We’re not going to bore you with the obvious reminder that if your business isn’t on social media that you’re losing clients. Nor are we going to bore you with fluff piece on tips that any intern could write. Instead we’re going to beef it up a bit with some more advanced tips on social media strategies for Overland Park small businesses.
First, let’s break your customer’s buying decisions into three categories.
- Inform
- Persuade
- Remind
Everyone that’s in the process of deciding whether or not to buy from you is in one of these three modes. If they know nothing about you, your job is to inform them about what you do. This is when your website and marketing materials should spend the most time on explaining your FEATURES and DIFFERENTIATORS.
After a customer has been informed about what you do, they transition into a period where you’ll need to persuade them to try it out. This is where you should transition your story from features, to BENEFITS. So your ads, the pages on your website you send them to, or even the marketing materials you hand them in-person – should stop talking about the features your service/product provides, and instead talks about why the customer will benefit from using it.
Lastly, you’ll need to remind them why they’ve made the decision to buy. This is where once again you transition how you’re telling your story from selling the benefits, to selling the DREAM. That’s one layer deeper into why they should buy from you. Coinciding with the dream wordage should be a CALL TO ACTION that INCENTIVISES the action you want them to take, typically through the form of a discount for free trial.
So let’s look at three examples of Facebook posts that communicate to your customers at the various stages of making a purchasing decision. For the sake of using a tangible example, let’s assume you’re a personal trainer in Leawood.
Inform Facebook Post; Emphasizing Features & Differentiators
My name is Sarah, and I’m a personal trainer in Leawood that uses a combination of DNA testing and holistic medicine to create one-of-a-kind workouts and meal plans for my clients. To sign up, checkout my website (link).
Persuade Facebook Post; Emphasizing Benefits
Anyone can study the internet and find things that in general are healthy; but the truth is that every human body is different. Because I take the time to run simple and inexpensive DNA tests, I’m able to suggest things that aren’t just healthy, but instead things that are particularly healthy for you! This means every dollar you spend, and every minute you use, will go farther. To learn more, checkout my website (link).
Remind Facebook Post; Emphasizing The Dream With A Call To Action
Being a healthier woman mean being a better mother. Set a great example for your children by doing what’s best for YOUR body. Sign up for a free week of coaching on my website (link).
Notice how each piece goes farther into the onion really cutting into the heart of why someone would actually buy from you. The goal would be for you to not just post on Facebook regularly, but to also spread out your messaging for people that are in the various stages of the decision making process.
But it gets better! Facebook has tools that can help you identify people that are at the exact stage of the buying process your customers are at. So instead of having a third of your posts be informational, a third persuasive, and a third as reminders…and then hoping that the right message gets to the right person at the right time – we can bump up the targeting.
Facebook is the most sophisticated ad platform in the world. This is good and bad news. The good news is that gives the power to the small business owner in Overland Park to create highly effective ads that don’t break the bank. But it’s bad because it means you’re going to have to learn a new skill. It’s not rocket science, but if you go into it without patience – you’ll fail. What we coach people to do is to spend no more than five dollars a day while you practice using their various tools (some of which to be described soon). After a couple weeks or a couple months, you’ll not only get the hang of their ad platform, but you’ll have a better idea of what type of ads work the best for your business.
So now let’s go back through the three stages of the decision making process, and talk about various tools that Facebook has at our disposal for each one of them.
Inform Stage
The thing that all of these people have in common is that they know nothing (or at the very least, very little) about you and your company. These are the people that more than likely don’t even follow you on your Facebook page. This means the goal should be to go out and hunt new people from your target demographic.
Lookalike Audiences
The tool we suggest using for the inform stage is called lookalike audiences. This is where you upload to Facebook a small excel list of email addresses from your best customers. The longer the list, the better – but even 100 will do. Don’t worry, Facebook isn’t going to spam these people or sell their emails. It’s actually the opposite. It will leave those people alone because they’re already your customers! Instead it’s going to run diagnostic on their demographics to decipher patterns. Things like, what types of magazines do these people read; what gender are they mostly comprised of; when in the day do they typically check Facebook; are they administrators of their own Facebook pages; what ethnicity are most of them…and the list goes on. Then, it’s going to hone in on OTHER people within whatever geographic market you want, such as Leawood and Overland Park, and tell you how many of them there are. It will literally give you exact numbers, like 20,456.
Next, you create simple ads that follow the same protocol as the ‘inform step’ wording (remember, FEATURES…that links to your website). Then, let your website do the rest of the work INFORMING them as to what you do. Hopefully it’s up to snuff. If it’s not, we have freelance web developers that work in partnership with The Grid that we’d be more than happy to put you in touch with.
Persuade Stage
With obvious exceptions, the average person will go to your website and then leave, even if they are almost sure they want to buy what you’re selling. This should scare you because you just spent time and money getting a perfectly qualified person on to your website, and now they’re leaving! Does this mean we have to start over? Nope. Introducing…
Pixel Advertisements
First, a quick history of the industry. A little over a half decade ago, a handful of companies started what’s called Remarketing (sometimes referred to as retargeting). This is where a website would put a snippet of code on their website and then when views of said website would visit the page, the page would leave what’s called a cookie on their computer. This triggered a reaction across the web that would only show advertisements to people that have been to the site before. An example in action: have you ever been shopping for shoes (or something like it), and then next thing you know you’re seeing advertisements for those shoes all over the internet? It’s not a coincidence. They didn’t all of a sudden grow their advertising budget by 1000 times. In fact, they’re now just targeting your specific computer.
Fast forward to about a year ago when Facebook created their own advertising product that is similar; they’re called pixels. First you put a piece of code on your website (which is much easier than it sounds, and there are experts at The GRID that can help you do this very inexpensively). And then when someone visits your site, it lets Facebook know who they are, and what pages they’ve been to. So now, we can cultivate a second type of ad that is geared towards people that are in the second stage of the buying process.
Just go into the ad dashboard, create a custom audience that fall under the list of people that have triggered your pixel code, and then create an ad that focuses on the BENEFITS of your product we spoke of earlier. We know they’re no longer in the inform step because they have been to your website, and thus learned what you do. So this allows us to “speak to them” more personally, by peeling away the onion and really trying to convince them to pull out their wallets. This also makes our advertising dollars go farther because we’re just targeting the radically niched list of people that have been to our website, and no one else.
Remind Stage
The last step of this whole thing is that we need to harvest all the informed and persuaded people to actually show up to our store and purchase (whether this is in person or online). To do this, we recommend two different Facebook ad tools…or both.
The first would be to continue to use pixel advertising, but in a different way. You’re allowed to create a custom audience of people that have been to specific pages on your site, but not others. Thus a person who has been to your shopping cart, but not seen the “thank you for purchasing page” they’re taken to after buying, would be considered someone that is very far along in the decision making process, but just needs another bump. Thankfully, you can tell Facbook to show a third set of ads only at those people. This is far more easy than we’re making it sound; let this be a friendly reminder that Facebook advertising is a new skill set, and like all skills you should be proud of, this will take some time to learn. Facebook, amongst thousands of other websites, have videos/blogs/podcasts about how to do all of this stuff. Or, you can always just hire someone else to do it for you.
The second would be boosted posts to people that like your page. So when you are crafting the third type of wordage that hones in on the dream layer of the onion, just click the boost button next to the publish button and direct it exclusively at the people that already like your page. This will ensure that a good chunk of your followers will see the post, which is not guaranteed to not be the case if you don’t boost the post.
There you have it Overland Park, an advanced guide to copywriting ads and messaging on Facebook.
We’re giving out free trials at The Grid, so fill out this page and come on down to try us out.