Test and Adjust
There is a proven formula that you can use to market your business on Facebook. One of the key advantages of this system is that you and your staff won’t have to spend hours on Facebook to get great results.
The steps are:
1.create a sales-oriented Facebook page,
2.find your ideal audience,
3.deliver value before asking for a sale,
4.get your audience’s contact information, and
5.market to your chosen audience (i.e., sell them something).
Last week we talked about marketing to the people you’ve gathered as an audience. We gave you some examples of how you can do this and what systems you can use. Click here to refer back to that article to learn how you can move people to the next stage of your sales funnel or make a sale to your audience. If you missed the article outlining the entire Success System for Facebook, click here to read it.
This week, we’re continuing with a bonus session about Go Social’s Success System for Facebook. We’ve talked about the entire system, and you have what you need to set up your own Success System for Facebook. Now we will discuss the strategies to improve the performance of your system and really crank up your results.
Analyze Where You Can Improve the Process
You’ve set up your Success System and you have people getting interested in your business. You run Facebook ads and people visit your content pages and then move on to your offer pages; some take your offers and some don’t take them right away.
Now’s the time to start figuring out how you can make your system better.
• How do you get more customers for every dollar you spend on Facebook?
• How do you get more blog visitors to go to the next step in your process?
• How do you get more of the people who go to your lead magnet to give you their information?
• How do you get more people to take your offer once they get to this page?
There are two different approaches you can use when you’re looking at ways to improve the results of your Success System.
You can start at either the beginning of the process—your Facebook ads—and work through all of the above questions one at a time, or start where you think your problem is.
I prefer starting at the beginning and working to improve each question one at a time and then moving to the next step. After all, if no one is clicking on your Facebook ads, you’re not going to have anything to work with in the other steps.
A quick note: One of the keys to successful testing is to change only one element in each test. For example, if you change an ad picture, headline, and targeted audience all at the same time, you won’t know which of these changed your results. So, as you’re testing, change one element at a time and document your results.
Facebook Ads
What you’re looking for here is how your ads are performing. How many people who see the ad click on it, and once they click on it, do they read the blog post?
The numbers I look at for initial analysis are the click-through rate (no matter what Facebook campaign objective I pick), the cost per click, and the Facebook relevance score.
Each one of these numbers gives me a glimpse of how my audience is responding to the ad and the blog or page it’s linked to.
The click-through rate tells me how many of the people looking at the post are interested in it. When we are setting up our audiences, we are only guessing what we think they’ll like. Now we get to see if they like what we thought they would. Are they responding to our message?
Depending on where the ad is seen by your audience—the newsfeed on a desktop, the newsfeed on a mobile device, the audience network, the right side on a desktop, or on Instagram—a good click-through rate varies. The rate could be as low as .1 % to over 5%.
After the click-through rate, I look at the cost per click. Usually the two numbers are related. The better the click-through rate, the lower the cost per click. Again, this depends on where the ad is seen and how you asked the viewer to respond.
The definition of a good cost per click depends on the goal for the ad, the value of what is being sold, and how many others are competing for the same viewers because, as you know, there are only so many ads shown to Facebook users, and the more competition there is for the space, the more you pay.
The final number I make sure to analyze is the Facebook relevance score. This number is controversial, but what it shows you is how well your audience is responding to your ad versus how Facebook expected them to respond. Now, Facebook doesn’t know everything, but it is getting pretty good at estimating what works best.
When you have a low relevance score, it means that people are hiding the ad or going to the page you ask them to and coming back to Facebook quickly. They could also be hiding your ad and asking to remove you from their newsfeed.
None of these responses are good for your business, and over the long term, they will effect what you pay for your ads. Also, it’s possible that if you receive too many low scores, you may even have your ad account cancelled.
Facebook provides many other numbers for your analysis; there are pages of information available for you to analyze. I look at these as I go deeper into my analysis, but the key numbers to start with are the click-through rate, the cost per click, and the Facebook relevance score of an ad. Get these numbers right and your other numbers will fall in line.
You have at least two sets of Facebook ads to analyze: the ads that bring people to your content page to start the process and the ads that bring people who’ve been to your content page to your opt-in page. Make sure both are performing well.
Blog Post/Content Page
This blog post/content page is the page we recommend you send viewers to from your Facebook ads. This is the content we use to develop our relationship with our viewers.
There are many factors to consider when you’re analyzing this page.
Is this page working? Do people who come here take the next step? How long do they stay? Are they clicking to the page, and then leaving right away?
How many of the viewers go to the next page without seeing another ad?
How many people who see the ad go to the next page?
Remember, after people see this page, our goal is for them go to a page where we offer them something of value in exchange for their contact information. Are they going to the next page?
