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In today’s highly digital world, entrepreneurs are shying away from traditional brick and mortar stores and flocking toward the web. Considering there are an estimated 205 million online shoppers each day, dipping into online business seems like a solid plan. But with ample customers comes ample competition.
So how do you best draw attention to your own e-commerce store? Advertising—more specifically, Facebook advertising—is one of the best ways to reach new leads.
With over 1.4 billion users each month, Facebook is essentially the world’s largest shopping mall. In the material below, we’ll go over a few of the best methods for developing a solid Facebook marketing strategy for e-commerce so you can start increasing your ROI today.
Essential Elements of a Successful Facebook Marketing Strategy for Ecommerce:
1. Custom and Lookalike Audiences
Facebook allows you to create a custom audience by uploading the emails addresses of your existing customers. The social media site will then use that list to find users who used the same address to create their Facebook account.
This way, you can target your ads to retarget people who are already interested in purchasing your products or services. You can also tweak your custom audience using several helpful advertising filters such as age, interests, income, and more.
This helps you to advertise only to those who are most likely to convert, which assists in reducing wasted ad spend.
Facebook has another tool that can provide even better results: Lookalike Audiences. Lookalike Audiences is a tool that uses the custom lists discussed above to find other users who have similar profile data to your existing customers.
Mostly, it matches interests and demographics. This highly effective and low-risk strategy shrinks your audience to include only those who are most likely to purchase your product.
You can use this method both to increase your leads and grow the number of likes on your Facebook page.
2. Dynamic Product Ads
One of the most useful elements of a good Facebook marketing strategy for e-commerce is Dynamic Product Ads (DPA). Have you ever visited a website, browsed a few products, only to have them follow you around in advertisements all over the web? This is known as retargeting, and Facebook’s DPA is one of the best tools for it.
With DPA, you’ll be able to reach old prospects and take a second stab at converting them to customers. Facebook’s DPAs display a carousel of product images, reminding your prospects of the items they abandoned in their online shopping cart. Ideally, this will motivate prospects to click on your ad and complete their purchase.
3. Measure and Spend Wisely
A good Facebook marketing strategy for e-commerce relies heavily on a decent budget. So, to get the best results from your Facebook advertising efforts, you’re going to have to spend a bit of cash.
That said, you’ll need to measure your product categories to determine where your money is best spent.
For example, you don’t want to pour all your funds into selling your least popular and least expensive product.
Focus on pushing the products or services that will best captivate your target audience while also inspiring significant purchases that will offset the cost of your investments.
Be sure to measure you ROI consistently, determining which ads are making you money and which ads are wasting your money. Adjust your audience, target spending, and featured products accordingly.
4. Boost Conversion with Video Ads
Video ads are one of the most popular and powerful formats for Facebook advertising. At Facebook’s last F8 Conference in April, it was revealed that video ads not only have a 25 percent lower Cost Per Action (CPA) than link and carousel ads, but they also have a 175 percent return on ad spend.
By implementing video ads into your Facebook marketing strategy for e-commerce, you may be able to improve your ROI drastically. Bear in mind, you’ll need to make sure the content of your video is both captivating and relevant to your audience.
5. Focus on Mobile
As you might’ve guessed from the amount of people with their phones fused to their palms, mobile marketing has become imperative to the success of e-commerce.
In the past, desktop was the way to go—in fact, in 2014, desktop CPM for North American e-commerce was over twice as high than mobile CPM. But Q4 of 2015 told a much different story: Mobile e-commerce CTRs were over 200 percent higher than desktop.
Moreover, 60 percent of Facebook e-commerce ad spending was mobile in Q1 2016. That’s 15 percent higher than it was in Q4 2015.
6. Keep it Quality and Captivating
When it comes to Facebook advertising, you can’t just post something lickety-split and hope for gold. The best performing ads are creative and tailored to a specific audience. People scroll through their newsfeeds an estimated 14 times per day.
In the smorgasbord of content that they come across, you need to make sure yours stands out. Keep copy concise and captivating; use compelling images and video.
Every ad you release should be done so with your target audience in mind:
- Will they find this interesting?
- Is this something they’d stop to watch?
- How can I better adjust this to fit their interests?
When crafting your Facebook advertisements, these are all important questions you should be asking yourself.
Additionally, you’ll need to make sure that your objective is clear. People shouldn’t be interested in your advertisement only to scroll right past it because they’re confused about what action to take. Your offer should be represented clearly and ensure that people see how engaging with your ad will be beneficial to them.
7. Communicate with the Customer
One of the best but most neglected features of Facebook advertising is that it puts you in direct communication with your prospective customers. You have the opportunity to hear their feedback firsthand, and customize and remodel your content accordingly.
Interacting with customers who engage with your Facebook ads is a great way to make them feel involved with and valued by your brand, which in turn makes them more likely to purchase your product or service.
The bottom line: Facebook advertising isn’t just important, it’s necessary.
While competition amongst advertisers on Facebook is high, implementation and proper use of the social media site’s advertising tools will help you stand out in the crowd. By tweaking your target audience, creating compelling content, and regularly measuring your results, you’ll be able to increase your prospects and convert more leads.
With so many companies and users flocking to the site every day, it’s imperative that you jump in the Facebook game.
To develop an effective Facebook marketing strategy for e-commerce, you’ll need to focus on producing properly-optimized, quality content.
After a bit of trial, error, and measurement, you’ll be able to pinpoint the best ways to implement the above methods into your Facebook marketing strategy for e-commerce.
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