November 11
The Renewed Importance of Social Media During COVID-19
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Transcript
This is part of what we have been doing, called the monthly marketing meetups with the OPO startups and the Greater St Charles County Chamber. My name is Ken Tucker, I’m with a company called Changescape Web. I’ve been facilitating these for a little over the last year or so. And just a little bit about me. I’m the owner of Changescape Web. We’ve been around for 15 years. We’ve got a podcast I’m really proud of called the Marketing Guides for Small Businesses. So if you want to check that out on Apple that would be fantastic. We’re also getting ready to launch probably maybe the end of the month, maybe certainly in December a podcast in conjunction with the Greater St Charles County Chamber called local St. Charles. And so look for information from the chamber about that. We’ve got a couple of episodes recorded, but we wanted to get a couple queued up before we publish those and go live with that. So, it should be live by the end of the month or certainly early in December.
So basically I think a lot of people haven’t really realized just how important social media has become right now with all that we’re going through with the pandemic and everything. And now that we’re past the political season so social media is going to become a lot less crowded. There’s going to be a lot less posting about all that kind of stuff now for a while. And so I think it’s a great opportunity for businesses to really start to think about what they can do with social. And I think the other thing is more and more people are spending time on social media. You know, there are people who have been able to work from home. There are people who are not working right now. They’re, they’re spending more time on social.
There are certainly more and more things that are going on there. And one of the trends that we’ve seen and I’ve been waiting for this to happen for a long time, is that more and more people are starting to search on Facebook for businesses. It’s, it’s still very common that people are going to go do a Google search, but more and more people are actually, while they’re looking at their newsfeed in Facebook if they have an idea they’re actually going and doing a search inside of Facebook to find a business. So it’s become more important now than it has been in a long time. And that trend has really accelerated with the pandemic. Another thing that’s a little bit concerning is if somebody goes to your Facebook business page to check you out after they have done that search and they don’t find that you’ve been posting regularly or worse yet you haven’t even really posted since March or April.
It leads to a lot of questions about your business. Are you still in business? Are you open? Do you have enough time to pay attention to really what’s going on in your business? And I don’t like to leave any of that open for interpretation by customers. So I think it’s really important to try to get into a regular posting routine, especially now that more and more people are using social media and they’re doing searches for businesses and social media. The other thing too is there’s such a strong level of support with a lot of people who really want to try to do everything they can to support local businesses right now, their friends and neighbors, and the community. And so they can only really do that if they know your business exists.
And so social media has always played an element in providing visibility about your business and for your business. From that perspective, I think it’s as important as it’s ever been. If not more. The other thing that it allows you to do is if you’re actively posting and engaging with people, you’re building an audience of fans and loyal supporters. And so now as you grow that, it gives you the opportunity to post to people when you’re slow, or if there’s something that they can do to help you out, or if you’re running an offer or a promotion. An example of this would be if you’re a restaurant or, or even a boutique down on main street, for example, and it’s really quiet, you can post on Instagram or Facebook or whatever social media platform is your preference and just let people know, Hey we’re wide open today.
We’re open for business. You can even give them an incentive to come in if you want by offering a promotion or something like that, but it only is going to work if you’ve built that audience and people see that in their newsfeeds. And then the other thing is, I think social media is always been an underutilized tool to help you build more direct channels of communication, email and text lists are gold right now. It’s super important to continue to build an email list and, and, or a text list, depending on the nature of your business. It gives you a way to communicate with people where you don’t have to be relying upon them happening to see your content showing up in the newsfeed. So don’t forget about that aspect of it.
When I talk to people about doing social media, I know there’s a lot of frustration there for a whole lot of reasons. What channels do I use? What social media platforms should I be using? How in the world do I create content that anybody’s going to care about? I don’t have a big budget. I can’t afford to pay either for somebody to do this or I can’t pay for advertising. I want to try to address any of those concerns in this presentation today. And if you have any questions, go ahead and put those in the chat box, and I’ll try to catch those as we go. When we look at the top reasons why businesses are using social media, 70% of businesses say they want to use social media to generate leads,53%, what to help build brand awareness and 50% want to engage customers.
