How to turn Facebook Likes into customers?

Facebook Commerce – Sell on Facebook

How to create value for customers and grow online sales using Facebook?

The underlying goal of every sales process is to create value for customers. Creating value is the only reason any business should exist. If a business isn’t creating value and is suffering losses, it should go out of business, as it is misusing resources and undermining prosperity.

In this post, I’m going to share with you 5 tips to help you continue to grow your ROI and boost online sales using Facebook. Pick the strategies and tactics you find most interesting and suitable for your business and start seeing your business grow.

5 Awesome Tips to drive Facebook Sales

#1: Create an offer with a clear call-to-action

The main goal of any brand on Facebook is to eventually bring in revenue. I wrote about how you can create a social media sales funnel. The underlying strategy – build a quality, targeted and engaged audience. This is critical to your Facebook sales funnel and should be strategized before you start selling. Fans are the most like to buy and they are always on the lookout for great offers from you.

The first thing you’ll want to do is create an offer post that announces your promotion. Promoting posts and creating ads for specific audiences helps you put the right products and services in front of the right people.

Generally, there are different types of Sales Offer/promotion:

1. Time-limited promo
2. Flash Sales
3. Promo Code

and the list goes on.

Try to make use of compelling words like “For a limited time” or “On sale Now” or “Hourly Special Deal” to catch your fans’ attention. Instead of buying at a later time, you can also offer incentives for booking or buying immediately. Throw in bonus to waive shipping fees, offer an extra week for your service or even a buy-one-get-one-free and so forth. Ideally, post time-sensitive offers with a money-back guarantee.

You’ve likely started to notice most of these ‘sales-oriented’ posts come with a link or a strong call-to-action.

If you are driving traffic to a sales page, you may try to embed the “call-to-action” buttons (Shop Now, Sign Up, Book Now and Learn Now) through the power editor.

#2: Create a Seamless Store Experience on Facebook With 3rd Party Store Application or Custom Tab

Setting up a Facebook store is easy – add a custom shopping tab using any 3rd party solutions such as Ecwid, ShopTab and StoreYa and you’re ready to go. These solutions literally let you bring any store you have online right into your Facebook Page. This is where Social Media meets Social Commerce.

Many predicted that the future of online shopping is in social shopping. Get your products out there where the people are. It helps to monetise the time and efforts you put into maintaining your Facebook fan page. The following infographic from Payvment gives a concise view of what is the landscape of Facebook commerce and how you can take that as a reference to formulate your social media marketing strategy for 2014.

#3: Advanced Facebook Advertising

Promoting posts and creating ads for specific audiences helps you put the right products and services in front of the right people.

When you create an ad, you’ll be targeting your ad to a specific audience. Although your ad would only be visible to the chosen targeted audience, narrowing down your audience will ensure your ad is shown to the most relevant people.

There are different ways to effectively identify your target audience:

• Learn from Peers/Competitors
  By using the graph search, you can easily discover who should you target. You can try different combination such as:
  • People who like X page and live in Y
  • Pages liked by People who Like X
• Use Custom Audience
  Sometimes the most valuable audience you can reach is one that you already have a connection to. Through Facebook Power Editor, you can upload a contact list of people who you’d like to reach with an ad on Facebook. For example, if you are an e-commerce company, you might have a database of customers including email addresses and phone numbers. You can upload the list of customers who have previously purchased from your site and then create an ad that’s targeted to them. It’s a great way to reach specific audiences with customised messages.
• Use Lookalike targeting
  Lookalike audiences let you reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to a customer list you care about. When you use custom audiences, you can choose to create a lookalike audience that targets people who are similar to your custom audience list. Lookalike audiences help you reach people who are similar to your current customers for fan acquisition, site registration, off-Facebook purchases, coupon claims and brand awareness.

#4: Sell Your Product with a Product Launch Strategy

Apple product launches are the de-facto case study of a typical successful product launch. Obviously, Apple knows how to launch a product to maximise sales. If we look in the past, almost every iPhone or iPad release has been a record buster for Apple – iPhone 5s sold more units than its predecessor iPhone 4s, which sold out faster than its predecessor iPhone 3Gs. Apple’s last iPhone launch saw iPhone sales top 5 million units in the handset’s first three days of availability.

It’s proven to work well if you have a product launch blueprint. Take another look at the recent Chinese Smartphone, Xiami’s Redmi launch in Singapore which was sold out in 8 minutes. Whenever there is a new product launch, the Chinese smartphone brand will be snapped up by customers in minutes. What’s the magic formula behind it? A well-planned Product Launch.

The purpose of a Product launch is to build sales momentum. It’s one of the few occasions for exponential sales growth. So why aren’t companies getting it right? A successful launch stems from a well-mapped blueprint. The key point here is you need to really think through your product launches. Plan beforehand what information you’re going to release, how to create the buzz and introduce scarcity as well as set different triggers to turn your product launch into something worth talking about.

That’s what Apple and Xiaomi did.

#5: Trace, Measure and Adjust

Tracking ROI for your social media marketing efforts is extremely important. Without tracking the ROI of your sales campaign you risk dumping money down the drain on weeks of effort that aren’t resulting in sales conversions.

There are currently two effective ways to track on Facebook

1. Conversion tracking pixel
2. Google Analytics.

Depending on the complexity of your campaigns, managing and analyzing these tracking can be time-consuming! You can always start small and outsource to a good Pay-Per-Click (PPC) management company once your campaigns become overwhelming.

Conclusion

What’s your approach to Facebook marketing? Do you have a similar funnel, or do you handle it differently?

Let me know in the comments below!