Sure, the millennials are opting out of Facebook, but still, the social media giant still isn't going anywhere.
Which is good news for marketers, businesses and individuals wanting to utilize the platform in their marketing mix in the year ahead.
By this point, it should be understood that when it comes to marketing, whether on Facebook or on any other online medium, it is crucial for marketers to constantly stay on top of things. With processes changing and taking new directions continually, it is important to be aware of what's going on and plan marketing campaigns and strategies accordingly. Only then can maximum success from a campaign be achieved.
For Facebook marketing in 2014, here are some points that marketers need to bear in mind for creating dynamic strategies:
Focus on the News Feed as opposed to the sidebar:
Prime real estate is changing hands on Facebook. For quite a while, the side bar had been the most obvious spot for placing your ad; however, that's not the case anymore. The best spot now tends to be the News Feed since it's here that most users are likely to view and engage with your message more. Based on Facebook data for the third quarter of 2013 according to Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer Marin software, News Feed ads have almost a 44 times higher CTR and 5 times higher conversion rate.
Go mobile:
By now, it is a well-known fact that mobile users form a major chunk of online users and most Facebook activity is being done on mobile devices. Keeping that in mind a significant part of your advertising budget needs to be allocated to mobile-only Facebook advertising. Creating robust mobile-only campaigns is a must and different creative approaches should be applied based on behaviors of mobile users.
Familiarity counts:
Statistics and observations by experts suggest that users of Facebook are more likely to purchase from brands that they know of already and have interacted with before. For this, it is important to know the history of user behavior and preferences. Time and budget should be allocated to tools that help retrieve users' browsing history and tastes. Tools like Custom Audiences help marketers gain knowledge about specific customers based on what they have searched for previously, which helps in boosting the conversion rate immensely.
Keep changing creatives:
The attention span of online users is less and the last thing that they will do is engage with the same ads again and again. To keep the freshness factor alive and motivate users to engage with your brand, keep rotating your creatives and develop new ones based ona regular schedule. Rotating the ads can lead to an almost 35 percent higher CTR and 4 percent higher conversion rate as per Marin.
The point is, like everywhere else, advertising on Facebook too is now a highly competitive domain and new ideas and steps need to be taken in order to create a positive impression and maintain it. Using these guidelines above, a successful campaign can be created and implemented in order to get consistent results throughout 2014.