In the era of Industry 4.0, Facebook marketing is becoming common to most businesses in the world. Whereas Facebook is the largest social media on Earth with over 2271 million active users, it’s a good place to promote your products and boost your sales. However, with recent change from the Facebook algorithm, it has reduced the amount of content from businesses on the user’s news feed. To overcome this, we present you 11 must-do Facebook marketing tips for ecommerce to boost your sales.
1. Create original, creative and funny content
When thinking about McDonald’s, we always think of their “I’m lovin’ it” slogan and reverse. If you could make yourself a catchy, attractive trademark regarding logo and slogan, it would be great for your branding effort. As a result, people would think about your company whenever seeing that content, building up the urges to buy inside their mind. Gradually, potential customers will actually make the purchase.
On another hand, creativity takes the most important roles in succeeding in Facebook marketing. By making use of creativity, you can create awesome ideas for your social media and campaigns. Nonetheless, some creative content is not necessarily relevant to your main product, as long as they can get a lot of engagements. Look at LootCrate here, made fun of MCU and LOTR fans, and also dropped an open question to create interactions:
According to Buffer, the most used reactions are Love and Haha (82% overall, excluded Like). Therefore, we know what type of content has the most interaction: Funny and inspirational content. Investing your content into those types should probably get your page go viral better.
Also, you can consider Niel Patel’s 70-20-10 theory, your content should have:
- 70% original content that you create by your idea.
- 20% content relevant to your followers’ interest.
- 10% self-promotion content.
Running some tests about this theory and see what engage the most, you can vary the portion to suit your business. In an optimized Facebook page, the page can reach exceptionally further and effective. For an example of success Facebook marketing, you can check out this Lloyd Taco Factory. By using only their own original content, they have reached 42,000 people per week, and 37% of new customers learn about Lloyd from Facebook.
2. Make human-to-human connection
First of all, you will need to get to know your audience. In order to create such a connection, you should understand deeply about them:
- Age
- Gender
- Nationality
- Interest
- Religious
- Shopping behaviors
Based on what you researched, you will have an understanding of their reactions and emotions toward content. Some audience like inspirational speech, some people love cute animal content, while other users find funny videos very interesting. With each audience, you could provide the right content to them. As a result, they will start to engage in your post and make your content go viral easier.
Also, different shopping behaviors need different approaches. The connection works best on the right target. Knowing what people want and like to purchase should take you one step ahead in ecommerce. Thus, you should define your targeted customer segment and focus on creating content for them exclusively. That could convert your audience into paid customers better.
Additionally, storytelling could drive your engagement further. In fact, stories are likely to attract people and keep them stay longer than other types of content. That’s what you need to build a human-to-human connection via Facebook marketing. Customers should feel being cared of and they hardly resist the temptation to browse your items.
For example, Star Wars fans are very keen on Star Wars stuff. Megalopolis, share the same interest with most of the fans: collectibles. They understand the importance of Star Wars merchandises toward collectors. Therefore, they hit it right in the spot: the human-to-human connection between Star Wars collectors, those collectors will surely be converted from “Awareness” to “Consideration” or “Conversion” in the conversion funnel.
3. Shift your content to videos
You might ask why the video? Because Facebook videos are dope! There are 182 million video views in total, and 47% of pages don’t upload videos. Now is the right time to direct your Facebook marketing effort to create advertising videos. Besides, if you can’t produce video content on your own, you can make use of Facebook Live. Livestream or online talk should return great engagement if you do them right.
Besides, Facebook has just released Ad Break, a new monetizing method using Video content. Ad Break will let you monetize your videos, just like YouTube. With short videos, the more people watch, the more money you earn. What if you use those short videos to advertise your own services and products? You can earn money both from Ad Break and product sales. All you need to do is crafting amazing videos and making them go viral!
Source: Locowise
There are some notes for you before working with video content. Beware of video length, as it’s optimized between 1 – 3 minutes. Facebook also enables autoplay and people are likely to watch in mute, so your videos need a subtitle. According to Locowise, people only watched a third of a video on average. Thus, make the first third awesome to keep their attention.
