In this post we’re continuing our four-part series on how to build your own business using a lead magnet, a squeeze page and Facebook.
First we started with creating the perfect lead magnet that targets your audience and makes them sign onto your list.
Next we covered exactly how to build a squeeze page or landing page that gets those visitors to say, “YES! Add me to your list NOW!”
Today in our third installment, we’re going to cover how to get traffic.
And of course you’re going to send this traffic to your squeeze page to build your targeted list big and fast.
Once you have learned all three of these skills, you can literally go into any market and create a list building machine in just days.
Better still, you can take it one step further and build a complete product funnel behind your lead magnet, offering a tripwire (low ticket) offer, followed by your main offer, followed by a big ticket item.
In fact I am going to cover all of that in the final installment of the series in the next post.
This way your lead generation will completely pay for itself.
And once that happens, you can generate as much traffic on demand as you like without having to come out of pocket financially.
This also means you can build your list as FAST as you like, too.
So let’s get started on bringing you super-targeted Facebook traffic…
If you’ve been following along with the series, you should now have a lead magnet created and a squeeze page in place to capture your new leads.
The next step is traffic, and for this we are going to concentrate on Facebook ads.
Of course, there are many free methods of traffic generation, and these do have a role to play and do work. But the problem with ‘free’ traffic is that it’s not actually free… it costs you a great deal in time and effort, and you must put a value on your time.
Typically, it is also a lot slower than paid traffic. Paid traffic is pretty much instant, and totally controllable.
Which is why we are going to concentrate on Facebook – you can drive as much traffic as you like, whenever you like, once you know what you’re doing.
Facebook Ad Campaign Basics
Your ad needs to look and feel like something your audience will resonate with. Don’t put a bottle of fingernail polish in your ad if you’re targeting construction workers. Think of who you are targeting as real people, and consider what they WANT.
Things to consider:
- Your lead magnet should be the perfect ‘present’ to your target audience.
- Your ad copy is your invitation to get the free lead magnet. Use language that will resonate with your target market. Call out their pain points, talk about the big benefit of your free gift and really entice them with your copy.
- Your ad image or video (your visual representation) should speak to your audience. You want to convey just how awesome your offer is in every aspect of your ad.
- Your ad should be consistent with your squeeze page. You want to use similar visuals, similar copy and have nearly the same title as your lead magnet. If things change from the ad to the squeeze page, it will confuse people and they will click away rather than put in their email address.
- Targeting is crucial – you’ve got to get your campaign in front of the right people. Many marketers target too broadly, or they target the wrong audience, and because of that they don’t get the results they should.
Now we’re going to go more in-depth on each of the above 5…
1. Your lead magnet
Just briefly reviewing what we already covered in the previous section on lead magnets – your lead magnet or free offer has to be something your target market WANTS. I know this is super obvious, but I can’t tell you how many times I see the wrong lead magnet offered to the right audience or vice-a-versa.
If your target market is overweight women over 40 years old who want to lose weight, don’t offer a lead magnet on 10 delicious chocolate cake recipes. Yes, you’re probably going to get a lot of overweight women of all ages, but who says they want to lose weight?
Instead, offer a lead magnet called, “Ladies: 5 Surprising Tips To Lose Weight Over The Age Of 40” or something along those lines. This way you are targeting your exact audience, as well as offering them exactly what they want.
Another thing to consider is this: You’re not really giving your lead magnet away. Not really. You are instead selling your lead magnet for the price of an email address. When you view it like this, you realize you need to step up your offer and make it a really good one that your prime prospects are willing to ‘buy’ with their email address.
2. Your ad copy
Your copy should speak to YOUR market, hit their pain points and talk about the benefit of your offer. And you’ve got to do all of this while sounding like a REAL person.
Remember that this is a SOCIAL platform where people are looking to connect with family and friends, and not to be sold to. So make sure that your copy is personal and written to speak to your market.
There is no template we can give you, because every single market is different, and every lead magnet is different. But we can tell you what all successful ads have in common:
- Speak in terms of benefits and pain points. For example:
- “Lose the weight forever without going hungry”
- “Transform your career without disrupting your life”
- “Find the love of your life and never be lonely again”
- When appropriate, call your target audience out by name. For example, “Attention Programmers…” or “Turning 50?” or “For Single Ladies Only.”
- And when you’re a local business, call out your location as well. “Learn to skydive in Southern California” or “New Yorkers, let us walk your dog.”
- Use specific numbers when appropriate. For example, “94% of ABC Graduates are employed within 6 months and have an average starting salary of $64,590.”
