This Facebook Marketing Guide offers insights into effective Facebook marketing, including ad customization, strategic planning, competitive analysis, and e-commerce optimization. It guides on engaging content creation, audience targeting, and maximizing ad performance. Ideal for marketers seeking to boost their Facebook presence and achieve measurable results.
Facebook is the largest social media site with over a billion users all around the globe. This Lawn Care Facebook Marketing Guide will help you catch up with current trends. Hopefully you will get some new insight into ways to attract new customers. With a very large number of users who log in daily, most lawn care companies take advantage of this site to expose and market their services.
The most significant part of Facebook marketing is the accessibility and easy access to information. You can search for your specific target market just by filtering the people by demographics, interests and even by exact geographical location.
This becomes an opportunity for start-up businesses and budding entrepreneurs to openly promote their products and services. As a marketer, here are some important tips for beginners on how to utilize Facebook for your business:
Kinds of Facebook Ads
Coming from a public page that can be created for free, you can purchase the paid ads offers from Facebook. There are many kinds of paid ads. First, you can build one that directs to your public page, or your actual lawn and landscape website.
These ads on Facebook can be bought through an auction. Brands are required to pay for every click, action and impression. There are a wide number of formats for the paid ads, depending on how you want to promote.
You can even make and publish all sorts of advertisements yourself, using Facebook’s free public page interface or by using an ads API developer. Facebook marketing presently has 10 various ad categories that fall in the Ad classification:
- Event ad
- App ad
- Mobile App ad
- Domain ad
- Page like ad
- Coupon or Offer ad
- Page post link ad
- Page post video ad
- Page post photo ad
- Page post text ad
These ads would require you as a business to input your desired text, photo thumbnail and meta description. Each type comes with a specific number of characters and photo size.
You just need to maximize your ads, and make sure your descriptions would entice viewers to click on it.
Facebook has also developed a feature that would allow users to hide your ad, if they refuse to like the page. A dialog box would then appear, asking for an opinion from the user on why he or she declined to like the ad. This can be a very helpful info for you to specify further improvements.
Customize Your Ads
Another significant tool that Facebook can do is to customize your ads, according to the people you want to target. You can have your ads linked to a related page they previously liked, or even previous external links they visited.
Facebook also gives you a powerful analytics tool to give you an idea on how well your marketing scheme is doing.
You can view the trend in how many people reaches your posts, or the rate of growth of your followers. With this, you can have an idea on which ads works, and which one doesn’t.
Facebook Marketing Strategies That Work
While other people use Facebook to chat with their friends or to share pictures and videos, lawn and landscape owners can use it for marketing and branding.
In order to become successful through gaining traffic and sales, businesses should learn to use the most effective strategies of Facebook marketing.
Within the first part of this article there is a comprehensive list of effective strategies:
- Making use of the site’s existing traffic. It is essential to have a company website because it will serve as a hub where people purchase the products and know everything about the particular services.
- It is recommended to put these icons on the homepage header because they are noticeable on this area. This action could also provide better CTR (click-through rate) placements.
- Displaying fan page URLs by using e-mail signatures. When sending e-mails to potential customers, include fan page URLs beneath the email message or signature.
By doing this, there will be an increase in traffic or following if the recipients click these attached URLs.
- Sending out email blasts. One way of letting people know that a particular business has a Facebook page is through sending email blasts. AWeber and MailChimp are some of the tools used in email marketing.
- In-store promotion of a Facebook page. Offline promotion is an ideal way of telling people that a business is now on Facebook. Print and include the Facebook page URLs on store’s wall, glass doors, business cards, paper bags and etc.
- Knowing when the best time is to post and schedule the status updates. By consistently planning the posting schedule, target audience will be more engaged in liking, sharing and commenting on posts especially if they are educational and entertaining.
- Using Facebook Ads. They can help in gaining followers and business growth. They are also used to create Facebook marketing campaigns. Plus, they are not that expensive.
