How To Use Facebook Advertising To Create Profits In Your Business Over The Long Term

Facebook Advertising – Powerful, But Get It Wrong, Its Money Down the Drain

With Facebook’s Advertising Platform’s powerful demographic settings, advertising your business on this platform can create tremendous ROI. It can be a tremendously profitable way to promote your business. With that being said, I find it really disturbing to see the amounted of wasted advertising budget on Facebook, do to poorly thought out (or no thought out at all) strategies for the advertising. You need a strategy for Facebook advertising. Don’t just point an ad at a post, shoot and hope for the best.

The reason for this video is I actually see many professionals in the industry rolling out these poorly thought through campaigns for their clients, wasting much money that is not even theirs. As my role in the industry is to support marketing agencies, this video in part is for you. But as I would like to see a general improvement in the quality of advertising provided to the SMBs of the world, if you are a business owner, its ideal information for you too. You need to be aware of how marketing works so you give your business maximum opportunity for success.

I hope you enjoy it, the transcription is below:

What To Advertise on Facebook To Ensure Profits (Transcription)

So recently I’ve seen a lot of repeat errors in creating advertising strategies on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. And I wanted to create this video because the error keeps happening and it basically wastes a lot of money advertising in a strategy that is never going to work. So I just wanted to talk through what happens giving an example, so if you’re watching this video hopefully you can actually create a better strategy. And you know when you’re spending advertising dollars which is based around putting your message in front of people, so you’re paying for impressions or clicks or whatever, you’re actually maximizing your chance of having a successful long-term advertising campaign.

And to start the video, I just, I really wanted to point out how social media works because if you understand this concept, you’ll actually understand better how you can construct your advertising strategy for optimal potential success.

So when we’re talking about the advertising tool, we’re not talking about the content side of social media. We’re talking about paying Facebook money to put your message in front of the demographic that you’ve said, using the ad manager or the Power Editor, that kind of stuff. So you’re actually putting an advert out there and paying Facebook to put it in front of your prospects. So if you want to have a bit of an insight on how to get the marketing side of it, the content side of it to work for you more effectively, I’ll put a link underneath the video so you can see it. I’ve got another video that I’ve talked about making that effective.

Yes, but let’s talk about these social media platforms because what people use them for is not to read adverts, you know that’s more of a search marketing strategy. What people go to search engines to read adverts, to find the stuff that they need. So social media platforms are more about people interacting. You know I get on social media so I can see what my sister’s up to because she lives 4,000 km away and I can interact with their children, my nephews and nieces. That’s why I use, that’s how I use social media. And my Mum who lives 2,000 km away does the same thing, she gets on Facebook to see what I’m doing with my children.

So when we’re advertising on social media, what you have to realize is, people aren’t looking for your stuff. You know, they’re actually doing something else so it’s an interruption style of advertising. So when we’re putting our adverts in front of people that don’t know us, we’re actually interrupting part of their life as social stuff, with the message that they may find useful and be interested in, but they don’t trust us yet. So when… it’s really important to keep that in mind because the biggest mistake that I find in social media advertising, is people go direct to sale. They don’t use it to market or to advertise, they go to sell.

There’s a great example, we had a business coach recently who’s in Brisbane and they wanted to do a roadshow; they had four weeks I think, or three weeks, to fill an event in Cairns. So they put together a Facebook advertising campaign to put their sales message, which was an Eventbrite booking page with a $60 price tag on it, in front of a bunch of business people who they didn’t know and didn’t have relationships with, in Cairns. So it was advert up, write good enough copy so you get all the clicks through to your landing page which was the Eventbrite booking page, and hope people liked your ad and your booking page enough to pay $60, for an event in three weeks.

You know, it was doomed to fail. There was no trust-building. There was these people in Cairns had no idea who this business was. I wouldn’t spend $60 of my money on an event from someone that I didn’t know, even if it looked relevant, even if it looked perfect. You know it was doomed to fail. I wasn’t even looking for that event, I was speaking to my sister. So, you really need to understand that concept – on social media, people aren’t looking for your stuff, they’re not looking for your messages. So what you need to do, is you need to realize that it’s about advertising and marketing. It’s not direct sales.

So what you do is you put your advert in front of your prospects, you get your demographic right. You know Facebook’s excellent at giving you the choice around demographic to make sure that the people who see your ad are as close to perfect to your prospects as they can be, but you get that part right. You write, really engaging ad copy, a really captivating title, have a really positive offer – but it’s not to sell, it’s to develop a database, or it’s to create awareness of your brand.

Don’t create a database on your business page on the social media platform, because you have no control over that and no social media platform really cares about business pages. You know, you invest and you end up with a hundred thousand likes and you do a post and it gets in front of 60 people, so don’t do that. Have a really captivating brochure or cheat sheet or something that, some piece of content that is of high enough value to your prospects that they’re going to want to read it or use it. Give them a tool for their business, or you know, for their home life, if that to get more of a retail business. But make sure that it’s high enough value that they’re gonna give you their email address and even better, their phone number, to use it. So you do that, you get people details and you build a database and, you don’t do it for a short period of time, you do it for every week, every month of the whole year. So it’s part of your ongoing marketing and you’re always building this database, and you nurture that database with high quality content as you go. You build those relationships.

So when people are ready to buy, because you’ve done the work they buy from you. Or if you have an event, you’ve already nurtured these people, they know who you are. So when you have an event, then use your e-mail marketing to sell the event to them. And they’ll pay for it because, firstly you’ve got the time and you’ve planned it and you know you’re actually nurturing for this event, and you’re advertising for this event, eight weeks, six weeks, four weeks in advance. So when it comes time and you have early bird tickets and all that kind of stuff, filling the seats isn’t a problem anymore. Because they also know you and they’ve been reading your stuff and they’ve been following your page, because they’ve been engaging with you in other forums.

So you know, that’s a key concept, don’t use social media to do direct sales. You know, I see it in the industry all the time. Facebook marketers and business coaches have this strategy all the time and they go direct to a dollar sale, that’s not how it works. It’s doomed to fail 98% of the time, I’m sure there’s someone there with an example of where it’s worked. For that example of where it’s worked for, that example I can show you 98, 99 times where it hasn’t worked.

Marketing is not, an advertising isn’t immediate. It isn’t “Let’s do this now and fill the room.” It’s not “We’ve got a thousand bucks, let’s bang it out for the next two weeks and sell our stock.” Its’ a long-term game where you actually do a little bit every month, you spread your budget over the year, and you build your prospects, and you fill your pipeline. Remember the sales funnel, it’s a pipeline. You put people in here then you’ve got this process that nurtures and filters nurtures and filters so down the bottom, you’ve got your ideal clients and that’s where you make your money.

So the point with something with social media advertising is, it’s just putting people in here and let the process, the sales process sort out the rest of the sales. So that’s social media advertising. You know I’m not, this video isn’t about “Don’t do social media advertising.” It’s about “Get the strategy right.” It really works well because the targeting of your prospects is so detailed that it can work really, really well, but you need to get a strategy right.