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In today’s Q&A, we are sharing a few of the Facebook marketing strategies that have worked for us so far and how you can apply them to your own online business.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- Should You Start a Facebook Group? – check out this post
- Elementary Librarian
- Have a Question? Ask it here!
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all, you’re listening to Q&A with S&J.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey y’all, welcome to today’s Q&A mini-podcast. We are answering a question today from Laura Lynn Matthews. Laura Lynn says;
“How do you market on Facebook? I would love to hear some tips for Facebook marketing.”
I want to start this out, Laura Lynn, by saying that we are certainly not Facebook marketing experts by any stretch of the imagination. We have had some success on Facebook and today, we’re going to talk a little bit about what has been working for us as far as Facebook goes.
SHANE: Okay, there’s kind of a general principle when you’re marketing on Facebook or kind of a flow the way things have to work. It’s just the way they’ve set up the system and if you understand how the system works, you can take advantage of it especially if you’re willing to spend money because no matter what anyone says to you, if you find a guru or you find some advertisement that says, “I can make your post reach all of your followers, all of your fans, or get in front of the people you want for free,” that’s just not true anymore. Facebook has created a pay to play marketplace.
The first tip I’ve got is you’ve got to be willing to spend money to make money on Facebook. Jocelyn is going to tell you an example here in a few minutes of how we were trading $5 for $17 or even $5 for $400. That’s the goal on Facebook is to spend money on leads and hopefully, those leads mathematically will work out in the sales.
If your product is $200 and you’re getting leads at $5 a lead, you’re trading a $5 bill for two Benjamin Franklins. That’s a pretty good deal. The way Facebook works is you have to go in first and build an audience and you can do that in a number of ways. You can upload your email list to Facebook and target people that are already on it or you can go in and actually pay for people to like your page.
Your ad will show and you can go in and target their interest and it will come up in their newsfeed and maybe they will like your page. Once you’ve built an audience of likes or you’ve already got a custom audience built maybe of your email list that you uploaded, then you pay to reach those people. Once you built an audience, let’s say I’ve got 1,000 people, a normal blog post is probably going on the show to about 20-40, maybe up to 100 of those people. So I’m going to have to pay to target ads at those likes but the good thing is, it’s more expensive to get people on to your audience at first.
It might cost you $1-$2 a person to get them actually to like your page or to get them to your audience. It’s a lot cheaper to target ads that you like. So once you’ve got them already on your list, it’s going to become less expensive over time to actually send messages to those people but you are going to have to pay to play. That’s kind of how the system works on Facebook. Now we’re going to tell you some specific strategies we’ve used in that system to trade that $5 for that $100.
JOCELYN: The thing that I really love about Facebook right now is that if you target your audience correctly, it is really rock solid. There are tons of people on Facebook, I mean, like millions maybe even billions now.
SHANE: Billions, it’s like 2-3 billion or something.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and it’s just crazy how many people are on there and they have it down to a science.
SHANE: They know what you like.
JOCELYN: Yes, kind of creepy a little bit in a way but…
SHANE: Let me tell the story about this USB thing, Jocelyn. Jocelyn and I were in the Apple Store the other day. This is so freaky. I picked up a USB for our MacBook Pro as the thing that we plug in and it has four holes in it. You can put more USB things in. I don’t think I said anything. I may have said, “I need to get this USB thing.” You know, your messenger app listens to you. They can kind of hear you on the phone but as soon as we got back in the car, did we not, Jocelyn? We saw an ad for the thing that I was holding in the Mac store. Was that not that totally true?
JOCELYN: Coincidence?
SHANE: I think not.
JOCELYN: Maybe.
SHANE: Another time, my little girl, Anna Jo, said, “I want some pretzels, daddy. I need pretzels. I’ve got to get some pretzels.” “Why do you want pretzels?” She’s like, “I just love pretzels. They are salty.” I was like, “I will get you some pretzels.” But I swear an hour later, there was a Rolled Gold Pretzels ad over on in the sidebar. That’s the good thing about Facebook is if you put your stuff out there, it’s going to get in front of the right people.
JOCELYN: We’re not saying for sure that Facebook is doing anything shady.
SHANE: I think they are listening to us.
JOCELYN: We don’t know.
SHANE: I’m just saying.
