One of the many questions I get when I’m talking to people who are looking to get started with Facebook marketing is: what results can I expect from Facebook?
The answer depends on what marketing assets a business already has.
What are marketing assets, you ask?
They are:
- Email list of customers
- Email list of prospects
- Number of legitimate Facebook Fans
- Engagement on your Facebook page
- How many LinkedIn Connections you have
- Traffic to your website
- Digital Assets you’ve created: videos, key blog posts, landing pages
- Proven offers you have available
- Existing email marketing in place and how effective it is.
- And More . . .
When I know more about a business I can give a business owner a better estimate of what to expect.
If you’re starting with none of the above it’s going to take longer to see results.
If you have some you’re going to see results faster and if you’re starting with all of the above you’ll be seeing results in a few days.
The challenge when you have none of the above is that you need to develop an audience and you need to test a message.
If you don’t get the results you want you don’t know which is not working so you must run another test.
If you know you have an audience that responds and you start a new campaign and it doesn’t work you know it’s the message and not the audience. The opposite of this is true too. If you know you have a message that works and you don’t get results with a new audience this audience isn’t for you.
All of the above takes time and as the old saying goes, time is money.
Now, what can you expect realistically when you start marketing on Facebook?
If you have some of the items listed above you will start seeing results within a week of starting to run Facebook ads. Just so we’re clear, I don’t recommend starting any kind of Facebook efforts in 2018 without having a budget for running paid ads.
Many times when we start with a new client, the first three weeks to a month is spent developing the different landing pages that are needed, creating the messaging, and narrowing the targeting down.
Once that is done the next step is running the ads. If they work well, and by work I mean whether or not we’re seeing people click on them, we’re going to have data to work with in less than a week and a $70 ad spend.
From here we would look at what results you got and we’d adjust from there.
We generally start seeing appointments and sales from our client’s Facebook efforts within a month, when we start with some of the digital assets. However, when we start with none of the assets it may take two to three months to see results.
Once you have a system set up and dialed in you’ll see consistent leads and sales coming in from your Facebook efforts.
Once you have a proven audience and message you’ll be able to scale it to more people and increase the number of people responding to your message.
With a Facebook marketing system in place, you’ll have another source of leads that you’ll be able to turn up and down at will.
Have a great day!
Brian
P.S. For an in-depth look at a complete Facebook marketing system looks like, sign up for my FREE Masterclass on Facebook marketing: Go Social Experts Facebook Marketing Masterclass. This Free class is a 5-day video course with a video each day, which goes into detail about each of the five steps for creating a profitable Facebook marketing machine.