If they’re not going to the next page, you have a problem with the page. It can be one of several issues, but two are the most common. First, you may not have people coming to the page who are interested in your topic. The ad may be promising one solution while the page delivers another solution.
Second, viewers may be interested, but the page doesn’t provide value to your audience. The information may be incomplete or presented in a way that doesn’t interest your audience or draw them to the next step.
Remember, you’re providing this information so that your audience sees that you’re interested in helping them and are able to help them. They need to feel grateful that you solved a problem for them.
Opt-In Page
The opt-in page is where you ask for your audience’s contact information and trade them something of even more value for it.
If everything works according to plan, your audience feels good about you and is willing and maybe even excited about giving you their contact information.
Now, how many people who get to this page are actually giving you their information? It doesn’t matter what they say; what matters is what they are doing. If you’ve done your job on the parts of the process that lead up to this point well and you’ve got a well-designed page and offer, you should be getting over 30 percent of the people who get to your opt-in page to give you their information.
There are many elements you can test on this page, including the following:
• The layout of the page
• The headline you use
• The bullet points or promises you’re making
• Whether there is a video on the page or not
• The location of your opt-in button
• The nature of the offer you are giving for your audience’s contact information
• The colors you used
• The function and ease of understanding of the page
As you can see, there are many factors that can change the results you’re getting. Testing these items one at a time will help you see what gets results.
Start by testing the elements that will get you the biggest results the fastest. Change the headline, the videos or pictures you are using, and the bullet points or benefits of your product, and then look at the less important items when you started getting good results.
If your page isn’t getting the results you want, it could be what you’re offering, and you may need to test a different offer.
**Tip** You can send your ads directly to this page as a test. Sometimes you can skip the first part of the Success System. You would want to test the opt-in percentage from this audience by comparing it to an audience that went through the entire Success System as well as the difference in cost for going through the process for both audiences.
Sales Page or Process
You’ve given your audience great information and have gotten their contact information from them. Now you’re asking your audience to do something. How many of them are doing it?
How many are taking you up on your offer, printing your coupon, or coming to your store? Are they scheduling appointments with you? Are they setting up complimentary calls you offered?
If the number isn’t what you would like, what are you going to test?
At this stage, there are multiple issues to address.
Has everything you’ve delivered before this set your audience up for this offer? Do they see the need for your product or service, or more than seeing a need, do they crave what you’re offering?
Are you asking for too much from them at this time? After all, if you’re giving them a couple short pieces of content and then asking them to purchase something for $1,000 or more, did you deliver enough value first? Is your marketing bank account balance high enough?
Look at every item on your sales page just like you looked at every item on your opt-in page and evaluate the results.
What Are You Offering?
It’s amazing to me that making a small change in what I offer can often make a difference in my results.
The only way to tell whether something will get the best results is to test it. Even if you know deep down in your bones that one strategy will work best, it’s always best to test different offers. Many times you’ll be surprised by which offer works best.
Many times, changing an offer from “buy one, get one free” to “50 percent off” or vice versa will significantly change the results.
Both buy one, get one free and 50 percent off have a similar cost for the company, but people perceive them differently.
Some other ideas for offers are
• discounted prices,
• extra product if you buy now,
• fast action bonuses,
• bonuses with a purchase,
• gift with a purchase or for scheduling an appointment, and
• free or complimentary analysis
There are many different offers used in different industries. You may want to look at what other industries are using and borrow ideas from them. With a few adjustments, you may have a huge winner on your hands, and everyone else in your industry will be wondering how you did it.
Conclusion
At the beginning of this post I stated that I like to start at the beginning of the Success System and work through the process one step at a time. However, you can test several different aspects at the same time as long as you have a way to measure the performance of each area separately.
Also, as you move deeper into your sales funnel with your analysis, you have more and more complex issues to analyze. Are people not doing what you want because you aren’t consistent with your topics? Are they not doing what you want because you’ve attracted the “wrong” people for the product you’re selling, or are they overwhelmed by what you’re asking them to do?
As you tackle all of these items and improve them one at a time, you’ll see your overall results improving exponentially. Make a small change in one number, followed by a change in another, and before long your cost per acquisition drops significantly and your number of sales increases substantially.
The testing and adjusting process never ends. There are times when you think you have everything working well, and you can let up for a bit, but then you learn something new that will improve your results further and you start the testing process all over again.
If you’re stuck in this process and you’d like some help analyzing where your process is working and what you can do differently, I can help with a 1-2-1 Facebook strategy session. We’ll go over what results you’re getting and develop a plan for you to improve your results. Click here for more information.
Have a great week, and in the next article we’ll talk about how to grow your Success System for Facebook for even better results now that it is up and running.