Facebook Marketing: A Complete Guide
Don’t let the shouting from overzealous “marketers” scare you off – Facebook is far from dead.
In 2024, the biggest user group on Facebook was made up of people aged 25 to 34.
You know who fits into that range? A perfect blend of Gen Z and millennial consumers.
Together, these two generations account for nearly half of the population. And as such, they’re responsible for close to 40% of global spending.
Facebook offers a unique opportunity to naturally connect with your ideal audience, present your brand and offerings in an engaging way, and even add some advertising dollars into the mix from time to time to create the perfect storm of traffic and conversions.
In this robust guide, we’ll go through the basic principles of both paid and organic marketing on Facebook, then introduce you to tactics and examples that will help you bring them to life on your own Page.
(Don’t have a Facebook Page for your business just yet? Don’t worry, that’s one of the first steps we’ll walk you through!)
Understanding Facebook Marketing for SMBs
Of course, you’re familiar with Facebook, it’s the most popular social network after all.
If you haven’t been on Facebook for a while and prefer to stay within your smaller bubbles, you may not realize it also offers a whole world of marketing opportunities for SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) — like you!
Marketing on Facebook involves creating a dedicated Facebook Page for your business (more on that soon) and using it to promote your brand, services, or products. By getting to know your ideal audience, optimizing your Page, and tapping into all the different types of content you can create, businesses on Facebook can practically create an online presence akin to a secondary website to reach potential buyers.
And it doesn’t stop at organic marketing. You can also pay to promote ads in various formats to maximize engagement.
With a strategic approach, just like the three-pronged strike we’ll walk you through today, Facebook may just be the perfect marketing channel to boost your business through the customer journey from awareness to conversion to retention.
Part 1: Create a Facebook Marketing Strategy (Organic)
Organic Facebook marketing, or inbound marketing, is all about sharing content on Facebook without any paid promotion.
Much like search engine optimization (SEO), it allows you to achieve visibility and engagement without a financial investment. It typically takes longer to see results with this strategy compared to the quick engagement ads achieve. However, the impact has a way of building upon itself, is often longer lasting, and of course, it offers a no-cost solution that fits into your marketing budget as long as you have the time to spend.
On that note, let’s get into the first seven steps we would take to establish a strong organic Facebook marketing approach so you can maximize your reach and engagement.
1. Create Your Facebook Business Page
First, let’s set up a Facebook Page!
This Page will serve as a hub where customers will discover and interact with your business as you share and perhaps promote content, showcase your offerings, and deliver all-around exceptional experiences (right?!).
And, the setup is simple and free.
To get started, log in to your Facebook account, select the “grid icon” in the upper right corner near your profile photo, and click Pages.
Next, you’ll be able to use the + Create new profile or Page to, well, create your new business Page!
Now, select Public Page > Next.
You should end up on the “Create a Page” screen. Here, you just have to fill in the basics: “Page name,” “Category,” and “Bio.”
When that’s done, hit Create Page and just like that, you’ve got a business Page on Facebook!
We would absolutely recommend you take a little more time here to continue enhancing your Page. This guide from Meta will walk you through much of the additional information that would be helpful to add.
And to really max out your chances to get in front of your ideal shoppers, check out this walkthrough focused on boosting visibility.
2. Determine Your Target Audience
A Facebook following of thousands might seem like you’re really crushin’ it, but if those followers have no real interest in your offerings, it’s not going to mean diddly squat for engagement.
You want to cultivate a relevant audience, so you always have a group of people eager to interact and convert.
That means doing the work to identify and speak to your target audience.
Your target market is the collection of folks most likely to purchase from you. Marketing to them saves your time, energy, and money, as you won’t be wasting your breath yelling into the void.
Typically, this group shares a bunch of common traits, like:
- Demographic
- Interests
- Purchase intent
- Challenges or pain points
- Goals and motivations
You can determine these traits by examining your current customers, checking the analytics for your website and social followers, leveraging customer feedback and support conversations, and even conducting competitor analyses.
Once you can create a persona (or a few!) that represents who you’re targeting on Facebook, you can use this information to guide the content you share on the platform.
3. Build a Content Strategy
A content strategy provides a map for creating impactful content for the audience you identified above.
It guides the purpose, the “why,” behind posting what you do. Just like getting to know your audience, having a strategy here is critical to making the most of your marketing money and effort.
Here are the basics of putting together this strategy:
- Speak to your audience: You know them. Now, figure out what they want to hear from you and focus on that.
- Set goals: Establish SMART goals for your content to hit. Usually, these are going to align with business goals like increasing traffic, conversions, etc.
