facebook lead generation and sales

We covered tracking last week which is essential because you first need to know if you are profitable and if something is working before you can move forward.  This can be found at http://marketingplaybook.co/hangouts/setup-facebook-tracking/

This week we are going to take a look at the different advertising objectives you have when setting up a Facebook ad and how you possibly leverage and use some of these options.

Facebook 13 different options for setting up a campaign.  It’s important to fully understand your options so you can start planning how best to setup a campaign.  Some of these will apply directly to you while others won’t.

As usual here is the live hangout video to accompany the written show notes guide.  We hold live hangouts every Wednesday at 2PM CST so sign up to the newsletter to get the invites.  You can also view past hangouts at http://marketingplaybook.co/live-hangouts/  and join our private Facebook group as well as Google community and twitter on our community page at http://marketingplaybook.co/connect/


Facebook Advertising Objectives

Clicks to Website: Send people to your website.  This is the more common method many small businesses and advertisers use.

Website Conversions: Increase conversions on your website. You’ll need a conversion pixel for your website before you can create this ad.  This is how I generally setup most of my campaigns.  This allows me to optimize better for conversions that are happening.  Even if I am not selling a product or service I can still use this option if we get a little creative.

Page Post Engagement: Boost your posts.  This is one of my least favorite options.  It’s fine but I really don’t care in most instances about others seeing my posts.  I would much rather get them to click on my website.

I’ll still use this method if I’m doing marketing for a special event just to get the word out more or if I have really killer content that I believe can be spread fast.  An example of this might be a pumpkin patch.  It’s October as I write this and chances are I would still drive business and interest to my pumpkin patch or corn maze for this time of year in the U.S.

Page Likes: Promote your Page and get Page likes to connect with more of the people who matter to you.  This again to me is low value for many companies.  It used to be a lot better back when you could then post new content and have it syndicated out to everyone automatically and for free.  Facebook has gone pay to play so even if you post something it won’t go out to all your fans.  Only a small fraction in the 3% to 10% range so you really don’t get a lot of value out of likes.

This can still play a factor in your marketing efforts however so you may find a good use and strategy to use this option.

App Installs: Get installs of your app.  I have an app I promoted rather heavily on Facebook and found the platform to be a really nice way of getting installs to my own personal app.  This is not common for many small businesses so I won’t go into this topic.

App Engagement: Increase engagement in your app.  This is where you re-market to those who have installed your app to get them to come back and use the app again.  It’s a solid way to help with user retention and it allows you to deep link into sections of your app which can provide great value.

Offer Claims: Create offers for people to redeem in your store.  This can be a really great way to market coupons and discounts.  You can set features such as who sees it and how many people can claim the discount which creates scarcity and forces people to take action or they lose the special.

Local Awareness: Reach people near your business. Here you set your business location and choose a radius of those located around you.  It’s a nice way of reaching people in a set distance from your business to advertise daily specials or events.

Event Responses: Raise attendance at your event.  If you are putting on a workshop of some kind this can be a great way to see how many people may attend.  Generally you get at most a 50% show rate so if you want 10 people to show up to your event I would recommend getting at least 20 signups if not 30.

Product Catalog Promotion: Automatically show products from your product catalog based on your target audience.  Think of this as the merchant feed options you have on AdWords and Bing Ads.  When you use your product catalog it will normally be in combination with Dynamic ads.

Brand Awareness: Reach people more likely to pay attention to your brand. I have not yet personally used this option. From what I have read Facebook with show your ad to those who will most likely spend more time looking at your ad. I personally do branding a little differently for local businesses which I will discuss later in this guide.

Lead Generation: Collect leads for your business. Recently this had become one of my favorite ways to produce quality leads at a very reasonable price.  It can be hard for some small business to capitalize on but if you have any kind of valuable information you can bundle into a quick free report as your lead generation offer it can work very well.

In order to take full advantage of this process you need a solid follow up already in place so ensure you have your sales funnel setup and ready to go.

Video Views: Create ads that get more people to view a video. To be 100% honest I have not had the same success with Facebook videos ads as I have with AdWords.  It’s really great that you can target a specific audience but I have not had a client personally that has had great measurable success with video ads on Facebook just yet.

