E-commerce Strategies for Facebook
Facebook provides anyone the opportunity to communicate and connect with their friends, fans, or followers in an authentic way. The key is to build an engaged following, convert followers into customers, and finally, converting a customer into brand advocates.
People spend so much time on Facebook, because of this, advertisers and companies large and small use Facebook to connect more than ever. Fortunately for you, most of them do not do so in a manner that is interesting enough to maintain long-term relationships with their potential customer base.
Brand Loyalty is Dead
Brand loyalty is rare and people are often on the next best thing. Too many brands over promise and under deliver. The key to thriving in such a market is to provide exceptional value.
This doesn’t mean that you have to be the lowest cost, this just means that you give consumers more than what you say you will by always providing value throughout the sales cycle.
The first step is to always research your competitors.
We can dedicate short novel to competitor research and how it relates to neuromarketing and emotional spending decisions. Instead, I will just cover the basics.
The great news about this step is it is used as the first step in any marketing campaign. Research provides great insight such as:
- Inspire different ways to position your brand
- Understand competitive price strategy
- Produce insights into your potential demographic
- Discover how to integrate their process into your strategy
- Develop a value strategy that is greater than your competition
Make a list of a few of the top competitors and a few of the mid-level companies. Find out where they are in relation to the strategies below. Take notes on how well they do things, make a note on some things they do poorly.
Next find all the reviews you can about the products, services, and company. Take note of the good and bad reviews. Both provide insight into just what exactly your customer base is looking for.
Finally, apply what you have learned to the strategies below. One quick example, if you find a lot of negative reviews about shipping costs, you might want to have an ad that offers free shipping. You can just add the cost into the product or offer free shipping over a certain purchase amount.
Facebook Options For Ecommerce
Over the years Facebook has limited the organic reach of Facebook pages. This doesn’t mean you should abandon Facebook, instead, I would say focus your efforts on this channel instead of multiple social media platforms.
The key to a successful e-commerce strategy on Facebook is to post often, dedicate time into producing great content consumers want to read and share, and use all the options Facebook has in place for your business.
We can break Facebook opportunities into several categories: your timeline, the marketplace, Shop section (tab), Facebook groups, and Facebook ads.
Facebook Organic Reach (Timeline)
According to ongoing studies, Facebook pages have an average organic reach between 1%-2%. Consider if you manage a page with 10,000 fans, you could expect to have 100-200 people see your post. Over time this could increase depending on shares and such.
There are ways to increase the Facebook organic reach like the suggestions found in the post by Neil Patel. A great achievement in Facebook organic reach would be 6%.
People like a great deal but do not like to be sold. The key to organic reach is to provide content that your followers want to read and find informative enough to want to share.
Great shareable content could include an article on secondary and tertiary uses for products. Or compelling articles others have written about your products.
Quizzes and Personalization (Timeline, Groups, Ads)
We have all seen the quizzes on Facebook: “Discover Your Personality Type” or “Only a Genius Can Answer All The Questions Correctly.”
A quiz is a great way to direct traffic to your blog page where you place ads for your related products. I found an article about quizzes found here.
We have used quizzes as a way for Facebook followers to opt-in to an email automation (funnels, growth hacking, email marketing, etc.) where we provide a primary message of free information and insights. We incorporate our client’s ads or correlate a problem with solutions that our clients provide.
Video Product Reviews (Timeline, Groups, Ads)
The process we use as Digital Marketers to increase e-commerce exposure and shares is to develop product review or explainer videos. What I like about this is you do not need a production studio. All you need is a cell phone with a video camera and some products. If you want to take it up a notch you can add some lighting to enhance the view.
Videos often have a higher organic reach and CTR. In the past, we have changed an image to a video and found CTR increase from 2% – 12% with all other things remaining the same.
For this example let’s consider you are selling a widget from Company A, Company B, Company C, and Company D. Or if you have four products from four different companies.
All you need to do is talk about each product and all the benefits of using the product. We often will write a basic script, however, if you are knowledgeable enough you could just wing it. The key is to come across as personable. Use natural speech.
Once the video is complete, you can upload it to your YouTube channel and auto post this to your Facebook page and share it on your blog. Tag and contact the companies that own the products you reviewed and see if they will share your videos as well.
And don’t forget to link to the products in the description.
Facebook Marketplace (Marketplace)
The marketplace is a great place to buy or sell items to people located close to your geographic area. The marketplace uses photos of the items you post. You can search by category or even price.
If a user finds something of interest, they can either send a direct message to the seller or make an offer. Selling an item is easy even from a cell phone:
- Take a photo of your item, or add it from your camera roll
- Enter a product name, description, and price
- Confirm your location and select a category
- Post
Facebook Marketplace is a marketplace for your local community. Forbes wrote a great article on how to use the marketplace found here.
Shop Section on Facebook (Shop Section)
Facebook has an option to place a tab on your Facebook page that allows you to exhibit and sell products from your Facebook page.
Magento, Bigcommerce, Shopify, and WooCommerce all have Facebook Shop integrations. These e-commerce platforms connect directly with Facebook Shop and will sync your product catalog.
Facebook Ads
From my experience, Facebook provides the lowest cost of advertising (PPC). The only consideration is the amount of time it takes to grow your revenue.
Facebook has a great cost per acquisition and cost per click, however, due to market saturation, it’s difficult to expand your business quickly.
One of the best guides I have found on how to drive e-commerce sales using Facebook is written by Neil Patel (just follow the link). In the article, he walks through strategies such as:
- Creating Lookalike Audiences
- Telling a brand story before pushing sales
- Pushing the advertising into Instagram
- Retargeting
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