In this 4th episode of The Digital Marketing Happy Hour, Lynda and Brian discuss how post promotion ads can have direct and indirect effects on your conversion performance, e.g. lowering lead generation costs.
Don’t forget to click through and subscribe to the DMMH channel- and comment on YouTube if you have any questions- or even suggestions for future videos!
Are you posting on Facebook, but not getting enough out of it?
Want more brand exposure? More interaction? More website traffic?
Then you’ll enjoy these 5 quick tips!
Run ads. And I don’t mean boost posts.
Get into the Facebook Ad Manager and create post promo ads to show your posts to more people.
If no one sees them, no one interacts, no one clicks, nothing else happens!
The main benefit of running post promo ads from Ad Manager is that you’ll learn how to get really affordable exposure and interaction, especially when you do the rest of these tips.
And another benefit is that you’ll be creating cool engagement audiences that you can later retarget to, and retargeting audiences are great for driving lead and sales!
Great news! As of September 2020, Facebook has rescinded its 20% text rule, as we originally outlined below. With that said, it’s smart to be judicious about your text-to-image ratio in order to create images that are pleasing to the user’s eye.
If you run ads but your post images have too much text, Facebook won’t show your post to as many people.
Once again, if you don’t reach enough people, not much happens…
Facebook has a thing they call the 20% rule.
The 20% rule is: you can’t have text in more than 5 out of 25 rectangles in a 5×5 grid placed over your image
So follow the 20% rule, reduce text in your images and you’ll reach more people!
Use this tool to check your images before your post.
How do you stop the scroll?
Grab the attention?
Get them to care?
This is a huge topic worthy of at least an entire book.
And it’s not just the concern of social media people- it’s something that musicians, artists, storytellers, advertisers…
All kinds of people want to grab attention and make people care.
But the short answer, based on our landmark Contagious Content study is that
You should have AT LEAST ONE of the following in EVERY post:
Make sure you have a website link in your post.
If there’s no link, how will they get to your website?
Do you really think they’re going to…
No way! That’s three or four extra steps you made them do! Most people are already on to something else in their life and you lost them!
So, put a link in every post, if you want traffic!
Also, BONUS TIP: watch your link clickthrough-rate.
Look at your reports (either export your posts from Page Insights or even better, if you’re running post promo ads, look at your Ad Manager data) to see which posts get the highest link-CTR. These are the ones that drive traffic, not just engagement. Learn from this!
This is an advanced one.
It’s a combination of 3 and 4.
You have to have a website link in your Facebook post, of course, or how will they find the blog post?
And you can’t be boring.
Your post has to grab attention or they’ll never stop long enough to consider reading your blog post.
No matter how interesting you think your blog post is…
And no matter how much time you spent writing it and editing it and making it awesome…
Your work isn’t done yet. Now you have to sell it!
The same way you have to write a good blog post title to get people to care, if you’re posting in social media or creating an ad about a blog post or both, you have to sell the sizzle about that post.
You might have already put some of that sizzle into your blog post title.
But in a Facebook post, you need an image or a video.
So if you just finished your blog post, you might want to take a break, because you need some creative energy now for the Facebook post.
Do you already have an engaging or funny or interesting image or video for it?
Or do you need to find one?
Go back to tip #3 on ENGAGEMENT and think about which of those SIX AWESOME THINGS you can use that fits your blog post.
Then you’re done!
:-)
Episode CINCO of Live Online Learning (LOL):
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Here’s what we talked about, in addition to attendee live questions we answered:
You’ve got to test more ideas in digital marketing and social media.
Because if you only text one post or one post a day or one ad a week, you’re only going to discover so much stuff and you’re only create so much stuff and you’re only going to get a certain level of results.
The more stuff you create, the more ideas you force yourself to have, the more likely you are to find that idea that your customer goes crazy for.
I’m talking about…
Here’s my analogy. Let’s say, in any sport, like my sport is the NBA. I love basketball. When I watch these guys, I’m like “Wow, there’s some amazing players.” Historically we got Michael Jordan, we’ve got Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, we’ve got Magic Johnson, we’ve got Shaq, we’ve got LeBron, Kobe, Durant, Steph Curry, Steve Nash, all these guys are one in a million, one-in-a-billion, right, because they’re freaks of nature in one way or another.
