Creating sales leads through Facebook
With the public regularly using social media to find exciting home improvement products, Composite Wood Company has made Facebook a key part of its marketing strategy. Sales director Tony Pratt explains how its G16 Award-winning campaign used Facebook to generate hundreds of sales leads for its customers.
Composite Wood Company has 12,083 followers on Facebook. A year ago, it was 1,784. Facebook has become one of our strongest ways to reach homeowners and generate leads.
When we launched our range of Composite Wood decking, fencing and garden rooms, we knew we had exciting home improvement products that homeowners would love. We always felt that social media, especially Facebook, offered a brilliant way of building our brand because it’s where people spend their time.
Latest figures from We Are Flint show that 78% of UK adults online use Facebook, 59% of them daily.
Even so, we’ve been amazed at how successful our campaign has been. We’re reaching homeowners from across the UK who see what Composite Wood will do for them. That translates into lots of enquiries for our customers.
Our use of Facebook won the G16 Award for Best Promotional Campaign (Retail), which shows how successful it can be.
We’ve learned a lot over the past year. Here are some of our tips for how to make the most out of Facebook.
Grab people’s attention. Facebook users are bombarded with messages, so you need to stand out to capture people’s attention. We’ve found that a great photograph, graphic or video will leap off the screen and make it more likely that people will respond. It’s also a good idea to put a logo or watermark on all images, as it makes it more likely than your company name will stick in their mind.
Mix things up. You never know when somebody will be looking for home improvement ideas, or what kind of message will inspire them. So, we’ve made sure not only to update our feed regularly to maintain a high level of awareness and engagement, but also to mix things up. No two messages are exactly the same. Even if we’re running a campaign to sell a particular product, we’ll switch between installation photos, product details, special offers and general calls to action to keep things fresh.
Engage regularly. We always want to hear from people who are interested in Composite Wood, so we’ve experimented with different ways to encourage people to respond. Offers and competitions have been brilliant for generating comments and shares. Before FIT Show 2016, we ran a competition to win a Composite Wood garden room that attracted over 1,000 entries. The total reach of the Facebook page during that time was 1,033,767 impressions.
Respond quickly. With this level of engagement, Facebook users often want to ask us for more information there and then. We’ve found that it’s really important to respond quickly and not let the conversation go cold. Composite Wood Company has an excellent response rate that is consistently over 90% and within an hour of a message being sent.
Reach more people with boosting. There are a lot of people you can reach on Facebook, and we’ve realised that the platform has unrivalled data on how to best target them. Paid-for, boosted posts offer a low-cost and very accurate way of pinpointing who might be interested in your products. It’s easy to do. When you create a post, select the ‘boost’ option and set the demographics you want to reach. If you’re working in a particular area, you can pinpoint the households you wish to reach. You can also search by age, gender, or hobbies.
Using the boost function, Composite Wood Company generated 800 sales leads from a single post in one week, either by homeowners contacting us directly on Facebook or by clicking through to our website. Many already had projects lined up that they wanted to discuss, which means lots of solid leads which we can pass on to our trade customers.