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Likes & Comments Are Nice…But Leads Pay The Bills

Every day, I speak to anywhere between 3-10 prospects looking to generate leads via Facebook Ads.

Many of them have tried Facebook Marketing before without any luck. So I ask them, “What was your strategy?”

The answer is like a broken record: “We hired someone to do posts every day and we got likes and comments, but no leads/sales”.

I then explain that in my opinion there are two types of Facebook Marketing.

 

Option 1: Post & Hope – This is what I call organic posting.

About 5 years ago, Facebook changed the way they display organic (free) posts. In the past, an organic post would be seen by the majority of people that liked/followed your page. However, in 2019 that figure is closer to the 3-5% of people that like/follow your page.

Facebook’s solution? “Boost” the post. Boosting a post basically means that Facebook will now charge money to show your organic posts to the audience you worked so hard to build for years.

The real kicker is that prior to this, many businesses ran ad campaigns to get people to “Like” their page, only to have to pay to reach those people again.

 

So, is “boosting” a real solution?

Boosting is the easy solution to the existing problem, but it doesn’t guarantee success.

When you boost a post, you are essentially paying to reach as many people in your audience you can afford within your budget. But boosting bypasses the real goal: not REACH, but rather, CONVERSIONS.

 

Option 2: Facebook For Lead Generation – or in other words – Facebook Ads with REAL RESULTS.

If you’re serious about generating leads from Facebook Ads, option 2 is for you.

This is where you create a specific, actionable offer, send prospects to a landing page to find out more and capture their details so you can follow up with them.

For service-based businesses, I truly believe the internet (in particular Facebook) is a great way to find your ideal customers, but the sale is in the follow-up.

My advice… don’t be scared to ask for a mobile number on your landing page form… don’t be scared to pick up the phone and call the leads. Don’t just rely on an automated email stream.

 

Here’s proof that works…

Example 1: 122 leads at $7.18 a lead – The results so far for one of our clients in the massage therapy industry.

 

Example 2: Who said Facebook Ads weren’t a good fit for B2B? One of our clients is a master of client retention…literally!

He’s managed (with our help of course) to generate over 100 leads at just $13 a lead!

Example 3: One of our acupuncture clients, is absolutely killing it with their latest offer.

Quality leads at less than $4 plus a CTR of just under 5%, proving the offer fits their marketplace perfectly.

 

Want to generate leads via Facebook Ads for your business?

Simply schedule your FREE Facebook Ad Consultation here: https://calendly.com/mitchgibson/facebookads

or call our team on 02 8915 6229 for more information.

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How To Use Insured Prize Money With Your Facebook Advertising Campaign

Have you ever wondered how certain companies can offer ridiculously high prizes such as $1,000,000 as part of their Facebook Ad campaign?

There’s a good chance they are taking advantage of “Insured Prize Money”.

What is Insured Prize Money?

Insured prize money is exactly that, so let’s say you want to run a Facebook Ad campaign where anyone that purchases your product within a certain time period goes in the draw to win $50,000.

Instead of coming up with the $50,000 yourself, you can purchase a premium to access $50,000 for just $1400!

 

Here’s How It Works

  1. You determine the length of your Insured Prize Promotion” – e.g.: 3 months
  2. You determine the $ amount, this can scale from $50,000 up to $1,000,0000. The premiums start at $1400 for $50,000 and are on a sliding scale up to $16,000 to insure $1,000,000 worth of prize money.
  3. At the end of your promotional period, you choose a “preliminary winner” (normally a random draw from all of your entries) and that person is invited to participate in the “Major Prize Spin” which is held online and involves an electronic spinning wheel with 250 numbers.
  4. Your “preliminary prize winner” uses a desktop or mobile device and enters a selected number between 1 and 250 – and then spins the electronic wheel.
  5. If his or her number becomes the winner, he/she wins the prize amount.

 

Who can take advantage of Insured Prize Money?

This offer is exclusive to clients of LBD Marketing that use our Facebook Advertising services. We have a partnership with the insurer directly to offer you a discounted price on your premiums.

 

How do I get started?

Simply schedule your FREE Facebook Ad Consultation here: https://calendly.com/mitchgibson/facebookads

or call our team on 02 8915 6229 for more information.