You have to balance that obviously with the challenge of how much time social media can take. Let’s talk a little bit more about how you would accomplish these goals, but the good news is many people who are on social media are actually looking for a deal and that’s usually very I should say at least very frequently, one of the first ways they did decide to engage with any particular business is because they see a deal that’s out there and buy a deal. It doesn’t have to be a discount. You could be offering a free consultation. You could be offering a free workshop you could offer a buy one, get one, or a free appetize if you order a full meal or something like that. It’s really important to think about those offers if you’re looking for a lead generation strategy.
So there are definitely some trends that are taking place. And as we go through these couple of trends, definitely think about how this is going to pertain to your business. So right now, 71% of consumers, who’ve had a good experience through social media with a business or a brand are likely to refer that to others. Now that’s huge because reviews on Facebook or recommendations actually on Facebook or reviews on Google or Yelp or any of the other key review platforms carry just a tremendous amount of weight. They help you with local search engine optimization. They carry a tremendous amount of social proof. People trust reviews from people that they don’t know online almost as much as how much they trust recommendations from their friends and family.
So social media is a critical element of that. And you can actually incorporate your reviews and post those reviews through your social media as part of your content strategy. So reviews and recommendations are really important. The other thing here is really staggering. Visual content gets 40 times more, is more likely to be shared than any other type of content so that’s going to be videos or image-based posts. And we’ll talk a little bit more about these here in just a second, but it’s super, super important if you don’t have a really strong visual element to what you’re posting on social media. You’re probably missing out on a lot of opportunities.
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Social media is used across the board, across the generations. Obviously some generations more than others, but still it’s such a great way to find your potential customers and get them to know about your business. One of the common questions that I get about social media is how many networks or how many social media platforms should I be using? How many should I be paying attention to? And really, you have to balance this with how much time you have to devote this, but I would strongly encourage everybody to set up social media and all these platforms, Facebook. We’re talking about business today, so a Facebook business page, a LinkedIn company page, a YouTube channel for your business, a business Instagram account, a Twitter account, and your Google, My Business page.
Now Google My Business is not necessarily a true social media platform, although it gives you the ability to do posts now that can show up in Google searches. And certainly your most recent posts, if it’s less than seven days old will show up if somebody does a search for your business by name and by location, sometimes they have to put the location into to get your Google my business page to show up. But you can also do posts on Google my business for an event or an offer that you’re running that don’t last just seven days. The typical post is going to only last seven days on Google my business, but if you’re doing an offer or an event you can set the timeframe from when you want that to run.
So don’t forget about it as a social channel. The really the key thing is this helps to build out your brand and be consistent, and it gives you a storefront if you will, a place where people can find you where they happen to be spending time online. Now, it’s obvious you want to think about who are my ideal or my typical customers, where are they already spending time online? And I think you want to factor that in, in terms of prioritization of which channels you may end up investing the most in, but all of these channels are really, really great. You can do cross-promoting where you could do a post using a tool, a variety of tools like Hootsuite, which has been around for a while will actually allow you to schedule one post and publish it to multiple social media platforms.
I think it’s really important. It builds out a total online presence. It gives people more places to find you online. It builds out your brand consistency if you do it right. If you have the same profile picture and the same cover for each one of your social media platforms, it really can enforce that branding and make you more recognizable. So when people do stumble across you in whatever channel they’re going to start to have some recognition about your business. I think most people if they answered this question would say that, yeah, every customer that I probably need for my business right now is probably on social media, one of these channels or the other. And so from that perspective, social media is a great place to be.
When you look at this thing called the buyer’s journey, how people navigate through the online world. We talk about the top of funnel or top of mind and that’s really the first time maybe they get to know like, and trust your business, but they may or may not be ready to buy from you yet. So social media is really fantastic for that. Whereas Google search or even Google ads more specifically can be really fantastic when somebody is ready to buy. Social media can certainly work for you when somebody is ready to buy. But we’ll talk about how that really works here in just a second, when we get into Facebook ads, I definitely want to spend a little bit of time talking about that.
