6 Powerful Facebook Marketing Strategies to Boost Your Sales

A user base of billions of monthly active users and the ability to create highly targeted ads makes Facebook an effective sales channel for marketers. 

This means every brand wants its products to be seen, loved and sold from Facebook. While it is easy to run a marketing campaign on Facebook, it doesn’t guarantee a return on your investment. 

So then, how can your business generate sales through Facebook marketing? A solid Facebook marketing strategy helps you tap into this audience. 

Here are the 6 powerful ways you can use Facebook marketing to increase sales and generate revenue. 

• Leverage the power of Facebook groups 
• Run a contest for email signups 
• Use Facebook for customer support 
• Facebook webinar for lead generation 
• Invest in Facebook ads 

1. Leverage the Power of Facebook Groups 

Despite the organic reach of Facebook being flat for most brands, Facebook engagement is actually increasing. 

You may be wondering how. 

For starters, Facebook groups and private communities are a brilliant channel to reach consumers without having to depend on the platform’s algorithm. 

More than 40% of marketers view creating private communities as their top priority in 2020. This is unsurprising, owing to the value of marketing your brand directly to your customers. 

Facebook Groups are the virtual equivalent of your coffee shop. Use them to showcase your expertise. Allow your audience to share information and ideas, thereby fuelling brand loyalty and trust. 

These days, many brands run their private Facebook groups for people with specific interests. Let’s take the example of the community by Mobile Monkey, a multi-channel chat marketing platform. 

This group has 38,500 members and around 10 daily posts. This means that Mobile Monkey can promote their products and content to 38,000 people for free. 

They have thousands of fans talking about their products and how to use them. The group allows them to educate their customers on how to get the most out of the Mobile Monkey products and to cross-sell. 

No wonder, private Facebook communities are on the rise, because they allow you to engage with your customers on a personal level and to nurture communities. 

Going a step ahead, you can scrap the data of the Facebook members in your community. You can take advantage of a LinkedIn automation tool such as Expandi to send personalized LinkedIn connection requests on autopilot. 

2. Run a Contest for Email Signups 

One of the most effective ways to grow your audience is by using Facebook competitions. The most common example is the “Like and share this post” format, usually used by local businesses. They are ineffective most of the time. 

To make an effective Facebook contest, choose from a bunch of different options. For instance, you can ask your followers to enter into a sweepstake contest by performing a particular action. This could be signing up for the email list. 

You can use competition marketing through Facebook contests to get email signups. You can then use a scam email finder to verify the collected emails and target these users with email marketing and nurture the leads to increase your sales. 

The trick to master here is creating a killer landing page.

Avoid the common landing page mistakes, such as unclear copy and multiple signup boxes. Have a clear call-to-action, a compelling copy and stunning visuals. Also, A/B test the landing pages. 

Adobe Photoshop collaborated with LadyGaga for their recent contest. The participants had to create a design using Adobe apps and upload them on the landing page. Clicking on the link shared in the post would take you to the page where you would enter your email to participate. 

When running a contest, don’t forget to create a unique hashtag for the event. 

Consider promoting your contest through other marketing channels. You could cross-promote the contest on other social profiles. Post about it on your blog, mention the contest in your newsletter and add a pop-up on your website. 

You can use social media posting tools to queue up your posts on Facebook. With the right tools, you improve your efficiency, and you have more time to build connections with your audience in real-time. 

3. Use Facebook for Customer Support 

Although not a part of your marketing, Facebook for customer support is an important part of your social media strategy. 

Your customers these days have a wide range of support service channels to choose from. They include a self-service knowledge base, blogs, chatbots and messaging services, to cater to different audiences. 

More often than not, your customers reach out to you on Facebook since customer care on this platform is immediate and accessible. Handling customer queries quickly directs them to make a purchase. 

More than 50% of customers say that they would boycott a brand due to poor response on social media. A Facebook chatbot is an easy way to answer customer questions without human assistance. Facebook Messenger bots can handle common customer queries and direct them to the sales page. 

Additionally, people are willing to engage with chatbots as long as their queries get answered. 69% of consumers prefer using chatbots because they deliver answers to their questions quickly. This could be because modern chatbots are difficult to distinguish from customer service representatives. They help you build better relationships with your customers through quick and valuable interactions. 

