If you’ve taken an interest in social media or marketing, for any length of time, you will know that they both revolve around building relationships.
Marketing gurus have long said, and we know that we need to ‘touch’ prospects 7, or 13 or maybe even more times, before they’re likely to buy from us.
When we draw up social media strategies, we plan to take new prospects from not knowing us to knowing, liking and trusting us through the content we share and the engagement we encourage.
So why, when it comes to running Facebook ads, do we so often see businesses throwing all this accepted best practice out of the window?
Maybe it’s the fact that it’s called an ‘advert’ that causes businesses to set up ads, targeted at people who’ve never come across them before, telling them to come and buy stuff, attend their event, or whatever. Or maybe it’s because they see big brands doing it, they think it will work for them (but the very fact that they are big brands means that we have all heard of them!)
Whatever the reason, the businesses will then sit back, when they don’t get the results they wanted and say ‘Facebook ads didn’t work for me’.
Nope! That’s because they were doing the equivalent of talking about the honeymoon on the first date!
When we’re running Facebook ads, we’re still using a social media network. All the social media ‘rules’ don’t just suddenly vanish just because we’re showing our stuff to a wider audience (which is what Facebook ads are all about.)
So, consider using ads to ‘warm up’ your audience before offering the sale and then see what results you get. Using this approach will also boost the numbers of leads you get if you’re following a lead generation strategy.
(NOTE: Want to get amazing results with Facebook ads, each and every time? You need to know the 10 Essential Elements to Facebook Ads Success. Get your copy of my free, essential checklist by clicking here NOW.)
The best plan for you will depend on whether you are selling a product or a service, in B2B or B2C, but good examples of ‘warm up’ content are:
- Position yourself as the expert by sharing a post which sends readers to your blog
- Introduce yourself by sharing photos of, or stories about, your store, venue or staff.
- Build trust by sharing a testimonial received from one of your customers, or by sharing photos of customers at your venue
- Help prospects realize they need your help/ product by asking them questions about the problem your product/ service helps them overcome
- Start a relationship with qualified prospects by offering them value content in return for their email address via a squeeze page
- Offer a product for a no-brainer price to ‘break the ice’– this works best when your audience understands what your product is without you needing to explain it.
Running these as adverts before advertising your workshop or directing people to ring you for a quote or encouraging people to come and buy from you will ramp up your results no end.
For even better responses, make use of Facebook’s facility to build custom audiences from website visitors to focus on showing your adverts only to those people who are now warmed up.
In other words, collect the data from those who have visited your blog page, squeeze page, testimonials page, or thank you page from a no-brainer offer and serve your sales adverts to them.
Now you will understand why businesses rave about Facebook adverts, if results have eluded you in the past!
(NOTE: Want to get amazing results with Facebook ads, each and every time? You need to know the 10 Essential Elements to Facebook Ads Success. Get your copy of my free, essential checklist by clicking here NOW.)
Do you already use this approach? What results are you getting?
I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments! Please share!