How to Use Facebook for Your Retail or E-Commerce Business

How to Use Facebook for Your Retail or E-Commerce Business

Facebook ads are a great way to drive Facebook users to your online store. Anytime you are creating Facebook ads for an e-commerce site, you are going to want to start by selecting a large audience and then carefully narrowing it down to get the most bang for your buck.

If you are in the health and fitness niche, for example, then you can start by selecting ‘fitness and wellness’ as your targeted group on Facebook’s ad manager. This will show you that the ads are targeting over 100-million people, so your goal is to drive this audience down. If you are selling yoga mats, then you can choose to zone in on Facebook users who have listed yoga as an interest. This will show you that you now have an audience of 40 million people, but you can’t just go and market yoga mats to 40 million people.

You need to find a way to further narrow this audience down. One way to do this is segment it down to ‘yoga mats’, which will lead you to a group of 210 000 people, which is a much more reasonably sized audience. This is where a lot of beginners start to struggle. They think because they have found their product niche on Facebook that they are ready to start marketing but showing ads of yoga mats to people who have said they are interested in yoga mats likely will not yield the results you were expecting. If you change your target audience to people who are interested in yoga as well as online shopping and certain yoga brands (such as yoga clothing brands), then you already have a more relevant target audience.

Another great way to use Facebook to market your retail business is to announce promotions and events exclusively on Facebook. If your audience knows that you run promotions and sales on Facebook, then they will have a reason to check out your page regularly. You can also use your Facebook page to share relevant and timely content online. The fact that Facebook doesn’t have a character limit or that your post doesn’t have a timeframe attached to it means you can combine your social media strategy and content strategy and share links to your company’s blog posts or other thought leadership pieces on your site.

WSI New Media Marketing is a social media marketing company in Greensboro, North Carolina.  Contact us if you need help with your social media marketing strategy.