There have been thousands of guys in the league over the years but if we had only had 10 guys in the league, if the NBA hadn’t been so big and hadn’t been so popular and hadn’t been so much money going into it, probably wouldn’t have that many guys and those guys would have done different things with their lives. They wouldn’t have been basketball players. We never would have found those genius basketball players.
If you don’t put enough money or time into your content, you’re never going to find that exceptional outlier of content that performs super well.
I’ve got this post that has a crazy dog in it that gets me 6 likes per penny I spend on it, because I’ve tested hundreds and hundreds of posts.
The more stuff you create and the more you test, the more likely you are to find that exceptional, you know, the Michael Jordan of Facebook post, the Michael Jordan of Facebook ads.
It’s probably not the one expect it is. That’s the other thing that’s weird about it.
There’s research that shows that marketing experts, even after 10 or 15 years of experience, do not get better at guessing which content is going to win with the customer.
You could say, “Brian Carter’s a great marketing mind. He’s amazing.”
He still can’t guess which one is going to work with your customer.
All he can do is say, “I think I analyzed your audience and I understand ’em pretty well and based on what you’ve said, you and I are going to figure out some ideas. We’re going to put them in front the customer and we’re going to see which one it works.”
If we only put 5 ideas out there, our chances of success are much lower than if we put out 100 ideas.
Then we’re going to find one or two that really perform amazingly and your customers are going to go nuts for them. That’s not only going to drive down your costs…
It’s also going to:
But you don’t get that if you don’t test enough ideas.
So many companies out there are just doing the bare minimum. They’re doing checkbox marketing. They’re like, “Yep, we put out our content calendar. Yep, we ran an ad.”
It’s really easy to do. I know. I’ve done it myself. You get tired, you get busy and you’re like, “I created an ad. I’m done. I’m going to go watch Netflix,” you know? “I’ve got so many meetings today, I don’t have time.”
Okay, but you got to figure out how in your process to make this possible.
And if you’re a manager, you got to figure out how to make this possible for your marketing team, give them more time to brainstorm. Figure out how to help them create more ideas and get more stuff out there. You’ve got to do it.
This is a competitive advantage, to be able to create:
It’s very important today because the better your ideas are and the more you test, the more likely you are to win.
Facebook is the king of social media. It has the most users and the best advertising platform.
You absolutely have to be marketing on Facebook. Everyone does. Period.
And because of the organic reach problem you have to be advertising on Facebook if you want to market on Facebook.
But Facebook advertising is a blessing, not a curse.
Here’s why I love the Facebook ads platform:
It’s a big, sophisticated, powerful platform you can easily get lost in, even if you’re an expert.
So let me simplify things for you.
The 5 Facebook ads every company should run are:
The #1 Most Important Ads You Can Run on Facebook: Ads Targeted to Your Ideal Customer
The most important kind of ad you can run on Facebook is an ad that targets your ideal customer.
So how do you find out who that is?
If you have the ability to upload a buyer list of e-mails to Facebook audience insights, then you may be able to find out more about them through that tool. If you find out what’s unique about your buyers compared to a list of leads who don’t buy or to your fans, then you’ll be in great shape.
What you want to know is what are
…and all those other factors that are in audience insights that you can use to target with Facebook ads.
What’s unique about your buyer that you can target with Facebook ads?
If you can’t use an email list of buyers and Facebook audience insights then you may have to run Facebook ad tests using website conversion ads that are fairly aggressive about sales to a number of different Facebook ad targets and see which one responds the best. And I mean being really specific about what you sell and how much it costs so that only the best people will respond to these ads.
Once you have a really good idea who your best customers are and best responders are on Facebook and you’ve figured out how exactly to target that on Facebook then the most important ads you run are going to be the ones that target your ideal customers… whether those are post promotion ads or video view ads or whatever kind of ads, the ones you target to your customers are going to teach you the most.
Because, whatever you’re doing, who cares what some fan thinks, if they’re not buying? If they’re not in your ideal buyer profile?
The most important ads for you to run are not ads to your fans and not ads to people on your newsletter email list- they’re ads to new people who fit your ideal customer profile.
#2: Website Conversion Ads
So many people run Facebook ads and don’t even know this ad exists, and they don’t know why they’re not getting leads for sales.
It’s because they’re not running this kind of ad.
This means sending people to websites or landing pages for leads or sales. And it requires setting up conversion tracking, or the ads won’t function as conversion ads.
