Tag: Facebook

How Much Do Facebook Ads Cost?

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Last year, Facebook made over $84 billion in revenue. Where do you think the majority of that revenue is coming from? If you guessed Facebook ads, you’d be correct.

Facebook advertising offers endless opportunities to interact with your target audience on a conversational platform. With 68 percent of Americans logging onto Facebook a day, if you’re not advertising on the platform, you’re missing out on some big opportunities.

Now that we’ve established the value of marketing on Facebook, you’re probably wondering how much do Facebook ads cost? Can I squeeze the platform into my paid social budget?

A recent AdEspresso study found that:

  • The average Cost Per Click (CPC) is $0.35 globally and $0.28 in the U.S.
  • The average Cost Per Like in the U.S. is $0.23. 
  • The average Cost Per App install in the U.S. is $2.74.

The issue is a number of factors can impact the cost of Facebook ads. So the average cost doesn’t tell you a whole lot about how much you can expect to spend. 

3 Factors That Impact Facebook Ad Costs

While there’s no set fee per ad type, there are a variety of factors that determine the cost of a specific ad, including ad type, bidding, and metrics.

Below, we break down the different components that work collectively to determine the price of your Facebook ad.

Facebook Ad Type

Facebook’s business platform gives marketers a variety of options to reach their intended audiences and retarget site visitors.

Much like other paid social campaigns, when charting your Facebook ads campaign, you need a clearly-defined budget. Your cost per result is defined within your bidding strategy (we’ll get to that in a bit). To ensure you don’t exceed your budget, Facebook also offers two cap options: a campaign spending limit and an account spending limit.

Here are the different types of Facebook ads you can use to achieve your campaign goals.

  • Page Post Engagement Ads: Reach a larger audience beyond your business’ Facebook page by using this tactic. These ads help you drive engagement on specific posts, stretching reach. By generating more activity on your posts, you gain more likes and followers who react positively to your brand or content. However, these campaigns can drain your budget if not enacted effectively.  
  • App Install Ads: These ads aim to do exactly what their title suggests—drive app downloads. Rather than highlighting individual features, these ads often demonstrate the app’s function and purpose.
  • Video Ads: Historically, video ads earned 135 percent more organic reach on Facebook compared to their stagnant counterparts. Facebook video ads can educate your audience about a product’s value and drastically increase reach.
  • Local Awareness Ads: Hoping to increase attendance for a free event or store opening? Local awareness ads are your new best friend. These ads drive brand awareness in specific regions, targeting users via location.
  • Offers: By setting off-site offer downloads as a campaign objective, you can customize your ads with specific calls-to-action. The offer ad should direct your audience to a landing page on your website that allows them to complete that action promised in the call-to-action.
  • Carousel Ads: Carousel ads are hosted on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. These visually stimulating ads allow you to share a narrative through up to ten images. When done right, these creative ads can drive up to ten times more traffic in three months. If your audience tends to react positively to an interactive experience, these ads are the way to go.
  • Image Ads: If you’re looking for an easy-lift ad, image ads are probably the route to take. These simple visuals are common, but don’t count them out: they can be extremely effective. With a visually arresting image and accompanying text, you can craft an effective ad that drives your audience to take action. 

The type of ad you select can impact the cost of your Facebook ads—which makes sense when you consider that making a sale is more valuable than, for example, getting a page like.

Ads that drive direct actions (like app installs) or sales tend to cost more than ads aimed at increasing brand awareness. 

Facebook Bidding Strategy

You’ve set a budget and determined which ad will work best for your upcoming marketing campaign.

Now what?

It’s time to dive into bidding.

When you bid on Facebook ads, you are entering into competition with other advertisers for the valuable terrain that is Facebook ad space. The platform uses an auction to establish which users interact with specific ads.

How does Facebook determine who sees what ads?  

It all starts with the competitive value of your bid. That metric is derived by adding the sum of your maximum bid to your ad’s quality and relevance score.

Quality score is a metric that represents how interested an audience member would be in your ad. Facebook estimates this figure as your ad performs, weighing the positive and negative to assign this figure.

To determine relevance, Facebook assigns a score based on the perceived interest of your target audience.

These metrics can be found in Facebook Ads Manager, and you can adjust your audience as needed to impact their standing.

Now that you understand what impacts who sees ads, let’s talk about the two types of bids—automatic and manual.

how much do facebook ads cost - bidding strategies
  • Automatic: When you select automatic bid, Facebook spends your entire ad budget to maximize your results. For those who are unsure of bid price, Facebook suggests going this route. Despite this recommendation, there’s more room for control when you take bidding into your own hands.
  • Manual: When you select manual bid, you have more autonomy over ad delivery and can enjoy better results for a lower cost than with automatic bids. With this method, you have options when it comes to optimizing ad delivery:
how much do facebook ads cost with ad optimization

Using manual bidding, you can optimize ad delivery for the specific desired result. Facebook’s delivery system and auction optimize for the desired action within each campaign objective.

When manually bidding for actions like conversions or clicks, there are two options to choose from maximum or average:

how much do facebook ads cost with manual entry
  • With Maximum bid, you set the highest possible price you will pay for a result.
  • With Average bid, your price fluctuates as an average, not a cap, giving you greater flexibility to reach your intended audience. 

Automatic bidding might be a better choice if you are just getting started, but manual bidding does provide more control. If you are new, I suggest starting with automatic bidding—you can set a maximum budget to prevent overspending. 

Facebook Ad Costs: Metrics to Track     

How much you spend on Facebook Ads should also be dictated by historical performance. To assess how an ad performed in the past, there are a number of metrics you can look at, including: 

  • Cost per Click (CPC) and Click Through Rate (CTR): From CPC, you learn how much the average click from your Facebook ad to your website costs. CTR represents the percentage of individuals who interacted with your website after interacting with your Facebook ad. With a high CPC, you’re going to want to check your CTR.

If you see a low CTR, that means your creative isn’t working, you’ve picked the wrong ad type to use on your audience, or your targeting is off.

