We all know how Airbnb has disrupted the travel and tourism industry once and for all with a refreshing concept back in 2008. For a company that was so unique with its product and approach, cracking the Facebook marketing game was no rocket science.

They were able to buck the possibility of retargeting ads and were cited by Facebook themselves as a success story.

What makes Airbnb a dream destination (pun intended) for any aspirant of Facebook marketing is how they blend organic and paid reach in their marketing mix. Scroll through their Facebook feed and see the engagement they get with simple captions, breathtaking videos, and images.

If Airbnb could make Facebook work for them, why can’t you?

If you’re a B2B or B2C, you need not get worked up anymore. Here’s your evergreen guide to Facebook marketing – let’s find out together what strategies you need to implement to be successful on this platform.

Let’s get started.

Identify your goals and target audience

Like any other marketing strategy, your Facebook marketing plan also needs to begin with defining your target audience. This builds the foundation for everything you do with your page – content, ad campaigns, your tone, and more.

So, how do you define your target audience?

  1. Chart out the demographics – age, gender, geography, education, occupation
  2. The interests of your audience on certain activities and topics
  3. Audience behavior that includes hobbies and websites they spend time on
  4. The pain points of your target audience and how they use Facebook

Your company may already have a detailed buyer persona, but if you don’t have it yet define it with primary and secondary audiences and further drill-down to the key details.

Another place to understand your audience is Facebook audience insights. By doing this exercise, you’ll be able to ease out the process of setting up Facebook ads as well as spruce your organic reach with content that resonates.

Once you know your audience, come up with the goals you want to achieve through Facebook.

It could be one or more of the following:

  • Lead generation
  • Improve website traffic
  • Distribute content
  • Increase brand awareness
  • Reap good ROI from FB ads
  • Create a loyal community

Now, your goals, target personas, and your content should align perfectly with one another for you to be successful on Facebook.

For example, if your target audience is women between the age of 25-45 living across the globe with an annual income of $45k who love makeup. Your goal is to create a loyal community and get more leads, then, your content should be a mix of educative content on makeup and skincare science coupled with product promotions that enable it. 

Note: Target personas and Facebook marketing goals are broad concepts, and these ideas will only help you get started. Further drill-down is possible based on your experiments, the data you collect, and the insights you gather thereupon.

Facebook page optimization

What kind of business pages are you attracted to?

The ones with great visuals and complete information or the half-cooked ones?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it? So, if you would like to engage with pages that spill out all the details, so should you be creating pages that are worth following. 

When it comes to Facebook page optimization, it is not just the aesthetic we’re talking about. Like how anything on the Internet needs to be search-friendly, so should your pages be for the search engine as well as the Facebook algorithm.

  • Name your pages appropriately – The first thing a visitor or the search engine for that matter considers is the name of your Facebook page. Don’t get all geeky and give a generic keyword as the name for your page because it does not help. Your Facebook page needs to be branded. Give a brand name that reflects the kind of work you do and the personality of your brand
  • Customize your vanity URL – On creating your pages, Facebook sets a default URL for your pages. Go to page info and customize your web address in such a way that it matches your page title
  • Update all the information – Make sure there’s an avatar, cover page, about page, CTA button, featured content. While adding a description about your page, make sure to add important keywords so that you are searchable. Optimize URL, page title, and “About us” with keywords but refrain from stuffing

Facebook tools: While conversions are becoming more apparent through your Facebook pages, make it easy for your customers by integrating messenger for business, payments through messenger, and saved replies to respond to FAQs of customers with templated responses. Facebook groups are another great place to hang out and add value to the community.

Come up with an intelligent content mix

Before you jump into creating and posting content, you need to know the different formats of content to create and the feasibility of the same.

Tip: Posting content on Facebook that is promotional does not favor the Facebook algorithm. Therefore, educate more and sell less. 

Content types:

  • Posters 
  • Videos
  • Gifs
  • Memes
  • Polls
  • Infographics
  • Contests
  • Seasonal posts
  • Monthly round-ups
  • Facebook stories
  • Link posts

 Buzzsumo’s study of 880 million Facebook posts found that videos get twice the amount of engagement than other post types. Facebook loves video content, hence, you cannot skip but have videos not only as part of your content mix but also, start creating and experimenting with them.

Tools and resources: 

  • Animaker: Since videos are an important part of your content mix, you can utilize Animaker’s Facebook video maker to create videos. This tool supports live and animation videos. You can also create gifs, memes, and video infographics using Animaker for free.
  • Buffer: Managing different content formats and posting consistently all through the year is quite overwhelming. A tool like Buffer can help you automate the process and schedule your posts.
  • Hubspot: You need a calendar that’ll help you set a pattern and keep the content rolling. It is also easy to track the progress and stay accountable to your plan and execution. Hubspot’s content calendar is a good place to start.
  • Picmaker: This is a good tool to create posters for Facebook. There are good templates for you to get started. You can choose custom dimensions for Facebook (940X788) and create posters.

Tip: The best time to post on Facebook is between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. EST on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday and you need to post at least five times a day for the best engagement. But here’s some food for thought. These studies give you the inferences from the research and survey they have done. But, every business is unique. Depending on the nature of your business and the resources at your disposal, first, get the data through various experiments and then freeze on what works best for you.

Invest in Facebook ads

Just like how Airbnb was able to triple their ROI with Facebook ads and lower their cost per acquisition by 47%, you can too.

If you take a closer look at what this brand has done for such a humongous success through Facebook ads, their remarketing ads worked in favor of them. They targeted their on-site visitors and hyper-targeted them with deals, carousel images, and custom audiences.

Number of active advertisers on Facebook from 1st quarter 2016 to 1st quarter 2020 (in millions)

Source: Statista

Set up a Facebook ad and target the right segment with relevant content, monitor engagement, and refine your strategies, or get started with Facebook pixel. Facebook pixel is a code to be embedded on your website which facilitates remarketing to custom audiences.

Here’s a tutorial on how to set up Facebook ads if you are a beginner.

  1. Plan your budget. Know what’s the expected ROI and work backward towards setting the budget and getting the creatives ready
  2. Decide on whether it is going to be a video ad promoting an offer or a whitepaper for building thought leadership or brand building through CSR content
  3. Run your ads and collect data. Based on the data (key metrics include impressions, cost of acquisition, and click-throughs) you can revisit your strategies

Weigh, measure, and analyze

It is important to periodically track and measure how your efforts are channelized. This will give you insights into what your audiences love and what they don’t so that you can review and tweak your strategies.

Facebook insights give you data about the page performance on a high-level which covers audience demography and how they are reacting to your posts.

Wrapping Up

If you are just venturing out into Facebook marketing, organic reach and ads would be daunting at first. But, when you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to scale up your marketing game.

But, remember that it’s a long game and without continuous efforts and experiments it is not easy to hack.

Brands like Airbnb have clearly set their goals, created useful content, and were able to get the message across to the right person through the right channel, and at the right time. The reason behind their success was consistency (3-4 posts) per day and utilization of UGC content and videos that are prioritized by the Facebook algorithm.

 Not just this brand, there are a lot of brands to take inspiration from when it comes to Facebook marketing, but what remains fundamental is good content and effort.

If you want to add your favorite Facebook marketing strategy, feel free to drop a comment!

About the Author: Nandhini is a Product Marketer at Animaker and she is excited about spreading the word to marketers about the power of videos in their content mix. When not working, she likes to work on her side-hustle and binge-watch TV shows.