I do not like how many videos are still auto played inside feeds and I don’t like that they charge and count as a view after 3 seconds.

There is clear value to be had here but I do not have the solution for what this is just yet.

Dynamic Ads:  Worth mentioning again as you can use your product catalog to setup Dynamic Ads to auto re-target page visitors for specific pages.  There are services out there that can help you set this up like ChannelAdvisor, Mercent and Adroll.  You can manually set this up as well but it’s a little more complicated just like setting up a Merchant feed in Bing Ads and AdWords.

Carousel Ads: With Carousel ads you can setup up to 10 images each having their own link to a specific location on your website.  Great if you are targeting a specific niche and have several similar products or services you want to push.

The setup for images is a bit different then the regular format in Facebook.

  • Recommended image size: 600 x 600 pixels
  • Image ratio: 1:1
  • Text: 90 characters
  • Headline: 40 characters
  • Link description: 20 characters

 Slideshows: You can use both videos and images to create a slide show with audio and text overlays.  Slideshows can stand out more than a normal ad because you have different images coming into focus that grabs people’s attention.

This is fantastic if you have some kind of process or story you want to tell your target audience.

Slide shows can be up to 35 seconds in length.  All images should have the same dimensions and be in a 16:9 or 4:3 ratio.   If you use different sized images then your images will be cropped and could possibly look off.

 

Your Facebook Audience

We will not be covering targeting this week but save it for next weeks hangout.  Still I wanted to at the very least provide you the options you have for when you target a person inside Facebook.

  • Location
  • Age
  • Interests
  • Gender
  • Languages
  • Education Level
  • Relationship Status
  • Political Views
  • Whether or not they are connected to your page
  • Remarketing / Retargeting

Design Recommendations

Here are the recommended design formats to use with Facebook as well.  In a later hangout we will cover more on best practices for creating a Facebook ad.  I simply have this listed here as it should be known incase you don’t get to our future article on creating the best Facebook ad.

  • Recommended image size: 1,200 x 628 pixels
  • Image ratio: 1.9:1
  • Text: 90 characters
  • Headline: 25 characters
  • News Feed description: 30 characters
  • Your image should include minimal text. See how the amount of text in your ad image will impact the reach of your ad.

Call To Action (Optional)

Add a call-to-action button to tell people what you want them to do when they see your ad.  Again I’m not covering this in depth today but it’s worth noting so I have included it here.

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How Best To Use the Facebook Ad Options

This is the part of the hangout I really wanted to talk about and for me personally where the fun begins.

Like will all methods you might have to try a combination of tactics and have to perform several tweaks along the way to produce the desired results for you.

Clicks to Website and Website Conversions

Branding yourself as an Expert

Both of these methods are similar in nature.  Generally when using these methods for a small business or business in the service sector you will not be focusing on initial sales.  You can of course try and maybe you will succeed but more than often you will not.

The reason for this was discussed more in-depth in our guide at http://marketingplaybook.co/hangouts/social-media-right-business/

With AdWords Search you know the users intent based upon what they are searching.  For Facebook you are doing more of interruption advertising and the person is often not in the buying mood.

For this reason I do Clicks to Website and Website Conversions as more of a branding opportunity.  This tends to work well over the long run for small businesses.  Just like with newspapers or mailers you are consistently putting yourself in front of the same audience over and over so they remember you and think of you the next time they need those kinds of services.

Let’s look at an example of how this might work.

You own a house remodeling company and specialize in Bathroom and Kitchen Remodels.  You decide to target Women who are married and are over 34 years of age.

You put together a campaign that has a great image showing both half the original kitchen and half the newly remodeled kitchen.  Your headline is there to peak some interest and you use a Geo callout for your local city and target those in your service area.

It might be something like  “Omaha Kitchen Re-model With a Unique Twist”.  In the text I’d probably mention how many before and after pictures there are as well as the total cost of the project.

With social media you need to understand that people are there not to be sold but to be entertained.  They are board and just trying to connect with a few friends and family members or see the latest images of babies and puppies posted.

