Recently, I was working a booth at a trade show and someone came up to me with a question.
I was promoting using Facebook to grow your business by running paid ads and selling products and promoting events at your business.
And they asked if Facebook should be used for communicating with your audience or if it should be used primarily for selling.
And you guessed it the answer is YES.
There is no “or” here. Facebook should be used for creating relationships with your customers and prospects AND it should be used to sell and promote your products and services.
After all, every business needs to have an audience. People who know, like and trust you.
This audience is your foundation. No business can afford to constantly attract new people every day.
The cost of getting a new customer is high. Returning customers are your profit.
But if you have an audience and you never give them a reason to visit your business or a way for them to buy something from you, you’re wasting your efforts creating an audience.
A successful Facebook strategy is to spend time and money creating an audience of people who are interested in you and your products.
You talk to these people and interact and develop the relationship, and then you give them a chance to buy something from you.
The other day I was reviewing an ad account for one of our long-term clients.
They had an ad that was seasonal that had run for almost 3 months and had returned over 10X the amount they had spent.
Now, why didn’t we spend more?
Well, the audience was too small for us to spend more money. When you’re running Facebook ads you want to keep the frequency under 5 and closer to 3 is better for an ad running more than a few days.
We were at 4.62.
We had tried other audiences, but they got a 1 to 2 or 1 to 3 return. Not near as well.
What was different?
The ad that was doing well was going to people who knew us.
They had interacted on Facebook, watched a video of ours, been to our website, and many were past customers.
In other words, they had a relationship with us.
The lesson from this is that if we want to grow our sales in the future, we need to spend time and effort reaching new people and developing a relationship with them first.
Now those ads won’t do as well, but if we want to keep growing our sales, we’re going to have to figure that into the cost of the successful ad.
And when we do figure the cost in, the return on what we spend is still good.
What are you doing to grow your audience?
And once you have them, how are you selling to them?
Have a great day!
Brian
P.S. For an in-depth look at a complete Facebook marketing system sign up for my FREE Masterclass on Facebook marketing: Go Social Experts Facebook Marketing Masterclass. This Free course is a 5-day video series with a video each day, which goes into depth about each step needed to create a profitable Facebook marketing machine.