If you know me then you will know I love Facebook marketing. This March I attended Social Media Marketing World in San Diego and while I was there I met Alex Houg, the twenty year old CEO of
Some Background
At 14, Alex was an internet marketing entrepreneur with his own online gaming accessory website which he later sold. Today he leads a team of 22 people at BlitzMetrics, helping small business owners drive leads and sales via Facebook.
His focus with BlitzMetrics is the QuickStart program, fully implementing and tuning Facebook ads with packages available for all levels of business. His other projects include The Untern Movement– A program designed to help college students discover what they love and gain valuable job experience in cooperation with universities. With this program, his goal is to provide participants with a certification program built around what they enjoy, free of charge.
Alex strives to help others around him succeed, empowering people to do what they are passionate about.
I took on the task of reading Alex’s blog to find out what I could learn about Facebook marketing. Some of the points are news related but I have extracted so much value and I hope you will too.
#1. Facebook Knows What You Did Last Night!
Yes and again if you know me I’m not afraid to share my most recent meal on Facebook and neither are the guys at BlitzMetrics. If you don’t have Graph Search yet you can access it by changing your language on Facebook to US and it should appear.
You may not be utilizing Graph search yet and if not you need to get on it. By running some simple searches you can find out more about your target audience. As the feature develops, Alex tells us that Facebook will make recommendations to users based on their interests! This may be powerful for you as a brand. Try these and see what results you get:
- Interests of people who like your brand
- Interests of people who like your competition
- Places liked by people who like my page
I could write a huge list, but this blog post is long enough. You see the idea is that you can also start to create the kind of content that interests your fans.
I had fun doing this search for photos of people who like Tweak Your Biz – and I spot some of my favourite people in there!
What you need to do now: Carry out some of these searches. Take a screenshot and use them in a post to thank your fans and customers. I do think it’s better to target people who already know you, but this exercise is a good way of finding out what your fans are into.
#2. Clever Ways to Impress Friends and Clients on Facebook
Of all the posts I read on Alex’s blog this one was my favorite. Being truly social means you need to listen and when you listen you pick up all sorts of information about the person you are meeting with. Now imagine you choose something relevant from that conversation and you send your client/friend a gift based on what they are passionate about. Check this out:
What you need to do now: Social Media is great and making connections is what it’s all about, but there’s nothing quite like making an impact with a customer. If they are really social they are likely to share your random act of kindness and this will give you some great visibility with their network, but remember it truly is better to give than receive.
#3. Keep Your Friends Close, Have Fun, Be Timely, Relevant and Helpful
Social Media is a powerful force that is evolving every day. One thing you can learn by following Alex is that there is no right or wrong answer. Social has to be at the heart of your content strategy and delivers what your customers need. If you are truly social your brand will build meaningful relationships with the right people who will either become your customers or it will strengthen the relationship you already have with customers. We are all learning and marketing on Facebook presents constant challenges but it’s really important to keep your friends close, have fun with what you do and deliver timely, relevant and helpful content.
What you need to do now: To be successful you need to be passionate about what you do and how you help. Alex certainly does this well.
#4. Will the New RHS Ads on Facebook increase Ad CTR by 300%
Facebook has re-designed the newsfeed, pages and to enhance the change the RHS ad looks different. Will this affect your ads CTR? Probably not if your using oCPM because Facebook balance placement but the net affect will be an increased average CTR and you should see an improvement in campaigns. The new re-design will save you some time now because you can use the same creative as you would for newsfeed.
Read the full story here
#5. Facebook Marketing Does not Work for B2B
This is a common complaint that I hear from B2B marketers, but as Alex points out the targeting options on Facebook are now more advanced. Not only can you target a workplace, but you can target people by job title, industry, office type and workplace. Are you looking to influence the influencers? Here’s your opportunity. Take your already performing ads and duplicate them with these categories.
Here’s a great example from Blitzmetrics. Alex and his team co-presented with Marketo, then they posted the content to their blog and targeted people who work at Marketo.
