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:
- Create a sales-orientated Facebook page.
- Find your ideal audience.
- Deliver value before you ask for a sales
- Get contact information.
- Market to these people (sell them something).
In the last step, we talked about delivering value before you ask for a sale. We gave you some examples of how you can provide this value, explaining what the benefits are for you and your prospects.
Click here to refer back to that article to learn how you can create a connection with your audience before you ask them for anything, including their contact information.
If you missed the article outlining the entire Success System for Facebook, click here to read it.
Now, we’re moving on to Step Four of the Facebook Five, and we will be talking about the process of getting contact information from your target audience.
Why Do We Want Their Contact Information?
In Step Three of the Success System for Facebook, I referred to the example of meeting someone at a networking event and getting to know them before asking for their card. When we go our separate ways—if we’ve decided we would like to connect again—we exchange contact information, usually in the form of business cards. On most cards, you’ll see your contact’s name, company name, phone number, email, address, etc.
We’re looking to do this online. Interaction online mirrors the physical world. However, we need to use different tactics to accomplish this positive result. We don’t have a business card in the online world to trade as we do in face-to-face meetings. Online our audience has already found us and doesn’t need any further information to contact us.
Another issue we need to consider online is that we always want more than one way to connect with our audience.
Think about it this way. We mentioned that on a business card we get our new friend’s name, address, email, phone number, and company information. We can return home and connect with them on LinkedIn, friend them on Facebook, and follow them on Twitter with this information. We can also mail them a thank you card, call them, or send them an email. We have a wide range of possible points of contact; we aren’t limited to one way to follow up with them.
We need to keep in mind that the most dangerous number for our business interactions is the number one. If we only have one way to connect with our prospective customers, we are at risk of losing access to the one way. Where would our business be? I’ve had clients in the past few years lose access to large email lists or lose their Facebook ads accounts and have to start over. They were barred from sending direct mail due to industry challenges and even had to deal with Google changing its algorithms, sending their website traffic into a nosedive.
When we have more than one way to connect with our audiences the responses we receive are better.
Think about it this way. If you receive an email from me, you may or may not open it. However, if you see an email subject line—even if you don’t open the actual email—an impression is made on your mind. Then, let’s say, you’re on Facebook and you see a similar message in a post and you go “hmmm.” Then you see another Facebook post or a second email. Now my message is starting to reach you. What you do next depends on your preference; do you open one of the emails or click on the Facebook post? Offering multiple options will help your business grow faster.
Another advantage of having a person’s email is that it’s cheaper to reach them. While Facebook ads aren’t expensive, they do cost more money than an email would. If you can reach your audience at a lower cost, there is a benefit. Millions of dollars are made via email consistently day after day, year after year.
Another way to connect that’s not often talked about is by sending a card or package in the mail. Imagine the surprise and delight your new subscriber will feel when they receive a package in the mail from you. What will that do to your response rate? You might want to consider testing this.
So What’s Stopping Us from Collecting All of This Information?
Why can’t we find more than one way to connect with our audience online?
We can if we structure our offers correctly.
If we do a great job providing value before we ask for potential client’s information, then it would make sense to them to provide us with it.
Remember, the more options we can utilize to stay connected to our audience, the more secure and profitable our business will be.
Do I Ask for Everything I Want or Just What I Need?
The challenge we have online is that the more information we ask for, the less people are willing to sign up for our offer—and we really want those signups.
Or do we? When we get large amounts of unqualified signups, people less likely to purchase our products, we spend time and money marketing to prospects who may not be the types of customers we want. Some customers aren’t profitable for you. Do you really want to work with them?
You must choose what you want from your results: a large number of potential customers or a smaller, more qualified contact list? The correct answer depends on the goal of your campaign. I’ve used both and have achieved good results from both strategies.
One of the filtering techniques you can use is asking for all the information. You’ll know that if people fill it all out, they are committed to working with you, versus just providing their first names and email addresses.
However, fewer people will fill in the information.
A possible way to compile a large number of contacts and collect information is to ask prospective customers for their name and email for a digital download. Then on the next page, offer to send a physical copy to them, and ask for their physical address. This is a way to have your cake and eat it too. And this indicates to you which customers are most interested in your offer.
What Do We Offer to Give Them in Exchange for Their Address?
In-person, we give prospective customers our business cards; online they already have our contact information. Now what?
The best strategy is to give them information that is even more valuable or is a continuation of what we had been talking about in our free information. Some call this type of content a lead magnet.
A lead magnet is something we give people to encourage them to give us their contact information. Ideally, when they read, watch, or listen to it, they become more interested in doing business with us.
The best lead magnets draw people to us who are interested in what we do and repel people who aren’t interested in what we do.
