I’ve been running Facebook Ads for myself and for clients in various niches, for quite a few months now and some strong patterns are emerging.
Facebook Ads works great for some people and not so great for others. I thought it might help if I shared what I’ve learned along the way.
Here are five simple tips to let you know if investing in Facebook Ads is the right thing for you.
1. Do you have an ideal customer or client profile (aka an “avatar”)?
If you have been in business for any length of time, you will have built up a picture of your ideal customer(s); are they individuals or organisations, male / female, their age, their educational background, their income, their relationship status perhaps, their interests, likes and dislikes. You’ll know which cars they drive, which newspapers or magazines they read, what TV shows they watch, where they shop.
You have a mailing list of clients or your LinkedIn contacts list is full of potential. You may even be able to name between 1-10 of your ideal clients. If you can, that’s gold dust.
I have three clearly defined customer avatars.
Avatar #1
One is a specialist or consultant, successful, working 1:2:1 or in person, with a high daily charge out rate. They are well thought of in their field but getting sick of having to travel to deliver their expertise. They really badly want to turn what they know into digital products so that they can create an automated marketing funnel and use that to leverage their expertise or to filter only their most ideal customer (and high paying) customers into a much reduced number of days work per month.
They either want to learn how to do that themselves (at least initially) or to outsource it. They are also willing to outsource the digital product creation nuts and bolts and any web work that will need doing.
Avatar #2
The second is an Infusionsoft Certified Expert, Infusionsoft Consultant or Infusionsoft user, marketing agency, digital marketing agency, web design, software development or SEO company who keeps being asked for more traffic, more leads, Facebook or Twitter Ads or Podcast Setup & Management by their clients, but who doesn’t want to hire another member of staff to deliver those things. They either want to outsource it (for a referral commission) or to find someone to deliver those services as if they were in-house, this is known as “white-labelling”.
Avatar #3
The third is an owner-managed company who may have a marketing manager but doesn’t have a marketing department. They have a marketing budget but know they could be doing more with it as the traditional things they spent that budget on, to date, don’t seem to be working like they used to. The boss is a down to earth type who doesn’t really use social media (so can’t see how that could work, being a bit nebulous) but has been talked to death by the marketing manager about how paid social media advertising could work for them, be that on Facebook, Twitter or Linked In.
2. Do you have a marketing budget?
Don’t laugh! So many companies don’t, they try and spend as little as possible on marketing at all times. Listen, I’m only a tiny boutique agency at the moment but I would rather eat less than cut down on my marketing budget! Actually, that’s not a bad idea, I could eat less, lose weight AND increase my marketing budget!
In the early days of your business, then every quarter year at least, it’s particularly important to create and then update your inbound marketing plan and your outbound marketing plan. Most well set up traditional businesses have the latter but hardly any have the former – still!
Outbound is where you identify your target market and by dint of advertising, trade shows, “real life” networking and on-the-road and telephone sales reps, you “go geddem”. It’s expensive and aggressive and it can work well but is fraught with traps if you don’t have a great system and monitor that system with hawk eyes.
By the way, I highly recommend the books “Predictable Revenue” and “SPIN Selling” if you are using Outbound Marketing (or want to do better at it).
Inbound marketing is where you entice your ideal client to come to you, using audio, video and written content marketing, blogging, podcasting, ezine and email marketing and interacting with potential future customers on social media. Then you gently educate them as to the benefits of your product or service and when they are ready, they put their hand up to say “Yes, please, I’m interested, tell me more!”
This is my specialty and I’ve been marketing real world businesses online using inbound marketing since around 1995.
3. Do you have anything to sell?
Yes, Facebook Ads clients often come to me asking me to build their mailing list and Facebook Likes but don’t yet have anything to sell. They have products planned and know the importance of building a list and an audience so that they have someone to sell those product TO!
They may also know that Facebook Page Likes provide valuable data on their target market so are willing to invest in growing those things.
