Michael is the co-founder of needls.com, a robo-agency that creates targets and optimizes Facebook and Instagram ads for small business owners and entrepreneurs.
Small business owner
Many small business owners have tried using Facebook ads in the past without a lot of results. It’s tempting in that case to assume that the ads don’t work, but the reality sometimes is that they didn’t use them well.
Perhaps the business owner didn’t have a good handle on what he was doing or he didn’t want to admit that he needed help.
Business owners only have a few options when it comes to Facebook ads.
- Do it yourself (which is challenging)
- Hire an agency (which is expensive)
- Use a different platform (which is complicated)
Needls is intended to “dumb down” the process of running Facebook ads. Its meant to help entrepreneurs or small agencies run Facebook ads properly.
Know your audience
Understanding the demographics of your audience isn’t the same as truly understanding your audience.
If you sell women’s shoes, it isn’t enough to know that your audience is women around 40 to 50 years old. You must know what her job is, what her income level is, who her friends are, what kind of shows she watching on TV, and who influences her purchasing decisions.
You must know the ins and outs of your potential customer in order to advertise effectively. The best way to do that is to talk to your existing customers.
If you’ve only sold 100 pairs of shoes, talk to the people who bought your shoes to find out why they bought them. Frame your marketing and sales around that particular buyer persona.
Consider whether there are multiple personas that make up your target audience.
Testing different objectives
Even if you talk to your customers, you’ll still have to test different marketing objectives and advertising objectives.
Your first 100 customers may have a different persona than your next 1,000 customers, so you may have to shift your approach.
You must try different approaches in your digital marketing mix.
You only have to do one thing really, really well, but you can test things outside of that one thing to make sure you’re not missing the boat somewhere else.
Grow the organization
It’s somewhat counterintuitive to digital marketing people, but in-person events are a great way to interact with potential customers or partners.
There’s still nothing better than actually talking to people in persona and getting to know like-minded business owners.
Meet with different people at different networking events. Go to dinners or meetups or find ways to connect with people in your industry.
It’s not digital, but it’s important. The point isn’t to gain business; it’s to make genuine connections and get insights.
When you go to in-person events, listen to people and provide advice and build trust. Then build an understanding that people should go to you for whatever it is you’re selling.
Having conversations
Sales calls now are about having meaningful conversations.
If you’re relying only on cold calls, you have to try something else. Focus on social media or ads, or content, or try the soft-sell approach.
Cold calls don’t work even as well as they did five years ago.
One executive told us that he doesn’t respond to cold calls. He said that the LinkedIn connection or emails are the primers for those conversations.
Needls has never done a cold call. They’ve grown from 0 customers to 1,000 customers by driving qualified customers to their site using Facebook ads, content marketing, and influencer relationships.
Start small.
It’s so easy to connect with people on social media. If you don’t already have an Instagram account for your business, set one up and start posting content. Instagram could become one of the biggest drivers for your business.
Finding influencers
If you sell office furniture, which isn’t super sexy, realize that everybody has office furniture.
Find someone on Instagram who has a unique twist on their office furniture. Follow that company.
Find people in your niche who already have a large following. Reach out and offer to supply a desk to an influencer who is willing to do a shout-out about your product.
Find people who have a large following and connect with them via direct message. Try out their service. Get in front of their faces as politely as possible.
You can generate leads on Instagram when you’re able to:
- Build connections
- Grow your following
- Use Instagram stories to talk about your service or provide advice.
- Use Instagram stories to drive traffic to your website.
Mistakes to avoid
To make your videos more effective, realize that 80 percent of the traffic is mobile, and most people don’t have their sound on while they are watching videos.
Without subtitles, they don’t know what’s going on, so they scroll past.
Use subtitles so that people who are watching without sound will still get your message.
Also, install a Facebook pixel on your website that will track to see how well your ads are doing. Without it, you have no idea how effective your ads are.
Make sure that you have a call-to-action. Don’t just talk about your product or service and then hope that someone clicks to your site and buys something.
Try something like, “Go to my site and check us out, and get a 25% discount if you use this code.”
Capture the audience’s attention within the first one to five seconds. Attention spans are incredibly short, so you must give people a reason to stop scrolling and engage with your content.
Facebook and Instagram are amazing ways to grow your business without spending a lot of money.
Using Needls
Check out Needls by answering a few questions that will help launch your first campaign.
- Tell the team more about your business.
- Identify where you hope to drive traffic.
- Enter a URL.
- Provide us with a headline or piece of text that describes your product or service.
- Upload an image or two.
After you’ve answered those questions, Needls can create hundreds of different ads for you to test to see which ones will work best.
They’ll target your ads using data science, and then optimize the ads 24/7.
It takes about 10 minutes to set up the campaign and then you can set it and forget it.
If you’re looking to build your business and get more sales and work hard now to create freedom in the future, you’ll put the time in now but you’ll be able to look back and see the benefits of your hard work.
“Building an Empire” episode resources
Needls is offering a 35-percent discount off the platform fee for listeners of The Sales Evangelist podcast.
This episode is brought to you in part by Maximizer CRM, personalized CRM that gives you the confidence to improve your business and increase profits. To get a demonstration of maximizer, go to the sales evangelists.com/maximizer.
Click on the link to get a free demo of what Maximizer CRM can do for you. It integrates your marketing campaign as well as your CRM, and it works whether you’re a small organization or a large one.
This episode is also brought to you in part by prospect.io, a powerful sales automation platform that allows you to build highly personalized, cold email campaigns. To learn more, go to prospect.io/tse. It will help you with your outbound to expand your outreach and it allows you to set it and forget it. Your prospecting will never ever be the same.
We’ll use prospect.io in the upcoming semester of TSE Hustler’s League to focus on prospecting. We’ll give you insights and tools that will help you gain new customers and provide training and strategies that you can implement today to ensure constant flow in your pipeline.
Check out TSE Hustler’s League and apply to see if it’s a good fit.
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