Right now, business owners across the US are looking for ways to get an edge up. They want to grow their businesses. They are trying to stay relevant. To excel in growing your business in 2020, you need to know how people-based marketing works. It’s critical for a marketer or owner stay on top of their competition, but not only play catch up and do what they do. You need to be different. You need to have a clear insight into your ideal consumer and the process they follow when making buying decisions. Do you fully understand the buyer’s journey?For instance, how does a typical consumer makes a buying decision?For most of you, your next customers perform a search for the problem that they are facing right now. They are at the top of the sales funnel. They are researching their symptoms and trying to identify the root cause of the problem. They will read articles and watch videos from business owners like you who are creating valuable and helpful content.
At this phase, you should try to be the Wikipedia for your industry. When you are the one who is helping them identify the problem and being extra friendly, you begin to build trust. The prospects view you as the authority figure in the space.
Eventually, they’ll get to the point where they know exactly what the problem is and they’ll start searching for solutions. Or maybe they know what type of product or solution they are looking for and search for their favorite brands. Then compare the recently emailed coupons in their email inboxes. They may also check what other consumers are saying across social media and forums about the product or service. Finally, they settle for one. Why do you think they settle for one and not any other? Do you know why brands spend a hefty amount on marketing and get low ROI? The answer is using a people-based marketing approach.
What is people-based marketing?
People-based marketing is marketing tailored to the right people and not proxies or cookies collected over time from third parties. This kind of marketing uses data and real-time results to market products and services to the right customers. To understand this kind of marketing, here is a simple case scenario: How many ads do you see in a day? Are most of the ads relevant to your needs? Do they promise to solve your problems? Do the ads engage with or make you angry with the advertisers for sending it your way?Most often, we snub our nose at a poorly placed ad. These kinds of ads do not appeal to our needs and desires, they are rather offensive. They degrade the brand reputation in our mind. That’s what most traditional marketers do without a real understanding of their consumers and data. People-based marketing uses real-time data. People-based marketing is the approach of targeting the right consumers with the proper context, the right channel, and product or services is the best form of marketing that has a high return on investment. However, how do you ensure you’re targeting the right people? You need to collect real-time data from them and save them. You take your offline individual customer data in your CRM and upload it to a secure platform where the offline data is matched with the online data of each consumer. The online data such as device IDs, browsing habits and social interaction details alongside the offline individual data help to create an accurate persistence consumer ID. This consumer insight helps to target and improve marketing campaigns. How does people-based marketing work: Using real-time data for marketing campaignsYou don’t want to waste your money on marketing and get low ROI. Most brands, which don’t use this form of marketing, spend a lot of time and money marketing their product and services to the wrong people.
What does successful people-based marketing work?
Most marketers have embraced this concept of marketing since its introduction in 2014. However, not all marketers have succeeded in it. Some didn’t have the big picture and threw in the towel. It’s because prospects want to buy from brands that show a deep understanding of their preferences and priorities. For people-based marketing to deliver results, here is what marketers must do.
1. Have the right marketing psychology
As a marketer who wants to see terrific ROI, you need good marketing psychology. An excellent place to start is reading and understanding Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which states that people want to feel valued. Marketing that’s skillful, honest, and smart, wins trust from the customer. You build trust by creating a valuable relationship with a customer. It’s the trust your customer has on your product or service that drives revenue for you. You don’t want to push things on customers; you want to add value to their life. You’re not trying to sell them something, but helping them get what they really want. And this is the basis of people-based marketing. It makes people feel valued because it leverages the knowledge of who they are and what they need to give them what they want. The key is to use your marketing skills respectfully and ethically, engaging and compelling your prospects to buy what they already want and need.
2. Have a customer’s persistent ID
Having a unique customer ID works wonders in any marketing strategy. It would seem to enjoy talking to the real person and compelling them to buy what you’re selling. To create your customer’s persistent ID, you need to collect real-time data about the customer. You must collect first-hand information and combine it with third-party data. And finally, use the information gathered to create a customer’s profile. How People-Based Marketing Work: Get the right audience dataIn the profile, you need to include information collected about the customers such as their age, interests, a position they hold in a company or their source of income, their demographics, and the devices they use. Reliance on cookies for marketing is ending soon. The only form of marketing that can enable you to be in the game and the competition is people-based marketing. It will allow a marketer to send a personalized message, to the right customer, at the right time. You need to have data from your customer: Not just data, but useful and real-time data. Having it will help you develop a marketing strategy that will skyrocket sales. As a marketer, you need to have the following data about your customer:
Are they using a laptop, a mac, a desktop, or a phone to browse?