If you’ve never set up Facebook ad conversion tracking, you haven’t done this. And that’s why Facebook isn’t working that great for you.
#3: Ads to Email Custom Audiences
Retargeting is really important.
But it’s not magic. It’s not as big a deal as some people think it is. Why?
Because it takes a while to get enough people into your retargeting audience for there to be enough to matter. Since only a few % click on ads, you have to have thousands of people in the audience before it generates any noticeable traffic back to your site. And overall, it doesn’t bring most people back.
But retargeting is a best practice.
It keeps you top of mind. It creates affordable sales you would have lost otherwise.
When most people think of retargeting, they think of website retargeting. Website retargeting means people have been to your website and they’re getting shown ads based on that or based on a specific URL that they’ve been to.
But there’s another kind of retargeting (that’s not really called retargeting but you can think of it that way) and that is the email custom audience which I think is much more powerful for a lot of people and surprisingly few people use it.
What is it? You can upload any email list to your Facebook ad account’s audiences section. A certain percentage of those people will have the same email list for their Facebook ad account and so those people will match and you’ll be able to show them ads.
So you can upload:
…and then target those people with Facebook ads.
For myself, I have a huge list of everybody that has been to all of my different websites all of my LinkedIn contacts and all of my Google contacts all together.
My custom email audience is over 30,000 people.
Think about your email lists- when you send them emails, only about 20 to 30% of them open the emails, right?
But if 50 to 60% of your email lists match on Facebook, you can get ads in front of all of those people. And those people who aren’t opening your emails right now? You can:
#4: Promoted “Emotional Selling” Posts
I have mixed feelings about post promotion ads. There are so many companies out there that have grown fan bases that are completely useless. They don’t understand that their fans aren’t seeing their posts.
They create posts no one sees and they boost those posts and their fans interact with them but that’s all that happens. Their Facebook page is this almost-dead thing they’re clinging to and trying to get people to interact with so that they can pretend their Facebook fan base isn’t really dead.
The Facebook fan base really isn’t doing anything for these companies’s bottom line. They need to step back and think about the fact that they’re in business to make money. And they probably need to grow their email list.
So that’s why the website conversion that is so much more important than a post promotion ad (boosted post).
But there is a kind of promoted post that’s worth doing.
I’m going to ask you do a specific kind of post promotion ad- I don’t want you to just promote whatever post you’re doing.
Because promoted posts are not going to make a huge difference if the posts themselves aren’t that persuasive to your audience. Most of what I see people post on Facebook is not that persuasive.
Some people do a fairly good job of getting people engaged to because they engage people’s emotions.
But very few people bring to bear the decades and decades of copywriting wisdom that’s out there. Be honest: how many copywriting books have you read? How much copywriting have you studied?
Very few people are bringing what they know about their company’s unique selling proposition into their Facebook posting.
And very few companies have done a deep dive into their ideal customer enough to know how to activate their ideal customer through their Facebook posts.
The most important post promotion ads that you can create are the ones that activate your ideal customer’s emotions…
These are the things you need to identify that are going to emotionally move them towards a purchase.
You won’t know what these are when you start, but you need to have some ideas what they are. You need to develop some questions about what they are… some theories. And test those theories by creating posts.
If you’ve done that work above to figure out who your ideal customer is and how to target them on Facebook… if that work is strong, then these Facebook post that you’re creating to emotionally move your ideal customer will have an effect on your bottom line.
What we’re talking about is the emotional part of selling. The emotional part of marketing. The irrational part of your customer’s decision-making process.
You need to get inside their head and their heart.
And the way you’re going to know that you’re on track with that is
#5: Any of the Four Types of Video Ads
Videos are so hot right now we can’t not choose the video view ad. People love to watch videos just like they love to watch TV. Videos are powerful and Facebook can get you a lot of video views.
Now you have to keep in mind that there are four different ways you could run videos through the Facebook ad platform. You could use it as creative in a website click ad, a website conversion ad, a boosted post ad, or the video view ad. And each one of those has a different objective. So you’ve got the video you just need to make sure you understand what goal you’re choosing.
If you want to get video views more than anything else the video of you at is your choice. The video view ad is a powerful way to get more awareness for your brand. And it’s a great way to educate people.
I made it the fifth option in part because not every company is creating video yet. I’m trying to go a little easy on those companies that are stuck.
