The most important goal of all marketing is to drive more value to the business than is spent to execute each campaign on a particular channel.
In other words, it’s a marketer’s job to make their efforts as profitable as often as possible. People often discuss the use of Facebook for brands with engagement, likes, shares, virality and more, which are all excellent metrics to help determine the impact the platform is having on your business. However, focusing on how these efforts can help monetize your marketing should be a top priority.
67% of U.S. Internet users are active on Facebook, which represents a small part of the 1 billion users on the platform. The impact your business can hope to make on Facebook is powerful; it just depends on your unique approach. It’s time to create a compelling strategy for monetizing your audience on Facebook. Here are some suggestions on how to get started by opening up some potential revenue channels.
Retargeting on Facebook from Your Web Visitors and CRM
One surefire way to close the loop of interactions with your brand on Facebook and your website is by employing the use of paid advertising. By targeting custom audiences of your choosing, your business is able to target customers that have previously visited your website. Facebook advertising allows you to target these interested visitors in the newsfeed and right side column to incite them to come back to your website to continue shopping or performing another action like downloading a resource.
This approach is similar to the use of display advertising, except your ads that are retargeting recent visitors will show up on Facebook as opposed to other relevant websites a person visits. The main difference is ads on Facebook tend to be more social by nature since there’s more room to be creative, conversational and immersive with your content, especially since Facebook users are much more engaged in content on Facebook as opposed to a banner advertisement seen on a blog.
The Facebook platform allows for real-time bidding that manually adjusts the targeting to match the habits that a user had on your website, allowing your campaigns to remain cost efficient and have a strong return on investment since they are targeted to the right users with relevant messaging.
Also look to bring the data from your CRM into Facebook using Facebook Ad Exchange to start creating an affinity audience, which is basically creating an audience that is similar to your existing customers but hasn’t yet purchased anything from your company. This can be setup through the Facebook Power Editor and will help your team build out a model based on the lifetime-value (LTV) of these potential customers as opposed to solely measuring efforts on a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) basis like you would on other marketing channels. According to All Facebook, the ad’s format, location, and audience on Facebook allows for a more engaging experience from users than traditional forms of retargeting. Businesses will typically see a 21x higher CTR (click through-rate) over web retargeting and a 45% CPA as compared to a typical 77% CPA on web retargeting.
With Facebook continuing to streamline its ad units, now is as good as time as ever to begin optimizing your retargeting campaigns on the platform by offering unique ads to certain segments of your audience, sharing exclusive offers on Facebook to returning visitors and customers and look to drive further visibility to your brand across the platform. Facebook drives the most ROI for businesses today as compared to other social platforms due to its extensive user base that covers many demographics, ability to target to users in depth based on their various interests, and a business’s ability to get real time feedback on their advertising from fans and non-fans alike.
Use Facebook to Build Your E-Mail List
The customers and potential customers on your e-mail list are often the most beneficial to engage and convert since they are subscribed to your messaging for the long run. Customer’s that become long-term purchasers are the most valuable of all types of online buyers and they most often result from your e-mail list. According to Convince and Convert, 44% of e-mail recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional e-mail. Therefore, it’s important to use Facebook to further fuel the growth of your e-mail list and the revenue it helps to generate from this database of clients.
There are a few tactics to build your e-mail list from Facebook, one of which is using paid advertising as we just discussed in the section above. Retarget existing customers and visitors, then look to offer an exclusive incentive to these users to encourage them to sign up to your e-mail list. This could be anything from 10% off to a buy one get one free coupon redeemed once they subscribe to your list.
One of the most effective approaches to building a profitable e-mail list with Facebook is holding giveaways, competitions, and sweepstakes. Creating an exciting, interactive, and participatory experience on your Facebook page, that could potentially synch with other social channels, to help encourage users to sign up with their e,mail and other personal information for a chance to win a prize, to receive a discount, earn a product sample, make their voice heard, and more can help quickly grow your e-mail list.
These promotions can be held within a Facebook app or as another option that was only allowed by Facebook’s terms of service until recently, on your Facebook page’s timeline. Contests held on your business’s Facebook timeline should aim to give some privacy to participants if the barrier to entry is supplying their e-mail, therefore be sure to instruct users to message your Facebook page privately when entering your promotion. As a point of reference, here are 30 more ideas for Facebook timeline contests.
