- Chapter 3: FaceFirst: How Facebook Fits In to Your Business and Other Marketing Efforts
- Evaluating Social Media Experts
- What Businesses That Profit from Facebook Do
- How Do You Synch Up Your Other Marketing Efforts with Your Facebook Campaigns?
From the Rough Cut
From the Rough Cut
From the Rough Cut
How Do You Synch Up Your Other Marketing Efforts with Your Facebook Campaigns?
Unless you do all your marketing yourself (and my condolences if you do), you have multiple role players. You might have multiple departments, consultants, and specialists, or you might be an agency that specializes in one channel and works with other agencies. Each party can either cooperate to achieve corporate goals or act like a petty fiefdom fighting the others and diminishing overall results. Sometimes these are called silos to emphasize how independent their power and operation can be.
Social media leads to more role overlap and creates more potential turf wars than ever before, so consider how Facebook will work with your other departments, role players, and specialists. Create a task force with representatives from each group to outline how they can quickly and constructively communicate.
Facebook + Print, Web, and Email
If you're already producing graphics for print media, web pages, email marketing, or display ads, you might be able to use these in Facebook custom tabs, advertising, and posts. Familiarize your creative team with the parameters of Facebook. For example, ad images are only 110 pixels wide and 80 pixels high. If the personnel doing advertising are different from the creative folks—and they likely are—make sure they have the leeway to adapt existing creative elements for these small image sizes. Often, simply reusing an image from another place results in a picture that's too small to really see what it is, and ad performance suffers as a result.
Another difference between graphics for Facebook and most other places is that Facebook graphics need to change more frequently. Ads burn out, so you constantly need more images. Posts are seen for a day or two at most, and then it's time to post again. Posts with images receive 50%–65% more interaction as those without images.1
What will you post next? If creative folks are going to be involved, they need to think ahead and provide 60–90 days' worth of images ahead of time.
Who handles choosing and buying your stock photography? Here again, the Facebook advertising and posting people might need their own access, and you'll need to budget for these stock images. Fortunately, for the advertising purposes, you need only the smallest photos, and they're the least expensive. There are also free image sources, covered in Chapter 9, "The Face of Advertising: How to Capitalize on the Most Powerful Marketing Tool."
Facebook + Google Marketing
If you're also doing AdWords, Bing, or Yahoo! pay-per-click advertising, will you use the same message from your text ads in your Facebook ads and Facebook posts? Perhaps not, but at least have the discussion about whether your high-level strategies are the same, whether the tactical implementations are similar or different, and why.
Vary Your Message for Each Stage of the Search Funnel
In most cases, I recommend you build your multichannel marketing strategy on the premise that consumers will hear about you on Facebook before they search for you in a search engine.
Facebook can play a mass-marketing role to spread awareness of your brand and how you solve consumers' particular problem; then search marketing can pick up consumers who are almost ready to buy. Facebook has to grab attention and interest from people who might never have heard of you, while an AdWords ad might just verify to them that your offering addresses the keyword they just searched for.
The text on your website might include keywords for search engine optimization purposes, but it could also include persuasive messages that better fit consumers in the information gathering or evaluation stages of the buying cycle.
Testing Similar and Different Creative
I've had opportunities to test the same ad headlines simultaneously on AdWords and Facebook and found that, as usual in digital marketing, people responded differently. While promoting channels in three new cities for a national radio network, I tested ads specific to the most popular musicians the network played. For the headline, I tested just the artist's name versus "Do you like <artist>?". It turned out that usually the question worked better on Facebook but worse on AdWords, although it varied somewhat by city. Sometimes I sound like a broken record saying "test it!" to every idea a client or student of mine has, but I've often found this kind of varied result across channels, markets, geographies, and audiences. You really do need to test every variation to find out what works best.
Facebook + PR
Public relations in the social media age means managing perceptions and working with influencers. I go into much more detail about Facebook PR (along with crisis response planning and building relationships with journalists) in Chapter 12, but in terms of coordinating the work in various silos, the people doing your Facebook work need to be coordinated strategically with those doing branding, reputation management, and positioning. All your choices in the preceding three disciplines affect your how you'll craft your Facebook posts and conduct your customer service.
Facebook + Email Marketing
How often will you email your subscribers as opposed to post on your fan page? Will there be any coordination between those messages, or will they always be on different topics for different goals? While choosing your strategy here, look for opportunities to test campaigns on both channels and see what works best. See if you can learn something about which of your activities works best in email and which on a fan page.
Here are some rules of thumb for developing this coordinated strategy:
- Use email for direct sales and news.
- Very few companies email more than weekly without losing lots of subscribers, so be sparing in your use of email.
- Use Facebook posts for multimedia—especially video because email has never supported video well.
- Use Facebook posts socially to engage and look for social responses.
- Use Facebook posts to survey customers for your own research.
Are your email subscribers mostly previous customers and your Facebook fans mostly potential customers? Often this is the case. It's easier to get a previous customer to buy, and sales messages are less offensive to them. Therefore, if that describes your email subscribers, you'll be able to sell more directly to them than to your Facebook fans.
Fans can require a more introductory or educational approach, but sometimes the fans of a businesses are mostly previous customers. Just gauge this before deciding how you'll post. Most of the fan gathering techniques in Chapter 10, "FaceHook: Capturing Qualified Prospects as Fans and Group Members," pull in people who will need some familiarization with your brand and offerings first, so your Facebook posts won't be as aggressive as your emails.
Facebook + TV
Right now 18 TV shows each has more than 10 million Facebook fans.2 TV shows do all kinds of cool things with Facebook, including
- Posting commercials and episode clips
- Posting previews of new episodes before they air
- Advertising when their new season starts
- Finding new fans by advertising to fans of similar shows
- Asking for votes when they're up for an award viewers can vote for
- Adding photos of scenes
- Creating Facebook Events if they'll be represented at events open to the public
- Reminding viewers, on the day of the show, to watch
- Posting live shows and responding in real time while the show is on
- Posting behind-the-scenes clips and special features
What about the sports we normally see only on TV or the Web? The National Hockey League (NHL) discovered more about its demographics after it delved into the Facebook Insights about its 2.2 million fans. It turns out they're younger, more affluent, and more tech savvy than fans of other major sports. The NHL's better understanding of who its fans is changing the way it markets to them.
Facebook + Radio
As I mentioned earlier, Facebook can help you penetrate new markets. Tracking is difficult because Arbitron's cume (cumulative audience score3 is the standard measurement, and when you're using multiple marketing channels like billboards, search ads, Facebook ads, Facebook posts, and local events advertised locally, it's virtually impossible to isolate the effect of one channel. I decided to send Facebook ad clickers to the network's "listen online" page so that I could get them listening to the music right away. That's not the ultimate goal, which is to get them listening in their cars and showing in the cume, but it's a great, trackable first step.
Also, I had some success sending Facebook folks to event web pages and hearing that an above-average number of people showed up who had never heard of the radio station before. They hadn't heard about it on the radio. I can't be sure (this is a really difficult strategy to track), but there's a very good chance these people were some of the hundreds who clicked on our Facebook ads.
Other Facebook strategies for radio include building a fan base and growing your email list. Facebook and radio seem to work synergistically because listeners feel a personal connection to the artists and the DJs, and when their curiosity is aroused, they can go to a Facebook page for more pictures and videos. If you have musicians do in-studio performances, you can post videos of that on Facebook. Having a huge listener base also means you can repeatedly tell fans about your Facebook page and grow a targeted fan base for free. This is one of the only cases in which fans not from ads are absolutely the right audience.