- Creating Facebook Contests. Facebook users like a particular fan page in order to participate in its contests. Conducting a simple photo contest can increase Facebook likes for up to 5 times more than a regular post.
Prizes to be given away may vary ranging from items to services. Don’t forget to do promotions during the contest period to draw more fans.
- Using Facebook’s “@” Feature. Tagging people and other pages with this feature will make them feel recognized. Therefore, it establishes relationships between the business and its customers.
- Developing Facebook custom tabs and apps. It is an additional option that can be used to gain more likes and fans by allowing fans to access event details, deals and other exclusive advantages.
- Engaging with own Facebook community and other Facebook fan pages. This is like a win-win situation. Apart from building strong relationship to customers, it could also create fan conversions when additional people will like the page upon seeing it on other Facebook pages.
- Joining and creating Facebook groups. Their privacy is classified into three: open, closed and secret.
- Open Facebook group is typically used for increasing brand awareness and growing network. Therefore, it should focus on interactions and participations from the fans.
- Closed Facebook group can be seen by anyone but only the members can see the posts inside it. It is mainly used for customer support services.
- A secret group is only seen by members and is used for confidential discussions.
Even if these 3 groups have different functionalities, the ultimate goal is to build the ideal relationship for every group type.
There are a lot of Facebook marketing strategies out there but having the above- mentioned actions are enough for green indsutry businesses to do marketing wonders.
Benefits Of Facebook Marketing
The number of Facebook users are growing exponentially. This means the amount of potential customers you can reach through Facebook becomes almost limitless.
Here are some of the reasons why Facebook Marketing is the best way to improve your digital marketing:
- It is cost-effective and boasts faster return on investment.
Facebook marketing is a very accessible entry point for start-ups. Just by creating a public page for your brand, you can jumpstart your promotions and publicity schemes for free.
- The fees only occur when you start signing up for sponsored ads, which depend on the length of the exposure and type of ad you want to acquire.
- The good thing about paid ads is that the results can be observed right away through specific metrics like reach, number of people who viewed and more importantly, the increase in your site traffic. You can filter the people according to demographics, to aim at your specific target market.
The good thing about social media is that you have the information about the users, ready at hand. This is ideal for local marketing like lawn care, especially when you need to target a specific age range and geographical location.
For sponsored ads, the link is designed to appear to people who liked similar or related pages.
- You can easily see how people respond to your posts. With every post you create, viewers can send their insights and suggestions through the comment section.
Whether it's a constructive criticism, a positive review or even a rant, Facebook allows you to hear out your lawn customer's demands and needs, so you can have more room for improvement. It can be a good threshold to getting "viral". If there's something very special about social media, it's the fast-paced cycle of fads and trends.
- Any video or photo posted online can have a good chance to circulate around the net. Facebook is very flexible when it comes to reaching out your audience. It can offer sponsored ads, or ads through recommendation.
- It can promote any form including events, offers, pages or external links. It can also be designed to fit mobile browsers, especially if you're promoting a mobile app.
- If you want a platform where you can freely check your immediate competitors, Facebook is the best way to do it. Through the ‘Pages to Watch’ feature, the site allows you to see the trend behind a certain page’s growth and posts.
This might not be fully valuable, but it can help you set a benchmark on how to assess your brand’s success in marketing.
Facebook can be an interactive platform for your marketing programs. You can ask your followers to answer a quick poll, to fill up a sign-up sheet, or even for promos. Facebook can even support a third-party website embedded into your public page.
- It will improve your SEO ranking. When your page is a popular link on social media and your posts are frequently being shared by your followers, search engine recognizes your site better.
Competing In Facebook Marketing
Description, Thumbnail and Headline
If you’re going to use sponsored ads, maximize your chance to promote your brand. This can be done through many ways. First, you need to give your viewers an idea, in a concise way, through the Meta description.
This is the short description that would appear next to your ad. Also, choosing the right thumbnail on your post is highly essential. When Facebook users browse through the site, they barely even notice the ads, unless the photo is highly striking, and would eventually catch their interest.
