Have you ever wondered about the difference between boosting a Facebook Post and creating a Facebook Ad? Today’s Facebook Live class is just for you! Brian will be explaining some of the best practices for each.
Transcript:
Hi everyone. Welcome to another Thursday edition of our 5 Stones Academy Livestream. Today we’re going to be talking about something that gets brought up to me a lot when I’m meeting with a client, talking to them about marketing their business. One of the things that we often talk about is Facebook Advertising because it’s an extremely effective method of getting your message out to your audience. Well, when I’m talking to a perspective client and I mentioned Facebook Advertising to them, they say, well, I’m already doing that. I’m, you know, putting $5 on a post here and there, you know, boosting a post, and they think that boosting a post is Facebook advertising and it’s a bit confusing, but the boosting a post is actually very different from Facebook Advertising. So that’s what, that’s what we’re going to talk about today is what is the difference between boosting a post on Facebook and doing actual Facebook Advertising.
So first let me show you kinda what a boosted post is. Now I took a little screen capture here where this is actually my nephew who lives in Tennessee. I happened to be an admin on his page and when I was preparing for this, it just happened to show up on my page and Facebook was suggesting that I boost a post. You’ll see that often when you have a ad that is performing better than some of your other ads. Facebook will say, this ad is performing better than most of your other ads would you like to boost it and you’ll have the opportunity to, you know, spend anywhere from a very small amount of money boosting that post to you know, as much as you want to. And boosting a post can be a very effective way of getting your message out further than just the people who like your page or actually two more of the same people who like your page because on average your audience, about three percent of them are going to see your Facebook Post.
Now, if you have a very highly engaged page, you might get up to 15-16 percent of your audience, but that would be pretty rare now to do that without actually putting some money behind the post. So when you boost the post, what it’s doing is it is extending the reach of an existing post that you’ve got that, that already resides on your Facebook Page, you know, it’s a post that you have created and you have the opportunity to pay to get more people to see that post. These boosted posts are optimized by Facebook for likes and comments and shares the things that you would want someone to do with one of your regular old Facebook post. It just gives you the opportunity again, to let more people see that. You’ve got some pretty basic targeting options when you’re boosting a post, you know, some of the most basic things would be do you want to target the people who already like your page or them and their friends and some more basic targeting options, but nothing really in depth. A boosting posts is also friendly for a small budget to put $5 behind boosting a post is something that’s perfectly acceptable to put $500 behind boosting a post is acceptable as well. And it just depends on how much reach you can actually get with that. Facebook will make some suggestions for you and it works really well for a post that is already doing well. Now it doesn’t have to be that post that’s already doing well. It might be a post that you’re going to create that you just know you from the beginning I want more people to see this then would usually see it so you can boost that post, pay a little bit of money and you get more people to see it. We will very often put $20 to $50 behind a post and see much, much more reach with that post than had we not done that.
And Facebook advertising versus boosted posts. It’s not an either or thing. You can certainly do both of them together. They are going to serve different purposes. It’s simple and easy to do for the novice. You don’t have to have any kind of knowledge beyond just administering your Facebook Page at its most basic level to be able to boost a post. It’s something that’s very simple and easy for anyone to do and there’s usually no bottom of the funnel work required. And I’m going to explain what I mean by that kind of towards the end of this segment. So that’s kind of the basics of a boosted post. Now, when we get into a Facebook Ad, I’ve got an example of an ad here that I was targeted for and it’s an ad for somebody that’s wanting to sell coaching services to, you know, build a $500 million dollar marketing agency.
Well, you know, they kind of hit the nail on the head with that. I’m a marketing agency owner and their advertising business growth coaching for marketing agencies. So with Facebook Ads, these are ads that they don’t reside on your Page. You won’t find a Facebook Ad. Like you’ll see a Facebook Ad in your feed, but if you go to the page that that ad is for, you won’t find that ad on the page. It’s just not how it works. The Facebook Ads are done through your Facebook Business Manager. You have very advanced targeting options with this. You can do the basics like geographical location and age and gender. You can get into things like a person’s level of income. You can advertise to somebody by whether or not they’re likely to be buying a house soon, or likely to get engaged soon.
