CHAPTER 1 : What You Need to do before logging into Facebook

"Why should I spend so much time planning my Facebook strategy?"

Before launching a Facebook lead generation campaign, set up a plan based on your specific goal. This plan will not only help you organize your efforts in order to be most efficient, but will also turn into a useful reference in the future when you want to see if your goals were reached.

GET MORE FANS
Increasing the reach of your page by expanding your fanbase is critical for business success on Facebook. The more people who ‘like’ your page, the bigger your reach across their network of friends. You may have 1000 fans, but they each have hundreds of friends who can see the content they interact with. (Note: the  average number of friends on Facebook per person is 229 according to Pew Research.)

GET LOTS OF LEADS
Increasing the number of your Facebook fans isn’t enough to drive business results. You will need to convert these followers into leads by sending them to your landing pages where you can gather their contact information. You can achieve that by promoting popular offers and tailoring ads to specific segments of your audience. If you are interested in a smaller set of more qualified leads for your product or service, you can adjust your ad settings to find this subset of people.

GET NEW CUSTOMERS
Leads are not the same as customers, though. Only a small percentage from your entire pool of Facebook leads will become customers. It’s your job to identify that group of people with the right marketing analytics and recreate their conversion path.

Am I targeting the right people?

So you know what you want to accomplish. Now it’s time to make sure you have enough information about--and people within--your target demographic to do it. Because Facebook is a social network rich with demographic details about your audience, you can easily segment the market to reach the people that are exactly within your target demographic.

In Facebook, as with any other marketing channel, you need to promote content based on your target buyer persona. You don’t want to risk attracting the wrong kind of visitor while driving away high-quality prospects, do you?

That’s why, like publishers, inbound marketers must have a detailed picture of their target audience in order to create optimal content for them. The best way to understand your audience is to build buyer personas. Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on real data about customer demographics and online behavior, along with educated speculation about their personal histories, motivations, and concerns.

You can develop personas following these three steps:

1. Segment by demographics
2. Identify their needs
3. Develop behavior -based profiles

Facebook provides plenty of user information that enables you to find the right target persona and go after them.