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For brands across all industries, Facebook is a core component of their marketing strategy. With over 900 million people on the social network, it is an invaluable vehicle for building brand awareness, engaging consumers, and driving traffic to your website. But to achieve Facebook marketing success, it’s not enough to simply create a branded Facebook page. You must apply a method to the social media madness.

Moontoast, Nanigans, and Brand Networks are local companies in the Facebook marketing business. What’s more, these masters have the social medium down to a science and were willing to share some of their secrets. Check out what Brand Networks, Moontoast, and Nanigans had to say about the state of Facebook marketing, their advice on best practices, and tips for how to make the social platform work for you below.

What are the basic components of a successful Facebook marketing campaign?

Blair Heavey, CEO, Moontoast: “Knowing your audience…establishing KPIs for the campaign, having a clear call-to-action, highlighting the campaign’s main value prop, and including an eye-catching graphics for the Share image and the ad units.”

Cheryl Morris, Director of Marketing, Nanigans: “There are three core components to any successful advertising campaign: (1) creative, (2) targeting and (3) optimization…[This] starts with defining your core customers, expanding to lookalike audiences through affinity modeling, and ‘going big’ with Facebook ad products like Unpublished Page Post Ads.”

Veronica Gage, Director of Marketing, Brand Networks: “The first step to a successful Facebook marketing campaign is to set concrete and measurable goals. The next step is to develop an appropriate and engaging tone of voice and to establish a content calendar that is both relevant to your audience and focused on your objectives. We always recommend including a paid media strategy as well. The Facebook News Feed is crowded, and simply posting content is not enough to extend your reach, build engagement, and attract your target audience.”

What are your thoughts on Facebook embedded posts?

Moontoast: “Facebook embedded posts are definitely going to expand Facebook’s reach even further. Giving brands the ability to embed a post straight from their Facebook page onto their website opens up the doors for their site traffic to spill over onto their Facebook page.”

Brand Networks: “Embedded posts are a perfect vehicle for telling a story using Facebook content and a great way to extend the reach of a Facebook Page.”

What are some Facebook marketing options for those that don’t produce content or have pages?

Nanigans: “Custom Audiences enables brands to reach their current customers on Facebook. The product is simple: upload your CRM information to Facebook (phone number, email address, Facebook ID), and Facebook creates a targetable audience with profiles containing this same CRM information.”

Brand Networks: “Take advantage of Marketplace Domain ads on Facebook’s right hand rail. These ads include a headline with copy, an image, and a click-through link driving users…directly to a brand’s company website…[or] other relevant brand content…Features that marketers can take advantage of with Marketplace ads include demographic and interest targeting as well as the ability to…see which ad generates the greatest response rate among the brand’s target audience.”

You measure Facebook strategy and offer analytical insights. What are the most important analytics to track for Facebook and why?

Moontoast: Heavey advises tracking consumers in the “Discovery, Interaction, Transaction, and Endorsement” stages. “It is important to track each of these so that a brand can understand who their fans are, what they find engaging and why.”

Nanigans: “Hands down: lifetime value and lifetime ROI…It’s critical for marketers to measure, attribute and optimize their marketing campaigns for lifetime value.”

Brand Networks: Gage identifies three key criteria to measure: (1) Social Engagement: “How many fans do you have? Are they the right fans in terms of demographics and geography?” (2) Cost per Impression or Actions: “CPM and CPA allow us to measure cost per impression as well as the cost for users to act.” (3) ROI: “This is really the be-all-end-all and the number-one priority for all of our clients. It’s critical to understand whether social activity is producing results for the bottom line.”

Looking for more ways to engage consumers? Learn how local brands use BostInno to make Boston’s smartest, savviest, fastest-growing audience their own.