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Facebook Paid Advertisements

Lesson 13 from: Building Your Online Marketing Machine for Photographers

Lindsay Adler, Robert Gordon

Facebook Paid Advertisements

Lesson 13 from: Building Your Online Marketing Machine for Photographers

Lindsay Adler, Robert Gordon

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Lesson Info

13. Facebook Paid Advertisements

Lesson Info

Facebook Paid Advertisements

We asked` people in our Facebook group, and so, so many people were frustrated and said, "I spent money and it didn't get me any actual conversions, nobody liked anything," and all of this stuff. But man, it is extremely, extremely powerful if you know how to use it. Robert's gonna tell you about this. We'll go through this quickly but also give you some real tips on how to utilize this. This is a lead magnet. We ran it on Facebook recently. You got 600 leads on it in like a week? in a couple of days In a couple days. It was 15 cents per lead, which, if you do the math, that's pretty good because you're not gonna get that kind of return on it if you do a magazine advertisement or something like that. You won't be able to track it. Facebook advertising in a nutshell. About 1.5 billion people are basically on Facebook. That's 1/5th the entire world. It's got the lowest cost per 1,000 impressions which means for every 1,000 people, it's the lowest cost. Laser focused on targeting. W...

e talked about demographics and we'll get a little bit more into that. 74% of consumers rely on social networks to guide their purchasing decision. Tremendous remarketing potential. We'll talk about what remarketing is. It's one of the most effective pay channels. If you look at this, newspaper $32 per thousand people. Facebook's at the very lowest, about an average of a quarter to reach a thousand people. 10 reasons why your ads generally fail. We'll go through these quick here. Your ads don't have the right objective. Facebook, there's a bunch of objectives. I don't know to pick. We'll get into that in the next slide. Improper or no targeting. You hit boost, it doesn't go anywhere. You don't know what happened. Offer isn't compelling. You're already selling something before anybody knows who you are. Nobody cares. You're not giving people a reason to click. They're confused. Call to actions. Bad headline, copy or image. You're trying to sell to a cold audience. You're trying to offer your services before anybody knows who you are. You're spending too little. "Well, I spent $3 on my whole campaign for seven days! "Nothing happened!" You spent more than that on a latte before you got here. (crowd laughs) You're not testing, okay? Just like anything else, you have to test. Test, test, test, test. Website isn't effectively converting people. People blame Facebook all the time. "Aw, I didn't get anybody converted!" Maybe there's something wrong with your website. Maybe people went to it and they got seven pop-ups, or maybe it went to the home page. How am I supposed to-- What do you convert on the homepage? It went to the wrong thing. Ad fatigue, people are seeing it too often and they're annoyed by it. Which ad objective? Facebook has awareness, consideration, and conversion. They broke it down. It's a lot less complicated but this is still complicated. I still look these up and go what the heck one do we use? Brand awareness, traffic, engagement, conversions, lead generation. Brand awareness. You would think you'd wanna use this ad objective but you'd be wrong. It's mainly for larger audiences, targets, and things like that. Traffic, driving traffic back to your website. That's generally the one that you wanna do. Engagement, likes, clicks, comments. If for some reason that's your objective, I just wanna get a ton of likes and clicks on it, use engagement. Conversions, okay? Facebook will optimize your ad based on people who've downloaded stuff off your website or converted. We talk about what a conversion is. Conversion is whatever you want people to do. It can be download. It could be submit a form. It could be call you, as long as Facebook can understand what a conversion is. Lead generation, you can ask for stuff right on Facebook where it doesn't go off of Facebook. It's called Facebook lead ads. These are the different types that you could do. Can I add to this real quick? Sure. We talked about our content upgrades. This will actually be, you give your email right there on Facebook and it sends it to you. They don't leave. It's just really easy and there's not as much chance to lose them. You could say, "hey I got the checklist for your "wedding day, right here and it's right on Facebook!" And then it sends it to them. It's really nice. What I liked about the optimizing for conversions. I thought it was fascinating. We'll talk about this. It can tell what people behave, how they behave and how you can try to reach the people that are actually gonna do something. The only ones that I would be concerned with ever working with would be traffic and lead generation and conversions. Don't worry about anything else. If you're gonna do this for the first time, worry about, I would try to do conversions first. We'll talk a little bit more about that. Now the targeting, there's a lot of targeting on Facebook. You can do custom audiences