How I used Facebook Advertising to Increase Business Ten Percent in One Month — Part 2, First Steps
Quotes from customers from one day last week
“Who’s doing your Social Media Marketing?”
“Wow, I didn’t even know you existed before I saw your Facebook Page”
“I love looking at all the pictures. Can’t wait for you to cater my wedding with all this amazing food”
“Can you help me out with my Social Media Marketing?”
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin… Huh?
Why do we even need to market through social media?
Can I do it myself and actually do it right?
Will I make a fool of myself and blow up my brand?
I can’t write, I cheated in English class in high school, how can I do this?
Should I just pay someone to do this?
How can I find the time?
These, along with many other questions, plagued me when I really thought about making a concerted effort to market Dish on Facebook and other social media channels.
You might be faced with a few of these questions or many others that are keeping you from engaging in social media, especially advertising on various channels. But if you start out small and work your way up — that’s what I’m doing — then I think you’ll find it rather easy.
As I had mentioned in the first article in the series (which can be found here), Dish had been cultivating our Facebook audience since 2009. We had thousands of followers. Many of those followers we had paid to get in the first place, but we had no strategy, no plan, no game.
“Why?” you might ask. I didn’t know how! I knew what our demographics were, I knew you could advertise on Facebook, I had even advertised on Google various times. But the whole Facebook thing seemed intimidating.
I managed the restaurant, the catering and pretty much everything else that comes with a small business. I have great employees who handle a ton of work for me, but I still have to drive the ship, keep it going in the right direction and make sure we stayed in the right lane. So, I just ignored it.
But if you read the first article — and you should — then you know I needed to learn how to expand my brand, increase its reach and put it on others mind.
Going back a few years, I had dreamed of billboard advertising or some form of radio and TV stuff, but I always knew that unless I was a big brand with a ton of money, these were not going to be feasible.
I decided to do more research on social media in general and using it as a marketing vehicle. What I found, though I already knew in the back of my brain somewhere, was I was missing the boat big time.
Some Numbers That Forced me to Engage
My customers are online and in a big way! According to the Pew Research Center, 75% of American Adults using the Internet are on at least one social media site.
Even crazier is that the average US user spends forty minutes each day on Facebook. I thought that was a lot until I thought about my own usage of Facebook each day. In fact, last year I had to unfollow/hide the vast majority of my friends so I wouldn’t waste so much time each day. For my current friends reading this, I recently undid this and I’m back to seeing your updates.
How about the fact that US users are actually checking their social media accounts a whopping seventeen times per day? Yes, seventeen times per day. Now I know why every time I post something on Instagram, I immediately get a whole crop of likes from my fans. I can post in the morning, the afternoon, even in the dead-middle of the night and sure enough I will get likes, like clockwork.
So, let’s just agree that if you have a business you need to be on Facebook and possibly Instagram and Linkedin at the very least. I haven’t really spent much time on Twitter or Pinterest, so I’m not going to cover them.
Where to Start
Let me state clearly: I’m in the middle of this journey. I know where I’m going and plan on making some amazing marketing campaigns with landing pages, email lists, automatic email responses, etc. But in the past few months I started slowly. I even redid my whole website which has increased leads by over 400 percent in the past two months. Look for future article on this soon.
A few months ago, I had taken the first step. I had finally, after years of having a profile page for my business, optimized it with all the bells and whistles. I had a ton of followers but I needed to engage with them.
The first thing I did was post regular updates. Almost every day I took a picture of my staff, our food, events we catered, etc. Things started to happen, people started showing up at the restaurant and mentioned the posts.
One lady came in a few days ago in fact and said, “I want the same kind of catering I saw online. I loved the menu and how it looked.” A few hours later, a group of people came in and said they had never eaten at the restaurant before but saw us online and proceeded to order a bunch of food and then post rave reviews all over Instagram.
The goal at this point was to get my customers — potential and otherwise — to think of me when they get hungry, when they want to put together a menu for a catering, anything to do with food, in fact.
I want them to know me, know my staff, know my business. I’m trying to open my business to them so they have feelings for it. I want them to love it, I want them to defend it if they hear something bad, I want them to feel like each of my employees are part of their extended family.
It Was Working — Now What?
The next step was to start spending more money on advertising; not a lot, $5 here, $10 there. This is where it got interesting and fun. I knew my demographic — women aged 35 to 55 — and knew that I could target this specific demographic on Facebook. This allowed me to spend only the right amount of money on the people that mattered: those who would consume my product.
Before I started to learn, I would have run the same ad, but maybe to everyone in Reno and definitely to both men and woman. I wouldn’t have thought to target females aged 45 to 65 who fans of the Food Network. In summary, I would have spent a ton of money to get the same results a mere $20.00 cost me. If you look closely at the ad below, you will see I’ve received almost 500 likes and shares and the ad has been displayed to over 2,000 people in my demographic and I only had to spend $20.00.
I encourage you to open a Facebook advertising account and start to play around. If you like to learn online, here are some resources I suggest you start with. They both helped me get a grip on how to buy adverting, how to test which ads were actually working and what types of ads I could run.
Facebook Blueprint: Free Online Training for Advertising on Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/blueprint — The resource you should spend a large amount of time on right now, don’t wait. There are eight-five short courses on everything you need to know about Facebook advertising. Everything from setting up your page to advertising and every option in between.
Facebook Ads & Facebook Marketing Mastery Guide 2018 — https://www.udemy.com/facebook-ads-facebook-marketing-mastery-guide/ — This is an inexpensive class you can take on udemy.com which I can highly recommend. I took this class back a few months ago and though I did skip some of the content, I found it amazingly detailed and covered everything I wanted to know about Facebook advertising.
The Definitive Guide To Marketing Your Business On Facebook — https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2015/08/20/the-definitive-guide-to-marketing-your-business-on-facebook/#141fbbe12f51
There is so many areas to cover but my intent is not to cover them all. If you really want to take advantage of everything that is out there you will need to configure your webpage, build landing pages, write out a specific marketing plan and make sure you are able to measure the results.
I’m working in that direction as we speak and hopefully will have more to say, but the point of this series is to let you know that you too can start advertising your business without spending a ton of money, without hiring a professional and still get real results.
Next Week
I will show you some of our actual campaigns, the results they had as well as the organic listings I used to drive traffic to my restaurant over the past month.
Visit Dish @ www.dishcafecatering.com
Visit Joe @ www.linkedin.com/in/joe-j-horn/
