This is not your typical marketing blog. I won’t start by asking you if you are doing marketing or not. I also won’t tell you in the introduction why you should be doing marketing. It is 2024. The time for this conversation was in 2014. Now, the key question is not whether you’re cashing in on the immense marketing opportunities but rather if you are doing it right. Marketing has been revolutionized, and whatever you have learned is outdated. Today, artificial intelligence and virtual reality are taking over. And nowhere is this reality more stark than on Facebook. So, take a pause and ask yourself if you are actually reaping the benefits of Facebook marketing.
When I talk about using Facebook to market your business, I don’t only mean placing ads on the platform. If you are doing that, congratulations, you are one of just 10 million users who actively advertised on Facebook as of 2023.
The Upcoming Endeavors at Facebook
To fully avail the advantages of Facebook marketing in 2024, the first thing you need to know is how the company has been reorienting itself from social media. Meta, as we now call it, is so much more than you might think. Let me briefly give you an idea about the insanely futuristic endeavors currently underway at Facebook.
AI Research (FAIR): Facebook AI Research (FAIR) is a leading research lab focusing on fundamental AI research across various areas like computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning.
AI for Good: This initiative focuses on using AI to tackle social challenges like poverty, disease, and climate change.
Horizon Worlds AI: This project aims to develop AI-powered avatars and experiences for the Metaverse, including virtual assistants and interactive characters.
AI Assistant for Messenger: Meta is developing an AI assistant for Messenger that can answer questions, translate languages, and book appointments.
V-JEPA: It is an architecture for video understanding that combines visual, joint, and event prediction and attention. V-JEPA achieves state-of-the-art results on several video benchmarks and demonstrates the potential of advanced machine intelligence.
Oculus Quest: Meta’s flagship VR headset, offering diverse content and experiences for gaming, entertainment, and productivity.
Metaverse Platforms: Meta is building the underlying infrastructure and tools for the Metaverse, including avatars, spatial audio, and social VR experiences.
Horizon Workrooms: A VR collaboration platform for remote work, allowing users to virtually meet and work together.
Cambria Headset: Meta’s upcoming high-end VR headset, featuring advanced eye-tracking and facial expression recognition for more immersive experiences.
VR content creation: Meta is investing in tools and platforms for VR content creation, enabling developers and creators to build engaging experiences.
These projects are other than the Meta Reality Labs, which focuses on developing advanced technologies for VR and AR, including haptics, displays, and AI-powered experiences. Meta is also researching various AI applications in VR/AR, such as natural language interaction, object recognition, and real-time scene understanding.
A winner marketing strategy
Ok, so you have understood that Facebook is pivoting heavily towards artificial intelligence and virtual reality. This is the present trend, and it will dominate the future, too.
Now you might be wondering: “Dang it! This seems so complicated. Do you even stand a chance?”
Well, you surely do. Just remember that the basics of advertising remain the same whether it is in the real or virtual world.
You make ads that are attractive, which turn people into your customers. This builds loyalty, and the one-time customer becomes your recurring customer.
A winning marketing strategy stands on three points.
Your objective
What do you want to achieve with your marketing efforts? Do you want to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, generate leads, or boost sales? Your objective will help you choose the right marketing format, placement, and optimization strategy for your campaign.
Your audience
Who are you trying to reach with your marketing? What are their interests, behaviors, and preferences? Your audience will help you tailor your content, design, and targeting to match their needs and expectations.
Your budget
How much are you willing to spend, and what is your expected return? Your budget will help you allocate resources wisely and measure your ROI and effectiveness.
Strategies to cash the benefits of Facebook marketing in 2024
Marketing has always been personalized. What one consumer likes or cares about might differ from what the other might prefer. So, each consumer has to be targeted with a different marketing goal in mind. This hyper-personalized targeting based on user behavior, preferences, and even emotional states has become more elaborate with AI.
Here’s how to come up with a hyper-personalized marketing plan:
Interactive Content and Storytelling
One of the benefits of marketing on Facebook is the AI-powered chatbots. They can personalize interactions with customers within, while VR allows brands to create interactive stories and product demonstrations. While you focus on more important things, the AI chatbot will give you peace of mind that your customers are taken good care of through meticulously crafted replies to their queries.