You should know the phrases they input in search: to enable you to understand what interest them.
You should know their age and products that they most like.
Having this data will go a long way in helping you create a real-time customer ID.
3. Automation
The typical automation, which most marketers use, might not collect useful real-time data because of its limitations. If a new customer logs into a site and shops for something before abandoning the cart, you can identify the device or the user and hence keep data unless the customer signs up using an email. How People-Based Marketing Work: Adopt automation to gather dataHowever, with people-based marketing automation, it is like a fish to the barrel. You can collect first-hand information from the customers because it doesn’t rely on cookie-based data.
4. Identify individual customer on across multiple devices and channels
In 2016, digital customers owned 3.64 connected devices. It’s a daunting task to track the user over these connected devices unless you use a people-based marketing approach. Most brands have a customer’s email lists. However, these brands can’t marry the customers to the connected devices they are using. This makes their marketing campaigns inefficient. The key in any form of marketing is to get a high ROI, which can’t be a tussle if you sent relevant marketing messages to the right audience has a clear insight about the device and channels the consumer is using. How People-Based Marketing Work: Automations
Conclusion
Marketing is becoming competitive every day. Companies are paying hefty prices for marketing campaigns. While it’s good to spend a considerable amount to get sales, it’s a noble idea to consider carrying out effective marketing that has a high ROI. The future of marketing is people-based marketing. Wouldn’t you want this kind of marketing for your business, one that has a high ROI and low cost per accusation? We can carry out a highly targeted people-based marketing campaign for you. Contact our people-based marketing consultants at Fieldtrip for a free 30-minute consultation on how to increase the marketing ROI in your business, e-commerce site or startup. We’ll set the paceto get more sales in your business.
Chris Field
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The key to success in ecommerce has always been the same: traffic, conversions, sales and repeat sales. In today’s hypercompetitive world, you need more than willpower to succeed in ecommerce. No matter what you sell, other people are selling the same thing.
You can’t just use mass marketing to reach out to your target buyers. You need to develop a strategic approach to marketing that enables you to generate and convert leads while reducing your costs of acquisition. Your e-commerce store must adopt a marketing strategy that enables you to sell more and more to the right customers.
Trigger marketing is one of the marketing methods that is making waves in the ecommerce world. The results of trigger marketing as compared with other forms of marketing such as mass campaigns have been breathtaking. Marketing experts are now beginning to find the Golden Key to unlock remarkable results in business.
What’s Trigger Marketing?
Trigger marketing is a highly targeted automated campaign, based on customer activity. It bases marketing technique on tracking, studying and analyzing customer behavior. After that, creating automated triggers that cause the customer to take further actions to make a sale happen.
Trigger marketing focuses on events.
For instance, a potential customer clicks on a link from Google and visits your website. He wants to buy a pair of shoes for work. He browses through a host of shoes on your websites. Stays idle on the site for some time and then finds what he wants. He gets excited and clicks, “Add to Cart!”
Immediately, his phone rang. After attending to the call, he leaves the cart without closing the sale and making the purchase. What just happened?
Trigger Marketing for Ecommerce
Your online store had traffic, visitor, lead and potential buyer. The metrics show that people like what you are selling. However, the cash couldn’t come through. How do you make the customer return to the cart, make the purchase and close the sale?
That’s where trigger marketing comes to play.
What if you set up a trigger campaign that captures customer emails and sends automated emails to remind them of the abandoned cart when they venture away from it?
This is will not only let the potential customer make the buying decision, but very excited that the ecommerce store thinks about him. He might say: “They have even reminded me of the shoe I wanted to buy the last time!”
A trigger-based campaign helps to close the sale and build an exciting customer experience.