These metrics serve as indicators of success. Check them frequently to ensure you’re not overspending on clicks that don’t result in action.

  • Cost per Action: Actions can take a lot of different forms—a video play, a click, a form fill. By assessing your ad’s CPA, you can get a pretty good indicator of performance. If you can lower that CPA, you can anticipate more conversions and drive revenue with the same ad spend.

For a more contextual understanding of your CPA, measure it alongside your ad set spend and frequency. Individually, ad metrics give you a tile. Collectively, they give you the mosaic of the true value of your ad.

  • Conversion Rate: Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who completed the sales cycle by interacting with your ad and ultimately making a purchase. Your conversion rate is the most important metric—it truly lets you know if you are meeting your goals.  

While there are many metrics you can find through your Facebook ads dashboard, these three provide insight into valuable data points that can tell you if you are overspending on your Facebook ads campaign.

When you ask how much do Facebook ads cost, the answer actually lies within the question: how valuable are my Facebook ads?

What Should You Spend on Facebook Ads?

The amount you should spend on Facebook ads is relative to the business you’re promoting and their specific goals. However, there are a few factors to take into account when identifying a definitive figure, including your budget and overall marketing goals. 

In general, a marketing budget should fall between 5 percent and 12 percent of revenue. If you’re looking to jumpstart growth, maybe you’re closer to that 12 percent. If you’re looking for sustained growth, you’re probably closer to that 5 percent. 

How Much Do Facebook Ads Cost - marketing budget split for facebook ad cost

Your Facebook ad budget should be split into three sections. 

  • 20 percent to engagement, education, and audience building
  • 60 percent to promoting your offer and generating conversions
  • 20 percent to retargeting

Allotting your budget in this fashion diversifies your ads, so you use lead-generation and content-focused ads together to drive Facebook ad success. 

You should also consider your overall goals. If your goal is to increase sales, it might make sense to spend more money to drive sales higher. On the other hand, if you want to increase brand awareness, it’s likely a better idea to have a set budget per month and reassess occasionally. 

Conclusion 

With 73 percent of United States Facebook users logging on daily, the social media platform is definitely worth a second look. 

Whether you’re new to Facebook advertising or a seasoned veteran of the platform, choosing the right ad format for your marketing strategy can make or break the campaign.

After you select and optimize your ads, it’s time to let your budget guide you the rest of the way.

Keep an eye on your performance through the metrics discussed above, and don’t be afraid to make adjustments.

Have you tried Facebook ads? What was your average cost? 

7 Advanced Facebook Search Operators

Facebook might have started as a way to connect college students, but today it is a full-fledged search engine, much like Google or Bing. The social media giant’s rise to search engine status includes the addition of advanced features, like Facebook search operators.

What are Facebook search operators, and why should you care about them?

Search operators are a powerful tool for filtering search results, but they also have added benefits for marketers and business owners.

Before we get into that, let’s first talk about what search operators are and why they matter.

What Are Search Operators?

Search operators are advanced search commands that make it easier to filter search results based on what you do (or don’t) want to see in search results.

For example, if you were looking up recipes for chicken soup but didn’t want to see results from Pinterest, you could use a search operator to remove Pinterest results by typing in:

“Chicken soup -pinterest”

facebook search operators - pinterest example

Google uses a wide range of these search functions that make it easier to use the search engine, including:

  • @: to search social media sites
  • $: to search for a price
  • –: to leave a word out
  • “Quotes”: to search for an exact match
  • . . .: to search a range of numbers
  • OR: to combine searches
  • Site: to search a specific site
  • Related: to search for similar websites

You can also combine these commands if you want to get fancy. For example, you could use “@ neil patel OR kelsey jones” to search for social accounts for both Neil Patel and Kelsey Jones.

Search operators make it easier to find the exact data you are looking for, but they also come in handy for marketers.

4 Reasons to Use Facebook Search Operators

Facebook used to have a feature called the Facebook Graph Search, which allowed users to search for specific content on the platform by using sentences rather than just keywords. It also allowed you to find who liked a page or visited a specific city.

Facebook Graph was changed in 2019, making it much harder to search the platform. Search operators, however, fill that gap by allowing users to search for highly specific content.

How can Facebook search operators help marketers? Here are a few ways you can use those advanced search features:

  1. Research your competitors: See what your competition is up to, including what type of content they share and what topics they talk about. You can also find new competitors in your geographical area.
  2. Find content to share: Search for multiple topics or exact phrase matches to find content your audience will connect with.
  3. Find user-generated content (UGC): Search for your brand name (and common misspellings of your brand name) to find content users have shared about your brand, even if they didn’t tag you.
  4. Research your audience: Understanding who your audience is and what type of content they like can help you build a stronger relationship. Use Facebook search operators to find content on related topics or specific phrases.

7 Facebook Search Operators to Try (and How to Use Them)

Facebook search operators use Boolean operators, which are the basis of database logic. In layperson’s terms, Boolean operators are terms that allow you to broaden or tighten the search results. For example, you could use AND to search for two search terms at the same time.

Below, I’ll cover how to perform each type of Facebook search, explain what information it will help you find, and explore how to use the search operators to grow your business.

I know it might sound complicated, but I promise it’s pretty simple, and the results are worth the effort.

1. Basic Boolean Facebook Search

Boolean searches don’t work using Facebook search, so you’ll need to use Google to perform all the searches we’re about to cover.

Using site: before the name of a site will display search results just for that specific website. Here’s how it works in practice. Type in site:facebook and then whatever search term you’re searching.

Example:

site:facebook.com my favorite murder podcast

This will display the results of groups or posts about the My Favorite Murder podcast.

Facebook Search Operators to Try - Basic Boolean Facebook Search

How to Use This Facebook Search Operator to Grow Your Business

Use this to find groups, pages, and users related to a specific topic. For example, if your target audience is small business owners, you could search for groups and pages for small business owners.

