EPISODE 20 OF THE MARKETING SOLUTIONS PODCAST: ONLY HAVE A SMALL BUDGET FOR FACEBOOK ADS? HERE'S THE STRATEGY WE USE FOR OUR CLIENTS.

Sonya McIntyre-Reid:

Hello. This is something I've been wanting to talk about for a long time, but I have so many thoughts around this that I've actually had to really scale it back [inaudible 00:00:37], so that you have a straight answer to the question that everyone keeps asking me and it keeps popping up time and time again. And that question is, "I only have a small budget for Facebook and Instagram ads. What should my strategy be?"

What do you mean by small, firstly, because I say anything $500 and below a month as being small when it comes to social media advertising. Realistically, if you want massive amounts of leads and business, you generally need a bigger ad spend. And as a rule of thumb, I say $10 per ad set per day. So if you have a number of different audiences such as one warm and one cold, that's $20 a day. But then to effectively generate leads, you really need a three-tiered approach. So you're looking at timing that by three, which is $6 per day. I get that for a lot of businesses, this isn't possible with the stage of business that they're at, and I'll talk about this three-tiered strategy more down the track. I've got some absolute gurus lined up to discuss this with me.

So what are the alternatives? Okay, here is a tactic we've been taking for some of our small business clients. We film a video to release every two weeks. This can be a Frequently Asked Questions or a great branding video. This is released organically on their social media. We then jump in the back-end of Ads Manager and set up a small daily budget for the rest of the month with either the video views or engagement objective. Now you might only spend a $1.50 per day on this, but what really matters is the audience that you're advertising to.

I've said it once and I'll say it again, you need to make use of custom audiences in the back-end of Facebook, specifically the audience of people who have visited your website, hello, Facebook pixel, have you got that installed, and the people who've engaged with your page previously as well as your mailing list. I'll do an entire episode on custom audiences because I feel it's really the key to successful Facebook advertising. If you can't wait for that podcast episode though, just Google Facebook Custom Audiences plus Facebook Blueprint and a free training from Facebook will pop up. Thank me later.

Okay, so what you need to do in your audiences is advertise to your website traffic as well as anyone who is engaged with your page and your email list or your customer database. This will mean that you keep building that trust factor with people who are already paying attention. You're focusing towards the end of the funnel rather than the top where it's a cold audience. That said, you also need to be reaching a new audience too and feeding the funnel at the top. So I recommend either creating a lookalike audience from your existing client base or getting crystal clear on your client, advertising to them as well in a separate ad set.

Once you've advertised to these people, you can then set up a page-like ad that goes out to anyone who has either engaged with your page or watched a certain percentage of the video based on the objective you chose in the first campaign. And this will then go out to the people that have engaged in some way or have been to your website, but aren't currently following you on social media. So the reason I like to do it this way is because if you run page-like ads to a cold audience, you may find that you get a low cost per like. But what will happen is, Facebook will send them out content to see if you will engage with it.

Seriously, next time you like a page on Facebook or Instagram, notice that suddenly you see two or three posts of theirs pop up even if they are old content pieces. If you then don't go and engage with that content, you're not likely to see a lot of their posts down the track. Whereas, if we do it the other way around and make sure that you've engaged in some way by watching part of a video or reacting to a post and then you go to like the page, you'll have a much more engaged audience and a higher reach.

So just to recap, custom audiences are key here, as is good video content that people find interesting. It doesn't need to be of a high production value, but it does need to be interesting. You also need to make sure you've got the pixel on your website. Again, this is something that I sound like a broken record over, but it's so important. Your website and social media work hand-in-hand. You need your mailing list or database of customers uploaded into the back-end of the Business Manager as a custom audience as well. Nurture these people. And then also start reaching a cold audience to fill that funnel.

So really guys, this does come back to how can we spread word of mouth? We're using social media to amplify that referral and word of mouth process, and that's always going to be the most effective form of marketing. So if you think about it that way, with nurturing a warm audience rather than going out to all of these stratagems and hitting them with an ad once, it's going to be far more effective for you.

I know this is a lot of information that I've just thrown at you and I've probably given you a lot of terminology and things that if you're not familiar with the back-end of the Facebook Ads Manager and Business Manager, it's not going to make much sense. So I've put together a flow on how this works as a freebie for you. Just head to my website, kiss marketing.com.au/free to go and download that. Hey, happy Facebook advertising.