In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm reviewing another section of the seminar I presented on July 27, 2014 at the JA NY show. This segment is about paying for traffic on Facebook; should you be doing that?
Paying for online advertising always has a right way and a wrong way. Typically the wrong way is seriously wrong and it's a complete waste of money. Most businesses, not just retail jewelers, are advertising on Facebook wrong.
Once upon a time, any business could set up a Facebook business page and ask all their customers to Like them. Those people would then see all, or most, of the posts made by that page. This was a ton of free adverting offered by Facebook for small businesses, and it was really good up until Facebook became a public company.
Facebook now needs to make money, as we all do. So they changed the way page posts work, limiting the number of people who will see each of your posts. Typically, the only people who see your posts now are those who have recently viewed one of your previous posts. This means that they intentionally looked at your page, liked, or commented on one of your posts. This creates a repetitive cycle of the same people seeing your posts while others completely forget that you exist.
I've seen pages with 800 likes only reaching 25 people. Similarly, I've seen pages with 3000 likes only reaching 100 people. These pages that don't socially engage, reach fewer people every day.
Pages wanting to reach their fan base are now required to pay at least $5 to "boost" a post. FB's latest incarnation of page boosting now allows you to simply throw money at the post, hoping it will reach your audience. This is what the boost post screen looks like as of today:
But instead of simply boosting a post to reach people, you should be using the Create Audience tool to select who to boost your post to. Here's the screen shot of that:
Once you dive into that Audience Tool, you start to realize that you can choose target segmenting that's very sophisticated. You have the availability to show your post to more than just the people who like your page. You can target by age, income, relationship status, and a lot more.
Here's where things get interesting, because a savvy marketer would recognize that they can create different ads to appropriately target people in those different segments, which means you probably shouldn't waste your time trying to boost a single post to the broad audience of people, and their friends, who like your page.
The better approach is to create ads that will capture the attention of target segments that you identify through the Create Audience tool. The challenge here is for jewelers to take the time to segment their audience, and then come up with an ad creative that will resonate with the chosen audience. This is not an easy task, but it's one that I feel everyone can learn to do.
Other than choosing who to target, and what to show them, another part of the Facebook ads is the ability to choose a "result." Most of the time business owners are doing what they expect they should be doing, which is trying to "reach" more people or get more people to "like" their page. Sadly though, it's impossible to measure an ROI of these "results."
FB has 8 possible results to choose from as of today:
Here's what those mean:
1. Page Post Engagement - Pick one of your recent posts and show it to more people.
2. Page Likes - Get more people to like your page. This goal also requires you to have a lot of personal interaction through your FB page in order to see financial results..
3. Clicks to Website - Get them off FB and to your website where you can control what they see and then tag them using Google AdWords Remarketing or Facebook Retargeting. This allows you to advertise to them again and again without paying FB for another ad.
4. Website Conversions - You can use this if you have an e-commerce website or if you have a way to measure a conversion, for example, when someone fills out a contact form.
5. App Installs - Used by developers who want to sell their apps.
6. App Engagement - Used by developers who want to increase the number of people actively using their app.
7. Event Responses - Jewelers can set up events through FB and then advertise it. This would be good for Ladies Nights or Trunk Shows. The Facebook Events platform is good for getting people more interested and signing up for an event.
8. Offer Claims - Stores who offer special discounts could use this ad type to promote that discount.
Of those 8, the Clicks to Website option is the only one I feel is worth paying for.
With the "Clicks to Website" goal in mind I have this 5 part magic formula for what jewelers should be doing with Facebook advertising:
1. Identify your target audience using the Create Audience or the Audience Insights tool that FB provides.
2. Set up a special landing page on your website that will appeal to that audience. Try to sell something on that page, or invite them into the store for a reason related to that ad.
3. Develop an ad creative that will match the landing page. Include some wording that invites them to "click for more"
4. Set up Google AdWords Remarketing that will capture the people clicking the ad and landing on that page. This gets saved for the future.
5. In the future, you can then use Google AdWords to show another round of ads to those same people who clicked your FB ad. You can keep showing ads to that group of people for 540 days.
Sadly, most FB advertising is done without a strategy. Jewelry stores should be using FB as a social network by communicating with the customer who has already purchased from them. Existing customers love it because they feel special, and it shows potential new customers that you are not only interested in their money.
If you feel that you don't know how Facebook works, or you don't understand if it has an effect on your bottom line, then that's probably because you haven't yet used any type of advanced digital segmenting in any of your advertising. Segmenting really does make a difference.
Figuring all this out is not easy, and no one probably told you this type of targeting was even possible.
There's a lot of media buzz telling you to boost posts for "like" and "reach," but that's just money flushed away. Don't listen to the media buzz and what the majority of other people talk about.
I have one final thought with regard to FB marketing specialists that will post on behalf of your jewelry store. These services do have low costs because they are posting the same thing for multiple jewelers. Sometimes they boost posts to improve the reach of those posts. Many jewelers believe this is the correct way, and it's difficult to prove otherwise without asking them to have faith in a larger marketing strategy. It's easier to pay a "FB specialist" a small monthly fee than to do nothing.
