Successfully combining paid advertising and organic content for Facebook marketing

Successfully combining paid advertising and organic content on Facebook in 2014

Marketing professionals all around the world, whether online or offline will know that the marketing environment can change significantly at any given time. Social media is a notoriously flexible and changeable medium, as users and owners try to figure out how to best optimise the sites. Just recently we have seen Facebook introduce a new brand page layout.

The latest change in the world of social media is one that was perhaps inevitable from the conception of social networking but has now set the bar for the future of social media marketing. In December 2013, Facebook released a document called 'Generating business results on Facebook.' In this document the company advise that they 'expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.'

What does this mean? Basically, it means that Facebook have effectively said that businesses will now need to ‘pay to play’. Business pages that want their content shown on their fans feeds will have to invest capital in boosting these posts and increasing their visibility.

Facebook do have a reasonable justification for this to some extent. Each user only has one feed, and on average they will have 250 people and over 50 brands competing for their attention on that feed. This can equate to content overload.

Naturally, there has been a strong reaction to this announcement in the industry, with many marketers advocating moves away from Facebook. As 2014 progresses we may very well see a decline in business pages on Facebook as smaller businesses are ‘out-bid’ for space by larger brands.

Marketers can expect to see drops of around 20% in their post engagement, a worrying figure since before the changes were announced it was estimated that only around 16% of your fans would see your content organically.

What does this Facebook change mean for marketers?

The first and most obvious change is that a larger budget will need to be allocated for your companies Facebook channel. This is where businesses have to ask themselves how valuable their Facebook accounts are to them, and where many smaller companies may feel that Facebook falls short of the mark.
When determining whether it is worth having a Facebook page for your company there are several considerations that marketers need to consider:

• Why was the Facebook page set up in the first place? If there were clear objectives at that point are they still being met and do they inform your objectives for your marketing plan and corporate objective?
• What content do you post on your page? If you’ve already got an engaged audience you don’t want to throw them away.
• What are the referral traffic analytics like? If people are already coming through to your website from your Facebook page you don’t want to close that channel.

Facebook’s changes don’t mean that your content will be completely invisible to your audience but it does mean harder work in terms of getting the content right. There will be much higher standards of content being produced by the larger brands, and much more research will need to be undertaken into your audience to determine what will work [see our section ‘Getting the content right].

With the increases in budget, marketers will have a much sharper focus on ROI. As businesses pay out for advertising they will expect to see some direct returns on investment. ROI has been a long-standing subject of debate within the social media world, with many people claiming you can’t provide a realistic ROI or that social media is too difficult to measure. This is not the case.

Measuring ROI

Facebook insights provide a wealth of useful data for marketers and in conjunction with Google analytics can provide a realistic and workable ROI.

Top Tip: Ask your web developer to set up a bespoke report on Google that tracks referral traffic from social media sites to goal completions.

These changes, although they will affect every business using Facebook, do not have to spell the end of your account. Yes, they do mean that more paid advertising will need to be utilised but that should only be a part of your overall social media strategy, and not the only activity you undertake.

You can pay for people to see your content but at the end of the day, if they don’t like it they won’t engage with it. The power of viral content is still as potent as it ever was, so for a successful Facebook account you will need a balanced approach and combine good content with paid advertising.

The key is not to panic as you see engagement rates drop, but to take a measured approach. Before you start creating adverts and content, get the measure of your page. Understand who likes it, what posts work and identify areas for improvement if there are any. Like any planning in marketing, you need to audit before you can dive in.

Photo Credit: Peter Forret via Compfight cc

Creating shareable content

As I mentioned above there is going to be a continued rise in the standard of content being created. Big brands will inevitably take the cake (smaller businesses can’t really afford to throw people into space like Red Bull, or fly across the Atlantic in a hot air balloon). But content is still king when it comes to social media and you should invest time into creating, useful, well-crafted posts and assets.

Big brands getting it right in 2013 included Volvo and their Van Damme video, which demonstrated the precision steering of Volvo’s trucks. The video has been watched over 69 million times and has become the most watched automotive commercial on YouTube ever.

A smaller company who got it right in 2013 was DollarShaveClub.com with a video about their one dollar razors that went viral and has had over 13 million views, boosting the company’s sales and brand awareness. You've probably seen it, but I still meet people who haven't!

So what do you need ?

1. Research your audience: Who are they? What do they like? Use Facebook’s graph search to map the interest of your fans. Find your audience and reflect their interests.
2. What has worked before? Have a look at your Facebook insights and find out what posts have had the best engagement levels previously. Establish what it is about those posts that your audience liked, were there similarities? You could also look to recycle some of these posts.
3. Watch the competition. Firstly, let’s be clear, don’t copy! But get inspiration from your peers, research the market and look at what’s working for competitors. You’re going after the same markets so establishing what elements are working for them will help you to build your content strategy.
4. Move with the times. As the bar rises with content make sure you’re keeping up with social media trends. Do your audience read your blogs? Would a video be better? Video is quickly becoming the most prevalent form of content and is shared and engaged with more than any other type of content on social media.
5. Plan, measure, adjust. If you haven’t already, put a content marketing strategy in place. This strategy should sit alongside your overall marketing plan. It should have objectives, examine your audience, the demographic data of social media platforms and outline the content that you will be using. You can then measure the effectiveness of the content in relation to your objectives and adjust it accordingly.

Getting the advertising right

Paying to promote your content should always come as the second step. You don’t want to pay to promote something that no one will engage with.

The key to successfully combining paid and unpaid content on Facebook is to see what performs organically and then bolster that with paid advertising.

As with content, you want to make sure that your advertising is relevant, targeted and effective. This is where you are spending money, so you need to ensure that you can make it count and justify your spend. You need to:

• Research. Again, you need to know who you’re advertising to and what they want to see. Having facts and information to build your advertising strategy from is crucial.
• Decide what you want the advert to do. Do you want to direct people to your Facebook page or to your own website?

• Know what you can do. Look at the different types of adverts that Facebook offer. There are many different ways to brand and target your adverts and tools that allow you to create your own. You’ll need to have clear budgets set (again based on your objectives) so you know what you can realistically achieve.

• Split Test: As with PPC you need to make sure that your advert is effective and split testing is the best way to discover this. Facebook allows you to split test the variables between your ads, which means you can find the cheapest clicks and which of your adverts are performing best.
• Plan, measure and adjust. As with content you need to have a plan in place for advertising to meet your objectives and you must monitor and measure your adverts so you know what’s working and what isn’t. Over time this will allow you to develop an effective and efficient Facebook advertising campaign.

And Finally…
The changes to Facebook do not mean the end of business marketing on the site, and you can make a successful business page by combining paid and unpaid content. The biggest tip is to be informed through research, not just about your own audience but about the macro environment as a whole. Everything else will lead on from that.