5 Facebook Marketing Mistakes You Need to Stop

Facebook continues to be a more popular digital marketing platform for all types of businesses. But because of the competitive nature of its landscape, you must constantly improve if you’re going to have a shot at Facebook’s success. A big part of achieving that is by learning from your past mistakes. Below are 5 Facebook marketing mistakes you should stop committing in the coming year.  

• I am not focusing on prospects’ pain points.

When people scroll through their feeds, they are bombarded with content clamoring for attention. A common mistake is leaning towards selling a feature or promotion instead of making your social media content about your prospective customers and their pain points. Crafting your posts and ads to focus on your customers’ struggles, aspirations and motivations trump seeing even the most feature-packed products/service. You only have a little over a second to catch your prospects’ attention; the best way to do so is by making content about them and not your business.

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In the example above, Promo quickly segues to empathizing with the challenges of running a business while also needing to worry about marketing. They then offer a solution to these pain points, highlighting the importance of creating professional videos and how their solution is convenient for business owners strapped for both time and resources. 

• I am not addressing negative feedback promptly.

No matter how good your product is, there will always be negative feedback on social media, particularly on Facebook, where it’s as much a pastime to complain as it is to scroll through content. And while this is something even the savviest social media marketers can’t avoid, there’s one surefire way to handle them—addressing them promptly. 

Don’t let 48 hours pass without responding personally to unsatisfied customers. Even when you can’t make amends and re-do what’s already been done, recognizing oversight or shortcomings lets your customers feel that you care about them. Doing so not only gives you a chance to win back a customer, but you’re also showing others how you value them. 

• Lazy targeting

It’s common for Facebook marketing beginners to target an audience that’s, quite simply, too big. Not only does this sort of imprecise targeting quickly lay waste to your marketing budget, but it also makes even the best marketing strategies much less effective when targeted at the wrong audience. 

Just keep in mind that targeting still depends on your marketing goals. If the goal is to raise awareness, then targeting a broad audience isn’t that bad. But if you have more specific goals like increasing Facebook conversions, then you’re going to refine your audience to whom your content is most relevant using the data that you have. So instead of just boosting content to target fans of your page, you can go into Ads Manager and refine your audience by creating a custom audience made up of your existing customers, website traffic, and people who’ve engaged with your brand. 

• Not optimizing content

This might seem like something that should go without saying. But you’d be surprised at how many brands still overlook this point. One way to optimize your marketing content is by ensuring that your paid marketing campaigns are aligned with all your organic content. This allows you to leverage invaluable data and insights from all your customer touchpoints.

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Skyscanner did this when they came up with three creative concepts for a holiday campaign and tested them on social media to see the best direction they should go with. And while they found that none of the three concepts resonated with their audiences, it was enough insight to drive them back to the drawing board and produce a better one. Additionally, they allocated a small amount of ad spend to target specific focus groups. All these eventually resulted in Skyscanner creating one of its most successful Facebook campaigns. 

• I am not tracking your results.

The best thing about digital marketing and the many online marketing tools that enhance it is the ability to track the intricacies of your performance. If you’re going to keep getting better at Facebook marketing, you’ll need to continuously track your results – whether they be wins or fails. 

If you’re starting with Facebook marketing, a simple approach to tracking your results is creating a document with your results and critical insights and sharing these across your entire organization. You should also regularly revisit this document to identify new opportunities presented by new features introduced by Facebook. 

Facebook’s native analytics can provide you with plenty of insights into your performance. How you learn from them will determine your future success. 

Final words

With changing algorithms and a highly-competitive landscape, Facebook marketing is something you’ll need to work on. You probably won’t get it right the first time, but learning from your mistakes and identifying mistakes you consistently commit is always a step in the right direction. Make sure you keep an eye on your past performances and allow them to guide the actions you take in the future.