But also because I have mixed feelings about video view ads- you get a LOT of different metrics on videos back, and it’s tough to decide which metric you should judge their success on. If you’re going to look at how long people viewed them for, since every video has a different length, I don’t think you can look at % viewed- look at the sheer duration in seconds. And think about why you are showing it to people- if it’s not to get a conversion, we can’t judge it by conversions… but are we happy with just getting views? Ultimately I’m not- I think videos a are powerful part of branding, but also should be used in website conversion ads to see if they work as well or better than any images you might be testing.
And if you haven’t started creating video, you need to get to it. The obstacles are probably in your head. Your standards are probably too high. A lot of companies and individuals are creating video and people are enjoying it. Don’t let perfectionism stop you from getting something done.
And that’s it- the five types of Facebook ads every business should run.
How many of them are you running?
Want more shares of your Facebook posts? Then you need to create more Facebook posts that go viral.
Want to get people to share your idea for you?
Want to reach the people you can’t reach yet- without even paying for it?
“Let’s make it go viral!”: It’s the executive order that marketers dread, because it’s so much easier said than done.
But the research shows us what kinds of Facebook posts get shared, and which kinds of posts they don’t share…
What People DON’T Share Is…
The 6 Types of Posts People Share:
This is a diagram I created based on my analysis of Agorapulse’s thousands of Facebook pages and post data back in 2012-2013. We saw it work right away and since then we’ve continually proven that these principles work for 100’s of companies. And in every Social Audit we’ve done for any company, their most shared posts are always one of these six types.
#1 Posts That GIVE Go Viral
When you give, people not only want to reciprocate (you’ve read Cialdini’s Influence, right?), they also want to give the same to others.
So when you offer discounts and deals and run contests, you may see those get shared, and you may also want to make sure your contests are set up to reward people for sharing.
You can incentivize virality (give them a carrot to get them to share) with a variety of contest platforms.
#2 Posts That ADVISE Go Viral
This is another type of giving, but from an information and insight perspective.
When you give tips and how to’s that help people overcome obstacles and get closer to their goals and dreams, they get shared.
You increase your chances of getting shares when those tips and how to’s look super high quality.
So if it’s a video, give it some production value. If it’s a blog post, write a good title, make it scannable, readable, and use great images.
I would recommend infographics if Facebook is a big part of your distribution plan, because infographics are not very compatible with Facebook:
#3 Posts That WARN Go Viral
This often comes into play for news services, for example TV news.
But it can also apply if you know something about your industry.
For example, I could write a post like “WARNING: Facebook Ad Costs Are So Low in 2020 That You’re Crazy Not to Run Them!” and talk about how
So that’s how you tie one of the viral post types in with your sales message- I would then be selling Facebook ad services. And yes, ninja trainees, I just sold it in this blog post too! ;-)
#4 Posts That AMUSE Go Viral
Humor. Almost everybody loves it. The problem is: how do you do it in business? To do humor well in business, you have to:
And because of the not offending and not being edgy thing, it may actually not be that funny compared to what you’d see on Comedy Central. But that’s ok. Corporate humor that doesn’t make everybody uncomfortable and is in fact hilarious at a conference may only warrant a chuckle from you alone at your desk. You don’t have to be Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle. In fact, if you try to be, you’ll probably offend somebody, and you won’t get shares- and even if you do, it could hurt your company’s image.
Now this is different for every company- it has to fit your brand, your culture, and your legal department. Some companies are younger and smaller and are OK with taking more risks, and they benefit from them. That’s great. Just make sure the level of edginess you choose fits your company.
#5 Posts That INSPIRE Go Viral
People tend to agree with positive, inspirational messages. They “like” them. And they share them because of
#6 Posts That AMAZE Go Viral
We may not have created the Internet to see amazing monasteries in the clouds or puppy videos or 8 year old kids playing incredibly difficult guitar pieces or skateboarders falling on their faces… but it is amazing how much amazing we can now spread.
The Internet connects us in a way that allows us to share more amazing things with more people than ever before.
In the past, it was just through TV shows (That’s Incredible! and Ripley’s Believe It or Not and America’s Funniest Home Videos), and people had to mail VHS tapes to these shows, or the TV shows had to have people traveling the globe to find them- but now so many people have smartphones, we can capture tons of things and the collective human race can judge and make each thing viral or not.
