Engage and Convert: Insights into Social Media Advertising - S4 E9

Hey everyone and welcome to today's episode. My name is Rich Haik and I'm the host of Let's Talk Social. This is a podcast where we go over everything in digital marketing, especially within the social media and website part of the digital world. Today we're going to be talking about just the overview of social media marketing in general and how all of that ties together. I've made some episodes on this in the past, but this is going to be a more so overall encompassing Version of all of those episodes. So a little bit shorter on each topic, but how they all tie together. Today's start to the episode is going to be about our marketing funnel. So if you remember from past episodes, I've brought this up a couple of times. We're going to be looking at how people are finding us, how they start to engage with the brand, when they finally buy, how we get them to keep coming back, and then how we get to turn them into advocates for our brand to go and tell others about us so they can come and buy from us as well. So we've labeled those steps as five different steps. Some people do them in four steps, three steps, whatever it is. We like to do five. And so we have our user acquisition, engagement and reinforcement with that person, how we get them to finally purchase something retention, which is new customers keep coming back or they stay subscribed to you. So extending that lifetime value of a person and then advocacy. So turning our strongest customers. Into advocates that will go and find us new prospects and share our business with them. So as we look at social media tactics, our websites, all of those things, we need to make sure that we're sprinkling in something that falls into one of each of these categories or that we have a overall cohesive effort to make sure that. All five of these categories are being hit again. If you look up marketing funnel, you'll find a different couple of versions. Some do what's called a flywheel. So it's an endless circle. We always like to just say someone goes out of the funnel and then enters back in on the step three, which is the conversions again, so that they come back and repurchase and then. Obviously, they're going to be seeing you through your email marketing or whatever it is. So engagement as well, but you can only acquire them one time. So as we talk about social media marketing in general, there's always two halves that we split it into. We've got our organic half, which is just posting to the page. Using hashtags or whatever engagement tactics that you've found work for your business. And then the actual paid side of it. So running actual ads between Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, whatever it is. And we separate those two because you almost can't have one. You can't have someone specialize in the both of them and do it at a very high level, especially when you're an agency and have people working under a client list and they just have a lot to deal with. But the other is. That your social media almost won't really thrive without the both of these being active. So we have to be making great content and getting that to the page, doing that in a strategic way, and trying to grow organically. But we also, because Facebook is, and all of these platforms are so saturated now, we need to actually be performing on the paid side as well and giving some money to these platforms for paid ad serves. It sounds like I get something back from that. I don't, but we've just truly found this in the last eight years or so of doing this for clients that if we're not going to be paying, Facebook is not going to prioritize serving our post above others unless we just do a really good job of the organic side. So something's going viral, getting lots of a thousand views within an hour or so. You can see that spike. That's always great, but it's even better. If we take that viral content and put some paid money behind it. So that's why we always split up the twos. We've got paid and organic, and those are the two sides of social. And there's four things that I believe that you should be keeping in your mind when we are talking about the organic side. So this is actually posting the engagement and everything. And the first one is who you are posting for. We always like to say, think of who your perfect ideal customer is and curate the copy. So the words on the post and the actual creative. So the photos or video to cater to that person so that we can get more of them. Now, this is hard to say just as a blanket statement for everyone. If you have a really niche market, then this is probably an easy thing to do. If you have a large range of clientele and you've got like us, for instance, as the agency. We've got everyone from mom and pop retail shops up to a hundred million dollar, almost billion dollar businesses or insurance agents versus construction workers. And so it's going to be hard to curate everything for who that perfect customer is, but. Instead of just posting content and banging it out and try to get things out to the page to meet some made up frequency quota, make sure we remember who we're actually posting for. And that should actually help do two things, which is tell Facebook and Instagram or tech talk, whichever platform you're posting on the type of person that you want, because that audience is going to start to interact with your post. And then ultimately over the course of time, you're going to train the algorithm to know that people around this similar. Demographic or this similar niche area are liking this content and then it will continue to serve it to more people like them. So that's one of the big reasons. And I forgot about the other already. I'll come back to that. If I remember, it'll hit me. I'm sure. The next thing to keep in mind is it's about quality and not quantity. So if we are going to be making these posts