Facebook Small Business Strategy 2023 (YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED)

Still struggling to create Facebook ads? You're not alone. Of all the social networks, Facebook exposes your business to the broadest audience and offers the most comprehensive set of business tools out there. But many users find its ads manager increasingly difficult to navigate, and this is really frustrating when trying to create and manage ads for the first time. Look. Totally get it. And that's why I'm here to help demystify the process for you. I'm like a reverse wizard. I'm unwizarding this whole thing for you. And the good news is you won't need an entire marketing team or to spend so much time learning the ropes that your other customer touch points get ignored in the meantime, either. What's up? It's Jamal from HubSpot and welcome back to the channel. So we've already done a video on how to create a Facebook business page to get your campaigns up and running, and this video is the next level of optimization into its toolset. Think of this as a comprehensive beginner's guide to effective Facebook marketing. Here I'm gonna break down some of the best page optimization and engagement tip. To help you reach new customers, increase website traffic, and improve sales so you can translate those efforts into actual clicks and conversions. I think we can all agree that we could use some of that. I'll answer some of the most frequently asked questions many of you left in the comments from the last video. Okay, so let's start with a basic question, but one that's important to know if you want to use Facebook advertising as part of your marketing strategy. Do I have to use my Facebook business profile that I created? My personal Facebook has way more followers, and I don't want to Facebook accounts. The answer is yes. It's actually against Facebook's terms of service to have a personal profile for a business, and you wouldn't want to do that anyway because personal profiles don't have the benefit of Facebook ads, which you'll definitely need in order to promote your business. You'll also have access to Facebook Insights, which provides useful information about your fans and their interactions on your page. Think of it as an ongoing focus group, as a valuable part of your target market. Your fans can tell you a lot about what they want through their interactions, comments, and feedback. And if you have a robust Facebook personal profile, then continue leveraging it as a networking tool, optimizing your business page. Already have a Facebook business page. Fantastic. You're ready to optimize. And if you don't, then bookmark this video and come back to it after you watch our Ultimate Business Page tutorial okay, so one of the most important things you can do is to make sure you've completed all aspects of your profile to optimize your new page. This includes claiming your vanity URL, choosing a page template, and customizing a stellar about section in complete detail. Now, Facebook will give you a unique URL when creating your page. However, this is just a string of numbers and shows no brand identity. Kind of awkward, but a custom username allows you to promote your brand on Facebook by turning the string of random numbers into your vanity URL and will be shared across your social platforms and featured in all of your marketing materials. It should be straightforward and contain the name of your brand identity of your business, for example HubSpot beyond just being nice to look at vanity URLs, make it easier for people to find and tag your business. And when others tag your business, those tags equal publicity, engagement and growth. They're also good for SEO. Put your business name in the URL and search engines will find you more easily. Speaking of easy on the eyes, in any social media marketing marketing campaign, you'll want to put your best face forward. You only have a few seconds to catch someone's attention, so make it count, my friend. One of Facebook's best features is its Business Page templates, which are designed with specific functionality for different kinds of needs and goals. For example, a restaurant and cafes template for a coffee shop. This one focuses more on photos and business hours. It also provides a menu tab which can hold standard or sample menus and has its own primary button Call now. Or a general business template for a local florist. Now, at this point, you may think you're done since everything's looking pretty good. But if you quit on the process, my friend, you quit on the results. And two quits don't make a right Optimizing your About section is what's going to get you the best ROI for your efforts. Google indexes Facebook Business pages so the text you include in your about section can help you rank in global and local search engine results. Use this section to describe your processes and services. Include your mission statement, tell your founder story, and other relevant business information. You should aim to add as many details to your about page as possible. Here's a quick checklist. Provide essential information on your page for customers to contact you through different channels like your phone number, email addresses, website and other social media platforms. Give the general location of your business. Include a call to Action button for customers to visit your website or subscribe to your newsletter Pin your best performing posts to the top of your page. Add tabs to promote various details about your business such as current offers, services, upcoming events, products, and much more. Click your page's profile picture in the top right and then click your page name at the top of your page. Click more and