However, I’ve noticed that they quickly realise that spending money on marketing and advertising without having any products to sell can be a rather dispiriting business if carried on for any length of time.
Luckily, digital products can be very quickly and easily created, using video or audio or outsourcing the transcriptions of either to create great products.
If they are in information publishing (or want to be) I like to encourage new clients to focus on creating $7 products (with a value of much more) then quickly move up to $47 – $97 products because both of those can quickly be used to mitigate the click costs and even our fees in some cases.
(Sorry guys, I think in dollars nowadays but the exchange rate is about 1.65 dollars to the pound right now!)
If you have a real world business, what products can you sell online that are not only profitable but could be sold at around the $50 – 200 price point?
4. Do you have a proven sales funnel?
If you are an established company who wants to sell online, one of the first things I need to know is “are you selling anything online right now, where do you get your current traffic from and how are your optin pages and sales pages converting right now?”
This is to establish a clear bench mark so we can see how you are doing now, then how WE are doing later on.
Also, we need to be able to put pieces of tracking code on each page, at each stage of your funnel.
Some clients, for example, are currently sending all their e-commerce sales to one “thank you” page so it’s hard to track sales of specific products.
We also need to know which ads are working best, pictures and copy, because some ads may convert very well to email optins while others convert to sales.
The flip upside of that is that, if you do have separate pages for each stage, we can re-market very specifically to the visitors to each page / stage in your funnel. So we can re-market to people who visit but don’t optin, those who optin but don’t buy or even market complementary products to people who buy specific products.
Existing search engine traffic converts to sales much better than cold social media traffic, because the customer feels like they “found you” themselves. So it’s always better to send cold traffic to a “free-mium” giveaway, to capture names & emails for follow up email marketing.
The most exciting thing about a clear and defined sales funnel is that you can optimize ads on Facebook for each stage. As soon as you have some clicks to your website or conversions to your optin, we can optimize your ads for that outcome. Ditto sales.
Facebook will actually go and find more prospects like the ones who have just taken action and either opted in or bought.
Yes, you read that right!
5. Do you have at least a 3 month runway?
Facebook Ads are not a quick fix, they won’t save a failing business in the first couple of weeks. You will also need to set a decent click budget per day, an absolute minimum of £20 or $30 but ideally £100 or $150 a day or more.
The more you can spend in the early days, the quicker you will get meaningful data and hopefully, some results.
In order to properly research your market, find new prospects, upload your existings prospects and customers and advertise to them, to be able to create “lookalike” audiences from existing prospects and customers, to be able to collect data from visitors to your site, to create and test many, many combinations ads to find the winners….
Well, it all takes time. You are looking at a three month time frame to even be thinking about starting to see any return on investment.
But when it starts to come, it can roll and roll and roll. With careful husbandry of ad copy and ad images.
And I guarantee you this, it will be less expensive, more quantifiable and more scale-able than any radio, tv or print advertising you may be doing right now.
In Conclusion: Are Facebook Ads Right For You?
Using strong images helps with a call to action, btw, this is one of mine that attracts new leads to Cairncross Media at under 50p / 75 cents.
In conclusion, after having evaluated your business against these 5 tips above, you will now be thinking one of three things.
“Yes, this is for me, how do I learn how do it?”
In which case I highly recommend Jon Loomer and you can find his tuition courses at his website.
Or…
“I love the sound of this, I know my clients will love it too but I don’t want to do it for them”
In which case you can email nicola [at] nicolacairncross.com to set up an initial chat about how we might be able to offer an outsourced or white label service for you and your clients.
Or…
“I love the sound of this, I want your team to do it all for me Nicola”
In which case visit our Welcome page to see details of our three simple, affordable packages.
There will be no hard sell, we only want to take on new clients who fit our ideal individual client avatar and who are grown up business people with products to sell and sensible marketing budgets.
We are really looking forward to talking to you!
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