Benefits of Facebook Marketing

The number of Facebook users are growing exponentially. This means the amount of people you can reach through Facebook becomes almost limitless. Here are some of the reasons why Facebook Marketing is the best way to improve your digital marketing:

  1. It is cost-effective and boasts faster return on investment. Facebook marketing is a very accessible entry point for start-ups. Just by creating a public page for your brand, you can jumpstart your promotions and publicity schemes for free. The fees only occur when you start signing up for sponsored ads, which depend on the length of the exposure and type of ad you want to acquire.

  2. The good thing about paid ads is that the results can be observed right away through specific metrics like reach, number of people who viewed and more importantly, the increase in your site traffic. You can filter the people according to demographics, to aim at your specific target market. The good thing about social media is that you have the information about the users, ready at hand. This is ideal for local marketing, especially when you need to target a specific age range and geographical location. For sponsored ads, the link is designed to appear to people who liked similar or related pages.

  3. You can easily see how people respond to your posts. With every post you create, viewers can send their insights and suggestions through the comment section. Whether it’s a constructive criticism, a positive review or even a rant, Facebook allows you to hear out your customer’s demands and needs, so you can have more room for improvement. It can be a good threshold to getting “viral”. If there’s something very special about social media, it’s the fast paced cycle of fads and trends.

  4. Any video or photo posted online can have a good chance to circulate around the net. Facebook is very flexible when it comes to reaching out your audience. It can offer sponsored ads, or ads through recommendation. It can promote any form including events, offers, pages or external links. It can also be designed to fit mobile browsers, especially if you’re promoting a mobile app.

  5. If you want a platform where you can freely check your immediate competitors, Facebook is the best way to do it. Through the ‘Pages to Watch’ feature, the site allows you to see the trend behind a certain page’s growth and posts. This might not be fully valuable, but it can help you set a benchmark on how to assess your brand’s success in marketing.

  • Facebook can be an interactive platform for your marketing programs. You can ask your followers to answer a quick poll, to fill up a sign up sheet, or even for promos. Facebook can even support a third party website embedded into your public page.

  1. It will improve your SEO ranking. When your page is a popular link on social media and your posts are frequently being shared by your followers, search engine recognize your site better. This is why client engagement and link sharing in social media is very powerful.

Facebook Marketing for Beginners

Facebook is probably one of the biggest innovations in the web over the past decade. It is indeed the largest social media site with over a billion users all around the globe. With a very large number of users who log in on a daily basis, most brands take advantage of this site to expose and market their brands.

The most significant part of Facebook marketing is the accessibility and easy access to information. You can search for your specific target market just by filtering the people by demographics, interests and even by exact geographical location. This becomes an opportunity for start-up businesses and budding entrepreneurs to openly promote their products and services

As a brand and a marketer, here are some important tips for beginners on how to utilize Facebook for your business:

Kinds of Facebook Ads

Coming from a public page that can be created for free, you can purchase the paid ads offers from Facebook. There are many kinds of paid ads. First, you can build one that directs to your public page, or your actual site. You can even make ads to publicize your events.

These ads on Facebook can be bought through an auction. The brands are required to pay for every click, action and impression. There are a wide number of formats for the paid ads, depending on how you want to promote. You can even make and publish all sorts of advertisements yourself, using Facebook’s free public page inferface or by using an ads API developer.

Facebook marketing presently has 10 various ad categories that fall in the Ad classification:

  1. Event ad

  2. App ad

  3. Mobile App ad

  4. Domain ad

  5. Page like ad

  6. Coupon or Offer ad

  7. Page post link ad

  8. Page post video ad

  9. Page post photo ad

  10. Page post text ad

These ads would require you as a business to input your desired text, photo thumbnail and meta description. Each type comes with a specific number of characters and photo size. You just need to maximize your ads, and make sure your descriptions would entice viewers to click on it.

Facebook has also developed a feature that would allow users to hide your ad, if they refuse to like the page. A dialog box would then appear, asking for an opinion from the user on why he or she declined to like the ad. This can be a very helpful info for you to specify further improvements.

Customize Your Ads

Another significant tool that Facebook can do is to customize your ads, according to the people you want to target. You can have your ads linked to a related page they previously liked, or even previous external links they visited.

Facebook also gives you a powerful analytics tool to give you an idea on how well your marketing scheme is doing. You can view the trend in how many people reaches your posts, or the rate of growth of your followers. With this, you can have an idea on which ads works, and which one doesn’t.

Video Marketing – Stage 2 Prep Work

Preparation is Key

Once you have a plan and a particular objective for your video, you need to carry on the creative phase of the process. Pre-production, the second aspect of video marketing is considered the preparation phase. What happens before the actual filming of the video is vital to the overall success of the shoot.