Benefits of Trigger Marketing for Ecommerce
A recent Forrester Research has revealed that trigger marking can increase your revenue by four times and grow profits by eighteen times the initial investment.
This seems to be astonishing and striking when you look at the conventional marketing results of most businesses. But it’s real! The question is how does it work?
Trigger Marketing for Ecommerce: How Does it Work?
Well, trigger marketing focuses on gathering important facts about the needs, wants and pain points of the target customer. It seeks to understand the buying behavior of the customer, browsing trends, mobile devices and other key details.
It is first about gaining a deeper understanding of the target customer so you can target advertisements to the right person, at the right time, on the right devices to get better results. As a result, the ad performs ten times other generic marketing mediums.
Here are some benefits of trigger marketing for ecommerce:
1. Stay relevant to the target customer
The problem with most marketing campaigns is that they are not relevant to the target customer.
Many businesses forget that each individual has unique needs and preferences. They don’t personalize their campaigns to apply to the consumer. Therefore, they get below average results. Trigger marketing helps to create campaigns relevant to the target customer and generate a high ROI.
2. It builds trust with the target customer
Build Trust with Customers: Trigger Marketing for Ecommerce
In ecommerce, trust is everything. People buy from people they like and trust.
When they trust you, they buy from you. How do you gain trust from target customers so they buy from you? You focus on understanding them in a deeply personal way and then send them insights, tips, offers, deals and promos that are very helpful to them.
3. Become effective and efficient in marketing
The game of marketing is to spend less to get more customers.
Trigger Marketing for Ecommerce: How Does it Work?
Then, you get repeat sales from one customer to the level where the initial cost is almost negligible, comparable to what you spent to get the client. Trigger marketing helps to leverage automation to improve campaign results. Instead of a manual, boring system, you leverage digital tools to streamline and get results faster.
4. Become highly competitive in your field
What are you going to differ from other ecommerce stores in your industry? How does your marketing systems different you from the masses?
According to MarketingChartz, only 19% out of 1000 ecommerce stores use trigger email campaigns to reduce cart abandonment and increase revenue. This segment is always the leaders in their field. Are you part of them?
5. Increase customer engagement through the buying cycle
Marketers understand that every customer has a unique buying method that fits into a general profile. To ensure that the potential customer goes through the buying cycle for a purchase successful, trigger campaigns would have to keep customers engaged when they fall out.
Stay Relevant to the Customer: Trigger Marketing for Ecommerce
Good trigger-based marketing campaigns analyzes the buying process and then create triggers to engage and cause customers to make the order.
6. Increase revenue and profits
What pays the bills is not traffic. You can use Google and Facebook Ads to drive a ton of traffic to your online store. But if the sales don’t come through, you will run out of business.
Trigger marketing helps you to optimize your traffic to maximize your advertising dollars. It helps you to get visitors to buy when they come to your online store. This helps to generate profits and sales.
7. Increase Brand Awareness
Increase Brand Awareness: Tigger Marketing for Ecommerce
Your brand is your online reputation. The stronger your brand, the easier it gets the sales. But building a stellar brand is not an easy task. If you will build a meaningful brand, then you have to develop a long-term relationship with clients.
With trigger marketing, you collect important customer data that allows you to automate campaigns that will amplify your brand and build a strong relationship with the customers.
Looking to use trigger marketing to grow your e-commerce store? Schedule a free consulting session to analyse your business and develop a strategic plan to boost sales and move to the next level.
I’d hate to scare anyone away from paid advertising, but I’m sure the the rest of my team would agree, we’d rather see you not run paid ads without having a good strategy in place first. There are so many variables to think about before running any paid advertising, and if you skip out on them, you’ll probably end up saying “Paid ads don’t work!” when in fact, they can work wonders if set up correctly and managed properly.
Issues to Tackle Before Running Paid Ads
While most companies will get great results with Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, YouTube Ads and retargeting, you’ll want to make sure that you address the following issues on your site:
Tracking is Everything!
Is your website set up so that you can track everything about the paid traffic campaign? Without tracking, how do you know what is producing the best ROI? The old adage rings true “Half of my advertising is working, I just don’t know which half.” Don’t rely on the new customer to tell you how they found you!
