Why you should invest money in your digital marketing, rather than spending more of your precious time

Do you spend money on your digital marketing? 

If yes, great. Read on to find out how you can make sure you are spending it in the right areas.

If not, I want you to ask yourself why not? And what resources are you using instead to promote your business? 

Chances are it’s your time. If you are a business owner, your time is your most precious resource. So read on to discover the better alternative for the “new normal”.

Digital Marketing and the New Normal

Regardless of the platform, the good ol’ days of posting to social media and it being seen by everyone who follows us are long gone thanks to:

• The amount of noise online
• The number of platforms most businesses try to be across
• The fact that people are busy and may not respond to your call-to-action the first time they see something you post
• Algorithm changes

And don’t even get me started on the fact that if you have a strong call-to-action, then you need to pay-to-play.

Yes, you can still achieve success on Facebook and Instagram these days organically… it just takes a lot of time and A LOT OF HUSTLE!

Social Media Hustle

Does any of this sound like you?:

• You see Facebook Advertising as an unnecessary expense. 
• You may have boosted a post once or twice and felt it was a waste of money.
• You spend loads of time hustling on social media rather than putting your hand in your pocket.
• You post in group after group, often kicking yourself when you get the “business promotion” days wrong and miss your turn for the week.
• You scroll through loads of social media content in hope that you stumble across content you can “add value” to, or a question you can answer, or someone looking for your products or services. 
• You are constantly DM’ing your friends, asking them to engage with your content and “share your latest thing”.
• You rely heavily on other people tagging you in posts related to your business.
• You have a referral group set up solely for the purpose of sharing each other’s stuff, which means that you also need to be constantly sharing other people’s stuff and tagging them in posts to return the favour. 

If any of this sounds like you, then I would challenge you to ask yourself “how much are these activities really costing you?”

I don’t know about you, but I ain’t got time for that!!!

The Alternative To Hustle

The good news is, there is a more efficient way to build your business using tools like Facebook and Instagram these days, without having to channel your inner Gary Vee. 

Cause let’s face it, most of us ain’t got his energy or the production team behind us to be omnipresent content churning ninjas. 

Paid social media (and Facebook/Instagram Ads in particular) provide you with an opportunity to run highly targeted campaigns that get results, without draining the limited time and energy that you have.

The truth is that most people spend way too much time (by comparison) creating content. Once their content masterpiece, whether that be a blog post, podcast or video is complete, they then share it on social media a few times (at most), email it to their list (maybe once) and then move on to creating the next thing.

The end result is very few people see it, even less take your desired action and next to nobody converts.

Then they say that social media doesn’t work. 

Well of course it doesn’t… if you are doing it that way!

That might have worked circa 2011, but times have changed. BIG TIME! And so must your digital marketing strategy as a result.  

These days, if you are going to make the decision to invest your time in content creation, then you are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t also invest in promoting that content. 

Your time is worth money. Adding a few extra dollars to amplify the investment of your time is going to get you a much better ROI for all the time, effort and energy that you put into creating your content.

But Facebook Ads aren’t the easy option either. 

Facebook Ads Don’t Work

I hear loads of people tell me that they tried Facebook Ads and they didn’t work for them. 

In most cases, the problem isn’t Facebook Ads, it’s how Facebook Ads are being used. 

Most people waste money on random acts of Facebook Advertising, rather than strategically investing in Facebook Ads, based on where people are in your sales funnel.

Facebook Ad Funnels Work

When it comes to creating a strategic Facebook Ads strategy, it helps to break your targeting into the three distinct phases that match your sales funnel.

• Top of funnel – These are the people that you choose to target because they have interests, behaviours or are of a particular demographic that would indicate that they have potential to be an ideal client, but currently have no direct connection with (and most likely no awareness) of your business. You can also target these people using what Facebook calls Lookalike Audiences by using an existing warm audience that you have access to (such as your email list or people who have engaged with you on Facebook and/or Instagram) and getting Facebook to find similar people to target. This is a great audience to target with your blog posts, podcasts, videos and other engaging content, encouraging them to engage with that content so that they move into the middle of your funnel. 
• Middle of funnel – These are the people that have engaged with your business by either visiting your website, subscribing to you via email, engaging with you on Facebook or Instagram, watching the videos you post on Facebook or Instagram, indicating that they are going to one of your Facebook events, engaging with your lead forms, visiting your shop on Facebook, plus more. Facebook allows you to create Custom Audiences for these and more activities that you can then use to retarget those people with ads that move them closer to the point of purchasing from your business. These are great audiences to put your opt-ins in front of so that you can then further nurture them using highly targeting email marketing campaigns. If you have low-cost/high perceived value products, this can also be a great audience to put those types of things in front of. If you do this well, the income from those products can sometimes help pay for your marketing.
• Bottom of funnel – These are your hottest audiences and can include people who have visited your sales pages, people who have abandoned cart, as well as your past customers. You can create Custom Audiences for these groups of people and then run highly targeted retargeting ads to those people, encouraging them to purchase your products and services.

It’s important to run a combination of top, middle and bottom of funnel ads so that you are constantly bringing new people, leads and sales into your business. 

Facebook Ad Budget

For most businesses, approximately 90% of your Facebook Ad spend would be spent on the top and middle of funnel activities. How you break that down will depend on whether or not you are able to get a lot of people into the top of your funnel organically or not. 

For someone who have a lot of organic activity and engagement, you may only spend 20% of your budget on top of funnel ads and then 60% on middle of funnel and 20% on bottom of funnel ads. 

For people with smaller audiences and not much organic traffic or activity, you may want to spend 70% of your budget on top of funnel ads and then 20% on middle of funnel and only 10% on bottom of funnel ads.

The reduced amount spent on retargeting is because your hot (bottom of funnel) audience is likely to be fairly small and if you spend too much money on this audience, then you will blow through your budget and exhaust that audience fairly quickly, which will end up wasting your money. 

Facebook Ads Secret Weapon

Facebook Ads on their own, don’t work as well as when you run them in conjunction with their best friend – email marketing.

Email marketing should be used in conjunction with Facebook Ads to ensure you get the best possible lifetime value from your initial ad spend. You can use Facebook Ads initially to capture their email address and then use email marketing to nurture them over time.

If you do this well, you will probably even find that you don’t have to spend very much at all on your bottom of funnel Facebook Ads, because your emails are making the sales for you. 🙂

Facebook Ad Mindset Shift

I hope this challenges you to question the way you are marketing your business online these days.

Ask yourself again, “Have you adapted for the “new normal”?

If you haven’t, it’s time to make a mindset shift and start properly valuing your time by investing in your marketing, rather than spending more of your precious time.

If you would like to learn more about how a Facebook Marketing Partner agency runs Facebook Ads for their clients, then I encourage you to join us for the How To Generate An Outstanding ROI For Your Facebook Ads Free Webinar. 

We’ll take you behind the scenes of a real life ad account and show you (in detail) how we generated a 700% return on investment and how you can use the same methods to achieve similar results. 

We’re going to unveil the EXACT steps we take to get our clients the best possible return on their ad spend and grow their businesses.

In the webinar, you’ll learn:

• The critical elements required to create successful Facebook Ads campaigns
• The different types of Ads you should be using to maximise your results
• How to structure your audience targeting for greatest impact
• Simple tools you can use to create Facebook Ads and measure success
• How to fast track your success with Facebook Ads

If you want hands-on, best practice tips and tricks for running your own Facebook Ads campaigns, you cannot miss this opportunity. 

Set your business up for success and increased ROI by registering now: 

http://impactiv8.com.au/fb-roi-webinar