Wrapping up, using video content can effectively generate engagements. From there, you drive your audience to make the purchase.
4. Attractive photos? Make them more attractive
We live in a visual world. Indeed, visual content is processed 60,000 times faster than text, and an average person only reads 20% of text content on a regular website. Visual content proves exceptionally efficient against text-only content and they should be well-invested. In Facebook marketing, apart from making your photo attractive, there are some ways to take it further.
Firstly, you should use photos with eye-contact. We know it sounds creepy but it did work in drawing attention. There are 2 types of using eye-contact. One is the ordinary eye-contact, which people look right into the reader’s eye. This basically catches the eye of the visitors and make them focus on the content.
The second one shows less effective in drawing attention but win in conveying the natural feeling via visual. You should make images with people focusing on the most important part you want to promote. For example, there’s a big CTA button on your picture with people looking or pointing at it, that should surely push that button stand out from the crowd.
Moreover, photo sizing on Facebook really matters. At first, it looks like not a big deal, but do not neglect a single detail, even it’s the smallest. With the correct size, the photos can convey your total message in the most effective way. Also, it helps your content look great on both desktop and mobile.
5. Try new post types such as Stories
In Sep 2019, Facebook and Messenger Stories hits 300 million active users. This is rising incredibly fast and has become an interesting ad type for advertisers. A Story can play both as images or short videos. Thus, the growth of Stories can generate more videos, better videos, and more visual-focused content. This is one of the reasons why video content is rising as the Facebook trend of 2019.
Furthermore, the stories can deliver full-screen visual content, which is very useful. The better size ratio can let you create content more freely and people will be attracted fully by your content only. This is pretty good news for people running Facebook Stories ad. Besides, with the same video, you can use it for Instagram Stories or Messenger Stories. The numbers of mobile Facebook users is rising, and most of the ecommerce purchases come from mobile (58.4% share of ecommerce sales). Therefore, Facebook Stories is a good way to convert users via smartphones and mobile devices.
6. Bring your business to your personal Facebook
The Facebook algorithm has changed and it’s a huge struggle for ecommerce businesses. The Facebook marketing tips above could help you partially overcome it, but it’s not enough. Due to the reduction of the business’s content on news feed, you should consider it as an advantage. It’s time to get personal. If you create funny, inspirational, or cute content that could make people attracted, sharing them won’t annoy anyone. After writing a great post on your Facebook page, you can share it again on your timeline.
Additionally, Facebook is the largest social media on Earth, then your staff must be using it too! Isn’t it great to have them share your content along with you? While you and your crew all share your Facebook page’s posts, your marketing effort will extend the reach farther!
Nonetheless, it has to be “perfectly balance, as all things should be”. It’s not wise to share a lot of things about your business and make your friends flooded with them. You should consider the numbers of shared posts and make it optimal for both your business and personal life.
7. Run discounts and special offers
Everyone is familiar with the fact that discount and offer could help boost your sales. However, understanding how it works should probably improve your discount campaign’s efficiency.
There is a term explaining it: “FOMO – Fear of Missing out”. Generally, it appears whenever people encounter an ending-soon beneficial chance. It generates fear of regret, leading customers to concerns of missing satisfaction events.
FOMO relies on satisfaction events or profit investments, such as giveaways and discounts. First, you will need to set up the offer and then spread the word using professional FOMO content. The art of FOMO is to emphasize the opportunity cost. Let customers see what they’ll lose if they don’t act. The deal must be attractive enough to make visitors concern about purchasing. Furthermore, another factor can speed up FOMO is time. You can show a countdown timer to make customers feel rushed about the losing deal.
Nonetheless, don’t overuse FOMO because it exploits the negative emotion of humans. It’s not wise to use it all the time and create a bad mood for your customers.
8. Provide your customers with the right solution
People buy when something hurts or when they want to feel good. A man was thirsty, he would buy water to get out of the thirsty state. You can sell fast when you provide people with the solution they need. When people find the similarity between your product with their issue, your ads will surely hook them up for a high chance of purchase.
If you could make a human-to-human connection with your customer, you should have certain understand about your targeted audience. Therefore, make use of it to point out their problem and help them solve it. Combine with FOMO, you can properly provide customers the right motivation to buy.