Pro tip: This search works for all websites, not just Facebook. Say you want to find a post from your favorite digital marketing blog or by a specific writer. Then you would perform a search for “site: <website URL> <the term you’re looking for>.”

2. Boolean Facebook Search for Two Terms Needing to Be Present

Using the AND Boolean search function, you can search for two terms simultaneously. For example, if you want to find information about digital marketing and small businesses, you would search:

site:facebook.com digital marketing AND small business

This will display search results related to both digital marketing and small businesses:

Facebook Search Operators to Try - Basic Boolean Facebook Search for Two Terms Needing to Be Present

How to Use This Facebook Search Operator to Grow Your Business

Perform competitive research for a specific niche or find groups your target audience belongs to on Facebook.

3. Boolean Facebook Search for One of Two Terms Needing to Be Present

Similar to the AND function, this search operator allows you to find results for one term or another. Unlike AND, which requires both terms to be present, the OR function allows you to find results including either term.

Let’s say you have a software company that targets customers who have SaaS (software as a service) or those who have a membership site. You would search:

site:facebook.com SaaS OR membership sites

The results will display groups, pages, and posts related to SaaS or membership sites.

How to Use This Facebook Search Operator to Grow Your Business

Research several competitors simultaneously or search for content related to your brand using both your official brand name and a misspelling or commonly used term.

For example, site:facebook.com Moz OR Hubspot would return terms related to both brand names.

4. Boolean Facebook Search for Terms That Should Not Be Present

What if you want to search for a specific term, but you keep getting unrelated results? The NOT Boolean function allows you to remove unrelated search terms.

For example, let’s say you are looking to hire a web developer, but you keep seeing results for designers. You would search:

site:facebook.com web developer NOT designer

The results will include videos, pages, and profiles related to web developers but not web designers.

How to Use This Facebook Search Operator to Grow Your Business

Search for employees or more specific content related to your industry by excluding specific terms. You can also use it to narrow geographical areas with the same or similar names, such as Paris, Georgia NOT France.

5. Boolean Facebook Search for Exact Phrase

Google and Facebook’s search features have gotten smarter in recent years, but sometimes they still don’t get it quite right. If you find your search results are slightly off, you can use the exact phrase match search operator.

This Boolean function tells search engines to only return matches that are precisely the same as your search.

To use this function, add quotation marks to the term you want to search.

Example:

site:facebook.com “mexican restaurant in kansas city”

A list of Mexican restaurants’ Facebook pages will appear in the SERPs, like this:

Facebook Search Operators to Try - Basic Boolean Facebook Search for Exact Phrase

Remember this is an exact match search. The search engine won’t return results that deviate even slightly. Search results for “mexican restaurant in kansas city” versus “mexican restaurants in kansas city” could be extremely different.

How to Use This Facebook Search Operator to Grow Your Business

Find competitors in your area or look for groups or videos related to a specific key term. It might also help you find UGC if your brand name is very similar to another brand or phrase.

6. Boolean Facebook Search to Fill in Blanks

What if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for? The fill-in-the-blank function might come in handy. For example, if you’re looking for a specific person but can’t quite remember their name, you can use an * (asterisk) to tell Google to fill in the blank.

Say you work for Hardrock Cafe and are looking for UGC. Some users might type in Hard Rock Cafe, while others might use Hardrock Cafe. The fill-in-the-blank search operator will return results for both.

Here’s how to use it:

site:facebook.com hard * cafe

Note that this will turn up more than just Hard Rock and HardRock; it returns any results that include Hard and Cafe, no matter what is between them.

Facebook Search Operators to Try - Basic Boolean Facebook Search to Fill In Blanks

How to Use This Facebook Search Operator to Grow Your Business

Use the fill-in-the-blank function to find information about terms that are often misspelled or formatted differently, or if you can’t remember the exact spelling. This search operator is ideal when users might not remember the exact format of your brand name. It can also help with competitive research by broadening searches.

7. Boolean Facebook Search for Local Businesses

Facebook is a powerful tool for local SEO, with more than 1.85 billion daily active users in the United States alone. Using a search operator for local searches can help marketers and business owners find local businesses.

Say you are considering opening a coffee shop in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. You could use this search:

site:facebook.com coffee shop rogers park chicago

This returns a list of all the coffee shops in that neighborhood.

How to Use This Facebook Search Operator to Grow Your Business

Local businesses can perform competitive analysis or market research to find local businesses in their niche. It might also help you to find brands for a cross-promotion strategy. 

Conclusion

Search algorithms have come a long way in recent years. However, they aren’t perfect.

Facebook search operators let you filter and refine search results for competitive analysis, find content to share with your users, and even locate groups where your target audience hangs out.

If you want to improve your Facebook marketing strategy, search operators are another tool in your toolbelt. 

Have you used Facebook search operators before? Which one is most useful?

The post 7 Advanced Facebook Search Operators appeared first on Neil Patel.

A Deep Dive Into Facebook Ads: How to Create, Optimize, and Test Facebook Ads

As a savvy internet user, you might think no one clicks on Facebook ads. You’d be wrong. Facebook is on track to make over $60 billion in revenue this year from advertising. Someone’s clicking. How do you get them to click your Facebook ads? More importantly, how do you get them to buy your product or sign up for … Continue reading A Deep Dive Into Facebook Ads: How to Create, Optimize, and Test Facebook Ads

The Advanced Guide to Facebook Watch

In 2017, Facebook launched its answer to the burgeoning streaming video market: Facebook Watch. Through Watch, users could view both scripted and live video from professional networks, brands, influencers, and everyday people.

Facebook released Watch to a limited group of users, and for that first year, it flew pretty much under the radar. In 2018, they launched it globally, and the service took off like a rocket.

By 2019, Watch had 270 million monthly users, and by 2020, that number had shot up to over 1.25 billion, according to Facebook.

I covered Facebook Watch in a previous post when it initially launched. Since then, they have expanded their content offerings (even getting into the music space!) and added a ton of features for brands and marketers.

In this post, I’ll dive deep into how to use Facebook Watch for marketing, now that the platform has matured.