When you offer a lead magnet in addition to offering a product or service, it gives people a reason to say: I may be interested in your products or services, just not yet. When you have the information they provide once offered the lead magnet, you have a chance to follow up with these people and sell to them once they’re ready.
Ideas for Lead Magnets:
- Online Lead Magnets
- Audio download
- E-book
- A free course membership site
- Email course
- Report or white paper, PDF download
- Video (one or a series of videos)
- Free webinar
- Get Physical Address
- Printed book
- Printed report or white paper
- CD (yes some people still listen to these)
- DVD (yes some people watch these on their TV as well as on their computer)
- Get them to come to your store or arrange a face to face interaction.
- Coupon or discount offer
- A free gift that they have to stop in to pick up
- Use an online scheduler for your prospect to schedule an appointment
- Free gift when you schedule an appointment
- Free gift when you come to an appointment
- Get Phone Number
- Complimentary call
- Discovery call
- Fill out the form and follow up with a call
As you can see, there is a wide variety of ways to encourage people to give you their contact information. If you’ve done a good job of giving them value first, they will be eager to give you their information so that you can help them even more.
People Are at Different Stages in Their Relationship with You
Make sure you consider this before you decide on a lead magnet.
The different lead magnets we listed require different levels of commitment from your audience. If you haven’t provided enough value before you ask your audience for their information, they aren’t going to want to share their contact information with you.
In the book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey, he talks about an emotional bank account that we all have in our relationships. When we do nice things for people, we make a deposit into our accounts, and when we ask them to do something for us, or we forget their birthday or our anniversary, we make a withdrawal. As long as our balance is above zero—or better yet, a high positive number—everything will go smoothly. As soon as our balance drops low or below zero, our relationship will be rougher.
As business people, we have that same kind of relationship with all of our customers. When we give them items or services they value our balance increases; when we ask them to do anything, including giving us their contact information or buying something, our balance declines. As long as our balance is high enough, our relationship is solid, but as soon as it drops we have to put more deposits into our relationship account.
If our balance is high enough, people will give us anything we want, including money.
Many of the items on my list above require a substantial withdrawal from your account. So they may not be suitable for the first time someone sees your offer unless you’ve offered the “epic” content from step three.
How Do We Decide What to Offer?
Depending on what we want from our prospects, we design what we are giving them accordingly.
If we want their physical address, we need to offer to send them something of value in the mail.
If we want only their email address, we offer them a digital download.
If we want them to come to our store, we offer them a discount or a gift with their purchase.
If we want them to schedule an appointment, we offer a gift when they schedule or when they come in for their appointment.
If we want to get their phone number, we offer a complimentary discovery call or a problem-solving call or its equivalent.
As I mentioned above, we can two-step this and offer the digital download first, then offer to send a physical item and ask for more information. In that way, we still get the majority of people who come to the page, but we will collect more information from them.
If you have a highly successful page, 25-35 percent of people will fill out the information depending on how well you performed delivering value in step three.
What Do You Do with The Rest of The People who come to your page?
Are they lost?
No, they’re not.
For whatever reason, they’re just not ready to share their information yet.
You collect them in an audience using the Facebook retargeting pixel, and you give them more information about your products and services. As you give them more and more information, you’ll be adding deposits to your emotional bank account and growing the balance.
Keep at it and sooner or later they will give you their contact information. At this point, they’ll be one step closer to becoming customers.
It’s Our Job to Stay in Front of Our Audience, Not Their Job to Remember Us.
Many times as business owners we expect people to just remember us. We spend our lives in our business and it consumes us. Why doesn’t that happen to our audience?
I’ve been guilty of this myself. It’s all too easy to expect my audience to be as interested in Facebook marketing, what changes there are, and what the changes can do for them as I am.
That’s far from the truth. Most people don’t care about the Facebook changes, they just want to know that I can get them results.
It’s my job to stay in front of my audience, providing good information to them so that they want to move closer to me and to my company. I want them to sign up for my weekly email, follow me on Facebook or sign up for my free masterclass that goes in-depth on creating a Success System for Facebook. Further, I want them to purchase a 1-2-1 Strategy Session, purchase my online training course, hire me to coach them, or hire me to create a Success System for Facebook for them and manage it on an ongoing basis.
The larger my audience is, the easier it is for me to sell my products and services.
When you implement this strategy, your audience will grow, making it easier for you to sell your products and services.
Have a great week!
P.S. If you would like to learn more about creating a Facebook Success System of your own, sign up for my free Masterclass Here. You’ll get 6 videos sent to you every day going into depth on each of these topics.
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Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Jan 12, 2016 and has been completely revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness