Intro | “Is Facebook Ads Going To Work For My Business?”
For anyone wondering if developing a social media marketing strategy or using Facebook ads are good methods to use to create demand for your product, service or offer of any kind, this post is for you.
I’m going to be going over what a guy named Jeremy Haynes calls the venus flytrap strategy.
It’s a very effective and scalable facebook ad strategy using and testing micro-content to identify, retarget, and nurture/sell someone on Facebook or at least get them to give you information so you or your team can sell them.
Below you’ll find a visual of how this looks in a mindmap
When starting, you’re initially going after (aka your objective when creating your Facebook ads should be) engagement or video views.
The idea is to run an engagement campaign trying to get people to comment, like, share, save or just engage with your posts. This includes watching your videos (which are trackable and retargetable (we’ll get to this soon)).
Static visuals should be geared towards getting those actual interactions that require buttons to be pressed on the post (like, share, comment, save, etc.).
Video view-through should also be an objective of yours with videos. You should be creating videos with the intent of capturing attention fast and holding onto that attention while building rapport, trust, authority, and curiosity around what you’re showing your target audience
If you don’t know this you can actually retarget people based on a lot of different qualifications so you can target people based on things like interests or behaviors or locations or some other demographic data.
But that’s the very beginning of it like I mentioned above.
There’s some other cool retargeting and custom stuff that you can do like creating custom audiences and creating lookalike audiences but retargeting enables you to target people that have liked shared commented or saved a post um and then you retarget and follow up with them on Facebook (or other platforms if you choose) based off of whatever it is that they interacted with.
You can create a Custom Audience from your list, Facebook Pixel data or Facebook SDK to specify the people you want to reach with your remarketing campaign. Your pixel or SDK can automatically add people to a Custom Audience based on the specific actions you’re most interested in targeting, like people who visit your site homepage or people who view a product but do not make a purchase. This can help you create ads that are relevant to where people are in their customer journey.
Learn how to set up a Custom Audience from a list, from your website visitors or from the people who use your app.
– Facebook
NOTE: You cant retarget people on different platforms if the retargeting data isn’t yours. In other words, you cant use twitter to target someone that interacted with your Facebook post or vis versa. You can only retarget on other platforms if you get the online users to visit a URL on your website or other owned digital asset that has a facebook pixel on it.
So, to start you really just start pushing out micro-content that all leads or makes sense to pair up with whatever offer it is that you’re using to try to get a conversion. This should be a paid / promotional piece of content (aka an advertisement). Organic reach on Facebook is terrible. So if you have no money to promote your content, you should consider doing stuff like SEO or other organic digital marketing tactics/channels.
Then you start pushing out your conversion campaign to all of the people that engage with your micro-content. You need to identify what resonates with your ideal client and then put more ad/marketing dollars into promoting the piece that is getting you the most engagement and resulting in the most conversions/sales/leads/etc.
And the reason we do this is that you get engagement.
Engagement is cheap.
It’s not expensive to go and get a like or a comment or anything.
But that’s not why you go and you do it you’re not marketing online and doing all this digital work just to get a like.
Obviously, you want money coming in and enabling you to grow and expand your business. This is basically a way to help you identify the people that are interested in whatever it is that you’re posting about so you’re filtering out all the other fluffy people that you don’t want to retarget.
So you are basically identifying and targeting the people that are specifically engaging with your content and no one else.
Even with Facebook campaigns that are prioritizing video view-through (video views), you can target people that have watched 50% or more of your video and you know for a fact that they’re going to be way more likely to watch another video or take action on another video or progress down the customer value journey (or marketing funnel) because they were at least interested enough to watch 50% of your previous video.
What Not To Do When Posting: TRY TO SELL ON THE FIRST INTERACTION
You don’t want to be approaching people initially saying “Hey do you want to buy my stuff? And do you want to buy it now?” in all of your marketing efforts.
That’s very very ineffective. People are still people. They want to be treated and approached like people.
No one wants to get approached by some random person on the street asking if they want to buy the stuff you have no idea about. Especially when they don’t know the person.
Trust, rapport, and everything else that’s important in the psychological sales process need to be taken into account in the digital world as well as the real physical world.
It’s vital to respect the individual (and the psychological sales process) and ensure that you are positioning/framing yourself and your company in a good way prior to retargeting and making any kind of offer at all.
Because if you’re not, again it’s just not going to feel right and people are going to be turned off by it. And with the people you approach in this way, you probably won’t ever get the opportunity to change their minds because the first impression and approach was so unattractive not focused on developing a relationship and adding value.
Personalizing Your Customer Value Journey
The opposite of that is creating a great experience while getting to know you and your brand
It comes down to context. You have to make sure that everything is contextual and that the customer journey is optimal and seamless/frictionless so everyone you’re marketing and selling to is having their own individual experience based on their online interactions with your brand and its content. This ensures that everything is happening at the pace that the prospect is comfortable with.
Because if it’s not personalized and it’s not tailored to the individual based on their past interactions with your content and your social channels it’s not going to feel like it should during the digital sales process.
It’ll feel weird and out of order. This usually happens subconsciously but it still happens even if the audience isn’t aware it’s happening.
Recap
So, to sum this up:
- Use content to refine who it is that you target content or offers towards (retarget by video view percentages, post likes, post comments, website content/page visits (blogs, landing pages, etc.)
- Consider the person that is on the other side of your content or offers. How would you react to anything you put online? If you’d react negatively or not even pay attention to it if it was on your facebook news feed, don’t post it or offer it. It’s not worth your brand reputation and a potential sour prospect that could have been a sale later down the road had you approached them better.
- Test different kinds of content aligned with your offer that you would follow up with once someone does engage with your content.
- Use data to continuously refine everything you do and how you approach your marketing initiatives
If you want to know more or want to know how this could work for your business, feel free to book a complimentary strategy call with me to go over the approach and how it would apply and work for your company.
Also, feel free to join our community and get early access to new content about digital marketing and digital sales processes.
Go crush it!