Content on Facebook Watch

Facebook is still experimenting with different content types by adding, subtracting, and tweaking to find the right balance for their platform. In 2019, Facebook’s head of global creative strategy Rick Van Veen told Variety,

We’re still figuring it out and learning. When you start a new platform, you’re going to have to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what works and what doesn’t.

Scripted Content

Facebook Watch Original Series

Facebook’s scripted content can be found under the Show tab. This section is where they’ve entered the ring with the likes of Netflix, Apple+, and Hulu. Here, users can find everything from comedies to critically acclaimed dramas to reality and talk shows.

“Red Table Talk,” for example, is a popular show starring Jada Pinkett Smith, where she brings on guests to discuss sensitive topics such as divorce and gender identity. Meanwhile, Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs” fame stars in “Return the Favor,” which won a Daytime Emmy.

Facebook Watch Red Table Talks

However, they’ve recently scaled back on their scripted content, canceling some of their popular shows in favor of live and sourced content from brands and users.

Live Content

Facebook Watch Live Video Content

Facebook Live predates Watch by a year. When Watch launched, however, Live was bundled in with the rest of the video content.

Types of videos on Live range from U.S. Senate committee hearings to live author readings and skiers showing off their tricks.

Small businesses have also rushed to Live, creating events and classes to increase revenue.

Music Videos

Facebook Watch Music videos

In August 2020, Facebook launched its new music discovery platform, Facebook Music. Here, users can explore videos by genre, trending topics, artist, and even mood. Currently, the app is only available in the U.S., India, and Thailand, but it’s already garnered a lot of attention.

For instance, Katy Perry debuted her music video “Smile,” the title track of her fifth album, on Facebook Watch.

How Facebook Watch Works

When you create a video on Facebook Watch, whether it’s a live event or a scripted show, you upload it to Facebook using their Creator Studio.

The Creator Studio is the hub for all of your business content for Facebook. From here, you can bulk upload videos, crosspost to different pages, schedule posts, consolidate engagement, and monetize. You can also use their in-depth analytics tools to monitor your content.

Facebook Watch Creator Studio Dashboard

On the videos you upload, Facebook places mid-roll ads. Forty-five percent of the revenue from those ads goes to Facebook, while the remaining 55 percent goes to you.

Helpful Hint: Facebook prioritizes longer videos (3+ minutes) and content that engages the audience and sparks conversation. They’re looking for content creators who respond to user comments and pin the best comments to the top of the feed.

How Your Business Can Benefit from Using Advanced Facebook Watch Features

In France, according to Facebook, national broadcaster M6 began creating videos for Watch. Their one-minute video views more than doubled in nine months and they acquired 6 million new follows organically.

Here in the U.S., says Facebook, Buzzfeed has increased their revenue by creating videos over three minutes across their Tasty, Goodful, Nifty, BringMe, Cocoa Butter, and Pero Like pages.

“We moved quickly and increased our payout from total in-stream ads by 20% compared to the previous half,” Maycie Timpone, Executive Director, Video & Publishing at BuzzFeed, told Facebook.

Facebook Watch has become a powerful tool in marketers’ pockets. Let’s take a look at a few ways Watch helps you increase revenue and attract new followers.

Hyper-Personalized Content

Facebook is all about personalized content, and Facebook Watch lets you upload videos right to your target audience. Your videos will also appear in specific categories, such as “Shows Friends Are Following.”

Facebook will also categorize your videos by genre, topic, and even mood.

Recently, Facebook introduced Topics to mobile users. Topics allows users to further customize their video feed by choosing categories that interest them.

Facebook Watch Topics

Show Pages

Proper Tasty on Facebook Watch

Show pages allow users to interact with show creators and fans. They can leave comments, ask questions, or even engage in interactive video content. Just like any other Facebook page, they can like, follow, and share pages with friends.

Real-Time Engagement

This feature is particularly helpful with live video. Viewers can react to, share, and comment on a video in real-time.

Real-time engagement is a great opportunity to get initial feedback on your video and engage with your audience by asking and answering questions and becoming part of the conversation.

Facebook Watch Parties

Facebook’s number one goal is to bring people together. It’s why they added groups a few years back, to allow people with similar interests to find each other.

With Facebook Watch Parties, viewers can bring a group of friends together to watch videos and chat about them in real-time.

Video creators can make content tailored to watch parties to boost engagement.

Playlists

Playlists allow video creators to group videos and post them to their pages. Videos play consecutively to boost views.

Marketers can use playlists for video series or to group videos by topic.

Optimizing Your Facebook Watch Videos

You may be creating killer content for YouTube already, but optimizing Facebook Watch videos is a little different. Here are some tips for getting the most out of your Facebook video content:

First, Make Sure It’s Original

Pulling content over from YouTube or even your website won’t work for many reasons. First, the aspect ratio may be wrong (more on that next). Second, original content exclusive to Facebook will keep people coming back, allowing you to take advantage of Facebook’s monetization tools.

Pay Attention to Aspect Ratio

Facebook gives video creators specific aspect ratios for all pages on both Facebook and Instagram.

You’ll want to follow those guidelines, but in general, make sure your video is shot for mobile. The vast majority of Facebook users access it via mobile, and more than half of ad revenue comes from mobile-first video ads.

Add Captions

Eighty-five percent of videos on Facebook are watched without sound. So, adding captions to all of your video content will naturally boost engagement.

Include a CTA

When you upload a video, Facebook allows you to add a CTA at the end. Whether it’s an invitation to watch more videos, check out a product, or simply like your page, adding a CTA can increase engagement and even boost conversions.

Beyond the Basics: Advanced Uses and Features of Facebook Watch

Recently, Facebook has added a bunch of cool new features that marketers can take advantage of. Let’s take a look at them.

ThruPlay

ThruPlay is a default setting and one you should keep on. With ThruPlay, if your video is shorter than 15 seconds, it will post it to users who are more likely to watch the whole thing. If it’s longer than that, it will deliver it to users who generally watch videos longer than 15 seconds all the way through.