Another question I get all the time is how often should I post on social media? Isn’t it too much to post every day on social media and things like that? The reality is I think you should try to post two times per day on Facebook. You can post more frequently on Twitter. Twitter’s much more fluid, it’s much harder for people to actually stumble across your tweet in their newsfeed. Whereas Facebook, it may be a little bit easier based on how much they’ve engaged with either the content or the business page in the past, but still thinking about social media, it’s kind of that river, right? It’s just a flowing river. That’s what the newsfeed is. And so just because you make that post, it’s not static, it doesn’t mean that when somebody goes and looks at their Facebook newsfeed, that they’re necessarily going to see that you’ve posted.
That’s why I think it’s important to think about making sure that you are posting multiple times a day. Especially in a time where all of us probably need to be much more visible and as visible as possible. Because of the challenges we face, some of us very much so, with the nature of it, our business, in terms of how business we either have, or we need to have to, to survive the economic situations we’re in, it’s really, really important. Now you want to map this out, certainly, you want to give it some thought, but I want you to really think about this whole idea that as a good rule of thumb, try to think about posting twice per day, it’s going to increase the number of people who are going to see your posts and most social networks actually like it when they see regular and frequent posting. Now I don’t want you to think that you should post 50 times a day. On Twitter, you could obviously post a whole lot more on Instagram. You can post a whole lot more than what you probably could or should do on Facebook or even LinkedIn. But again, don’t think that it’s just I only need to post like every day or every other day. I don’t think that that really applies for most businesses.
You know, one of the things that everybody wants to try to get out of social media is they obviously want leads, and leads means that they’re really trying to get people to make a purchase from them. So when you look at the things that drive the purchasing behavior as it relates to social media, if your business has seen to be responsive on social media, that’s obviously the biggest factor. I think part of that responsiveness too, is the fact that you’re active and you’re posting content on a regular basis. Doing offers, offers are huge. It may very well be the first reason why somebody decides to click on your social media profile, your business page, or Instagram account. It’s always been the case that people are looking at social media as a way to try to find an offer. And so that’s, that’s an important consideration. Educational content is huge. You know, not everybody, if you’re on social media and all you’re doing is just posting all the time about sell, sell, sell. You’re probably going to turn people off.
People want to know your business. They want to understand your business. They want to see behind the scenes, what goes on in your business, they want to learn from your employees or meet your employees. They also want you to help them solve problems or understand situations that they’re dealing with. So when you’re thinking about what you need to be posting on social media these are really important statistics.
I definitely think that people can obviously get a tremendous boost in brand awareness by posting on social media. Don’t forget about the educational component as we’ve talked about. I think you also want to show community involvement and as a company that does social media management for other businesses, this is one of the things that’s really hard for us to do in that capacity. And that’s where we need every business to really kind of take ownership of this – show the engagement of what you’re doing in the community. If you’re an electrical contractor and you’re working on building a house with your local habitat for humanity, post about that, share that information, people love that stuff. It’s good for the community. It’s good for the charity that you’re working with. It’s good for your business because it gets you seen in a really positive light for very good reasons. And I think you also want to think about creating content that can create a buzz.
So there’s this brilliant strategy called the recipe that a company called strategic marketer has come up with. I think it’s a super easy way to think about what content you can and should be creating and so you’ve got the recreational content. The picture here is an example of like a, not really a holiday, but you can do like national day posts. You can do motivational posts. You can tell jokes you have to be careful with jokes, obviously, but if you remember in that previous side, people actually like to see humor. And so that’s an important aspect but then you get into the educational content share successes, provide case studies, tips or tricks.
All of those things are important. Conversation starters – what do you think this versus that I see a lot of realtors, for example, posting a picture of two different kitchens side-by-side which do you prefer this or that? And they’re asking people to comment on that post, to build a conversation and get engagement. Engagement helps get more visibility on your post on most social platforms. So definitely think about that inspirational – this could be a series of quotes, I’m sure you all see it when you scan through your different newsfeeds that a lot of people are doing some of these types of posts, quotes or even showing before or after pictures again. All of this is content that really isn’t even trying to sell you anything.