We send them directly to our website with a re-marketing pixel on it.  On this page we have actually setup a multi page funnel and talk about the process under each image.   Let’s say we have 16 images. The first page may have 3 images each with a quick paragraph describing the image.  There is a NEXT button at the bottom for the person to go to the next page.

You tell the story of the remodel.  Why the person wanted the remodel done, the materials involved, the processes used, the cost, the time it took, the challenges you had.

What you are doing is connecting and relating with the visitor and at the same time establishing yourself as the expert in the field.

Each page is clearly branded with your company name and you have your phone number front and center for people to call for a quote or to discuss a possible re-model.

While you might actually get some calls initially, chances are your sales cycle is actually several months out.  That means to really test this out you are going to have to run multiple ads for several months before you start to see initial sales results.

As we are using 3 images per page with 16 images that means we have a total of 6 pages.  On page 3 we could place a conversion pixel.  We could also place it on the final page 6 if you wanted.

What we are doing here is building an audience that is deeply interested in your service.  It’s great that we are building a remarketing list for all the visitors but chances are those people won’t convert as well down the line as those who make it to page 3 or 6.  If you wanted you could setup conversion pixels on both those pages but we will stick with page 3 for this example.

You let the ad run for 2-3 weeks spending $20-$50 a day depending on the engagement rates.

You now have a nice list of people you can remarket to who have clicked your ad in the first place.  These are the people you will be sending out your next re-model post too.  You can of course use this second ad to create another re-marketing list to keep fresh eyes coming in as well but it’s the remarketing list that you are re-branding yourself too.

From your Conversions list you can create a look-a-like audience to target those people who are similar to you current users who have already converted.  These are the people who not only clicked on your ad but also made it to page 3.  From this initial list of at least 100 conversion you can build a solid list of people who are very likely to enjoy your content.

The end goal is for people to see your work so when it comes time for them to do a re-model they will call you as they already have a relationship with you.  They know the work you do.  They know the price of the re-model or at least a rough cost.

As you have already established yourself as the local expert and go to place you will find your company recommend out even by people who have not used your services personally.  People love to be helpful and when a friend mentions they want to do a remodel the person will naturally want to offer an opinion and you company being the only remodel company the person is likely to know they will recommend you out for the job.

In a perfect world this would work like gangbusters.  You may find you need to change up the funnel a little but this is intended to give you an idea of how I generally recommend small businesses setup their sales funnels using this kind of ad objective.

You can of course try to directly sale to people.  When you do this you will generally find it a lot harder to convert then with AdWords and you definitely need to have remarketing in place to re-connect with people over the course of time.

 

Page Likes

Making Friends and building a fan group

For me personally I do not like attempting to get page likes.  It used to be great when you could build a list of fans and then anything you posted went out to most of your fans.  This no longer is the case.  You now have to pay to have the vast majority of your fans see your new posts.

This is fine if you need to get started and appear to have some fans but honestly you will naturally gain fans just sending people to your website.

Still there are plenty of strategies that can take advantage of Page likes

EXAMPLE COMING

Event Responses

Building Direct Relationships

Honestly I think this is the most unused option out there that small businesses are not taking advantage of.  You are an expert in your field and have very knowledgeable information to be shared to the general public.  Take advantage of this and help educate your community.

Let’s cover an example of how you might be able to capitalize on this and meet great people in your community and build personal relationships.

You are an Auto Mechanic. You can create a Facebook Event to providing training and safety tips on a multitude of procedures.

This could be an event talking about How to Change a Tire safely,  or how to save big bucks and do your own light attendance like changing wiper blades, filters and the like.

Generally people in the service based industry are very guarded with their knowledge.  This is 100% bad.  They like to make up excuses like if I train people how to do it themselves then I won’t have customers.  The truth of the matter is most people will be way too busy and find it far easier to hire and expert out to do the repair or service for them.  Those who do actually perform the service themselves would never actually be a client anyways so it really does not matter.

