In a previous blog post, which you can find here, I touched on how if you want to earn more, you need to learn a higher paid skill. The skill I have chosen to immerse myself in for the next couple years is paid traffic, funnel creation and other forms of digital marketing. I will be documenting as I go so follow my blog to learn more about my journey.
That being said let’s dive into Facebook ads…
In my opinion, the most important questions you should be asking if you are looking to start an online business or create an online presence for your already existing business are as follows; who are my dream customers or in other words who are the people I want to serve, where do I want to take them or what results do I want to bring them, who has my dream customers or where are they already congregating and what bait can I use to get them from where they are currently and bring them into my world.
With 2.27 Billion monthly active users, it is no secret that your customers are already on Facebook, so therefore you should be utilizing the platform. Frankly speaking, if you aren’t advertising on Facebook or posting consistent engagement content on the platform then you are leaving money on the table.
“If you’re a practitioner, if you really had to sell to survive, you would realize that the most under-priced ad product right now is Facebook Advertising. If you had to sell to feed your children, you would put your money there.” – Gary Vee
The Beauty Of Facebook Advertising
Before we get started, you should understand that marketing and advertising is evolving away from traditional media. Instead of direct mail we now have e-mails and mailing lists, instead of billboards we have Facebook ads and Google ads, instead of radio ads we have YouTube ads and Podcast ads.
The trend that you have to be aware of is that marketing is no longer being a pest but being a welcome guest and when done right people actually engage with you and your business. But how do you get your existing customers to become fans on Facebook and rave about you to their friends and family?
Introducing the Facebook Pixel…
A Facebook pixel is a piece of code Facebook gives you that you can add to the pages on your website, that piece of code records the information of the people that visit your site as well as their activities and is the foundation for everything else done through Facebook advertisements.
The Facebook pixel allows you to find those website visitors on Facebook, re market to them, or even simply invite them to like your page, leave a review or tell others about your products and services.
The pixel is so intelligent that you can group these website visitors in your Facebook ads account based on their actions on your website. These groups are called audiences, and with audiences you can now treat them based on their actions.
The Facebook Audience…
So say a group of people land on your website get all the way the order page, buy and eventually get to the thank you page, you can create a custom audience based on those website visitors (or even an offline list of customers, or even just any demographic you like) target these people with other products you think they’ll like since they already bought one of your products.
You can nail your custom audience down to the nitty-gritty even based on what kind of pages they like on Facebook…
What’s even cooler? Facebook gives you a ton of options for building audiences. Since these people who bought have already shown you they are buyers, you can utilize the option to create a lookalike audience.
What happens then is that Facebook with its massive amounts of data would then compile a list of tons of people who share lots off attributes (page likes, household income, education etc) in common with your already existing customers, because since they are very much alike, then they are likely to like or even need the same products and services. Making sense so far?
Cool. So we talked about those who landed on your website and successfully bought. What about those who for some reason, go to your website, maybe even went as far as the order page but didn’t follow through with the transaction…
Introducing Facebook Re-targeting Ad Campaigns…
I am willing to be that you have been re targeted before…
Check this out…Has this ever happened to you? You visit a website once, and the next time you log onto Facebook you see their ads? or say you visit a website, and then you go on to YouTube or Instagram and somehow you just see their ads everywhere, almost like you’re being followed am I right? Congratulations. You’ve just been re-targeted.
The real beauty of Facebook ads is the ability to re-target people and get sales that would have otherwise just fallen through. Because the Facebook pixel is so smart, it records peoples actions and those who didn’t go through with a particular Call To Action on your page can be re-targeted and taken back to your website.
All of this is made possible because of the Facebook Ads platform which all the top business owners are going to be utilizing in 2019.
In my opinion the main benefit of Facebook ads and where it beats traditional marketing is the fact that you can decide who gets to see your ads and you get real time feedback on how people are engaging with it.
You can kill under performing ad-sets and scale the winning ads in real time, all with the click of a button. A level of flexibility and high performance that can never be attained with your billboards, TV ads and even radio ads all at a fraction of the price of these traditional means of marketing!
In Conclusion…
If marketing were fishing, traditional media would be like going into just any water, selecting a bait at random, casting it into water and hoping you catch a trout. How silly is that? Yet by investing in billboards instead of Facebook ads, these are what some business owners are doing with their marketing.
Facebook has increased the chance of success for any entrepreneur who knows what he/she is doing. Just about anyone can throw up a store now from their college dorm room, drop shipping products from china and succeed simply because they know how to create an ad and use Facebook’s laser targeting features.
If they can do it, don’t you think you, with your time tested business and high quality goods and services, should be doing it too?
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Thanks for reading thus far. This is by no means exhaustive but just a tip of the iceberg. If you’ve found this post valuable in any way then share with a friend. Also comment what you liked about it and what can be improved…
Till next time.
Be great!
Kelechi Ochulo 