ULTIMATE GUIDE TO FACEBOOK SUCCESS

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10 Step Process for the Time-Starved Small Business Owner

YOUR DAY

THERE ISN’T ENOUGH time in the day!

If this sounds similar to how you’re starting each day, you’re not alone.

As small business owners, we have a ton on our plates. We are pulled in so many different directions, and are often expected (mainly by ourselves) to be ‘experts’ at all of these aspects of our business.

But it just isn’t possible! Yes, if we had endless amounts of time to educate ourselves on accounting, social media marketing, content strategy, contracting, financial management, and Facebook – oh, Facebook! – we could get the hang of it. But is that the most effective way to spend our time? Is that where we bring the most value to our business?

5:30am – Wake up, check some emails in bed, dash through your morning routine and rush off to the office, listening to a podcast as you drive, and leaving yourself voice memos for items you need to take care of later.

7:00am – Log in to your email, check your to do list for the day, reorganize based on last minute changes from yesterday, take a quick phone call, answer a few emails, and…you’re already behind.

Fortunately, we’re here to provide a solution for the Facebook marketing woes of the time-starved business owner. This solution comes in the form of a little guidance, a well-crafted toolkit and an awesome plan. Eliminate wasted time and overwhelming frustrations of diving into and managing something you aren’t familiar with.

You are excellent at providing the service you offer, or perfecting the product you sell, but when the thought of Facebook and social media marketing crosses your mind, you can feel your heart rate quicken and your palms get sweaty. You anxiously realize you should be building your social presence for your business to grow, but how are you supposed to find time, and how are you supposed to know which route to take to drive results?

The last thing you want to do is invest hours upon hours into wasted efforts. You want a plan that works, a plan that will drive results.

Don’t let your sanity suffer, let’s simplify this process! We are here to empower you with the tools you need to successfully & simply harness the power of Facebook marketing, and drive results from your efforts.

The engagement rate of the top brand, Magnum Ice Cream Bars, on Facebook in May 2015 was 26.8%. (SocialBakers.com)

1. 1. Establish the Business Basics
   2. Set Your Goals
   3. Prep & Plan
   4. Create Compelling Content
   5. Get Your Toolkit Together
   6. Set Your Page Up
   7. Organize Your Launch Campaign: Get the Ball Rollin’
   8. Boost with Bucks
   9. Don’t Give Up
   10. Test, Track, Test, Track

With this Ultimate Guide you will learn how to:

• • Develop an effective content calendar
  • Encourage and create engagement that matters
  • Run a targeted ad campaign
  • Use Facebook’s Insights tools to adjust & monitor success

The 10 steps necessary to streamline your Facebook endeavors and start seeing real results from your efforts are outlined below.

LET’S DIVE IN!

Establish Business Basics

To get started, you’ll want to ensure you and your team have a solid understanding of your business and brand. As a business owner, you know why you started your business, but is everyone else on the same page? Establish your brand story, tying in the ‘Why’ behind your business and what you are trying to accomplish with your brand. Developing a strong brand story and messaging allows you to get a plan in place for you and your team. Map out what your brand voice is.

What is your business’ tone?

Words you prefer to use, or want to exclude from your brand language?

Are you the casual voice of a friend or family member or the professional and wise voice of a mentor?

Having guidelines in place equips your team with the information they need to appropriately represent your brand.

Your brand identity is equally important, and a key factor in establishing a lasting impression. Your brand identity is the look of your brand – your brand colors, icons, graphics and visuals. Every visual element you create (i.e. cover photo, profile picture, timeline graphics…) should be in line with your established brand identity.

Clear guidelines and rules make it easier for your designers and partners to create design elements that embody your business and brand. Once this is in place, you will have a clearer grasp on your ideal target audience. Identifying this up front will equip your team with the tools they need to develop messages and content that will resonate with this segment of consumers. For example, if your audience was moms with children in youth sports, an article or post titled ’10 time saving tips for moms with athletes’ would resonate more than ’10 tips for time management.’

