Exclusive: 3 Steps to Launching a Facebook Marketing Strategy for Your Startup

Ilan Nass

To run a successful startup, you need certain key essentials. A strong team, a strong product idea, and a solid business plan all play crucial roles. However, they don’t guarantee success. If no one knows about your startup, you certainly can’t acquire enough customers to stay in business. That’s why you need to prioritize marketing at an early stage.

Luckily, you don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of money to reach potential customers. With Facebook ads, marketing your services or products can be relatively easy and inexpensive.

That said, your campaign won’t be effective if you merely create a generic Facebook ad and publish it blindly. As an ad platform, Facebook gives you the opportunity to create truly dynamic campaigns. To maximize your return on investment, keep the following points in mind. Whether you decide to partner with a professional Facebook advertising firm or build a strategy on your own, these key points are essential for success.

Customize Your Audience

Facebook allows you to target custom audiences when posting ads. This makes it easier to reach people who may be interested in your services.

For example, with the Custom Audience from Your Website tool, you can target people who’ve already visited your website. You can also use the information you have about those people to create custom audiences consisting of people who may have no familiarity at all with your company.

With Facebook’s tools, you can target people based on their demographics, location, interests, and more. Have you created an augmented reality app? Facebook can help you target customers who likely own the necessary hardware to run it.

Monitor Analytics

Facebook offers analytics tools to help you monitor how successful a given ad campaign is. The platform frequently updates these tools to make them even more useful.

Using them to test different campaign ideas is smart. You don’t want to limit yourself to one marketing strategy.

Not all of your ad ideas will be effective: Launch multiple campaigns, and use the analytics tools to determine which is more effective. This can be as simple as targeting multiple custom audiences with the same ad. With Facebook’s Ad Manager, you can determine what the cost-per-click (CPC) of a given subgroup is. Just remember: The lower the CPC, the better.

Plan for the Future

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that a the custom audience with the lowest CPC from your last marketing experiment is the perfect custom audience. Odds are good there are changes you can make to achieve an even lower CPC.

That’s why Facebook’s Audience Insights tool is useful. This feature offers key information about people who clicked on your ads, which is information you can use to refine your custom audiences in the future.

While these tips are useful, you also need to remember that you should have a key goal with every Facebook ad you design. Simply letting people know your company exists isn’t enough.

Whether you’re trying to sell more products, earn more social media followers, or promote a deal, make sure every ad links to a relevant page on your site that encourages a visitor to take action. By keeping these points in mind and having a clear goal, you’re much more likely to boost brand awareness and revenue with your Facebook advertising – even if you don’t have a big marketing budget.