Although younger generations tend to ignore Facebook in favor of Instagram and Snapchat, the social media giant remains a dominant force. It provides a broad set of features that have great potential for today's businesses.
Automation helps build long-lasting relationships with your customers; therefore, it has an impact on your audiences' engagement levels—and your revenue.
The purpose of this article is to help marketers recognize the importance of marketing automation processes on Facebook.
Automation and Facebook Ads
Marketing automation software integrated with Facebook Ads enables you to create personalized, timely, and relevant marketing offers in ad campaigns that use customer online behavior and transactions to target those ads.
You can create, analyze, and optimize Facebook Ads and Custom Audiences campaigns, educating potential customers with relevant information and advertising products and services those customers are currently interested in.
You can also target ads using any data previously collected, based on audience behavior on your website, such as checking a given product, abandoning a shopping cart, and previous transactions, as well as other data, such as your segmentation and scoring information, and reactions to other campaigns and information about offline purchases.
The end result: your ads are targeted with great precision, therefore achieving better returns.
For example, a certain Mr. Smith visits your website. He likes the black shoes you sell, so he adds them to his shopping cart. However, he is not convinced enough to buy them. What's more, he has to go to pick up his daughter from swimming lessons. He shuts down his laptop and leaves. Mr. Smith did not agree to receive any marketing information via email, so sending him an email with abandoned product information is not possible, but reaching him via social media is. Because in that very moment an automation rule adds him as a contact to the abandoned-cart Custom Audience. And sometime later, an ad for the shoes is displayed in Mr. Smith's News Feed to encourage him to finalize the transaction.
A marketing automation platform can help you evaluate the efficiency of your Custom Audiences by monitoring the number of ad displays and the CPA for each group you set up. That way, you can reach customers and groups of customers in a more precise, automated, and efficient manner.
Bots for Facebook Messenger
Bots are another reason for using marketing automation with Facebook. Bots can be used by any company to automate its customer service and sales through Facebook. These new intelligent tools can recommend products, check order status, and help in the complaint process.
If a customer clicks a link from within a Messenger chat, the bot recognizes him and links up the conversation to the marketing automation platform. Software then creates an individual behavioral profile with valuable data, connecting information collected during the conversation to other data acquired in other available channels, including Facebook, desktop, mobile, or a call center, enabling further communication in all those channels.
It's worth highlighting that today's younger generations prefer chat over the other methods of communication. Therefore, it's a good source of data about customers, allowing you to obtain their email address and other information from the chat conversation.
Using Collected Data
Behavior-based consumer data allows marketers to better personalize messages, meet consumer expectations, and save time at each step of the purchase process. The digital world is all about micro-moments, and marketing automation platforms can provide personalized information in real-time, just when the customer is interested in a product and most likely to buy it.
The offer can be displayed for them by Facebook Ads or Facebook Messenger, but also in other channels, such as email, mobile, SMS, your website, and other sites. Such targeted marketing reinforces e-commerce branding messages.
To succeed, companies must meet one requirement: satisfying the customer. That can be achieved by a personalized multi-channel experience—a surefire way to turn prospects into customers.
Essentially, if you are to ensure a better customer journey, data should be collected and delivered in all available channels and integrated within an automation platform.
To succeed, companies need to use personalized, precise, and simple communications with their customers on the platforms those customers are using the most. Marketing automation for Facebook opens doors to new possibilities for success.