 

 

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Creating a “Trust-Based” Funnel Using Facebook Ads

If you are selling a high-end product or service, you need to create a “trust-based” funnel to get your leads to commit.

As much as we would like it, 99 times out of 100, you will be destined for failure if you think you can sell a high-end service without building a trusted relationship first.

By high end, I mean services and products like:

  • Advanced Courses (Over $1000)
  • Business Coaching & Consulting
  • Multi-Day Educational Workshops

So how do you build a Trust Funnel using Facebook Ads?

Start by giving away free content, whether it’s an eBook or webinar or even a seminar.

Either way, when asking people to opt in, don’t be afraid to ask for their mobile number.

I’m a huge believer that the internet is a great place to source your leads for high-end services/products but the sale is built through a relationship over the phone or face to face.

If they aren’t willing to give you their phone number, they probably aren’t willing to give you their credit card either.

In the example below, we show one of our clients who is offering a free webinar on how to publish a best selling book.

Once you have the lead’s details, it’s important to add them to an email sequence to build further trust.

This could be as simple as asking them how they liked your ebook/webinar etc, or you could give them further content to digest.

Here are a few simple templates you can use for your trust funnel:

Email 1: The Thank You Email – Sent Immediately

Hi {First Name}

Thanks for registering for/downloading my FREE Webinar/eBook {Name of your webinar or eBook}.

In case you haven’t had a chance to look at our webinar/ebook yet, here is the link again: {insert link to content here}

Thanks again,

Your Name.

Email 2: The Follow-Up – 2 days later

Hi {First Name}

Just a quick email to see if you have had the chance to read/watch my eBook/Webinar?

If so, what did you think?

If not, here is the link again: {insert link to content here}

Thanks again,

Your Name

Email 3: The Reveal – (For a service) – 2 days later

Hi {First Name}

We’ve had such good feedback from our ebook/webinar that we’ve decided to launch an advanced program called {name of high-end service}.

If you’d like to discuss how this program could help you, I’d love to organise a quick call with you.

Here is the link to my appointment booker, feel free to schedule a time that suits you best:

{Insert link to scheduling tool, I would recommend calendly.com}.

Thanks again,

Your Name

Email 3: The Reveal – (For a product/course) – 2 days later

Hi {First Name}

We’ve had such good feedback from our ebook/webinar that we’ve decided to launch an advanced course called {name of high-end product}.

We’d love to have you as part of the program. However, we do have limited places available.

To ensure you don’t miss out, you can register here: {payment checkout form URL}

Thanks again,

Your Name

So what do you think?

It’s time to take action! Start a Facebook Advertising campaign with LBD Marketing today or call (02) 8915 6229 for more information.

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Facebook Advertising Objectives: Links Clicks v Conversions

Traditionally, the biggest question with pay per click advertising is, “How much do you pay per click?”

The lower the better, right? Well, with Facebook Ads, not always…

When creating a new Facebook advertising campaign, you’ll find you’re asked to choose an objective.

The most common options are “Link Clicks” and “Conversions.”

NOTE: For the conversions objective to work, you need to have the Facebook pixel installed.

So let’s say once you set up your targeting, there ended up being 100,000 people that matched your desired criteria.

Imagine those 100,000 people sitting in one big football stadium.

If you chose the “Link Clicks” objective,  your ad will be shown to a random selection of people within your target audience.

However, if you chose the “Conversions,” Facebook will be a little bit more picky on how it chooses who sees your ad.

How does Facebook decide who to show your ad to?

Generally, Facebook will first look at the existing people that have converted on previous campaigns using the Facebook pixel. However, this can take 50-100 conversions before it starts to build an ideal profile.

If you’ve never run a campaign before, it will more than likely show the ad to people that have opted in to similar offers from other advertisers.

So essentially, with conversions as the objective, you get the cream of the crop when it comes to audience selection.

Best of all, as you continue to get more leads, Facebook further optimizes your ideal prospect to get the best quality leads Facebook has to offer.

So what’s the catch?

The catch is that with conversions, you’ll find that the CPC (cost per click) can be up to 3 times higher than if you chose Link Clicks as your objective.

However, as I mentioned earlier, the cost per click is irrelevant, and what you should be focusing on is the CPL (cost per lead).

