Building a Social Media Digital Footprint 1 – An interview with Brandon Falcon of Falconics Inc.
Danna: Good morning, this is Danna Olivo with MarketAtomy, and welcome to all my Charge Up Studio listeners. We have Brandon Falcon with Falconics with us again today, as we continue with part two of our social media footprint series. Hi, Brandon.
Brandon: It’s going well.
Danna: Today’s podcast is going to focus on Facebook. As I stated in our last podcast, we’re going to delve into each of the most popular social media platforms over the next three or four podcasts. We will be touching on how you can utilize your digital marketing strategy to begin to attract those elusive prospects, convert them, and turn them into advocates virtually. Since we’re not able to get out and meet everybody one-on-one anymore, we’re trying to make it a little bit easier and give you some tips on how you can do this in the new way of working. Brandon and his team are experts at this. They’re working with me, and I look forward to continuing and seeing how things work with us. Today we’re going to focus on Facebook. With that being said, let’s get started. Brandon, let’s talk a little bit about Facebook. Can you give us a brief overview of how the Facebook landscape has changed since the beginning of last year?
Brandon: Definitely. So obviously these social platforms, especially a giant like Facebook is always evolving, always changing, and adapting with time. They manage a lot and they do so much as an organization. Facebook is not just face-looking more. They’re Facebook and they’re Instagram. There are a variety of other platforms that are obviously a little less now, but Facebook does a lot of things, so they are always adjusting and always growing, always scaling. We typically see every two or three months, some platforms consider a significant change, but what we’re specifically seeing over the course of the last year is that they’ve really dug in to focus on their core goals. This is what Facebook started out on, which is connecting people and helping build a better-unified environment for communication with friends and family. Their original focus was on a lot of posting, getting lots of people to just look at your content, and building big groups. Now, their goal is more focused on getting individual smaller groups or niche groups, family and such, to communicate, see each other’s content more often and connect more genuinely versus generically.
So, a lot of that’s going on. We can see a lot of their efforts on their end revolve around matching and not the likes and so forth. Our goal is to build that genuine communication between two people who are a group of people, and I think it’s a really positive move.
Danna: Oh, very good. Well, what I’ve noticed quite a bit over the last, probably a few years, especially with Facebook is a lot of talk and disagreement over Facebook’s control over content acceptance, what does this mean for micro and small businesses on a limited budget?
Brandon: There’s a couple of different areas we look at when we look at the content distribution, we can look at first of the organic side, which is just what you can generally post anyone ever on, and have a Facebook ad to profile of groups on and so forth. And published content doesn’t cost a thing, it’s free to everybody, so that is your organic side, your paid side is going to be more… So, we’re trying to get action from users on Facebook, buying your products, clicking somewhere, watching something, so on and so forth, they have definitely become a lot stricter on what they allow or don’t allow… For example at one point, they allowed for postings for helping people find mortgages easily through their platform. More recently, we’re seeing these posts are being limited, they’re not even allowing you to easily advertise for jobs. They’re limiting anything talking about cryptocurrencies or finance. They’re limiting anything that talks about credit, credit restorations, and so forth. Even things getting into race and gender are being limited. The wording being used in posts is the craziest out of everything being monitored. Anything that’s focused around answering a question from you to industry, for example, simply asking “Are you looking to buy a new home?” could instantly get you banned.
So that is where people are starting to say, Hey, is this an overstep? Because is that really targeting or, is that just trying to profile them, or is it just good targeting. But there’s ways to bring value regardless of if you follow the rules.
Danna: So, if you’re just looking at generating sales, rather than simply informing, educating, or communicating, that’s where they start drawing that line.
Brandon: Yeah, pretty much what they’re saying is that you’re not building enough rappore with your audience to go straight to a sale. The joke in the industry is that you can’t just go in straight to asking someone to marry you, we must go on dates. You must develop relationships. To do that is where we’re going to be using things like quality content or tell a story through your organic social platforms, links, blogs, videos, and Facebook lives. All of these are stepping stools up to being allowed to have compelling conversion ads, getting purchases, and sales.