And all of that stuff is right there for you to find with Google and BuzzSumo and PostPlanner… because no matter how many people have shared it, a lot of this amazing stuff has not been seen by most people. It’s not only proven viral- it’s still new to many. Especially the stuff that was on sites like Ebaums World before Facebook. Sometimes you’ll see something go viral on Facebook and discover it happened four years ago…
So those are the 6 types of posts that go viral!
How to Make Your Revenue Go Viral
The goal here is not just engagement, though- but also to tie it into your sales and marketing messages.
Engagement is great, because every brand needs attention, but if you want extra credit and better ROI, make sure you’re also thinking about your customer’s pains and problems and your services’ and products’ benefits.
Tie it in and connect the dots. Give them a call to action related to your brand. Put a link in the text (and some utm parameters to track it well in Google Analytics) so that they can go somewhere to take an action meaningful to your bottom line.
You’ve already pressed their buttons and stimulated their emotions- so channel that into a transaction with your company- or at least make the courteous suggestion that they might considering doing that…
Then it won’t just be your engagement going viral- your revenue can go viral, too!
How do you know if you’re doing well on Facebook? And once you’re doing ok, how good can it get? Here are the minimum thresholds and some of the best metrics we’ve seen:
| Minimum Threshold | Awesome | |
| Facebook Post Engagement Rate | 1.0% | 16% |
| Newsfeed CTR | 1.0% | 5.0% |
| Right Column CTR | 0.1% | 0.5% |
| Lead Gen Squeeze Page Conv Rate | 5.0% | 40% |
| Ecommerce Site Conversion Rate | 1.0% | 3.0% |
| Amazon Product Page Conv Rate | 12% | 20% |
| B2C Cost Per Lead | $10.00 | $0.15 |
| B2C Cost Per Sale | $10.00 | $3.00 |
REVIEWED & UPDATED January 8th, 2018:
This post was originally written in June 2015. And some of these tips have been true since I started teaching Facebook marketing in 2011. I wrote this list a few months back for a keynote talk and have kept them up to date.
The tips are divided into 3 groups
Note that Facebook marketing is a stepwise, funneled process- so, though not every tip is focused on the last step of the funnel, each tip is trying to increase your results down the funnel.
1. Check out Facebook Audience Insights for your type of customer. This tool is located in the Ad Manager. Learn who your fans, prospects and customers really are. I’ll bet at least one thing surprises you. If you don’t have enough fans to see other likes, choose your biggest competitor, or an interest in your niche instead.
2. Don’t bring up a bad thing unless your offering fixes THAT problem. Or unless your specific audience likes warnings (e.g. bad weather) or being negative. In which case, your bad posts will get a LOT of likes. If they don’t, you don’t have that kind of audience. However, empathizing with your customer can be really powerful. Some of our most powerful case studies come from this.
3. Use happy positive faces that are close-up enough for us to read their expressions. :-)
4. Avoid bland stock photography. Even if you have to take your own photos, find something authentic. If you do use shutterstock, find something exceptional.
5. Animals work. Even people who hate kids love animals. Yes, you can definitely make an animal relevant to your brand and yes people will love it. Yes, even in B2B. They’re still human beings. Open your mind and try it.
6. Cute works. Kids, pandas, Ann Handley, etc.
7. Dogs always win. Pugs and labs are some of people’s favorites. This is the cutest dog on the planet.
8. Try something WEIRD. At the very least you’ll STAND out. Like that joke about my Grandma. You haven’t heard that? You need to watch this video.
9. Write content about mistakes people make in your niche- if you want to boost conversions.
10. Be brief, simple and clear. Try Hemingwayapp.
11. Test everything. Test posts, ads, images, cover photos and landing pages. I even split-test my blog post titles.
12. Capitalize on the big winner. Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Learn from what did and didn’t work, and come up with new ideas that are more like what worked and less like what didn’t.
13. Learn from what your customers like. What they like is in Audience Insights and how they respond to your posts and ads.
14. Keep testing new ideas. Don’t give up. Don’t settle for what’s the best right now. Watch this video: The More You Test The More Likely You Win
15. Shorten your funnel. Try to take out a step or two. Make it easier for your customers. It’ll boost your conversions and profits.
16. Think about whether your customers public and private faces are different. Serve the public one with public posts. Try segmented ads, private videos and segmented email lists for the private ones.