Do you have the Google Adwords Conversion code installed?
Do you have Google Analytics installed?
Do you have the Facebook tracking pixel installed?
Do you use call tracking numbers to separate calls from Organic Traffic from SEO vs AdWords vs FB ads?
Where are you going to direct the paid traffic to?
Sending someone to your homepage is most likely a huge mistake. Do you have landing pages setup for your promotional offers and individual treatment plans and services?
Do you have calls to action and a system in place to make it easy for the prospect to make an appointment? This could be a tool like LocalMed or other online scheduling software.
What happens if they leave your site?
Do you have a retargeting strategy in place in case the paid traffic doesn’t convert on the first visit? Most companies aren’t going to close the deal on the first visit. If your sales cycle is measured in the weeks or months, you need to have a strong retargeting campaign that nurtures the lead and moves them to the next stage in the buyer’s journey.
Let’s take a cosmetic dentist for example. If you are marketing All-On-Four and dental implants, what happens if the visitor doesn’t become a new patient on the first visit? Just like that pair of boots follow you around the web until you buy them, you should be retargeting your prospects with valuable content, educating them about you, your practice and your passion.
Update Your Sales Process
Is your team trained to handle a new patient calling in from an AdWords ad or Facebook ad campaign? They need to be treated differently than a referral.
Convincing a referral to come in is simple. Convincing someone who saw you ad on Insta to schedule an implant consult is much different.
Is your front desk actually answering the phone? The number of practices that send new patient calls to a phone tree or voicemail is insane.
These new patients want to talk to someone to schedule an appointment. They aren’t going to leave a voicemail. They are going to call the next dentist on the Google search results.
If you roll your phones to voicemail while everyone is at lunch, don’t run paid ads.
If you don’t have a solution for taking calls from 7am to 8am or 4:30pm until 8pm, don’t run ads. We see so many prospective patients calling in on their morning commute or after they get home at night.
Are you willing to commit to testing different ad variations, different copy, different promotions over the next 30 to 45 days? Paid ads are amazing, but you will have to test and tweak campaigns to improve performance over time.
Good companies can do a great job right out of the gate, but even the best will need to run tests to find out what works best for your practice and your audience.
With Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg lighting up the news with on-going privacy concerns, Facebook suffers only slightly from some negative press and a few account deletions.
Then there’s Facebook’s January announcement that they were making changes to their algorithm (again), causing some to overreact by suggesting that Facebook advertising is dead.
I prefer to think of Facebook ads like temporarily depressed blue chip stock ready to rally and out perform all expectations. Like blue chip stocks, Facebook and Facebook advertising aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Advertisers needn’t worry. Facebook reports 2.13 billion monthly active users for Q4 2017 and 1.40 billion people logging in daily. That’s billion with a ‘b.’ Usage has been growing steadily (some might say ‘aggressively’) every year.
When you factor the lifetime value of a customer with Facebook’s ability to help businesses nurture customers, resolve customer service issues and respond to changes in public perception quickly, no small businesses can afford to ignore Facebook anymore.
Simply put, changes to Facebook’s algorithm should reduce noise and clutter in a user’s content feed. This is good. But it also means that not everyone who has ‘Liked’ your business page will see it in their regular feed. That’s still okay. Soon, you’ll see why.
All that data that Zuckerberg promises to do a better job of managing and protecting? This data unlocks every marketer’s dream: highly targeted customers on-demand. It’s the best advertising buy in today’s crowded marketplace for a reason.
To borrow a misquote attributed to Mark Twain, “The reports of Facebook advertising’s death are greatly exaggerated.”
Yet there does seems to be a serious disconnect among small business owners and their Facebook advertising.
Citing research done last year, smallbizmarketing.com reports 80% of small businesses use Facebook for marketing. Yet inc.com, also referencing 2017, reported that 62% of small business owners say Facebook ads don’t work.
Let me repeat: 62% say their Facebook ads don’t work. Another 20% of small businesses aren’t even trying.
What do successful Facebook advertisers know – the 18% – that the majority do not?
They know how to marry Facebook’s tools with good advertising campaigns written specifically for the nuances of Facebook.