Danna: Yeah, it’s a little confusing sometimes not knowing what’s going to be accepted or not. When I think about it, when I’ve put up ads and videos, they all must be approved. What I have found many times is that a lot will not be approved on the first pass. When I can’t understand why I go and challenge it. The second approval round they turn around accept it.
Brandon: That’s because they have an automatic process for approval. First, it goes through an AI process that assesses the approval based on a few qualifications that can be identified. A great example would be asking if the ad has a bad image or does it have more than 20% of text on top of it. Does it have any very specific targeting that we considered inappropriate, again, race, age, sexual preference or can be considered harmful to a group of individuals? Those types of things are taken into consideration when it goes through the first approval process. It also reads the ad copy, the message, or the description of your ad to see if it is a positive tone, voice as a professional. Are there any guarantees in there that you should not be making like referencing medical statements? Where is the link going to, does it have content on that page or is it against the rules for any reason? It’s checking all of these resources, to quickly answer, “Do you qualify or not qualify?” It gets kicked off or kicked back to you if it is. It is at this time that you can challenge the negative answer at which time a human gets involved in the approval process.
Danna: Okay, okay. Well, that explains a lot. I find this on a lot of platforms I use.
The point is that you don’t have to accept their initial decline, you can challenge it. That’s important for business owners to understand that. So, if a small business owner was to come up to you and say, can Facebook really help my business? What would be your response?
Brandon: I would say in short, yes. The reason being Facebook is what we consider an anchor platform. They are the largest social platform in the world. They connect the most individuals ranging from young to old. Everyone has a Facebook account, for the most part, your audience is on Facebook. The question is can you get to them? Do you have the knowledge, or the skill set needed to get you in front of your specific audience?
Danna: Yeah, so let’s talk a little bit about the audience algorithms Facebook brings. Give us a little bit of information on how we can better target our specific audience.
Brandon: So, there’s a lot of things. A lot of ways Facebook can help you target your audience. Such as boosting posts, which if you have a business page, you can customize your audience a little bit. But that is more the entry-level to Facebook. The real version that you want to get your hands on or what you want assistance with if you’re choosing that route is your business manager in your ads account. Referred to as your Facebook Business Manager, it oversees all of your Facebook assets, being your Facebook pages, your groups, your What’s Up, and your Instagram accounts., It ties all of these into one unified location that you can manage a business. Next, you have your ad account, which is under that as well. That is what is loaded, targeting your end audience. This is where we generally come in and build custom audiences. It’s where we can come in and utilize an audience that you guys already have. Maybe you have 10-20 email addresses or maybe 10,000. We can take those, upload them to the platform, Facebook will go hunt the common denominators of those individuals and build audiences from it.
For instance, what our organization wants to do is we’ll go through and figure out what that common denominator is at the top 5% to 2%, which is really the most consistent thing across everyone. We then build a targeted low audience from that, building a little broader audience, which is like 10 to 15% of your overall audience. We compare and contrast, we run some targeting, and then usually three or four weeks later, you have a highly defined target audience that you can market to over and over and get consistent results from.
Danna: So, you’re saying that I can take my list that may have 5000 names, these are people that I have met, that are business associates, colleagues, things like that, and you can build my audience from the personas identified on that list?
Brandon: We’re going to figure out the micro-actions that those individuals share in common that make them take action. For instance, perhaps black people don’t realize and they buy at certain hours, maybe the age range suggests that they buy between the hours of 8:45 PM and 10 PM. Between this knowledge and what we find out and the age demographics and hundreds of other characteristics, usually about 12 to 20 of them, we will figure out the common denominators and define your audience of people that are similar to those, and the people that have the highest chance of converting, those are people who have bought from you before, and we’re targeting people just like that. We have a separate list of people that are interested in you before they are most similar because a lot of times we’re just really taking them up this ladder, the life cycle in your funnel. Yeah, we don’t call it a guarantee, obviously, no organization can guarantee it, but we can rather quickly figure out the common denominators that are successful and… Yes, get the right audience.
Danna: That’s interesting because I didn’t know that. Okay, okay. I’m learning a lot myself here today. That seems daunting to me as far as trying to figure all that out. Let’s move on here. What kind of return can I expect to see with paid social ads versus Pay-Per-Click ads?
