Shirley Anthony is an author, speaker and owner of Marketing Breakthroughs, a marketing consultancy operating for over twenty years.
How would you like to be in the position where you had a results-generating Facebook Marketing campaign that you could turn on like a tap, whenever you needed new clients? This weekend I attended a Facebook Mastery seminar and I thought I’d share with you the winning 5-step recipe for achieving this.
Even if Mark Zuckerberg is currently facing intensive US Senate questioning about the harvesting of personal data, Facebook with its over 2 billion members worldwide, is here to stay and growing every day. It offers you a wonderful opportunity to build a tightly targeted audience, create and advertise a sales funnel, run a conversion campaign and reap significant ROI. Here’s how.
Step 1: Attract the Right Audience
The key is in the target market selection. You don’t want to be marketing to Facebookers who do not need your product. Get as single-minded as possible in building an audience of your ideal customers. How do you do that?
If you have a list of ideal clients already, connect with them on Facebook and then use the Facebook tools to find a 1% lookalike audience. Another route would be to embed Facebook pixels (code) on your website and establish a profile of the people who land on your website pages. These are hot prospects as they are interested in your offering. This information will be “fed” to Facebook via the pixels and you can then instruct Facebook to build an audience, matching this audience profile.
The best way to construct your offer is to promise what your ideal buyer desires and/or to help overcome their greatest fear
Step 2: Create an Irresistible Offer
Create a compelling offer on Facebook that motivates the viewer to immediately want to take action and experience instant gratification. The best way to construct you offer is to promise what your ideal buyer desires and/or to help overcome their greatest fear.
Your product will determine your approach to your offer. For example, a hairdressing salon may offer a “crazy discount” by asking people to like the hair salon’s Facebook page and in return, receive a voucher for a free haircut worth R400 ($US33). This campaign immediately gets more feet into the salon where there is the opportunity to sell other products and bolsters the salon’s Facebook audience.
If yours is a service that requires the building of a relationship or further education about your product, you could offer a white paper or a PDF which answers one of your target market’s burning questions, in exchange for their name and e-mail address. In this information giveaway, you offer a free consultation. This is where you’ll get the opportunity to convert your hot prospect into a paying client.
Step 3: Create a Sales Funnel
This is a series of pages which will communicate your offer. Your viewer clicks on the offer appearing on their newsfeed and is taken to a series of landing pages. Keep these as simple as possible, clearly explaining your offer and how your viewer redeems it.
Use language which focuses on the result; the transformation your product offers, for example, the sexy new look of the free haircut; and the free consulting offer to up-skill busy execs to add 2 hours to their day. The psychology of your offer is to show your prospects you are intent on serving them first.
Include a thank you page for those who redeem your offer.
Once you have found an approach which generates at least 50 conversions, you’ve probably hit bull’s eye
See also: 3 LinkedIn Marketing Strategies to Reach your Ideal Customer
Step 4: Advertise your offer on Facebook
Test your offer on Facebook with a small advertising budget to start. Carefully monitor the results i.e. the number of clicks you get, the number of people who redeem the offer, the sales you are generating versus your costs.
Experiment with different headlines, copy and visuals; monitor and compare the results. Once you have found an approach which generates at least 50 conversions, you’ve probably hit the bull’s eye and gotten a winning formula which you can use over and over again to turn hot prospects into paying clients.
Step 5: Use Retargeting
Research shows that some prospects often have to have five contacts with you before they buy your product. For those who don’t take up your offer immediately, set up seven e-mails to be automatically released to them (via an email service provider like MailChimp) over 10 days after they click on your offer. Provide more value-added information in these e-mails, make them personal and always include a call to action which they can click on to redeem the offer.
And there you have it. You now have a successful client-attracting campaign which you can turn on and off as you need the business. No more cold calling!