- Create a content calendar: Maintain consistency by planning, creating, and scheduling content in advance. Don’t forget to include a mix of content types and topics and plan for seasonal events.
- Measure and adjust: Use analytics to track performance against your goals, and refine as needed.
Above all, as you’re just getting started with Facebook marketing, keep your content strategy adaptable, don’t overcomplicate it, and flex as desired.
4. Get Active When Your Followers Are
Hey, we get it– It’s tempting to share on Facebook whenever inspiration hits.
However, because of the way social media algorithms work, engagement leads to more engagement. That means planning your posting times for when people are online can significantly enhance the impact of the content you’ve put so much effort into creating.
In our full guide to the best times to post on social media, here’s what we uncovered about when you should post on Facebook:
Best days to post:
Worst day to post:
Best posting times:
- Monday: 9 a.m. to 12 p.m.
- Tuesday: 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 p.m.
- Wednesday: 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.
- Thursday: 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 p.m.
5. Engage, Engage, Engage
Even more so than many other social media platforms, Facebook is not a billboard.
Simply plopping down a post and walking away won’t get you far. People want to interact on Facebook. They have questions, concerns, and complaints — and they’re not shy about leaving them as Facebook comments, reviews, mentions, messages, and so on.
So, it’s time to get genuinely social.
If you don’t want to spend all day online, we recommend dedicating a specific time each day to converse and clean up any spam on your Page. You might also plan your time around the best posting times of the day to maximize your productivity!
If you’re overwhelmed with making sure nothing slips through the cracks, hit Google to look for a social media management platform (some biggies are Hootsuite, Buffer, SocialPilot, etc.) that fits your needs and budget. There are dozens and dozens of these apps on that market that make it easy to see, prioritize, and quickly respond to communications on Facebook —and usually any other social sites your business is active on.
6. Focus on Value, Not Spam
Yes, your Facebook Page is designed to connect with customers and, ultimately, drive sales.
That said, there’s no chance your audience is looking for endless advertisements.
Here’s our spin on the “rule of thirds” that will keep your Facebook productive while also creating relatable content that resonates:
- One-third of your content should be creative: Share your exciting ideas for the upcoming season, customer stories, etc.
- One-third of your content should foster direct engagement with your audience: Share user content that’s been shared with you, run polls, and ask for participation in the comments: What do they think about your newest offering? What would they like to see next?
- The last third of your content can now focus on actively promoting your business and offerings: Cha-ching!
7. Consider Facebook SEO
Social SEO applies traditional SEO strategies to your social media profiles and content to improve your visibility for your niche audience.
How does that translate to you and your Facebook Page? There are a few achievable tactics you can enact to tap into Facebook SEO:
- Identify and apply Facebook keywords: What content are people looking for and interacting with on Facebook? You can hop into your Page Insights to see what your followers are interacting with (we’ll dive into this more later). We also recommend trying out using Google Ads’ Keyword Planner to evaluate the popularity of your typical target phrases and discover new keyword ideas. Then, incorporate the best phrases across your page where possible: your username, the “About” section, posts, captions, etc.
- Leverage local SEO: If you have a physical location, adding your address enhances visibility in local search results. For businesses with multiple locations, create individual location Pages.
- Optimize alt text: Since Facebook is a highly visual platform, attach optimized alt text to graphics to improve accessibility and searchability.
Part 2: Steps To Excel With Facebook Ads
Aside from organic marketing, business owners can also conduct paid marketing —aka paid advertising or outbound marketing —via Facebook.
Facebook’s ad platform is really powerful; you can make, run, and show ads in lots of places: your Facebook feed, Messenger, and even other apps and sites. You can even design ads in all kinds of diverse formats, such as single still images, videos, slideshows, and more. And as you’ll see, one of the best features is the ability to target that highly specific audience you identified in part one.
Ready to see it for yourself? Perfect, let’s run through getting your first ad setup, and then explore the best tips to be successful with Facebook advertising.
8. Create Your First Facebook Ad
To create a Facebook ad, go to your business Page just like we already learned how to do.
Log in, select the “grid icon” in the upper right corner, go to Pages, and select the business Page where you want to run an ad.
From the “Manage Page” menu on the left, visit Create ads. When you land on the “Create new ad” page, you’ll see all kinds of opportunities for customization.
First, we highly recommend clicking Change in the “Goal” section to see all your choices, including getting leads, likes, website traffic, and beyond. It’s fine to go with Facebook’s automatic recommendation, but it’s also great to know your options!
Now on to perhaps the most important element…what your ad will look like!
Scroll down to see “Ad creative,” where you can choose to turn an existing post into an ad or start from scratch with your imagery, content, and what call to action you’d prefer to display.
