93% percent of marketers use Social Media. If you’re a marketer, you probably are now wondering what on Earth are those other 7% doing. And you’re probably right because now, Social Media is one of the most important platforms for advertising.
Let’s take a look at some very interesting stats about Social Media:
Over 80% of accounts on Instagram follow businesses. We all do. If you want to find out about any kind of promotions or discounts you can get from your favorite brands, you just check on Instagram. Click To Tweet 93% of people who follow businesses on Twitter plan to purchase from those businesses. Click To Tweet Over 25% of Facebook users who clicked on an ad, purchased from that ad. That is converting at a very high rate Click To Tweet Over 80% of the B2B relationships or leads can be fostered back to relationships and connections on Linkedin. Click To TweetGoogle Ads Vs Facebook Ads
Now let’s take a look at costs, because I’d say here’s one of the explanations for the rise of Social Media Advertising: The average cost per click on Facebook right now is $1.86.
If you’re doing ads on Google, then you know there’s a very different story on Google. Just as an example, a business we manage has a CPC of $1.34 on Facebook, but pays $15.42 per click on Google Ads for essentially the same audience!
You can literally place a social media ad at every single stage of the customer journey. You go down this funnel faster, cheaper, and with a stronger brand loyalty because they are not text ads, but visuals. This happens when you empower somebody with an image, a video, or an animation.
The main advantage compared with the text ad is that you can tell a story, create an emotion. You get people to feel t think with their heart, and not just appeal to their logic.
We’re talking about people, not keywords. We’re talking about human beings that we are targeting, demographics, personas, avatars or whatever you want to call them. On Social Media, we’re talking about people and we’re targeting their profiles.
We’re not talking about keywords, and that’s a very significant change: Through Facebook Ads you’re creating a sphere of influence for these people and you’re not 100% concerned about the bottom line, the final click for the conversion, because most of the time it’s probably not going to happen, but we’re talking about influencing, about brand loyalty, brand awareness.
Behaviours compared to Keywords
If we take a look at Facebook’s users and their behavior, we can say that Facebook is not a website, it’s a mobile app. It’s not the first page of Google, it’s an app that I open on purpose, I’m not searching for something hoping to find the best results. I open Facebook to catch up with my friends and my family. We go on a mobile app to be social. We’re not necessarily there to be sold to or bought. So what do you have to do as a marketer? You have to make them excited to leave the app. To tap on your ad and to get to your landing page. And the landing page can’t be just a sales page, because they will be disappointed that they have left the social app to be sold something. They need to find something exciting there.
You, at your our own agency are always evolving and changing as this platform evolves and changes. So don’t get discouraged and don’t get complacent. Things change all the time.
The magic of Facebook Remarketing
The power of Facebook and Instagram (also owned by Facebook) is on the remarketing game!
First and foremost, let’s make one thing clear: Social Media Advertising is not only about brand awareness and cheap clicks. The power of social media is in the fact that you can remarket to list.
Not only do we upload custom audiences, our lists of emails, but Facebook helps us create lookalike audiences based on our lists.
Facebook has relationships with companies like Visa or Mastercard. So we’re not just giving to Facebook our profile: age, marital status, kids, books and whatever, but Facebook also knows your credit score. They know if you won your own home if you’re renting or if you have a car loan… and so on.
So Facebook has this amazing ability to create a lookalike audience and help you target more people – If you had the chance to discuss with any of the Facebook employees, they would confirm to you, based on their data, that the best performing campaigns are using lookalike audiences.
The Facebook Advertising philosophy is the remarketing,
Build your email lists
But remarketing is based on audiences, and for better audiences you need email lists. If you don’t have yet an email list, this should be your first assignment!
How do you do that? Go through your analytics and look at your top five pages of your website. Every single one of those top five pages should have a lead magnet opportunity or a pop up of some kind to capture an email address.
If you can see that somebody has spent 4-5 minutes reading a blog, that is prime picking for the next like 30-page white paper to learn even more. You’ve already assessed their mindset and how much they’re in, like wanting to get from this blog. So why not give them more and then capture their email and provide that to Facebook. It’s a no brainer.
Demographics before Interests
Have done Facebook advertising before and it has frustrated you? Go into your Facebook Ads Manager account and look at your targeting. Is it full of interests targeting? Delete that. Stop targeting based on Interests. You were probably really excited when you did the targeting based on interests, but the truth is that Facebook isn’t always amazing when it comes to figuring out what people are really interested in. Go to your profile -> About and check. Just think of how many music bands are on your Facebook profile listed, and how many of their albums you actually own. And even more realistic, if you’re ever going to purchase something related to those bands. Or look at anything else – there’s a huge chance you liked a lot of pages because someone invited you, or because you went to an event and you just liked their page on a hype moment.