Set Your Goals

You have your business brand basics in place, you know who you want to target, now it’s time to set some goals! What are you trying to accomplish by establishing a presence on Facebook? Know this now!

Before you even get started planning your strategy, have clear and specific goals in place to direct your plan and guide your team. Understanding what you would like to see from your efforts, will dictate which tactics you want to use and which metrics you want to monitor.

Are you looking to increase brand awareness?

If so, by how much and when? Are you looking to increase the number of monthly leads generated?

Want to convert more leads into customers?

Increase registrations for webinars or email signups?

The exciting, and often overwhelming, aspect of social media marketing is that there are SO many different directions you can go and goals you can accomplish.

But, you can’t do it all at once if you want to be successful – especially if you are strapped for time or have a limited budget. So, before you dive in and try and do them all, identify which of these goals is the MOST important – which is best aligned with your overall business goals, growth and revenue goals or sales goals – and develop your Facebook marketing plan around that.

And remember, you don’t want to switch it up in three weeks. Give your plan some time to take roots and spread its wings in order to accurately monitor the success of your endeavors. Once you’ve given it some time, you will be able to determine if benchmarks are being met, what is working well, and if adjustments need to be made.

Identify who your social team will be and assign roles and responsibilities appropriately. Do you have someone on your team that can act as your social advocate? Who will you have manage the content and engagement on the page, or is there someone on your team that is passionate about Facebook and can encourage and excite your team about the brand’s new involvement and activity? Having the right people involved that are committed and accountable for their respective roles will be critical to maintaining a consistent and engaging campaign, and crucial to the success of your strategy.

Prep and Plan

Start to plan your content with some keyword research. Utilize online tools like Moz.com’s Keyword Difficulty Tool and Google’s Keyword Tool to uncover keywords your audience is regularly searching for, as well as keywords that have a higher likelihood of helping you gain exposure due to lower competitiveness or keyword difficulty.

Talk with individuals within your target audience and existing customers and compile questions they have that you can answer, content they like to read about, examples of other Facebook pages they follow or resources they refer to for information. All of this data can help you craft an effective Facebook content strategy.

In addition, of those 30 million small businesses, there is a good chance you can form some Facebook alliances. Make a list of the active businesses on Facebook (specifically those with engaged audiences – i.e. their fans are pumped about their content!) who are in different industries than you, but are targeting the same audience. Take a peek at the content they are posting too and see if you can glean any details on what this audience is already engaging with and interested in that you may be able to tie into your strategy as well.

Once you get started with your page, go through and connect with these pages as well! Sharing their content and engaging with them to both provide valuable information to your fans, and to get in front of their audience. There are millions of businesses on Facebook!

As of June of last year, there were over 30 million small businesses with active Facebook Pages (Techcrunch.com). Among these pages are most likely a few of your competitors. Monitoring your competitor’s activity before you get started on yours can help you identify tactics that are working well (posts that are getting a lot of interaction) that you can tweak and improve upon to utilize for your business.

Use keywords – Now that you’ve done your research, put it into action by incorporating these keywords or phrases within your content strategy. Use Frequently Asked Questions gathered during your research to post Q&A status updates or content on your site to drive your fans to. Get Personal Fans are connected with your page because they care about your brand, because they have similar beliefs and values. But, they want to connect with the PEOPLE of the business.

Show your personal side – give them what they’re looking for! Post behind the scenes pictures, team photos and updates and sneak peeks into your business. Deepen the connection with authentic, real posts. Be Valuable Don’t just be more noise. Be the brand that stands out in the sea of businesses posting on Facebook. You know your industry or specialty better than anyone else – share that knowledge with your fans. Help them understand their pain points and solutions. Don’t sell – educate and guide.

Craft Compelling Content

So, the content. Or, in other words, the core of your Facebook strategy and a key factor in the success of your efforts. Luckily for you, steps one through three of this guide have set you up for a streamlined and simplified content creation and planning process. Understanding what your target audience is interested in, what their pain points are and what types of content they’ll want to see ensures quick and frequent engagement with your posts.