and demographics and interests and behaviors and lookalike audiences, and you're like "I don't know what any of those are." Demographics is pretty simple, age, male/female. Interests, and their behaviors and there's a lot more categories for that too. We did this in our customer profile. We already answered some of these questions so we're helping ourselves in this step. You already know how to do this, because you did the exercise for building your audience. You already know who your target audience is. You know their interests, where they hang out. You know their behaviors. Custom audience is really cool because if you install the Facebook Pixel in your site. By install, it's basically copy... We haven't talked about Pixel yet though. I know, but copy and paste the code or something on your site. Basically what it does is, you ever go to one website, view something, you go back and it's following you. The ad, like a pair of shoes you just looked at. Follows you everywhere That's called remarketing, or retargeting. Facebook does the same thing, they do it really well. Creative Live does the same thing. Yeah, we see our own stuff all the time. I see my ads everyday, for me. I'm like "Oh, thanks!" You can create a custom audience of people who've been to your website in the last 180 days or the last 7 days, and show them ads based on that. They might not have even known that they went to your website but then you send an ad because they visited your engagement photos. All of sudden they're seeing engagement photos, an ad related to engagement photos because they viewed your page. It knows where they went on there. It knows where. That's super powerful. Create another custom audience based on people who have interacted with your posts on Facebook. Let's say you put a video out, and somebody watched 100% of that video, which is rare, but you know that they're real interested. You can run them another ad, because they already showed massive interest. That's warming people up also. Custom audiences, super powerful. We'll talk a little bit more about that. Facebook is an auction, which a lot of people forget. You spend $3, you're not gonna get it back. Do you have to spend a lot of money? Absolutely not. You can do it on $5 a day, $2 a day, run an ad for a week or three days. Important things to note for Facebook advertising. What to look at, what is your goal? I want to get people back to my website. I want them to download something. You're gonna look at, how much did this cost us? It's costing 15 cents per lead. We spent $78. It reached 20,000 people, generated 524 leads. That did pretty well. Could we get that number down? We have, and we would, but we're happy at 15 cents a lead. But we were very specific with who our demographic is, what their likes are, because we filled out who would actually be interested in downloading what we had to offer. Also, did you talk about relevancy on this one? Yeah, relevancy, it's a score from one to ten. If you ever run Facebook ads and you get a real low relevancy score, below five or six, it means your ads not doing well. The better your ad relevancy score is the cheaper it's gonna be for whatever your action is. Keep that in mind. Facebook shows you all these numbers. I don't look a half of them, we don't look at half of them, you just wanna look at how much you spent, how much it's costing your for your action, and what the relevancy is. You look at three different numbers, that's basically it. Let's see, to boost or not to boost? This is where most people get started with Facebook advertising. They see a post and it says, "Boost to reach another 1500 people." Sure, why not? They do it and nothing happens. That's what's really annoying about that. Sorry, the next slide had more information on it. Boosting optimizes for engagement automatically which means if that's not your goal, then you're selling yourself short. By engagement that means it's gonna show it to more people who are going to engage with that post, which you would think would be useful, but not necessarily. They may like and comment. Oh, great, didn't go back to my website or do anything. I got no sales from this. Right, so you're better off boosting a post that's already doing well or already getting engagement, guiding people back to your site, but if it's just like here's my photo and I boost it, that really achieves nothing for you. You're just spending money. Don't use boost, basically. I feel good about myself because I get likes. It's the short answer, okay? If you're starting with Facebook advertising, don't use boost. I don't want to say it's a complete waste of money, but there's better ways to do it. Vanity, you just liked that you got likes. Yeah, or people do it because it's their first introduction into Facebook and it doesn't anything. The Facebook Pixel, what is this? How is it relevant? Is it important? It's probably one of, if not the most important things we'll talk about the entire day. This is how we stalk you. You install this little piece of code on your site, it takes two seconds. Copy and paste, you can email Squarespace, or your web guy, or Wix or whoever, and you say, "Where do I put this thing?" What it does is when anybody visits your site, doesn't matter from where, it tags them so the next time they log into Facebook you can run