then manage Sections now, just having a Facebook business page isn't enough to keep your visitors engaged. To fully connect and deliver the information, inspiration and advice your customers want, you need a consistent content strategy if you want them coming back for more. So this is where we factor the Facebook algorithm into your posting strategy. Your audience is most likely to see your content and engage with it when they're on Facebook, which sends important signals to the algorithm to extend the reach of your posts. So how can you identify the times when your audience is online and active? Well, it depends on a couple of things. Your business, industry goals, and the content itself all play a role in the success of your posts. Fortunately, there are some great tools to help you learn the best day and time to post, but we'll get into that in a minute. For now, let's review some general guidelines and best practices before you have the data to dig into. On average, the best times to post on Facebook are in the evening and mid to late afternoon, specifically between 12 to 3pm and 6 to 9pm, with the worst times being 6am to 9am and 9pm to midnight. Best days to post are Friday and Saturday, with the worst day being Sunday. I guess everyone's at church. Of course, you'll need to think about the time zones when planning. For example, are you a local business or do you have a global audience? If you're in California, some good times to post may be 6:30am, 9:30am and noon. Now, 6:30 may seem especially early for followers on the west coast, But it's already 9:30 in major cities like New York and Atlanta, so it may just be the perfect time to reach Eastern time zone followers as they sip their morning coffee. It also catches audiences in the UK and Europe while they're still at work, reaching them around lunchtime. Thankfully, there are multiple resources available to help you automate posting, including Facebook's built in publishing tools. Start by creating a post in the white box at the top of your page's timeline. Instead of clicking Share now, select the small arrow next to it and select Schedule. Select the time and date and click Schedule Now. To manage all of your scheduled posts, look for publishing tools in the top menu of your page and click Scheduled Posts. There you can edit or delete posts as well as preview them for both desktop and mobile viewing. Now content planning is way more than just scheduling, especially when you're trying to promote your brand or business and connect with your customers. For marketing to be successful, you have to define who your ideal audience is and what they want on Facebook. If you're not sure where to start, Facebook has a powerful free analytics tool as part of their ads platform, now called Insights within the Meta Professional Dashboard. Compared to the now defunct Facebook Analytics, Insights may have less metrics than it did before, but it's still a useful tool that keeps crucial audience data all in one place, making it easy to keep tabs on your Facebook performance, whether paid or organic. To access this feature, go to the Manage Page menu and click Meta Business Suite. On the Overview screen, you'll see top level Insights for Facebook on the left and Instagram on the right. If you have a connected Instagram account to look specifically at Facebook content metrics with no Instagram data, click on Content in the left menu. Then open the Ads, Posts and Stories dropdown and uncheck the Instagram option. Result metrics allow you to see how well you're doing from a day to day perspective for your Page reach impressions, Page and Profile visits, new Page likes and followers, and ad trends. You also have video insights which tell you how those posts are performing. Key metrics include total time users spend watching your videos, the number of users who watch your video for three seconds or more, and how long your videos keep or retain someone's attention. From here, you can analyze outcomes during a specific time frame, like a week ago compared to this week. Are there any up or downward trends that have impacted your performance and results? Did you create more posts or more ad creatives? Did a particular post end up going viral? Did you spend more and anything else that would have impacted your performance? Facebook Insights also allows you to capture demographic and behavioral data about your audience. Here you'll find the breakdown from two groups of people, people connected to your Page and people on Facebook. Click on Filter to see different audience segments. The United States will likely be your default location, but you should change this based on where your target market resides. Also, you can specify age and gender. The Interest section is a great way to uncover industry information. You can add general interests or the names of specific pages. However, not every page will be available to analyze if they don't have a substantial number of followers. In this example, let's take a look at men and women in the United States between the ages of 25 and 50 who are in Atlanta. Interested in coffee, culture, fair trade and local food and drink? You'll see the estimated audience size here is 143,000 to 168,000 people. Why is all this information useful? When you want to set up a Facebook campaign, you can use this information to target the right demographics and budget accordingly. For example, if you want to split the campaign between male and female or decide which locations are more important for your business. Some things to keep in mind while analyzing insights since your profile usually includes conversions like a link to downloadable content or an online store, understanding how many people