Use this information, as well as the info you gathered from the active pages targeting the same audience, as you begin to develop your content calendar. Facebook uses an algorithm to determine which information gets into an individual’s News Feed. The algorithm is a combination of affinity score between viewing user and edge creator, weight for this edge type (create, connect, like, etc.) and time decay factor based on how long ago the edge was created.

PLAN FOR CONTENT THAT WILL ROCK THEIR SOCKS OFF With your target audience (buyer persona) established, mastering Facebook’s algorithm becomes much easier.

CREATE A CALENDAR REALLY plan it out! By this point, you’re probably pumped and ready to get started with your Facebook marketing. But, be cautious not to overcommit. Only include within your content calendar what you know you and your team can reasonably commit to. Consistency is a key element in increasing your chances of showing in your fans’ news feeds. It’s better that you stick to posting only a few times per week consistently, than overcommitting and following your calendar for a few weeks, then falling off for a few, then jumping back on – only to fall off yet again when things get too busy.

Your content calendar should include: –

• The dates your content will post (if possible to get more specific, including times can be very helpful)
• The post content to be included
• Any applicable links within the post
• Any images or graphics you’ll be including Your content should include a mix of content formats including videos, photos, articles and standard text updates.

Creating a promotional calendar can really tie your content efforts and campaigns together. If you want to run a ‘10% off’ swimsuits promotion in June, tie some of your content posts around swimming, beaches, or tips to getting your summer body during this month to tie to this theme and supplement your promotional efforts in a ‘non-salesy’ way. Note: As you get started and begin to see how your content is engaged with, and when your fans are on Facebook, these days, times and content types may need to be adjusted.

GRAPHICS + IMAGES U.S. researchers recently discovered that the human brain can process images that the eye sees in just 13 milliseconds (DailyMail). Whoa! With that stat in mind, we should all realize the power of posting images to Facebook. Without a doubt, tying captivating images into your posting calendar can have a significant impact on the reach and engagement of your posts – as well as the simple fact of getting noticed in a busy news feed. Using photos and graphics that are representative of the content or post as well as your brand is important in building fan trust and increasing brand recognition and recall. Use a photo that is recognizable for your profile picture, as this is what will show in posts and within your fans’ feeds. Creating branded graphics for your posting strategy? That’s great! Adding a little logo on your images can help build brand recognition, but don’t let it overtake all of your graphics. In addition, keep in mind, if you are using text overlay (placing text on top of your images or in your graphics) and want to boost your posts, be sure your graphic is okay to promote with Facebook’s Text Overlay Tool. As of the 4th Quarter of 2014, 28% of Facebook users were ages 25-34, 25% were 16-24 and 22% were 35-44.

Get Your Tool Kit Together

Although there are certainly times you want to use graphic designers, sometimes time is limited and budget is tight. Introducing Canva. One of the easiest design tools ever created, enabling anyone to become a designer. Create timeline graphics, cover photos and more with this awesome tool. For simple photo editing and features, PicMonkey is another good free option. Images: Great images are key to a great strategy. There are some grand selections for images within paid subscriptions such as iStock.

Time is tight! We certainly understand that. Although we don’t encourage you to schedule all of your posts (and if you are scheduling, you still need to have the appropriate notifications set to ensure speedy engagement with your fans) there is definitely a time and place for scheduling. Not only can you schedule your posts right within Facebook, you can also use some great third party tools such as HootSuite or Buffer. Having the right tools at the right times can make or break your Facebook success. Having the right FREE tools can be even better, especially if you’re on a budget.

Educational Resources: Having the right resources in place for easy reference and regular updates on Facebook trends, tools and tips makes your life a lot easier. Subscribe to Radiant’s blog and bookmark some of these sites! Website Analytics: Don’t stop at tracking the activity on your Facebook page. Set up analytics on your website to see how your Facebook activity is influencing your website activity. Tracking statistics and analyzing that data to make decisions can be a pivotal reason why businesses succeed. Having clear goals set at the beginning will help you identify which of your website metrics are most important to be monitoring. You can’t go wrong with this toolkit! Social Media Examiner Amy Porterfield Mari Smith HubSpot

Set It Up

Now that you’re prepped and ready to go, let’s get it all together and set it up!

