5 Ways To Find The Perfect Customer Online

30Apr

Are you trying to promote your business through Facebook advertising? Do you want to increase brand awareness on a local or global scale? Do you want a VERY specific group of people to see your ad? Maybe you want anyone and everyone to see you? It’s all possible, but you need a pro’s help.

When we work on Facebook advertising for our clients, we are fully aware that we’re in for a task. Each business is an entirely separate entity and as such, requires a unique approach. Why? Because Facebook gives us so many options and avenues to visibility that we have to carefully craft a strategy for every advertisement.

What are the best ways to fully utilize Facebook strategies? How should YOUR business use them? Below are five of the most effective options that you can take advantage of when trying to market your brand.

1. Location. When we’re looking at these options, we have to ask ourselves “Who do we want to click this ad?” Obviously, the answer should correspond with who your target customer is. Does your brand appeal to customers in your hometown or all across the U.S.?

For example, the law office of Payne & Price wants to reach out to more potential clients. However, they only handle cases in Atlanta. Obviously, there wouldn’t be any point for them to pay for a national reach. People in non-relevant areas would see the ad and move on, and they would do so fast. Narrowing your geographical reach is important, especially if you are trying to appeal to a particular area.

2. Age and Gender. We have bunched these two together because many times they go hand-in-hand. Age and gender are important options that need to be specified in any campaign. Whether you know it or not, your product’s appeal has an age range. Often, it will also appeal to male or female audiences as well.

Safe Haven Nursing, an in-home caregiving facility typically for seniors, is trying to raise their brand awareness on Facebook. Their target audience is not the elders themselves, but rather their adult children. They should target the ages of 40-55 in their specified area. Since studies show that the children who make decisions about their aging parents’ healthcare are often daughters, they may also want to choose a female audience.

On the contrary, My Cali, an eager startup clothing line that is aimed at Millennials, will want to target those between 18-35 to match their desired clientele. They can also make separate ads that feature male and female apparel.

3. Life Events. Are you a wedding planner? Baby clothes retailer? Marketer for a college? This one is for you. People celebrate milestones in their life on Facebook quite often and as a result, you can offer them targets to compliment this time.

The marketing team at Hampton Ridge, a beautiful event venue in the Pocono Mountains, is trying to reach out to engaged couples looking for places to spend their special day. With Facebook marketing, they can target couples in the area who have been engaged for 3 months and 6 months. They won’t bother with those who have been engaged for over 12 months because those couples are typically ready to walk down the aisle. With Facebook advertising, you can be that specific.

4. Income. To be frank, what is the sense of marketing to a crowd that can’t afford your product? Or, you may want to reach out to a more or less wealthy clientele. Either way, you have the ability to target those in a specific financial bracket or those with a particular household income.

The folks at Everclean Housekeeping were tired of being rejected after giving quotes for their services. Instead of lowering their rates, they decided to use Facebook marketing to target those with incomes $100K or above. They quickly saw a different demographic start calling in, and business improved.

5. Interests and Values. When I say interests, I don’t necessarily mean you should target people who like to play basketball or go hiking (although you could do that). Facebook has the ability to look at the Pages people have liked as well as tap into their profile information so users see promotional content they are actually interested in.

This goes beyond hobbies or passions. Perhaps your product appeals to a more conservative or liberal audience? Maybe you want to reach out to the Christian, Jewish, or Muslim communities in your area? Or maybe you just want to promote your products to those who support your local football team. Whether it’s a personal interest or something that your target market values, it’s possible to connect with people with that shared commonality.

As you can imagine, of all of these strategies this one takes some finesse. I would suggest you take a step back and look at your “typical” customer. What do you imagine them doing or participating in when they aren’t in your business?

Banyan Tree Tutoring was trying to reach out to parents in the Chattanooga, TN area. When they began their advertising journey, they chose to add several elements from above. First, they wanted to reach those who were interested in the local schools, Facebook pages about parenting and home-owning, and local sports teams. Then, because they are considered a premium service, they chose a specific income. Next, they chose the age range of the typical parents with school children, 28-50. Finally, they decided to stick within 20 miles of the Chattanooga city limits. Through these efforts, Banyan Tree Tutoring and thousands of other businesses are drumming up more business in ways they didn’t expect.