Next, in the “Audience” section, you can choose the automatic recommendation (“Advantage audience”), the People you choose through targeting option, or build a new audience specifically for this ad via the Create new button.
Next up, check out Duration. Here you will choose how long this ad will run as well as set your all-important daily budget. To the right of this panel, you’ll see your “Estimated daily results” based on your chosen budget.
Once you add your payment information, you’re ready to publish your ad to get it live!
These are just the major components of creating your first ad. You’ll see all kinds of other tweaks to make on this page, including adjusting your ad placement to maximize your budget and turning on a Meta Pixel that you can place on your website to measure how well your ad is driving traffic.
The more you advertise on Facebook, the deeper you’ll see the rabbit hole go. If you’re seeing success and want to dive into optimizing Facebook ads as a main social media marketing channel, we recommend checking out Meta’s guide to using Ads Manager, a more detailed platform for creating, running, and boosting your ads across the Metasphere.
9. Optimize Budget by Knowing Your Goals
Ads perform best when they have a well-defined objective.
Setting clear goals not only helps track ad performance but also ensures you’re spending your budget the most efficiently.
For instance, you may be in the early stages of building your local community, so ads that raise awareness and bring traffic to your Facebook profile are the ultimate goal. Or, if you’re in growth mode and need to make some serious cash, you might be all about ads that direct Facebook visitors right through to key conversion points on your website. Knowing these specifics will also help you narrow down the best budget, audience, and other details for each ad.
Wherever you land, when you go to create Facebook ads, be sure in the “Goal” section to select the option that best matches up, from choices like “Get more Page likes,” “Get more leads,” “Get more messages,” and so on.
10. Refine Audience and Location
As understanding and meeting your audience is pretty much universally good advice, of course, we already touched on this while discussing organic marketing. It applies here, too.
When creating Facebook ads, you have several audience options. Facebook will do the targeting for you based on what it knows from your Page, but you can create a blanket audience to apply to your whole Page. Plus, you can even create hyper-specific niche audiences that you want to target for individual ads or timeframes.
The level of customization is up to you, but here are the basics of what Facebook currently lets you refine in the audience category:
- Location: Ideal for businesses with a local physical component. Focusing on location allows you to reach people in your area who are more likely to find your products or services most relevant.
- Age range and gender: These details allow you to better align with your target market.
- Demographics: Focusing on education, finances, career, and more makes it more likely for you to reach real potential purchasers.
- Interests: From Facebook Pages they’ve liked to the entertainment content they consume, honing in on Facebook users with interests that align with your brand is wise.
- Behavior: Mostly mobile users? Logging in from out of the country? The way certain audiences use Facebook may have a big impact on how and if you choose to serve your ads to them.
11. Make Your Content Compelling
You quickly learn that strong copywriting is super important for marketing, and Facebook ads are no exception!
No matter the ad format, your written content must resonate with your ideal customer and inspire action. To get to this point, you must have taken your time with the previous steps to develop a clear understanding of who you’re targeting and what action you want them to take.
Now that you’re sitting down to actually create ads, here are the key components to think about:
- Headline: Engaging. Conversational. These are terms you want to be thinking about when creating a headline that captures attention. Avoid overused phrases, cheesy “marketing speak,” and hard-to-understand industry jargon (unless any of these are definitive to your brand). Your headline serves as your ad’s opening line and must be as captivating as the first sentence of a great novel.
- Description: Now it’s time to add the most critical context. What does your audience want to know? How can they save on this purchase? How you would answer potential objections? About new features? This text, usually shown along with imagery of some sort, should be highly valuable and again, eye-catching, to encourage people to stop scrolling and take a closer look.
And always take the time to tailor your Facebook ad copy anytime you’re addressing even a slightly different audience segment, even if the offer remains the same.
12. Keep It Interesting With Various Content Types
You already know you need quality and visually appealing imagery for your ads, so we won’t harp on that. But have you thought about the spice of life —variety?
Facebook has an incredible number of ad formats available.
- Image ads can take on your classic design, or you can use panoramas and 360-degree photos.
- Feed ads can feature traditional and 360-degree videos, and you can also advertise via Reels for another video-based approach.
- Carousel ads, which enable you to feature a slideshow of still images or videos, give you a chance to show off multiple different offerings or various features of the same one.
- Collection ads are kind of like carousel ads, but they send people to a different landing page for better engagement.
To learn the ins and outs of each ad format, Meta’s got a great breakdown here!
13. Take Advantage of A/B Testing
Clearly, you have a lot of options for how you choose to create Facebook ads. Experimentation can help you identify what performs the best for you, so you can stop guessing and reach maximum ROI.
