Marketing Best Practices

mktpractice

Using Facebook Ads for Lead Generation

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If you’re looking for actual people rather than just sending people to a sales page, then you will want to look into lead ads. They’re relatively new to the Facebook ad suite.

Lead ads specifically include a contact form that captures their contact information for you.

You can ask customized questions right in the ad.

When your ad has finished running, you can download your leads directly from your Facebook page. You can also connect the leads directly into certain Customer Resource Managers (CRMs) such as Salesforce.

Remember that when you advertise on Facebook, you also have the option to advertise on Instagram. When you do create an Instagram ad, make sure it’s very graphically intensive since that’s why people are on Instagram. You could also do a quick video detailing the value of what you’re offering.

Always Tell People What They’re Signing Up For

You want your message to be clear across the whole ad experience (video, call to action, promotional copy, etc.). What will they be getting in exchange for giving you their personal information?

Also, you will want to be sure that they know what will happen next.  If they give you their phone number, you need to call them. If they give you their email address, then you will email them something.

Your time to follow up is a key metric in your success. Don’t let people forget who you are. So don’t run the ads if you’re super busy with the end of the month reports, or you’re going on vacation. You will want to be there to follow-up quickly.

You could use the questionnaire to find out when it’s most convenient for the lead as well. Then you know when to contact them.

Make sure you have a clear call to action. Don’t let people wonder what they should do next.

Don’t Ask Too Much

I used to be very involved in the email marketing space. One thing I learned was that the less information you ask, the higher your conversions. If you ask too much, people shy away wondering what you’re going to do with all that information.

What Can I Use Lead Ads For?

You can use them for just about everything. Facebook even suggests newsletter signups. Since I use aweber and Sendlane, I am hesitant about how easy it would be to import contacts from the Facebook download.

aweber specifically is known for being tough on email imports since they want to be sure you really do have permission to email them.

That being said, I’m going to be testing lead ads over the next few weeks to drive traffic to a squeeze page. Another name for squeeze page is lead capture page.  I’ll be testing solo ads and regular traffic ads to the lead generation ads.

I’ll discuss it in my private Facebook mastermind group. It’s a low-cost subscription where I share with you what I’m doing and answer your questions. It’s a great community of people who help each other. If you’re interested, you can learn more here.

Creating Your Marketing Plan for 2018

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Happy New Year 2018

Happy New Year! Notice the image is blank? Yup. That’s your blank slate for 2018. It doesn’t matter what’s in the past. You’re starting off fresh right here and right now.

First, have a clear vision for where you want to be in one year. Do you want to double or triple your current income? Spend some time really thinking about this because it will impact the next step which is creating your marketing plan for 2018.

I’m currently of two minds about BIG goals and achievable goals. Brian Tracy always said that you need a goal that you believe you can achieve, otherwise you’ll talk yourself out of it. But I just finished listening to 10X by Grant Cardone. Grant counsels to shoot for the stars. Then if you hit the moon, you’ll still be happier than if you shot for the atmosphere and achieved it.

I think it helps to know yourself. If you’re just getting started, the doubling your income will seem awesome. Then your brain will realize you can do it, and you can then go for the 10x. Or maybe you’re the type that is all in, gung-ho, running faster than your guardian angel can fly. In which case, yeah, go for the 10x goal and let it motivate you.  Or do both and see which feels better.

How To Achieve It

Ok, so you have your big goal for 2018. Now it’s time to do reverse planning. Don’t panic!  Actually, let’s play a Jedi mind trick to make it easier, and it will help you to believe you really can achieve it.

First, let’s say you want to earn $120,000 this year and you’ve never made more than $50,000. Divide 120,000 by 52 weeks and then by 7 days a week and then by 24 hours in a day and you get $12.74/hour. That doesn’t seem so scary, now does it? Especially since $50,000 is $24/hr.  (ok, you’re not really going to work 24 hours a day 7 days a week, but work with me here. You can make $12.74/hour, right? It helps your lizard brain calm down when it sees that it’s not a big deal.  The lizard brain tends to freak out over the big numbers like $120,000).

Put in your numbers and manipulate it until it looks achievable. Then post that somewhere and say “I can easily do that.”

Your Marketing Plan for 2018

Ok, so how are you going to get that $12.74/hr? By finding your ideal clients who want what you’re offering.

Defining Your Client

Ok, let’s start out with your ideal client. Perhaps you’ve done this. If so, pull it out and dust it off. Is your ideal client really still your ideal client?

Well, how would you know, I hear you ask.  Pull out your financials and your client list from 2017. You may want to put this into a spreadsheet. But what you are going for is who are your top grossing clients.

Now, I have to ask…do you like working with them? Or do you cringe when they call?

If you can, try to identify some special qualities about your favorite clients. What makes them mesh well with you. And what are the qualities of the worst clients?

Going forward in 2018, how can you get more people like your favorite customers and weed out the bad ones?

Evaluate Your Offerings

Next, it’s time to research which of your products or services is bringing in the most money. This could astonish you as well. Maybe the data is telling you that it’s time to pivot and adjust what you’re offering. Or it’s telling you that you’re marketing your stuff to the wrong people. In which case, you need to do more research as to who your ideal client should be.

