The combination of Shopify Facebook can be extremely powerful in creating and marketing an online store. If you already own a Shopify store, but you want to grow and scale it, the most popular social media network in the world is the best place to go.
Facebook has over 2.14 billion users, which means that you have an enormous audience to which you can market your product and store. Furthermore, according to statistics from last year, 18.3% of US adults made a purchase through it last year.
Keep on reading and I will give you the best tricks to utilize Facebook for driving sales and traffic to your store.
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Is Organic Way the Best Way to Promote Your Store on Facebook?
As already mentioned, one of the biggest pulls for using Facebook is the large audience you can reach.
However, that’s the main reason why the organic way doesn’t work anymore. There are simply too many people, too many pages and businesses, and everyone is fighting for the attention of customers.
If you aren’t a known brand – like Apple or Nike, it will be almost impossible to get people on your Shopify Facebook page organically. It doesn’t matter how good your content is or how often you post.
Nowadays, social media sites change their algorithm constantly, which means that you must always produce content that aligns with it. And that is not a good idea for a business.
To generate organic traffic, you must have a dedicated following that clings to all of your daily posts as it’s tough to gain new followers as a start-up.
Some companies try to get their friends, relatives, and acquaintances to like their page and promote it But still, that’s too small of a group to build a business. Furthermore, even if you get a couple of thousand people to follow your store’s page, those users may not be interested in your product and they won’t become customers.
This means you can’t reach your target audiences by using the organic way. Unfortunately, the only way to do successful marketing on Facebook is through ads. That means you have to pay to play.
In order to not spend money recklessly, let’s just find out how to best use Facebook ads to market your business.
Best Practices for Shopify Facebook Marketing – Ads
Make Sure You Have Your Audience’s Data
One of the first things you should do is get Facebook Pixel in order to track your ads data. You may think everyone does that but the truth is they don’t. However, you can’t follow the rest of my tips without first making sure you have it integrated.
To know how to optimize your campaigns and what to spend money on, you must have good data. One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing and eCommerce is the opportunity to track every step your customers make – from how long users spend on your website to how often they leave items in their cart without making the purchase.
Everything must be tracked correctly, analyzed, and then look to be implemented in your marketing strategy.
Create Marketing Funnels
Look, this isn’t something that’s easy and simple to do. It’s not native to Facebook ads and you must find a workaround to do it.
Now, remember that marketing a product can be similar to developing a relationship. Let me give you an example!
You know that when you’re dating someone, you can’t say let’s get married on the first date and expect the other person to agree. The same goes with products – you can’t bombard people with a Buy Now ad campaign and anticipate a high conversion rate.
In order to boost sales, you must go slow. As it’s in relationships, your company and the potential customers have to first get introduced to each other, develop a connection, and only then become partners. For that to happen, you must develop a marketing campaign using the following steps:
Start with Content Ads
Introduce your company, what you stand for, and what you’re offering. Here, you just have to give your brand message – no call to action buttons. The idea is for the clients to understand your reasons for creating this business.
Continue with Video Ads
This is a different type of content, that’s more inclined towards people who have shown an interest in your brand and would be willing to spend more time watching materials that are related to it. It’s again a part of your marketing campaign to get customers to know your firm, not to make them buy your product.
Promotion Ads
Now that you have introduced your company to the world and you already have a group of potential clients, you can try to do marketing for sales.
Here’s where we create an ad with a call to action button – such as buy now or visit us and we aim to make people want to do business with us.
Optimize Your Ads Correctly
One piece of advice you have to remember is – don’t do the default optimization for all your Facebook ads. You will just be throwing money down the drain.
Even though you are an eCommerce business and your motive for marketing is to drive sales, you shouldn’t make all your ads about purchases. Some of them should aim to get the customer accustomed to your brand and those will go to the top of the funnel. The promotional ads that are optimized for sales are the ones to go down the funnel.
Keep in mind, you have to treat all parts of your marketing strategy with the same care.
Leverage Remarketing
This may be a new term for some of you, so let me explain. Remarketing means showing your ads to people who have already interacted with your brand in a way. These are typically the ones with the highest conversion rate and they’re the wisest way to spend your money.
Before you do so, make sure to keep a check on a few rules:
- Don’t constantly show the same ad to the same customers. You will most likely annoy them. Be sure to have more than one running ad and always keep the frequency metric under 6.
- Take advantage of dynamic product ads. Look for products that the client has already shown interest in and offer them again, but with a discount.
- If a customer makes a purchase, get them off your retargeting list. You can imagine how bad your company will look if someone buys your product and receives another coupon for it, only five hours later. That doesn’t mean you can’t ever remarket to those people, you just have to do it smartly. Offer them other products or invite them to be a part of your loyalty program.
Target Lookalike Audiences
Once you have a customer list of at least several hundred people, you can go on and build a lookalike audience on Facebook.
There are a couple of details in place here:
- First, the larger and more detailed your client base is, the more precise you can be while creating a lookalike audience.
- Second, you must include people that have already purchased from you and are already repeat buyers in those groups.