JOCELYN: Anyway, that’s the good thing about it. They do know us so well which is both good and bad, depending on how you look at it but from a marketer’s perspective, this is a really amazing thing. We’ve had a lot of really good luck recently with Facebook. People are kind of giving Facebook a bad name right now because they changed their algorithms, etc., and…
SHANE: Because they charge. It’s cheap people that don’t want to pay for ads basically.
JOCELYN: We understand that. I mean, it is frustrating to have the bait and switch happen on Facebook but the good thing is that you can still have a lot of success if you know how to do it right. Recently, I just had a Black Friday sale on the Elementary Librarian site and what I did is I uploaded my email list. I have not sent a lot of broadcast emails to my list recently so my open rates have been just okay.
What I did is I just downloaded my email list and I thought to myself if I can’t get them through email, maybe I can get them through Facebook. When I uploaded the email list, I had a lot of people who were actually on there. I tried to optimize my ads where the conversions would be what I was looking for.
SHANE: She targeted only that email. She didn’t just target all these other people like her audience. Jocelyn uploaded all those names, Facebook found those emails in its database. They were Facebook users and Jocelyn’s ad showed to the people that were on her email list. They were already familiar with her brand.
JOCELYN: I put their conversion pixel on my “thank you for purchasing page” and that’s how I was going to know if those people actually bought anything. It’s actually very easy to do. It sounds kind of tricky but all you have to do is just copy and paste that pixel and put it into the section of your site. I think it says like head or header, or something like that.
SHANE: There are instructions on Facebook.
JOCELYN: Yeah it tells you exactly what to do but anyway, I just downloaded that on there or I copied and pasted that on there, and I actually was able to get, I can’t remember exactly how many conversions out of it but I paid less than $5 a conversion. I know that might sound expensive like I paid $5 per sale but my minimum product, my very least expensive product was $17 for the sale.
SHANE: Her most expensive is almost $500.
JOCELYN: And so I know that at the worst case, I made at least $12 off of every $5 I spent. If I were going to trade you $5 bill for $12, would you trade?
SHANE: Every single time.
JOCELYN: I think you would. For me, it was totally worth it to do those Facebook ads.
SHANE: The big thing is, is if you’ve already got an audience, that’s the best practice on Facebook, you’ve got to target people that are familiar with your brand. If you’re just running ads and you’re just targeting random keywords, random interests, or random people in random places, you’re not going to have a lot of success on Facebook. We’ve done that in the past. We’ve put it out there, we’ve run an ad for $200 and nothing happened.
The reason was we were just being broad, random, and not targeting anybody, but we have always had success when we uploaded our email list or when we put the money upfront and we built those likes. We brought people into our fold. We used money upfront to introduce our brand to people and then we marketed products that we thought they would be interested. That familiarity is what you have to build on Facebook before you’re going to get anybody to buy your stuff.
The biggest tip on Facebook is #1 you have to spend money. You’re going to have to do it. If you don’t like it, you’re going to have to find some other place to play because Facebook is not going to give you anything for free. The next tip is you’ve got to market to people who are familiar with you, who have some kind of relationship with you. They have either signed up for your email list before.
Facebook gives you a tracking code where you can put it on your website so any visitor that comes to your website from Google or anywhere else, they get a cookie put on their computer and then when they go log into Facebook, Facebook knows they’ve been to your website and they show them your ad, that’s a way to target people that are familiar with your brand or you just pay for likes. You got to build your own audience on Facebook, introduce yourself to people, and then, later on, you can go back and market to them.
JOCELYN: The biggest thing is that no matter what –and this is on any social media platform, on any advertising platform – you need to keep an eye on your ads. If they are not working, change something. Stop the ad. Don’t spend $500 on something that’s not converting. Pay attention to what’s going on and we think that you’ll be pleasantly surprised with Facebook ads or any other kind of ads like that.
SHANE: Start everything low. Watch it. If you can get people clicking to your website, that’s a good sign. Add a little more money. If you can get people to convert, add a little more money. Don’t just throw money at the wall and hope something works. Start your Facebook ads cheap, work them up once you see something that’s working, you will probably make a few conversions and get your money back plus a lot more.
JOCELYN: Thank for your question, Laura Lynn. We hope that was helpful and we hope that was helpful with y’all who are experimenting with Facebook marketing.
SHANE: See you all next time, bye.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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Miguel says
When you started what what you best way to promote your eBook?
If you don’t have an Email list what is the Best way to start?