Paid Online Events

Paid online events are a function of live video and have become an essential tool for businesses. Brands can create, host, and promote an event all in one place. They can also set a price and collect payment easily.

Helpful Hint: Facebook normally collects a fee for a paid online event. At least until August 2021, however, they have waived their fees.

Fan Subscriptions

Creating the ability for fans to subscribe to your video page boosts engagement. It also allows you to foster customer loyalty through exclusive offers and content for subscribers.

According to Facebook, it also allows you to predict revenue monthly.

Stars

Another feature is Stars, a tool that allows fans to support your work. Users can purchase stars to send to you. For every star a fan sends to you, Facebook gives you 1 cent.

(Think “Ralph Breaks the Internet” and the hearts he had to earn on his videos.)

The more you engage with users, the more likely they are to send you stars.

Facebook is still rolling out this program to a limited number of users, but you can sign up to show your interest.

A/B Testing Tools

On the back end, Organic Video Post Testing allows video creators to test between two and four variations of a video at a time. Videos are distributed to your target audience, but they’re not posted to your page. The video with the most engagement after a period of time is then posted to your page automatically.

In-Stream Ads

According to Variety, Facebook takes in 22 percent of U.S. digital ad spend. Before Watch, ads that appeared in newsfeeds and the right rail kind of got lost in the mix, right?

However, as pointed out previously, ads that would usually get lost in Facebook feeds get a lot more attention when they appear in the middle of a video.

Mining Audience Data from Your Facebook Watch Viewers

When it comes to analytics, Facebook Creator Studio is a veritable treasure trove. Here are some of the cooler stats you can mine from your dashboard:

Views

There are so many different ways you can parse these metrics. For example, if you want to see the number of minutes viewed, you don’t have to settle for a lump sum. You can break it down by minutes viewed on your page, in shared posts, and crossposts.

You can also see how many views were over three seconds long or how many people viewed the whole video, depending on what comes first.

You can also filter by auto-played vs. click-played and paid vs. organic.

All of the views are measured over a 28-day period.

Audience Engagement and Retention

To get a quick overview of your posts, you can look at the number of reactions, comments, and shares for videos with at least 100 views.

Facebook Watch Post Engagement

You can also go way beyond that. You can see audience demographics, and you can filter by fans and non-fans to know who you’re truly reaching.

If a video is performing well, you can choose to boost it right from your dashboard.

To dig even deeper into each video, Facebook shows your viewer retention through the entire length of the video. Line graphs like this one show you exactly where viewers dropped off in your video so you can make adjustments.

Facebook Watch Video Retention

What’s really neat: when you hover over the line graph, each point of the line displays your video’s corresponding frame.

Finally, you can measure each post against other posts to assess which types of videos and content are working well (or not) for you.

Negative Feedback

Just as important as the positive metrics are the negative ones. Facebook can show you negative comments, as well as how many times people hid your video from their feed or reported it as inappropriate.

Click-Throughs

Finally, Facebook can differentiate between clicks to play your video, clicks on links embedded in your video description, and clicks on your CTA.

Increasing User Engagement Via Facebook Watch (and Why This Matters!)

We’ve talked about all the levers you can pull with Facebook Watch, but how do you use them to increase user engagement? Here’s how to use all their cool features to do just that:

Take Advantage of Real-Time Commenting

Comments give context to all those reactions and shares, but you probably knew that. Of course, you can use them to improve your content by creating more of what gets positive comments and less of what doesn’t.

More importantly, you should be responding to comments, not only on your videos but also on your pages. Show your fans that you’re paying attention, and they will be engaged followers.

Spark Conversations

Instead of simply reacting to conversations already happening, create and direct the discourse yourself. Invite fans to comment on specific elements of your videos, share their tips, or ask questions.

If you’re a part of the Star program, this is a great way to encourage people to send some your way.

Use the Subscription Function

Subscriptions are a great way to create that velvet rope effect. Create an exclusive space for fans to get updates on content before anyone else. Offer content and giveaways for subscribers.

Make them feel special, and they’ll keep coming back for more.

Put That Mined Data to Good Use

As you’ve seen, Facebook gives you a wealth of analytics about your videos, right down to the minute viewers stopped watching your videos.

Use that information to compare and tweak content, experiment with longer or shorter videos, or introduce and keep track of new content.

Don’t Neglect the A/B Testing Functionality

While it is time-consuming to create more than one video, A/B testing multiple versions of videos will only increase your engagement, and you can’t deny how easy Facebook makes it.

Since they don’t post anything to your page until the end of the testing period (which they do automatically), you really have nothing to lose.

Conclusion

Facebook Watch has had explosive growth and attracted the attention of brands, celebrities, small businesses, and influencers. The sheer number of viewers and the amount of ad revenue on the table makes creating original content for Facebook a no-brainer.

The real trick is pulling the right levers to create engaging videos that get reactions, shares, and comments. If you can get subscriptions, even better.

Dive into your Creative Studio to look at all the advanced tools Facebook offers.

How will you use Facebook Watch to build your audience and boost your revenue?

The post The Advanced Guide to Facebook Watch appeared first on Neil Patel.

How to Create and Use Facebook Polls

Facebook Polls can help you unravel the problems of your audience, what you should create next, and their true sentiments about your brand. While it can help you make more strategic business decisions, Facebook Polls can do other wonderful things for your online presence like:

  • Boost your Facebook page’s engagement (asking questions is one of the best ways to generate high engagement)
  • Help you beat the newsfeed algorithm without ads
  • Foster a strong sense of community around your brand

In this post, you’ll learn all the different ways you can create polls on Facebook, how to use them effectively, and how polling your audience can help your business grow.

How to Create Facebook Polls

Gone are the days you could create a Facebook poll from your Newsfeed or timeline. At the moment, the only way you can share a poll is on a Facebook Group, a story, an event page, or on Messenger.

Facebook Group Polls

Facebook Groups are one of the best tools for brands on the social media platform. It allows you to create a community and improve customer engagement.