What you need to do now: If you go to a big event and want to impress the influencers, write a great post and target them in your ad using these options.
#6. Should You Use Mobile Apps on Facebook?
This is a question people regularly ask. If you are a large brand with a development team and budgets apps add great value. Small business owners can use a number of solutions also. Using apps should only be used if they are central to your marketing strategy and to get the most from them you will need to amplify them with ads. Alex advises that you should always focus on creating great content that adds value to your fans.
Here are some great companies that can provide you with all you need.
What you need to do now: Keep creating great content and adding value to your fans. Apps are really useful for list building and engaging fans but always think about your goal.
#7. Sadness for Facebook Admins as “Always On” feature is turned off
Yes, it was a sad day for me too when this feature was turned off and to be honest a real pain. Running an ad that automatically updated with every post was a real time saver. The good news is you don’t have to deal with the barrage of disapproved ads because images broke the 20% rule and when you used Facebook in your text. In addition the Boost Post (yes I just used that word and we will get to that subject later) has been revamped with smarter targeting options.
What you need to do now: Create some time every week to promote posts individually!
#8. Is it Really Possible to Get 100% CTR on ads?
How happy would you be to see that in an ad report? Alex says it is possible but only if you use super target audiences. It’s not uncommon to get a CTR of 20%-40% but how can this be when most people are lucky to get 1%. How you do this is target the people who have already bought from you and use custom audiences. This way your CTR will increase and your cost per conversion will decrease.
What you need to do now: Get your customer list and upload it to Facebook. People who already know you, like you and trust you will buy from you.
#9. Facebook Ad Groups/Sets: How to Get the Best from them
More changes to the way Facebook ads look and feel. Personally I like this change. Now each of your ads live in their own set. Budgeting and end dates are at the ad group level, so now there is no need to create a new campaign for every post. Campaigns are still by objective so audience-engagement-conversion framework still applies.
What you need to do now: To get the best from ad sets test out a number of creatives to see which perform the best.
#10. Are Boosted Posts a Waste of Your Ads Budget?
Alex entitled his post $88 to reach 360 people? What you need to know about boosted posts is that Facebook’s estimator is not accurate when you add additional budget to your boosted post. Alex says “We’ve been able to get a reach of 50,000 on this very post for only $72. So it’s unlikely that it would jump to $240″. The takeaway here is that you can still get results if you have great content and your targeting is spot on.
What you need to know: If you don’t have time or your budget is small and you need to promote something in a hurry boosted posts can work. Be warned though your targeting must be relevant and you need to have rock solid content that you know works for your target audience.
#11. Do Boosted Posts Really Work?
This leads on from the last point and really I’m pointing out boosted post because many smaller local businesses with limited targeting options use this feature. The other challenge is a lack of time and budget to do anything more advanced. Here are some reasons that you may want to boost a post
- Increase engagement but not conversion
- Select interests as oppose to fans and friends of fans
- If you have a highly shareable product for which you have reviews
- If your content is excellent and that is evidenced by people liking it
The team at Blitz Metrics boosted a post for $15 which got 28 interactions and 20 clicks to their website.
What you need to do now: I saw this great comment on Alex’s blog from Benjamin Harries:
“Find the product that people like, create a post to promote it, target the right people based on their interests and keep satisfying customer demand” Don’t forget it’s not about finding loopholes it’s about knowing what your customer wants.
“The training BlitzMetrics puts on is completely free to students-even the travel and lodging. The businesses we have as clients subsidize these efforts, whether it is the NBA, Infusionsoft, Marketo, Jack Daniels, and other brands. This gives students hands-on experience. Non-students must pay for training, which we conduct online and in our offices in Minneapolis”
To re-cap on this post and as a reminder, Alex Houg is a twenty year old CEO, he knows much about marketing on Facebook and if you want to stay ahead of the curve keep an eye on his blog.
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