In our experience as a Facebook Advertising Agency, the conversion rate (the percentage of people that click on ad who register their details) is 3-5 times higher. So in most cases, you get a higher quality lead at a lower cost and all you have to do is sacrifice your ego when it comes to traffic statistics.

So what do you think?

It’s time to take action! Start a Facebook Advertising campaign with LBD Marketing today or call (02) 8915 6229 for more information.

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Audience, Offer & Destination – The 3 Steps to a Successful Facebook Ad Campaign.

I probably speak to 3-5 new prospects a day looking for a Facebook Ad Agency and I’ve come to find the majority say “Mitch, Facebook Ads don’t work for us. We’ve tried boosting a post and it produced a few comments but no sales.”

I then go on to ask what their strategy was, usually with the sound of crickets in the background.

In my opinion, boosting a post is simply a branding ploy, which is fine, however our goal is to get real leads that turn into sales, so you can put food on the table for your family.

To achieve this, we use a 3 step process known as audience, offer and destination.

I’ll break down each of these so you know why they’re important.

Audience

When small business owners think of their ideal audience, they usually think along the lines of “Women aged 30-50 living in Sydney.”

While that may be the case, to get a good result with Facebook ads, you need to dig deeper.

At LBD Marketing, we like to work with a “warm audience” first.

We are lucky enough that Facebook gives us the opportunity to create custom audiences from assets we already own.

There are a few ways to create a custom audience, but the most common are:

an email or mobile phone list of your past/current customers
your website traffic (given you have the Facebook pixel installed on your website)
an industry-specific email list

Lets say you had a list of past clients who have a common interest in that they have already purchased your product or service. With Facebook Audiences, you can upload a CSV/Excel list of emails or mobile numbers and Facebook will match them to an existing account.

Once you have done that, you can expand that audience by creating a “Lookalike Audience,” also known as a LAL.

A LAL is created by looking at the characteristics of the custom audience and finding similar people on Facebook that also have those traits in common.

You can still segment this LAL via age. location, gender etc. In our experience, a LAL will give you a better audience that produces better results.

Offer

The second step in our Facebook ad strategy is the offer. Going for the direct sell usually doesn’t work too well on Facebook.

Our goal is to create trust in order to build a lead that can turn into a high ticket sale.

One of the ways we do this is via an ebook or some other type of content bait.

The reason this really works is that it gives you, the small business owner, the opportunity to show off your expertise while capturing the lead’s details at the same time.

For example, one of our clients provides personal consulting to help business owners retain existing clients.

He has a high ticket service, and if he simply put out an ad saying, “We help you retain your clients, we charge $XXXX – wanna buy?” – he would have received absolutely no response.

Instead, he gives away an ebook educating his clients about the “3 Reasons Why Clients Leave & What You Can Do About It.”

This is a copy of the ad below:

 

Facebook Ad Agency

The take-away from this step is that Facebook ads work better when you are willing to provide value first, build trust and then move on to the sale once you have developed the relationship.

Destination

The last step of our Facebook Ad strategy is “destination,” and it’s the step that gets ignored the most.

By destination, I mean, where do the prospects land once they click on your ad?

In most cases, small business owners send their ad traffic to the home page of their website. The problem with doing this is a home page generally has no direct offer and no way of capturing lead details.

What you should be doing is sending them to an offer-specific landing page.

The difference between a landing page and a website is that a landing page focuses on one specific offer. It has no navigation menu, so there is only one thing for the prospect to do: fill in their details.

Going back to the Masters of Client Retention example from step 2, here is the landing page:

Facebook Advertising Agency

As you will see, it is very direct and straight to the point. The call to action is to download the ebook and nothing is there to distract the visitor from going anywhere else.

So what do you think?

It’s time to take action! Start a Facebook Advertising campaign with LBD Marketing today or call (02) 8915 6229 for more information.

 

 

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Local Area Marketing Using Facebook Ads

Local business – it’s the forefront of our economy, it’s were community meets business. Unfortunately, the internet boom has caused many brick and mortar local businesses to lose significant market share. In this blog article, I will share with you some great tips to running a successful local area marketing campaign using Facebook advertising (all for much less than you would pay for a local newspaper ad).

First though, let’s look at how local businesses have traditionally marketed their business.

