Clever Ways To Use Facebook Groups For Marketing Your Brand

Over one billion people use Facebook groups each day so they can be incredibly beneficial when it comes to marketing your brand.

First, let’s clarify — we’re not talking about Facebook pages. Here’s a quick summary of the differences between Facebook pages and Facebook groups.

Facebook Pages: A profile for business, public figures or organizations. A page is very similar to our personal Facebook profiles, allowing customers to follow a brand and allowing marketers to develop a brand image.

Facebook Groups: A place for like-minded individuals to share their views and interests. Groups are a place to ask and answer questions. Groups also allow you to send messages directly to the group members inbox.

So now we know what we’re dealing with, how can we use Facebook groups to market a brand? There are two initial options open to us: engage with potential customers through existing groups or design a group for your target audience and set it up from scratch.

Clever Ways To Use Facebook Groups For Marketing Your Brand

Engage with Existing Groups

Choose Your Groups Carefully
To find groups relevant to your target market, just search on Facebook for related terms. Once you’ve found a few groups to join, Facebook will start to suggest other similar options. The best Facebook groups are moderated well and with their users in mind. This means posting links or promotions is either forbidden or only allowed on certain days. Without these guidelines in place, groups can quickly become filled with spam and are unlikely to attract and retain group members for long. Vet groups carefully in order to find communities that address effectively your customers’ interests and needs.

Ask For Help
Tell other group members that you need their help with a survey or a product title or how to market a new line. This is a good way to start engagement. Mentioning your brand in this communication is a very soft form of marketing but one that will help to get your brand name out there.

Promote Your Products
If you’re a member of groups that allow brands to post promotions on certain days, think carefully about the design of your post. Everyone else will be posting promotions on this day too so you need to do something to make your post stand out. Make sure images are professional, the text is instantly engaging and links take members to a relevant and easy to navigate web page.

Get Email Sign Ups
On promo day, don’t just promote your products. Offer group members a useful free download or money off code in exchange for their email address. That way you can bypass the group to communicate with each sign up directly, interspersing promotional messages with lots of valuable content.

Start a New Group

Determine the Purpose of Your Group
Starting your own group takes a lot of work but means you can tailor the purpose of the group exclusively to the needs of your brand and your customers. You could start a dedicated group for customer inquiries in order to provide truly responsive customer care. You could show customers how much you value them by creating a group exclusively for people who have made a purchase from you or who buy regularly. Whatever direction you choose for your Facebook group, be sure to set privacy settings, oversee membership and moderate comments so the group experience is exceptional for everyone involved.

Establish Brand Authority
People don’t join Facebook groups to be sold to. Instead, they’re looking for a community where they can share ideas, learn new things and engage in interesting discussions. You can establish brand authority by creating a well-moderated forum in which all of this can take place. You can also add value to the group by answering questions, inviting relevant influencers to join as members and sparking interesting debates.

Test Content Ideas
A Facebook group can be a great resource for developing your wider marketing strategy. You have an engaged selection of participants on whom to test content ideas. If a starter post you write gets little response, you know it’s probably not a winner with your target audience. Similarly, questions and problems posed by your group members can be the perfect starting point for popular blog posts, e-books and infographics to share across your marketing platforms.

Get Feedback on Product or Service Ideas
In a similar vein, make the most of your ready-made marketing forum by asking for member opinions when it comes to the development of a new product or service. You can learn a lot about how best to develop and promote new brand offerings with the help of your group members.

Using Facebook groups to market your brand is not the most direct form of marketing available to you. It’s a long game but, if you make the most of the group communications and avoid going on the hard sell, it’s one that could reap great rewards for your brand authority, customer loyalty, and wider marketing strategy.