Trite but true: Knowledge is power.
Who do you want your ads to reach?
We know the following about Facebooks’ current demographics, which you should slice and dice into smaller sub-groups to fit your target market:
Slightly more women use Facebook than men, 83% to 75%, according to sproutsocial.com. The geographical split is quite interesting with 81% of both urban and rural people being on Facebook compared to 77% of their suburban counterparts.
The youngest Baby Boomers are now over 50 and the oldest are 70-ish. Facebook organizes their demographic age groupings a little differently, counting those ’65 and older’ as part of their smallest demographic group. But you can still use Facebook ads to reach an amazing 62% of these older consumers.
If the oldest users make the smallest demographic block on Facebook, there’s no surprise the youngest users, people within the ages 18 to 29 years and within 30 to 49 years, make up the largest two blocks. If these age groups reflect your idea customers, Facebook ads have the potential to reach 88% and 84% of them, respectively.
The bottom line for any small business owner is: Facebook is the 600-lb gorilla within social media Every advertising dollar must pay for itself and much more. If an ad doesn’t produce leads or revenue, cut it or fix it quickly. Good Facebook ads and ad campaigns differ from traditional ads and campaigns.
Facebook helps you as a small business owner address those bottom-line advertising facts with an analytics tool called the Facebook Pixel. Simply install it in the header of your website. The Pixel tracks who is coming to your site and what they are doing when they get there.
Knowing who is attracted to your website, what pages they are visiting, and what your visitors are doing while allows you to tweak an underperforming web page, beef up or change your marketing message, spot opportunities for new products and services, and recapture business that otherwise might have just faded away…
You may be familiar with Google analytics for measuring the effectiveness of your web pages. Facebook Pixel tracks and provides even more nuanced information about your visitors, then allows you to stay connected with them with follow-up advertising.
This is targeted and responsive advertising on a whole different, interactive level.
Let’s look at advertising differences on Facebook and Google for a moment.
Google guards their actual calculations behind their Google Adwords valuations like uranium. Whatever the formula of the day is, they base their pay-per-click (ppc) prices on number of views for a specific keyword search.
A selling point for Google ppc campaigns is that people searching a keyword or keyphrase are assumed to be at least mildly interested in the subject. Your ad gets exposed to a percentage of these people and you pay only when they click on your ad. That’s all the control you get.
See how you stack up against your competition and see what it is like to work with us for free. Let us do a free assessment of your website, web presence and marketing campaigns. We will show you how you can generate more leads without spending any more money.
Facebook doesn’t have anything like ‘keyword’ searches. Therefore, some point out you can’t assume any interest – even mild interest – in your Facebook ad.
But on Facebook, you are able to put your ad in front of people with the same demographics, same interests and needs, same income and potential discretionary income as your best customers. You can do this with scalpel-like precision.
We already know the psychology of people and their buying habits are very similar among like-minded and like-advantaged people. That beats potential ‘mild’ interest in my book, but as they say on late-night infomercials: “But wait, there’s more!”
Remember the old marketing Rule of Seven? It says that a prospect needs to see or hear a marketing message at least seven times before they take action and buy.
Once you have created the perfect Facebook ad, one that fits into the Facebook culture, then the Facebook Pixel gives you ultimate control to reach out to that same person again. Try that with Google Adwords.
There’s only one downside I know to the Facebook Pixel. You get one pixel to install per Facebook account. That means you have to choose where and when to use it. (Yes, you can move it to a different page later to track and follow different visitors depending on your marketing strategy.)
For example, let’s say you have chosen to place the pixel on your sales page. When a visitor comes to your site and makes a purchase, the Facebook Pixel takes notice and records the action. Now you can automatically send follow-up Facebook ads for complimentary products and services.
But what if your visitor comes and doesn’t make a purchase, book an appointment, or take whatever action you want? Happens all too frequently, right? The Facebook Pixel records that as well. You can set those customers to be retargeted with specific Facebook ads.
