How startups can use Facebook marketing to brand, sell, and grow

Facebook marketing is a must for startups looking to grow their brand and sell more products and services. Its many built-in tools offer great ways of generating interest and awareness and also allow brands to make sales directly on the platform.

With more than 1 billion daily active users around the globe, Facebook is the number 1 social media platform in the world, and the advantages of branding on Facebook are pretty clear. Not only do you have access to a vast audience, but you can find your exact target audience through content and ads. And you can choose how much to spend on ad campaigns, which aren't nearly as expensive as other forms of advertising like television commercials, billboards, and PPC ads on Google.

As you dive into the world of Facebook marketing, you need to know the best practices and the right tools to use to make your startup stand out. Here are some pointers to get you started.

Pay for ads and boosted posts

It's well known by now that Facebook marketing is based on a pay-to-play model. "Fans of business pages do not really see the posts from those pages, as only 1 to 3% of posts actually get delivered to them," says Sally Hendrick, Facebook experiential branding strategist for Social Media Traffic School. "However, if you put some ad spend behind your posts, you'll be able to reach the right people with your content marketing," she adds.

Once you come up with a budget for your Facebook marketing campaign, you can start crafting it. Michael Anderson, marketing and SEO specialist at GeoJango Maps, suggests investing in Facebook ads and boosted posts. You create Facebook ads from scratch and then advertise them to a specific audience, while boosted posts "are pieces of content that have already been posted to your timeline that you then decide to advertise to a wider audience. They both work well for drawing in new leads," Anderson explains.

Use the tools provided

According to Hendrick, two tools you should use for your Facebook marketing campaigns are Facebook Audience Insights and Lookalike Audiences. With Audience Insights, you can figure out who your competitors are and what interests people have, which will "give you ideas on what type of content to share that would appeal to this market," she says.

Lookalike Audiences is a tool that allows you to clone your existing dedicated audience and target them with content and ads. "The qualities of your existing customers, website visitors, and video viewers are matched up with other people on Facebook that you haven't reached yet," says Hendrick. "The likelihood of these digital clones of doing business with you is multiplied due to the matching characteristics with your existing customers."

Nyha Shree, a co-founder of jumper.ai, believes that another important tool is Messenger, "Like email, it allows personalized one-on-one communication with your audience, meaning you can really serve the best information to the right people at the right time. However, it beats email because its open and click rates are often four times higher."

Test and analyze your campaigns

Facebook marketing is not an exact science, but you can improve your open and click-through rates by extensively testing and analyzing your efforts. Shree says that you cannot run a campaign without doing A/B testing to figure out what's going to provide the best engagement and return.

Keep in mind that Facebook ads have built-in analytics tools, so use them to see what's working and what's not.

Build trust with your audience

In order to achieve ad and content success on Facebook, you need to form meaningful relationships with your audience before you try to sell your products or services to them. Engaging with them one-on-one and providing them with helpful content are ways you can do just that.

"If your audience doesn't trust you, they certainly won't click on a link and purchase your product," says Anderson. "With this in mind, the biggest do of Facebook marketing is to get to know your audience and work towards building trust."

Creating your Facebook marketing campaign

"Facebook used to be a great medium for generating interest and awareness," says Shree. "However, thanks to developments in their own ecosystem and from third-party services, it's grown into a great place to also make sales to those interested customers."

Facebook can seem like an intimidating platform because it's so vast. But with the correct tools and tips in your back pocket, you can find success on the site and experience, firsthand, why Facebook marketing is effective for building audiences and selling your startup's products and services.