advertising to them that can an infinite possibility of different things. It's super, super, super successful because somebody just saw that, you might run a top of mind ad, or you might run a blog post. You're not gonna run a direct sale off where you go they were on your engagement photos page and you run an ad about their blog post. One of the things that we had talked about. It's super powerful. You wanna install this quickly, so if it's something that you're like, "how do I do this?" Do this soon. All it is is going into Facebook, going over to where Facebook Pixel is, copy and paste into your site. We talked about custom audiences and what that is. People who visited your website, people who visited more than one page of your site, people on your email list, people who already purchased from you, people who have watched a certain length of video, people who have interacted with your post already. Here's what's really cool. We're not gonna market to people who already downloaded our lead magnet. Why are we gonna waste money on that? We're gonna basically not market to them at all because they already downloaded something. So we don't waste money. That's a custom audience. You upload all the emails of people who already purchased from you. Not gonna run the same ad. Why would I waste that money? Keys to a successful Facebook campaign. Know your audience and what stage of the funnel they're in. Don't just market to people randomly like, "Hey, I have this sale," and expect something to happen. Make sure your offer is compelling and test the ad variations, just like anything else. We just want to test and pivot, continually test. I'm gonna summarize this part. Here's what you should be taking away from this Facebook segment here. When you are on Facebook, when you sign up for an ad, you have to understand what you're trying to do. What am I trying to achieve? If it's just likes, it's hard to actually get that to be money. What is your goal? Maybe that's driving traffic to your site, but you're driving traffic to your site in a place where it's good content, where they'll engage, and then maybe has a way for them to have a content upgrade. Or maybe, right on there you have the ability for them, you run the ad so they can submit their email and get that checklist or whatever it may be. You're trying to figure out what to do that's more actionable than like my photo. Some call to action, something to get them to engage. When you do this not only do you need to figure out what you would like them to do, and that's how you figure out those objectives, but you also have to figure out very specifically who is that audience, so you have to go to that customer profile, so you can answer a lot of questions. One of the things that we had on there, there were things like lookalike audiences and demographics, I can get so specific that I can say based on where you live, your age, how much money you have, your relationship status, I mean it goes really, really, really specific. You have a really specific customer profile. You're not wasting money on people that are outside of the people you'd like to actually be your customers so you figure out who's qualified, and then only target them, so you're not wasting your money. And one of the misconceptions is when doing Facebook advertising, you're advertising to your fan base. Yes, you can advertise to people who like your page, but if you're just starting out, just building your audience that could be your friends and family, so why are you wasting your money on them? You can advertise outside of your fan page to all these different demographics. You don't need to advertise just to those fans. You would think those are the most engaged people, but as we know, if when we're first starting building our page it's like we're building our friends and family so they're not gonna buy from us. What you wanna do, is you wanna figure out those objectives, what you're trying to achieve that's actually actionable, more than just liking. Specifically, who you're trying to reach that customer profile, and then what you're going to do as well, is you're going to install this Facebook Pixel thing. Like we said, you can ask your host or you can figure this out, it's real simple. It's a piece of code. You can then from there see how they're interacting with your site and target specifically to those people. This is perhaps a little bit more advanced than your first Facebook ad you do. Just know that that exists. For the first ads that you're doing, the most important thing that I would say so that you're not grumpy about it all is testing, because I notice vastly different responses to my Facebook ads based on the photo that I've chosen, the call to action, the words that I've used, the audience that I've chosen. Every time that we run any sort of ad, we do several versions of them. We're running them at the same time, and we can give it a couple days so you can see which ones are doing well. I'll give a little bit of money to each, and when I see what one is doing well, I kill the rest of them, because when an ad performs better, it actually decreases your cost per conversion, or per click, or per view. What I'll do is we'll test six, seven versions of it, and we'll just change little things. We'll see this one's doing good, and then pour more money into