Over the past seven weeks, I’ve talked about what it takes to develop your Success System for Facebook. When you make the effort to set up a multistep approach, you’ll multiply the results you get from your Facebook marketing.
Click here to read an overview of the entire system.
The Facebook Five is the core of the system. After you have implemented these five elements and have tested and tweaked them (click here to read an article about testing and adjusting), and they are working well for you, then what?
How do you increase the results in a way that you maintain profitability? Many times, if you increase your budget from $10 a day to $100 a day, you simply spend more money for minimal improvement in results.
Why does that happen?
When you’re running your ads and you’ve optimized them for website clicks, website conversions, or other objectives, Facebook is figuring out what you want; it has a system to find the people most likely to do what you want. When you radically increase your budget, Facebook has to find more people quickly and needs data to find them. As Facebook is working on getting more people, it is spending more money, and many times your results aren’t what you’d expect.
How to Increase Your Results Profitably
There is a process for maintaining your results as you expand your budget and the number of people you want to reach.
The first step to take, when you know that your system is working, is to expand your budget slowly and steadily. This lets Facebook’s algorithm sort out and find the best people for you.
I suggest that you increase your budget by no more than 50% a day and space out those increases over seven days.
If you’ve been running your ads for $10 a day to perfect the process and you want to increase your ad spending, you can go to $20 a day with no problem. Four to seven days after your results stabilize, you can raise your spending by 50 percent. So go from $20 a day to $30 a day and then, after four to seven days, to $45 a day, and so on until you’ve exhausted your audience and Facebook can’t find more people.
Increasing your budget in this way depends on the size of your budget. To work effectively you need a larger audience – typically in the range of 500,000 to one million people.
Having a smaller audience doesn’t mean you can’t follow this process; it just means that you’ll run out of people sooner, and you won’t need to increase your budget as much.
Different Ad to Same Audience
The second step you can try is to run a different ad to the same audience. They’ve been buying well, yet only a small percentage has bought. If you have an audience of one million and 1 percent of them buy, you have 10,000 sales. That’s a large number of sales, but what about the other 990,000 people who have yet to buy?
Maybe they’ll respond to a video ad instead of a link click ad, or maybe they’ll respond to a different picture in the ad or to another type of ad.
You can reach out to your audience in multiple ways, and what one person responds to, another doesn’t. Run several different ads to your audience, and you’ll continue to see different people buying.
Different Offer to the Same Audience
You’ve been increasing the budget and running different ads to the same audience, and you know you can grow even more. Now what?
How about using a different offer for the same product to this same audience?
Here are some ideas to get you started:
• Instead of a buy one, get one free offer, how about 50 percent off?
• Offer the item at a great price.
• How about a free trial?
• Offer a free consult.
Different promotions will strike different people as the best one, and as you offer a variety of options, more will buy.
Different Product to the Same Audience
Everyone who’s going to buy your current product already has done so. Can you sell them a different product?
I use this strategy in changing up what I’m selling each month. One month I may be selling my done-for-you services (“We handle all your Facebook marketing”). The next month I’m selling my training course, Smart Facebook Marketing, which trains business owners and their teams to run their own Facebook pages. In still another month, I’m selling my 1-2-1 coaching sessions.
All of those products and services revolve around Facebook marketing, but they all reach a different audience.
How can you do that?
These ideas are all designed to maximize the results you can achieve from one audience. But if you’re maxing out with your current audience or you want more growth, then what?
Find More People
When you were doing your market research in step two of the Success System for Facebook, you found at least four or five potential audiences and chose to work with the one that tested the best. (Click here to review that session.)
Now it’s time to start using your number two and, then, number three audiences from your testing.
You’ve found an offer and ads that work, so now move them to audiences with different interests and see what happens.
You may need to tweak the ad you’re using. If you implemented the ideas in the section above about a different offer or different product, you’ll have several ads that you can test with these new audiences without having to create anything else.
You’ve done the work. Now, use it fully.