engage with your page is crucial to understanding future performance. Also, insight metrics don't tell more than you see on screen. So if you want to dive deeper into your CTR or click through Rate, you'll need to analyze your funnels further, which is already neatly laid out for you within Facebook's Ads Manager. In addition to metrics about your weekly reach post, engagement page likes, and which posts have the best performance, Ads Manager provides insight on things like clicks, conversions, and even sales. This is super important if you're running a business page, you might not be aware that only the tiniest fraction of your followers even see what you're posting. Sounds extreme, but it's true. Unfortunately, Facebook has been decreasing business page visibility in newsfeeds for a couple of years now, a frustrating algorithm update for business owners everywhere. But if you include Facebook ads in your marketing strategy, along with private Facebook groups, which we'll get to in a minute, your chances of reaching your followers and new audiences skyrocket. On your Meta Business Suite menu, click on All Tools, scroll down to advertise, and click on Ads Manager. Once in, you'll see the Campaign Dashboard. We'll focus on the campaigns for now. All your campaigns are shown in the middle and consists of three elements across the top in tab format, Ad Campaign, Ad Sets, and Ads There can be multiple ad sets under a campaign if you want to target different audiences and and use different placements under one single objective. And each ad set can include various ad creatives where you decide on imagery and messaging. There can also be many ads under an ad set if you want to split test what creative elements work best for your ad set. Facebook guides you through all these steps to choose your objective, target your audience, and set a time frame and your budget. For this, we'll choose a middle of the funnel action like engagement and now we're ready to jump over to the Ad Set level. But before we do, remember these adjustments to your ad settings can be made seamlessly whether you're on a computer or managing things via the app. While there may be small differences in the interface, you can still adjust your ad preferences. So here's where it gets a little bit spicy. Scroll down to custom audiences, then head to the detailed targeting section. Here's where you'll search for things highly relevant to your business. Type in a keyword and you'll see it suggesting all of these other options. Search around for additional interest from the suggestions and look at the audience size, behaviors and description for each of these to determine the best option for you. Once you have a list of quality targeting options, go through and test them. Create one ad set for each interest behavior. If you put all these interests together in one ad set, you'll get a blended average and won't see which of these produces the best or worst results. Testing will of course depend on your budget. You can set an overall budget for your campaign or individual budgets for your ad sets. Before setting either, consider your total budget for Facebook ads. There's no one size fits all answer when it comes to deciding on an ad budget, several factors can influence us, like your industry, your goals, and audience habits. If you're looking for the absolute minimum amount you should spend on Facebook ads, then even as low as $1 per day can still make a big difference. The average cost per thousand impressions CPM so far in 2023 is $11.87. So according to my calculations, if you only spend $1 in Facebook ads per day, you could have people see your ads 30,749 times per year. That means for just $1 per day you can get around 30,000 imp people who wouldn't have seen your ad otherwise. The next step above spending $1 a day is to spend enough to take advantage of Facebook's algorithm. According to Facebook, an ad set needs 50 conversions per week to feed its algorithm with data to find more users who are most likely to achieve your objective. This is the level where you can really take advantage of Facebook ads, which is a whole other video that we've already done because we're kind of on the ball around here. So if you'd like to level up your Facebook advertising know how from costs to formats, campaign management, testing metrics, and more, click the link in the description below. Now, if you want your ad to run continuously, choose Daily Budget. Choose the amount you're willing to spend on this specific ad per day. This is an average, so some days you might spend slightly above or below. If you're looking to run your ad for a specific length of time. Choose Lifetime Budget. Facebook will automatically try to evenly spread out the amount you select over the period of time and then schedule. Keep in mind, Facebook ads on their own will not generate the conversions you need to build your customer base. The quality of your content and how quickly you respond to questions and concerns are also essential for continuing to build brand awareness and growing your reach. Now, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. How would you like to bypass the Facebook News Feed algorithm and connect with your target audience where they're actually likely to see and interact with your posts? Sounds pretty good, right? Facebook groups are a great way to find and connect with your ideal customers. The whole purpose of these groups is to provide a sense of community and bring people together over similar interests. And there are tons of niche Facebook groups out there. Whenever you create a post in a Facebook group, it'll be shared at the top of the group feed and anytime someone comments on your