While Business Pages struggle to get an organic reach above 5%, Facebook Groups are different. The algorithm pushes group posts to newsfeeds, which means you have a much higher organic reach without paying for ads.

Below, we break down the steps to create a poll within your group with an actual profile and business page example.

Step 1: Go Your Group

On your desktop or mobile, go to your Facebook Newsfeed, click on the “Groups” icon on the left-hand side menu and select the group for your poll.

Facebook Polls how to add one to your facebook group

Step 2: Create a Post

Click the “What’s on your mind” section to create a post. When the pop-up loads, navigate to the “Add to your post” section and click on the three dots to see more options.

Facebook Polls create a post

Step 3: Create Your Poll

A new “Add to your post” screen will load with various options. Select “Poll” from the list. It will take you back to the “Create post” pop-up, and you can start adding your poll options in the “Write something” section.

Facebook Polls how to create your facebook poll
Facebook Polls adding poll options

Step 4: Publish Your Poll

When you’ve added all your options, click on “Poll Options.” Here you can choose if people can add options and if they can vote for more than one option.

Once you’re done, click “Post.”

Faebook Polls how to publish your poll
Facebook Polls options

Facebook Story Polls

With 250 million people using Stories every day and it’s prime real estate on users’ News Feeds, creating a poll is an invaluable (and fun!) way to connect with your audience.

Let’s see how it’s done.

Step 1: Open the Facebook App on Your Smartphone

Navigate to your Facebook Page by tapping on the “Hamburger” icon on the left-hand side of the screen. You’ll see your page in your shortcuts section or by scrolling down and tapping on the “Pages” button.

Faebook Polls how to make a poll on facebook stories

Step 2: Create a New Story

Tap on the blue circle with the plus sign around your profile picture and select “Create a Story” from the dropdown list.

Facebook Polls creating one on facebook stories

Step 3: Create a Poll

Swipe to the left until you see the “Poll” card. Write your question and customize the “Yes” and “No” options.

Choose a color gradient background or upload a photo from your camera roll.

When you’re done, tap the “Share Now” button.

Your followers will see the percentage of who voted for which option but only you can see how many votes each option received and how each person voted.

Facebook Polls publish one on facebook stories

Facebook Messenger Polls

While you can no longer post polls on your News Feed, Facebook added the functionality to group chats in Messenger for your personal account.

Hopefully, Facebook will roll out the feature to chats for business pages. It would be an excellent way to carry out quick customer satisfaction surveys.

Here’s how to do it.

Step 1: Open a Group Chat or Create a New One

Faecbook Polls how to create poll in messenger

Step 2: Tap the “+” at the Bottom of the Messenger Window Next to the Text Box

Step 3: Select the Poll Icon and Type in Your Question

Facebook Polls select poll icon in messenger

Step 4: Add Your Options and Tap “Create a Poll”

Doing this allows you to share it with your group.

Facebook Polls in Messenger add your options

Event Page Polls

Polls are a powerful feature for brands who host in-person or virtual events.

You can create one to get valuable input on details like:

  • Which location, date, or time suits everyone.
  • Attendees’ opinions on how the event went.
  • How many people want specific catering options.
  • Voting on itinerary options.

Step 1: Go to the Event

Log into your Facebook account and click on “Events” on the left-hand side of the screen. If you don’t see the event icon, click on the expand button and scroll down until you see it.

For events created by a Facebook Business Page, go straight to the events tab on your page.

Facebook Polls go to the events tab to create your poll

Step 2: Create a Post

Select the event you want, click on the “Discussion” tab and select “Add a Post.”

A new window will pop up, and you’ll see the poll icon on the right-hand side of the “Add a Post” section.

If you don’t see it, tap on the three dots to expand the post options.

Facebook Polls creating a poll on a facebook event
Facebook Polls creating a poll in events

Step 3: Create a Poll

Click on the poll icon, and you’ll go back to the “create a post” screen where you can add your question and options.

You can add more possible answers by clicking the “+Add Option”. Use “Poll Options” to allow people to add options and enable/disable people from choosing multiple answers.

When you’re ready to post, click on the “Post” button to add it to your event’s page.

Facebook Polls in Events add your options

Facebook Video Polls

With 500 million people on Facebook watching videos every day, you can’t go wrong with adding video content to your marketing mix.

But how do you get people to ENGAGE with it once it’s posted?

Video polls.

It’s a quick and easy way to personalize a viewer’s watch experience and get them to snap out of passively consuming content.

We tell you how to do it below.

Step 1: Upload a Video to Your Facebook Page

You can also head on over to Creator Studio to edit a video you’ve already posted to your page.

Facebook Polls how to create video polls

Step 2: Click the “Edit Post” Button

A new window will load where you can edit your video’s title, caption, and tags.

Facebook Polls edit your post to add a video poll
Facebook Polls how to add a video poll

Step 3: Select the “Polls” Option

On the right-hand side of the pop-up, scroll down until you see a greyed out “Poll” section.

Select it and click on the blue “Create Poll” button.

Facebook Polls select the poll option to add one to your video

Step 4: Ask Your Question

On the left-hand side of the pop-up, your video will appear with a slider. You can move it to the section of your video where you want the poll to appear.

On the right-hand side, you can fill in your question and answer options. By default, there are only two options to start with, but you can add up to six by clicking on the “+Add another option” button.

Facebook Polls create a facebook video poll

Step 5: Choose Your Poll Settings

Scroll down further to finalize your poll settings. You can specify when you want the poll to show up, its duration, and when you want to publish the results.

Step 6: Save Your Facebook Video Poll

When you’re happy with your poll, click on the “Save” button to start collecting results!

5 Ways to Use Facebook Polls to Grow Your Business

Here are some of the ways you can take advantage of polling your audience to grow your community and make more sales.

Create Different Types of Facebook Polls

You don’t have to stick to boring ol’ text polls. Facebook lets you spice things up and stop mindless scrolling in its tracks by adding images and GIFs to your polls.