Are you excited yet? You should be! But you need to face facts, Facebook advertising is intense. It takes time, effort, and strategy. However, once you have it down, you will have an advantage over the competition and reach an audience you wouldn’t have access to otherwise.

Ready to start Facebook advertising for your business? Contact us today!

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Good Timing: When Should You Publish On Social Media?

By Christopher Tompkins

21Mar

Social Media

You created an amazing post— the copy and imagery are both awesome. Then, you publish and nothing happens. Not even a single like! Did your perfect piece of content fall flat? Or are there other factors to consider? Very often content is published at the wrong time, and there may not be enough people online to see your brand’s presence.

Many business owners and marketers have come to us frustrated with a lack of engagement and online response to their content. After we look into what they’ve been doing, we often see that they’ve been scheduling at inopportune times of day. Social media marketing, like many other professions, requires precision and attention to detail. One of the smallest, but most important, of these details, is timing.

WHEN the time is right for your post greatly depends on WHERE you are posting and WHO your audience is. For example, even if you have the exact same piece of content and send it out to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest at the same moment, they will all vary in terms of engagement rates. Additionally, you need to consider your specific audience and their web browsing habits.

As you create your content and decide to send it out to the world, keep the following schedules in mind:

Facebook Best: 2 – 5 pm, 6 – 8 am
Facebook Worst: 10 pm – 4 am

Twitter Best: 1 – 3 pm
Twitter Worst: 8 pm – 8 am

Pinterest Best: 2 – 4 pm
Pinterest Worst: 1 – 7 am

LinkedIn Best: 7 – 8:30 am
LinkedIn Worst: 9 am – 5 pm

Instagram Best: 4 pm – 9 pm
Instagram Worst: 8 am – 3 pm

Now, the tricky part is tailoring these preferred times to your ideal customer. In a certain respect, a lot of the work is already done for you. For example, Instagram attracts a younger crowd- a demographic that typically goes on social media in the afternoon and evening. That’s reflected in the ideal time.

However, the range of 4pm-9pm is pretty wide, so you may want to sharpen your strategy even further. Does your ideal audience have a family? Then post in the earlier afternoon or later at night (when their children are asleep).

Facebook is another example of why it’s important to know who your audience is; there are two ideal posting time slots. Since this platform’s user base is so broad, you have to really figure out when your users go online. 2-5pm is great for 30-50 year olds who check out social media on their lunch breaks or right after work. 6-8pm is good for after dinner web browsing and is good for a large number of demographics including online shoppers.

Through extensive experience, our marketers have learned which times work and which don’t. We know that your intended audience also influences the right publishing times. If you are trying to reach a younger audience, later times may work. If you’re trying to attract caregivers or healthcare workers, the morning might be better. It can be subjective when it comes down to it, but that’s why there are social media marketers who know exactly what to do!

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Maybe Your Audience Just Isn’t That Into You (And How to Win Them Back)

By Christopher Tompkins

19Mar

Business, Content Creation, Facebook, Facebook Advertising, Instagram, Marketing, Social Media, Social networking

Your relationship with your customers is a bit like the dating world. You have to know who you’re trying to find, and who would be interested in you. For many online marketers, however, they strike out more than they create lasting relationships.

It’s 2018–a mass majority of small to medium sized businesses have created some form of social media marketing with the intention of generating customer engagement and online visibility. These professionals signed up for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms. They developed great content strategies. They even generated a decent budget for advertising. That’s all you have to do to start attracting customers by the thousands right? Wrong.

While all these steps seem like the right actions to take, some businesses still miss the mark when trying to attract an online following. As any marketer knows, this is an extremely frustrating part of the job, especially when you’ve done a ton of research into what makes the right content. It’s not that your message isn’t marketable, however. You just need to adjust your approach.

Are you not feeling the love online? A majority of businesses face a slump in engagement. You might even have a large number of followers, but you still only get very few likes, comments, and shares. If this is the case, you’re not alone. Give the following techniques a try:

1. Tweak your tone. Does your content read like a sales pitch? You might believe that you must promote your products nonstop, when in reality you need to tap into a conversational, human voice. That’s the whole point of social media. You can’t connect with your followers if you come across as a door-to-door salesperson, you’re surely going to make your followers’ eyes roll.

