Drop shipping is awesome.
You can run this business in any point on the globe, you don’t need much money to start, and it’s not necessary to have any previous experience in the field.
That’s why people readily buy customized drop shipping stores or build nice websites themselves. Being inspired by incredible drop shipping success stories, they wait for tons of sales, and to achieve that, they start trying to promote their webstores.
Quite commonly, our support team gets questions about Facebook promotions – people are wondering what should they do if they want to advertise their dropshipping stores on Facebook.
That’s why we have prepared this Facebook promotion guidelines!
To answer this question, you first of all need to learn more about your target audience.
If your potential clients use Facebook a lot, then yes, you should definitely go for it.
In our own experience, Facebook is a wonderful promotional channel in the majority of cases. The reason is, it is the most popular social network globally: according to the data of June 2017, Facebook has 2.01 billion monthly active users. This is much much more than Instagram (600 million), WhatsApp (500 million) and Twitter (284 million).
Wherever your potential customers live, you can easily reach them with the help of Facebook. The newest stats shows the following data about the geographic location of Facebook users:
As you can see, this social network basically covers all the global regions. So, if you are not targeting some specific and narrow customer segment living in a very remote part of the globe, it won’t be difficult for you to connect with your audience through Facebook.
Well, first of all, you need to be present on Facebook, so you will have to create and run a page dedicated to your drop shipping store.
When the page is created, you have 2 ways to promote it on Facebook.
The first way is share your posts in Facebook groups that are somehow related to your store idea.
The second way is to create and run Facebook advertising campaigns. Speaking in simple terms, you create a promotional message and pay some money to show the ad to a selected group of Facebook users.
At the moment, we are preparing detailed Facebook promotion guidelines. As for now, you can read official Facebook instructions to get a general idea about launching and managing Facebook Ads.
If you’re only going to place promotional posts in other Facebook groups, you don’t need to get a business account.
If you want to create and manage Facebook ads, you need to get a Business Manager account. To do this, go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager – this is how you will get an access to your Facebook Ads dashboard.
To create an account, you need to submit some additional details – your account information, and also the payment method you are going to use.
The account information will include your account name, business name, business address, time zone, currency, etc.
Providing your payment details, you can choose one or several preferred payment methods – Facebook accepts multiple payment options, including credit cards and PayPal payments.
As soon as all the necessary details are submitted, you can plan your Facebook advertising campaigns.
You will be able to add and manage up to 5 Facebook pages through this Business Manager account.
You surely know something about your potential customers, right?
Even if you only have a general idea of a portrait of your average client, it’s a good starting point.
When you are creating an advertisement campaign on Facebook, the system asks you to set some parameters of the audience who is going to see your ad:
When you set these parameters, you create a new audience – you can save it and use it later for your further campaigns.
If you feel that you need to target your audience even more precisely, you can use:
Custom audiences consist of people who are already interacting with you somehow. There exist various types of custom audiences, for example:
As you can see, it’s great to work with custom audience because these people are already interested in your store offers. Don’t miss out the opportunity to get in touch with them! To learn more about this type of audience, you can read the official Facebook guide.
Lookalike audiences consist of people who never interacted with your store or brand before. Still, they are really important: these audiences are created by the Facebook’s own special algorithm.
Facebook takes a custom audience you already have in order to generate an absolutely new audience.
Most likely, these new people have never heard anything about your business; still, they share significant features (hobbies, interests, behavior patterns, etc.) with the people who already cooperate with your brand.
Chances are, they will like the ad you’re targeting at them, and you, as the result, will get a bunch of new loyal customers.
The real question here is ‘How much money CAN I spend on Facebook ads?’
If you can’t afford spending on advertising right now, wait a bit until you have some savings.
The thing is, if you only have money for 1-2 ads, you won’t be able to track their performance and understand whether it’s actually efficient. You simply won’t gather enough data to watch and analyze.
You can run several different types of ads on Facebook. The platform has minimal budget requirements for each type, so look at the numbers carefully.
We recommend you to try 3-4 different ad types during one month. This will help you get enough data on your ads performance and understand what can be improved. So, do the math and calculate how much you will have to spend for your very first Facebook advertising campaign.
When it’s over, you’ll be able to analyze the results and rethink your costs if necessary. The more you experiment, the higher are your chances to find a winning combination of Facebook ad types.
When you run the Facebook page dedicated to your drop shipping store, it’s important not to:
In other words, you need to keep a healthy balance.
The barely minimum is to post at least once a week. If you’d like to stick to this strategy, it’s the best idea to make posts showing and describing your products, announcing sales and introducing special offers.
If you have the energy to post more often, you can make posts once a day. In this case, you should think of mixed content. Apart from the post ideas mentioned above, you can also tell your subscribers your store news, share your buyers’ feedback, make little polls and surveys, ask for your subscribers’ opinion on your product range and service quality, and in general, keep your readers interested and entertained. The more they are engaged in conversations, the better!
When you think of an idea for a post on the Facebook page of your store, make sure that it contains:
A bright high-quality picture or a short interesting video grabs attention of your page visitors and makes them interested in reading further.
Write a short text to comment or explain the visual material. Don’t make it too long – 150-200 characters will be more than enough.
The reason why you make these posts is to motivate people on making a purchase, right? Encourage your readers to take a look at the newest offers, or to visit your website, or to share their feedback, or to ask you something about the items, etc.
Hashtags help people surf Facebook and find the type of content they’re interested in. Think of a catchy and memorable hashtag describing your business, and use it consistently for every post you make. Also, put 2-3 popular hashtags related to the content of each separate post. Don’t be afraid to experiment with these additional hashtags!