Facebook marketing – What should a company focus on in Facebook marketing?

How to make any sense of this mess?

Let’s dig deeper into the facts that are relevant to the company’s Facebook advertising, and where the different points of views are originating from.

Many of the topics in this post are also compatible with other social media platforms, such as Instagram. Instagram buys their advertising platform from the same place as Facebook does, and their algorithms are very similar. But in this text, we will be referring specifically to Facebook.

Organic or paid advertising on Facebook?

First of all, when we speak about Facebook marketing, it is good to specify, are you referring to organic Facebook marketing, or are you talking about paid advertisement.

These two perspectives support each other, but roughly you could say that nobody is making any real results by solely using the organic visibility. Facebook groups are sometimes an exception to this rule, but in general, most of the marketing that creates results in Facebook is paid advertising, which is really just content distribution.

With paid advertising, you can measure how much the euro invested in marketing will bring back in sales. In the organic side, you are in a way creating a media of your company on Facebook, and thus the results are usually seen in the long run. 99% of your focus should be kept in paid Facebook advertising, and post some content every once in a while on the actual Facebook page.

The biggest challenge of the organic side is, that you have to reverse this whole mindset in that moment when Facebook won’t be seen as a clear content distribution channel. Instead of bringing the marketing message straight from the company to the customer. Marketing should be something you do together with the community. Working together with the target audience, not at them.

This turn in mindset could be essential in the long run to ensure potent marketing. It might also be, that Facebook itself is not the best channel to apply this mentality.

The fact is however, that with well planned marketing message you can still convert potential customers into leads, an eventually into a sale, with the help of Facebook.

You don’t need to work together with the community, but you will be required to have a clear message to the potential client, and a clear path from that first advertisement, towards the final sale.

In theory, creating media out of your own company, that the potential clients actually follow and interact with, is a golden idea. But in reality, executing that idea is so challenging that, in 99% of the cases we would recommend sticking to the paid advertising.

Paid Facebook advertising – getting everything out of your target audience

Now we are getting to the point, where most of the successful Facebook marketing pays off – paid Facebook advertising.

In general, paid Facebook marketing means that you have a message, that you want to share to your target audience. Facebook on the other hand, is aiming to maximize the user experience, and the benefit of the marketer.

Each impression is being auctioned for, and how well the target audience reacts to your message, and how much you are willing to pay for that reaction, all effects in the end results.

Of course the advertising itself includes many more details to it, but the main question is how well will your message fit your target audience, and how much you are willing to pay to reach that wanted goal.

The essential part is to define who you want to reach with your post, what are these people interested in, and how to turn that interest into profit = a sale.

On this abstract level the bigger picture behind Facebook advertising can be a bit difficult to understand, so let’s get down to the details of how we exploit the paid Facebook advertising.

How does our own Facebook marketing work?

At the moment all of our results from Facebook marketing are coming out of paid advertising. Most of the effort is being pushed towards advertisement, where we use lead magnets, such as guides and online courses.

The goal of Facebook marketing is to create leads and the success of that can be seen by following how many of those leads are turned into sales.

In addition to that, we of course do advertise our blogs, our customer experiences and other content on Facebook, but for the sake of the bigger picture, these are a very small part of Facebook marketing.

If you look at the lead prices we are getting from Facebook, from our campaigns directed at Finland, the prices are between 1€-5€, depending on what kind of content and what quality lead we are looking for. None of the leads we are collecting from Facebook at the moment are fully ready, but at least corporate decision-makers out of the target audience.

Facebook marketing is also our primary channel in the international field.

Facebook is the channel that is primarily being used to get results for example in the US market. This tells a lot about Facebook as a channel, at least to the extent that it is very easy to test different messages on Facebook and to test the different markets cost-effectively.

Compared to, for example, Google Ads or Linkedin, testing on Facebook is much cheaper and with impressions and clicks being cheaper, the target audience accumulates data much faster.

If we would now jump into testing out the Google Ads in United States by using a testimonial video, we would have to spend at least a few thousand euros towards the project, before being able to say if it’s actually worth the effort or not. Sure the industry is also more challenging in USA compared to Finland, but here, even with 100€ you can see clearly, if the message you are putting out there is of interest of the target audience, or not.

One thing that we have not tried out a lot in Facebook is using Messenger Bots, I have personally heard a lot of good case studies. One thing to keep in mind though, related to this is that, there has been some tightening in the rules related to Messenger Bots.

Conclusion of Facebook marketing

You can do a lot of things with Facebook marketing, and this blog is only focuses on the most necessary things. All remarketing, how to use references, how to get the most out of your videos, and much other relevant content has been still left outside of this text.

In the future, however, we will definitely open up a lot more details about how Facebook marketing works, and how to get the most out of it. However, the details and different tricks and tactics for dropping the price of the lead, or for a quick sale are not what you should focus on in the big picture.

Focusing on the basics will take you far:

1. What are your customers interested in?
2. How and what type of content am I creating out of the subject my customers are interested in?
3. And how do I take the customer all the way through from that thought, until the closed deal?

When these basics are properly thought out, Facebook marketing is often quite easy. And if thinking about these basic things seems challenging, for comfort I can say that the basics are always the most difficult. And because of the challenges of the basics, the focus is often shifted towards the more irrelevant details.

And when all the basics are covered you are ready to start campaigning. If building a full campaign for Facebook seems still unfamiliar to you, be sure to check out our 5 examples of lead generation ads on Facebook you can rely on.