Most businesses use Facebook apps from the plethora of providers to host their Facebook promotions to gain e-mails, try the following providers for both DIY and enterprise software:
Options for Small to Medium Size Business
Options for Enterprise Businesses
Once you’ve either developed an app internally, with the help of an agency or using one of the above app providers, the finished app is where your promotion lives on your Facebook page. Incorporate engaging visuals, strong copy throughout the app landing page, offer an enticing prize, and supply an easy to fill out sign-up form to properly capture these e-mails. Once you’ve setup a Facebook contest, it is important to continue to post and share that the contest is live on Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, and your other marketing channels to help drive Facebook users to the landing page for the app. For some inspiration of past successful Facebook campaigns that increased e-mail sign ups, here are some examples from small and big businesses alike.
Social Customer Service Helps Raise the AOV (Average Order Value)
As per usual, put your customers first. This is especially important on Facebook when you’re looking to drive more revenue. According to NM Incite’s State of Social Customer Service Report, 71% of those who experience positive social care are likely to recommend that brand to others. Recommendations and word of mouth marketing is compelling for your business’s future growth but is hard to quantify and prove that it is stemming from Facebook.
Although recommendations aren’t easily attributable to a change in revenue, an increase focused for midsize to large businesses in customer service on Facebook and other social channels can be associated with an increase in the average order value amongst customer purchases. Simply monitor the average order value before and during the use of extensive of customer service on Facebook to notice an increase. According to Social Media Today, when companies engage and respond to customer service requests over social media, those customers end up spending 20% to 40% more with the company.
Extensive customer service on Facebook to increase the AOV involves monitoring your Facebook pages for feedback from your customers in a timely manner, with a positive attitude, offering value, being helpful, taking the conversation offline when it requires further support and offering support however it is needed. This is conducted on your business’s Facebook page, specifically on your wall when Facebook users leave a message, on your content with Facebook users leave a comment and in the inbox where Facebook users can send you private messages.
A comprehensive approach to customer service looks different for each type of business, but overall it’s important to communicate with customers like a sympathetic person to increase their trust, familiarity, and relationship with your company. As the perceptions of your business continue to improve through world-class customer service, so can the buying habits of your current and future customers.
Provide Value, Provide Value, Provide Value, and Then Sell
Social media will never be the main driver of revenue to your website or your brick and mortar store when approached as simply as a means to generate traffic from Facebook’s user base to your business. The way Facebook impacts your company and becomes a substantial means of bringing revenue is by consistently adding value to your audience on the network.
The content you’re continually publishing on Facebook should not be promotional, a sale or product driven a majority of the time. Your company should publish valuable content that resonates with your audience, teaches them something, causes an emotional response or a piece of content that is aligned with their interests. Once you’ve consistently publish quality content that isn’t sales driven, you can then occasionally publish sales driven content to incite people to purchase your products or services since they already trust your expertise in your industry.
By building a long-term relationship with your audience as a company they trust, respect and admire, the attempt to sell them on your offerings will more likely be effective. For example, providing a couple of posts about a free eBook, facts about the industry and a how to video on your Facebook page over a two week period, followed by a post to buy your educational software is the right way to balance your approach to the social network and make revenue off of the relationships you’ve built.
This approach can help build long last relationships with influencers and advocates that support, share, review, defend, and love your brand. These social media users can help grow your community on your Facebook page to ensure that every time you’re selling your offerings; your company makes the most of those moments of social commerce.
There are many examples of brands on Facebook that mainly drive value to their audience and an occasional sell, here are four of the top pages that utilize the value-based approach to Facebook:
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Red Bull – The Red Bull page very rarely discusses the energy drink, instead it focuses on the extreme sports and other varied interests of its demographic by bringing entertaining content.
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Burt’s Bees – The Burt’s page shares blog posts, product information, and on brand promotions with its audience to engage them with the company to build a long-term dialogue with their content.
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Old Spice – The Old Spice page uses humor to continually engage its fans and non-fans to keep communication on 24/7 without having to solely rely on conversation about its product offerings.
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Red Mango – The Red Mango yogurt brand’s Facebook page shares enticing photos of yogurt and its customers enjoying these treats. Although they are mainly sharing product photos, they are never using a hard sell to drive foot traffic to their stores because their ongoing dialogue does it for them on their page.
What are you thoughts? Have you been able to monetize your Facebook marketing efforts? What kind of ROI have you achieved on the social network? Please share your experience in the thoughts below.
Editor’s note: This story originally appeared on SumAll’s blog.