Published on September 15th, 2020
Facebook has over 2.5 billion monthly active users and is therefore still a great way to connect with potential customers. But what are the best ways to increase your sales on Facebook? In this post, I will tell you 7 Facebook strategies to increase your sales! Let’s dive in.
Get The Basics Right
This is not really a strategy, but more of a must-have and basis for everything you are going to do on Facebook. You need to have the basics right. And what do I mean by that?
It means that you:
- Need to have a profile picture
- Have an engaging Facebook Page description
- A great cover photo or video
- Set up your contact information on your Facebook Page
Let’s go further to the real strategies.
Be social
This one sounds really cliche, I know. But this is really one of the most important strategies. What most businesses forget when they’re doing anything on social media, is actually to be social. They are just promoting their services or products or re-posting their website content once a week. But that’s basically it. They are not engaging with others’ posts. They are not liking anything else. They are not putting comments.
They are doing nothing. Just promoting themselves. But that doesn’t work. Most people forget what Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were invented for. They were meant as social platforms. So how can you best use such platforms? To actually be social.
Gary Vaynerchuck (New-York Times best selling author, entrepreneur and investor) created a strategy for this: the $1,80 strategy. He says that you need to find 90 Facebook accounts in your niche and leave your two cents at one post of every account. And then repeat this, every day.
Let’s say we are a marketing agency. So we go to Facebook and type in “marketing” in the search field. There, we can filter on the year and what kind of posts we want to see. I chose to go for posts of this year and “Public Posts”: Then, scroll across the posts and click on an interesting one. And eventually, leave a meaningful comment:
That’s it! Just do this 90 different times a day, and your followers will grow constantly. And this strategy can be repeated on every other platform as well. The reason why this strategy is so extremely powerful, is because most Facebook users aren’t doing this.
Bonus: If you are going to do this on Instagram, Twitter, or maybe even TikTok, make sure that you search for hashtags. So, do not search for “marketing”, but do search for “#marketing”.
Post Consistently
The third strategy is to consistently post content on Facebook. And the best way to do this is, is to provide value to your audience.
What problem do you solve for your audience? How can you provide tips and tricks to solve that problem? These are the most common ways to provide value and create content at scale. But I know, most marketers and entrepreneurs still struggle with creating so much content.
So that’s why I am sharing this slide deck with you: How To Create 64 Pieces Of Content In A Day
This slide deck was made by Gary Vaynerchuk and shows some effective tactics on how you can make social media content at scale. It has been really useful to me and (I think) thousands of others.
Use Facebook Groups To Grow Your Audience
Let’s be honest. In general, the organic reach on Facebook is really, really low. Facebook is a saturated platform and even when you get thousands of page likes, your posts won’t get that much engagement. With the tips I shared above, you still can improve the engagement of your posts. But I might take time and a lot of effort to do so.
So, a great alternative to organic reach is Facebook Groups. Facebook Groups are one of the best ways to increase your sales. With Facebook’s organic reach, you are most likely to be seen to people in general, not focused on anything in particular.
But Facebook Groups are always focused on a particular niche or on a particular location. I will give you two examples to explain.
The Location Facebook Group
So, let’s imagine that we live in Truckee, California. It has a small population of 16,849 residents. And let’s imagine you are a real estate agent in that area.
Close connections with residents are important for your business and Facebook Groups are a great way to make those connections. So, head over to Facebook and type in “Truckee” in the search field.
Then, on the left hand, you click on Groups:
Here, you see an overview of all the Facebook Groups related to Truckee.
A great one is the “Truckee Tahoe People”, it has over 26.000 members and 160 posts a day:
So, what do you do now?
You just become a member of that Facebook Group, introduce yourself and engage with others. People will get to know you. And you can help people when they have certain questions or problems.
It doesn’t have to be related to real estate all the time, you can also just chit chat a little bit And what is the benefit of that?
The benefit is that when they need anything related to real estate, they will come to you. Because they know you and because they trust you. You made a real connection with them.
The Niche Facebook Group
The other kind of Facebook Group is the Niche Facebook Group. This is not so much focused on a specific location, but is more focused on a specific niche. The advantage of this kind of Facebook Group is that people are often in it because they have specific problems related to the niche.
Once you solve those problems for them, they will see you as an authority and are more likely to come to you when they have a problem.