STEP ONE Choose your business’ classification. There are 6 different classifications to choose from, and each will provide more relevant information for your page.

Your choices include:

Choose your official Page name and category (depending on which classification you choose, you may be able to select your Page URL – choose wisely, you can only change this one time). And voilà, you’ve completed step one! Local Business

• This classification includes: About, Address, Hours, Price Range, Parking and Contact. Tip: If you would like to have people check-in or write reviews for your business, this may be your best choice.

Company, Organization or Institution

• This classification includes: Year founded, Address, Mission, Products, Awards Brand or Product includes: Founded, About, Product, Awards Artist, Band or Public Figure includes: Address, Affiliation, Birthday, Biography, Interests, Gender Entertainment includes: Release Date, About Cause or Community includes: Cause Type, Description, Cause Groups

STEP TWO Ensure your Page is completed fully and optimally. When completing the various sections of your page, use the keywords your research uncovered to build out your information and help optimize your page for search engines.

Add a captivating and brand relevant cover photo (851×315 pixels) and profile picture. Add a call-to-action (CTA) button to your cover photo that ties into the goals of your Facebook marketing. Simply click the ‘Create a Call to Action’ button on your cover photo and walk through the step-by-step process selecting the URL and button copy. [ Start Posting! ]

Start liking the pages you uncovered in your research who are targeting the same audience as you, to build out your news feed with relevant information to re-share with your fans and engage with to gain exposure with their fan bases.

About this section will show as a tab on your page, in addition to the left of your newsfeed. Depending on the classification selected, this section includes basic information about your business – address, phone, website, and your page info (short description, long description, price, hours, products, categories, email, and milestones). You can also find this information by going to the ‘Settings’ tab and ‘Page Info’.

Profile Picture the profile image should be representative of your business, and ideally 180×180 pixels to fit best in the space available. Since this image is what will show in searches and posts using your business’ icon/logo can help to increase brand awareness and familiarity. Add to Favorites adding your page to your favorites, will create a link in the vertical navigation to the left of your personal news feed – giving you easy access to your page

Implement Launch Campaign

You have a solid content strategy, posting and promotional calendar in place, now you just need to get people to your page! Before you begin inviting consumers to connect, start your posting and engagement to have some activity on your page. Your plan to launch should be strategic and comprehensive, utilizing other tactics to promote your new page. Start easy – get your team on board! The easiest way to get your first few hundred likes is to launch an internal campaign. Get your team excited about your involvement and communicate with them how important they are to the success.

Encourage your employees to like the page, and to share the page with their network, family and friends. Worldwide there are over 1.44 billion monthly active Facebook users (Source: Facebook) Now, get everyone else connected! Here are our top 5 tactics to include to run a successful launch campaign:

1. 1. Use email marketing to develop an announcement template inviting your existing email database to connect with your Facebook page. Incorporate a fun contest or giveaway that is relevant to your business to incentivize them to like your page and stay connected.
   2. Design a branded print piece to give away at your physical location to prospects and customers, for your sales team to distribute and for your employees to share with contacts, friends and family.
   3. Design a poster to hang throughout your business’ locations to catch the attention of customers and inspire them to connect. Add an easy to scan QR code if you want!
   4. Update your website to add the social ‘like’ button as well as a feed with either a plugin like this one, or the Facebook developer page plugin.
   5. Update any directory listings you’ve created to connect your listing with your Facebook page. Lastly, develop an ad campaign to reach your target audience.

