Facebook Offers For Brands: New And Improved?

Facebook may have lost a bit of its shine recently, but the one thing that people still appreciate in the world of marketing is the famous Offers service. Facebook Offers has been continuing to provide businesses with an effective way to target ads that build brand loyalty, and obviously sales.

Facebook has recently brought out some improvements to the platform, and some of these improvements are centred around Offers.

We will take a look at these improvements and see how businesses can best take advantage of them.

So what are the new features?

The new features were just rolled out, and already they seem to be a true enhancement of a service that wasn’t too shabby in the first place.

One of the best features that’s available now is the reminder service. This provides reminders to shoppers across devices. The reminders will simply give notice of what offers are about to expire. This is very handy, especially for brands that have a number of offers on at the same time.

Some brands offer seasonal specials, alongside the usual offerings, and ensuring that customers can get the very best out of the whole experience and are not missing opportunities is a major piece of work. This feature should make it that little bit easier.

Making the whole access thing even more of a hot agenda item, Facebook now offers a dedicated bookmark for users. All offers that are interesting to customers can be saved in the offers bookmark on their desktop or on mobile, therefore making it a lot easier to keep track of what is going on, and obviously spend more.

A feature that is coming soon is the ability to generate unique coupon codes for each customer. This might not be incredibly useful for all brands, but it helps to track purchases and also builds up customer base knowledge.

Finally, if an advertiser is offering an in-store offer, customers can access it on their phone in a matter of seconds now. This means that if you are walking around a city and you know you are going to shop somewhere, you can potentially pick up a code in store, or on the way to the store.

So, the above shows a couple of good features that should help people get more out of Facebook offers. Will it be enough to create a seismic shift for brands? Or is it much of the same?

And we have to say that even with these improvements listed out above in this post, the very best thing is that viral, word of mouth appeal Facebook Offers brings. It makes the platform incredibly useful for businesses, and simply helps with bringing ROI to advertising campaigns.

Get your offer right, and make it exciting enough, and it gets picked up by a customer. Produce an incredibly engaging Facebook page post or ad with a great deal alongside it, and when it goes out to the newsfeed, you’re most likely to receive add-on sales from people who simply see it scrolled up on their feeds. It’s a piece of marketing genius, and any brand that is not taking advantage of Facebook Offers and using that word of mouth feel is pretty much shooting itself in the foot.

But going back to the new features, we were excited by the bookmarks tab idea. The best thing about this one is that hardly any work is involved. Customers simply have to claim an offer and then it is automatically saved to the Offers bookmark. This is on mobile and desktop as well.

It adds a little bit of ROI to brands as well, because there is hardly any work involved and it means that nothing is missed. Again, it’s all about the brand getting the offer exactly right and targeted enough, this will allow customers to want to claim the offer, and because of the bookmarks it is automatically retained for future use.

It’s up to brands, obviously, to ensure that customers see their offer as ‘a favourite’. But it’s handy, and it just makes the whole process for the end user a more pleasant and efficient thing.

And then there is the whole reminder thing. Again, this brings more efficiency to the whole operation. Offers do expire. This little feature ensures that your offer is always front of mind, and doesn’t get lost in the Offers bookmark.

A great thing about this feature is the way it reminds you on desktop about an offer you picked up on mobile. So after a long day of shopping, logging back into Facebook at home brings the company’s ad and offer up, the centre of the customer’s attention.

Facebook has always required a little work if you want to get the best out of it. And Offers is no different. While changes are taking place, the tried and tested methods to use with Facebook offers haven’t changed. It’s still important to keep the principles at the forefront of what you do as a brand.

Make the image that you use with your offer eye-catching. With so many offers out there, if you want any chance of having yours placed in the Offers bookmark you need to make sure it is visually arresting.

With a short word limit for offers, 90 characters, another key element that still rings true is making sure that your offer is very specific. Be very clear on what you’re offering to your customers so that they know what they will get if they claim. There’s no time for flowery prose, it’s all about making sure that you’re clear, to the point and you’re selling.

Definitely. It’s more end-user based than immediate benefits to brands on Facebook.

But at the same time, the efficiency that Facebook has built into the operation simply means that the mobile experience is quicker and easier to use, and has less chance of your offer getting lost in the noise.

If anything, it enhances Facebook offers even more, by simply making it one of the best options for any company that wants decent ROI on their social media efforts.

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