How to Use Facebook to Increase the Quantity and Quality of Your Leads.
If you are marketing a B2B business but have yet to implement Facebook as part
of your overall marketing strategy, you are not alone. Unfortunately, you also
are missing out on a critical platform that can help with lead generation and
establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
This webinar will teach you how to use Facebook to increase your sales.
If you have any question, feel free to contact Greg Chambers at gchambers@goleadsconsulting.com
Webinar Recording
Slide Transcripts
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right here is where Facebook starts to separate itself from traditional list compilers that I was familiar with in that it just knows everything. It knows what you like. It’s knows what your friends are like, the big machine kind of mashes them all together. It looks at your behaviors and it’s able to target ads based on that
That being said, that’s mostly business to consumer stuff that we’ve been doing for years. How does it work for business to business, that’s the big question?
The way it works business to business is because they have this special feature, what I call their special power which is they can create audiences. we’ll talk about audiences next.
Facebook on the other hand is more attributes, what somebody looks like as opposed to what it is that they’re doing. when it comes to businesses targeting individuals we know that business are made up of individuals. we’re not able to get to what they’re buying. we can’t search on Facebook for insurance agents near me. But what we can do is we can marry those two things up inside of audiences. We can take everything that Facebook knows about everybody. We can take the audiences where we’ve taken the intent from AdWords and where we know the things businesses are searching for and we can mash all those together inside of our audiences.
What we can do is we can put that, the Facebook pixel on our websites. And by doing that if we can say insurance agents near me that’s bringing people into my insurance agency website. That is because they’re probably looking for insurance. When they get back on Facebook, they now know who they are. we can pick up intent and go from there.
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Let me talk about what we did with a law firm using the same type of information.
What this law firm was after was a class action cases. Things that aren’t on Facebook. this is an example of using what Facebook has to give you. we don’t know, we didn’t know- nobody is on Facebook searching for or liking mesothelioma, the asbestos cancer. you can’t find that search. On Google you can pay for it, but it’s super expensive. you can search for things that are around that and we bring them over to Facebook. On Facebook we could do a few things. We could create- their goal is to get more lawsuit cases, as I said, we could get more impressions on the traffic that we already generated running ads. if we were already running ads on television, on radio trying to generate this traffic and then we got people to come to our website, we could now get more impressions on that traffic. We could distribute content. We used a lot of the Facebook audiences, the things that people did like. For one of the targets that we were after was the Gulf oil spill lawsuits. we knew that anything that these people were probably part of these communities that were on the shores. we could look up every single one of those communities along the shore and most of them had people who liked Tampa Bay, you know, or part of the Tampa Bay commerce and they liked that page, we could target those. But instead of running ads for them, what we did is we would create content for the website which we were already doing. And we were distributing it to that audience. we were running and ad for that content to that audience about the BP oil spill lawsuits, thinking that anybody who was interested would see that and they were starting to associate the name of the firm with BP oil suit settlements.
Then as I said we were retargeting the same visitors. Facebook audiences allowed us to divide those groups up into website visitors lookalike visitors which was after we started generating some traffic one of the things that audiences allows you to do is you can tell is, I always refer to Facebook as the robot, you could tell the robot, hey these are all the people that I’ve been targeting. Why don’t you go in and find people who look like them.
And the interesting thing is it’s actually pretty good at doing this. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories of artificial intelligence or the machine learning where you just keep feeding things into it and then it comes up with conclusions that the human mind does not because it’s sorting through many pieces of data. it figures out that just by analyzing a face it can tell you whether or not you have a limp something ridiculous like that.
This lookalike audiences does the exact same thing. The challenge is for most of us is for our small businesses that are doing business to business marketing is we don’t have enough to get really good information. But even with small audiences it tends to do pretty good. As we said we use it for PR distribution.
the result we had approached these campaigns we had a very specific cost per rate, cost per lead CPL, but it was cost- we had a very specific dollar amount that we were shooting after. If you’re wondering what we based that off of we had based that off of we could actually purchase these leads. we knew that we could spend for instance on transvaginal mesh leads we could spend $500 for a qualified lead. that’s a lead that has all the symptoms. They’ve already answered all the questions and we know that they’re good people that are probably looking to join this lawsuit. If we knew that it was $500 for a super qualified lead like that, we were trying to generate them for about $150. And the reason was because we had to do more work for them, but it albrought that average cost down. You couldn’t afford to spend $50,000 all the time on these class action lawsuit leads. But once you bring that average cost down quite a bit.