Video production is a lot of work. Before proceeding, you need to have figure out everything you will need and assemble them. Remember, the best defense against unforeseen problems and delays is pre-planning. Pre-production delves on the logistics of video production and focuses on a range of work including scriptwriting, creating storyboards, production scheduling, determining your equipment needs, finding locations, lining up your talent including the cast and crew, getting supplies and props as well as wardrobe selection. Below are some tips on how to make the most of your preparation phase.

1. Get your script and storyboard prepared before anything else

In the planning phase, you have already conceptualize what your video wants to convey and how you want to do it. Make that the basis of writing your script and storyboard. Sometimes the script may have been written at this stage but will need revising. If you are not confident with your script, you may want to get professional input which will require extra cost but might be worth it since it will play a huge part on your production.

Meanwhile, creating your storyboard doesn’t require for you to be a talented artist. You can either use drawings or picture clippings to create the scenes in your script. A storyboard is crucial because it makes you visualize the scene by scene breakdown of the video, hence you have an invaluable guide on how the shoot will go, and can make the necessary adjustments beforehand.

2. Construct a Shot List

A shot list is simply a detailed shot-by-shot breakdown of each scene. It is usually done using Microsoft Excel and creating a table composed of three columns: scene Number, location and detailed description. Unlike the storyboard which only presents visuals, the shot list points out the specifics of each scene like what props should be used, how the camera lights should be placed and the amount of crew that needs to be present.

3. Come up with a production schedule

Creating a production schedule or a shooting schedule, as it is sometimes called, will determine the overall production workflow and steer the process in the right direction. It is necessary to include the following information in the schedule: Location, scene or shot, equipment needed, people in shot, contact information, and the date and time of the shoot. Having all these important details written on paper will help you track down the flow of the production, manage expectations, target concerns and involve all the people crucial to the success of your video product.

Planning ahead of time, and getting everything you need before the actual production will prepare you to handle unforeseen elements – whether they be scheduling conflicts, scene confusion, location unavailability or equipment shortage – and this will ultimately take you closer to achieving your goal.

Video Marketing – Stage 1 Plan or Fail

Planning: The First Aspect of Video Marketing

Nowadays, marketers rely heavily on videos to create a buzz on their product, service or brand. And why not? Video marketing is a highly effective and efficient method of delivering your message to the world. Most people would rather watch a video than read text. In fact, all over the globe, people spend more than 6 billion hours watching online videos every month. That’s equivalent to almost an hour for each person in the planet. Another fun fact: video-sharing website YouTube is the second most used search engine behind only Google.

Integrating Video Marketing into the Internet

In this Digital age, video marketing is time efficient and cost effective because uploading a promotional video in websites doesn’t take much time and is often free of charge. Traditionally, video marketing was used for television advertisements but by taking advantage of the Internet today, anyone can easily upload a video on Youtube and look for ways to make that video viral. Businesses can also buy ad spaces or simply post their video in their own website. It might all sound easy but video marketing isn’t just about uploading videos; there are 5 aspects of video marketing and they all require substantial amount of work. These are strategic planning, pre-production, production, post-production and distribution.

The Conceptual Stage

Video is an exciting marketing tool which can be used to convey a message that will most likely guarantee an emotional response from viewers. However, not all video content is appropriate for all kinds of audience. Before creating a video, strategic planning is crucial in order to clarify the objectives and set the stage on how the video is going to be developed. Prior to anything else, you must identify the purpose of the endeavor. What do you want to achieve? Pick one primary goal and generate a strategy from there. This will also help you decide on what your message is. The video should be tailored to communicate a clear and specific message to your viewers.

Define Your Audience

Carving our your core objective requires knowing who your target audience is first. Marketing campaigns often fail because they did not focus on their target viewers, hence their content seemed either irrelevant or too broad for them. Make sure that your goal is aligned with the most important people in your business: your prospective customers.

Building a buyer persona will simplify things for you. Determine the imaginary profiles of your customers by establishing their age, gender, income and preferences. By doing this you will narrow down their wants and needs and anticipate what kind of content will be suitable for them. Moreover, you can decide on what kind of platform you will use to deliver your video — YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, blogs or your own website.

Map Out Your Success

Planning also involves budgeting, deciding on the amount of money you want to invest on this endeavor. The budget you create will guide you throughout the whole process by determining what your limitations are. Make sure that you also set a timeline and provide allowances to compensate for unforeseen events. In this stage, you should also pre-determine your distribution and marketing strategy. Remember, the best laid plans always look ahead.