- Use the bottom section of your ad to help your prospect overcome any doubts they might have. For example, you can use short, to-the-point – testimonials to drive your point home. “Using this guide I saved $54,395 in six months!” – Joe Smith
- Have a call to action. Tell them what to do without yelling or hitting them over the head. “Grab your copy here”
Research plenty of ads for similar products to get ideas. Write as though you are talking to your prospect right there in the room. Don’t waste words. When in doubt, get a copywriter to help you.
And test. Do plenty of testing to see which copy works the best for your lead magnet to hit just the right target audience.
3. Your ad image
This is known as the ‘creative’. It is not necessarily just an image, it could be a video – you can use an image or a video on Facebook, so you’ve got choices.
Your image is what most people see first, before they even read your copy. That’s why it needs to be the most interesting thing in your ad.
Pick something that really represents your offer and the message you’re trying to put out with your copy.
Images can be photos, cartoons, diagrams, etc. It doesn’t need to be elaborate, but it really should help to convey your message.
It’s a literal representation of the message you’re trying to relay to your audience.
You can place a line of copy on your image to very clearly show and say your message.
For example, if your line is, “Don’t bottle up your feelings” for a counseling company, then the image could be bottles that look unhappy (I’ve actually seen this one.)
If the line on your image is, “Turn your subscribers into raving fans” then the image itself would be a group of raving fans.
You might need to hire a graphic artist to get just the right image, but it will be well worth it.
When looking for images, go to Google, type in your keyword and click images. This will show you which images are clicked on the most for the keyword, and it will give you lots of ideas.
As with the copy, be sure to test your images to see which one works best.
4. Consistency & congruency
Is your ad congruent with your squeeze page? Imagine your ad is red and purple and talks about going back to college.
But when people click the ad, they are taken to a squeeze page that is green and orange, and talks about making money.
This isn’t congruent but it sure is confusing, which is why people will leave without filling out the squeeze page form.
Maintain consistency throughout your funnel until the person takes the action you’re seeking, which in this case is filling out that squeeze page.
And when you place an offer behind your squeeze page to monetize your entire funnel, you’ll want that to be consistent as well. (We’ll cover monetizing your squeeze funnel next post.)
Three things that must be congruent from your ad to your squeeze page are the design and imagery, the benefits you talk about, and the offer itself.
For the design, you want the same color scheme, layout, imagery and font selection/size/color. This isn’t to say the ad and squeeze page should look exactly the same, but they should look consistent. For example, two different photos of the same woman, the same or very similar colors and the same font.
Make sure you talk about the same benefit(s) and use the same language between the ad and the squeeze page. And maintain the same offer as well. A good way to do this is to use an almost identical headline in the ad and the squeeze page.
Be consistent or you will lose people. It’s that simple. And it makes your job easier, too.
5. Targeting
Invite the RIGHT people to get your lead magnet. The best campaign placed in front of the wrong people will fail.
Targeting broad keywords does not work well. Instead, target specifics. For example, if you type in a keyword into the Facebook ad platform and it tells you that your potential reach is 20 million people just in the United States, then you’re being far too broad. You need to get more specific and you will get much better results.
Facebook makes targeting fairly easy because they have more interest based data than anyone in the world. Facebook knows exactly what people like because it monitors everything everyone does on the platform.
Facebook not only knows what we’re doing on Facebook, but they also track what we’re doing all over the web.
And all of this is great news for us as marketers, because we can target the very best people – the ones most likely to buy – for our offers.
Facebook has 2.3 BILLION users – guaranteed, many of your future customers are on Facebook.
When you set up your Facebook campaign, you’ll get to a screen that says, “Who do you want your adverts to reach?” This is where you can target based on:
- Location – target areas where people can buy your products or are already buying your products.
- Age – don’t assume you know how old your best customers are. If possible, take a survey of the customers you have now – you might be surprised.
- Gender – again, don’t assume. You might think your best prospects are male, yet it could be you can get a better response from females because no one else in your niche is targeting them.
- Detailed targeting – this is where the power of Facebook advertising comes from, and we’ll go into more detail below.
Detailed targeting
There are four different categories under detailed targeting:
“Interests” – this is the most powerful option when entering a new market and the place where you should start. You can choose to target people based on their interests, which may include things people share on their timelines, apps they use, pages they like and other activities on and off of Facebook.
“Behaviors and Demographics” – in some cases, depending on your market, they can be very useful. Most of this is based on third party data, and Facebook is trying to match their users with this third party data. This is why it’s not going to be as accurate as targeting interests.
“Custom Audiences” – these are people you’ve already been in touch with. For example, you have their email addresses and you’ve uploaded the data to Facebook, or it’s a list of people who visited your website, or people who interacted with your app, etc. This is useful for retargeting people you’ve already been in touch with, which is why you won’t be using this when you first get started.