More importantly, the ad title should be short, yet, appealing. You can try mixing up teaser style that would spark curiosity, or a full headline that would compel the reader to click.
Checking Out Other Pages
To succeed in Facebook marketing, you need to follow other pages. This might seem like an odd tip, but by following and getting a benchmark from other similar pages, you can have an idea on the trend’s customer feedback and insights from their end.
Moreover, you can also check the average likes and number of followers they have. This can be a good start on assessing your room for improvement.
Try not to post anything during the peak hours. Yes, you might be thinking that the most strategic time to post is when a lot of people are online. However, it is also during these times that the people’s new feed gets bombarded with stories, posts and links.
By posting during non-peak hours, the tendency is that people would be seeing your post upon checking their feeds. This can be before 8am or after 6pm.
Creativity Is Key
Be creative on your posts. Again, following the trend is an important aspect in this part. Most people share and repost photos that are exceptionally funny, motivating and provides insights.
These photos come in forms of doodle photos, captioned photos or simply text photos. The trick here is to incorporate your brand well to the gist of every post.
Post Questions
Digital Customer Care
Show that you care. Facebook is a very good platform to show how much you value customer insights, so you need to take advantage of this opportunity.
Customers are more likely to trust a brand that could be easily reached through social media. You can do this by replying to comments and showing that you immediately address issues and concerns raised by page followers.
Tips On Facebook Marketing
Thinking of how to improve marketing strategies on Facebook? Ever wonder what tactics are being used by professionals?
- Consider using ActionSprout. If marketers think that Facebook pages are the real battlegrounds on Facebook, think again. Users typically interact with the page updates appearing in their news feeds apart from visiting the actual Facebook pages.
ActionSprout is a good additional custom tab on Facebook pages. While most Facebook pages require users to visit their pages
Once users have already clicked the action of their choice in the news feed update, they will be automatically redirected to another page in order to continue the completion of the action.
- Boost announcements for new services. Boosted posts for a newly launched product can increase the demand as well as the fans that like the page.
It is ideal for small scale business like lawn and landscape companies even though it is not recommended by some Facebook marketing experts. Do not hesitate to test this kind of technique.
After all, refusal of recommendation doesn’t mean that this is ineffective and will not work.
- Make use of website custom audiences. While Facebook ads are used to target a specific audience, running a Facebook ad through the use of “Power Editor” can target all the visitors of a Facebook page (website custom audiences). In order to increase leads and potential customers, Facebook ads should be creative.
- Increase PR Efforts. Facebook is not only used for marketing campaigns, it can also support the brand’s publicity efforts. A lot of journalists rely on Facebook to look for stories. With the help of the said social media platform, sharing stories is now easy.
As a result, there will be faster information delivery to the public especially if there are emerging issues and breaking news regarding new developments, etc.
- Use Facebook’s audience insights. Better return of investments can be generated if a business knows how to target a particular type of audience for advertising and optimize content strategies after understanding the audience insights.
This will let the marketers see what’s engaging for audience and what type of post does this audience like. By investing time to understand their insights, fans will become more receptive on posted contents.
- Do split testing on Facebook ads. Finding the right keywords to use is crucial for Facebook advertising. To prevent wasting money, it is recommended to do a split advertising test first.
Allocate portions of advertising budget on running a variety of ads one at a time. Then, study the comparisons to assess which particular advertisement works best.
Only split testing can answer what particular benefit can a marketer get if he targets a narrow or wider audience.
Before anything else, it is important to plan ahead. Make sure you if you are going to use Facebook ads you understand all the concepts. Otherwise you could waste a lot of money. There are many free Facebook ads courses you can attend.
The “Dos” and “Don’ts” of Facebook Marketing for Lawn Care Businesses
About 1.39 billion users are active on Facebook and half of them log in every day. There are 5 newly created profiles every second and approximately 30 million fan pages belong to businesses.
