How to market a small business on Facebook

With around 2.89 billion monthly users, Facebook represents a huge amount of potential customers. 

For that reason, marketing your small business on Facebook can be incredibly effective if you know what you’re doing. 

In this handy guide, we’ll be looking into Facebook marketing. We’ll cover some specific Facebook marketing tools, like:

• Facebook ads
• Facebook insights
• Promote your business locally

To help you get the most out of your Facebook marketing campaign, we’ll also share some general advice and tips about how to do it, including:

• Outline your goals.
• Consider your tone of voice.
• Don’t push your business too hard.
• Post regular content.
• Nurture your profile.
• Promote your Facebook page.
• Use pictures and videos.

Direct advertising is the simplest way to market your small business on Facebook. You can use Facebook’s ad service to create personalised ads that will run across different platforms. 

It’s a valuable service, but shouldn’t be used on its own. You should combine your direct advertising with actual content that will help you find followers. 

Facebook insights is a marketing tool that will help you better understand your audience, so you can keep refining and improving your marketing strategy. 

With Facebook insights, you’ll gain access to valuable information about your audience, such as:

• Their demographic.
• The sort of pages they like and follow.
• Their language and location.
• How often they use Facebook. 
• Their purchasing history.

With all this information at your fingertips, you can target specific groups and easily measure the success of your marketing campaign. 

Facebook’s local business promotion service allows you to advertise to Facebook users in your local area. It’s like the regular ads service, but a lot more targeted. 

It’s great for locally-focused businesses that rely on foot traffic, like bars, cafes, and restaurants. But really it’s useful for any business looking to attract local customers. 

Much like any other marketing strategy, it’s important to outline your goals. What, specifically, are you trying to accomplish?

For example, you might want to improve website traffic by 10% or increase sales by 5%.

A clearly defined set of goals will give you something to work toward and help you measure the marketing campaign’s success.

Once you know your goals, you can start making concrete plans about how to achieve them. We’ll cover more on this in the next sections. 

Like all social media platforms, Facebook is a place for human interaction, first and foremost. For that reason, your posts should all be written in a personable, human voice. Try to avoid salesly language or industry jargon. 

The specific tone will depend on your particular brand guidelines. You can choose to be funny, serious, or soft and comforting, as long as it sounds like something an actual person would say, rather than a heartless business.

Following from our last point, one surefire way to put people off is by constantly pushing your business and products without any original content. 

When you’re managing a Facebook page for your business, people know you’re there for marketing, but there’s a certain degree of give and take. 

Accounts that are constantly trying to sell you something without offering anything in return can become annoying, so they’ll most likely be ignored or unfollowed. 

Most people check their social media pages more than once a day looking for fresh content, so most platforms are geared toward constant updates and news. 

Because of this, posting regularly is the best way to gain some traction on Facebook. Some people will tell you posting every day is the key, but that’s not always necessary. The important part is consistency. 

You should always post at the same times every week, so your followers know when to expect new content. Definitely don’t just repost old content for the sake of posting something. It will look lazy and uninspired. 

You should also think about what time of day you post content. Post at times when Facebook is busiest, usually on weekday afternoons. 

As we mentioned above, Facebook is all about relationships. So alongside regular posting, you should take the time to interact with your followers and nurture those relationships that will hopefully turn into loyal sales.

Here are some simple ways to nurture your relationship with your followers:

• Encourage comments, likes, and shares.
• Reply to comments.
• Engage with other people’s content by commenting, liking, and sharing. 
• Run competitions, polls, and surveys.

Embracing the “social” part of social media is a great way to improve your brand image and turn your followers into loyal customers. 

As a general rule of thumb, you should promote your different channels, not just Facebook, whenever it’s appropriate. 

You don’t have to shove it down people’s throats. Just include information about your Facebook page on your business website, business card, Instagram page, or any other social media channel you work with. 

Pictures and videos tend to get more attention on Facebook. If you just post a paragraph on it’s own, it’s much easier to ignore when people scroll through their newsfeeds. Even if you are posting text, it’s best to combine it with an image or graphic to stand out. 

Here are some easy ideas to get you started:

• Photos of new products.
• Videos of new products being used.
• Photos of you and your team. 
• Short biographical interviews. 
• Tutorial videos. 

Making a habit of posting things like this will be a huge boost to your Facebook profile. After a while, you’ll have a rich backlog of photos and videos that new followers can look through too.

If you manage to market your business on Facebook, it’ll lead to a huge boost in your sales, and that will lead to more complicated bookkeeping.

Financial management can be stressful and time-consuming when you’re self-employed. That’s why thousands of business owners use the Countingup app to make their financial admin easier. 

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like automatic expense categorisation, invoicing on the go, receipt capture tools, tax estimates, and cash flow insights, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 

Find out more here.