17. Test multiple ways to say the same thing. Try more than one way to express it. Use science to test diverse language.
18. Include links in posts to get website traffic. (But when it comes to ads, this is not the most affordable way to get website traffic- read this).
19. Include a call to action to get them to do something. Like, “Hey, subscribe to my podcast, it’ll make you a better marketer, better business person, and you’ll smell better too!”
20. Track which Facebook posts work and don’t work. Figure out why you think they work or don’t. Develop your theories and test them with your next set of posts. This is one reason not to create a whole month of FB posts at one time. First, it doesn’t give you time to learn from the current month before scheduling new posts, and second you’ll get smarter every week, but your posts will be up to 4 weeks dumber than you are now.
21. Create coaching and cheerleading posts. Motivate people, and echo their values, beliefs and likes.
22. Find famous and motivational quotes.
23. Use universally revered people for images and quotes. Einstein and Maya Angelou are good. Thomas Edison is not- he’s actually controversial!
24. Follow the 6 do’s and 4 dont’s from my Contagious Content ebook.
25. Always choose website conversion ads if you can (rather than just clicks to website), and use a conversion pixel. Even if you aren’t going for leads or sales, try putting the conversion code on a deeper valuable page your best visitors would check out.
26. Modify your targeting with behaviors like people who use Facebook payments (tells you with more certainty they have money to spend and/or might be a good ecommerce prospect) or lines of credit or other financial info.
27. Test granular creative to granular targets. Did you find 3-4 main demographic personas from Audience Insights? Are you testing personalized advertising to these personas?
28. Try widening your targeting and making your copy more specific. You can “target” by using the ad text to tell them who should click and who shouldn’t.
29. Test retargeting, custom audiences and lookalike audiences. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don’t. But they must be tested.
30. Test using the brand name in headlines vs. not. You could also call them out by job title or interest.
31. Test superlatives. Are you or your product the most/best/cheapest/biggest/etc?
32. Test images featuring the product vs. not. You could also show a representation of their dream aspiration, or their current nightmare.
33. Show a preview of a lead magnet- or use an image in the ad that’s also on the landing page. Then they’ll know they’re in the right place when they land.
34. You can do lead gen ads now in two ways- via website conversion ads, or the new “lead ads.” The latter have a few weaknesses right now. #1, they have been more expensive in our tests. #2 You have to remember to log in and download the emails regularly from Facebook, then manually email people. It’s easier to use LeadPages or ClickFunnels tied to Aweber or MailChimp set up with automatic welcome messages or an autoresponder series. I suppose you could weekly download them, upload those to a system like GetResponse that lets you upload emails, have an autoresponder there, but after a week they’re cold. You’d need to download and upload the emails daily. Some companies are working on a solution to this, but right now it’s a mess. We still recommend website conversion ads combined with a landing page split-testing solution like LeadPages, ClickFunnels, Unbounce, etc.
35. One of the biggest problems we see with clients are when they create their own landing page or lead gen process. Custom programming can create problems, inflexibility, or interfere with tracking. If your website can’t split-test, you should use an industry-standard landing page solution like LeadPages, ClickFunnels or Unbounce. They can be customized to fit your brand and often can be made to look like they’re hosted on your main website or a similar one. Branding can be fixed. A lack of split-testing or the inability to track conversions cannot be fixed as easily.
That’s it- start with a few, and add some more of these tips to your practices every week!
The biggest problem with Facebook posts is reach. You need to get your audience to like them, and that means you need to know what your audience values and what their goals are. If you can create a post that cheerleads for those values and goals, you’ll get likes and that gives you more reach.
But we feel that ads are needed to promote posts, because if you only have 1,000 fans and you’re only reaching 50-100 people with each post, that’s not enough. What percentage of those 50-100 will come to your website or contact you or come into your physical store? The number of potential customers drops with every step through the marketing funnel, so out of 50-100 people you may only get 5 clicks to your website. That’s not enough. The average ecommerce website converts 1% of visitors, so you need to be getting 100 people at a time to your site, not 5. That’s why ads are necessary, and fans are an increasingly peripheral consideration. promote your posts with ads that target your potential customers, whether they’re fans or not.
The way reach new customers for free is to get Facebook shares.
(click to tweet that sentence!)
I studied what kinds of posts get shared and which don’t in Contagious Content (free pdf here).
People share posts that are giving (contests), advising (how-to), amusing, inspiring, amazing, or warning (bad weather coming).