Data-driven optimization
The merger of data and AI is revolutionizing marketing, enabling data-driven optimization to reach new heights. AI can analyze vast amounts of data: From customer demographics and behavior to campaign performance and social media sentiment, AI can extract hidden patterns and trends human analysis might miss. It can also predict future customer behavior, allowing for personalized marketing campaigns and targeted interventions.
Community building and engagement
Building a vibrant community around your brand on Facebook can be a goldmine for your marketing strategies. AI facilitates community management and fosters deeper engagement through personalized content. For example, AI can analyze user preferences and suggest relevant content within the community, keeping them engaged and interested.
What you need to learn
The pivot towards virtual marketing needs some shifting of strategies at the end of business as well. But worry not, there are plenty of examples of established brands acing this new marketing frontier as well and you can learn from them to turbocharge your marketing campaign and make sure it is ready for whatever the futuristic world of AI and VR throws at you.
Insert yourself natively within the platform
Users have stopped being fascinated by ads. Now, they irritate them. So businesses should integrate their products or services into the metaverse in a natural and relevant way. For example, Nike created a virtual sneaker store in Roblox and launched it. SWOOSH, a web3-enabled platform, where users can buy and customize their own digital shoes.
Parallel real-life marketing in the virtual environment
Metaverse offers businesses a world far broader than the realm of real life. Here, they can extend their existing marketing campaigns and events to a wider and more engaged audience. For example, Balenciaga launched its 2021 fall collection in a video game where users can explore a dystopian city and discover the brand’s clothes.
Retail virtual goods to digital avatars
As a business owner, this is your chance to extend beyond physical goods and explore the growing demand for virtual goods and assets, such as clothing, accessories, skins, and NFTs, that users can buy and use to personalize their digital avatars.
Take the example of Gucci. The fashion company sold a digital-only handbag for $4,115 on Roblox, a virtual world platform. Yes, it happened. And this isn’t even the most exciting part. What should blow your mind – and convince you to enter into the virtual world of marketing – is that the bag was only made available for one hour on May 17, 2021, and it was sold for more than its cost in the real world, which is around $3,400.
Establish your own virtual venue
Businesses should create their own branded spaces in the metaverse, where they can showcase their products or services, interact with customers, and provide value-added experiences. For example, KFC created a virtual restaurant in Animal Crossing, where users can visit, order food, and win coupons.
The campaign aimed to promote KFC’s products and brand to Animal Crossing players, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when many people were staying at home and playing games. The campaign also generated a lot of online buzz and media coverage, as it was one of the first examples of a fast-food chain creating its own virtual restaurant in a popular game.
Create immersive experiences
The virtual world, like our real world, thrives on unique and memorable experiences that can delight and educate customers. For businesses big and small, this is the chance to test and launch new products or services, as well as explore new applications and possibilities for their brand. It also opens a new revenue stream by selling virtual goods and assets.
Take the example of National Geographic. It partnered with Oculus to create a VR app that lets users explore Machu Picchu, Antarctica, and the International Space Station.
Key determinants of an effective strategy
Exploring the virtual world, which literally offers endless opportunities for marketing, is important. But don’t get bogged down and shun the tested principles of marketing, which still reign supreme.
The alignment of your marketing strategy with goals and audience is still paramount, and whatever platform you choose should be done after keeping your campaign objectives and target audience preferences in mind.
There is still no substitute for high-quality and eye-catching visuals. The virtual world offers you an even bigger canvas to be creative and come up with impactful content that piques interest and sparks action.
The idea is to make informed decisions so that Facebook marketing benefits your business. Whatever you do, make sure you monitor it and keep improving it after analyzing results and adapting your strategy based on data.
Conclusion
The focus on modern Facebook marketing strategies does not mean you take your eye off what is working in the present. The benefits of Facebook marketing still lie in the short-form video. Keep leveraging Reels and Stories to capture attention and tell engaging stories. Also, stay updated on trends and keep yourself informed about evolving ad formats and best practices. In this way, you’d end up winning with your current marketing ideas and also place yourself in a position where you are also ready to thrive in the future as well.