2. Tweak your content. So maybe you have your voice down, but you’re still pushing promotions like there’s no tomorrow. That’s not the way to go, either. Instead, consider what we call “pull marketing”– blogs, news, quotes, recipes, fun facts, etc. You know, stuff people actually enjoy reading or watching, whether it’s part of a marketing strategy or not. This is where there is a game-changing difference between online marketing and traditional marketing, there has to be a takeaway — some information or entertainment aspect that gives the content value.

3. Tweak your publishing times. Now, a bit of logistics come into play. Perhaps you’re just missing your target audience’s ideal viewing window. On top of every platform having an ideal publishing time window, you also need to consider your audience. If you have a younger crowd, you may want to consider evenings, whereas an audience 30-50 years of age may be more likely to scroll the web in the morning. If you don’t keep this in mind, your target audience’s news feed may have buried your content down the line.

4. Tweak your awareness. What does your website have to do with social media marketing? Well, a whole lot if you want to get technical. But your website could serve as a gateway to an increase in social media followers as long as you add buttons that directly lead to your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other pages. Additionally, if you’re selling a product, integrate the social media platforms logos on the packaging somewhere. If you have a physical location, post signs around the property that promote your social media channels.

5. Tweak your advertising. Whether you’re advertising on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, paid advertising can certainly boost your awareness and visibility– if you do it right. If you’re boosting posts, make sure that there is a call to action that your audience will want to pursue. If you’re doing target marketing, make sure you’re targeting the people who would be most likely to be interested in your brand.

Social media advertising can be a gateway to heightened engagement if done correctly. However, many business owners feel that they can handle this themselves or pass it off to an intern– in the meantime they end up wasting hundreds or thousands of dollars because they didn’t utilize the most effective route. It’s important to have a team of social media marketing experts by your side to guide your brand to continued success via these intricate strategies.

Your social media audience deserves the best from you. In return, they’ll help you spread the word through user generated content. But you have to earn their attention. The above ideas can help you a great deal as long as you take the time to develop the strategy that’s right for your brand. As we’ve said, all this is a bit like dating. It takes some work to find the right match, but it’s definitely worth it in the end.

Consider The Go! Agency your matchmakers! We specialize in perfecting our clients’ voices online. Are you ready for a professional to handle your social media? Click here to learn more: http://ow.ly/ODg330iWZLM

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At The Drawing Board: Creating A Landing Page

By Christopher Tompkins

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10May

Advertising, Content Creation, Facebook, Facebook Advertising, Local Marketing, Marketing

In our last post in the At The Drawing Board series, we learned how to create a saved Facebook audience. Now you’re probably thinking, “Finally, we’ve got our audience so we can create our ads! Woohoo!”

You could definitely do that, but you may be making a massive mistake.

Why?

Well think about this, where is your Facebook Ad going to send your audience?

Many people focus on their ad, never considering the next step in the journey. You can have the best Facebook ad in the world, but if it leads to an irrelevant page on your website, then you’re wasting your money.

To ensure your ads are successful, you need to make sure the pages they’re pointing to are well designed and help you to reach your goals. That’s where landing pages come in.

What Is A Landing Page?

In basic terms, a landing page is a page that visitors arrive on when they first come to your website. Since it’s possible that a visitor could arrive on any page of your website, you could say that every page is a landing page (which is why website design is so important.)

In the case of Facebook Ads, a landing page will be the page on your website which you are going to send people to once they click the ad.

Now you could send people to the homepage of your website, but that wouldn’t help you to fulfill your goals. So your landing page should be a custom page designed to help ad clickers towards a marketing goal.

For example:

Your goal may be to sell a new type of tennis racket. Your Facebook Ad will make your audience aware of the product and entice them to click. From there they’ll come to a page on your website with the intention of them buying the tennis racket.

In our case, our goal is to get people to sign up to our mailing list so our landing page will be designed with that in mind.

Landing Page Tips

So where do you start when it comes to creating a landing page? Here are a few tips!

Have a clear goal in mind

If you don’t have a goal, you’re getting way ahead of yourself. Come up with your marketing strategy first.

Your goal is the purpose of your landing page and ads and has to be clear to the user. Is it to download your ebook? Buy your product? Or to sign-up to your mailing list?