Instead of that, go to Demographics. And ask yourself which are the demographics you’re targeting. Here’s an example. You’re selling this cool game. WHo would you target? The 13-15 year old kid who wants to have this cool game for his next party? The kid that already knows about the game? Or the 35-44 year old woman who wants to be cool in her son’s eyes.
So do demographic targeting first. Once there’s a statistically significant winner, then you’re going to add now behavior one versus behavior too, right?
On Facebook, there’s demographic targeting, interest targeting, and behavioral targeting. Start with demographics. Then go to behavior and only after you have those two clearly defined go-to interests. Start testing with interests one at a time. Some of them will be garbage, some will be jackpots. The key for us to find them one at a time, don’t stick 20 interest in one thing.
Use Facebook creation tools and A/B testing
Upgrade your ad testing. Stop creating a lot of ads. Facebook now has its dynamic A/B testing of the ad creation functionality. Cut your design time in half by utilizing this new testing tool and only create ads after you have tested the basics. Upload three images, separate designs, concepts with different elements of the ads and then they mix and match until they find an answer that works the best. It really cuts down the time incredibly. Start with an image, a video, and a boomerang animation.
Also, differentiation between offer and urgency. Offers like 20% OFF, $200 OFF – be really specific. “The urgency is ending tonight” Or “Three days left”. Want to do some of that language. It works really well for most marketers.
You need Social Proof in your message
And the last element you have to keep in mind is the element of social proof. As much as we all call ourselves “early adopters”, the truth is that most of us are not. We like it, but we always want to read testimonials first, to see what other people have to say about that product. So use in your message this social proof. “Trusted by over 10k people”, “The notebook that transformed America”. Prospective clients want to know that people like it. They want to see the elements of testimonials and social proof.
Create personas based on behaviours
Chose behaviors over personas. How someone acts is so more relevant than how they behave. How you behave versus how you look on paper is very different. If you have a subscription-based business when someone cancels the subscription ask them why. Is it too time-consuming? Is it too messy? Is it too expensive? Let’s say the user select “too expensive”. When they submit the reason, redirect them to a specific page, based on their response. In our case, the user selected “too expensive”. On Facebook Ads, you have an audience based on the Facebook Pixel, created only for people who landed on your “Too expensive” page. Target them on Facebook with ads like “We miss you. Please get a $10 voucher to try our product again”
Behavior should dictate your marketing and when you do that, marketing is no longer just marketing, it becomes natural to the end user.
Tie your emails to your social media ads. If somebody sees a Facebook ad 24 hours after they opened your email in their inbox, they’re 22% more likely to purchase from you or sign up for the webinar or whatever it is that you’re promoting. So go back to your really pretty email sequences and your email marketing team (if you have one) and tie some of those best-performing ads that you found based on the above tips and tie it all together.
Other things that you digital marketing agency should do all the time:
Facebook groups are your new gated content community. There are very successful groups inside of Facebook and people are super engaged. You don’t have to create your own group. If you have one and it’s really engaged, then good for you. But, you can always be active in those big groups that have a lot of people that you’re targeting. Like if you’re promoting a hair salon, you should be in those moms groups. Obviously, don’t do silly promotion in those groups. Try to be as active as possible, with engaging, good content.
Facebook Ads should be just one part of your entire Digital Marketing Strategy
Facebook ads should never behave by themselves in a silo. That’s just not how social media advertising work. SEO plus social media is a marital bliss of online marketing. Go into your Google Analytics, under conversions, multI channel funnels and assisted conversions – you’re going to see the yellow brick road. In most cases, you’re going to see that the last conversion might not be social media. Maybe it is, but probably not the majority in comparison maybe to organic or to your paid advertising. But Facebook is the number one assistant in conversion marketing.
If you’re taking marketing decisions based on the last click attribution models, where you give all the credit to the very last click before they convert, you’re doing yourself a massive disservice. Go into your analytics and keep track of where you are today and where the assistant conversion techniques come in and how they help you.
The power of social media lies in behaviorally based remarketing strategies. Click To TweetYou have to look at social media like a remarketing game, which means it’s all about those lists.
So have you learned something new today? Or have any additional tips? Leave them in the comments below!