Facebook and Growth Marketing

This week I started Facebook Ads from CXL Growth Marketing Mini Degree. Facebook Ads is a part of Channel specific growth skills. The course goes through the customer journey with Facebook and is instructed by Curt Maly.

The instructor first goes through the B.E.L.T method, the B.E.L.T stands for Belief, Engage, Lead, and Transact. The first stage in the B.E.L.T is the belief method. In other words, the awareness level as the concern of the belief is to raise awareness.

When setting a campaign in Facebook, Facebook allows you to set a Key Performance Indicator. It depends on the skill of the Media Buyer and Planner when setting a campaign objectives. Reach, Brand Awareness, Video Views, and Post Engagement is the metrics in the Belief stage. Reach is about reaching the maximum number of people, Brand Awareness is reaching people who are more likely to pay attention to your brand.

The second stage of the B.E.L.T method is to Engage, it means nurturing your audience through the funnel by educating them with the problem and your solution to move them through the funnel until the next stage.

After the Engage stage, moving the audience to the Lead. Lead stage is product and service focused. Website Conversion, Video Views, Clicks to website, and Leads ads are the metrics used in the Engage stage.

The last step before Building the campaign is the Transact which is mainly about making the purchase. Video Views, Ads, Click to website, and website conversion is the metrics of this stage.

One note that the instructor mentioned in the course is about Black Friday. Usually, companies starts promoting before the Black Friday, which is noted in the course that the Black Friday promotion should start the first of November.

Finally, building the campaign. In Building the campaign stage the funnel is constructed into three parts, first is the Tofu which stands for Top of the funnel. Second is the Mofu which is middle of the funnel. Third and finally is Bofu, which stands for bottom of the funnel.

I studied Social Media Marketing from Northwestern University by Randy Hlavac where he discussed the Bottom Line Roi and how to set your social strategy depending on your objectives. There are three main Social Strategies, first is the Engagement Strategy, second is the Nurture Strategy and finally the Social IMC (Integrated Marketing Communication). By far, this is one of my favorite courses along with the book of Social IMC: Social Strategies with Bottom-line ROI. I believe that the combination of Social Media Marketing along with Facebook Ads by Curt Maly is a strong input to optimize your output.

Strategies depends on objectives. What is your main objective? To get more leads or to increase your Social Share of Voice. How would a company operating in the FMCG industry set it’s strategy? Would it be like the Real Estate Industry?

How efficient are you toady? Maybe you are converting enough leads for your business to survive but are you efficient? How much money did you spend? In other words, Are your actuals numbers efficient compared to the budget you spent?

Many agencies build their ad sets depending on what is common in the industry, which seems relevant. For instance, in the Real Estate Industry in Egypt, most of the Brokers and Developers mainly depend on the Social Media by creating ad sets with visuals for units along with a caption including a Call to Action. In the generic picture, this maybe the solution for your business but let’s take it more specific.

Now, let’s take it more specific by assuming on an ad copy that is common in the real estate industry:

Caption: Own your unit now at XYZ with 0% down payment and up to 10 Years Installments
Description: Submit now/Signup/Fill the Form
Ad Type: Static, An image of the compound or the unit specified
Objective: Leads
Target Audience: A series of assumptions made regarding the target audience by assuming on their age, location, gender, interest, and many more..

After setting the campaign, looking at the result maybe you achieved your goal and maybe not. But let’s say you got 1000 leads with a 120k budget spent. For clients, maybe it is good. But did you know how many leads can you get using the same budget if a funnel and a buyer journey were used? (we are assuming that the campaign generated leads which is not the dominant case as mostly you get a decent number that is not qualified). Usually, you can get leads for a short time, it means that after the testing period you may achieve the Key Performance Indicators but one time after the other, it is not working.

Since that you assumed on your target audience so you may be getting a decent number that is not qualified that usually ruins your comments and react on your post with a strange reaction like haha reaction on a proper post about a unit which is irrelevant.

Now, let’s look at how funnels and buyer journey really works by assuming on the first step which is the research and insights. Let’s assume that you conducted a research to know more about your buyer persona and you found more about your audience age, location, marital status, interests, and other relevant characteristics that you can use in your campaigns.

While analyzing your persona you found that a category of people that is interested in investing in the real estate industry. Now, instead of assuming what is your next campaign now you have a more specific picture of what to do.

A multiple ideas can be the solution, let’s look at the ad set now:

Caption: Including a caption about the investment to attract the target audience
Description: Invest Now/Know More/ Be a part or any relevant CTA for investing
Ad Type: this is the most important part about your campaign, that it not necessarily a static post mentioning just an info or visual of something. Your solution could PR activity by conducting an episode with an investment expert talking about investment in the real estate and giving 10% of your information for free, or you can create a blog if you found that your persona reads blogs on the web about the trends in the real estate investment, or you can refine your message to be more specific about investment while showing your units potential.

Summarizing, there is a great difference in campaigns that are based on research and campaigns that are based on assumptions. The only problem is you may not know the difference without testing and comparing.