“Lookalike Audiences” – this is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your current customers. You can base your lookalike audience on things like data custom audience, conversion tracking pixel, website custom audience and so forth.
In the beginning, you’ll want to just focus on “Interests” and save the other three for later.
Research
When it comes to targeting, research is your best friend and it’s worth your time and effort.
If you don’t learn about your target market, then you’ll never know where to find them. And that’s what your mission is going to be, is to find out where they’re ‘hiding’ within the Facebook platform.
It all comes down to specificity and being able to find the avid members of your market – the people who don’t just like your niche but LOVE it and spend money in it.
Use the “But no one else would” trick
So how do you find the avid members of a market? By using the “But no one else would” trick.
For example, let’s say your niche is tennis. There are some very famous tennis players that everyone has heard of. There are tennis players that some people have heard of, and others haven’t. But only an AVID tennis fan would have heard about the more obscure players.
So if you’re targeting avid tennis fans, then targeting by using the name of an obscure tennis pro will get you only avid tennis fans.
Crazy but true. This trick works so well, you can use it in almost any niche.
Everyone has heard of yoga.
Some people have heard of certain well-known types of yoga.
But if you target an obscure form of yoga that only avid yogi’s would have heard of, then you’ll have the market you’re looking for, and so on.
Think about the ‘who’ or the ‘what’ of your market, that only the most enthusiastic people in your market would know about. That’s a great interest to target. And each market can have several of these, too, not just one.
Questions to ask
Here are a list of questions that you can ask yourself concerning your campaign.
Keep in mind that you are asking these questions not for your business in general, but specifically for this one campaign that you are doing, this one lead magnet that you are giving away, and this one audience you are targeting.
- Who are the authority figures, leaders or big brands in your niche?
- What books or magazines or newspapers does your ideal customer read?
- What websites do they frequent?
- Where do they live?
- What events do they attend?
- What tools do they use?
- What is specifically unique about this group?
Make a list for each one, focusing on the areas most specific to your group. In other words, if your market is fly fishing, then general sporting goods stores are far too broad, while a fly fishing magazine could be perfect.
You can do a Google search for each one, such as “Top fly fishers,” “Top fly fishing websites” “Top fly fishing organizations” and so forth.
Other research ideas
- Audience insights from Facebook – this lets you find other pages related to your interest, gives demographic data and so forth.
- Forums – see what people are asking, their reading level and how they talk. You’ll learn how they speak, the keywords and slang they use and more.
- Buzzsumo – enter keywords and find out what articles have been shared the most.
- Amazon – research books and products in your market, read the reviews and find out how they speak and what they think.
As you can see, research is really important for finding the right people for your audience. If you get this wrong, then the rest of it doesn’t matter.
But if you get it right, you can create a campaign that will pay you for months, years and maybe even as long as you care to run it.
So now you know who to target, you’ve got your ad, your lead magnet and your squeeze page.
Now it’s just a matter of starting your first campaign, monitoring your results and making any changes along the way that you might need.
To set up your campaign, go to Facebook’s Business Manager. Or if you don’t know how to set it up, Facebook will show you exactly what to do here: https://business.facebook.com/
From there you can click on Ads Manager or Power Editor, and again Facebook is very good about showing you exactly what to do to start and run your campaigns.
If you run into anything that doesn’t immediately make sense to you (and it’s possible, the first time you run a campaign) then simply Google it. You’ll be amazed how many obstacles can be quickly surmounted using Google!
Conclusion
Millions of people and businesses have run Facebook ad campaigns, so I can guarantee you it’s not rocket science.
You may or may not be successful the first time out. It’s entirely possible you’ll mess up and only get a handful of subscribers.
If this happens, don’t panic because it’s all part of the learning process. Remember, every niche and every lead magnet is going to be different. Figure out what went wrong and try again. The secret – as in so many things in life – is to get up one more time than you fall down, and you will be successful.
And by the way, plenty of people have literally made MILLIONS using Facebook ad campaigns. The trick is they learned all they could and then they dove in and made it work for them, just as you will.
If you would like some advanced (free) training on running Facebook Ads from a true expert, sign up for this free webinar from JayKay Dowdall. You’ll get some fantastic tips here that will make a real difference to your success with FB ads, right from the start – I strongly recommend you watch this.
OK, in the next post we’re going to cover how to make these campaigns self-liquidating, in that you are earning as much or more money than you are spending to build your list.
Once you’ve got this down, there is no limit to how fast you can build your lists of prospects AND buyers.
And there’s no reason why you can’t be well on your way to a solid 5 or 6 figure income, either.
