Boosting Strategy For Local Businesses

January 11, 2017 Chandler Walker

There are a literal TON of ideas and strategies available on how to market and how to do it in the most effective way.

Something I've learned as I've built campaigns and worked on and designed strategies around different businesses is that it's most often the simple things that work very well and it's the long term strategies that win in the end.

Especially for local businesses.

If you want to grow your business and your brand you need to get it in front of as many people as possible and in the most efficient and cost effective way.

The best way right now to get in front of people is to get on their phones where they have their faces inserted in all the time. One of the best ways to do this right now is to utilize a boosting strategy for brand awareness on Facebook.

This strategy is designed to put your brand in front of people on a consistent basis and at the lowest cost possible for a local business. This is assuming you always have a solid content calendar put together and that your are actually executing on that calendar.

The boosting strategy revolves around putting about $5-$10 into each of your posts that you put out. This does a couple of things 1) it builds your website audiences and video audiences that you can pull from later on to create new lookalike audience and 2) it puts your brand in front of people from the same audience on a consistent basis.

I recommend using a website or email list custom audience and making a lookalike audience from that as they tend to work the best, but using the people who like your page and their friends will work well if you don't know how to create lookalikes or if you don't have a large enough email list or website following from your Facebook pixel.

If you're in front of someone all the time with content designed to build a relationship and tell a story, you are there when they need you to answer question or when they see you put out a call to action at the end of the month they are much more inclined to come in and see you. As they have already been consuming your content for some time and will trust your brand over others.

If you do this and do it consistently for a few months you will notice an uptick in the traffic into your business and a much larger social blueprint from that. But the biggest thing you have to do is be CONSISTENT! Everyone starts something like this and falls off the wagon due to not being able to produce the content or not seeing immediate results.

Last you can go into your business manager and invite all the people who liked your post to like your page. Thereby building up your page audience on top of what the boosting gave you.

This really comes down to building that relationship with the people who follow your page and working to develop a sense of trust with them.

ChansLogic Ep013

January 10, 2017 Chandler Walker

In this episode we talk about CONTENT! What your content calendar should look like, how to organize it, best practices and how to advertise your content in the most effective way.

Be REAL. Be HUMAN. Be SOCIAL.

Use #ChansLogic to ask questions!

Find Steph on:
Snapchat | sbentley02
Facebook | steph.SAF
Instagram | @stephanie_saf

Music by Victor Spoils | victorspoils.bandcamp.com/releases

Facebook Retargeting

December 23, 2016 Chandler Walker

One of the most powerful and cost effective tools we have available to market our businesses is Facebook ads. It is a massive platform with obscene amounts of data compiled about almost anything you are even remotely interested in.

Because of this incredible amount of data Facebook has available we are able to construct highly targeted ads to people who have already expressed an interest in something similar to what you do or fit the profile of a specific buyer persona you have created.

Then there's the Facebook pixel. A little nugget of joy that allows us to track who visits specific pages on our website, what processes they were in when they visited and it allows you to build up a website audience off of that pixel.

When you create an audience from your Facebook pixel based off of traffic to your website it will take the people who visited and compile an audience called website visitors that you can use to run ads to.

Think about it this way: someone visits your website from something you posted on Facebook, looks at the page, doesn't convert and leaves your website. With the website audience created from your Facebook pixel you can retarget the people who visited that page and didn't convert with an ad.

Maybe you say thanks for visiting the site and offer them a free guide, consult etc. The big thing about this is that you are now targeting an audience that is no longer completely cold and by putting your brand in front of them more often you are essentially creating and building a relationship with them to move them from cold to warm to hot. When they're hot that's when you finally go for the ask!

The next idea to look at are look alike audiences. Say you've worked on a website audience, had some success and it doesn't seem to convert anymore or you need a fresh audience that's similar to what you were working with.

The lookalike audience does just that. You will take your website audience and create a lookalike audience in your audiences section of your Facebook as manager. The lookalike audience is exactly what is sounds like. It is a audience with similar characteristics to your website audience based of the profiles of the people in your website audience.

For local and small businesses it's smart to choose the 1% lookalike audience when you are creating it. The key to marketing to a lookalike audience is to not expect them to convert right away.

This is now a cold audience and in order to warm up a cold audience you have to put out excellent content for them to consume. I would spend at least a month putting good content in front of this audience and then go for an ask, which is simply revealing what your product is and asking them to purchase it or book a session with you for a consultation.

You can create these audiences from email lists, video views, content people engaged with on Facebook or even people taking action on an app.

