Whether you’re a business owner or marketer seeking to improve your digital marketing strategies, tons of customer data are available at your fingertips. The challenge is to turn that data into actionable plans.
Take Facebook, for instance. Facebook usage has increased in the past year. Amid multiple lockdowns and self-quarantine measures, many people resorted to using Facebook to stay connected. If you have a Facebook Business Page for your brand, you have probably collected overwhelming data in the past year. One look at the platform’s insights and analytic tools, and you’d have a bit of idea about the people visiting your Facebook page and engaging with your posts. But the job doesn’t stop there.
What matters more is how you will use insights to improve your current marketing campaigns or create a new one. If you’re uncertain where to start, here are some actionable tips to help you:
Measure the Right Things to Refine Your Ad Targeting
Data-driven marketing agencies would always tell the same thing about advertisements: know your audience first. You probably have buyer personas to guide your first try at Facebook Ads. But like any digital marketing strategy, Facebook or social media marketing isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it thing. You have to tweak your ad targeting based on the results of your previous advertisement efforts. By looking at previous campaigns, you can know your audience better. You can target them better in your future ads.
Whether on Facebook or traditional media, high-performing ads aren’t made by accident. If anything, they are a product of well-thought-out metrics, multiple insights, and lots of A/B testing. So if you want to get the most out of your ad budget, collect and analyze as much customer data as possible beforehand.
Consider variables like demographics, posting schedule, and ad types and placement. Measure those things to gather important customer data. Cross-reference that data with your buyer personas. Does your audience on Facebook belong to the 18 to 40 age range, like how you specified it on your buyer persona? Do they resonate more with video content than texts and images?
Look at Posts Engagement to Plan Your Content Mix
Now that you’ve refined your target audience, it’s time to craft your ads and social media posts. The rule of thumb is to follow the “80-20 rule.” That is to use 80% of your posts to educate, inform, and entertain. The other 20% can be used to promote your brand and sell your products. The goal is to balance promotional posts with value. Based on the observations of Hootsuite marketers, Facebook algorithms aren’t a fan of self-promotion. The platform prefers meaningful content over posts about coupons.
One way to plan your content mix is to look at the Posts Engagement section on your Facebook Business page’s insights page. In that section, you will have a better idea about which content type works well for your audience. You will easily see the organic reach or “virality” of different content types.
Pro tip: use filters to analyze insights. For instance, you want to know which video content resonates the most with your audience. You don’t need to sift through all your posts. You can use the video filter to see which specific video posts garnered the most likes and shares. Analyze the similarities of those videos. Do they all have closed captioning? How long are these videos? Maybe you need to shorten your next video.
Post engagements give you a lot of clues on what your audience likes. From there, you can plan your content mix. Make sure to create a content calendar to keep your content mix and frequency organized.
Analyze Insights to Refine Your Sales Funnel
Assuming you direct all traffic and leads from Facebook to your website or Shopify store, you can use Facebook insights to refine that particular sales funnel. Go through the Facebook Insights page again. See which promotions and campaigns result in the highest conversions. Cross-reference that conversion rate with your Google Analytics data, where you will see where all the clicks and website traffic came from.
When analyzing Facebook insights, you can also check the low-hanging fruits. Perhaps, there are people you didn’t use to target, but they’re now engaging with your posts. Or maybe, there’s a significant uptick in the engagement of an old post. See if you can update it to attract more customers.
Facebook provides tons of valuable data to help grow your business online. But similar to other consumer data, Facebook insights require your input and analysis to transform them into actionable strategies.