for that specific person and. Going through the trouble of curating content to go about this. We're not necessarily trying to just get as much content out as possible, but more so more quality content. And I've said this probably in 10 episodes now over the course of the last few years, we've been doing this podcast, but it's something really important to keep in mind because. If we're not actually going to be, making things that are quality one, they're not going to get engagement. But two, if we're just talking about pure, what makes sense, and we have to optimize for how much time we're going to be spending on social media, not all of us can do this all day, every day. And so if we're going to dedicate some time to this, we. All of us here are of the belief that we should spend the time doing something that's a little more quality instead of doing less quality, but more quantity. And so that should again, help with the algorithm and everything, and get your post back to more people that you're actually looking for. So something else to keep in mind is the frequency at which you post is going to impact what your page is optimized for. Last episode was entirely about this, so I won't go too deep into this. Just go give that a listen. We even have a handout PDF that you can download on the website. And bye. Essentially, the more that you're going to be posting, the more reach you might get, but the less you're posting, the ideal there is that you're actually going to have more engagement on a per post base basis, just because the people are only getting on their phones so many times per day or on their desktop computer, whatever it is, you're only getting on Facebook so many times a day, Tik Tok more so if we're posting and posting and posting, like we see some people post five, 10, 12 times a day, they're not going to get served every single one of those posts. And that's goes for your entire following. So just naturally, some of those posts are not going to do as well as they could. So they might be seen by more people or that same person might get on and see both of your posts, but they're not necessarily going to engage with the both of them just because they've already engaged with the one. And so if we're looking at like how to maximize our reach, that's probably the way to do it, as opposed to a little bit more, we want to maximize engagement, which is my preference, because you get to train the algorithm around what you're looking for, then you would actually be posting less, which plays into again, the quality over quantity. And then last minute lastly is just the actual algorithm in itself as something to keep in mind. So these again are all around organic social, some things to keep in mind here. The algorithm wants to see consistent posting inside of your pages. So making sure that the cadence at what you're posting doesn't go five posts one day, ghost for three weeks, five posts again, ghost for another week. It's eight posts that it doesn't necessarily like that. And that doesn't mean you have to post like Monday, or anything like that, but we typically like to set up a weekly frequency and then look at our insights on our pages and figure out what days we have the most users on. And then again, inside of those days, what times they're actually on the most. And so we actually want engagement from accounts that are similar to our target demo. And so that was saying earlier, and I made the joke when I did this presentation that the argument could be made that when your parents or whoever it is goes on your business's Facebook page and then they like one of your posts, if they're not in your target demo, they're actually telling Facebook and Instagram something else about who to serve this post to more often. So all the time we see this. If like you're starting a new business for sure, you love the support from friends and family and all of that, but over time you might only see friends and family that are getting this post and actually liking it and they're sharing it back to their same group so it's not getting any new exposure. And that's ultimately telling the algorithm, Hey, we want more people in this age range in this area or whatever it is. Be, you don't have to tell them not to engage with anything on your page, but be specific about who you're trying to get to engage to the page. Cause again, we're, the algorithm doesn't have a brain necessarily. It's just going based on what users are interested in, how they're similar demographically location, all of those things. And something else to talk about within inside the engagement portion of this is that different types of engagement have different levels of weight inside of what the algorithm likes to see. A share on Facebook, we'll just talk about Facebook only because this kind of applies all the way down the chain. Getting someone to share your post on Facebook is one of the best things that you can do for the algorithm to grab that and keep sending it back to more people, even outside of those it's been shared with. Comments are the next best. So if you can get somebody to comment on the post, that's going to tell the algorithm, Hey, this is getting a little bit higher of a level of engagement than people that just watched 10 seconds of the video and left or liked the post and just went on and swiped on. And then you've got comments that are worth more than likes. So we're building down, we've got shares, comments, likes, and then ultimately views. And so if someone just views a post, doesn't like it and goes on. It depends on how long they viewed that post. So if they viewed it for 60 seconds versus six seconds, the 60 seconds is going to tell Facebook and Instagram, Hey, I think this is going to actually be more engaging to this target audience because they're looking at this longer. However, If someone were to like it or to comment on it or to DM it over to somebody else, those