posts, it'll return to the top of the feed. So there are a lot of opportunities to increase organic reach with members of any group that you're in. To search for relevant groups, use the search field in the top left corner. You can search by topic, your location, and even get very specific by typing in an influencer's page name. There's also a group feed where you can discover new groups from your feed. Click Groups in the left menu. Click Discover to see suggestions. Once you come across a group that seems like a good fit, read the group description and get to know the host of the group. Why they start the group? Who are they trying to help? Does the group show daily activity? Knowing answers to these questions will be a good indication of whether or not the community is a place where you can provide valuable insights, participate in discussions, and directly connect with your ideal customers. Choose no more than five groups and engage in these groups several times per week. Remember, consistent and active participation is what will land you the audience who's interested in what you have to offer. Go to each homepage and choose to pin them to your shortcut list. That'll place them on the left hand side of your Facebook newsfeed. You do this by selecting the More option under the Discussion section of a given group, then select PIN to Shortcuts. Your customers drive your business, which is why it's so important to stay connected, listen and be responsive to them. Don't just be available when you want their attention. If you want to build a trusted and respected brand, you need to earn it, and Facebook's very responsive to Messages Badge is one way you can do this. It shows potential customers that you quickly respond to questions and concerns. Customers will trust your page more, which helps foster loyalty and grow your business. This badge automatically appears on your page if you have a Messenger response rate of 90% or higher and a response time under 15 minutes. To get the very responsive badge, you're going to need to turn on notifications, use automated responses, mark messages, use away status and message. This way, Facebook will notify you whenever you've got a new message. It'll also acknowledge every customer who messages you and send an instant reply. Even when you're away. Messages you receive when your Page's status is set to away won't count towards your response rate or response time either. Now, if you plan to use Facebook or Instagram ads as part of your marketing strategy, the Facebook Pixel or Meta Pixel is a must have tool. Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that you place on your website that collects data and tracks conversions from Facebook ads. This information is invaluable when it comes to optimizing your ads, building targeted audiences for future ads, and remarketing to people who've already taken some kind of action on your website. For example, I recently spotted some poppin decals for my robot vacuum in Instagram Stories. I swiped to check out the custom skins and even added one to my shopping cart. Then I got distracted thinking about pizza and put down my phone. The next time I opened up Facebook, this ad popped up in my feed. This is called retargeting or remarketing and gives businesses an opportunity to recapture potential leads or customers if they've left your site without converting or meeting a marketing goal. Facebook Pixel works by placing and triggering cookies to track users as they take various actions on your website. Facebook calls these actions events. There are 17 standard Facebook pixel events for which you can simply copy and paste the event code. Some of these include Add to Wishlist, Add to Cart, Initiate Checkout, Customize Product Schedule, subscribe, and Complete registration. On your Meta Business Suite menu, click on All Tools, scroll down to Advertise, and click on Events Manager. From here, click Connect Data, then select Web. Click Get Started. To continue, select Facebook Pixel, then Connect. Name your Pixel, enter your website URL, and click Continue. Now you only get one Pixel for each ad account, so the name should represent your business rather than a specific campaign. Choose how you'll install the Pixel code using a partner integration or manually adding it to your site. Now you can set up Facebook Pixel events, choose your Facebook Pixel id, enter your URL, and Click Open Website here. Facebook will provide a list of all suggested events. Click on Review next to each event, then choose to Confirm or Dismiss and click Finish Setup. I know that was a lot and I appreciate you hanging in there with me. So Bottom Line In a sea of over a billion daily active users and 7 million businesses, Facebook optimization and advertising is a must for any business hoping to get a positive ROI from social media marketing. And this video is just a start. If you're interested in learning more about maximizing the value of your Facebook and Instagram ads, along with additional audience building tools and strategies, lead generation, and the right ad type for your marketing goals, check out our free Beginner's Guide to Facebook and Instagram Marketing. You can find the link in the description below. And while you're down there, drop a comment to let us know what other Facebook topics you'd like us to cover. And don't forget to like, share and subscribe for more content if you found this video helpful. Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time for me to put a tracking pixel on my bed. I'm gonna track how many naps I can get in in the next 24 hours. I'll let you know how it goes. Until next time I can find this.

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