This is an example of providing the right solution. Tired of waiting for your friends to come? We’ve all once been there in this longing situation, and waiting is not always so comfortable. How about grabbing a Coors Light chilling till they come? The beer can help us relax in the meantime. By giving them the similarity, the picture can draw attention from your customers and inside their heads, there’s an unspoken rule formed: Enjoy the Coors Light while waiting. That will passively increase the sales of this beer brand.
9. Be quick and fast responsive with Facebook marketing
The truth is, the world is changing every day. In order to succeed in Facebook marketing for ecommerce, we must keep up the pace to any latest trend. Those are great materials to craft your creative, unique content.
Look at how Durex did it here. They’re aware of people are likely to use emojis during flirting, especially the eggplant 🍆. Therefore, new creative content was born based on eggplant, which encourages people to use condoms.
Moreover, it’s not only being quick responsive with trends, but also to your audience. If your audience is considering about your items, they will ask questions. You must respond to their question, fast and convincing to convert them into buyers. There’s a great way to stay connected: using Quick Facebook Chat. This app will display a Facebook Messenger chatbox at a corner of your site, letting people send messages to your Facebook page directly. Just install, connect to your page and the chatbox will be good to go!
Also, Quora is where questions gather, you should pay some visit to check your business reputation there. Besides, answering questions related to your product type should be a good way to promote your items.
10. Carousel ads are awesome
Yes, yes they are. This ad type proves extremely useful to the ecommerce business. For example, Lilly Pulitzer, a women’s clothing retailer, has achieved an increasing return on ad spend by 60% and average order value by 21% over previous campaigns using carousel ads.
Carousel ads fit perfectly both on desktop and mobile. It provides multiple items for people to slide back and forth. We all know that something slidable always draws curiosity, it urges people to slide! Furthermore, carousel ads are easy to set up. You can find the full spec here by Facebook.
Carousel ads work best in directing people to a specific store or page. Make sure your headline, CTA button, and images are super impressive to lead your audience to wherever you want.
11. Community growth and word-of-mouth
Some small ecommerce businesses focus their Facebook marketing effort on their community. They do not invest much in outbound marketing or pricing competitive, but on productivity. By making their products better and better each day, their customer community will feel being well-treated and certainly have good words on your business. On Facebook, creating a group for your products is a good way to create a community.
The Facebook group is not only the place your customer can talk, review, feedback, exchange knowledge, tips, but also where you can provide support, tutorial, and guidance. If you keep providing info and knowledge about the industry/product type of your ecommerce business, the place will become a community hub for that whole industry. However, remember to put your product inside that content to make it become the best solution for customer’s issue.
Whenever people are having any matter with the product, they will always head to your group rather than anywhere else. This not only increases engagements and keeps it interactive, but also create trust and authentic about your brand. A happy community is always good for ecommerce businesses.
There are some useful groups for ecommerce sellers such as:
Beeketing ecommerce Success Community – a group for Beeketing’s customer to share their success!
Merch by Amazon – an active group for Merch by Amazon sellers and supporting group for the tool Merch Informer.
Shopify Newbies – where Shopify users gather and exchange their tools, tips, and experience
Wrap it up on Facebook Marketing tips
Facebook marketing has evolved to overcome the algorithm change in 2018. The trend in 2019 will shift its focus to Facebook video and visual content. To stand out from the crowd, both of your visual content and text must be unique and catchy. You can try optimizing your photo based on size, eye contact, and attention.
Besides, some discounts or special offers are always welcome and convert well, if you make use of FOMO well. Getting to know your audience is the key to boost your sales. Based on what you learn from them, you must provide what they need, or make them believe what you provide is what they need. The world is changing every day and you also need to be quick and fast responsive at all time. Moreover, Facebook is evolving every day. It has given us all the tools to promote eCommerce businesses and new features are coming very regularly. Hence, you can always use new things like Stories, Carousel ads or Community group to convert potential customers.
We hope our Facebook marketing tips for ecommerce will certainly boost your sales. Go ahead and try new things, but don’t forget to share your success story to us. You rock!