By: Olivia Roehm, Account Executive
As the consumer packaged goods industry continues to grow, so do the needs and demands of the customer. Among the growing list of 2019 trends, companies need to focus most importantly on the increased reliance on customer data. With over 156M people in America accessing Facebook each day, there are a number of reasons you should be using Facebook to leverage your business.
Increased Reach
We know the importance of expanding our reach, and we know that our reach needs to consist of the people most likely to buy our products and keep coming back. Facebook provides direct access to your consumer. It allows us to efficiently increase our reach through minimal cost commitment.
With a Reach and Frequency Buying campaign, for example, businesses can easily identify goals and objectives, manipulate ad formats, and systematically place ads for a higher return with the right audience. Reach and Frequency Buying campaigns allow for sequencing and retargeting of ads based off performance data on all campaigns. For some best practices check out the Reach and Frequency Buying Guide. However, having a team or employee to spend time getting to know the platform tools and making optimization changes is the best way you can effectively see decreased costs and increased reach and engagement over time. It isn’t enough to just know the tools – you have to pair that with your understanding of your audience.
Building Brand Loyalty through Audience Growth
Facebook has many ways to focus a campaign’s efforts; businesses need to test a multitude of objectives, sale focuses and brand awareness focuses, to see results across the board. And audience loyalty should be a focus while utilizing social media platforms.
Audience analytics is a powerful tool. It is difficult sometimes for leaders to see the value in spending time on social media, since it’s hard to measure the impact on sales. Yet, we all know as marketers that the more brand loyalty you have and wider the reach of that loyalty, the more market share growth your product will have. Facebook is a tool that offers a unique opportunity for free market research! This cannot be understated: it is free research! Your social media page followers can become the easiest way to engage in an informal focus group around your brand’s colors, messaging, products, specials, sales strategy, etc. Take the opportunity you have to build a strategy through your social plans!
To boost your brand awareness on the ad side, Facebook has a variety of tools that allow businesses to leverage the placement, targeting, and optimization of their content across the sales funnel. You can choose to target potential customers based off recall, as well as the different types of content each customer likes to view. Facebook allows you to segment customers who engage more with photos ads, and those who spend more time viewing video ads.
The ability to target the largest number of potential customers, who fit your brand’s target market, control and stay within your budget, and receive immediate feedback on ads is an invaluable tool. Facebook is one of the only digital platforms which has created such focused metrics for brand awareness and loyalty that can translate into hard data for your brand’s strategy.
Tracking Sales Impact
With so many different ways to target and grow your business on Facebook, it is extremely important that you are tracking and leveraging the Facebook data reporting systems for all of your marketing campaigns.
Facebook allows businesses the ability to track KPIs based off true business outcomes like reach, brand awareness, and video views. Remember, it is very likely that a customer found out about your brand and made a purchase based off of viewing your ad, but not clicking through. Facebook allows you to track the impact of this activity.
You can also employ more specific sales strategies by either getting detailed with your offers, driving Facebook users to your online store or in store promotion, or developing ways to test overall store lift by running Facebook campaigns in certain cities or metro areas. Start with the sale you want to track, and develop a strategy to leverage the data Facebook will give you. Again, having the expertise of a team member or an agency team who works in this daily will make sure you are utilizing all the targeting and tracking methods available through the platform.
About as Close to a One Size Fits All Solution
We often say “there isn’t a one size fits all solution” for marketing. This is true, but Facebook is a platform that can be useful at the micro and macro level. Facebook’s business model is built on user data for businesses to use for marketing and advertising. They continue to be the leaders in creating the most cutting edge and efficient solutions for reaching target customers in a social and engaging way. The consolidation of tools inside the business manager, as well as the large number of resources and education, make Facebook one of the leaders in digital marketing and a tool CPG marketers should be leveraging.