Retargeting is one of the genius concepts behind Amazon’s massive success. While your business can’t compete with all of Amazon, it doesn’t have to. You can use the same strategies to keep your products and services front-of-mind during your customers’ buy cycles.You’ve experienced retargeting yourself. Say you are on-line researching which vitamins or minerals might stop those pesky leg cramps which have started waking you up at night. Now for days or weeks afterwards, ads for magnesium, potassium or B-1 start appearing on the right-hand side of your browser’s pages.
This is retargeting. The Facebook Pixel allows you to choose to which visitors you want to automatically retarget your ads. You can have your ads repeat to people who have visited your website or those who actually visited your opt-in page but stopped short of providing their emails.
You can retarget people who put products in a shopping cart but had second thoughts and abandoned the cart and site altogether.
You can also create a customer audience for your ads using specific parameters.
For example, use Facebook data to create ‘look alike’ audiences— those people who are similar or have many traits in common with your best customers. Just like the popular CBS television program Bull uses ‘mirror juries’ to help them understand the thought processes of the courtroom jury, you can use the demographics, interests and behaviors of your best customers to find and connect with people similar to them.
It makes sense that others who share the same demographics, traits and interests as your best customers probably have similar needs for your products and services. Facebook helps you find them and gets your business in front of them.
The pixel itself provides you with the information you need to decide what advertising strategies to employ and when. The more you learn about your customers, the easier it is to craft effective ads and a good marketing plan to capture business and serve more people.
No other social medium comes even close to providing the exposure nor the targeted flexibility of advertising on Facebook. Soon, your business can be among the successful 18% and we’ll see this number grow.
If you find yourself agreeing with the 62% of small businesses surveyed by inc.com last year who said Facebook advertising doesn’t work, listen up. Facebook advertising is too nuanced to simply say ‘Facebook ads don’t work.’
What is true: The ‘same ol same ol’ generalized ad won’t work for Facebook because social media is dynamic. That’s like using a hammer and chisel when you should be using a laser. You must understand how to create a successful social media ad, which differs from a regular print ad. Otherwise, yes, Facebook ads ‘won’t work.’
First, let’s talk about the ONE area where traditional rules do not necessarily apply. Facebook is all about images…it’s the FACE in Facebook. You need a great visual that attracts attention, first and foremost. Untypical of usual ad rules, your image doesn’t have to relate directly to your text. But it does have to be good.
Consumer Acquisition reports that 75% to 90% of your ad’s success rests on your selected graphic. That’s a huge percentage, but it makes sense.
If your image doesn’t draw the attention of your prospects, they won’t read your awesome ad copy. But if your graphic delivers attention, then your terrific headline, text and offer can seal the deal.
Go for a clean image so the eye can see at a glance just what you want to communicate. Ideally, your entire ad should instantly communicate to your reader:
Your distinct offer
Benefits they’ll receive
What they should do next
Alternatively, your artwork can be cute or humorous or even unusual so the brain does a ‘double take’ to verify what it sees. But these are riskier strategies (albeit there are ways to reduce your risk that we’ll address in a moment.) The style of image you chose must fit your brand. If your brand isn’t edgy, don’t try it. Go for something that visually arrests or appeals, even if it’s not fine art.
Back in the days when direct marketing was king, no successful advertiser would even consider rolling out a big campaign to his entire mailing list without testing the heck out of his package. Printing costs, premiums, postage – it was much too expensive to make such a gamble.
So why would you gamble your campaign on an untested image? It took direct mail companies weeks before they knew which package beat their control. With the speed of the Internet, you’ll know right away what adjustments to make.
Use the same type of A-B split testing to identify which image resonates best with your audience. Test a dozen or so images with a portion of your audience, keeping every word of your headline, text and layout the same except for the image. You’ll determine fairly quickly which image out performs the others.
Once you have identified the best image for your purpose, split test other components of your ad. Test heads, test layouts, test copy or colors until your ad performs the way you want.
Do all this work and you still can’t expect a winning Facebook ad campaign if you don’t have a great offer, one that can’t be ignored. So let’s talk about that.
Copywriters make their living using the ‘power of one.’ Simply put, they look for one big idea for their ad’s appeal. They don’t want two ideas, only one.
Why? Two ideas — however great — dilute focus and confuse your audience. Confused people don’t buy. Nor do they give their email addresses or book appointments. They click away.
