The Juggernaut you Need To Be On

Facebook revenue: $6.43 Billion +59% on last year

Facebook profit: $2.05 Billion +186% on last year

(Oh yeah - and these are just figures from the last quarter!)

It’s About Mobile

4 years ago Facebook made exactly zero dollars from mobile.

Nowadays more than 1 billion people check Facebook from their phones every single day.

As a result, mobile now accounts for 84% of its advertising revenue, that’s $5.24 billion every 3 three months.

So what?

It means that advertising on Facebook works.

It means that ads have to perform well on mobile devices

It means that if you have a product or service that appeals to the general public, you might want to be thinking about how you can use the channel.

Feeling a little down? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Image credit:  AT&T - 1968 rchappo2002 on Flickr

Is Your Business Wasting Time On Facebook?

Look - I get it - we all need to be on the platform - that’s where the people are and that’s how we can be found - but this idea that once you’ve got your page up and running you need to keep your audience engaged by posting great status updates is just ridiculous.

Unless you have a dedicated resource and they’re really good at finding and identifying hysterical stuff that is even funnier than the stuff your own friends post and share - well - ain’t nobody got time for that!

Do This

Have a good looking business page, share your blog posts, shoot and boost video, otherwise use Facebook as a super targeted advertising platform to go and find new customers.

If you have no budget, use the time you’d normally spend finding and posting stuff and login as your page and start liking and interacting with other businesses where your customers might hang out.

There are of course exceptions to this rule but for most business owners who don’t have a marketing team, the days of organic reach are over - Facebook is an ad platform, and a bloody good one at that!

Feeling a little down? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Image Credit: The Internet!

How To Build A Super Targeted Audience

The Past

Door to door salesmen - telesales calls during dinner - cultural memes that millennials don’t even know about, existed for a reason - they took a B2C product and put it directly in front of the consumer.  Aside from being massively inefficient, such an invasive approach pissed more people off than it pleased.

The Now

While ads on billboards, television and websites solve for efficiency and invasiveness, they lose out on relevancy.  Programmatic advertising is certainly more targeted but the ads are already super annoying as they follow you around the internet like a lost puppy.

The arrival of social media delivered the opportunity for digital door to door marketing, but just as before, people found it to be invasive and annoying and of course it took forever.  While targeting influencers to share your message is more efficient and brings secondary benefits, the sheer volume of content makes it hard to cut through the noise.

The Way

If you could identify the customer who was interested in what you had to offer and find a way to connect with them directly without freaking them out and coming across like a stalker - wouldn’t that be awesome?

I’m playing with a number of different tools but the one that’s really beginning to stand out is The Dao - http://darwineco.com/dao/.  Originally conceived as a research tool built around IBM big data and cognitive technologies,  I’m using it to develop an audience of people who are talking about what I have to offer.

If you’re interested in learning more about your market and building your own audience, I highly recommend checking it out.

Feeling a little down? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Image Credit: Yin Yang - Wikipedia

Get On Your Phone!

You know the difference between you and your customers when it comes to your business’ digital footprint?

You experience it on a big screen - they experience it on a phone.

Think about it - when it’s time for you to “do marketing” you’re at your desk using your office computer or a laptop.

Social Is Mobile

We all have Facebook pages, most of us have Twitter and Instagram accounts.  We have them in order to increase the reach of our messaging.

Having run several rounds of Facebook ads for different clients I can tell you that the vast majority of social traffic that comes through to your website is overwhelmingly mobile - in some cases over 90%.

Design For Mobile First

We just changed the landing page for a current Facebook campaign when we discovered that the average time on page for mobile visitors was less than half that of desktop visitors. 

Turned out that the beautiful layout that worked perfectly on a large screen became way too text heavy and complex on a mobile screen.  It was a simple fix, but with nine times as much mobile traffic as desktop - we should have started with the mobile design first.

Get Off Your Desktop

The next time you “do marketing” spend some of that time on your phone, you might be surprised at how different you look.

Find yourself procrastinating and avoiding your work? Listen to this, it really helps you get things done

Image Credit: Smartphone Abstraction by Jonas Smith on Flickr

Time to Revisit Facebook

I’ve not been a particular fan of Facebook for business.  Sure it was amazing in the beginning but over time if you didn’t have a huge budget and content team - it was tough to see any kind of ROI.

But as with everything in the digital marketing world - things change, check these facts out:

• Last year about 20% of the world’s population logged into Facebook - on the same day!
• Business’ organic reach - which has been steadily declining for years is now back on the rise
• In some markets, Facebook is sending more traffic to websites than Google

Google Ads Vs. Facebook Ads

Google grew because its core product - selling ads - worked and businesses made more money.

But what was Facebook’s core product for businesses?  A place for them to hang out & meet customers?  The ability to organically move their annoying message into the news-feed?  No - it was and is again - Ads, but for years Facebook Ads sucked.

Facebook Ads No Longer Suck

Whether it’s the amount of people, the easy to use interface or the incredibly granular control that allows you to target all single female nurses between the ages of 25 and 33 who have a passion for bodybuilding and theme parks, love beer, own a dog and have just got a new job,  I’m beginning to see Facebook Ads work for small businesses again.

There’s 3,500 people on the planet, using Facebook, who meet the above set of requirements.  Think about what image you could put in their mobile news-feed to grab their attention!

Huge Mobile Ad Distribution

One recent campaign we did for a local business saw less than 3% of click throughs come from the desktop- whereas 48% came from the mobile news feed and 47% came from off-Facebook mobile apps and networks.

Try It Out

You can get in the game for as little as $150, so long as you get creative with your Ad imagery and have a decent landing page that will convert.  If you need a hand - get in touch.

Written while listening to: Music to Grieve to - Acceptance #1 by music2work2

Image Credit: dinero facebook by Esther Vargas on Flickr

Data From A Recent Yelp Ad Campaign

Client was a Vintage furniture store in Los Angeles.  Before  the promotion they would average around 70 Yelp visitors a month but the traffic was good - most of it new, 20% bounce rate and an average of 5 pages read per visit.

Yelp were marketing a 3 month minimum contract, $75 a month for an “enhanced” profile with $275 a month allocated to Ads.  We reckoned it was worth dropping a grand to see if it worked.

Call To Action

With our “enhanced profile” we ran a 10% Off Anything In-Store call to action which lead to a dedicated landing page - all people needed to do was inform us of the offer at time of purchase.

The Results

I’m not going to quote Yelp’s metrics because although they look impressive, here’s what the store experienced:

• Nobody mentioned the Yelp Ad and claimed their 10% off during the time of the promotion
• In the 11 weeks up to the end of the year only 10 people visited the landing page with no-one visiting it during December
• And even more impressive - actual Yelp traffic during the promotion was down 21% on the previous year!

Takeaway

If you’re a law firm - you might want to check out this article that pretty much says the same thing:

https://jurisdigital.com/yelp-advertising-reviews-effective-for-lawyers/

Bottom line - I won’t be recommending Yelp Ads any time soon - oh sure - you need to ensure that your NAP is correct and that you deliver a good enough service that inspires people to review you - but spending money to juice the process - doesn’t seem worth it.

Written while listening to: Sadness by music2work2

Image credit:  y2.d56 | fml. by Bryan Rosengrant on Flickr