Small Business Facebook Marketing

For small businesses with the right products, services, and customer base, Facebook can provide a powerful and cost-effective platform for marketing a company and its offerings.

While a services firm that serves other businesses will probably do better targeting its marketing efforts on LinkedIn, Facebook’s large audience and wide reach makes it an effective platform for small companies that serve consumers or depend on local audiences.

Facebook offers a range of tools, both free and paid, to help small businesses expand their target market, generate leads, serve customers and, ultimately, create more revenue.

Creating a Page

The home base for your small business Facebook marketing efforts will be your company’s business page. Business pages are similar to personal profiles, but also offer additional tools designed to help companies improve brand awareness, customer service, and sales.

Some important elements to an effective Facebook business page include:

• Your about page. This is the best place to highlight your company’s products or services, expertise, history, community ties and other elements that distinguish you from competitors.
• Your cover photo. This is the large image at the top of the page, and should provide an appealing look at your company, team members or location.
• Your profile photo. This can be your logo or, if you’re a one-man band, your photo.
• A call-to-action button. This simplifies the action you want customers to take most often. Depending on your offerings, this could mean contacting you, placing an order, booking an appointment, or something else. The button takes customers directly to the desired page on your company site.
• Additional tabs. You have the ability to add custom pages with information such as directions to your location, hours, job openings or other important details you want to share with visitors.

Define Your Audience

A valuable step in marketing your business (on any platform) is thinking about the audience and prospective customers you’re trying to reach. Understanding their age, location, gender, the challenges they face (personal or business) and when they’re most likely to be using Facebook can offer important clues about the types of posts they’ll be interested in and when you should schedule those posts.

It’s also important to think about your goals for that audience. Common objectives include generating leads for in-person sales conversations, increasing sales and conversions on your website, or providing an effective customer-service channel.

With this information in mind, you can think about the types of posts and information you want to share on your page. Avoid seeming overly promotional by trying to make about 80 percent of your posts informational, and 20 percent talking about your company or your products and services.

Investing in Ads

While a company page is important, you can’t expect it to drive your desired results by itself. Most people who like your page will see less than 8 percent of your posts, so you should consider making small investments in Facebook ads to generate page visits and in-person customer growth.

Facebook offers a range of automated advertising tools for small businesses. Once you answer basic information about your company, your goals for the ad campaign and your budget, the tools will offer targeting suggestions and generate several versions of your ad to test. As the campaign rolls out, the tools will optimize your ad to increase its performance.

Even a modest investment in ads, coupled with an attractive profile page, will help you harness Facebook’s large audience and reach.