Letterbox drops: While these can be effective, they are not highly  targeted and the cost to print and deliver them starts to add up.

Newspaper Ads: Local newspapers live off advertising revenue. However, this once “mega-source” of leads is draining out. Don’t let them fool you with their false readership numbers. Just because they say they deliver 100,000 newspapers, doesn’t mean that 100,000  people actually read them – and for those who do read them, they need to see your ad and have a need for your service. The pool of opportunity just gets smaller and smaller! (I should know…I worked in local newspaper advertising for 2 years.)

Referrals and Word of Mouth: Ideally the best way to grow a customer base; however, you can’t always control how much business you generate from this source.

So, why Facebook?

Ok, let’s look at the facts!

If you were to walk the streets and ask every person if they had a Facebook account, I can assure you 85% of them would say they do.

This is where your potential customers are socialising. Treat Facebook as the modern day equivalent of a networking event.

Now that we understand that Facebook is a great medium to find new customers (especially for Local Area Marketing), here is how we do it.

I am going to use one of our clients – My Fitness Club – who have fitness gyms on both the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast in Queensland.

We recognised that the majority of people that attend a gym live within 10 km of the location, otherwise they don’t go.

Facebook allows us to target a radius around the location of that gym to ensure it is only showing our ads to potential customers located within that area. This is why Facebook is the obvious choice when it comes to Local Area Marketing.

Local Area Marketing

Once we have our target, we then create multiple different ads using varying  imagery to see which works best.

Here are 2 examples:

Local Area Marketing Local Area Marketing

The next step is  VERY, VERY IMPORTANT!

Instead of just sending leads generated by  ads to the client’s  website, we direct them to  a customised landing page. This allows us to mate the ad offer with the website, which increase the chances of getting their details.

In this case, the offer was a free 2 week trial.

Here is the landing page:

Local Area Marketing

 

We then tracked how many people clicked on the ads, and how many people entered their details on the landing page:

Local Area Marketing

This strategy produced a 12.5% conversion rate. For anyone that actively tracks their conversion rate on their website, will know that anything over 3-4% is considered a win.

One thing to note is that you don’t need a massive budget to run a successful Facebook Advertising campaign.

At LBD, we recommend a minimum budget of $600 per month in advertising spend (which works out to roughly $20 per day).

It’s time to take action! Start a Facebook Advertising campaign with LBD Marketing today or call (02) 8915 6229 for more information.

 

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The Cost of a New Customer

You may know how much your sales are worth. You surely know your costs. You might even have your budgets planned for the next few years. You probably have some of your ROI figured out for your marketing plans.

If you have made it to our blog, you are probably one of those digging for new and creative solutions to find new customers.

But do you really know how much your customers are worth?

A perfect marketing solution will not only take into account what it costs to get a new customer; it will also consider what your customers are really worth to your business.

You might say:

I own a small business. I’m concerned with my day to day operations and getting through this quarter with slow, controlled growth. I know how much I am able to spend on marketing, so why should I worry about more math?

The answer is simple, and once you realise it, it will entirely change how you look at marketing.

A customer is not worth just a sale. A customer is not worth only how much you are willing to spend on your marketing. A customer is worth much more than that.

Here at LBD, we like to break it down into a simple equation.

Here it is:

If I was sitting in a room with you now, and I had an unlimited amount of your target customers waiting to buy your product or service, how much would you pay to let each customer through the door?

This is the real “cost of a customer” – also known as the customer acquisition cost.

To work this out, you need to consider a few things.

  1. How much you make each sale? (If this varies, use an average based on your last 20 sales, or use the lowest sale price possible if you want to be really safe.)
  2. How much profit do you make from each sale?
  3. Is the customer going to pay once, or recurring?

If it’s a on-off sale, then you need to acquire the customer for less than the profit of that sale.

If the profit is $100, then anything under that is net profit.

If you sell a recurring product or service in which a new customer might pay each month based on a subscription, your aim is to acquire the new customer for under the first month’s sale price, then profit in the following months.

Think of it like this: if you could go to a bank and swap $50 for $100, how many times would you line up to do so? As many times as you can!

Remember, there is no single figure that meets the needs of every business—small businesses are all different.

So what’s the best way to acquire new customers at a profit?

