The traditional way companies sell their physical products online is with a website. This requires using content marketing to create lots of viral content about the products. You also need to master SEO to get your content to rank at the top of the SERPS (search engine results pages), so people can find your content.
To help people find your products, you also need to find the right buyer keywords that people are using to search the internet for products and services that solve their problems. Over the years the way companies sell their products online has changed. The new way companies are using to grow sales to an untapped market is with social media. Facebook Ads has emerged as the best way to sell physical products with social media. Facebook and several companies now offer free and paid tools to increase online sales.
Millions of people are already online on Facebook everyday. Instead of using SEO or content to get people to come to your site, you push your ads to people on the largest social media network on the internet.
Facebook is the preeminent social media platform originally used to sell digital downloadable products. With Facebook Ads, you can now sell physical products on Facebook, and more quickly get your products in front of buyers.
This social media network that reaches over 2 billion users, has become an untapped well of sales and profits for physical products. Rather than spending time searching for products online, sellers are using Facebook to push products to millions of potential buyers instantaneously.
How to Use Facebook Ads to Sell Physical Products
With Facebook Ads, you set up a campaign to target your desired market. Rather than using SEO and keywords, you focus on the demographics to reach your audience. The process to sell physical products via social media is different than using the internet. Google, Chrome, Yahoo and Bing are search engines.
1. Set Up a Free Facebook Page
To start selling on Facebook, you will need to set up a Facebook Page for your business. The good news is setting up a page is free. This is the way you will engage with your customers using Facebook Ads.Put most viral website content on your Facebook pages. This will increase engagement, by getting potential customers to click to view your website.
You can set up a Facebook page in a matter of minutes. You will want to set up a Facebook business page repartee from your personal Facebook page.
Click Create. You can now create a Facebook Ads campaign.
You can link content on your blog to your Facebook page. This is great way to get potential customers to your company's blog or website without investing in any marketing.
Do you have video demonstrations of your product? You can post a link to your Youtube videos on your Facebook page.
Offer a promo, a discount or a coupon? Since the Facebook page is where your customers will land when coming to Facebook, potential customers will be primed to buy your products when they see discounts and offers that may not be on your company website.
2. Create a Buyer Persona Facebook Ad
Neil Patel, marketing expert states, "A buyer persona is a representation of your target customer’s preferences and behavior." You know your target market, their needs, wants and desires.
With a Facebook Ad using an image of your target buyer persona, your customer can see themselves interacting with your product.
Your ad doesn't need to have a lot of verbiage either, as the persona image sells the product for you.
Studies show, a buyer persona Facebook ad, laser targets your ad to your target customer, and can increase sales by as much as 171%.
There are several companies that offer free or paid software to help you create a buyer persona. If you don't have the time or skills to create a buyer persona, you can get one made on Fiverr for about $5.
3. How to Promote Your Web Pages
While you sell and market your products on your company website, you can't sell your products on these sites directly via your Facebook page. Instead, you can link your following physical marketplaces to your Facebook page:
Website ● Shopify Store ● Facebook Store
You can promote your pages and products to potential customers with Facebook Ads. Based on the demographics of your potential customers, such as age, sex, income, interests, location, current job or career goals, you can push offers directly to millions of potential customers.
You can even push offers to the following users:
people who have purchased from you recently ● people who have purchased in the last 30, 60 or even 90 days. ● customers who haven't purchased for a year or longer ● potential customers who have visited your site, but didn't purchase. You can send these people promotional coupon offers to get them to buy, such as discounts, free shipping, etc.
4. Use Colorful Images
You need to use a colorful product image in your Facebook ad to improve engagement with readers.
Readers will look at images and decide if they want to read your content.
TThe image should be of a person smiling and outgoing. This tends to generate more interaction than someone sad or unemotional.
TImages of females also have increased interaction than images of men.
5. Target Product price
Not all physical products are conducive for selling on Facebook. Studies indicate $49.95 is the best starting price to sell products on Facebook when using their marketing tools, such as Facebook Ads.
6. Create a Facebook Shop
People spend an average of 1 - 2 hours a day on Facebook, looking at the pictures, commenting on posts, and a great way to sell your products on Facebook is to set up a shop on your Facebook Page. You can show and sell your products to people right on your business Facebook Page. Your customers can view, shop and purchase your products directly from your Facebook shop. You will need to set up a checkout page.
7. Use Facebook Dynamic Ads to Increase Sales
Dynamic ads look similar to other Facebook ads. Instead of the seller creating an individual ad campaign for each of your products or target customers, you create an ad template that automatically shows users images products and details based on their interests.
Dynamic Facebook Ads uses your Facebook pixel or SDK to show ads to people who have already shown interest, either by previous interaction or their likes.
Dynamic ads show relevant product recommendations to people so that they are encouraged to take action from your ad.
You want to optimize your ads for your target business goal, such as:
- link clicks
- increase in conversions
The Facebook algorithm chooses products from your catalog for each customer individually, that have shown to generate the best results for your investment dollars.
For example, if you optimize your dynamic ads for conversions, the Facebook algorithm automatically shows your products that have the best chance to drive conversions.
A popular ecommerce system, Klaviyo, allows companies to export a specific user segment to target for improved sales, such as people who haven’t purchased in 60 days. You can create a dynamic ad for a custom audience, that’s updated dynamically for each user. In the example, each day customers who haven’t purchased in 60 days are added to that audience "automatically" to receive an ad, and customers who make a purchase recently are removed.
8. Test Different Offers
You can use different colors, different font sizes and even different images in your offers.