It’s literally just building relationships and leveraging social media to grow an audience and get that audience engaged, and ultimately increase your visibility, the perception of your audience about your business. You don’t even get to promotional content until you get down to P. And these are actually kind of in order of how much, in terms of the mix of what you should be posting, in terms of a ratio. And so you don’t only want to do promotional type posts, maybe 20% of the time. Now certainly absolutely take advantage of it, but if all you ever do is post something and say, Hey, hire us. People are probably going to start to tune you out at a certain point in time. And then this last thing is really important.
And again, this is where I think it’s a challenge for the businesses to take this particular type of post on where you can show the behind the scenes. So if you’re working at a coffee shop show the baristas at work, you can have an interview with the business owner to have them talk about why they started their business or what their core values are. As a business, people love to see this kind of stuff. And that’s really hard to build out a lot of this stuff, you can actually build out and build a schedule and actually do a lot of automation to get these posts out there and, and set up on a regular basis. You still need to monitor for the conversation to improve the engagement levels, but you can automate the creation and the posting and publishing of these, but when it comes to the promotional or the entrepreneurial things that take more effort and more time when it comes to creating social media. I encourage you to try to come up with a content calendar and use the recipe as a guide.
The image that I just showed you on the previous page, think about that mix. I mean, find a source to pull from. If you’re a roofer, find a source to pull funny things about the roofing business – there are sites that are specifically set up to help you do that kind of stuff. Sharing content from other people is really valuable. People really respond to that. It’s still a very important component of the mix. Maybe not as important as it used to be, but it’s still something that you should consider to do. You definitely want to post content where you’re going to be able to drive people back to your website so frequently, this would be either a blog that you’ve got on your website or an offer that you want to run and promote on your website.
Or even to learn more about a particular service, you can send them to a product or a service page and, and you can just post about that and it doesn’t have to be an ad. It can just be a regular post. It doesn’t have to have any promotional aspect of it. It’s really just like, “Hey, you want to learn more about how we do interior painting, click here to read more”, and they can either go to a blog post or a page that describes that you certainly want to create and share your own content. I think the best content right now, bar none are videos and photos or images. So let’s just take Facebook as an example, because it’s really the 800-pound gorilla. I mean you’ve got a site like Instagram that is just literally a visual posting platform and that, and that’s what it is.
And, and there’s a reason why Instagram is so successful for people. They love visual content. It’s more memorable when we see something visually for most people, it tends to stick more in our minds. Um, we live in a world where, especially when you’re on social media, you’ve got a short attention span. You’ve got to do everything you can to capture somebody’s attention as quickly as possible. And an image or a video is really the best way to do that. And then the FA you know, the, especially with Facebook, it favors in its algorithm of delivering the content that you post. It favors video second is going to be image type posts. Third would just be status updates, where you might just type in a quick status update with no video or, or image attached to it. And then the fourth is these link-based posts where you link to an article on a blog, for example, on your website, or you link to a piece of content that you want to share with others because you think it has really good, valuable content for them.
And video clearly outperforms everything else by far images do really, really well. You’ll never be able to go wrong with posting images, um, link, style posts don’t carry the way that they used to. It’s still important to consider though because it becomes a really important source of traffic back to your website. We build 12 months, social media campaigns for every blog post we do for our client, and it drives a tremendous amount of quality traffic back to their website. And it’s important to get some traffic quality traffic back to your website, for some reasons that we’ll talk about as we get into the ads specifically remarketing, you definitely need to get people on your website. You want to educate I think this is something I just can’t stress enough. The educational content is just absolutely critical.
And I think you can certainly when we looked at that slide that showed the six different social media sites the Facebook page and the LinkedIn company page and Twitter and Instagram and whatnot, you can cry, you can use a tool like HootSuite to post the same piece of content to multiple social media platforms at the same time. And encourage w you know, it certainly saves time, but if you have the opportunity, try to do something tomorrow, that piece of content, um, as, as effective as possible on that platform, for example, if you’re going to post to Instagram or Twitter, you want to include some hashtags on Facebook, hashtags, aren’t nearly as important. Um, but on Twitter, they’re critical on Instagram. They’re really important. So if you post the same exact piece of content, but likewise, if you post something and your thought really is, Hey, I want to get it out there on Instagram.
