Facebook Advertising Works. Most Businesses Aren't Ready for It.
It's been more than 5 years now that I have been working with social media marketing. If you are reading this then no doubt you are looking to increase your success. Let me share with you how I turned my own social media marketing needs into a successful digital/social media agency.
During the great recession 2008 time frame, my financial business was simply crippled by all the excessive financial regulatory oversight. I made a decision to stop doing business in the US, as growth in my industry was expanding double digit increases vs. low single digit in the US. So the decision was obvious, I had to expand my business overseas. At that time my database was extensive with tens of thousand's of people that have used my technology all from the US. I had virtually no international footprint to start growing my business, and needed to start marketing overseas.
I have done marketing overseas but in countries that my institutional memory worked. I have more than 30 years of marketing under my belt including spending well over a half a billion dollars in marketing for the firms that I worked with or for including, long form and short form television commercials, newsprint, radio, direct mail and magazine. One thing missing was digital media. I had done Google ads and had moderate success my biggest issues was always the scalability of Google ads. I learned long ago that to be successful in any marketing campaign you needed to spend to diminishing return.
If you have a budget and you get a return of let's say 3:1, well then there is no reason not spend everything you can until the 3:1 starts to go down. When that happens you pull back your spending. The problem is that there are very few marketing avenues that let you do that. Direct Mail, no, there are only so many address that you can buy. Radio a little more, magazines no, newspaper no, Televising, Yes. You can spend more money on more time, and better time slots getting more eyeballs watching your program. But today there are so many channels it is much harder to be cost effective and capture an intuitive audience.
I use Facebook, and one of the primary reasons is that it is saleable, there are over 1.84 billion people around the world on Facebook and I can micro target my audience deliver my message and collect the contact information without ever leaving my office. That is what I did; I took my business and my message over seas in 5 languages and built a database of over 24,000 new contacts in less than 12 month's using only Facebook.
As I shared those experiences with others, I started getting questions about how I did it and how they can do it. The next thing I know. Fast-forward to today; I have a thriving successful digital medial agency that focuses on Facebook advertising.
I was with a new prospective client the other day and their situation was similar to most reading this. Either you have never advertised on Facebook, but I have heard about it and are interested in doing some ads or like this perspective client I met with, you have been doing some Facebook ads and are struggling. I get two kinds of replies from this type of experience, first one is "James, I need your help, we have been advertising on Facebook and it is just too much for us". Or "we don't have the resources or the experience to be successful and would like you and your team to do it for us". The other type comment is "James we have been running our own ads on Facebook and quite frankly did really well. We were killing it and getting hundreds of leads, BUT for some reason we are not getting anything now"
Ah, that is the interesting one for many aspects. Facebook is not stupid; they are one of the biggest and most successful technology companies in the world. Yes they are a social media company but their ornate understanding of technology drives everything they do on social media, and how we use it in our everyday lives. That means they know how to make money, and the way they make money is from people and businesses advertising on Facebook. The secret to successfully advertising on Facebook is not necessarily complicated but it does take an understanding of the metrics and processes.
Facebook is always changing their algorithms so that they can deliver your ads more efficiently and get you the leads at the cost you want, however the same technology allows them to accomplish their own financial goals that of course they have to report to their shareholders. Did you ever think that maybe they know when a new business advertiser comes on board? What if they said "hey Johnny just started running ads for the first time today, lets open up the faucet and make sure he is getting leads at great cost no matter what". Now, what do you think you would do if all of a sudden you were spending $10.00 a day and get 20 leads for $.50 a lead? Yea you will increase your ad spend to $20.00 a day, why not? After all we want to spend our marketing dollars to diminishing return (Scalability) right?
Then all of a sudden you start to see your ad metrics getting worse. Facebook has got you sucked in and your spending more and they are making more. I am not saying that they do this, just asking you to think about it. Just like anything else in life you have to work at, Facebook is no different. I constantly hear that the only thing in life that is certain is Death and Taxes and Facebook changes. Facebook makes changes to their user interface and algorithms constantly sometimes many in a week. You have to stay on top of it. You have to understand things like ad fatigue or relevance scores, where to run ads to avoid competition with fortune 500 companies etc.
