If you’re thinking about taking a big marketing dive into Facebook to boost traffic, leads and sales – stop using traditional thinking terms right away. They generally don’t work in social media. Instead, approach your Facebook campaign as an ongoing commitment that overtime will produce a positive ROI (if executed properly). While an occasional viral boom can happen once in a while, it’s rare like finding gold in a creek, so don’t get caught up in thinking that everything you do will be the next BIG viral thing. Here are four tips I recommend you follow for running a successful Facebook campaign:
1. Have a Plan
The same way your business should always be operating with an overall business plan that provides strategy and direction, running a Facebook campaign should also be looked at in the same sense. Dive into laying out a specific plan that’s going to help you reach your goals. Your plan should include items like how long you plan to run your campaign, how much you plan to spend and the analytics you want to measure success or failure off of.
2. Goals
A Facebook campaign can’t be treated like a one-day launch or a weekend flurry of postings. Dedicate yourself to monitoring the postings that bring out conversation and engagement. This is a great way to funnel people into the “potential buyer” cycle. Make sure that you keep track of what’s working and what’s not, so that you can properly change direction if need be. The last thing you want is to run an entire campaign without seeing much in return for your investment.
3. Authenticity
People are brought together on Facebook through engaging content (e.g. Whitepapers, EBooks, Infographics, etc.), especially when the content is authentic – sorry, just talking about how awesome your company is isn’t going to work. By understanding what your target demographic care about seeing, you’ll discover different ways in which you can lure in engagement by hitting emotions that push for curiosity or for the need to take action.
4. Offer
Whether your campaign is contest, promotion, event invitation, sweepstakes, or giveaway – you have to provide a targeted offer. Just as I mentioned above, once you understand what your target audience cares about, it should be easy to push an offer that will create buzz within you fan community. Also ensure that you get something out of the deal such as email address (best info to get!) a like and/or a share – by doing this, you open up the opportunity to remarket your future offerings to these people.
What are other factors you’ve seen work well?