A Facebook Messenger chatbot will help your brand connect with customers 24/7. The three strategic advantages of using chatbots are: 

• Lead qualification through simple questions
• E-commerce transactions with lower drop-off rates and higher upselling opportunities 
• Offer more personalized support to reduce cart abandonment or explore upsells in a friendly manner within their comfort environment (i.e. Facebook chat). 

Here’s an example of HubSpot’s Facebook chatbot that offers multiple options to the user, such as free tools, newsletter signups, and a support team email in case the visitor wants to talk to the customer service agent.

Facebook Messenger chatbots help brands scale 1:1 engagement with their audience. 

4. Leverage Facebook Webinars to Gain New Leads 

The value of Facebook for B2C marketers is well-known and written about. As a B2B tool for lead generation, not much. However, if you are a B2B marketer, you still can’t afford to ignore Facebook. 

A popular B2B funnel utilizes webinars to gain new email signups. When you offer value to the potential leads straight on the platform where your audience resides, it works. You can then leverage the webinar to offer a content upgrade such as a course or a whitepaper or a free trial. 

To access this freebie, the webinar viewer will have to sign up for your email list. 

Here, Facebook offers an extra benefit. To promote their live video platform; if you run your webinar through Facebook live, your engagement increases. Your followers get notified that your brand has a stream scheduled. 

Mari Smith’s Facebook page has nailed this to a fine art. Here’s one of her live videos. 

The video is about using Facebook marketing to grow your business. She promotes her online training program “Facebook marketing essentials” in the post and the video. 

The link takes you to the landing page: 

Here, the page promotes paid premium content, courses and coaching. 

5. Invest in Facebook Ads 

The cost of reaching people on Facebook is lower than that of display advertising. However, plenty of people waste money on ineffective ads on Facebook. 

The success of a Facebook ad depends on the targeting, the landing page where you send the traffic and the ad copy and visuals. For the highest possible conversion rate, optimize each of them. 

Facebook’s massive user-base lets you scale these ads based on your budget. 

You can start by using the data collected from your CRM to create a Facebook lookalike audience. This way, you can go after people who are similar to your existing customers. 

As Facebook allows targeting users based on their interests, you can target people who like or follow your bigger competitors. Once you start running the ads, you can refine them through trial and error. 

These 9 Facebook ad formats allow you to customize your ad strategy. In the beginning, try out a few different formats to see which one works better for your business. This knowledge will help you engage better with your audience. Also, at first, target a small audience to understand who wants to see your ads. Gradually, you can widen your target group and build a solid connection with them. 

6. Use Facebook to Run Retargeted Ads  

Most companies face a common challenge of potential customers landing on your website and leaving without making a purchase or signing up for your newsletter. The real mistake is letting the leads go without a fight. 

Facebook retargeted ads work as a great tool for winning these leads back. 

When you have a new visitor to your website through inbound search, you can use retargeting to make an offer related to the page they visited. 

For B2C customers, the retargeted ad could include a discount on the product they viewed, to push them to make a purchase.

The Italian tourist board Trentino ran a combination of Facebook ads to raise brand awareness, reach a new audience and encourage them to visit the province of Trento. They promoted things that people could do in a small Italian town such as hiking, boating, lifestyle activities, and biking. The combination of video ads, carousel format and Canvas resulted in a 4.3 times increase in the holiday offers viewed. 

The ad format used could host up to 10 different images or videos in a single unit, which meant users saw all four options in one place and were able to click-through to dedicated landing pages for each activity.

For B2B leads, you could use a content upgrade. Direct them to a dedicated landing page in exchange for email signup. An email marketing sequence can warm these retargeted leads. 

The benefit of this approach is collecting the leads who are not ready to buy. For B2B businesses, this can help you take leads to a stage where they are ready to book a sales meeting. 

Wrapping up – Increasing Sales with Facebook Marketing 

The two ways that Facebook marketing can help you increase sales is by: 

• Increasing the size of your audience 
• Increasing the engagement among your existing audience 

The 6 strategies we’ve looked at, fulfil either or both of these goals. They use a combination of free and paid strategies with Facebook’s in-built advertising featuring and third-party apps. 

Use these Facebook marketing strategies to increase your sales from new and existing customers alike.