If you spend the time you will reap the rewards, Facebook ads work, your customer is on Facebook, it does not matter if they are B2B or B2C you can find them and you can micro target them to be very specific as the qualified lead you want. If you are getting too many leads you can increase some of the targeting filters such as income, net worth, own a home or rent a home and just about anything you can think of, each time you make those changes to your audience you will reduce the amount of leads that come thru and increase the quality of the lead. Facebook will work for any business so long as the business is not prohibited from running ads on Facebook. There are only a few and to find that out just go online and search Facebook terms and conditions, you can make sure your industry is not one of the prohibited.
I have yet to find a business that I could not drive leads to. That said I wanted to leave you with the number one thing that I find businesses struggle with that I have personally witnessed from just about all niches out there. When I walk into see a new client the theme is always the same, "I need Leads". That true, and you will get leads from Facebook, however it will not do you any good to get leads from Facebook if you don't know or have a viable product or service to sell.
You would be surprised at how many businesses are trying to get leads when they really don't have anything to sell. Seriously I have clients that have come on board asked me to get them leads but have absolutely nothing to sell. So make sure you have clearly defined your product or service and what the price point is or will be. From experience if you are selling a high ticket item, be prepared to make sure your sales process has a live phone call to the lead in it. Less than a few hundred and you can utilize an automated process.
The process is actually the other side of most business failures when working with the leads, you get the leads, you have something to sell, but you have no process in place to work the leads. I have had customers that I send leads to with a great cost per lead conversions and only to find out that they didn't contact the leads we sent them in anyway. You would be surprised at how often this happens. Leads start coming in and then and only then do the clients realize the inefficiencies of their sales process.
To help you do it yourself and be successful you can follow a few simple steps that I have outlined below for you:
Three steps to get started
Step 1- Identify your product or service and the price points that you want to charge for them. If you are going to have a high price point lets say $1,000 to $10,000 + you need to think about having a live sales call during the process. You can use qualifying communication thru automation and nurturing but ultimately you need a sales person on the phone building a relationship and asking for the sale.
Step 2- Your process, which is an extension of step one. What will happen to the lead, will they get a confirmation, when they enter your sales pipeline, do you have a sales pipeline? Will they get a welcome email? How will you notify your sales team that you have a new lead, will you have a follow up process or nurture sequence to keep your leads engaged?
Step 3- set up your ads on Facebook. Make sure that you have a well thought out landing page or lead ad, and be sure that all of the notifications in above steps are working to notify your sales team and or process of the new lead. Test all the links in the ad process before going live. Be sure to maintain a high relevance score of your ads by having your content on your landing page correlate to your content in your ad. You will get better deliverability by doing so.
Three easy steps to get started advertising on Facebook, I only had a small amount of space to share my passion, and excitement about Facebook and how advertising on Facebook can help make your business much more successful than you ever thought it could be. Here are a few things that you can take along with you for further research and that will help you become a better Facebook advertiser.
Test various price points, $10.0 a day may be better than $20.00 and $47.00 a day may be better than $20.00 but $50.00 may not be as good as $15.00. Point is that Facebook runs very complicated algorithms and every variable you make or change can affect the over all success of the ad.
Video typically does better than print, always look for engaging images that create conversation, make sure that your landing pages are mobile responsive, 84% of the 1.81 billion people are using a mobile operating system on Facebook, don't dismiss this audience group. Look for ad fatigue meaning if your ad stops performing then change it, BUT be careful changing ads as it takes about 10 days for Facebook to optimize an ad so that they can deliver the ad to the most likely person to engage with your ad, and as contradictory as this sounds don't change your ad if you don't need to, each time you change your ad Facebook will reapprove it and launch it with Facebook's most up to date algorithms which in the end serve Facebook over you.
I have tested thousand's of individual variables, I have a tremendous amount of institutional memory but I never become complacent because Facebook is always changing.