You may be wondering what’s the point of creating these lookalike audiences?
It’s quite simple – this is an audience that Facebook believes is similar to your customers. The idea is that if your content has worked with your previous clients, it should work with others with similar interests.
Also, when knowing whom you’re targeting, you can optimize your campaign for that specific audience.
Offer Promotions to Your Shopify Facebook Page Fans
There are some ways that Facebook makes your life as a marketer a bit easier. One of those is through their custom app that lets you reward your audience with different types of promotions.
From a coupon that gifts them a free product to a discount code that lets them shop with 20% off – it could be anything!
Of course, you get many benefits from this tactic:
- Only those that follow you will get access to these promotions. In fact, statistics show that 39% of Facebook users follow businesses in hopes that they will receive special offers for doing so. And guess what? All of this encourages loyalty.
- Boost traffic to your store and drive more sales.
Good Copywriting Matters for Your Shopify Facebook Page
You will hear from some people that words don’t matter as much, that video content and visual effects affect customers more, I disagree.
Storytelling is the best way to sell anyone, anything. A good story brings out emotions and that creates a connection between a customer and a brand.
Look at Nike – their commercials are all stories that people believe in and get inspired by. Over time the public begins associating these feelings of belief and inspiration with the swoosh logo and the “Just Do It” slogan and that becomes the building block of the communities of Nike athletes around the world.
Nowadays, whenever you hear those words – “Just do it”, you don’t think someone is giving you orders, instead the Nike logo just pops into your head. And that’s how you know that words matter.
When you write for an ad, you must do it in a catchy way because you’re aiming to grab the attention of the customer. Look to create something that will provoke emotion within the person reading it. It can be anything – something funny, motivational or even sad, the point is that it has to make people feel something.
Research has already proven that humans remember the most, when they associate events or individuals or brands with a certain feeling, with an emotion that it provoked in them. So don’t fight science and don’t overthink it. Imagine that you’re the customer – what would make you remember your company? What’s special about it?
Use Quality Sources for Your Ads
You don’t want your company to look and feel cheap. Even if you’re a start-up that’s operating from your childhood room. That’s not something you want your customers to be able to notice. The goal is always to look as professional and as successful as possible.
Some tips on how to achieve that:
- Whenever you are incorporating images into your ads, make sure they’re of high quality. You don’t want blurred pictures or ones that have logos on them. It makes your company look incompetent.
- The same goes for your logo. Whenever you get one made, you should make sure you have it in different sizes and with the best possible quality.
- Videos fall into this category too. While they’re a great resource for engaging users, they’re not easy to make. A badly made video can have a worse impact than not having one at all. If you decide to go that route, make sure you can produce a product that’s of the needed quality and represents your company in the best way possible.
Target A Specific Audience by Using Interests On Facebook
Facebook has a lot of users, we all know that. Most people on the platform use it to socialize, share content, or connect with friends. At the end of the day, it’s a social media app, not a sales platform.
So in order for your Shopify Facebook marketing strategy to work, you have to pinpoint a niche audience, especially when you’re selling a product that can be of use for a specific group of people.
When you go to the interests, you can find categories and pages related to your business and audience.
The more narrow of an interest you type, the more specific search results you will get.
Let’s take this example: If you’re selling basketball shoes, searching for basketball teams will be a lot better for your store rather than looking for sports shoes.
If you combine a few niche interests, you will get an audience of people really interested in your shop. Don’t try to target a wider group of people, aim for small and specific ones. That’s key for Shopify Facebook marketing, especially for start-ups.
Remember, bigger doesn’t always mean better. By narrowing down your audience, you will increase your chance of conversions.
Have Patience And Be Persistent
Most of us want things to happen as fast as possible. But patience is a virtue and it’s one of those qualities that you should most definitely develop as a business owner.
When you want to create a successful marketing campaign, having a strategy is crucial. And a lot of the time, you start slow and steady. You need to start with generating great content that’s for a specific audience.
Put a good budget first. Begin by spending $50-100 a day and depending on how successful the ad is, you can decide if you want to continue with it or not. If it’s good, it will be less expensive over time. If not, you will need to learn to optimize your ads.
However, there is no step-by-step plan for creating a Facebook marketing campaign that’s 100% successful. What you should do is take all the advice you can get, put it into practice and figure out what works for your company and what doesn’t.
You may not be extremely successful from the get-go but as you gain experience over time and your brand receives some recognition, you will start getting more and more sales.
So take a deep breath, armor yourself with patience, and be ready for a long ride.
Is Shopify Facebook Combination Worth Trying?
There’s not a simple answer to the question. In my opinion, Shopify Facebook combination is totally worth it, especially when you are a brand that is getting some traction. If you already have a customer base, building a Facebook marketing campaign will be both easier and more successful.
For start-ups that have almost no clients, Facebook is a great way to make the business more popular and begin building an audience.
No matter what type of company you have, you must get it on Facebook. Even if it isn’t the platform that will make it successful, it’s still the biggest social network in the world, so it’s definitely worth it to have your business on it.