And you use 10 hashtags, which is perfectly cool with Instagram. And you put that on your face, Facebook page. Um, anybody who’s a sophisticated user of social media may be turned off by that because they’re like, they know what you’re doing, and they may see it as being a little bit lazy. It’s just a risky run, but you got to always bow balance that with the amount of time that you have to write. So I just wanted to bring it to your attention. Don’t just post about promotional stuff. I cannot say that enough, that just doesn’t work if that’s all you do. So a couple of minutes, so we’ve already talked about a couple of these things, just a little, and that is that it shouldn’t post links to other people’s content. That’s a bad thing. It takes people away from me away from my social media.
You know, it’s not doing anything to add value to me. And it’s like, don’t think about it as me. Social media is a community. Um, people are going to attribute the value and expertise of that piece of content that you see share to you because you took the time to share your that valuable piece of content with them. And if they find that that content helps them in some way, they’re going to assign as much or more value to you as they do to the original source who created that piece of content. But the other thing is, remember, social media is all about sharing and getting other people to share your content, and to increase your visibility whoever posted that original source of content, they may see that you posted that content and shared it with their audience.
So that means that they may be more likely to do the same thing for you if you post really good, interesting content. So it’s, it’s definitely only something that you want to consider just for the sharing, the social sharing aspect of it. Myth. Number two is, again, we’ve talked about this, but, I shouldn’t post every day on my Facebook page, that’s just too much people get tired of that. And the reality is very, very, very few people are going to see every post that you do from your Facebook page. If they do, they’re, they’re a highly engaged user. They may even be somebody who manages your account. So if you’re seeing that maybe because you’re the Facebook page manager, but like I said, from an organic posting perspective, meaning where you’re not paying to advertise your posts, you’re seen by a very, very, very small percentage of the people who like your page, not, not the entire platform, literally the people who like your page.
So if you have a hundred people who like your Facebook business page and you post a video, for example on average, maybe 16% of the people who like your Facebook business page might see that video in their newsfeed. If you post a link to a blog on your website that might be eight. People would see that showing up in their newsfeed. So, so really keep that in mind. And that’s why I think posting twice a day is a really good rule of thumb because it just gives you much more opportunity to be seen by people that you want to be seen by this, just this is a graphic from a statistic and just kind of shows what’s going on right now in terms of content in regard to Facebook page engagement.
So, as you can see, video is really critical it’s, it’s driving the most, um, engagement. It also gets the best visibility link, style posts get the lower much lower engagement and obviously less reach. And on average very, like I said, very few people will see you, the content that you post on your social media platforms, organically, meaning where you’re, you’re not paying to advertise. So now we can talk about all of these different advertising or social media platforms as an advertising tool. Um, I really want to just talk about Facebook today, just because there’s just a ton to Facebook advertising that we can talk about, and I’m only going to scratch the surface here, but if Facebook ads are performing really well right now, and it’s if you use Facebook advertising as a strategy, you can really create some pretty cost-effective campaigns.
Now you have to look at how long is the, is the buyer buying cycle for your product or service that you offer? What is the price point that you can sell something at? You know, what’s the volume of purchases that people might buy of that product? You know, you have to factor all that in so that you can determine what is a good budget for me to spend if you do cleaning and you’re, I’m just making these numbers up, but if you, your average job is $150, and you can do four jobs a day when you allow for drive time and you’re spending a thousand dollars a month on Facebook. Yeah, yeah. Ads, um, yeah. I have to run the numbers and say this, that makes good business sense for me to split. And that amount of money when I, I can only do X number of jobs at this total price per month.
