How to Use Facebook to Market Your Products

Do you have products to sell?

Have you tried using Facebook ads to promote your products?

To find out how to market products via Facebook, I interview Steve Chou.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Steve Chou. Steve and his wife run an ecommerce site that sells handkerchiefs and linens at BumblebeeLinens.com. He's also host of the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast and the website MyWifeQuitHerJob.com, where he teaches people how to sell physical products online.

Steve explains which Facebook ad types he uses to sell his physical products.

You'll discover how Steve uses email and Facebook ads in tandem.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
Listen Now

You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, or Stitcher.

Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
How to Use Facebook to Market Physical Products
Steve's Story

As Steve and his wife were preparing for their wedding, his wife wanted a nice handkerchief because she expected to cry during the service. After shopping around, they imported a bunch of handkerchiefs from Asia. After using only a few, Steve and his wife listed the rest on eBay, where they sold like hotcakes.

Later, when Steve's wife became pregnant with their first child, she wanted to quit her six-figure income job. They reconnected with the handkerchief vendor and opened their online store, Bumblebee Linens. At first, Steve worked as a microprocessor designer by day, and after the baby went to bed, Steve and his wife ran the business. It became such a success that they maintained their income even after his wife quit her job.

Steve explains that soon afterward, their friends began wanting to have kids and quit their jobs, and they kept asking Steve how to launch an ecommerce store. Instead of answering the same questions over and over again, Steve began blogging about his experiences running the store. That's how MyWifeQuitHerJob.com got started in 2009.

To generate sales in the early days, Steve used Google AdWords. His brother-in-law worked at Google in the AdWords division and showed Steve how to use it. Back in 2007, Steve generated a lot of sales via clicks that cost him about 10 to 15 cents.

Steve says online content also helped generate sales. They wrote articles to help brides and provide craft ideas for their products. After three to six months, the articles started ranking in search engines and sent traffic to their store, too.

Today, Bumblebee Linens sells handkerchiefs, linen napkins, linen towels, lace parasols, aprons, and more. Steve says the store has several target audiences. The handkerchief audience includes people planning weddings and an over-55 crowd. Event and wedding planners are the target audience for napkins and moms are the audience for Mommy & Me aprons. The company has in-house embroidery machines for personalizing their products.

Listen to the show to learn more about the audience and the content on MyWifeQuitHerJob.com.

Win-back Campaigns

Steve explains that a win-back campaign targets people who have already purchased from your shop because those people are more likely to buy again. To run this type of campaign, you need to figure out who those people are, and if they haven't purchased within a certain timeframe, give them an incentive to come back.

You can automate a win-back campaign with an online merchant system. For example, if someone hasn't purchased from Bumblebee Linens in 60 days, they automatically receive an email and a Facebook ad with a 10%-off coupon.

To automate the Facebook component of the campaign, Steve says the ecommerce system Klaviyo allows Bumblebee Linens to export a specific segment (in this case people who haven...