According to a Statista report, 73% of U.S. users visit Facebook every day. This means there is a lot of potential for retailers to sell their products on Facebook.
Facebook Stories alone have 500 million daily viewers, and the latest developments on Facebook will bring many lucrative opportunities for ecommerce store owners in 2023.
Throughout this blog, we’ll discuss the latest developments in detail and guide you on how to use Facebook for ecommerce marketing.
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Whether you are a new ecommerce store owner, or already doing well in your product niche, what strategies shall you employ on Facebook to move a step ahead and capture more revenue?
Let’s split the strategies into the two main categories, organic and paid, to understand how retailers can explore both to utilize Facebook for ecommerce marketing.
What Are the Two Main Categories For Facebook Marketing?
Online retailers can use both organic and paid mediums for ecommerce marketing on Facebook. Both have different prerequisites, hence marketing is also slightly different for each category.
1. Organic Facebook Marketing
There are many opportunities on Facebook to market your products organically.
Most ecommerce store owners start selling their products through numerous Facebook BUY & SELL groups. Thousands of these exist and are free to join. To start marketing your products, choose only those groups that are RELEVANT to you and are within your LOCALITY.
However, if you don’t have a Facebook page setup first, everything is in vain.
Below are a few examples of how social media marketing works on Facebook. And, if you aren’t already doing it, here are a few ways you can.
1.1. Group post
This is a group post. People usually post ads of their products on social media. As you can see, someone is selling a BMW in this post.
Recently, Facebook introduced Shops in Groups, which enables people to support the communities they care about by purchasing products from them. This is a huge opportunity for ecommerce store owners to upscale their organic Facebook marketing efforts.
Source: about.fb.com
For instance, there is a group called “Save the Earth.” active members of that group might buy T-shirts, mugs, tote bags, and apparel from the group shop to show their commitment to the cause.
Facebook is also introducing Product Recommendations in Groups. This will make shopping easier from shops on Facebook, primarily because Facebook will show products that members recommend when you ask for guidance in a group. Again, this brings in several new marketing opportunities on Facebook for ecommerce store owners.
Top Product Mentions is a new feature in the news feed that helps with product discoverability. Products most recommended by peers from the groups you are a part of are shown to you. By coming up with a strategy to increase engagement with your product name, you can have your product trending because of this new feature.
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1.2. Page Posts
Page posts are another form of organic advertising on Facebook. No one can post on your page except you. Most companies have page followers in millions. This means whatever they post gets seen by some of their followers.
Similarly, we have a video ad. Most companies use video ads to sell products because they get the most views.
1.3. Related Pages
Related pages are automatically marketed by Facebook to users who visit a particular page. Usually, Facebook page owners select the ‘related pages’ but if they are not available, Facebook will generate its own list.
1.4. Suggested Groups
Next, we have ‘Suggested groups.’ Facebook shows suggested groups in your home feed, depending on your preferences.
These are some of the ways to market products organically on Facebook. And, those who are good at it, earn considerably from their work.
1.5. Organic Marketing Requires Time
Before excitement gets the best of you, understand that organic marketing on Facebook requires time and effort. Remember the saying: “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” The same thing applies here. You need to create credible profiles and pages first, then gather the audience, and so on.
However, it is always better to use paid marketing strategies to get success early on.
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2. Paid Marketing for Ecommerce
Paid marketing campaigns is another relevant marketing option available on Facebook. These posts receive a boost from Facebook when you pay money; similar to Google Ads.
Above are three standard formats of Facebook ads for ecommerce that you can use to promote your products.
A few ways in which you can use Facebook paid marketing for business include:
2.1. Sponsored Post
Here is one example of how Audi is promoting its latest vehicle.
2.2. Dynamic Product Ads
2.3. Video Facebook Ads for ecommerce
Facebook also allows video ads. These are perfect to attract eyeballs and spread the message to more people. Video ads are charged per view.
2.4. Influencer Marketing for Ecommerce
There is also a new interesting feature called Live Shopping for Creators making it easier for creators and influencers to highlight their favorite products. You can use this new opportunity to hire influencers to subtly market your products to their followers.
3. Which is Better for Beginners: Facebook Organic Marketing vs. Facebook Paid Marketing?
The correct answer is both. In fact, beginners are encouraged to start with an organic profile. This means they need to create a page and post some great content. Once they have some decent posts, they should then opt for paid facebook marketing to boost the best ones to get an audience. They can double-down on this audience with lookalike and custom audience features.