Regardless, make sure there is a clear call to action. No need to be subtle. Make sure it stands out, a colorful button works best. Hitting the user over the head with a giant button that says, “ADD TO CART” is way more effective than being vague.

Keep it simple

Everything on a landing page should have a purpose. It should convince the user to complete your call to action. When you think your page is complete, go through each element and ask “How does this help the user towards my call-to-action.” If it doesn’t help at all, remove it.

With that in mind, your landing pages should be much simpler than your website pages.

Use an offer

The best way to encourage a user to complete your call-to-action is to tie an offer to it. The better the offer, the more likely they’ll be to take you up on it. Time sensitive offers can also add a bit of pressure to complete the CTA right that moment.

An offer of money off an order or even an ebook is a great way to get users to convert.

Check your Landing Page before you let it out in the wild

It goes without saying that you should proofread your landing page before you start sending users to it. But something that is often missed is checking the landing page on both a desktop PC, tablet and a mobile phone.

The page will look different depending on how your users are arriving, so you want to ensure nothing is getting in the way of them completing their call to action. With most people now using their mobile phone for Facebook and using the internet, you need to make sure your landing page looks fine on a mobile.

With these tips in mind, your landing page should be a success and you’ll finally have something which you can send people to once they click your ads.

If you need some help with your landing pages, contact us now, and we can help!

At The Drawing Board: Creating A Saved Facebook Audience

By Christopher Tompkins

Copy of Go! Blog Image Templates (900x350)

2May

Advertising, Facebook, Social Media

Choosing an objective for your Facebook Ads is easy as it will correspond to your overall goal. It shouldn’t take too long to decide on what type of ad you want to run.

But before you even think about writing copy or creating media to go along with it, you must first think about who is going to view your ad.

Facebook has a powerful audience creation tool built into it and learning to use the tool is quite easy. But finding a good audience for your ad is a little tougher.

In the following post I’m going to explain how to Create a Saved Audience and the audience we decided on for our Facebook ads campaign.

Creating Customer Personas

Before you create an audience on Facebook, it’s worth sitting down and trying to think about who your customers are. This will help with your audience creation on Facebook, but will also help you to get an insight into who your ads will be targeting.

When creating your ads, it’s good to always keep your customer in mind. Think about what would engage them and what would spur them into action.

In order to help, we like to create personas for our potential customers. These are profiles which include all the demographic information about our various customers, whether relevant or not. The more the customer is described, the easier it is to find them and communicate with them.

The longer you’ve been in business, the easier this exercise will be. The more experience you have, the more you’ll know your customer. But creating personas may help you to think a little deeper.The profiles should include:

A name for the persona
Age range
Job Title
Location
Education
Interests
Family
Values
Fears
Goals
Challenges

To figure out our own personas, we spoke to our Vice President and Social Media Managers. They’re in touch with our clients and potential clients each day, so they know them well.

With their help we created our own personas.

Transferring Your Personas to Facebook

Now that our personas were done, it would be quite easy to transfer them over to Facebook. We decided we wanted to build as large an audience as possible so we chose a persona that would be broad.

The majority of our services are provided to local business owners so they would be our main target. We’d create a target audience made of:

Small business owners
Between 35 and 55.
That lived locally.

Entering our business account, we used the menu to go to the Audience section, where we chose to “Create a new Saved Audience.”

From there we gave our audience a name and transferred our focal points over to the audience.

First, the local audience. We decided this would be anybody within a 40-mile radius:

Then the age to narrow down the audience a little:

And finally the fact that we wanted the audience to be made of small business owners:

With the details entered, all we needed to do was to click, “Create Audience,” and that audience could then be used for an ad campaign.
It’s worth noting that Facebook can create audiences as broad and defined as you want them to be. You could send your ad to an audience as large as everybody in the USA. Or you could send it to every 30 year old in a certain zip-code.

In our case, we decided to start off with a broad audience at first and refine it over time. We felt this would be a good way to keep our ad price down and also figure out how to hone in on more specific potential customers.

However, the other option is to dive straight in with your personas. If you’re selling diapers then it’s common sense that you want to sell to women who have recently had a baby. But if you sell special organic diapers, maybe you could also narrow your audience by choosing women who are also interested in organic foods. That way you’re hitting the perfect customer with your ad.