You can advertise price. You can advertise convenience. You can advertise function. But you shouldn’t advertise price, convenience and function together. Pick one.
When you are excited about your product, it’s natural to explain its features. But people don’t buy products for features. Rather, they buy benefits they expect to receive from those features.
Good copywriters know we make decisions with our hearts, with our emotions. We then use ‘logic’ to reinforce our decisions, causing many people think their decisions are logical. They are not. They are still emotional. Try to write your ads with both in mind.
Speak to the emotional need then provide enough details for the head to agree with the ‘click’ the heart wants to make.
Think this is hogwash because you sell industrial equipment not jewelry?
See how you stack up against your competition and see what it is like to work with us for free. Let us do a free assessment of your website, web presence and marketing campaigns. We will show you how you can generate more leads without spending any more money.
All the decision makers in a company – The fleet manager, division manager, CEO – these are all people first who have deeply-seated emotional needs to make good decisions, and to not look foolish by making poor ones. Buying industrial equipment involves a lot of money. It can feel risky. Risk registers as emotion.
So how do you uncover those emotional needs? The old rule is to come up with all the benefits you can think of for every special ‘feature’ your product/service has. But don’t stop there. For every benefit you list, ask yourself SO WHAT?
Imagine you sell used motorcycles. Your Suzuki VStrom 650 has a gas tank that holds 5.8 gallons of fuel. That’s a feature. What is the benefit of that feature? As your prospective buyer, the benefit is that I won’t have to stop as often for fuel. “So what?” Well, I can ride my motorcycle to more ‘out of the way’ places without risk of running out of gas. “So what?” So, the adventurer in me has no restraints… See? Now you are getting down to something that resonates emotionally with me, your would-be buyer.
When you know what your customers really care about, you’ll know the emotional words to pack into your ad.
Now let’s think about your offer. Facebook ads are brief by definition. You aren’t going to be selling an actual car through a Facebook ad but you can gather leads, pique interest, build familiarity with your dealership, announce sales and special events and even book appointments for test drives. But that’s all about your business needs.
To write a successful ad that speaks to your potential customer, ask yourself:
How will my offer improve my reader’s life? You’ll know because you’ve drilled down every benefit to get to the underlying benefit and the emotions it evokes.
The copywriter’s ‘power of one’ secret is also a reminder to write your ad with just one client in mind. Don’t speak to the world. Speak to the one. Know all you can about your ideal customer and what action you want him or her to take.
The magic of this ‘power of one’ is that many ‘ones’ will feel as if you understand them personally, and they’ll respond to this uniqueness in droves.
Whatever your amazing offer is, write it with ‘the click’ in mind. In any sales copy, the purpose of the headline is to get your prospect to read your lead. The purpose of the lead is to get them to read more. Every sentence must deliver the reader to the next sentence. If it doesn’t, you fail.
Facebook ads must do the same, just with far fewer words. Every word counts and every word must propel your reader to the next.
The sweet spot is about 40 words of text. Facebook limits you to 90. Make every word count. You may have 90 words but don’t be tempted to use your allotment. Remember, your ideal ad communicates your message at a glance. Fewer words, the better.
Facebook has also been known to cut text short of 90 words when screens are small. Make sure you use your preview feature to make sure everything is just as you want before you publish.
The ad itself has but one job: to get the click. A simple flick of the thumb or forefinger doesn’t sound like much. We think that if we write a compelling ad and have a great offer, people will automatically exert this little bit of effort. They don’t. You can improve your results by telling people what you want them to do next. If it’s click through to a landing page, then tell them to click.
If it’s to call for an appointment, tell them (in no uncertain terms and with urgency) to call. Remember to make it easy for them by providing your number. Ads without the appropriate mobilizing information are wasted spaces.
For the most part, everything we’ve discussed today is solid advertising gold. No other media platform offers the kind of targeted exposure that Facebook does. Rightly so, it remains the darling of small businesses and entrepreneurs who learn to take the creative steps to make Facebook ads work for them.