Types of Tracking Possible with Facebook Ads
There are a lot of things you can track through Facebook Ads for ecommerce. Most successful marketers use these stats to discover and strategize how to bring more traffic to their website, and then turn them into recurring customers. Below are some Facebook marketing stats that you, as an online retailer, can use to devise a marketing strategy and then analyze it.
- Traffic and Clicks
- Engagement
- Conversions
- App installs
- Offers
- Event Attendance
- Video views
But first, a little about Ad creation…
Before we get down to the nitty-gritties, let’s learn a little about setting up a Facebook Ad.
Creating Your First Facebook Ad
Creating an ad on Facebook is simple. First, open your ad account. You must add your credit card info, and wait for Facebook to approve it to have a verified account. Once the account is set up, you are ready to create ads. Click the CREATE CAMPAIGN button to proceed.
Here is the URL if you don’t know where to look.
Name your campaign, and then create your ad set. You will have to select the location and preferences of the audience. Refer to the image below to get a full picture of what goes behind creating a Facebook ad.
A few things to note:
- Don’t fill your Facebook page with promotional posts. Keep a balance of 80 percent informational content and 20 percent advertising content
- Don’t create ad campaigns to only gain likes and engagement when your goal is conversion
- Make sure that you only target paying customers through Facebook audience insights. You can find them through the audience selection tool. Search for people who have bought something online recently.
- Always create a cap for your ads. If you leave the campaign uncapped, it will eat most of your money. It is always better to add both campaign level and ad level caps.
- Make sure you have a Swipe file of the best ad copies and images with you whenever you promote ads on Facebook.
4. Facebook for Ecommerce – Strategies to Generate More Orders
Now that you are familiar with Facebook advertising platform, and know what mistakes to avoid, let’s learn about strategies that can bring more orders.
4.1. Creating an Audience for Brand
As an ecommerce store owner, your primary motive is to bring in more orders. The more orders you bring in, the more successful your online store will be. Furthermore, the best way to bring more orders to your store is by building it as a brand. I will give just one example here. Wish.com. Even Gary Vaynerchuk has said, “This store is going to take over Amazon pretty soon.” The reason? It is playing with the hearts of people.
The ecommerce store was created by exGooglers. They knew that the best way to sell products online is by dropshipping. And they don’t dropship just any product. They dropship products that aren’t available in the country or the local area.
How are they doing it?
They are building themselves as a brand. They have tons of dropshipped products. Yes, some of the products have too much shipping cost. But they have established themselves over the years and people trust them.
In fact, now that so many dropshipping stores are in the market, the only reason they are in the business is that they are doing something right.
So, as an ecommerce store owner, what should you do to become like Wish?
Build an audience that matters. Let’s dissect a few posts by Wish.com.
Who wouldn’t like this post?
The beauty of using Facebook for ecommerce products is that it URGES YOU TO BUY! A phenomenon that we call “impulse buying.” If you have your credit cards fed in the system, you simply have to press BUY. This feature gives ecommerce store owners a lot of control over the emotions of their target users. They simply have to evoke the emotions within, and half of the work is done.
But before you can do that, make sure you understand various audience personas.
4.2. Finding an Audience that Shops Online
The best way to find an audience that shops online is through the audience insights tool on Facebook.
I personally prefer this tool because it shows the segmentation I can do with each audience type. Once I have an audience created for an ad set, I will save it and then use it in my ad.
Importing a new audience in the ad set is easy. Just create the ad set. When you get to the CREATE AUDIENCE option, click on OPEN and the audience will get imported to your ad. Now make changes to it or add additional preferences as per your liking.
Now, if you have to target only those who have purchased online, you will have to select purchase behavior from the user interests column.
Here is an example of how you can target only those who have shown impulse purchase behavior on Facebook.
4.3. Searching Relevant Audience through Other Pages
Now, let’s drill even further by targeting only the audience that is relevant to your niche.
Let’s say you want to target ‘Fishing enthusiasts.’ What type of audience interest will you select? We have a few options available, including:
- Pages relevant to fishing
- Magazines relevant to fishing
- Fishing stores
- Fishing Games
- Hunting and Fishing communities
We can target pages, but everyone is also doing the same. Also, pages are free to use and your ads won’t directly target those who are actual online buyers. So, we won’t target it. Next, we have magazines available. These are subscription based magazines related to hunting and fishing. These people have actually paid $$$ for magazines. So, they are more inclined to buy your products. These are your actual target buyers.
We also have fishing stores available but we don’t know if the people who like that page are also customers. But we can still take the chance with micro-segmented campaigns.