Boost With Some Bucks

There are a lot of businesses vying for the eye, and time, of the consumer. Although you’ve established a great brand and plan, to compete and snag that special spot in the News Feed, you’ll want to back your plan with a dedicated ad budget. The Awe-Inspiring Ad Craft the perfect ad by following these three tips:

1. 1. Take the time to select the perfect image. The image is a significant factor in whether or not the ad will catch a Facebook user’s attention – so make it a good one! Smiling faces, bold colors and simple images often perform best
   2. Keep copy short and sweet and reflective of your brand and voice
   3. Direct the user to an optimized landing page. Once the user clicks on your ad, they’ll want to be taken to a landing page that is representative of the ad and provides more detailed information about your business and brand. Create an ad that will appear in the News Feed, as these ads receive 3 times more likes than right-hand column ads. That’s right, three times more! The engagement rate of the top brand, Magnum Ice Cream Bars, on Facebook in May 2015 was 26.8%. (SocialBakers.com) Utilize Facebook’s Audience Insights tool to create your ad’s target audience.

Segment your audience based on location, demographics, interests and behaviors. Design your ad campaign around the goals you have established for your Facebook marketing.

Choose an ad objective (awareness, consideration or conversion) and incorporate this into the copy and creative for your ad. You’ve created a compelling ad and determined your target audience, now let’s get started on the creation of the ad! Head over to the Power Editor within Facebook to create and monitor your ads. T

he Power Editor is a tool within Facebook that allows you to: – Create multiple versions of ads within a campaign – Upload creative in bulk – Set up and manage ads in bulk – Create ads for multiple pages and accounts To get started, log into your business’ Facebook page and select the dropdown in the upper right corner of your screen and select ‘Create Ads’.

After you’ve determined your ad objective, selected your target audience and crafted the perfect ad, it’s time to determine your budget and ad placement. Determine how much you want to spend, and how you want to spend it. Set your ad budget and schedule. You can determine if you want your ads to run continuously or if you want them to have a start and end date. In addition, you can set your ads to run on specific days of the week or specific times of day. Select where you would like your ads to appear. You can choose between right-hand column ads and News Feed ads. You can select desktop only, mobile only or both.

Don’t Give Up!

Keep an eye on your Insights tab. This is where you’ll be able to monitor the success of your content strategy and see how your Facebook marketing efforts are driving traffic to your site and converting leads into customers. You’ve developed a plan, prepped your team, set up your page, launched your campaign and boosted with some bucks. Now, it’s time to take a step back and see what’s working and what isn’t. Your plan is only as good as the data that supports it, and the actions you take because of that data. This is where your ongoing monitoring and optimization will come into play.

Monitoring your Facebook page and campaign’s performance will give you an insight into what content is resonating with your fans, what promotions are driving traffic and sales, and what days and times your fans are most active. Facebook’s Insights tool will be your best friend when it comes to monitoring your performance. Insights can help you answer questions like: What are the demographics of your fans? When are your fans most active? What types of content are your fans engaging with the most? What days and times are your fans most active? Where are your fans located?

Your Insights will be a wealth of information that you can use to optimize and adjust your Facebook marketing strategy moving forward. As you continue to monitor your performance and adjust your strategy based on the data you collect, you’ll begin to see an increase in engagement, traffic and leads from your Facebook marketing efforts. Keep your eye on the prize, and don’t give up! It takes time and persistence to see results from your Facebook marketing efforts, but with the right strategy and tools in place, you can drive real results for your business.

Test, Track, Test, Track

It’s important to remember that your Facebook marketing strategy isn’t set in stone. As you continue to monitor your performance and adjust your strategy based on the data you collect, you’ll want to continue testing and tracking to ensure you’re getting the best results possible from your efforts. Test different types of content to see what resonates most with your audience. Track the performance of your posts and ads to see what’s working and what isn’t. Test different targeting options to see what drives the best results. Track the performance of your campaigns to see what’s driving the most traffic and conversions.

By continually testing and tracking your efforts, you’ll be able to refine your strategy over time and drive even better results for your business. So there you have it! The 10 steps necessary to streamline your Facebook endeavors and start seeing real results from your efforts. Now go forth, and make your mark on the world of Facebook marketing!