Use the different options to get creative, show off your brand personality, and encourage engagement.

Ask the Right Questions

Polls are an excellent way to start a discussion in your community and conduct valuable market research.

For example, if you create a poll around content marketing, you can ask questions like:

  • “Do you see results from your content marketing?”
  • “What’s your biggest struggle with content marketing?”
  • “Do you struggle to see an ROI from your content marketing?”

You can use the results to plan out your content calendar, brainstorm a new offer, or create a piece of gated content your audience will love.

Collect Feedback From Your Audience

Hosting a free training for your private Facebook Group community? Get feedback on how your audience enjoyed the content with a poll. Instead of guessing if your training resonated with your community, you can ask them directly and use the feedback to fine-tune your content. A quick poll question like “Did you find the training actionable and easy-to-understand?” will do the trick.

Learn About Your Audience

Your Facebook polls don’t need to be strictly business all day every day. You can use the feature to go beyond basic demographics and find out what makes your audience tick.

For example:

  • What colors do they prefer?
  • Who are their favorite influencers?
  • Where do they hang out online and offline?
  • What are their biggest values?
  • What is the big goal they’re working towards?

Polls can collect meaningful information you use to make your brand more relatable and marketable to your audience.

Use a Slight Touch of Controversy

Want to stir up some engagement? Create a poll around two different schools of thought in your industry.

For example, if you work with freelancers you could ask, “Do you find platforms like Upwork and Fiverr valuable for landing clients?”

There are strong opinions about the pros and cons of using content mills, and it’s a hot topic in the freelancing community. Creating a poll around this will spike likes and comments, forcing the algorithm to push it out to more users.

How Facebook Polls Can Help Your Business

Still not convinced of the impact Facebook Polls can have on your business? Here’s how they can boost audience engagement, brand awareness, and help you sell your products before you’re ready to launch.

Boost Your Engagement and Brand Awareness

As AdWeek points out, consumer engagement on Facebook with brands is volatile. Polls are an easy way to encourage your community to engage with your content and build a relationship with your fans.

With multiple ways to interact (liking, commenting, sharing), you can feed the algorithm all the signals it needs to serve your post out to more and more users. For users, polls break up monotonous scrolling and allows them to share their opinion quickly and easily.

Find Out What to Create Next

The key to a successful online business is to create things your audience wants.

While keyword and market research can go a long way to get you there, once you’ve built a community, it’s better to go straight to the source. Use a poll to ask your followers what they want to see next.

For example, you could offer several topic ideas for your next blog post, YouTube video, or online course. Can’t decide what color to use for your new t-shirt designs? Create a poll and give your audience what they want!

Stir Up Interest Before a Launch

Before your next launch, use polls to start teasing your new products or services. For example, if you’re a clothing company, you can post pictures of your soon-to-be-released hoodies and ask people to vote on their favorite style. Not only is it a way for you to see what’s resonating with your audience, it creates anticipation for your launch.

Discover the Opinion of Your Followers

Remember the old days of focus groups as a marketing tactic? You can get the same results for FREE and in a shorter amount of time with polls.

Use Facebook polls to find out:

  • What your followers like about your brand.
  • What they would change.
  • Their overall opinion on your products or services.

Once you know people’s opinions, it’s much easier to speak their “language”, change things up, and align your marketing messaging with your audience’s wants and needs.

Conclusion

Polls are an important tool for any brand. They are an instant connection to how your audience feels about you, their struggles, and how you can best solve their problems.

By asking the right questions, you can adjust your digital marketing strategy to match the needs of your followers and give them that “WOW this was made for me” experience.

How will you use Facebook Polls to serve your customers better?

The post How to Create and Use Facebook Polls appeared first on Neil Patel.

How To Use 3D Photos On Facebook For Your Business

Changing consumer behavior and evolving tech platforms require us to uncover new strategies to reach our customers.

One trend that presents just such an opportunity is 3D photos on Facebook.

Partially influenced by 3D technologies and mixed reality resurgence, 3D photos can help you capture attention and tell your brand’s story on Facebook.

What are the 3D Photos on Facebook?

3d photo facebook

3D photos allow you to view an image through three dimensions instead of two, so you can see things slightly around an image that would otherwise be out of view in a standard 2D photo.

For example, in a 3D photo of a person looking into the camera, you’ll see parts of the sides of their face, and slightly above their head.

3D photos allow you to explore an image by scrolling, tilting, and panning using your mouse or trackpad.

One important note: 3D photos are not to be confused with 360-degree images. The latter allows you to explore a scene in its entirety, but requires special equipment and a unique setup, which we won’t be discussing here.

How do 3D Photos on Facebook Work?

In short, a lot of funky, complex algorithms make them possible.

Developed by research scientist Johannes Kopf at Facebook, the algorithm works by analyzing the depth maps and tiny movements produced by your phone’s camera and motion detection system.

These depth maps are then processed and turned into 3D meshes, which create the final 3D photo.

Not all phones are capable of achieving this. Mid-range smartphones, such as the iPhone 7 and above, are needed to create 3D Photos.

Why Should You Care About 3D Photos on Facebook?

You may be skeptical about using 3D photos on Facebook. It may conjure images of other forms of 3D media, such as cinema or TV.

Those aren’t the best 3D media, and both of them failed to catch on. In recent years, though, artificial intelligence and augmented reality have begun to show promise.

However, 3D photos—particularly on Facebook—are a unique case.

There are a few reasons why you may want to use them for your business:

Disrupts Facebook Saturation

Facebook has been around for a while, which means that most brands and advertisers are already using it. More than 90 million small businesses use Facebook. As there is only a limited amount of attention span to go around, you must continuously compete to capture attention. 3D photos offer a powerful way to do this as they allow you to pattern innovatively interrupt the user’s attention.

Fights Limited Organic Reach

Facebook has reduced brands’ organic reach and is instead prioritizing posts from friends and family. With fewer opportunities to wow your audience, you need ways to stand out, such as 3D photos.