The golden rule is, the better you know your customer, the easier you can find them and create an audience based on them. So start thinking about your customer, who they are and what they like. That way you can target them.

At The Drawing Board: Learning About Facebook Ad Objectives

By Christopher Tompkins

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26Apr

Advertising, Facebook, Social Media

In the last post in our At The Drawing Board series, I wrote about deciding on a marketing strategy. In this post, I’m going to talk about the first part of our strategy: Facebook Ads.

We decided that Facebook Ads would be a good way to bring leads into our funnel and raise awareness of our company and services. From our ads, we’d collect email addresses so that we could stay in contact with leads via email marketing.

But just deciding to use Facebook Ads is the easy part. Planning Facebook Ads is a whole different ball game.

Facebook Ads come in many types, which are ever changing. The type you choose is based on the objective you want to complete.

In our case, our objective was to collect email addresses, which gave us a few options:

Conversions – An ad run with the objective of converting users. The ad pushes a user towards your website with the aim of the user completing a specific action. (Such as, in our case, filling in our email form.)
Traffic – This type of ad aims to push users towards a particular website. (In our case, it could be a landing page for our email list.)
Lead Generation – An ad that collects contact information from users directly within Facebook, providing you with a list of people that signed up.

There are a few other objectives that didn’t seem like they would be as relevant to us:

Brand awareness – Making more people aware of a Facebook page and brand.
Reach – Showing an ad to the maximum number of people
Engagement – Getting people to engage with a Facebook page’s posts. (Increasing reactions, comments, likes, etc.)
Video views – Getting people to view a video.
App Installs – Having users buy and install an app.
Product sales – Aiming to get people to buy products from an online store.
Store visits – Having people visit your real world location.

Many of these ad types seem similar but have small differences beneath.

So what are the main differences between ad types?

The options are given for how the ad looks and works. Since each ad is based on a certain objective, each one looks different. A video views ad will consist of a video and text, while an engagement ad will only show a post from your Facebook Page. Some ads show a button, while others like the lead generation ad are unique and contain forms that can be filled in.
How the ads optimize. Once you run an ad for a certain amount of time, Facebook can automatically optimize it in the background so that your objective is more easily obtained. With that in mind, it needs to know what you want from your ad so it can help you get there.

With all of this in mind, since we were looking to collect email addresses, we decided to start off with a conversions ad.

Our basic plan was that our ad would direct users to a page where they would enter their contact details. Those who entered their details would have converted, which was the main goal we wanted to strive for.

However, we could have used other types of ads too. Any good Facebook Ads campaign will try out some ad types to find the one that works best and completes an objective for the least amount of money.

What Can $5 of Facebook Engagement Get You?

By Christopher Tompkins

18Apr

Advertising, Facebook, Social Media

One of the key lessons we took from our improv session a few weeks ago was that we should roll with other people’s ideas.

We shouldn’t just tell them, “Good job.” We should join in. Add to their idea. Collaborate.

The Battle of the Beards was one of those ideas:

“Our Copywriter, Mike has a beard. Hey, so does our Social Media Executive, Bill. Why don’t we have them face off on social media in a beard battle!”

That was it, the whole idea. A beard battle. Just a silly update on social media. But as tends to happen in a creative environment, the idea soon snowballed.

The Idea Grows

Mike and Bill loved the idea. Maybe a little too much. They’d possibly been waiting for the day when they could one-up another man’s beard. Glancing at each other across the office thinking, “My beard is so much better than his. If only I had an opportunity to prove it.”

Luckily for them, they now had the chance.

Soon the silly suggestion was becoming a ridiculous reality. Mike and Bill both agreed to pose for some photos. But not before they each hired an entourage of beard stylists to ensure they looked delightful.

We had them face-off in the conference room, and soon the smack-talk started. “You call that a beard? I’ve got more hair than that on my big toe!”

To sort out the argument once and for all, we decided a post on Facebook where people could vote for the best beard through reactions would work.

But we feared that nobody would see the post. Facebook has started to change its algorithm so that it’s getting ever harder to get something onto other people’s feeds.

We tried to get Don King in to promote our post, but for some reason, he wouldn’t return our calls. Instead, we promoted the post through Facebook instead. We didn’t want to spend too much so decided $5 would do.