The possibilities to continue to create new audiences and work them from cold to hot are endless and if you show that what you have is worth it by first building trust and a relationship through excellent content then you will garner a following of fans who will use your products and/or services!

Facebook is about building trust....not selling

June 5, 2016 Chandler Walker

Facebook has a massive user base of many different people from many different cultures and walks of life. People go on Facebook and other social networking sites to be able to unplug, see what there friends are doing, check out the latest news from around the world and to feel a little more connected to society.

Because there's so much attention on Facebook and so many people are on it businesses and marketers see it as an opportunity to sell products and services. If there's that many people in Facebook it must be pretty easy to sell on the platform right?

Turns out people don't want to be sold on social media. They want to get away from the selling, click bait marketing and other common tactics employed by marketers. Think about it; when your scrolling through Facebook and you happen across a blatant ad you scroll right past it. You don't have the time or patience to listen to another blah blah blah sales or landing page about features and benefits of a supposed wonder product.

So what makes you stop and click, share, comment or like something on a social network? For most people it has to be something that sparks emotion; it's a funny video or picture, meme, article that you find interesting or an educational piece that gives you some valuable info that you can use. Once you see enough of this stuff from a page on Facebook you start checking it regularly, like the page and begin to trust them as a resource for content you enjoy.

This is how we build a relationship with people and show them that we care more about them than sales by providing a tremendous amount of value at no cost. Now that we understand how people want to interact on social media and how they consume content on it. Why are traditional marketers still relying on short term tactics for selling with click bait Facebook ads, sending people to a landing page with a countdown timer (that never really hits zero), promising certain features and benefits and then sending a series of spammy emails encouraging people to hurry and buy now?

It's because they don't understand the changing landscape of marketing and haven't taken the time to learn how people want to be interacted with on social media. Plus it's much more difficult to produce content that actually helps people for free and the results take longer to show up in the form of new customers. But when they do you form a powerful relationship with your customers, because you already given them so much. Your brand will become so engrained with them that they will go out of their way to purchase the products and services.

When looking at the ideal strategy to build your brand and get people to purchase your products and services it's all about building that trust and developing a relationship with your customers. You do this by focusing on what they want and how they want it and this is through producing incredibly valuable information through blogs, videos, funny pictures and videos and interacting with them and talking back and forth when they have questions. It all comes down to LISTENING to your customers and reverse engineering your strategy to address their wants and needs!

Learn to Crush it with Facebook Live!

April 15, 2016 Chandler Walker

There's been a battle between live platforms lately with Periscope, YouTube live and now Facebook live. With Facebook taking a serious interest in live video and making it the centerpiece of its current strategy this is bad news for everyone else.

Facebook has been paying some media publishers to produce live content in order to increase the awareness of its live platform, get more users engaged and using the feature and it has prioritized live in its news feed. Kobe Bryant's last game was featured on Facebook live! Now there will be a live button that replaces the messenger button at the bottom of the Facebook app and Facebook will be introducing a video search feature to make it easier for people to search for videos like they do in YouTube. If that isn't enough Facebook is going to be adding filters and drawing on the screen during live videos. Hello snapchat? Er Facebook?

This is a huge indication companies should be working toward going live to build awareness and offer a unique piece of your business that is raw, real, unedited and unscripted. People love to see this! It adds the human piece to your brand in a world of boring non personalized marketing, where consumers feel as though they are just numbers and companies don't care about them.

How should we use live effectively? We should start by thinking about what people are asking and what they want to see in behind the scenes, funny or unique content. If you see everyone else doing something do something different. Create a small mini series that you put up weekly that covers something people are actually asking about or interested in. This means you actually have to LISTEN to your audience and react from what they say. When you're recording live be sure you have someone to respond to the comments and engage with your viewers. Chances are you're going to have a lot more comments from the viewers in your live video. Finally ask the viewers questions during the video. People love to be interacted with and will comment back with a response on what you're asking them.

With Facebooks improved embedding you can now put your live videos that are saved as recordings on your website or anywhere else you'd like to showcase them. Though the most important thing for Facebook is keeping people engaged on their platform. In addition to improved embedding you can use live to record from a GoPro, drones and similar items.

If you're interested in continuing to be relevant in social and digital marketing you're going to want to, at the very least, produce some live content and see how it does in terms of who watches it and how many people you get engaging with you on that video. Don't ignore this, you'll regret it later when everyone else is doing it and it's much harder to build that engagement. Those who jump in early are the ones who build the biggest following and achieve the greatest success!