Or maybe it’s time to sit down with your ideal client and find out what they really need. Then you’re in the perfect position to give it to them and be their expert.

Another thing to consider is that you’re too general in your offerings. Maybe you have a sales training program and you’re trying to sell it to everyone. But if you found out that you work best with a certain type of industry (software, real estate, etc.), then maybe it’s time to rebrand it as the solution for that industry.

Now, here’s where I always used to get stuck when my mentors would tell me this….You can still sell it to other people. You’re just spending your marketing dollars to that one niche. You can also expand later.

Maybe you wrote a book on Facebook ads and then rebranded it as Facebook ads for Mortgage Professionals.  You could also then release it as Facebook ads for Financial Advisors without too much editing, right? But, if I’m a mortgage professional, I’ll be more inclined to buy a book that’s just for me rather than a generic Facebook ads book.

Get More Customers

Now comes the fun part of your marketing plan for 2018. Where are you going to find your tribe?

It’s time to decide where you’re going to spend your advertising budget (and how much, and how often) to let people know that you have the exact thing to solve their problem. But remember, you want it to seem easy to the potential customer to say yes.

I was talking with a mentor the other day about some words on a sales page. He said you never want to tell people they’ll learn something. They want things to magically happen. Just something to think about.

Also, if your ideal client doesn’t hang out on Facebook, don’t advertise there. It may seem obvious but sometimes my clients get swept up in the “But everyone is doing it.” and I have to try not to say the standard “If everyone jumped off a bridge…” because that’s not helpful.  So I’ll just say you want to fish where the fish are biting.

Resources

Check out all the books by Mike Michalowicz. He does have a goofy sense of humor, and The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur does get a little down and dirty with its potty analogies. However, you will learn a ton about building up your business.

How Not to Do A Webinar

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I know I promised I’d talk about doing your marketing planning for 2018. But heavens to Betsy. I just recently had four webinars that made me want to speak out and warn you how NOT to do a webinar.

Don’t Fake The Background

I’ve started doing YouTube videos lately, and they’re fun. But it’s not always easy to clean up my office and close my closet doors. I have a yarn habit for my knitting that sometimes gets a bit extreme. But I digress.  So instead of trying to shove everything in, I hung some peach colored fabric. (I have a sewing habit too)

I use Camtasia 2 on my Mac. It has a nice built-in camera and it’s easier to record video on it than on my Chromebook. But I can’t move my Mac downstairs like I can a Chromebook. So I set up the backdrop to test the ability to “green screen.” It’s a work in progress.

But there’s a huge difference in cleaning up the background and faking the background.

I was on two webinars that were pre-recorded. By the way…most webinars you’re on are going to be pre-recorded. You’ll see someone saying something like “let me just switch to a different camera” or whatever, and they’re just turning on the recording. I don’t mind that, honestly. I’d prefer if it were more authentic and you could go watch it on demand rather than trying to find some time when it’s being played.

And always put in controls. Please. I sometimes want to skip your “about me” section and get right into the meat.

The marketer slash salesperson would say that the intro is important for building up know/like/trust. I get it. I really do. But if I already know you, I want to skip it.

So on one webinar that was supposed to be a lot of free information, the background was a grand study with lots of books in the background. It’s nice, but I didn’t buy it. And the webinar disappointed me because the interviews with the bigwigs turned into a love fest. “oh, remember when we met. And you said this. haha. yes, that was so funny.”

This should be its own heading but don’t waste my time. I’m there to hear what you promised. Make sure you’re delivering it. (I was on another one today where I gave up after 25 minutes. Yeah, I can’t believe I gave 25 minutes of my life to a webinar that never got to the point.)

The second delivered the goods. It was amazing. The person used a fancy car background. I thought it was a bit over the top. It’s so 00’s to show a big house and a car. I think the market is over that.  Then I was checking him out (do your research on everyone.). I saw in his YouTube videos, he had the exact same car in the background. It hadn’t moved & it still shined in the same places.  Therefore, it was a fake background.

Maybe it’s a big joke kind of thing with his tribe. But if you’re trying to bring people into your tribe, think about how they would react to it.

Be There When You Say You Will

So, my other webinar today seemed to do things right. It had a 6 day email series leading up to the event. I was engaged. I was excited.

It was supposed to be 1pm. Now, I thought it was 1pm Eastern Time and had that on my calendar. None of the lead up emails had a link to the webinar. I did get one this morning that said I’d get an email right before the webinar with the link. Ok. Cool. I must have misunderstood & maybe it was 1pm Pacific.

Well, 1pm Pacific came and went.

2:48pm I get the email for “here’s the link!” and it also said that it was starting at 1pm Eastern on the dot. End quote.

I’m guessing their email person goofed and set it up for 4pm Pacific instead of 4pm Eastern. These things happen. It’s just surprising when it happens with a big name.

Always check your time zones in your email service provider before scheduling your emails.

In their defense, they started as a big love fest and I thought “I’m done.” They provided an option to read the transcript instead of quitting. Which I did. It’s a sales gimick. I should have known.