So you definitely need to think about how the economics of the deal and is the advertising, right? The right way to go. Now, frequently advertising is if you don’t have a big budget advertising, maybe the most effective strategy for you to use because social era, and I’m sorry, search engine optimization typically takes a lot longer time and it can be considerably more expensive because you have to do a whole lot of things to do search engine optimization. But getting back to Facebook, advertising, you do ads, actually the organic and the paid. Work that you’re doing should work together. And, and, uh, you can actually take organic posts that you’ve created and turned those into ads on Facebook. That’s a very common thing to do. Do the reality is in any given then market, I mean, and this, these are general numbers, but in any given market maybe only 3% of the people are ready to buy.
Now, obviously, if you’re a restaurant, that number is going to be considerably higher. But across the board, the reality is there’s probably another 15% of people who are potential customers. I mean, they may just not realize it yet because they’re not aware of your product or your service, or they may not even be aware that maybe that’s something they really do want to consider and think about. And so, uh, when you’re putting together a Facebook advertising strategy, don’t forget about the 15%. These are the 15% of people are the people that you can warm up to become people who are actually buying from your business and becoming customers. So social media examiner, um, puts out so much great information if you, if you’re not familiar with them, definitely check them out. This is basically some information they put together on a way to look at Facebook ad strategy, Facebook on the, on the left-hand side, they talk about awareness, consideration, conversion.
So you’ll see this idea of a sales funnel. And so you’ve got top of the funnel. You need to build awareness of your business. Once people start to know, like, and trust your business. Now they’re ready to start to think about maybe doing business with your business, buying from you, and whatnot. And that’s where you get to the consideration level. And then if they’re still struggling to, to take advantage of that, you need to, you need to give them even more reasons why they need to be buying from you. So on the right-hand side, the education audience building and engagement that’s at the top of the funnel and Facebook ads are really tremendous for this. In most cases, I don’t recommend people spend a lot of money on Google ads at this level, unless Facebook is just really not a, a really solid platform to help them reach their ideal customers.
You get much more bang for the buck spending on Facebook ads to drive education, audience, building, and engagement, in building brand awareness, if you will, then you get to the point where you can start to do to talk about your offers. What products and services do you have available for people and give them an offer or a reason to, to click more and find out more, uh, and then last but not least, we talked about this at the beginning, why you need to be driving traffic to your website and how social media, even the link style posts of driving traffic back to your blog post is getting more traffic on your website. Well, that there’s this thing called the Facebook pixel. It’s, it’s a, it’s a piece of code that you put on your website, and anytime somebody goes to your website, if you have the Facebook pixel activated it, it puts people in a re retargeting or remarketing audience, and you can run ads only to those people.
Who’s been to your website? And even more specific than that, if you, if you want to set it up this way, you can if you offer siding windows and roofing as core services, if somebody goes to a page on your website about roofing, you can put them in a remarketing audience so that when they’re on Facebook, you can run a roofing specific remarketing ad only to those people. Who’s been on the roofing pages of your website? Likewise, you can do the same thing where you can build an audience for siding or windows. And so hang on, I’ve got to add another.
Okay. So retargeting is super, super powerful and it’s really cost-effective. And so you definitely want to think about how can you leverage traffic to your website and turn it into an opportunity to create really highly effective, very targeted ads to people that you know, are interested in that product or service because they were on those pages of your website. So again when we think about that funnel the Facebook advertising funnel, I want to go back to this social media strategy, the mix of content that you need to be creating. And so the awareness stuff really is probably the
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stuff. Those are the things that you do, you can do to really help build an audience and get people interested in your business and start to help them solve problems. And again, I can’t say this enough build that know like, and trust aspect of your business here’s where you get to the promotional opportunities.
So if we go back to that slide you’re down now in the middle of the funnel. And so you, you definitely, this is where you can start to talk about the offers. If you lead your advertising, just talking about the offer, you’re only targeting that 3% that we talked about a couple of slides ago where the 3% on average are only those people who are ready to buy right now, you’re skipping the 15% of other people that you can warm up to become customers if you just rushed down to here. And so, yeah, you may, you may have some real success initially when you build your ad and run it as an offer, but you’re going to hit a wall because you’re not getting in front of other people who are, are not ready to buy, and you’re just giving them an offer.
