14 Dec How to Drive Business with Your Facebook Strategy
When it comes to driving business value through social media, Facebook should have a spot reserved in your strategy. The social networking goliath has nearly 1.5 billion daily active users and averages over $98 in ad revenue per user – nearly twice as much as any other platform. To ensure your team is extracting maximum Facebook business value for your company, crosscheck the following with your current strategy.
Align Your Metrics with Business Goals
First, make sure you are tracking website conversions from social media. To do this, implement the Facebook pixel on your website and manage website events in Facebook Events Manager. This will allow you to track if people are taking actions on your website after being exposed to one of your brand’s Facebook ads. From there, you can create custom or lookalike audiences for strategic targeting and optimize campaign delivery to people most likely to convert on your website.
If your business has brick-and-mortar locations, you’ll also want to track offline conversions to better understand which offline events – such as in-store purchases – happened as a result of someone being exposed to your Facebook ads. By attributing offline event date from your customer system to people who saw and clicked on your Facebook ads, you can better understand the effectiveness of your ad campaigns and return on your ad spend. To get started tracking offline conversions, you can upload your offline event data in Events Manager or through the Facebook API.
Optimize Your Current Strategy
Once you ensure you’re reporting on the right metrics, it’s essential to review and optimize your Facebook strategy. This can put you on the right path to achieving higher campaign ROIs, lower advertising costs, and increased conversions. In this process, there are a few key business questions whose answers will help determine which optimizations you should focus on.
First, look at your reports to see which ad execution drives the best cost per conversion (CPC). To do this, you can self-create A/B tests to learn which strategy is most efficient for your brand. To get started, identify a test variable to analyze between two ads; this could be ad creative, audience, placement, or delivery optimization. Facebook even offers split testing to simplify this process for marketers. From there, you can track which ad performs best and use that data to inform future ad execution.
If you are running a larger campaign and want to understand which strategy drives the most efficient incremental brand outcomes, you can work with your Facebook account representative to set up a brand lift study. In this process, you’ll set up a multi-cell study with a test and control group in each cell to understand how your campaign resonates with your audience throughout your sales funnel. You can measure ad recall, brand awareness, consideration, and purchase intent. While this can be beneficial for benchmarking overall brand performance within your vertical, it’s important to note that there are specific requirements in place that must be met in order to qualify for a brand lift study. Again, you’ll need to work with a Facebook representative to get started with this process.
Continuously Test and Learn
The social media landscape is constantly changing. It may sound like a broken record when we say this, but it continues to hold true. Because of the perpetual shifts in algorithms, new features, and dynamic audience behavior, social media marketers must remain nimble and continuously evaluate their strategies. The tactics outlined above are a great starting point to driving business value on Facebook, but it’s the follow-up to those steps that will ensure your strategy remains fresh and relevant. And if you need strategic guidance, we’re here to help.