Next, we have hunting and fishing communities that include adventurists. Hence, we will also count them in our list because most of them purchase hunting equipment for their expeditions on a regular basis.
To create your audience run a search for fishing magazines.
Now, search all these fishing magazines one by one on Facebook to make sure they have a page. Once you are done with that, look for these magazines in interest section of the Audience Insights.
Here is one example.
We have found one magazine. You can do the same with other fishing magazines as well. Make sure that you have a tangible audience size. Otherwise, the cost of showing ads will be too high.
4.4. Facebook Retargeting Tips for Ecommerce Stores
Now that you know how to target relevant Facebook users to build an audience, you can retarget them later. Let’s discuss some best Facebook marketing strategies to retarget social media users.
Creating a Custom Audience
Let’s say you have a list of customer details. You want to target them through Facebook as well. How will you do that? Facebook allows users to easily create a custom audience for the marketers. They can then retarget customers who visited their stores. Retargeting campaigns can be created for:
- Lost customers
- Recurring customers
- Announcements
- New arrivals
- Events
- And many other trends
Creating a custom audience will require trial and error. But once you understand the system, revenue is enormous.
Let’s learn how you can create a custom audience for your store.
Creating a Lookalike Audience
Once you have the custom audience generated, you can create a lookalike audience of the same. Lookalike audience refers to an audience that has the same preferences. Let’s say you wanted to target people who were over the age of 40 and played golf.
You targeted a few people and the ad was successful. Now, if you want to create a lookalike audience, it will consist of people who play golf and are above 40.
Note: These people are not those who have seen your ads.
I created an audience of mobile users who like a certain niche of smartphones. Now, I am looking for the same kind of audience in Canada.
I personally prefer targeting countries and provinces/states because this helps you drill down further while creating ads.
It is better to restrict the audience size to 1 million. Test with different ad sets and use one that works the best. Once you have data available, it is time for split testing.
Split Testing
This is where the actual game starts. You will be creating split testing ads to make sure that you don’t waste money on less performing ads.
Here is what you need to do.
- Create one adset for your audience and then test it. If it doesn’t work, create another audience and test that.
- Use a minimum budget for ad testing. Test the ad for 3-5 days before you call it quits
- If the ad works, create a lookalike audience and retest.
- Again use the same strategy for testing.
Hint: You can create a copy of the same ad and change the audience for faster testing.
4.5. Facebook Lead Generation Tips
Let’s take a look at some lead generation strategies for new ecommerce store owners. The best way to get started with lead generation on Facebook is with pixels. Facebook offers a small pixel that can track each action on the page. You have to install it on your website to get leads for your business.
The Power of the Pixel
ollow this guide to setup Facebook pixel on your page. First setup pixel from the Facebook advertising account. Here is the complete process of how to set up Facebook pixel in your website.
Right Ad for Right Intent
Now, only run ads that actually serve the purpose. Don’t simply set and forget. Monitor and optimize as we mentioned earlier: micro-segmentation.
This is one mistake that we made. The campaign went over the budget set for this adset. If we had not set a cap on top of it, it would have been devastating.
Don’t Forget Ad Funnels
Next, create funnels for your audience. Here are some scenarios that you should focus on.
- Customers leaving from the product page
- Customer leaving from the add-to-cart page
- Customer buying products
- Lost customers
Create different ad campaigns for each of them so that you can attain the most revenue.
Let’s say, for lost customers, you can announce a cashback or discount program. For happy customers, you can offer a referral program with a discount. So on and so forth.
Trial and Error
As a beginner you will surely face many errors. That is totally fine. That’s how you will learn and grow. But know that money doesn’t grow on trees, and make sure that you always keep a cap on your campaigns. If you don’t keep a cap, Facebook will spend more than it should on unnecessary targeting.
Make Use of Facebook Default Forms
You may have a form available on your website, but it is always better to use the default Facebook features as they generate more leads. Most people don’t want to click an external link. So, if your purpose is to collect emails or any other detail of the person, do that with Facebook forms.
When you have the lead, you can nurture it using multiple marketing channels.
What’s Next?
There is always some new development happening in the social media world and so many trends that you can rely on. As a business owner, you should learn how to use Facebook for ecommerce marketing by following the tips, tricks, and strategies we have discussed above. Just one word. GET STARTED.
You now have almost all the information that an ecommerce paid marketer should have to start selling products online. Our purpose was to cover the essentials because you can get other information about Facebook for ecommerce on the internet, or by getting in touch with us!