You’re not giving them a reason to understand why maybe they should be making that purchase from you back up here. So definitely keep this formula in mind. Create whatever variation of this you need to, but this is where the organic element, um, Italian with, with the advertising element on a platform like Facebook, when you think about Facebook ad budget distribution I think you want to think about 20% of that ad budget should be audience building. So, as an example, one of the things we do is every time we write a blog post for a business, we, we talked about creating that 12 months, social media campaign, where we were driving people back to that blog over the course of two Oh months that’s or that’s the organic strategy to keep getting people to go back to the website and read that.
And, oh, by the way, when they do that, they tend to stick around, around, and go visit other sites, which is really a good thing in the eyes of the search engines from the search engine optimization perspective. But you, um, we also build an up audience of people that, um, we think are the ideal audience. And we w every time we do a blog post, we spend 25, 10 to 25, maybe even 50 bucks, depending on the size of the audience to get that boosted out there in front of the right audience, on Facebook. And again, it’s literally audiences building it’s and it doesn’t necessarily mean social media audience. It could be getting traffic back onto your website so that you can turn around and run retargeting ads at a fraction of the price to only those people that went to specific pages on your website.
And that’s laser-focused advertising. When you can take advantage of retargeting. So we talked about the audience that we just talked a little bit about the retargeting. So keep a good chunk of your budget available for retargeting. Now, another element of retargeting, I want to make sure I talk about is if you do Facebook video ads, you can actually build an audience of people based on how far are into the video they watch. So they watch more than 50% of the video. You can actually build an app audience to remark it too, based on that, that, um, um, based on how much they watch that video. So you can only run those ads that, that remarketing ad to the people who spent more than 50% of the time or more watching that video.
They’re the people maybe who are the most interested in what you have to offer, right? So that’s where you can really take advantage of, uh, of remarketing or retargeting. Um, it doesn’t have to be all driven by what’s happening on your website. There are certain events or activities that you can build a remarketing audience from a video ad. Then definitely spend 60% of your budget or so on this idea of promotion. But again, as I said, if you skip the audience building, um, you’re going to miss that 15%, uh, and you’re going to miss an opportunity to increase the organic reach because you’re not building your audience on, on your social media platforms. I hope that makes sense. I mean, we could literally do an entire session or even a series of sessions talking about Facebook advertising, but hopefully, I can give you guys some good ideas today on how to take advantage of it.
Video ads are great. Right now one of the campaigns we’re doing it’s like basically a penny per impression. So that’s pretty darn cheap. It’s great for audience building, like I said I’ve got a typo here, animated GIFs count. So that’d have to be a true video. It could be a little animated GIF. Um, if that makes sense for you to run an ad for, and the way I look at it is it’s almost like you have the opportunity to build your own TV channel and run your ad to exactly the right target audience for a fraction of the price of any other advertising platform that I’m aware of. Uh, and, and video ads are just fantastic because they’re so cheap. Uh, now you have to create the video.
So there’s certainly a cost to creating the video. There are a lot of different ways that you can do that. You know, we’ve been doing a lot of animated explainer videos. You could have a message from the owner of the company. You can hire a professional spokesperson in a lot of different, you can create a video that Le that literally has no voice over it. Literally just shows pictures and may maybe B roll and, and the world words on the video itself tell the story of what’s going on with the video, a lot of different options there for a lot of different price points, image-based ads perform really well. Now, the interesting thing is what you may personally think is the best image to use for your ad. I’m amazed over and over and over again.
And, and maybe I don’t have the most aesthetic eye when it comes to images, but rarely, and this goes across the board regardless of who you talk to most of the time, the image that you think is going to work the best, rarely performs the best from an ad perspective. So it’s really important if you’re going to do, uh, image-based posts or ads, I should say, uh, try to create a couple of different variations where you use a couple of different pictures, see which one’s performing best. And then cancel or pause or, or, or stop the one that’s not getting the reach and the engagement and, and double down and make the investment in the one that’s performing the best or even better yet create another variation with that second picture and see how that performs. Now, just a couple of tips on image ads.