Lookalike Audiences
You create a lookalike audience in your Facebook Ads Manager. This is an audience Facebook creates for you based on an audience you already have.
If you have the e-mails of your buyers, you can upload the addresses to Facebook and create a lookalike audience based on this strategy. Think of it: You’ll have a group of people like your current customers just for the asking.
To achieve the best results, you need to have several hundred to a thousand of these e-mails that Facebook matches. The more matches you have in your base audience, the more data Facebook has to work with. It is good at finding others like those in your core group.
If you have enough buyers as a foundation for a lookalike audience, that’s great. But if you don’t have enough people in that audience, are you out of luck?
No, you’re not. Other audiences you can use are:
• E-mail lists of your prospects
• Your Facebook likes
• Lists built off conversion pixels
• Your website traffic lists (even including who went to specific pages)
Those audiences have generated great results for us when we were ready to grow our client base.
Expand Your Marketing to Other Sites Using What You’ve Learned on Facebook
Facebook gives us a wealth of information that no other platform currently provides. It shares the demographic data for those who are responding to our ads, what device they’re using when responding, where the ad was that they responded to, and much more.
Facebook also offers the best targeting options available. Use this information to fine-tune your audience and offers.
As we look at the information that Facebook provides about who is buying and responding to our efforts, we can move to other platforms. I suggest using them in this order:
• E-mail
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Twitter
You may want to target these platforms in a different order, depending on your situation, but I would stick with these big platforms until you’ve maxed them out.
There are many new platforms coming online regularly, but they don’t have the necessary mass of people on them yet. You’ll be discovering how to work with new platforms, but what you learn will be worthless if not enough people use them.
Yet, enormous audiences are available to everyone on the key social media platforms. Mastering just one of them will help transform your business. You don’t need to jump on every new platform that comes out, and doing so would only dilute your efforts.
Having said that, see what happens with a promising new platform over a year or two. Has the buzz worn off? Are people are still active on it, or has it gone away? If the platform lasts and continues to grow, then you may want to investigate it.
Expand the Offer Offline
Facebook is great for testing and getting started. You can begin with a small budget, hone your offer, ramp it up to a larger audience and then, if it continues to work, take it offline.
The advantages to testing your message and market on Facebook are that you can do it quickly, easily, and inexpensively.
You can set up an ad to target an audience or, better yet, use your existing audience to see how it responds to your efforts.
You don’t have to risk money up front and wait to get the results. I can have an idea, create everything I need to develop it, and have an ad running in an hour or less. Then, on a $10-a-day budget, in twenty-four hours I’ll have a sense of how it’s doing—and in forty-eight to seventy-two hours, I’ll know if it’s working. It will cost me $30 and three days to find out, and I’ll have indications before that.
If your ad works great, ramp up the budget and go; if it doesn’t, adjust it and try again.
Once you have an offer that works the way you want, it’s time to take it offline.
Traditional media still work well and are worth testing, provided you know that your ad works before you run it. Traditional media to try are:
• Newspapers
• Magazines
• Direct mail
• Radio
• TV
• Billboards
The advantage to showing up in those media is that, in many cases, there is less competition.
A well-rounded business that’s stable won’t put all of its marketing in one place or one medium. Businesses that succeed long term use a multifaceted approach.
Use Facebook to test everything, and then move to offline media with an ad that has the best likelihood of working.
The powerful thing about Facebook is that you can test TV commercials—oops, I mean videos—along with written ad copy all in one place.
Wrap-up
You’ve taken the time to set up your Success System for Facebook. Now, run with it.
You’ve been feeding it and testing it with small amounts of money. Now, ramp it up.
If you know that every dollar you spend brings multiple dollars back, what are you waiting for? Grow your results.
Use every tool available. Take all that you learn from your Facebook marketing and move it to other media to improve your company’s entire sales results.
I’m looking forward to hearing your success stories and how you’ve changed your business by using Go Social’s Success System for Facebook.
Have a great day!