Moreover, about 1 billion Facebook searches are made every day.
Given all the statistics, it is important to use Facebook marketing strategies in order to catch up with the growing number of active Facebook users and fan pages.
While it is hard for marketers to build loyal followings on Facebook fan pages, knowing the “dos” and “don’ts” is essential for them to see what’s working and what’s not in the field of Facebook marketing.
Below are some of the important things to apply and the classic mistakes to avoid as a Facebook marketer:
- Draw fans by being authentic. Use Facebook to post original contents that should not be missed. In the end, let people know what makes a company stands out among the rest.
- Value customer service always. Satisfied customers keep coming back for more and might also end up recommending the business to their connections.
To keep them coming back, a Facebook marketer must be able to listen and quickly respond to customer queries.
- Set-up Facebook fan pages, not profile accounts. Using profile accounts for business is clearly a violation of Facebook policies. Also, Facebook pages have certain privileges on analytics, ads and apps which are not applicable in profile accounts.
While Facebook pages can accommodate unlimited fans, profile accounts can only accommodate 5,000 friends/connections.
- Develop solid posting strategies. Content and consistency are the two main keys to having a firm posting strategy. Identify the marketing goals first then come up with solid posting strategies that can achieve the ideal results.
- Understand customers’ needs by getting their feedback. What they will say is important for the improvement of products and services. There are a lot of ways for them to give feedbacks. Some of these include:
- Completing surveys
- Responding to posts
- Giving recommendations
- Remember that investing time on reading customer feedbacks is good for any business.
- Never spam Facebook pages. Spamming people is worst thing to do in marketing because it can lead to the loss of followers and prospective customers.
- It is important to mix up contents through sharing videos, quotes and articles as well as asking questions about particular issues. Contents that contain pushy marketing messages are considered as spams.
- Do not measure success through the number of likes. The real basis for having a successful Facebook page are the following: engagement, conversions and reach.
Getting a lot of likes doesn’t equate to having connections. They are built through customer interactions.
- Do not be confined with using marketing strategies on Facebook alone. Relying solely on it is effective but integrating it with other marketing strategies of social media platforms is more effective.
Doing cross-promotional strategies on various social media networks could expand the content’s reach.
Moving forward, it is essential to apply these “dos” and “don’ts” of Facebook marketing because Facebook isn’t going anywhere.
Facebook Ads
Facebook marketing has revolutionized the way digital marketing is done for lawn and landscape businesses. What used to be just banner ads on the internet can now be done in many forms, especially in this vast social media platform.
Here are some of the types of Facebook ads you need to know:
Creating A Public Page
You can always start with the conventional type of Facebook Marketing, which is setting up a public page for free. All you need to do is to maintain posts and update the page regularly. Using the right tools and resources you can schedule a months worth of posts in about an hour. This is a great rainy day activity for office people or techs.
It comes with all the necessary tools and self-service interface that is easy to use, even for beginners. This is cost-effective, and very easy to manage.
Sponsored Ads: Domain Ads
Domain ads are the most common type of paid ads that you would often see, and when you click, would take you to an external site. These ads are normally done to increase site traffic and improve customer interaction.
Domain ads can also illustrate social context like for instance, a certain friend “likes this page/site.” For this to take place, Facebook should be able to go with the target URL of your domain ad with a relevant Facebook public page.
Event Ads
Event ads are very helpful if you need total exposure for the publicity of your events. It is also shown on the right-hand side of the desktop, with a maximum of 90- character description.
Mobile App Ad
As the name suggests, this kind of ad only shows up when a user is on mobile view. Once the ad is clicked, the ad directly leads the user to AppStore or Google Play to install the mobile app.
The effectiveness of the ad is measure by the number of downloads, while being integrated with Facebook.
Page Post Ads
The easiest and widely used type of ad is the page post ad, in which your Facebook page can be posted as ‘sponsored’ or ‘promoted’. Once the user clicks on the link, Facebook will direct it to the public page.