It’s refreshing when someone puts on an information only webinar to help their tribe. I’m going to start doing FB lives on the FB page, and I’m starting to build up my YouTube channel. I want to have the information there when you need it. Sign up to my email list and you’ll be the first to know when a video goes live or when I’m about to hop on to Facebook.

Where You Should Be Spending Your Ad Budget Right Now

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Because it’s the holiday season, you probably think you should be spending your ad budget right now driving people to your website. And that would be a mistake if you’re still new to the game.

Everyone’s Doing It

Yes, everyone is spending their ad budget hoping to drive people to their website to get more sales by the year’s end. That means that it’s a lot more expensive now than it will be in January. Remember, all advertising platforms utilize auctions. If you’re following my Focused FB Ads method, then you’re using automatic bidding on your Facebook ads.

So the cost per click will go up, and you’ll get fewer views for your set daily amount. One other thing to remember is that your daily budget isn’t precise. Google will let it go over by as much as 20%. (Some people report that it can be twice your daily budget. I personally have not seen that).

The other reason why you don’t want to be spending a lot on ads right now is that people are becoming blind to ads. Their screens are full of this widget and that gadget, and they’re just exhausted. You really have to do something to stick up out of the crowd and off the page.

 

So What Should I Be Spending My Ad Budget

Spend your Facebook ad budget to get more people to like your page. Then you can create a lookalike audience and capture new customers in the New Year.  Ease back on your Bing and Google ads.

If you’re Business to Business (B2B), most companies are fairly dead at this time of year. People are having office parties or are on vacation. So your target audience isn’t paying attention. If you have your Google and Bing ads set up for click conversions, you can let them run. It won’t cost you anything to have impressions show up. But if you’re paying for impressions, you may want to try testing some pay per conversion ads right now to save money.

If you’re Business to Customer (B2C), identify the one or two products that usually sell well and focus on them. Remember, video ads are still performing better than carousel which performs better than a single image. And spend some of your budget testing out Instagram ads. They’re still quite cheap for the result.

What you need to be doing now is planning your next quarter and year. I’ll go more into that in the next post.

Set Up Your Account for Bing Ads

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If you haven’t, you will want to hurry and set up your account for Bing ads.

Getting Set Up With Bing Ads

If you haven’t already, go to Bing Ads and create an account. I had one automatically because of my Hotmail email account. However, I didn’t want to use that since it was a personal email account, and I wanted my ads to be associated with my business.

This section is short because so is signing up. It’s a lot easier than other online advertisers.

The next step is to either import a campaign from Google Ads or create a new campaign. For this post, let’s only look at importing your existing Google ads.

Importing Your Google Ads

What can you import? Almost everything.

  • Campaigns
  • Keywords
  • Negative keywords and negative keyword lists
  • Ad Groups
  • Labels
  • Expanded text ads
  • Shopping campaigns and product feeds (if available)
  • Targeting

It’s not exactly a one to one; however, it captures a lot.

With ad group level ad extensions (site link, call extensions), it can’t be imported. You can only import the account-level extensions. That includes:

  • App extensions
  • Call extensions
  • Callout extensions
  • Image extensions
  • Location extensions
  • Review extensions
  • Sitelink extensions
  • Structured snippet extensions

Broad match keywords will come in as a keyword phrase.

Targeting will capture

  • Age & Gender
  • Device
  • Ad scheduling
  • and Location

You can only import active campaigns by default with the Bing ads interface. There is a checkbox if you want to be able to see the paused campaigns.

What’s Up Next

Once you’re in, the interface is a nice blend of Google and Facebook.

In the next of this series, I’ll go over setting up an ad and an audience.

Tips for Running a Solid Facebook Ad Campaign

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One of the first things you’ll notice as you run more ads is that the effectiveness degrades over time. The people who initially clicked on your ads tended to be the more responsive ones, and once you’re past that first wave, you’re wasting your money on those who aren’t

So, it’s important to monitor your daily click through rate. Watch for how it performs over a period of time. When you start to see a decrease, you may want to consider pausing that ad and starting up a different one to the same audience.

Test your ad performance at various times during the day. You’ll likely find that it performs better at certain times. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t allow us to choose what time of day our ads run. However, we can manually turn our ads on and off to ensure they’re running at the optimal times.

Some Other Good Tips

1. Target your audience so that it’s at least 100,000 but no more then 1,000,000 In fact, you should test highly targeted ads to a very narrow audience.
2. Create more then one ad. We’ve talked before about split testing.
3. Replace the default image that Facebook populates into your ad. Upload your own image. Recommended size is 600×315.
4. Have a strong call to action. Tell them exactly what to do next. i.e. Click, Call, Download Now
5. Pause the ad indefinitely if the cost per click is too high. It should eventually get down to pennies, so if it’s still around a dollar, you may need a different ad or better targeting
6.Don’t delete your ad. It keeps the analytics around which helps Facebook target your ads better
7. Always have a start and stop time. Don’t let it run indefinitely. Plus, if you have a hard end point, Facebook wants to ensure you’re spending your money and will show your ads more then someone who hasn’t.

 

Taking the pain out of marketing

 

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