Brandon: They’re similar. Your Pay-Per-Click, usually that’s your Google or Bing or other search engines, is where people go to actually search for a question versus your social platform ad is designed to build a relationship. Pay-Per-Click ads are usually designed to solve a problem right off the bat, your customer is actively hunting for a solution, it’s convenient because they’re actively looking and as a result, they do charge usually at least two to three times more for an acquisition or a lead, than you would on a social platform. Social ads are more what we consider interrupting ads. Social ads are branding ads. They generally are trying to attract those buyers that are not ready to be buying but thinking about it. You are trying to imprint on their minds your brand for future needs.
Let’s say we’ve identified that they are trying out a house, for instance, and they’ve looked for landscaping, furniture, maybe colors for front doors, those types of things. They’re going to search on other platforms. Facebook can identify and figure out the common denominators including that they’re looking at housing things, and then we can start serving ads while they’re browsing, talking about buying the house, or buying that first home or second home. The more they search on other platforms, the more data Facebook gets, and the more that we can target and figure out what they’re doing. Once again, we’re interrupting their flow. We can come in at a fraction of the cost, and because the platform is so large, we can hit them over and over versus what one searches for. You might do a little ad on Facebook and do it 5, 10, 20 times in different ways to get the results.
Danna: Well, this is like when we were talking on our last podcast. If you’re going to go to pay per click and pay more for Google searches, what you’re doing is trying to reach those individuals that makeup 1% of people who are ready to buy now. Whereas with social media ads and things like that, we’re basically branding ourselves in the minds of those individuals while they’re doing their research. What they do, their buying habits, what they’ve done before they make their final decision.
Brandon: Absolutely, that whole thought of it, and I know you as another market and a strategist, you recognize that people typically don’t buy on the very first time they hear of something, it takes usually 8 to 10, 12 interactions before they take an action. That is where working with us is going to come into play. We’re going to be able to build that indirect report with that customer, with them seeing your messaging like, “Here’s a blog with a problem being solved.” It’s identical to something you’ve come up with. You can post things you’ve noticed in your life, or case studies, or just reviews. Social Media can be a powerful tool and build that relationship with your target audience when we could not get them the first time through platforms like Google and Bing.
Danna: Right, exactly. And as you indicated earlier, a lot of these social platforms are communication platforms. They’re connecting people, businesses to business, consumers to business consumers to consumers, it’s connecting a lot of these people and just offering information, offering information, and education. That’s the way we must look at it. You can’t look at social media for that actual sale. What you’re doing is you’re generating those leads, so that you can follow up with them either through email campaigns or some other channel to keep that communication going. Okay, so what would be the average cost to establish an early-stage social media plan?
Brandon: Obviously a lot of businesses have a lot of different goals. By that I mean there are B2B customers or business-to-business versus a business-to an end consumer B2C. So, trying to buy a cheeseburger online versus buying a company. Social media vehicles offer totally different ad budgets. Typically, the very first thing I would start out with when working with a particular business is to start with a type of branding campaign that is more designed to create awareness. This is who we are, this is what we stand for, this is what we’re all about. Those can come in very minimal, usually anywhere from $500 ad budgets and higher. It doesn’t go much lower than $500 though. It’s going to be hard to get enough data to make sense of it, but you can comfortably start even a small business at $500 bucks. If you’re a little bigger $1,500 to $3000. This is where you’re going to get better returns quicker because we’re going to be able to identify a lot more audiences or avatars. Depending on what your organization calls it, we can define a lot quicker and a lot more variations of that.
Danna: And that’s not just Facebook you’re talking about across all platforms.
Brandon: We can share the $500 budget across several platforms.
Danna: What could be a mixture or an integrated approach that includes some of the Google or Bing or whatever that is at a higher rate, you’re going to be approaching and reaching those ready to buy now buyers, but also branding for those that are searching and getting ready to.
Get the full interview by listening to Episode #23 on the Charged Up Studio Podcast at https://www.chargedupstudio.live/episodes/.
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