Facebook provides a free platform for spreading your beauty business message. It also offers tremendous ability to go viral, and it's the preferred contact method of choice for a huge, general demographic. Add the opportunity to mix in inexpensive advertising, and the ease with which it integrates with the huge population demographic interacting through mobile devices instead of PC's or laptops, and you have a highly flexible tool for leveraging your beauty business.
When we talk about leveraging, we mean positioning your beauty business to its best advantage and most profitable exposure. While there are many aspects to marketing your beauty business using Facebook and other social media channels, we are going to discuss 3 steps to leveraging your beauty business with facebook, to help get you up and running quickly, and to help you understand the tools you can use to leverage your Facebook presence by creating a positive user experience and increasing their engagement with you in your business.
Step One: Customer Identity
The core of all marketing campaigns is, of course, your beauty customer. Identify her correctly and your chances of success and profit blossom rapidly.
Around this golden core, understand what is possible and add the structure of planning, and you're well on your way to creating a campaign that will actually work -- and work well, with identifiable and measurable results.
You've learned to ask "who is my unique customer?" Now take it one step further and ask: "Who is my unique customer on Facebook?"
(TIP: Look among your own Facebook friends to find her, since she is in all probability among them.)
More blogging-related posts you should take a look at:
1. Who, among my Facebook friends, fits my target customer's profile?
2. What time of day does he `hang out' there?
3. How many minutes or hours does he stay online?
4. What sort of links does he happily spread?
5. Is she triggered or driven by humor? Social appeal? Environmental or humanitarian issues?
6. Does she ever recommend products or answer questions?
7. What "answer" can I provide that will benefit my customer and her friends, if she passes it on?…ie…how to apply eyeliner quickly.
8. What does she not like? Does she complain about specific problems? Does she spread links and information she doesn't like?
9. Can I use this tendency to my beauty business' advantage (without alienating her)?
10. What does she need most? And what can I provide?…ie…does she need a video instruction, or if she lives close by, does she need a one-on-one consultation?
In the midst of getting into this "critical thinking" mode, however, make sure you don't lose sight of the most important basic of all...
It's still all about your customer and her needs -- not about yours or your business'. Understand that, keep it constantly in sight and you're positioning your efforts to succeed.
One of the most attractive reasons to leverage your business via Facebook lies in the fact that Facebook is, for the most part, free.
The Facebook opportunity you should start with? A free Facebook page for your beauty business.
Your Facebook fan page can:
Free Facebook Notes and the possibilities they offer should not be ignored. Notes is one Facebook tool that can offer you a huge advantage in your positioning, because at the moment it is largely ignored.
You can spread "blog" posts and longer messages and contents using Facebook Notes. Think about how you can put that to use in your marketing campaign.
Facebook Notes will feature "Notes" (blog posts) from your customer's Friends in her feed -- and that should include you! She can also subscribe to your notes so that every time you post one, she is notified (i.e. sees the truncated version, which she can then choose to expand).
With the removal of other features and the functionality to share, Notes may become an even more important tool for engaging your visitor, and growing your beauty business.
A campaign is only as good as its metrics -- meaning, if you don't track and measure your results, you're playing hide-and-seek in the dark.
You will need to decide, right at the planning stage, how you are going to track and tweak so that the latter processes can be built seamlessly into your content flow.
A good social media marketing campaign tracks: A great social media marketing campaign tracks, analyzes and seamlessly adapts, shaping its direction to conform to the most natural "flow" created by the results (i.e. its customers).
Fortunately, Facebook provides easy tools for you to use, as well as clear instruction on how to use them. (You'll be prompted as you set up your campaign.)
Facebook fortunately provides its own tracking tools. Facebook Insights allows you to measure almost every aspect of your Facebook Page presence and trends, providing a rich data flow for your campaign. It does all this through your Facebook Insights dashboard, where you can almost instantly access graphs and stats showing:
Facebook has also added Insights for Websites, designed specifically to measure interactions through social plug ins:
While there are so many ways to grow your beauty business, staying focused on just a few steps can make an incredible difference.