Facebook Ads for sure….However only if your strategy is on point. You’ll see what I mean when you look at our Facebook Advertising Case Studies – the results speak for themselves.

It’s time to take action! Start a Facebook Advertising campaign with LBD Marketing today or call (02) 8915 6229 for more information.

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Before you spend another marketing dollar, ask yourself this….

Before you spend another marketing dollar, ask yourself this question:

If you and I were sitting in a room and there were an unlimited amount of customers waiting outside the door ready to buy your product or service, what would be the maximum you would pay to let each customer through that door?

That is what marketing is all about. It’s a measured approach to buying new customers.

Finding out how much it’s worth to buy a customer is called your “allowable acquisition cost.

In plain English “allowable acquisition cost” means, “How much can you afford to pay to acquire a new customer?”

How do you figure out this number for your business? The answer to this depends on what you sell and how often your customer buys from you.

If you sell a one-off product that costs $200 at a 50% profit margin, anything under the $100 mark is profit.

If you sell a recurring product or service for $200 a month, the aim is to acquire the customer for a cost below the first month’s payment, so that in months 2, 3, 4 and 5 you start to profit on your investment.

Once you have figured out how much you can afford to pay to acquire a customer, it’s time to figure out a marketing strategy to acquire them.

At LBD Marketing, our favourite strategy is Facebook Ads. We find this is the most measurable way to acquire new customers for our clients.

We then use the following mathematical equation to find the acquisition cost:

Number of Clicks (Eg: 1,000 clicks) x Cost Per Click (Eg: $2) divided by (/) the Number of Conversions (Eg: 100 conversions or 10%) = Cost Per Lead ($1000 x $2 = $2000 spend divided by 100 leads = $20 per lead)

Note: The actual amount per lead will vary depending on your offer and your industry.

Once you have your cost per lead, you then need to see how many leads it will take to convert a sale.

In this case, if we have an allowable acquisition cost of $100, we will need to convert 1 in 5 leads.

It’s time to take action! Start a Facebook Advertising campaign with LBD Marketing today or call (02) 8915 6229 for more information.

 

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Double Your Facebook Audience with Lookalike Audiences

In the first scene of the first Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Dr. Jones has to replace a golden idol with another object of similar weight and size so that he does not set off a series of ancient traps that might prevent his escape. The object he chose to replace the idol with was a bag of sand, and, suffice it to say, it did not work. Had he an object that was more precisely similar, he may have found himself a safe exit, though it may have provided a far less exciting introduction to the film.

What Indiana needed was a look-a-like; something that very closely resembled what he sought out. Perhaps if he had a Facebook account, or at least the internet, he would have been able to find one.

You see, fellow marketing adventurers, Facebook offers us with a way to create Lookalike Audiences. Maybe we can’t make replica golden idols, but we can easily and quickly expand our marketing outreach with just a few clicks.

A Lookalike Audience provides a way to take the guessing out of ad targeting and is especially useful for those of us who already have a strong base audience, or even those who want a quick and legitimate expansion of their target audience.

Facebook Advertising can be a powerful tool with just the basic targeting options, but it might feel like there is still a core group of your potential audience that you are not reaching. Instead of running multiple test ads on sample demographics, try to let the data rich Facebook network develop a custom audience.

To create a Lookalike Audience, you just go to the Ad Tools bar and select Audiences. You may have already created a few custom audiences based on people who have made purchases through your site or even just an email list. Facebook can create a Lookalike Audience based on one of your already existing custom audiences, on conversion pixels, or just from your fans. This new group will have similar interests and take similar actions to your already existing audiences.

You can also change the size of the audience by determining how broad or specific you would like the similarities to be. For any type of business, retail, B2B, or even adventuring archeologists who can’t find the right museum to buy their new find, this is a hugely useful tool. You can expand your reach, find new leads, and bring new customers closer to sales.

If you feel like you are missing out on a chunk of your potential audience, then improving your Facebook Advertising through Lookalike Audiences might be the key for you. Don’t get rolled over by the giant boulder of slow audience growth (sure, this might be stretching the Indiana Jones thing, but we’re better at marketing than movie metaphors, we promise).

It’s time to take action! Start a Facebook Advertising campaign with LBD Marketing today or call (02) 8915 6229 for more information.

 

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