You want to try to make it blend into the newsfeed so that it feels organic so that it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb and just cries. Hey, I’m an ad, I’m an Abbott almond ad. You’re going to get a better response. Typically when it is blending into the newsfeed, um, you having people in your, in your, in your images is really important. If it can be somebody from your business, that’s fantastic. It doesn’t have to be though. You can certainly use stock images, but sometimes stock images just also scream that they’re stock images. So, be careful with that. But what you can do is create what’s called a graphic image, and it’s, I want to clarify that it literally, in this case, just meaning text on the image where you could have that picture, and you’re going to have text on that image and you can turn that into an ad.
And that used to be up until maybe a month ago or so, there was this 20% rule where 20% of the real estate on your ad was text. Facebook would reject that. Well, they did away with that, um, a little, or maybe even a little bit more than a month ago. So that rule no longer applies having said that you don’t want to go crazy with the amount of text that you put on your image, let the image speak for itself. We talked about why visual has such power. It’s easier to remember. It catches people’s attention. If there’s too much clutter, there’s too much text over that it’s going to become a distraction. Um, so those are some thoughts on, uh, Facebook ads. Once you’re running an ad, if you’re trying, this is specific, especially when you’re talking about an offer focused ad you, uh, you want to drive people to either a landing page on your website or on a website that you at least control, or you can create a what’s called a Facebook lead ad where people stay inside of Facebook, they don’t even leave.
And then there are just so many different, uh, targeting opportunities that you can use. So, for example, if you’re a veterinarian, you can target people with pets in a five mile radius of the clinic. If you’re a carpet cleaner, for example, you can target homeowners within certain zip codes. You can build audiences from your customer lists. So if you have an email list or you have a list that you can export out of like QuickBooks or your accounting software, you can actually upload that into Facebook and create an audience of people that you want to run your ads to. Um, you can also do that with your current page likes. You can exclude people who already like your page so that they don’t see the ad so that you’re only reaching brand new people who, who don’t like your page, a lot of different things you can do here.
You can also create a lookalike audience of people that you, uh, upload either from your, like your current customer list that you upload and things like that. Now that’s going to use Facebook’s algorithm and it’s going to say, okay, and it’s not going to be an exact match, but in a lot of cases, it may be a pretty good approximation to help you build a good target audience. You’ve got location parameters that you can set. Um, as well as the, I mean, you can run ads based on people’s job titles, a lot of different things that you can do. So, um, definitely explore all of the Facebook targeting criteria. And this is just an example of a landing page. So these two are landing pages on somebody’s website.
This would be an example of a Facebook lead ad. You’re you run your ad inside of Facebook. They click on the learn more button and they go to a screen inside of Facebook. And the beauty of this is that, um, they, the, it will, pre-fill this form based on the user’s profile information. So their email address and their phone number that they’ve already put in their Facebook profile. So it’s great for mobile. You know, if you’ve got an audience of people who are likely going to be clicking on your ad using a mobile device and only a mobile device, this is a really simple way to do it. The downside is they can be more expensive and they can also generate lower quality leads typically. Whereas if you can send somebody to a landing page on a website, you may have more of an opportunity to help them understand what they’re going to get in terms of this offer, whether it’s schedule appointment, or a free download, or a discounted coupon or whatnot, and they may wind up disqualifying themselves just based on that additional information that you can provide there that can be harder to do with the Facebook lead ad.
So it’s an awful lot. We’ve, we’re almost at an hour. So I want to give you guys an opportunity. If you want to download a free ebook on social media, we’ve got one available, called The Anytown Small Business Guide to Kick-Butt Social Media. So if you want to grab a copy of that you’re more than welcome to, and with that, I’m going to open it up and see if anybody has any questions. Click Here to Download.
Resources for Video and Image Editing
- InShot – http://www.inshot.com/
- Clipomatic – https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clipomatic-text-on-videos/id1263032315
- InVideo – https://invideo.io/marismith/
- Boosted – https://boosted.lightricks.com/mari/
- Canva
- Facebook Slideshows (in Facebook)
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