Offer Ads
Offer ads are useful and enticing, especially when written well. The key to a successful offer ad is to include the important details, the number of people who previously accepted the offer and the expiration date. The photo should also speak a lot, because it’s what the users would notice at first glance.
Sponsored Stories
Besides the usual ads, sponsored stories can also be purchased through Facebook Marketing. These are frequently the most interactive type of ads.
They are, in reality, support and endorsement made by the user’s friends, and thus tend to get higher click-through and rates of engagement. Once a person likes a certain page, it becomes an ad that appears onto other user’s new feed.
This is more effective in some cases because the credibility of a recommendation from friends is likely to be higher. There are certain types of stories ad. Some include page or place ad, which was mentioned earlier, the app story, game played or even event RSVP sponsored story. All of which work similarly, by showing who among your friends list are using the same app or going to the same event.
Facebook Ad Retargeting
Perhaps you’ve heard that ad retargeting enables merchants to bring customers back to their shopping carts so they can buy something. That is absolutely true. It doesn’t work 100% of the time, but it works enough to make quite a bit of a difference. Similarly, ad retargeting also enables green businesses to drive people back to content pages that would eventually convert customers into paying buyers. That part is true as well.
However, despite all the excitement about ad retargeting technology, there is a secret sauce that you cannot ignore. Seriously. If you understand how the secret sauce works, then you would know how to craft together a more effective ad retargeting campaign.
On the other hand, if you remain clueless regarding this element, chances are your campaign would probably be hit or miss. Often times, it’s more of a miss than a hit.
Secret Sauce
What secret sauce am I talking about? Proven interest. That’s right. When people come to your lawn or landscape website, they have a proven interest. Ad retargeting essentially gives you a tool to bring those people back to your website. You have seen retargeting whether you realized it or not. You do a search for "dog groomers" and next thing you know you see doog groomer ads everywhere. Products for DIY dog grooming show up. You were retargeted.
However, here’s the problem. If you’re just going to bring them back to your business home page, you’re wasting your time. Real proven interest boils down to internal pages. That’s when you know that this person is serious. That’s when you know that this person actually is engaged enough with your content that they would go to internal pages.
I’m not just talking about one main page. I’m talking about secondary pages or other internal pages. In fact, the deeper you get them into your website, the better the results. This means that they have looked through other content, they’ve somehow figured out how everything works, and they’re more likely to convert later on.
Two Ways To Retarget
Now that you fully understand that ad retargeting is all about getting people who have gone to an internal page to come back, there are two ways to retarget.
You can remind them to go back to where they left off. Maybe this is a purchase page. Maybe it’s a shopping cart. Maybe it’s some sort of article that goes into a conversion page with one click. Whatever the case may be, you just remind people to go back to your website and they end up where they left off.
The other way you can retarget is to pull them deeper into your website. This is an often-neglected strategy when it comes to ad retargeting, but this is actually quite powerful.
You have to understand that not anybody’s going to interact with your content the exact same way. Some people will find themselves very deep into your site, others will find themselves in a fairly shallow or common secondary page.
The key here is to pull them deeper from that page, but not necessarily driving them to a sales page. In other words, you’re just going to be pulling them deeper into your content, but not necessarily dumping them into a shopping cart, sales page, or any other type of conversion page.
This is how you get better sales. You condition the mind of the visitors, so they voluntarily drill deeper into your site until they eventually convert.
Maximize Ad Retargeting’s Results
How do you take your results to the next level? It’s very simple. Instead of pushing sales with your content retargeting, push your squeeze page. This is the page that recruits people to your mailing list. It will be your mailing list that will do the heavy- lifting of converting that visitor into a buyer.
Of course, if you already have people showing up at your shopping cart, then your ad retargeting should focus on bringing them back to the shopping cart.
But outside of that, if you’re dealing with people who stop short at content pages, push them to sign up to your squeeze page and let your mailing list convert them eventually.