that. But where you wanna know, is you cannot spend two, three dollars. It just doesn't work that way. You do need to figure out a budget. Think of it like this, if you're a high-end wedding photographer and you're charging $10,000, $12, for a wedding. If it ends up that you're spending, per lead a dollar or two, but you have the potential to nurture that and turn it into a wedding client then that's not so bad. But, if you're a much lower end and you're spending two, five, seven dollars a lead, and your average package, $100, that might not be the right investment. You have to actually figure out what are you spending on, and then what are you trying to get them to convert to to figure out how much of a budget to give. You have any final thoughts on that? It's still one of the most cost effective ways. You understand, this can be a little daunting and I'm sure everybody's tried Facebook after. We've tried and failed a million times. Test it. Yeah, so we've gotten things down pretty much to a pretty good level. It's not throwing money away because a lot of people start with the wrong intention. They start with a boost, and then you're getting likes and clicks, you go this did nothing for me. When you pick the optimization or pick the ad objective, like traffic to your website, Facebook knows. It's got some really unbelievable algorithm that knows. It's gonna show ads to people that are more likely to click to your website, or more likely to fill out a lead magnet, or more likely to fill out your contact form. It knows this. The more you do it you can figure out which audiences, and which demographics. You start to see which ones are responding well, and so then you can target those again in the future or make changes. To summarize all of that, just to give you that idea, you've gotta test. It's not gonna work the first time. Do different variations, when you figure out what's successful, give more money to that and don't run it just a couple days with a couple dollars. If you've done that before and it didn't work, there's your reason. Once you've collected the Pixel data, how do you create a custom audience based on it? Okay, basically under audiences in Facebook there is an area that says custom audiences, and you basically create it based on what you want. If your objective is your email list, you can upload a CSV file, an Excel sheet of all your customers or all people who performed a certain action. Say you uploaded all the people who downloaded your lead magnet. That way you're either marketing to them again, or you're excluding them because you don't want them to download something they already downloaded. Or if it's an action they took on the website, I want to target people who visited my pricing page twice in the last three days, or the last seven days. Obviously they're interested in pricing. Now I'm going to show them an ad for a sale that I'm doing. Wait, I was just looking at that photographer, now he's got a 50% off sale or 50% off on an album. That's really going to be where the power of that is, especially website custom audiences. One of the things that we think is valuable is we wanted to give you as much information as possible because as you can see, we didn't show you how to install the Pixel, and then how to go through step by step, but now you know it exists. There's 8 billion different things of how to install the Pixel, but if you didn't know what a custom audience is, how would you know to go create it? We wanted to give you that information so you know. You know what, that might be a good idea. They looked at the boudoir page. I'm gonna create a custom audience based on that. Our idea was not to have you click and follow how we clicked through Facebook. Anyone can show you that, but instead ideas you might have for utilizing it for your business.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Content Marketing Guide
Building Your Online Marketing Machine Keynote

Ratings and Reviews

Rajiv Chopra
 

This is a very good class indeed. Everyone needs a Robert, and Lindsay is definitely smart to have Robert with her. The combination, where she paints the big picture, and he gets into some of the nitty-gritty, is brilliant. They have two different styles, and they play off each other very well There is a wealth of information here, and enough tips for someone to explore further For me this is a very useful 'class'. I have built brands for companies, and other people, but never did focus on myself! So, this fits perfectly in what I was looking for. So, kudos to Lindsay and Robert. Or, should I say, 'Bravo'?!

Cindee Still
 

Wow! Being in the audience you could feel Lindsay's passion for her art. She is a fabulous speaker captivating the attention of her audience. She and Robert a wealth of information that they are sharing so others can succeed too. My mind was blown. I'm so glad I will have access to this class on my computer so I can digest the information in smaller chunks as I move my online business forward.

PETE
 

She is an amazing teacher. Gordon is brilliant. would love to see more of him. Just wish Lindsay would stop posing the whole time. she'd be just as beautiful without so much makeup, the heels, the hand on hip and angling herself the whole time. Another great class.

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