5 Essential Components of a Successful Facebook Sales Strategy

With almost 1.5 billion registered users from all across the globe, Facebook is any marketer’s dream platform. Over the last couple of years, it has seen the average age of its users rise steadily, which means there are more people on Facebook with cash in hand and the ability to make their own purchase decisions (unlike teenagers or younger users).

All this presents a great opportunity for marketers and online sellers to increase their product sales and acquire new clients from Facebook. However, in order to create a successful Facebook sales strategy, you need to have certain components in place, apart from having a good quality product that fulfills a specific need. Here’s a quick look at some of them.

1.  High Quality Social Media Content

Content is the king on social media as well. But the kind of content that works on social media, Facebook to be specific, differs from blog content. It needs to be short, engaging and interesting enough to make people share it with their followers. There needs to be a lot more visual content like memes, images, videos and infographics.

However, while creating Facebook content, you need to keep your objective in mind – which is to make sales. For that, you need to share content that makes you a reliable source of high value and actionable information related to your product and industry. Share new researches, statistics, findings and benefits related to your product and use short updates (visual and text based) to stay in touch with your followers.

2.  A Vibrant and Engaged Fan Page

An engaged and loyal audience is one of the primary needs of any sales strategy. But in the case of Facebook, it’s importance is magnified since there are so many other companies and brands approaching users all the time with their products and offers.

In order to develop a long term and dependable Facebook sales strategy, you need to have a well-managed and engaged Facebook fan page. Your fan page is the central platform from where you can manage all your sales and marketing campaigns, engage your followers and then convert them into paid customers.

There are examples of people successfully selling their products on Facebook without a large fan page, but their returning customer rates and customer loyalty are usually low. Moreover, they never engage their customers to build a long term relationship.

Engagement comes from having a personality. Instead of being a faceless company, add personality to your page and connect with your followers on a personal level. Respond to their comments, tag them in posts, address them with their names and have fun with them.

3.  Smart Use of Facebook Advertisements

Over the last couple of years, Facebook has invested a great deal in improving its advertisements. They are much more targeted than before and allow users to locate their target audience in a number of very smart ways. In my personal experience, the CPA (cost per lead acquisition) of Facebook ads is much lower than any other ad network.

You need to make use of this feature.

Gone are the days when your Facebook posts could attract thousands of organic views. Facebook has tightened the screw on post exposure. Now you need to invest in advertisements in order to attract targeted traffic. And in my opinion, it’s a very reasonable investment with high returns.

I’ve explained my Facebook marketing strategy in more detail in this post.

But in short, you need to target people that are already buying products from your competitors. Be as specific in audience selection as possible. Start with a short advertisement campaign and see how it goes. Then gradually invest more budget and adjust your ad content and images to see what works well.

4.  Using Contests and Giveaways

Free giveaways are a great way to attract lots of potential customers to your page and at the same time give them a taste of what your paid services have to offer. It also builds credibility in the eyes of your target audience. Similarly, holding contests on your Facebook page not only increases the engagement levels on your page, but also gives you an opportunity to let your customers explore your products and services in more detail.

However, your free giveaway needs to be in line with your main product. It can be a downgraded or limited version of your main product, or a trial version of your services. It needs to complement your primary product and give the users a sense of what to expect from you when they pay for your products or services.

5.  Simplifying the Buying Process

Many great products fail to achieve high sales numbers because of a complicated payment process. Creating a seamless buying process is critical for the success of your Facebook sales campaign. This includes the payment process, plus the overall buying experience.

The best way to create a simplified and effective buying process is by integrating an online store with your Facebook page. You can do that by using free tools like Selz.

Selz lets you integrate a fully functional online store, including a shopping cart, with Facebook from where you can sell your products directly. With this approach you won’t have to route customers to any other page. Moreover, it allows you to accept buyer payments from Master Card, Visa and PayPal.

In online sales, the speed of the buying process and the number of redirections involved in it, plays a key role in the overall sales conversion rate. Therefore, simplifying this step should be one of your priorities.

Conclusion

As I said at the start, Facebook is an extremely effective marketing and sales channel. However, in order to fully benefit from it, you need to create an engaged audience with a well-managed fan page, and invest intelligently in Facebook advertisements. Add a simplified buying process to this, and you’ll have a winning Facebook sales strategy.