Let’s go with the How to Change a Tire Event.  You send people to an events page for a signup where describe how you will be teaching people to change a tire on the side of a road in your shops parking lot.  You will cover the safety tips and what to do when your tire is blown while driving, how to pull over a car safely, how to secure the vehicles, where to jackup the car, how to change the tire and other safety tips like using your hazards or road side kit with cones.

The whole point is to establish yourself as an expert.  Those who are in the market for a mechanic will naturally now think of you as the expert because you where so helpful.

Humans are creatures of habit and you are far more likely to return to a place you have been to before.  If it came down to your shop or a competitors they will choose familiarity over discomfort almost every time.

It’s human nature to want to reciprocate.  If I give you something then you will want to give me something back in return.  This might be your business or it might be a referral.  You will find that holding these kinds of events will create the most loyal fans possible.  You have helped them out and they actually now know you for being an outstanding person.  They will recommend you out to everyone.

You can get really creative with the different kinds of events that can be hosted.

Lead Generation

Creating High Value Leads For Your Small Business

Lead generation on Facebook can be a big win for many. In order to get a lead you will need to first offer something in exchange for the person handing over their contact details.  This also helps to qualify the user.

Let’s use an example of a Real-Estate Agent.  You can offer a free quick report on the initial value of the persons home.  You would of course explain that this is not exact unless you come out and inspect the home.

For most Americans our network is largely in the real-estate that we own.  Home owners are constantly curious about their homes value and what other homes in the area have sold for.

You would have to word the ad copy in such a way to peak curiosity while under promising on the results and then having a streamline process in place to easily handle each lead and present a niche PDF of a rough estimate of the home’s value.

For most businesses when you do lead generation you will have a standard lead generation offer that is not customized but auto delivered via e-mail to everyone on signup.

I’m using the real estate agent as an example of a more complicated funnel just so you can understand different ways of using Lead Generation.

you setup a lead capture form in Facebook and the person fills in the fields you require such as the home address, their name, their phone number if needed and you accurately describe the information you will be sending them such as the last 3 homes in the area that have sold recently.  You can also compare the last 3 homes most similar to this persons home.

The harder you make the form the more qualified and interested this person will be.  If you first started out and had a really simple form but the leads where poor then you can make the form more and more complicated.

With an industry like this it’s a real balancing act between quality leads and the price for the leads.

One of the biggest issues I often see with lead generation is the lack of customized follow-ups.  You need a set sales funnel in place to help segment out tire kickers with those who are generally interested in hiring you.  It’s normally not hard to setup a lead generation offer but the really hard task is in nurturing the lead

Offer Claims

Generate Sales and New Clients At the Same Time

I love offer claims.  If you sell anything then chances are you can offer some great value to new and existing customers.

How Facebook offers work

  • Store offers send people who claim the offer a barcode or QR code that can easily be redeemed from their mobile device at checkout in store.
  • Online offers send people a discount code and are sent to your website to shop. They can use the offer code at checkout to redeem the value.

 

With offers you set what the deal is, how long it lasts and how many people can claim the offer

Let’s take a look at how an offer claim might work.

You are a Baker and offer people a Dozen Cup Cakes to the First 20 People who claim the offer for just $5 bucks or your cost.  By limiting the amount to just 20 people you are creating scarcity. By charging a small price you are stopping tire kickers from just claiming the offer and never using it.

This same model can be done for dozens of services like carpet cleaning and offering 1 room free when you get an 2 rooms cleaned.  If you are a mechanic you can offer maybe 5 synthetic oil changes for $99 dollars.

It’s a great way to help entice new customers in the door and get them familiar with your business.

You can also setup very similar funnels through Free Giveaways or sweepstakes.  An example might be a funnel where you are giving away a free cake and the person needs to first signup which get’s people on your e-mail list.  From there they move to an up sell page where you are offering a discount on a dozen cupcakes but the price is high enough to where you are still making money on the deal.  If they decline the offer you can send them to a page where they can claim 1 cup cake for free.  I don’t know about you but I have never gone into a bakery and walked out with just one cupcake.  If I did my son would never speak to me again.

With this method you also have their e-mail address and can send them a weekly special list or information on seasonal delights that your bakery does.

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