We all want the most bang we can get for our marketing and advertising buck. There’s pretty much agreement all around now that traditional outbound marketing – you know, those expensive TV, print, and direct mailers – doesn’t work all that well and yields a pretty low ROI. Besides that, typical website conversions hover around a pitiful 1-3%, some even lower. So what works to grab some of that remaining 99-97%? Facebook advertising, of course.
Facebook has around 1.86 billion monthly users. Now that’s a huge potential market! In addition, slightly over 71% of all Facebook users are 25 years old or older – the ones with the money to spend. Further, a 2017 study revealed that 52% of consumers were influenced by Facebook in their purchasing decisions, both online and offline.
But you’ll need a strategic approach for your Facebook ads and marketing funnel to capture your targeted portion of that market. Let’s see what it takes.
General Principles
Probably the most common mistake in much Facebook advertising is jumping the gun and trying to sell to people who aren’t ready to buy yet. Most of the time, people are on Facebook to keep up with family, connect with friends, share recipes, get a little news, and so on. Generally, they aren’t there to buy anything.
That’s why you need a “funnel” – a way to gently and gradually move people from potential prospects to loyal customers. All it takes is keeping the WIIFM principle firmly in mind.
People aren’t really interested in you or your business and don’t really want to know about your products/services. What they want to know, what they ask, is this: “What’s in it for me” (WIIFM). So your job is to show them that – the benefits – and then build trust.Step 1: Attraction/Content Promotion
Your initial goal with a Facebook sales funnel is to attract visitors to your website and build an audience in a way that provides a good ROI. And you do this by offering great content that addresses their concerns and offers solutions to their problems.
There’s a ton of online content now, millions of pieces published every day. So yours has to be unique, relevant, of high quality – and, of course, engaging and a delight to read. Focus on the prospect’s problems and what their life would be like if that problem wasn’t a problem for them anymore.
Step 2: Lead Generation
This next step involves turning those website visitors into leads. You offer something of value, usually free (a lead magnet), in exchange for contact information so that you can later send out marketing emails to move them further down the funnel.
Your offer, though, absolutely must provide VALUE. Otherwise, you’ll damage the trust relationship you’re trying to establish. But done right, it will position you as a giving, knowledgeable, trusted authority in your field or industry.
When thinking about valuable content, think of something that you could charge hundreds of dollars for. Give away your best stuff. This gains trust and establishes you as the authority figure and market leader. Only the best people give their stuff away for free. They have the mindset of abundance rather than having a scarcity mindset where they hoard all of their knowledge to themselves.
Step 3: Lead Nurturing
This is where the automated email campaigns come in. A carefully crafted series of emails will further nurture and help build that essential trust. These emails are not newsletters informing the reader about your company. These lead nurturing sequences continue to focus on the prospect’s pain points and solving their problems. Each email points further down the funnel and closer to the “Aha Moment” where the prospect realizes that YOU are the best person to solve their problems.
Lead nurturing sequences also often involve another targeted Facebook ad campaign or two. You can use Facebook’s custom audience options to effectively laser focus additional offers and move people closer to to the bottom end of the funnel – conversion. Retargeting your audience is an effective way to get your messages in front of your prospects as them move further down your funnel.
Step 4: Conversion
Conversion is the ultimate goal – converting people who were once mere prospects into possible leads then to hot leads and finally to paying customers.
The key in this step of Facebook advertising and funneling is to focus your hot leads on a specific buyer persona and communicate a personally resonant and very specific value proposition. If you’ve done everything else right further up the funnel, this step should be fairly straightforward and uncomplicated.
Keep in mind, though, that these are just the major steps in the Facebook advertising funneling process. There are several other sub-steps that can’t be neglected. These are built around the standard buying cycle– opportunity recognition, discovery of alternatives, comparing solutions, making a decision, and implementing the solution – and involve landing pages, thank-you pages, automated email marketing sequences, and re-targeting efforts.
While we have seen companies try to build out funnels on their own, because of their complexity and number of moving parts, most companies struggle to create effective funnels. The commons mistakes usually lead to the teams giving up all together, throwing their hands in the air and claiming “Facebook Ads don’t work!” Well, if you want to see how Facebook Ads can predictably and consistently produces high quality traffic, leads and clients for you, reach out for a free strategy session with our expert advisors.