And plus kind of went to school on what was good and bad about the other leads. That really brought down the cost per acquisition. that huge increase in ___ was the big win that we found in this. it was all due to Facebook I have to give credit where credit is due.
This one is more of a business to business challenge. We had been contracted with a seminar company. They were trying to get a very specific audience of owners and CEOs, small to midsize enterprises. And they wanted to attend a series of events. The first event was a breakfast. this is a cold group that they’re trying to get in front of by addressing a topic, putting them in a pretty interesting location, and giving them a chance to network with each other was kind of the objective. They were going to be running multiple events here, one of the other goals was they wanted to raise their awareness of them too.
we approached it as Facebook was part of our rule of 30. If you’re not familiar with the rule of 30 it sometimes I think it was called the rule of 27. I’ve seen this about 100 different ways. We use internally the rule of 30 and it is that only, you need to see something 10 times before you can take action. it’s that idea that I need to expose my brand to you 10 times before I get to a point where you can name me and recognize who I am and what it is that I do. The rule of 30 is that only 1/3 of the messages are getting through if that. It could be 50 or the rule of 60 by now because everything is busy.
we wanted to, we were using Facebook to help with those impressions, to increase the number of impressions in front of this audience we could get this entire list which was about 250 that we were targeting in this group if we could get 750 impressions in front of this group we were probably going to have a chance at grabbing those attendees for $150 apiece. in addition to Facebook we had done invites. We had lists that we had purchased. We had invites. We sent them an invite and a postcard. A letter and a postcard. We ran LinkedIn ads to the same demographic audience. We did some press releases that we were able to get some business journals to pick up on. Then we did a voicemail campaign that we designed that really just mimicked everything that was on the ads and the idea was that nobody was really going to pick up the phone. One out of 20 I think got through to somebody who was live. we gave them a script to use. But then more than that it was a 20 second commercial that we could run through.
Then for Facebook it was really just audiences. Customers and site visitors. We had a list of some of these business that we’d done business with them before. we loaded that into Facebook. Then we knew who their people who were coming to the site and visiting a particular page were the people we were targeting. we were trying to show them ads on that too.
the result was that the first event reached their maximum attendance at their cost which was exciting for them. And the surprise was that when we got there the list that we had, that 18 that were there, there was- it was a cold list. there were three people who did not- who said they were going to be there who didn’t show up. But at the same time there were three people who were unannounced who just came walking in. I have no idea exactly where they came from, but what we could say that is that Facebook helped with that. Somewhere in that web of the rule of 30 where we were just trying to get all those impressions out, they missed the point where they needed to register for this event. Instead just came and joined us and it was great.
The big bonus was the feature events have been a lot easier to fill on a much shorter list because of brand awareness. They’ve been able to expand beyond. Actually they know their business pretty well in that they knew from the very beginning that they were going to be expanding beyond this CEO list. That’s just one to start with because then everybody who is trying to pay for an event a CEO knows what they’re looking for, they say oh, sure. I’ve been to one of those events and I found it worthwhile. You’ll find it worthwhile too.
So, those are the big things right, is that- by creating an ad set promoting content, news articles, and then watching activity that’s’ what we can do today.
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this is the what can you do now. this is the Greg, hey, thanks for everything but what is it that we can do- what are you saying that we should do for our particular business?
I would start simple which is just take a simple snapshot of where you’re at today in Google analytics and excel, taking a snapshot of this is what standard activity across a website. This is standard activity inside of our company looks like, inside of excel and may include things like calls and you know, average number of proposals. Nothing where I’m trying to tip off my hat because what gets measured gets managed. But it algets managed by management but it algets managed by the people who are being managed. I’m just trying to take a snapshot of where everything is that I can see where things move if they move.
Add the Facebook pixel to your website and start building an audience. Building an audience of customers. If you have email addresses for your customers load them up into Facebook. If you use a tool like Mail Chimp they probably have a built in match tool to build an audience. I found that those don’t match as well as if you just manually match the audiences. download into a single column of email addresses and upload it into an audience and call it whatever it is you’re going to call it.
What I found is that you should be able to match 75 to 80% and that’s even on a business to business list which is surprising. Your results may vary. But we have had success in building those kinds of lists. And then I would build an ad where all I featured was the latest news. the picture for the latest blog post and run it for a short period of time and just promote it to the people who are visiting my website which is the Facebook pixel, and then the people who are in my audience already. That’s that audience of customers that you built.
