In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, I detailed the difference between boosting a Facebook post vs. targeting an audience with a specific post or ad. I also provided a strategy to use Facebook advertising more effectively using Google AdWords Remarketing and Facebook Retargeting.
I'm a big fan of the remarketing features because they can be used to lower your monthly online advertising expense. As of today, very few retail jewelers are using the remarketing technique, which means there's plenty of chance to steal a few customers away from your competition.
In the heated competition between you and your local competitor, you can use remarketing as a trump card. Imagine this... A local customer browses for a new local jeweler. They visit your website and the website of two other local jewelers. They will probably visit the store with the website that appears to best serve their need, which could be a product or a service that they are looking for.
Let's assume for a moment that this customer chose your competitor over you purely based on your website. You still have a chance to recapture the sale if you are using both Google Remarketing and Facebook Retargeting. Although they chose to visit your competitor, the retargeting would allow you to immediately sneak ads to their Facebook feed, and they will see those ads while using Facebook from their smartphone.
In other words, there's a chance you could still have a sale even though they are thinking about going to your competitor.
Here's how it plays out...
- Potential customer searches Google for a jeweler.
- They look at the jewelry repair page on your site and on your competitor's site.
- They choose your competitor because they are faster to get to while out running errands.
- While out running their errands, they are also chatting with their friends on Facebook.
- They see a special post by your store's FB page promoting a special on all jewelry repairs.
- The special catches their attention and they tap it (it's a smartphone they are using).
- They decide to cash in on that special and drive a little further to your store instead of to your competitor.
In this scenario, the potential customer doesn't realize that they were remarketed. You captured a sale you would otherwise have lost to your competitor. The initial visit to your website allowed it to happen.
Let me explain how this would work in more detail so you can implement it...
First: You need to make sure your website ranks in Google. I think that's obvious, but I wanted to make sure to cover everything. Please see my previous 1051 Daily Nuggets for ranking ideas.
Second: You need to set up Facebook Retargeting on your website. You need to manage your tagging so you can identify which single products people are looking at, single pages, or sections of your website. In the above example, I would have tagged this person with the "jewelry repair page" tag.
Third: Create a page post for that "special." I've carefully avoided using the word "offer" because of the FB "Offer" feature that your page already has. Facebook's own statistics have shown that those offers have a very low effectiveness, so don't bother. Instead, you need to create a special status update detailing how great you are at jewelry repair and give some incentive to everyone who mentions this post the next time they bring in a repair.
However, there's a little trick to this. You see, you don't simply want to slap that status update to your page that's visible to everyone because that's really a broad strategy that won't work very well. Instead, you have to create something called a "Dark Post," which sounds a little devious, but it's not.
The Dark Post is a normal status update to your page that doesn't appear in the regular feed. The only way to see it is to have a link to it, in other words, use it in an ad. You can create as many Dark Posts as you need to associate with your retargeting.
Here's an example screen shot of creating a Dark Post using the "Create Unpublished Page Post" screen. This is a "link type" post. The red arrow points to the magic option that turns this into a hidden post on your page.
Here's an example of the "status type" post. Again, the red arrow point to the option which states "this post will only be used as an ad."
The text in the above example ad says:
Jewelry Repair Special
Mention this post the next time you bring in a repair and we'll take 10% off.
Our bench jeweler has 35 years of jewelry repair experience repairing all types of jewelry.
Valid once per customer.
Creating these Dark Posts can only be done from within the Facebook Power Editor. The Power Editor is an option from within Facebook's Ads Manager. The screen shot below shows where you can find it...
By the way, the Power Editor only works in the Google Chrome web browser. I'm not providing directions on how to get to the Ads Manager or using the Power Editor because FB tends to rearrange things a lot. So just do a Google search for "facebook dark post" or "facebook unpublished post" to find the latest directions.
To wrap this all up, hopefully you can see how fantastic these Dark Posts are for your marketing, especially when teamed up with Facebook Retargeting. Have you ever wondered what the ROI is on your Facebook posts? Well, when you use ad copy similar to what I gave you above, they will be forced to tell you they saw the ad. All you have to do is make sure to keep track of who tells you what and you'll be able to track the sales from this marketing strategy.
