Tuesday, December 1, 2020
Most of us can agree on one thing when it comes to social media marketing or digital marketing in general: Facebook has the largest reach. Unfortunately, Facebook’s massive reach means that it can often be harder to navigate for users and marketers alike. It is also full of Facebook features that can confuse both users and marketers. Finding the profiles of potential customers can be difficult without the right tools, and end users often struggle to find “organic” pages for companies they’re interested in. Here are some Facebook marketing tools that can help you as a marketer find your customers and engage with them in a variety of ways as part of your Facebook marketing strategy.
Facebook Ads
Although they cost money, Facebook ads are one of the easiest ways to reach customers on the platform. Depending on the type of ad, they can be placed in a user’s feed or in one of the page sidebars. No matter what kind you choose, make sure that you deploy effective tools such as these for adequate management.
Below is just a summary of some of the leading tools. If you do a lot of Facebook advertising, you’ll want to check out my post on Facebook Ads tools.
Would you like to create and manage your Facebook, Instagram and Google ads all in one place. AdEspresso lets you do that with their comprehensive ad management service. On your AdEspresso dashboard, you can leverage advanced analytics to determine what’s working, and what isn’t. You’re also able to do A/B testing, and optimize for each platform you plan on using. Want to order the ad space for your campaigns in one place? AdEspresso has you covered too. users love the fact that this program is intuitive, and allows agencies to easily add clients to their agency account.
Pricing: starts at $58 per month for a single user spending under $3,000 on ads per month, and increases based on ad spend and number of accounts tracked.
Need better analytics information on your Facebook ads? How does free sound? Although Agorapulse is a paid social media management program, they offer a variety of free tools to anyone that asks for them. One of these is called Ads Report. This is an analytics tool that measures the effectiveness of your Facebook advertising efforts. The catch is that it’s only for Facebook, and only for ads. If you need support for other networks, you’ll have to find those elsewhere. With that said, Ads Report is a great tool that lets you see what AgoraPulse has to offer without the big price tag. It’s also a good way to get your feet wet in the use of analytics.
Pricing: Free!
Sometimes placing ads and waiting doesn’t bring in as many sales as you’d like. After all, there are a lot of customers who will check out a website, and then “think about it” for a while. Maybe it’s part of their overall market research, but other times they just aren’t sure if they want something. That’s why retargeting is so important. Perfect Audience is a program that allows you to carry out cross-platform retargeting. They’ll place cookies on a device, and thanks to their proprietary technology they know what other devices the same person uses. So, they’ll carry out the retargeting campaign on the same person, no matter how many devices they use. Users report an incredible 400% increase in ROI with retargeting efforts. This program works with Facebook ads as well as many other platforms.
Pricing: set a weekly campaign budget, and it’s pay as you go. No hidden fees.
Need a good scheduling tool for Facebook and Instagram? Qwaya is a Facebook advertising partner that maximizes your ad spend. This program is full featured: you can schedule ads, do split testing, and take advantage of a comprehensive analytics program. One of the big advantages of Qwaya is that it lets you set rules on when to discontinue a campaign, and when to double down on more effective advertising. This way, your business can save money by only continuing ads that are successful. Another awesome feature is the dedicated links for each advertisement. This helps your outside analytics track which ads are driving the most traffic, taking the metrics beyond simple engagement numbers. Not convinced yet? Qwaya works with Google analytics, too.
Pricing: $149 monthly for a one-user license, with pricing increments based on users only. No limit on spend at any level.
How does a quick review of your Facebook ads sound? Wordstream’s free facebook ads grader will compare your Facebook ads with the competition: and give you a full report. The idea behind this is a somewhat different approach from simple A/B testing or standard analytics. These will tell you what’s working, but not necessarily what everyone else is up to. For instance, the competition might be doing something better than you are, but most analytics won’t necessarily catch it because it’s more concerned with what works for you. Go ahead, spy on your competitors!
Pricing: Best of all, it’s free.
Facebook Analytics
No matter how hard we might try to hide from the numbers, marketing on Facebook is all about the numbers. After all, creativity only goes so far when trying to sell products and services. For example, your message might not be received the right way, or fail to get your point across. To counter those problems, you need Facebook tools for analytics.
With a tagline of “know your audience,” Sociograph is a free analytics tool especially for those who manage communities on Facebook. It works by gathering information on the people who watch your products, or who interact in your community. For instance, it might tell you that women under 40 are wild about those ballet flats, or that guys under 25 are gravitating towards these cool headphones. With this information, you can place more targeted Facebook ads that help more people in a given demographic love your product. Or, you could discover that marketing efforts targeting women over 40 are failing, and you need to step up your game in that area.
Pricing: Best of all, Sociograph is free.
Facebook Contests
Those of us who like to create buzz in a competitive way sometimes enjoy doing contests. After all, who doesn’t like prizes and free stuff? But doing this requires careful planning and a way of ensuring the contest is fair. Here are some tools to help.
Gleam is my social media tool of choice and while it is not focused solely on Facebook, Gleam handles much of the programming work required to run contests and give out rewards on any given social network, including Facebook. For instance, you can create a popup that allows a customer to receive a discount off their order for agreeing to email promotions. This is probably one of the most common site-based promotions out there. Another use of Gleam is social galleries, which allows a site owner to show off user content from social media sites. Contests can also be built directly into the site. Best of all, Gleam integrates with a wide variety of other applications.