There’s a statistic out there that says that Facebook knows that you’re going to get married three months before you do. And if you think about it, people are changing their relationship status all the time on Facebook. So, you know, when they are in a relationship, they’ll change it from being single to in a relationship, when they are in a relationship and get engaged, they’ll change it to that they’re engaged. And then once they get married, they’ll change it that they’re married. So Facebook has got all of this data built up about people and the actions that they’re taking, what they’re doing before they get engaged. And they can use that to show a high probability of someone who is about to get engaged, to be married. So depending on your business, that might be something that is very valuable for you and that’s just one example of the many things that you can do with targeting on Facebook.
So Facebook Advertising typically is going to require a larger budget. You can do Facebook Advertising with a small budget, but it’s a lot of work to do for a small budget and especially if you’re paying someone else to do it for you, you’re going to want to have a budget that makes it worth it to pay them to do the management of it for you. And it’s not for the novice. The majority of even the people out there who claim to be professionals that are doing Facebook Advertising, they do not know what they’re doing. They may have some of the basic ideas of it down, but the majority of people who are doing this professionally are not very good at it, we see the ads that are out there. We see the actions that, you know, that that ad would bring you through and we’ll get into that when I’m talking about the bottom of the funnel, a part of the marketing. On a surface level, it’s not a highly technical process to go through. But to make these ads work takes a lot of practice and a lot of testing and, you know, just becoming really good at your craft to make it work. So it does not for the novice. Again, in most cases, is going to require the bottom of the funnel work to be able to see a return on investment or especially to track our return on investment. With Facebook Ads, you can have call to action buttons. On this ad, this like page button right here is a call to action button. And, there’s other examples of the call to action button that I’m going to show you in the next few slides.
And whereas I showed that a boosted post would be optimized by Facebook for likes on the post, or shares, or comments, there are things that you can optimize your Facebook Ads for. And just a couple of examples that I’ve got here would be to optimize for Page Likes, to optimize for video views, to optimize for website clicks, or app installs, and there’s a whole host of things that you can do, you know, that you can have your ads optimized to do and Facebook will serve these ads to people who are more likely to take the action that you’re wanting them to take based off of their past history. So a lot more that you can do with ads. Let me show you a few examples here of some ads and the call to action buttons. So this was the same ad that I showed you a minute ago with the like page button. We’ve got an ad here that is for sign up and they’re selling a subscription service.
We’ve got another one here where they’re wanting you to download their guide. And the reason that they’re doing that, they want you to download their guide because you, of course, are going to give them your information when you download that guide. So now they will have a way to market to you further by you downloading this guide, you have shown that you were interested in WordPress, which this is a WordPress hosting company, so now you give them your email address, you get this guy that’s going to have some valuable information in it and now they get to market to you on an ongoing basis. So, you know, the idea behind this ad is to get you to download this guide. When really, it’s to get you to give them your contact information.
Here’s an ad by IBM. Honestly, it’s a terrible ad. If anybody knows someone at IBM marketing, I would love to show them what a small agency could do for them, but this ad from IBM, their call to action is to learn more. And basically they’re telling you about how IT analysts can monitor over 35 billion security events a day with their platform. And they want you to learn more about that platform. So, Mark, you have a question?
So that’s really going to depend on a lot of different factors. Typically we talk more in the area of monthly budgets and I like to see a monthly budget of at least about $500 a month with Facebook Ads as kind of a starting point. And then as you start seeing the return on that, you’re going to want to put more and more into that.
Audience Question: What would be a good starting budget?
Answer: It does depend a lot on what it is that you’re selling and how big your audience is. So someone who has got a very large audience and they’re wanting to target like the United States, for example, is there a geographic area they’re going to need a much larger budget than someone who is selling something locally. Like a chiropractor for example, who only needs to reach people within a 10 mile radius of his practice. So you know that the budget is really going to depend on a lot of factors. We kind of have to sit down and figure that one out and make it specific to you. And in a lot of cases, we really can’t tell you anything more than a starting point until we actually get started and start seeing what happens with it. So, you know, it just depends. If you have $100 a month budget for Facebook Ads, I would say spend that on boosted post instead of Facebook Ads because it’s not worth the investment in the time. and in the, just the entire process of going through, building out these Facebook Ads for a small budget like that. So again, it’s going to be specific to each person.
