Social media evolves quickly.
Not so long ago, the likes of MySpace, Tumblr, Vine and Friendster were mainstream platforms.
Now the Goliaths — and they ain’t going away — are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube & TikTok.
As they have become more robust and sophisticated in collecting info on their users, they are now a marketing dream for companies and brands unmatched by any media in history that has come before it.
These platforms are collecting vast amounts of info and data on all of us — our interests, likes, activities, habits, buying decisions — and this has enabled marketers to get super micro and targeted in reaching prospective consumers and building relationships with them.
Our go-to platform to deploy for clients is on Facebook, *the* Goliath among the above mentioned Goliaths, with its incredibly wide demographic, purchasing power and reach which touches basically everyone on the planet.
Boosting Facebook posts used to be the way to go to reach a new audience, but it has now become a bit old school with FB’s maturing and highly sophisticated ad targeting tools superseding it. In other words, boosting is fine as a broad targeting objective, a brand lift strategy, to say build more awareness around your brand and generate likes and follows to your page(s).
Your focus with a boost is brand awareness so FB is not sending your ads to people that are more likely to take a certain action. Boosting a post will get it in front of a lot of people and create engagement, but it won’t be contextualized.
It doesn’t build a deep relationship that converts.So yes, of course, brand lift is all fine and dandy — always — but… if you’re trying to grow your biz online and create actual leads that you can convert, rather than boosting posts you will want to run a lead generation based on your objective or you are going to want to run landing page views to drive to a website.
Your best bet is to use and learn FB ads manager desktop version to pick specific targeting, and do rapid fire testing to determine what ads are converting and what aren’t. If you want effective, tactical marketing, hone in on one avatar (meaning your “target audience”) and build a relationship with them by telling their story through a series of videos (including your origin story), addressing a paint point(s), and making an offer/solution to them.
Facebook allows you to mine data and take it off of FB through lead ads.
You can get these people into a CRM (customer relationship management system) and sell to them through email marketing. Think about it, this is incredibly powerful stuff that was never possible in previous eras.
The best strategy you can deploy with these targeted Facebook ads is Top, Middle and Bottom of funnel. You are warming prospective customers up through the funnels, becoming comfort food to them before converting them by getting them to purchase your product/service.
With targeting, you can actually re-target someone that watches 50% of a video and give them a free PDF download in exchange for their email and phone number. Now you are selling to them on email, text in their feed and… you can even set up an auto responder (i.e Manychat) to chat with them in their FB messenger!
It is highly personalized content. This is how good targeting works… and it wins!
Why?
Well they say it takes 22 touch points before someone buys something…
Think about attempting to accomplish that in the offline world. It would take forever! That is why it’s soooooo important to ensure you are online and micro-targeting and re-targeting your ideal clients with ads, warming them up and hacking their attention to get them to build trust in you, and you close them.
There is another stat that says 35% of prospective customers/clients need to be nurtured over a 90 day cycle and then they will choose. This is why micro targeting needs to be coupled with email and sms autoresponders/marketing, sell in chat and re-targeting ads.
The macro and the micro is this: If you want pure brand lift, yes to boosting your page. If you want to generate real, quality leads and appointments, you want to run targeted Facebook ads with quality content/video.
Everyone is on mobile: Go there now. And go deep with it.
—Cody May
P.S. whenever you are ready to chat some more about running Facebook, Instagram, Google, Youtube or TikTok ads that get results… Click here and let’s brainstorm a plan: https://studioptbo.com/book-now/