How we promoted our post with $5

Although our beard battle was a bit of fun, it’s still an excellent case study on how to run a Facebook Ad. We had a goal, a set budget ($5) and something fun to promote, now we just needed to create our ad.Since our goal was to increase the engagement on our ad, it seemed to be a no-brainer to use the Engagement ad type on Facebook.

The Engagement ad type allows you to optimize your ad campaign to gain more post engagement (reactions or comments), page likes or responses to your events.

Choosing a Facebook Audience

The first thing you do when creating an ad is to select an audience. In this case, since our post was about beards, we decided to hit an audience that was interested in beards.Fortunately, Facebook Ads tracks the interests of its users, and we were surprised to learn that there were plenty of groups for beards:

We further narrowed the audience down to 18 to 30-year-olds as we felt they’d be more open to the silliness of the post and voting in it.

This gave us an audience size of 88,000 which was more than enough for what we needed.

Budgeting and Scheduling our Facebook Ad

For the rest of our ad, we mostly stuck to Facebook’s default settings. We only wanted the beard battle to run for a day, so we set a lifetime budget for the ad of $5 and set it to run for 24 hours.We had the ad show up on Facebook (excluding Instagram) on mobile to keep costs down but also to ensure that anybody that saw the ad was in the position to react to it.

Creating the Post

Last up we needed to create our Battle of the Beards post. Thankfully our bearded men were happy to pose for photos. The post itself was based on an NFL Instagram post we’d stumbled upon:

Here’s our version:

Ad Results

After a week of excitement, the post (and ad) finally went up and almost immediately we started to get some reactions, although it seemed most of them were from Mike’s family.

Soon people not related to the contestants began to react. Our ads were working. In the end, we got great results both from our ads and organically. There was plenty of engagement:

Our ad results weren’t too bad either.

We reached 317 people with our ad, 44 of which reacted to the post. Just over 1/6 of people that the post reached engaged with it which was a good result and each engagement cost 9 cents.

What does this show or prove? Well first of all that our audience – people that like beards, were happy to engage in a post about beards! (Actually, after looking at the profiles of most of the voters, I could see that almost all of them had their own beards!)

But deeper than that, it proves that you don’t need to spend a lot of money on Facebook to get somebody to engage with your business. You simply need to find something that your target audience is interested in and go from there.

If our business sold cosmetics products for beards, this would have been a perfect opportunity to get potential customers interested in our business and our $5 of ads could have easily brought in a good return on our investment.

Especially because, as I mentioned, much of the engagement came from men with beards.

As it is, we don’t sell anything related to facial hair. But we succeeded in our own goal: to have some fun. Not just for us, but for the people that engaged with our post.Since the win, we’re happy to report that Mike hasn’t retired to the Bahamas. But he has been strutting around the office and stroking his beard more than usual.

Bill, on the other hand, has vowed to grow his beard twice as long for a rematch.

At the Drawing Board: Deciding on a Marketing Strategy

By Christopher Tompkins

12Apr

Facebook, Facebook Advertising, Marketing

In our last post in the At the Drawing Board series, I discussed the very first stages of one of our marketing campaigns. Myself, Chris (our CEO) and Dale (our VP) met to discuss a goal for our campaign. In the end, we decided we wanted to promote our Facebook Ads service as we believe it’s something we excel at.

During the meeting, I took down all of our ideas and later tried to form them into a concrete plan.

To do this, I first wrote down:

The goal for our campaign. What we wanted from it. This we settled on as bringing more clients in for Facebook Ads Consultancy.
Who our campaign was going to be targeted to. In this case, local businesses seemed a good starting point as they would most benefit from using Facebook Ads.
How people would find out about our campaign. Such as on social media, through our emails or (mainly) through running Facebook Ads.
What options we had for turning potential clients into actual clients. Our blog, social media, email marketing and customer service.

Once these were written down, we could easily form a small funnel to visualize the bare bones of our campaign.

At the top of our funnel, people would become aware of us and our services. From there they would become a prospective client, which would eventually turn into a consultation.

Creating this diagram allowed us to think more about how we would turn people aware of our service into clients.

