I speak to people every week who have cottoned on to an idea that if they market their business on social media it’ll be cheap. So, they throw fifty bucks at a boosted post, hope for the best, then when exactly not much happens they figure it’s a lost cause. And, yes, I understand why people do it this way: it’s a budget thing when you’re bootstrapping.
The thing is, marketing your business via social media is incredibly cheap. Where else can you get a highly-qualified lead on the phone for about $20? Heck, even $30 is good! Where else can you stamp your foot and say, “But I only want to speak to these people!” and actually get your way? And where else can you speak to them right before their partner’s birthday and suggest something suitable? Oh, but there’s the other complication …
If it’s a social media ad anyone can do it.
Yes, you can. You can boost posts until your wallet bleeds dry. You can certainly do enough to be dangerous and give Facebook lots of money. That is your prerogative. But can you do it effectively? Do you know, as the fabulous Cat Howell says, your “CPM from your oCPM”? If you campaign stalls and your costs start going up, can you figure out why and how to fix it? Do you retarget via your ad funnels and CRM system? Do you even retarget at all? Are you tracking the activity at every stage and improving the weak points? If not, you’re leaving a truckload of money on the table.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a DIYer at heart. It’s a buzz to figure something out and learn new stuff. The resources are there for the taking, baby. You can sit up until the wee hours and test and tweak to your heart’s content. Or, here’s an idea: you can go run your business and make yourself replaceable so that you can have that lifestyle you pinned on the noticeboard when you launched this thing.
Just last week a guy phoned me who owns 23 stores and isn’t shy of investing in growth. Somehow he ended up with a marketing crowd who helped him part with his money and in return gave him nothing. I ducked into his ad account for a look to see where we could optimise, and found nothing but boosted posts with no audience targeting past, say a 40 km radius from a store. And no retargeting at all. No wonder the guy’s wife was nervous about him phoning me to check out another ‘hustler’ 🙂
Are you getting enough?
If you’ve hired a marketing crowd, jump into your ad account on Business Manager and look for the following:
1. Pixel tracking correctly installed on both your website and your funnel(s), with standard and custom events appropriate to your niche and what you’d like to monitor.
2. Custom audiences set up with interests overlaid according to your target market: different audiences for different aspects of your business;
2. Lookalike audiences based on your original crowd;
3. Audiences created from your customer database, plus a regularly-updated manual upload of same to track offline events – that way if you have customers walk directly in and have an upsurge of activity in your store, you can see what to attribute to your campaign
4. Different funnels for different aspects of your marketing, each with layers. The first creates awareness. The second retargets people according to their level of engagement and the actions they took and when they took those actions. The ‘bottom of funnel’ creates urgency in a call to action.
5. Integration with your CRM so that you’re building a valuable list of prospects from your campaign.
6. Email sequences from your CRM with stacked audiences, sending the right message to the right person at the right time.
7. The most effective ad formats for your objective.
8. Evidence of ongoing split-testing of ad creative as one aspect of avoiding ad fatigue + ensuring you’re getting the best creative out there.
9. Evidence of social proofing on the winning ads prior to them being used.
10. Evidence of split-testing of placement and delivery times and ad formats.
Shall I continue? Okay … 🙂
As well, do your marketing people communicate clearly with you: both in regular reporting and when factors of a campaign alter. Are they telling you what is happening and, if there’s a challenge, what they’re doing to resolve it?
There’s nothing magic about social media ad campaigns and there’s nothing magic about good old-fashioned clear communication between a business and a contractor. There is, however, skill and thought required in getting the ROI you deserve.