Facebook has built some A/B testing capabilities into their advertising platform so you can compare various elements of the experience, such as:
- Format: Experiment with different formats to see which one captures your audience’s attention most effectively.
- Placement: While the Facebook news feed is considered prime advertising space, test alternative placements (like Messenger) to determine what works best for your business.
- Objective: While you may expect to benefit most from ad goals focused on page likes or lead gen, you may find that targeting conversions is better for your business.
- CTA: Test different CTA languages (“Book Now,” “Shop Now,” etc.) and links to see what drives the most of the type of engagement you want.
To learn more about why and where else to run A/B testing, don’t miss our own guide on the topic The Small Business A/B Testing Guide: How and Why To Run Split Tests.
14. Pay To Boost a Page Post
Boosting a post is Facebook’s way to pivot a regular organic Page post into an ad. It’s a super simple option for diving into advertising if you don’t have the time or energy to start from scratch.
To boost a post, you need Administrator or Manager access to the Facebook Page, and still have a Facebook Ads Manager account with a valid payment method set up.
From there, all you gotta do is choose the post you want to boost and click the Boost Post button at the bottom! (If the button is grayed out, that post can’t be boosted. It’s rare, but it can happen.)
Then, an ad customization screen will come up. Just like when you’re setting up a traditional ad, Facebook will automatically populate the goal, audience targeting, duration, budget, and other details. Go ahead and click Publish to boost your post right away.
However, we recommend you at least review the main sections just like we did above when creating our first ad to make sure you’re happy with everything before publishing.
For really robust instructions on this process, take a peek inside this guide.
Part 3: Measure Your Marketing Success With Facebook Analytics
Whew, we made it through the most laborious steps! Now, we get to observe the fruits of our labor by measuring our success and finding room for improvement.
If you’ve been here for a while, you know what that means — it’s analytics time, baby!
Thankfully, Facebook also makes this really approachable.
Just head over to your Page again and look at the “Manage Page” menu in the left sidebar. Find Insights.
Click See Details under “Page Overview” for a basic rundown of engagement on your page, from reach (that’s how many people saw at least one post) to likes, followers, comments, and more.
Scroll down to see more like your top post, a recounting of your recent content, and deets on your audience.
With time, this page will get more and more comprehensive. You can also visit your Meta Business Suite, which is where Ads Manager lives, and navigate to Insights again on the left side of the screen for a more data-heavy breakdown of page performance.
These analytics aren’t just fun for us nerds; they’re crucial for making our Facebook marketing even better (both ads and organic).
3 Facebook Marketing Examples To Steal Follow
Wow, enough with the boring shots of Facebook fields and graphs. Can we get some dogs and, wait a minute, diapers (?) up in here?!
Naturally.
1. User-Generated Content Enriches Newsfeed: Spark Paws
A brand’s user-generated content (UGC) is created by its users (or followers, customers, etc.) rather than by the brand itself. Often, brands will ask for permission to use, or even pay folks to use this content in either their paid or organic marketing.
In this example from the Spark Paws Facebook Page, the brand has reposted an undeniably eye-catching piece of UGC that’s relevant to the season and to their target audience to create organic content that promotes one of their more fun products —pet clothes!
2. Eye-Catching, Shoppable Ad Drives Conversions: Nora’s Nursery
Nora’s Nursery is aware that their product —well-made, reusable diapers — is initially much more expensive than their disposable counterparts. So, they address this argument head-on in this static Newsfeed ad. The copy and imagery both speak to how parents can save on their more costly product, and the call to action takes shoppers directly to a page where they can convert to cash in on the savings immediately.
3. Organic Reel Content Inspires Engagement: The Mystery Box Warehouse
The Mystery Box Warehouse of Gastonia, North Carolina, runs a delightfully unique promotion: anything you can carry out in one trip is yours for just twenty bucks!
This makes for some really creative shopping tactics —which they capture on video to turn into organic content with amazing sharing and virality potential.
How Will You Use Facebook To Become Your Own Best Marketer?
We swear we tried to keep it succinct, but there’s a lot to know about Facebook marketing!
It isn’t just about posting pretty pictures or throwing out the occasional ad — successfully marketing a small or medium-sized business on Facebook requires understanding your audience, crafting value-driven content, and incorporating ad spending very wisely. Always look back at your metrics to keep making data-driven decisions.
If you can do all of that with the help of what we’ve shown you here today, we salute you.
Nonetheless, if you need any support along the way, we’re here to help.
Yes, DreamHost is known for making web hosting and, now, even website building accessible for everyone, but did you also know about our roster of pro services, including marketing experts who can help you create an eye-catching, conversion-driving social media strategy?
Schedule a free marketing consultation and let us help you set up the marketing approach that’s best for you.
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