Then just sit back and watch. The big thing is where is it going to show up? Is it driving a little bit more activity do the number of phone calls go up? Do the number of proposals jump up just a little bit? Sometimes that’s all it takes. I’d run it for, say Greg, how long? I’d run it for 60 days. How much does it cost? I don’t know exactly. I will say that for most of the campaigns we don’t spend all that much money because the audience is tight. You will need to refresh the ad on a regular basis because once- it’s like anything, it’s a- Facebook can get many impressions in front of this audience quickly that the effectiveness of whatever it is you’re doing goes away pretty quickly. I suggest running something and then changing it up on a regular basis. But you shouldn’t have to spend much more than a few hundred dollars. I’m guessing at how big your audiences are, but a few hundred dollars a month will get you something where you can see is it enhancing everything? here I will tell you this story.
I used to do business to consumer, I owned a Hawaiian shirt company and in that Hawaiian shirt company we would target like it was easy to target on Google because Google was intent. I could say I saw you search for a Hawaiian shirt or tropical shirt. You knew what they were searching for and you could bid those positions and design your ads and landing pages and watch your conversions there. But on Facebook there was nowhere to search for that. But what we could do is we could say, hey if you like Jimmy Buffet, if you like Kenny Chesney, if you like tequila if you like Mexico, Hawaii, these were things where we could target you as an audience and you could come to the website. What I found was that people would come to the website but I wasn’t able to – like in analytics it was not showing conversions. the more money I spent on Facebook the more I was just like, I don’t get it. I am not able to convert. Other people may be converting but- none of their stories matched mine. I talked to one company and they were ventured company and they were like, “Oh, we spend $5,000 a day and it’s working great.” That’s like my yearly budget for Facebook. I don’t have that to spend. is it working? I don’t know. I turned it off.
When I turned it off since I had- we tracked pretty extensively I did notice that everything kind of got depressed. All my results went down a little bit. I’ll say about 9%. And on a whim I said that thing’s really changed except for I turned off Facebook. What happens if I turn it back on? I turn Facebook back on and this was before audiences and some of the tools they have now. And everything went back up. what was it doing? I have no idea. It’s that rule of 30. Somewhere in there I was getting enough extra impressions that it was enhancing my results. to this day people I’m talking to, I was talking to a large toy retailer and he was saying the same thing. He said I just don’t get anything from my spend. It seems to be the same audience. I told him the story that- that same story and he went back and sent me the email and said, Greg, it is. That is exactly what it’s doing. It’s enhancing it when I blend it in with all of my cost per lead, cost per acquisition activity it’s working.
That’s really what we can do now.
They say, “Oh, the most that I sell is kid’s things,” because parents do get up on an early- and their kids tend to have parties early. what we did is we ran nothing but branding ads. We just, I said let’s cut the newspaper advertising because it’s expensive. And let’s just run Facebook and just soak the moms in those areas with images of the hottest kids’ costumes.
Sure enough, the same thing. Yeah, it was our best start to the season ever. Nobody said that they saw anything on Facebook. You know, I get it. That’s the way the rule of 30 works, right.
those are some of the questions. how long does it take? I don’t know. I can’t answer that question. How much does it cost? I don’t know. Can’t answer that question either. Set a budget. Set targets. And then start measuring because I think you will see results pick up and of course if you engaged us with that, if you engage us to do this work I can actually – then I will give you better ideas as to what things cost because I can actually look inside your thing.
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we are putting together a pilot program and I invite you to join it. The way to join it is to find out whether or not – let us run through and describe what it is that we’d like to do, and then you tell us what it is you’re trying to do. And then we’ll see if we can generate the goal which is more leads than you’re generating from whatever you’re paying for right now, we could probably generate more leads if we apply these tools. And if nothing else we can give you- well, I guess more leads really is better results. But if you’re getting no leads, we can give you some leads. If you’re getting some results, we could probably give you better results. That’s it. There’s an overabundance of tactics out there. There’s a dearth of strategies. We will help you apply our strategy to your business and that’s the Lead Gen Tools program.
invite you to sign up and get a demonstration on that. I try to keep this as short as humanly possible. Looking to see if there’s a timer on this. This time I did make sure I did record. Thanks for your patience. The next webinar that we will do it looks like it’s going to be on analytics. look for that in June. Thank you
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