Pricing: Limited features for free, or buy access to pro apps individually. There’s also a comprehensive plan available starting at $95 per month.
Pagemodo is a comprehensive Facebook page design service. In addition to the basics of design, it has a contests section that helps you run them with no coding needed. Generally, Pagemodo contests are set up as a way to gather email lists, but it doesn’t end there. You can set the contest to randomly select a winner, or let you do the work. They’ll also ensure your contests are compliant with Facebook rules.
Pricing: To run contests, you’ll need their pro plan at $19 per month, or their agency plan at $59 monthly.
Like Pagemodo, Wishpond is a comprehensive Facebook solution that has a contest-running component. They do offer a wider variety of contests, such as referral rewards and prizes for voting on surveys. In other words, you can use contests as a way of performing market research, and not just a method of paying for engagements. Also, Wishpond is highly compatible with a wide variety of other applications that your agency might already be using.
Pricing: the most basic plan is $49 per month, paid annually. Free trial is available.
Those of you who run a lot of contests will probably love Woobox, because it automates the process. In fact, with “winner picker” you don’t even have to go through the trouble of selecting the winner. Even better, Woobox gathers participant information, and knows when you have a repeat. They’ll even help you target specific customers. I love the fact that Woobox doesn’t offer just a few contest options but supports a wide variety of formats and prize types.
Pricing: very limited free plan, with full-featured accounts starting at $32 per month.
Facebook Content
As the old saying goes, if you’re going to do it, then do it the right way. Creating content is the perfect example of this, because it’s the content that provides a draw for customers. Ineffective content is just words on a page, and often wastes valuable resources. Here are some tools to help make the perfect content.
Note that if you are looking to create video content for Facebook, check out my recommended video marketing tools. Also, you might want to check out this post on how to write a post on Facebook that gets engagement..
Want to find stuff your customer base would love to read, without putting in a lot of work? Drumup is a social media automation tool that finds cool stuff other people have put up, and uses it to help fill your feed. Added to content you produce yourself, this can be a very effective way to educate consumers and build brand loyalty. It also helps drive traffic by creating mentions and cross-linking with other sites or influencer profiles. There are even mobile apps to let you do management on the go, and a Chrome extension to help automate.
Pricing: The cheapest plan is $15 per month, with more features at $39 monthly.
Those of us who need to supplement our own content with proven posts would love Post Planner. This is a social media application that helps you get inspired by the success of others, and even adapt pre-published content to your goals. You’ll never run out of ideas, and you’ll have an idea about how well something will perform before it’s published.
Pricing: As little as $3 per month.
Is your business primarily local? Unlike with most social media managers, Promorepublic was designed with the small local business in mind. In particular, they aim to help businesses such as car repair garages and eateries, rather than tiny e-commerce sites. If you don’t have a design team, Promorepublic will design promotions just for you, and deliver them in editable format. This allows you to reuse custom content in a snap. And, since it was designed just for your business, it won’t look like half the Internet. In addition, there are basic social media management tools and an advertising platform that lets you buy local-only advertising.
Pricing: Small businesses pay $49 per month, with other plans available for agencies.
Facebook Messenger Marketing
No discussion of Facebook tools would be complete without addressing Facebook Messenger. After all, Messenger is used for customer service tasks, and not just chatting with your friends. Messenger is also a great way to send personalized messages to your target audience. While there are many Facebook Messenger tools, these two seem to be the market leaders at the time of writing this post.
If you are new to the subject, please check out this post on Facebook Messenger marketing.
Looking to sell $16,000 worth of pizza in 4 months? Or using a Facebook Messenger Bot to funnel leads and generate $1.2 million in revenue? These are just some of the results that Manychat customers have seen. From easily building out your Facebook Messenger Bot to processing payments automatically to connecting with Shopify and automating your abandoned cart messages in Facebook, ManyChat has a lethal combination of both an easy-to-use user interface combined with advanced technology to help you leverage Facebook Messenger bots for business.
Pricing: You can have unlimited subscribers with their free version, but access to advanced functionality require a subscription starting at $10 per month.
Don’t have the staff available to sit and chat with customers on Messenger? Most small businesses have limited staffing, so they deploy MobileMonkey to help them. Here’s how it works: You can use MobileMonkey to build chatbots. These take care of the majority of your customer service inquiries without your having to deal directly with the customer. All chat based communications for the same customer are put in one place for you to read later. You also can program MobileMonkey to send automatic responses to consumer questions, and send Push notifications to their phones.
Pricing: There’s a limited-feature free version, with paid plans starting at $19 per month.
What are your favorite Facebook tools? Let me know in the comments.
Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash
Neal Schaffer is a leading authority on helping businesses through their digital transformation of sales and marketing through consulting, training, and helping enterprises large and small develop and execute on social media marketing strategy, influencer marketing, and social selling initiatives. President of the social media agency PDCA Social, Neal also teaches digital media to executives at Rutgers University, the Irish Management Institute (Ireland), and the University of Jyvaskyla (Finland). Fluent in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, Neal is a popular keynote speaker and has been invited to speak about digital media on four continents in a dozen countries. He is also the author of 3 books on social media, including Maximize Your Social (Wiley), and in late 2019 will publish his 4th book, The Business of Influence (HarperCollins), on educating the market on the why and how every business should leverage the potential of influencer marketing. Neal resides in Irvine, California but also frequently travels to Japan.