Now with this ad right here, the call to action button is learn more. So just to give you an example of another one. And then here’s one that doesn’t actually have a call to action button at all. You don’t have to use a call to action button. Now something that I wanted to show you, it’s a feature that I really love, is when I get served an ad, I often like to see what’s the targeting that that person has used to serve that ad to me. So when you see a Facebook Ad, one of the things that you’re going to see is where it says sponsored right here.
Now if it says sponsored, I’m going to have these three little dots right up here at the top and I can click that and I’ll get a dropdown. And one of the things that I can do is click on this where it says, why am I seeing this ad? And when I click on that, it’s going to show me why it is, you know, that I’m targeted. Now, it doesn’t always show you all of the targeting and shows you some of the most basic things, but sometimes it’ll show you some things that are pretty interesting. And in this particular one, there were a couple of things I thought were pretty interesting. So it says, one of the reasons that I’m seeing this ad is that IBM wants to reach people interested in cloud computing based on activity such as liking pages or clicking on ads. So they are able to look at the types of pages that I like on Facebook and also the types of ads that I click on to determine that I’m probably interested in cloud computing.
Then it says there may be other reasons you’re seeing this ad, including that IBM wants to reach people ages 22 to 64 who live or were recently in the United States. Now you can do that same thing when you are doing ads and you can do it on a smaller level. It’s called Geofencing. So you can say that I want to serve an ad to a person who’s recently within a particular area. And you can define some times on that as well. If you do business in a place where there’s a large event and you want to reach the people who were at that event, then you can do some of your targeting based off of that, you know, them being in a, in a specific area. If you want to reach people who were at Jazz Fest and you want to get them to come to your restaurant, you know, that weekend or something like that, then you can geofence that area and then serve ads to somebody based off of the fact that they were in that area during a certain timeframe.
So that’s a really cool way of being able to target someone. But as you see ads, click and look to see what people are doing, you know, and why they’re targeting you because that could give you some ideas in your business as to how you might target some other people as well.
Alright, so I had mentioned the bottom of the funnel work. Now the funnel that I’m referring to is going to be your marketing funnel. And if you look at this graphic here, then you know, just so your basic marketing funnel is going to be, you know, the top of the funnel is where we create awareness about our business or service or the product that we’re selling. Once we create that awareness, as people get further down into the funnel, they will develop interest in that product or service. Then they’ll develop the desire to have that. And then they’ll take an action which would be purchasing. And then the retention is going to be the bottom most part of the funnel where that person has already bought, they have become a client, and now they want to do more business with you or maintain that relationship with you.
So you can see that we’ve got our people coming into the top of the funnel and you’ll see that, you know, in a marketing funnel, every marketing funnel is going to have holes in it. I don’t care how good your marketing funnel is, there’s going to be holes in it. You a hundred percent of the people that become aware of your product are not going to buy your product. It’s just impossible to do, but what you want to do as a marketer is to make those holes as small as they can possibly be so that people don’t get out of your funnel. Once they’re in your funnel, you want to take them through all the steps down to a buying decision and when we’re talking about Facebook Ads, we don’t want to just serve them an ad and then just point them to the homepage of our website and hope that they do something.
We want to really take them along the path that we want them to follow. Now, in some cases it might make sense to just point them to the homepage of your website, but if you do that, there are some things that you’re going to want to do. Now when we’re running Facebook ads for one of our clients, we want that client to be able to know without a doubt whether or not those ads are working for them. And the only way that they can do that is for us to put the tracking mechanisms in place. So there are a couple of things that we’ll do. We will use tracking phone numbers, and we’ll use something called dynamic number insertion, we also use landing pages. I’m gonna show you an example of something that we’re doing with our own website.
