Facebook Marketing Plan

As with any business endeavor you need a plan and especially for your marketing strategy since you have so many options open to you that you would be hard pressed to keep track of everything without a plan to make sure you are heading in the right direction.

The Target Market

As already mentioned, the Facebook demographic is extremely diverse and you have the added advantage of being able to use people’s profiles to further narrow your target market down. For example, if you want to target women aged 24 – 35 who live in the Midwest and love to crochet, Facebook makes it extremely easy to do. The advantage? You can be certain you aren’t wasting resources, whether money or time, on reaching a wide audience of which only a small percentage is actually your target market, as was often the case with traditional marketing channels.

Remember that the key to building a successful business is to have an excellent understanding of your target market. The more you know about them, the easier it will be to build a relationship with them.

Consumer behavior, in simple terms, is driven mainly by two desires, the first is to avoid pain and the second is to gain pleasure. However, pain avoidance carries much more weight. Therefore, the more you know of your audience and what pains them, the more you will be able to meet their needs by providing a solution to their pain. In fact, if you do your market research properly, you will be able to create a product that sells itself. This is where the power of knowing your target market truly lies.

What better way to build a relationship with your target market than through a social media platform that allows for so much interaction, like Facebook?

There are a few tools you can use to locate your target market. One of these is the Facebook Insight tool which provides information on the people visiting your page, including information such as their age and sex.

Establishing Your Marketing Goals

Facebook is an essential marketing tool that you need to integrate into your overall marketing strategy for the simple reason that you can glean a lot of information from your market. From product creation to feedback on your service, Facebook can be the ultimate market research tool, and you can achieve all this without paying a penny.

In essence, the core goal of any marketing campaign is to increase sales. However, there are other aspects to increasing your sales which, initially, may not appear to be directly linked to increasing your profitability. But they are, and can boost your sales more effectively than even a Super Bowl advertising campaign.

These are building a brand, forming a community of prospects who are raving fans, providing customer service and receiving feedback on your business. These four aspects are vital to building a sustainable business model that will generate an income for you for many years.

The Power of Branding

A brand is basically the image of your business. It’s what sets you apart from your competition in the mind of your target market. Thus, the key to branding is finding your USP (unique sales position/proposition), which you can actually do with the help of existing customers. Simply conduct a survey and ask why people are buying your product or using your service and not the competition’s.

If you do not yet have a product and are just starting your business, then you should analyze your competition and identify what their USP is. This will give you some idea of what you can do to add extra value and find your USP. Remember never to use price as a USP as this can backfire.