4 Mistakes to Avoid When Incorporating Facebook Advertising Into Your Multichannel Strategy

With more than 3 million active users, Facebook advertising is an effective way for brands to increase revenue and boost their consumer base via eCommerce. That’s why more and more brands like Anheuser-Busch, Lenovo, and Allbirds are turning to this platform to set themselves apart from competitors and reach even more buyers. 

However, when launching a generic digital strategy, it’s easy to forget that Facebook is just one stop of many on a multichannel shopping journey for your consumers. Here are a few common mistakes that you should avoid as a multichannel brand.

Mistake 1: Casting Overly Wide Nets

In the age of personalization, only casting a wide net on one social channel and hoping for the best is no longer an effective strategy. Once you start gathering first-party consumer data, make sure you’re starting to understand and segment your consumers. That way, you can launch targeted campaigns in the future and improve your chances of success. Third-party analytics tools can provide you with these insights across platforms, and tell you how to target your consumers on Facebook as part of an overall buying journey.

What’s more, analyzing consumer data allows you to segment shoppers into “micro audiences” and “niche audiences”, smaller but highly qualified groups that may share similar goals or have similar needs and interests. These differentiating factors could include anything from shopping behaviors to omnichannel fulfillment preferences, and help you zone in on the factors that are most effective at driving conversion.

Mistake 2: Ads That Don’t Reflect Purchase Consideration Factors

Now that you know your consumers and how they engage on Facebook, it’s time to make sure that they are getting the kind of ads they want to see there. Facebook’s online advertising gives businesses access to the social network’s full array of platforms, which includes Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Although it may be tempting to simply place ads across all of these channels, doing so without the entire shopping journey in mind can waste time, resources, and your company’s budget. But how do you do so with the goal of driving higher engagement and sales? 

This is an ideal moment to look at each audience segment and analyze where they are on their path to purchase. MikMak’s Shopping Index has found that for some brands, shoppers like going to their websites immediately after engaging on Facebook ads to do further product research. If you knew this about your brand, you would tailor your Facebook ads to speak with a research-ready audience. As the shopping experience becomes increasingly omnichannel, for example, consumers want to know fulfillment options and timing earlier in the purchasing process. If you know these habits of your audience on Facebook, make sure your ad there reflects this knowledge. 

What are the top purchase consideration factors for your shoppers on Facebook?

Mistake 3: Only Using the Platform as a Bottom-of-the-Funnel Tactic

Social commerce is an increasingly important strategy to keep brands connected with consumers. However, be wary of overreliance on bottom-of-the-funnel tactics in your Facebook advertising strategy. Using Facebook ads as a lead generation tool is a great way to add top-of-the-funnel tactics to your Facebook advertising. An important point of consideration when determining what to deploy, however, is understanding how timing impacts your consumers’ shopping behaviors. MikMak’s Shopping Index has found that during peak shopping season, top-of-the-funnel campaigns can be just as effective in driving purchase intent, and can be launched in tandem to maximize conversion. 

The more consumers interact with your brand, the more you’ll learn about them over time. This enables you to produce effective, targeted nurturing campaigns that can complement your social media tactics.

Mistake 4: Neglecting Other Social Media Marketing Strategies

Consumers demand flexibility in their shopping journey to make purchases the way they want. They are browsing and interacting on multiple social platforms, so your brand should be too. Only paying attention to one platform, or treating consumer engagement on each as separate instead of one of many stops in a whole consumer journey, can produce a disjointed picture.

Modern brands need a comprehensive multichannel marketing strategy that utilizes other social media platforms, multiple forms of media, email marketing, and more. Winning brands weave together strategies for segmented audiences and look at each channel as a unique stop servicing specific purchase consideration needs.

Businesses advertising on Facebook should create audience-focused content that answers the following questions: 

• What do consumers want to see on Facebook as part of their overall journey? 
• What purchase factors are most important to your consumers when engaging your product on Facebook?
• Is this ad launching during peak season, and are there specific peak-season behaviors that it should address?
• Where do consumers tend to go from here, and how can I reflect this within the ad? 

These questions will help you better understand your overall audience, and discover the micro audiences within your consumer base.

Get Started with an Effective Facebook Marketing Campaign

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