5 Facebook Marketing Tips to Promote a Business (Organic VS. Paid)

Have you used Facebook to promote your business? Are you struggling with the reach of your organic Facebook posts?

In this article, you will learn:

1. The best ways to promote organic content on Facebook
2. How to plan and schedule your posts
3. How to explore ideas for creating diversified post content for maximum engagement
4. How to set the budget to promote your posts
5. How to measure the performance of your organic content (experimenting with post variables and buyer personas)
6. How to identify the most successful posts that lead to conversion, capture insights, and use them for post modeling

Here is a complete walkthrough on how to use the organic and paid marketing strategies on Facebook to promote your business.

Facebook Marketing: Organic vs. Paid

There are two key differences when considering organic or paid promotion on Facebook. The first is that organic content is free and it's the soul of Facebook feed. People find it interesting, but with increasing users and changing Facebook algorithms, the reach of organic content is decreasing day by day. The second is that social networks are being designed in such a way that businesses have to pay to show up in the feed of a wider audience. But, both types of marketing have their own merits. So, before we discuss it further, let's have a brief overview of the difference between the two with the help of an infographic.Ā

How to Promote Organic Content On Facebook?

You can promote the posts you publish on your business page using Facebook. Facebook algorithms allow your posts to reach a wider audience when promoted. You cannot ignore post promotion on Facebook because it's crucial to your overall success on the social networking platform.

It's important to note that organic content can't do wonders without any paid promotion as the reach of organic posts is dependent on page followers, most of which will not see the posts. There is no certainty that the posts you create on your Facebook business page will reach your intended audience. According to social media experts, you should consider yourself fortunate if about 10% of your audience is able to see your posts while scrolling through their feed. Due to these circumstances, you should have a strategy in place to use your organic and paid content to work in tandem to achieve the best possible ROI.

The ultimate purpose of Facebook organic posts is to promote to the audience that is aware of your brand, products, and services. They will be receptive to your promotional offers when announced. So, the objectives of your posts should be to:

1. Educate your audience
2. Create brand awareness
3. Build excitement around the product and the company
4. Engage through community involvement

Here is the step-by-step plan to promote your business using both organic and paid tactics on Facebook.Ā

1.Ā  Plan Your Facebook Posts and Scheduling

The biggest mistake people make when planning their Facebook posts is using the wrong posting frequency. You may create tons of poor-quality content but it will not help you achieve your objectives. The best practice is to focus on quality rather than quantity and promote those posts to reach larger audiences that might be interested in your product.

You don't need to post every day or twice or thrice a day in order to prove your existence. Five quality posts per week may be far more effective than three average or poor quality posts a day. You can use a scheduling tool such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social to make your life easy.Ā

2. Create Diversified Post Content for Maximum Engagement

The next thing you should pay attention to is the variety of posts. These posts should not take a lot of time to produce. If you're struggling to create quality posts in a given time frame, here are a few ideas to create different types of posts that will engage your audiences.

• Tell a story that resonates with real people
• Ask questions
• Share behind the scene photos of your business
• Share trending topics
• Share branded graphics with your company logo, fonts, and colors
• “Before and after” stories
• “This or that” analogy
• Share useful tips
• Customer highlights
• Product highlights
• Customer reviews of something they have tried which is related to your industry
• Share facts that answer the questions of your audience
• Share infographics and videos
• Share product photos and description
• Show some brand personality and share light-hearted humor
• Provide links to your blog posts
• Announce contests and giveaways
• Announce discounts and sales
• Share user-generated content

Apart from that, you should also follow these tips when posting on Facebook.

• Post consistently
• Test various posting frequencies
• Build a strong brand using personal videos with clarity and creativity
• Choose the right hashtags
• Create a branded hashtag
• Partner with micro-influencers to increase the reach of your posts
• Convert your social media audience into your email subscribers
• Use emojis
• Add CTAs everywhere
• Track and learn from your best performing posts

3. Set Your Budget for Promoting Posts

Determine how much money you can afford to spend to promote your organic content. It is not necessary to boost all the posts you publish. You can choose the top 10 posts per month and test them using paid promotion. The ideal budget to promote a post can be anywhere between $10 and $20. If you choose a lesser amount your ad may not run more than 2-3 days. Just choose a consistent number in the beginning and it will pay off exponentially.

4. Test Different Buyer Personas and Post Variables

After deciding the number of posts and the budget for boosting those posts, start testing their impact. Identify buyer personas which are also known as Facebook avatars; they may have different opinions and likes. You can create a variety of content for different Facebook avatars and do some testing to get valuable insights that would help you tremendously in your social media marketing.

Apart from the avatars you can also create content for different image types and styles of copy and present it to your Facebook audience. The insights you gather after people respond to your experimental posts will give you a lot of data that will help you know what's working and what's not in your posts and ads.

5.Ā  Identify the Most Effective Facebook Posts to Model

A post created with an engagement objective should have a cost per the objective of less than $0.08. Videos and blogs should have even less cost per objective. For your blog, you can aim for a CPO of less than $0.50. You can turn your top-performing posts into ads in Facebook Ads Manager by using their post IDs and running them as part of your preliminary campaigns. This way, you are likely to get thousands of likes and hundreds of shares and comments on your posts. When a post performs well, people are likely to notice it and it will lead to even more attention from your audiences.

The Conclusion

You should use Facebook not only to generate leads and sales but also for nurturing relationships. Establish a bond of trust by consistently being in touch and integrating your business into the lives of your customers and prospects.

This is essential for establishing your business as a trustworthy brand that people can use and refer to their friends and acquaintances. This requires using your organic Facebook content to work in unison with your paid content. Try this strategy in your business, analyze the results, and share your comments below.