Alright, so here’s the web design page of our website and you know, this is just one of the interior pages of our website. You can see it’s got our navigation up here. We could put someone into this page, but then they might get distracted up here by going and clicking into the site and going somewhere else that we don’t necessarily want them to go. Once we’ve got that person’s attention, we want to keep them there, we want to keep them focused on whatever it is that we’re trying to sell them. If we served someone an ad that is specific to a new website for their business, then when they come to the website, they should land on the page that is all about websites and we want them to take action from within that page. If you go to our homepage and go to the services and click on web design, this is the page you’re going to come to.
Now what we do is we’ll create a landing page. Now this is our landing page and this page is identical to the other page that I showed you. Now are not always identical. Sometimes we make some changes to them, but the the page content itself is identical, but you will notice that we do not have a navigation because we don’t want them to go clicking around and get distracted by other things. We want them to take action on what they came there for. They were interested in a website. We don’t want to overwhelm them, so let’s keep them on the website page. The other thing that you’ll notice here is that we have this. I’m ready to get started button, which was not on our main page, and we also have a phone number here at the top, which also was not on that page.
Now this phone number is not the main phone number at our office. That is a tracking phone number. If somebody calls that, we’re going to get reports that someone called that number. We also will get an email or a text message immediately after they call telling us that that call came from this page of the website. If somebody clicks on the I’m ready to get started button, they’re going to be brought to a form at the bottom of the page and this form is different from the other forms on our website. So when that form gets filled out, we’re going to know that it came from one of our ads. So we are able then to track that return on our investment. We know that that customer came to us through a Facebook Ad or a Google Ad and we can differentiate between the two to determine what is and what is not working for us. So when you’re running these Facebook Ads, you need to do the bottom of the funnel work so that you can be sure that the money that you’re spending is being spent wisely and your marketing agency should be doing this stuff for you if they’re doing Google or Facebook Ads for you so that you can make good decisions with the money that you’re spending.
Audience Question: If you have less than $500, should you do ads or should you do boosted posts?
Answer: If we’re talking about $100, do boosted post. If we’re talking about $200 to $500 and you’re able to do these yourself, yes do ads. If you, uh, if you have a $400 budget, $350 budget, yeah, it may make sense. You just got to make that determination for yourself to determine is it going to be worth doing that or is my, are my dollars better spent just doing the boosted post?
If you are doing these things yourself, if you’ve learned how to do the Facebook Ads yourself and you’re not paying someone else to manage them for you, then it may make a lot of sense for you to go ahead and run Facebook Ads. I was meeting with one of my clients recently and we were looking at his cost of acquisition per client and the number was a bit high. And the thing that I showed him was the way to get that number lower is to spend more. That might seem a bit crazy. It might seem a bit counterintuitive, but we charge them to manage all of their ads for them. Now for us, their budget could be $500 a month. It could be $50,000 a month. Now they’re there would actually be a difference there and what we would charge them, but not proportion, you know, not in proportion to the the ad spend.
So if they’re spending $500 a month and then they’re paying us to manage it, then when you divide that by 20 clients, your cost per acquisition is going to be higher. But when they spend more money on their ad spend, say if they take that $500 to now $3,000 and we can get them a whole lot more clients and the only half of what they’re spending or not half, but only a portion of what they’re spending is increasing. You know, that being the ad budget and not what they’re paying to manage it, than their cost per acquisition gets lower and lower and lower. So you’ve got to look at those things, but if you’re managing the ads yourself, then the only cost of acquisition that you have is your actual ad spend plus your time. And you know, as a small business owner, as an entrepreneur, especially if you’re a solo-preneur or something like that, in many cases, you actually will have more time than you have money. And then as your business grows, you’re going to quickly get to a point where you will have more money than you will have time and you will want to buy that time back. And that’s when you want to start paying someone to do this stuff for you. So again, you just have to look at it specific to your business to make that decision.
Well, thank you all for being here with us today. I think that the the bottom of the funnel is something that we’re probably going to start getting a little bit deeper into. It would probably make a really good series to do talking about the things that you need to do to put in place to make sure that your marketing does actually working for you and that you’re getting a return on investment. So, you know, look for a series on that coming up soon. And if you’ve got some ideas for some things that you would like to learn from us, we would love to teach you.