So let’s say you are a gardener, just head over to Facebook and type in “garden”:
Then, you click on “Groups”:
Here are a lot of Facebook Groups that are focused on gardening, waiting for your tips and tricks.
The members of these Facebook Groups have specific problems related to gardening, and you could be there to solve them.
An excellent way to be seen as an authority!
Create a chatbot on Facebook Messenger
In 2016, Facebook opened up their platform for chatbots on Facebook Messenger. And since then, Facebook allows you to connect a chatbot to your Facebook Page. But what is a chatbot? A chatbot is an automated conversation partner. It facilitates a conversation between a human and a computer.
Normally, you have a conversation with another human via Messenger, but with chatbots, you are not talking to another person, but with a computer.
Chatbots are a great way to:
- Reduce your customer service costs, because they can automatically reply to your users
- Increase your sales, they could recommend your products or send abandoned cart messages
- Automatically qualify your leads
And the best part of Facebook Messenger are the open and click rates. On average, Messenger has an open rate of 80% and a click rate of 60%, which is extremely high. Compare that to your 20% open rates and 4% click rates of your email campaigns! I will talk about three advanced strategies you can use to leverage your chatbot on Facebook Messenger.
Abandoned Cart Messages via Messenger
This strategy is only applicable to eCommerce stores. But it is extremely effective. As an eCommerce store owner, you know that 65% of your users leave your checkout page.
And if you don’t reengage with them, there is a chance that they will never come back. So, if they leave your checkout page, we need to make sure that they will return to your store. But, how can you do that? We can send them an abandoned cart message inside Facebook Messenger.
An abandoned cart message is a message that you sent to someone who has added items to their cart, but didn’t purchase them. So, with the abandoned cart message we are reminding them of the products that they were going to purchase at your store. But, how can you do this? For example, you can use chatbot software, such as Recart. With Recart, you can use an Add-to-Cart Popup.
This means that when a customer adds something to their cart on your website, a pop-up will appear:
Once the user clicks on “Get this in Messenger”, you can send them a message inside Messenger:
If they click on “Notify Me”, they will automatically get back to your website.
They will fill their cart with items.
They will go to the checkout page.
But then? Then they leave.
And this is where the magic happens.
Because you already had a conversation with them in Messenger, you can send them that abandoned cart message:
And with the high open and click rates that Messenger gives, there will be a huge chance that they will come back to your online store and finish their order.
To give you a little bit of context on how effective this is:
Only three weeks ago, I set this kind of a campaign up for a client and here are the results:
$992 in extra sales in less than a month!
Create Contests / Giveaways
You all have seen them.
“Guess how many balls are on this picture and win a free product!”
“Tag 5 Friends and Like Our Page and You Have a Chance of Winning a Free Hour of Shopping”
Contests and giveaways, they happen a lot.
And it is logical, because they are extremely effective.
- Contests have a conversion rate of almost 34%, which is higher than other content types.
- 94.46% of the time users share the promotion immediately after they register.
- Of the total participants, 62.13% share the promotion with a friend in order to suggest that they take part too.
What most people don’t know, is that you don’t need a Facebook Ad for a contest or giveaway. You can just make a Facebook post and connect it with your chatbot.
First, make an engaging Facebook post:
Then, when someone comments on your post, you can automatically send a reply inside Facebook Messenger:
Once you know the winner of the contest, you can send them the price.
But what about all the losers? You give them a discount on their next order. So, they will eventually become new customers of you:
Use Sponsored Messages
This is one of the newest Facebook strategies out there. We all know Facebook ads. We see them every day in our feed and people are used to them.
But what about Sponsored Messages? Sponsored Messages are a new kind of Facebook ads. Instead of showing an ad in their News Feed, you can send them a message in Messenger.
Which looks like this:
What are the benefits of these kinds of ads?
- People don’t know them yet, so some of them won’t think it is an ad
- Open rate is 80% and the click rate is 60% in Facebook Messenger, this is a lot higher than a usual ad
- There are really cheap
Now It’s Your Turn
Those are my 7 Facebook Strategies To Increase Your Sales. Now, let me ask you a question. Which one are you going to use? The $1,80 strategy? Or the abandoned cart messages? Leave a comment below right now.
