With the increasing popularity of Facebook, the social media giant has become one of the most beneficial marketing platforms for numerous large businesses across the world. However, if used the right way, it can also contribute to the growth and development of small businesses, which are geared toward local customers.
Facebook has been coming up with advanced features that can make marketing a whole lot easier for local business owners by helping them reach out to more people, increase sales through enhanced reliability, and ensure better services for their customers.
So, if you are running a Facebook business page for your local business, here are 4 powerful tips to make your marketing efforts more effective:
1. Make ‘User Engagement’ Your Priority
While promoting a local business through Facebook, your first and foremost focus should be to improve user engagement. Whatever you are posting to your business page should be relevant and interesting enough to grab the attention of your followers instantly. If you fail to make your followers intrigued, you will not be able to get them engaged with your posts. This will turn your business page into a failure and all your efforts will go in vain.
No matter how strong your local business marketing strategy is, you need to plan differently for making it a success on Facebook. According to Facebook’s page algorithm, the more engaged a follower is with a page, the more he/she will get to see its posts in their news feeds.
Hence, build a trustful rapport with your followers first. Post interesting content to your page, which might include attractive images, fascinating facts, informative quizzes, fun polls, and even links to inspiring or motivating articles. Such posts typically receive strong responses from followers and get them talking. Once the relationship becomes stronger, start posting promotional links too.
Try to engage at least 10% of your total number of followers every day with your posts in order to raise the click-through rate of your website and increase your sales.
2. Learn To Showcase Your Offerings
Local businesses have plenty of opportunities to show off their products on Facebook and give their sales a significant boost. The best thing about a local business is the array of tangible products / services offered by it, which can be showcased tactfully through ‘Facebook Suggestions’ in order to make people aware of the business, thereby fetching more customers.
The ‘suggestions’ feature in Facebook allows businesses to use striking images of their products / services for catching the attention of more and more local users. If you are a local business owner, all you need to do is choose high-quality images that can appeal to as well as ignite the senses of demographic of the small area targeted by you. Also, list the details of that specific product / service so that it can excite the right people.
If the products / services can be showcased the right way, ‘suggestions’ can turn out to be an extremely powerful tool for Facebook marketing.
3. Make Your Business Easy to Reach
Remember those good old days when the number of marketing medium was very limited and people simply had to rely on a telephone number in order to reach to a business near them. Well, though the media has changed and local businesses are now seeking potential customers through social platforms like Facebook, staying reachable is still critical to their success.
As a local business owner, you can add all your contact details (address, email ID, phone number, etc.) to your Facebook business page. However, most people expect immediate responses upon contact and you need to focus on the following two things for this purpose:
Facebook Messages: It is the most convenient way for any Facebook user to get in touch with a local business. If someone is interested in your offerings, he/she can simply send you a private message on your page regarding the query, which is simple, easy, and prompt. So, make sure that you have turned on the ‘message’ feature on for your business page.
Contact Numbers: While putting your business phone number in the ‘About’ section of your page is vital, it is even more important to mention it every time you create a post. This will help your followers connect with you directly from their news-feeds rather than visiting your timeline, which is essential for increasing the number of sales.
4. Be As Much Responsive As Possible
The responsiveness of a local business page matters a lot to its present as well as potential customers. According to the latest study, almost 40% of customers having a complaint about the products / services offered by a local business expect a reply within an hour or so while around 30% of them expect it as fast as within half an hour. Hence, you need to be committed to responding to the messages of your followers as fast as possible.
The ‘Page Responsiveness’ feature of Facebook allows people to know how quickly they can expect replies from a page. It shows that the business actually cares for its customers and page followers, which enhances the authenticity of the page itself and helps their followers make well-informed decisions.
Being super responsive to the queries, concerns, and complaints of followers / customers can also give excellent competitive advantages to local businesses. However, you must have responded to at least 90% of messages already sent to you and not take more than 5 minutes to reply in order to qualify for getting the ‘Page Responsiveness’ icon.
Running a Facebook page for your local business can turn out to be extremely fruitful, if you start following these 4 simple techniques. So, get ready to leverage Facebook for promoting your business and emerge as the ‘best’ by beating your local competitors.
