Facebook marketing is attempted by many but succeeded at by relatively few.
Often its focus is misunderstood, leading to a lack of impact. A good Facebook marketing strategy should revolve around creating highly relevant, compelling content that resonates with people, encouraging them to share and feeding new leads into your sales funnel.
Running contests are a great way to get things moving and we look at a typical way of doing this below.
Online Photography Business Example
An online photography business wanting to use Facebook to promote its services is in a strong position because photos and videos are great visual media for grabbing people’s attention; both can be used to good effect on Facebook.
Assuming you already have some contacts on your business Facebook fan page, how about running a contest amongst your followers?
For a photography business it would be something like a “Cutest Baby” contest where your fans can upload images of their baby; the photos are all tagged so their friends see them and they are encouraged to vote for that photo, with the winner getting the most “Likes”. This helps to spread the photos (and your business name) virally.
The winner gets a free photo shoot. But it doesn’t stop there. This is just the beginning of creating a sales funnel through Facebook – remembering that the end goal of all marketing is to create more leads for your business.
Try running a contest as part of your Facebook marketing strategy.
Building Your Sales Funnel
With our website we might have a free report, white paper, video or other giveaway that people opt in for so that we can gather their email address and add them to our sales database for future marketing campaigns.
Monetising through Facebook works on the same principle – we need to capture details of new leads so that we can follow up and market to them.
With contests, we can follow up with all entrants by sending them a coupon for a discount for a service or a free consultation, for instance.
Generating Further Leads
In the photography business used above, perhaps the coupon gets them in for a free planning session for a photo shoot; suppose this leads to a photo shoot which we get them to announce by “checking in” on an iPad at reception – so it appears in their friends’ feeds and all their contacts know that they’re at your business doing a shoot.
When they return for the viewing and collection we can get their consent to upload the photos again with tagging – this again makes sure the pictures appear in friends’ feeds, spreading them far and wide, creating more engagement and possible new leads amongst friends; we can also create slide videos with programs like “Animoto” and then upload the video to Facebook so it’s working for us in a new format that can be shared amongst contacts too.
We can take this a step further by creating a referral scheme whereby they can take coupons for their friends and distribute them; or you can make a special offer directly to any friends that have made comments on posts.
Make sure you get testimonial videos from anyone that agrees to your coupon or offer and these can be used for further marketing purposes in the future.
You see how the marketing effort spirals? Most businesses out there can come up with a Facebook marketing strategy that uses similar principles; photos and video are especially popular for sharing and can really help to promote our business.
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