What is one creative way to use Facebook for customer acquisition?
The following answers are provided by members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
1. Post Creative Content
Facebook is a platform where your clients want to engage with you. The biggest no-brainer is offering creative content that your followers can share. For example, we make sure to post inspirational quotes and fun content mixed with industry related news. It’s simple: your followers will want to engage with you on things that interest them the most.
2. Support Email Campaigns With Facebook Custom Audiences
Offer a special discount or offer to your email list. Create a custom audience on Facebook that contains your email list members, and then run Facebook ads that align with the messages of your email offers. Reinforce the value of the offer by being in multiple places for your targeted list.
3. Watch Groups for Leads
Facebook groups exist for just about everything, including finding better services around local areas. I like to monitor Facebook groups that are active in my area for the kind of information that can mean leads. Our construction company, for example, can really take advantage of a home improvement group attracting people who want to remodel.
4. Honor a Different Customer Each Week
Customers like to be acknowledged, and you can showcase a different customer each week on Facebook. Think about what motivates your customers most. Is it how your product makes them look or feel? Use that knowledge to devise a program that promotes your best customers in ways that will motivate others to give you a try.
– Nicole Munoz, Start Ranking Now
5. Host a Competition
Host a competition where your participants post photos of themselves with your product or utilizing your service. Not only will potential new customers learn more about your product, you’ll show them that you genuinely care about your current clients and are willing to feature them — something all social enthusiasts enjoy.
– Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance
6. Foster Guest Posting Relationships with Unique Targeted Content
Guest blogging and cross-posting is a fairly common strategy, but it is often done without tailoring content to the audience on the medium through which you are posting. For instance, InGenius posts about strategies for high school debaters to become more competitive college applicants through theNational Association of Speech and Debate and it generates more than 200 times our standard audience engagement.
– David Mainiero, InGenius Prep
7. Use the Review Feature on Facebook Pages
You can get your customers to write reviews on your Facebook page. These reviews work and potential customers want to read about your business before they try it out, especially from their peers or others they trust. Leverage these reviews by making positive ones into status updates and thanking the reviewer personally.
8. Use a Specific Messaging Strategy
Start a Facebook group for a specific audience you advocate for. Start the group around the topic of their biggest desire. Then use messaging plus video to share your authenticity and expertise. Position yourself as the solution to get their biggest desire. You do that by demonstrating your knowledge, case studies and testimonials. Proof sells far better than promise alone.
– Joshua Lee, StandOut Authority
9. Offer Free Things
I’ve run campaigns in previous businesses, giving away small prizes to people who engaged with our products in a quick and easy challenge. Create an easy contest that anyone can do and offer prizes like gift cards. Watch in shock at what it can do if you have a big enough network on your Facebook page. We saw traffic to our websites grow up to 10 times in a month from this strategy.
– Andy Leff, Electricity Labs/Warp Speed Labs
10. Utilize Audience Insights
Facebook Audience Insights can be used to segment out a hyper-targeted audience and then served ads for customer acquisition. You can utilize the tool’s Affinity and Relevance scores to hone in on a sample set of Facebook users that are more likely to be acquired as customers based on user interest data. Your ads will have a lower cost per click (CPC) and a higher engagement rate.
11. Use Lead Ads
Last fall Facebook released lead ads, which allow mobile users to request more information from advertisers without taking the user off Facebook. It’s a seamless and intuitive method of capturing leads, and one that caters to an increasingly mobile user base. Marketers may also test their ad in a variety of formats (video, carousel, etc.) to see which is most effective for their audience.
– Ismael Wrixen, FE International
12. Retarget
Facebook is a retargeting gold mine. Add a retargeting pixel on your site and then boost your Facebook posts to folks who have visited your site in the last 90 days. We increased our engagement by over 332 percent by leveraging small boosts to our retargeted audience.