7-Step Facebook Marketing Strategy to Dominate 2018

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Let's be honest here–Facebook isn't slowing down. There are more than 1.86 billion monthly active users on Facebook, which includes a 17% spike in two years. For your business, brand or enterprise company, this channel is unavoidable if you're truly trying to create a worthwhile play in social media marketing.

Your Facebook marketing strategy has to be unique. There's an ocean of potential customers you can reach on Facebook. But with a larger pool, it's harder to dissect and find your spot within its space.

That's why we created this Facebook marketing strategy for 2018, which includes seven essential steps to not only get started, but also create an impressive plan. Get started now.

1. Create Facebook Goals That Directly Affect Your Biggest Needs
Every marketing strategy you've read–at least the good ones–probably suggested to create goals for your specific market. The reason everyone mentions this is because goals are essential to address your biggest marketing needs.

If you're considering using Facebook for marketing or looking to improve upon an existing strategy, you obviously have some needs. Don't create unrealistic goals that chase vanity metrics like followers and Likes. Instead, address your biggest challenges with Facebook or social media in general through proper tracking tools.

Sprout provides an easy to understand overview of your Facebook growth

Addressing Your 2018 Goals
Your CEO most likely sent out an inspiring email or gave an enthralling speech at the end of 2017 outlining the core goals for 2018. OK–maybe it wasn't life changing, but we bet if you looked back, it has everything you need for your Facebook marketing strategy in 2018.

Here are some common yearly goals for businesses and how an effective Facebook strategy can help you in 2018:

Increasing quality of sales: Improving the quality of sales starts with better targeting (we'll address this more further down). Through a well-planned Facebook marketing strategy, you reach your target audience more efficiently. Just because the pond is bigger, doesn't mean you'll get bigger fish. Work on what you know best and use Facebook as a source to improve your reach.
Adding more value to the organization: Facebook can better nurture customers, improve awareness and provide more resources to you audience. Make Facebook your go-to source of information.
Better pulse on the industry: Are your competitors always one step ahead? With the help of social media monitoring tools, you can track, listen and report on all social conversations revolving around you, your competitors or the industry. Always try to increase your listening powers before speaking.
More efficient recruiting: No one said social recruiting is easy, but it's only growing in popularity. Social can be a great source for increasing recruiting efforts and reaching top talent faster (we'll also talk about this more later). Working your employees' social networks for a higher social reach makes your chances of recruiting higher quality employees better.
Smarter growth: Reducing churn, limiting spend and increasing acquisition are all parts of a successful business, but Facebook can help you in each of these areas. Whether it's through ad spend, increased targeting or more social selling, addressing your Facebook marketing strategy can help you get closer to these goals.
These goals won't address everyone's needs, but you can see a trend on how better social media marketing can affect the entire organization. You've heard it a thousand times, work smarter not harder.

2. Study Your Facebook Demographics
Demographics are key to any marketing strategy and on social media, it's no different. When looking at Facebook, you have nearly 1.15 billion people scrolling through their feeds every day, so it's important to know who you need to reach and how.

Additionally, understanding the latest demographics is important as this network's audience fluctuates through the years. But for 2018, let's take a look at the latest data on its core demographics:

facebook demographics image

Age & Gender
Data from the Pew Social Media Update 2016 report showed women tend to adopt Facebook more frequently than men and the core age group is 18-29. However, with 62% of 65 and older users on Facebook, your band has a much better reach across age groups than any other network.

Pro Tip: don't limit yourself because you think younger generations are only on Snapchat and Instagram. Facebook is still most used network among 18-29 year olds.

Location & Income
Facebook's demographics spread across all primary locations and income pretty evenly. However, urban and rural areas both have 81% of their demographics on Facebook, while suburban areas make up 77%.

As for income, data shows the highest amount of Facebook users (84%) make less than $30,000, while 77% make more than $75,000.

Pro Tip: Again, Facebook's versatility shouldn't prevent you from exploring targeting your most core business demographic. More likely than not, you have better reaching power here than other social networks.