People don’t share posts that focus on your company or its employees, are edgy or offensive (except for rare customer groups that are all about those things), are obscure or niche in interest.
When you find that one of your posts is highly likeable and shareable, advertising it will get you a ton more interaction and visibility for a low cost. Our best post ever got us 80,000 likes and 35,000 shares and was seen by 424,000 people for less than a $200 ad spend.
Any post without a link to your website is a wasted opportunity.
(click to tweet that!)
Keeping people on Facebook won’t necessarily help you get sales.
For B2B, blog on topics that help move your prospects toward the decision to buy from you, then post that on Facebook with a link to the post. Then promote that post with ads targeted to your prospects.
Authors, experts, and influencers sold $10 million dollars worth of eBooks in 1995 almost exclusively through Amazon.
In 2014, they sold about $1.6 billion dollars worth of eBooks on Amazon alone.
Now influencers, experts, and authors are becoming more digitally savvy and have built email lists, Facebook fan pages, and Twitter accounts.
They’re using these channels to sell their digital content using a new tool called Heyocart.com.
Heyocart.com allows authors, experts, and influencers to sell to their Facebook fans by asking their fans to simply comment “buy” to purchase. I talked about it at my Social Media Marketing World presentation!
Now, I’ve got additional data to add along with the process, and best practices.
Here’s how it works (you can do this too, it’s free):
Heyo Cart is just a tool- you need a good product and the right price, too!
It’s a good idea once you post your product to alert all your email subscribers and social contacts as well. The sooner you get responses on that Facebook post, the wider it will go.
Have you ever spent dozens of hours creating an infoproduct and then debuted to lackluster sales?
I have. I’ll admit it.
Even though I ran a poll about it before creating The Awareness Blueprint… what people say they’ll buy is different from what they actually buy. You can’t find out what they’ll buy until you’re selling it! I only made about $1500 from that, which is not good enough given how many hours I put into it.
So instead of creating a whole wedding cake first, create a cupcake to see if they’ll buy it. If they buy, then make a wedding cake.
In other words, create a small $7 or $17 product first, sell it with Heyo Cart, and then if that goes well, create a bigger version that’s more expensive!
Read more on cupcakes and product design in this great piece by Des Traynor.
I’ve tested a couple cupcakes now with Heyo Cart, and got radically different responses to each. I’m already saving time by not continuing to work on the less “buyable” one.
I’m going to create 3-5 more and then whichever one does best, I’ll create a bigger product for that one.
In a recent A/B test conducted by author and info-marketer Sue Zimmerman, Amazon and heyocart.com were both put to the test. Sue posted her latest eBook for sale on Amazon and also to her Facebook page using Heyo Cart to see which would drive more sales.
On Amazon Sue sold 15 copies, earning her $106.76 over the first 10 days.
Using Heyocart.com, Sue posted on Facebook and sold 95 copies, earning her $591.05 in the first 10 days.
“An additional benefit we gained from using Heyocart.com was that it gave us the ability to collect the email addresses and names of our buyers. This made it easy to put them into our CRM like HubSpot, InfusionSoft or OntraPort for future upselling and content marketing. Amazon doesn’t do that,” said Zimmerman.
Heyo Cart CEO, Nathan Latka expects that trend to continue in 2015. Heyo Cart allows authors and infomarketers to sell on Facebook by having their fans simply leave a “buy” comment on a post.
“There’s an enormous opportunity for experts and influencers to sell digital products to their consumers inside of Facebook,” said Nathan Latka, CEO of HeyoCart.com. “This is where consumers spend their time and it’s where they’ll buy.”
According to internal data from heyocart.com gathered in Q1 of 2015, the best price point for authors and infomarketers to sell ebooks and other digital content on Facebook is $9.00. This was based on a sample size of product prices shown to 1m people who are fans of influencers and experts.
According to Heyo’s Q1 2015 data, the best price point for authors and infomarketers to sell ebooks and other digital content on FB is $9.00 <- click to tweet!
As influencers, experts, and authors look for ways to spread their content, make more money, and gain in popularity, Latka anticipates this trend toward social commerce to grow exponentially.
“Total transaction volume done on social media networks on both mobile and desktop will surpass $40 billion by 2025,” said Latka.
If he’s right, heyocart.com might be the next Amazon for authors and info-marketers. Click here and you can try it for free.