We already knew our first step, where we made people aware of our service would be done through the use of Facebook Ads. But how would we turn people that had seen our ads into clients?

Possible options were:

Create a drip fed email marketing campaign that would send emails automatically to people on a mailing list to build their trust, before pitching our services to them in an email.
Capture phone numbers of potential customers and call them up to work out whether they could use our services.
Pass people on to our website or social media in the hope they’ll start to follow us and eventually decide to use our services.
Capture physical addresses and send them marketing materials through the mail.

Chris and I decided a drip fed email campaign would be the best option, as it would mostly run itself once set up, it would keep us in contact with people in our sales funnel and allow us to market to them. This allowed us to change our diagram:

With this diagram in place, we had a strategy that we could work on, and our campaign was starting to take shape. This gave us some tasks that we would need to do next:

Think up a Facebook Ads campaign that allowed us to collect the email address of people interested in our service.
Write and create an email marketing campaign based around our theme of Facebook Ads consultation.
Plan a timeline for our campaign showing us when it would start and when the content would need to be created for.

In my next post, I’ll discuss the first stage of our funnel, the Facebook Ads campaign. How we expanded on our ideas to create something more substantial. Meeting with our Copywriters and Social Media Managers for input to create a campaign map.

The 4 Facebook Ads Your Page Needs

By Christopher Tompkins

21Sep

Advertising, Facebook, Social Media

Businesses of various sizes, industries, and locations are flocking to Facebook! Entrepreneurs and professionals realize that their target customer base is just a few clicks away. How are they promoting themselves? Facebook advertising!

When one thinks of online advertising, those pesky pop-ups come to mind. Facebook advertisements are more subtle, engaging, and effective. To make things even better, there are multiple types of ads. Here are the four categories that you can benefit from right away:

– Boosted posts. Sometimes, you have a post that hits the spot. If you see a piece of content that’s receiving decent engagement, boost it! It will expand its reach to as broad or narrow as you like, stirring up new connections and conversations.

– Page likes. Do you need more likes on your page? There’s an ad for that! Likes are an essential element of Facebook marketing. These ads will raise your numbers quickly.

– Event awareness. Many companies use Facebook to promote their events and functions. Get those RSVPs back quicker than ever with Facebook ads.

– Website traffic. For many companies, their websites are driving forces of business and marketing. Your Facebook and website can – and should- work together to reap the rewards of the internet.

Unsure of which ad is best for your business? Let us help! We manage hundreds of Facebook pages and advertisement campaigns for clients, and they are blown away at their results!

Contact us today to see how your business can rock Facebook marketing!

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The Dying Art Of Facebook Organic Reach

By Christopher Tompkins

13Sep

Advertising, Facebook, Social Media

At the risk of sounding old – back in the day, Facebook was a very different place for marketers. Posts had a better chance of reaching the right people organically without boosts. Sure, advertising was still around, but it wasn’t the life force of the platform. Now, it seems like selecting the right avenue in the Ads Manager is almost as important as writing the content itself.

Advertising has become an essential element to Facebook marketing. At the center of this issue is updated algorithms. As you might have noticed, what appears in your timeline is what Facebook thinks you want to see the most, not necessarily what is most recent. Yes, the option of changing the feed results is available, but not many people know or bother with it. The pages you visit the most, the people you converse with often, and topics you like alter your results. This can be good and bad for consumers, but it’s a challenge for marketers, especially those who are just starting out with Facebook.

While advertising’s grasp is hard to escape, marketers can ensure that their content is willing to do some heavy lifting. Appealing visuals, popular hashtags, and interesting news articles can help fight back. In the end, though, Facebook’s infrastructure leaves little choice to marketers. Even if it’s only a few dollars, companies will have to to pay something.

There is a good side to this. Once you decide that advertising is necessary, your page will benefit. It’s not a scam. Your marketing team will be happy with what Facebook does for your content. Once Mark Zuckerberg’s people have a bit of dough, they will take care of you. Not only will your numbers be what organic reach used to be able to do, but you will also have a unique advantage. We see advertising’s growth for various reasons, yet the most significant is that the platforms understand that businesses are thriving due to their social media efforts. With literally billions of people watching, it’s easy to make an impact. For it to keep being easy, they need a little bit of payment.

What do you think of Facebook advertising? Comment below!

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