are all going to be actions that are worth more than just one viewing it. So the thing to optimize for if you have the opportunity or if you're asking people to go and do something Would be the either the shares or the comments and it's seemingly gotten harder and harder as the years have gone on To get people to comment on certain types of posts. I've got an episode coming out about this but essentially people know their worth inside of social media and so Getting someone to spend the time to comment is getting more and more difficult as the years go on. So using our creativity to get past that kind of a invisible barrier there is going to be really important, especially moving into 2024, because again, we've just never had such a saturated market within social media for every industry that's currently on there. Something else the algorithm likes to see is using new features when they come out. So if you see the new button on Instagram or on TikTok and they're like, Hey, we have a new way to put stickers inside of videos or new one of the new story features where you know, you have their polls and your countdown and you can add gifts and the clock and the weather and all those things. If something new like that gets added, use it almost immediately because and find a way that makes sense, but use it almost immediately because the platforms are trying to test whether or not they want to keep this new feature. And sometimes they don't even roll it out to every single phone. So just recently just, I think a week and a half, two weeks ago, Instagram. started releasing the ability for captions to be put on stories. So on your vertical story that disappears in 24 hours, you can actually type a caption for that story at the bottom. And when it was first rolled out, we had some people in the office that couldn't even see the captions and others that could, but again they're testing whether or not they want to keep this feature. And so using that often and early is going to be really beneficial for you because we can ultimately... Get the extra wanted exposure because we're just testing out new features that they have. And the content type that we're putting out, again, it's in this handout from last episode, but the videos are going to be weighted the highest, so we talked about shares and comments and all of that's worth, one's worth more than another. Videos are more likely to be served out to people randomly, then carousels, then static images. So in that order, so if you have to prioritize what content type you want to be using, go for videos first and see if you can do that. If not, do a multi post image, so it could be three to six images and a carousel post. So that's the ones you can swipe through. And then very last is the static image post. Something to keep in mind here that I put on one of the slides is a brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is. It's what the consumers tell each other that it is. And so we were talking about the bio of your page on this one. You can put in there the world's best boutique or whatever it is. In your bio, but ultimately they're your brand's persona online is going to be shaped around the social proof that it's gathering from. Your consumers like friends and followers and that kind of thing. So if they jump onto your page and it says world's best boutique and they have no friends following it versus, XYZ boutique located in this place, we offer this, and this, and you have 12, 15 friends following it. That second page has a much higher likelihood of getting that new follow because it's again about the social proof of the other people are saying not what you're saying to them inside of the bio on your pages. So that was a big switch for us. We have a ton of client pages. Have left some kind of where it makes sense to leave them, but humbling those descriptions in a sense and bringing them to a point where it just is, again, going to let them kind of shape their own opinion, but you're still being informative about what you do or what you offer. Okay. So that's the paid side or the organic side. And we're going to be moving over to the paid side of social media. So why the social media ads are important. I mentioned this earlier in the episode already that it's so saturated nowadays, it's hard to even get. Above and beyond, we have, we had one client with 110, 000 followers and they couldn't get more than 30 likes on a post. So we weren't sure if they had bought them out of the gate or how that was panning out, but they weren't running any paid ads. And the second we started doing that, all of the numbers started to spike back up. They were also posting too much. And a few other issues were inside of the page. Again, doing all of these things together is ultimately what's going to help. So with paid, it's again, one of the biggest things I think people forget about is this is the number one best way to get your social media posts and your page and just your business in general at this point in front of new customers. So especially if you have someone running professional paid ads like we do, this is going to be the best way that you can do that because you have such a refined and targeted list. So depending on your budget, we can look at how many people are going to be in our target audience. We can even monitor how often they're going to be seeing your ads so you can optimize the frequency at which they're looking at the ads, all of these great things come into play, but whether you're boosting them on your own or actually having someone do them, this is going to be, again, the best way that you can actually get in front of new potential customers. And I think that's a really important thing acquisitions at the top of the funnel. And if we don't have people going into the funnel, there's not going to be any other stages for them to hit apart from people that have already been acquired through whatever means. So number one question I get asked with social media is how much should we be spending on our social media pages? And so I had mentioned earlier, we do weekly cadences with the organic side and how often to post with the paid social side, we do monthly budgets is normally the thing that we'll try to determine here. So the reason we do that is because most people, if they've got historical data on the business have up and down. Kind of months or they might have seasons that are better or worse and so we can look at that to determine what the ad spend range is going to be and The easy equation to do for the minimum range so again, this is the bottom of the range toward the bottom of what we would recommend spending is your monthly revenue times 0. 