Ah, remember the good old days, back in 2009, when social media was free. You could just post a Facebook page to promote your business, and hoards of prospects would start following you, sharing all your posts with their friends, and before you knew it, you had quadrupled your sales.
What's that you say? I was right until the part about making more sales?
Interesting.
Surprisingly few businesses on Facebook have mastered the art of turning their free social media presence into income. And it hasn't helped that the social media consulting community has so often neglected the “marketing” aspect of the services they provide.
So when platforms like Facebook started to charge businesses and marketers to get their messages in front of Fan Page followers, many complained.
But are those complaints really justified? Let's take a look at how Facebook has changed over time for businesses to find out.
In the old system, businesses (or their outsourced social media consultants) worked hard to post engaging content that would excite, inspire, and move their prospects… hopefully to a purchase of goods or services. Little of it was done with many strategies in place, and Facebook provided few tools, if any, for them leverage their efforts.
Over time, however, Facebook's user-ship grew, and there was more competition for attention in their personal newsfeed. So something had to change if consumers on the platform were going to maintain a positive experience. And that's why, over the course of a few years, most businesses saw a reduction in organic access to their fans… simply because their fans demonstrated greater interest in others things – like pictures of cats, babies, and bacon.
And that meant if a business wanted to connect with consumers, they would have to pay for that access.
But it's really important to understand that this hasn't happened in a vacuum. And I truly believe that if businesses and marketers understand the gift that Facebook has given them, they'd be overjoyed. You see, Facebook has unarguably become the market leader in online consumer focussed advertising. And, along he way, they've developed the best tools and systems in the industry to target the exact individuals you want to reach for the lowest possible cost.
So while posting content on social media aiming for organic reach is a good place to start, it's a slow, uphill battle. Even in the past it required a lot of time and energy just to get things off the ground… including daily content creation and slow, organic audience building. And organic reach requires real engagement, because everything you post is seen based on Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm, which rewards pages for having a higher percentage of engagement among their audience (regardless of the audience size).
But with paid ads, you are in control of who sees your content, how many people you want to reach, and those posts can increase engagement faster. You can target your posts to reach as highly a targeted audience as you wish, based on any number of things, including demographic, psychographic, actions, and purchase history.
And here's the best part: it's dirt cheap, and has the potential to carry some of the highest retire on investment numbers around.
Compared to newspaper ads, radio spots, and CPC ads from platforms like Google, Facebook comes in among the lowest costs-per-action just about anywhere online of offline. And with the ability to place tracking pixels on pages across the web that will allow you to “continue the conversation:” with people who click on your ads through retargeting ads, you have a much higher potential to convert your prospects into customers.
And it's not all that complicated to do. You just need a strategy, and the ability to think analytically, not emotionally. Here are the essential ingredients:
A demographic to reach
Compelling content to share
A strategy for moving your prospects toward becoming customers
Sounds simple enough, doesn't it?
Well it is… and with a few more details on how to properly structure your fan page content, and best utilize the range of tools Facebook has available to us as business owners and marketers, you'll be hitting those higher ROIs in no time.
Ready to keep moving forward with Facebook ads? Then check out my Facebook course bundle here.