It is by far the largest social network in the world, connecting people. Also if you just represent your small business with a local or national market, Facebook is a strong platform for targeting a much wider audience to gain market share (and customers) from your rivals.
- Post with a Purpose
You can’t just post anything you’d like to post and hope to gain traction. Every post you post should have a purpose beyond noise filling out the void. Be mindful of what you are posting and when. Determine what you would like to post, and why you post it. Think of the move that someone needs to take when you write. Using the insights into Facebook to look at old topics and posts and see what’s the most popular. Also, search the competitor pages to see what kinds of content and subjects the followers received the most exposure from.
2. Optimize your Facebook Page
It doesn’t take long to populate your Facebook page with company information. Consumers still use Google to search for local businesses, but more consumers turn to Facebook to scan for products and locate local businesses. If they are already on their phone in the app, they will frequently check into a business to look at reviews and recommendations, look up information on their addresses, find a phone number, etc. Once they can click through to your website on your page or click to call the number that you have listed and Facebook commerce Manager can help init.
3. Use Facebook’s Story Feature
The story feature of Facebook is a perfect way to get easy-to-digest content across from your audience. It’s a perfect way to highlight the small business history, too. Stories are a more casual way to reach your audience and it’s a form of Facebook marketing that just costs you a little time behind the lens. News doesn’t need to be specific to stories. They can be anything with a question or poll, from an engaging question to a short video. Use everything that ramps up engagement.
4. Get a Better Cover
A generic cover at the top of your page will fill up space, but Facebook gives you other options. Post a video cover instead of using a basic logo or an image of your company. String together a series of short clips from recent events, or videos taken from your business, interactions with customers, happy employees, etc. Upload the video as the cover of your page to showcase your brand and the small business culture. For prospective customers, that is far more attractive than a static image.
5. Manage Your Time with Planned Content
Avoid posting on Facebook without a calendar of content unless you switch to a trending subject. A calendar is the most efficient way to get content live without the social channel wasting so much time. You can preplan what you will post and when with a content calendar, then preload that content into a tool such as Buffer. A scheduling tool can upload your content automatically, based on your timetable. The only time you need to jump into Facebook is to monitor and respond occasionally to comments from the followers.
6. Include Customer Service in Your Facebook Marketing Strategy
A stunning 82 percent of consumers expect great customer service from brands on Facebook, according to a study by Accent Marketing. Customer delight and stellar customer service are a smart way to stand apart from competitors in your industry. Use Facebook as a gateway to customer support offers you the quickest response time. It’s a huge signal of trust to be able to reach a brand when there’s a problem and people are more likely to choose you when they know you’ll respond. You can see that if there is a question the customer service is on the spot.
7. Post Visual Content
Live video is great, but your other scheduled posts, from images to video, should include even more visual content. Not just posting links and posts based on text. Visual content is a requirement for a positive web presence according to HubSpot. This is particularly true as visual content sees 40x more interaction than any other form of content, and is much more likely to be shared.
8. Measure Your Success
Regardless of your Facebook marketing strategy, make sure that you calculate the effectiveness of your efforts they might result in evergreen marketing. Taking time every week to study your thoughts on Facebook. Check post and content performance to continuously adjust your strategy to determine which actions — like the ones listed above — are most effective in bringing you new customers and improving your Facebook engagement.