02 to your monthly revenue times 0. 04 Okay. So that's two to 4 percent of your monthly revenue, which we believe should be spent on the actual, just the paid side of the ad. So that doesn't include paying the people that run the ads. That doesn't include having content created. That doesn't include any other advertising avenues you're exploring with just the paid side inside of socials. And then another big question I get asked again is what type of ads should you run? And this is actually what I forgot earlier in the slides. I said I had two things. I could only think of one. If we're going to go back and boost something or if we're going to actually be running ads and pull them forward into one of our campaigns that we're running the, a lot of people have backwards thinking on this. So if you think that you normally get 50 likes a post or whatever it is, let's say you have 2000 followers normally get 50 to 75 likes a post. And you're used to boosting things. You might do 10 boosts or 10 bucks a boost or something like that to the same audience over and over. If one of your posts gets like 20 likes and it's something that you thought was important or you cared about, they'll be like let's throw 20 on this one this time. And we'll get that back up to what they think is normal, which is that 50 to 75 likes on the post to get it back up to that normal cadence. And in reality, that's actually backwards thinking because the creative and the copy and the creative first, so the photos or videos, that's going to be the biggest like indicator as to whether or not the post is going to have success inside of paid ads as well. So if something does bad organically, it's probably not going to perform optimally on the paid side. So if it is like an event and you put. Like an organic post out and it just tanks and doesn't do well. You might just try to think of a new way to re promote that and get a new post out to the page, whether you delete the old one or leave it space amount, and then put money behind that one. If it does go to organically so that when it gets again in front of new customers, that's what the big paid things about. They're going to see something that your current customer base has already resonated with and already engaged with. And that's going to have a bigger impact for the same amount of money on your business. Remember that don't set an invisible standard for the post. Just put money behind the content that has already taken off and done well. And then lastly we'll go over just real quick, the boosting of posts, the foundations of it. So foundations of paid social boosting posts in Facebook is like the absolute minimum when it comes to trying to get paid spend behind this. So if you're not doing that already, you can give it a shot and just see if it does anything for you. But we like to use an analogy in a sense where if we're not putting any paid spend, it's like we're trying to cut through a large piece of meat with a butter knife. Like it's, you might get through eventually, but it's just ultimately not going to be that effective. Boosting the post is like using a steak knife. Whereas you can definitely get through at some point and then having managed agency ads again, whether it be us or anybody else, I just true wholeheartedly believe this. It's like using a butcher knife. You can chop right through that meat because you've got the targeting, the data, the analytics. All of the extra things that come into play here. So obviously you have the extra fee with the agency as well, no matter who you're using, or you've got the fee for your own time to go and learn how to run these. But if we're talking dollar per dollar, how to best stretch that dollar, it's ultimately going to be through the managed ads. And if we can't afford that, if we can't if you're not ready to explore that avenue, boost them yourself so that you can at least have something and just make sure you're not using the butter knife. So that is the entire presentation for this, the digital overview between paid and organic on social media. If you have questions about any of this stuff, I say this in every episode, as leave comments on our Instagram, Facebook posts on YouTube. We are on YouTube shorts and YouTube, and we're also on Tik TOK through our agency page. We take all of our. Let's talk social content and that goes to the alpha social media tick tock page as well. Also quite a few office shenanigans on there. So if you guys are interested in having a backside insight into what agency life is like, we post a lot of fun content on there as well. So let me know if you have questions down in the comments. Thank you guys for listening. I presented this to about 80 people or so over the course of a couple of weeks and. It seemed to go really well. We had a lot of questions come out of this for them. So I'm curious to see if you guys will have anything. And our next episode is coming shortly. And again, this is going to be about consumer behavior on social media. And I think there'll be some good food for thought there for all of us, content marketers or business owners out there. So thank you guys for listening. Have a great day.