Provides A New Form of Storytelling

A 2D photo can tell a story, but a 3D photo can make that story come to life. 3D photos offer new ways to connect with your customers by opening up a new channel of creative storytelling. 

Brands are catching on to how effective this type of media can be on Facebook, but 3D photos haven’t been fully exhausted yet. They’re likely here to stay, and now is the perfect time to get the most out of them.

Can You Advertise With 3D Photos on Facebook?

Although 3D photos can be a powerful tool for organic content, they’re currently not available to use in Facebook ads.

Facebook hasn’t stated the reasons for this, and we don’t know when or if they’ll be available to use as boosted posts. 

However, it’s safe to assume that Facebook currently measures 3D photos’ performance on the platform. If they show promise and measurable user engagement, Facebook may allow advertisers to use 3D images at some point.

Who Should Use 3D Photos on Facebook?

Like any marketing channel or technique, the results you can expect will depend on your product, industry, and customers.

If you’re offering an intangible service such as management consultancy, there may not be many creative use cases that work in your space.

However, if you’re showcasing a visual product like a designer handbag, 3D photos can be a natural extension of your marketing strategy.

Here are some industries that can benefit from 3D photos:

Fashion

3D photos can help inform consumer decision-making when buying clothes and accessories. It’s often difficult to get a feel of such items online, and seeing them in 3D can help.

Film

3D Photos can also be a natural extension of animation. They can help bring an animated character to life without having to animate.

Travel

If you’re selling a vacation destination, making the image more immersive in 3D can help the user visualize themselves being there. Scenery, ambiance, and colorful visuals in exotic locations can come to life.

Entertainment

Other immersive experiences, such as festivals or theatre, can use 3D photos to provide a better glimpse of what they have to offer.

Real Estate

Selling a home typically starts with attractive visuals, which help prospective buyers imagine living there. 3D photos can enhance this effect.

Visually heavy industries can use 3D photos to their best effect. Also, industries that offer immersive experiences can use 3D images to replicate their value proposition more closely.

How to Post 3D Photos on Facebook

If you decide your business can benefit from using 3D photos on Facebook, here are the steps to post them.

Get the Right Equipment

Luckily, Facebook has made posting 3D photos accessible to everyone. You won’t need any fancy camera equipment.

All you need is a mid-range smartphone that has single or dual-lens, portrait mode capabilities. An iPhone 7 or equivalent (and above) is suitable to take 3D photos.

Decide on Marketing Concepts

If you want to get the most out of 3D photos on Facebook, you must view it as part of your marketing strategy instead of a gimmick.

The concepts you come up with will require some creativity and application to your industry, but here are some general ideas:

  • Show Your Office: Take a picture of your team at work, smiling into the camera to build trust and familiarity with your brand.
  • Showcase Your Products: If your products or services are visual, you can showcase the best parts in 3D. For instance, if you’re advertising a new home, you could take a 3D photo of an antique or furniture piece.
  • Offer Special Promotions: You can also use 3D photos to amplify a promotion. Saving your 3D pictures for when you want to capture attention preserves the novelty effect.

When taking 3D photos, keep the backdrop in mind.

Typically, the Facebook 3D photo tool performs best if there is an object at the forefront. Having various other background depths also helps.

Images with high color contrast work well too. 

Take Your 3D Photos

Use appropriate lighting and a contrasting backdrop, then put your camera in portrait mode.

Take the photo, and that’s it! Your phone’s camera and the Facebook algorithm will do the rest when you upload the image.

Using Existing Non-3D Photos

You can also turn existing photos into 3D photos. Facebook has taught their artificial intelligence (AI) to create 3D structures from 2D images, so you can upload any image you already have.

Keep in mind that although the effect can be quite convincing, the app is essentially “guessing” what the 3D image would look like. This means that there could be some blur, which you’ll need to check before publishing.

Upload Your Photo

This is a pretty straightforward process:

  1. Navigate to your business page via the Facebook app.
  2. Tap “Publish” to create a new post.
  3. Choose “Photo/Video” and select your image.
  4. Tap “Done.”
  5. Tap “Make 3D” at the top of the photo.
  6. Wait for Facebook to convert your image into 3D.
  7. Preview the 3D effect by panning and tilting.
  8. Add post text in line with your marketing strategy.
  9. Tap “Publish” again.

Your 3D photo and post will then be published to your page.

Facebook offers these tips for creating 3D photo posts:

  • 3D photos can’t be edited.
  • If you’d like to share a 3D photo, you can’t share multiple photos.
  • 3D photos can’t be in photo albums.
  • 3D photos can’t be boosted or used in ads at this time.

Examples of 3D Photos on Facebook

To help get your brain buzzing with ideas and possibilities, take a look at how some pages are using 3d photos on Facebook:

Now, you can view your favorite furniture up-close and easily interact with Wayfair items before you buy! How? We’re…

Posted by Wayfair on Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Wayfair has created a 3D rendering to allow their customers to view and interact with their furniture before buying it.

Omnivirt created this 3D Game of Thrones image, an excellent example of how these photos can work in marketing promotions.

Game of Thrones 3d photos facebook

The character’s cinematic effects are amplified, making him come to life and almost jump out of the screen.

This Facebook video showcases the use of 3D photos in a real environment. In this way, you can turn an otherwise standard image into a more attention-grabbing media form.

Conclusion

3D photos on Facebook are an innovative way to help your posts stand out in a crowded news feed.

Although 3D photos may not move the needle in any significant way due to the limited reach of organic posts, they’re a useful tool in a holistic marketing campaign.

In the future, 3D photos may become one of the most effective ways to advertise on Facebook. We’ll have to wait and see what Facebook decides.

Have you used 3D photos on your brand’s Facebook page?

The post How To Use 3D Photos On Facebook For Your Business appeared first on Neil Patel.

Facebook Advertising Consulting

Social media dominates the present-day marketing landscape. More so, a platform like Facebook that gives you direct access to 2.6 billion people.

But is it actually worthwhile to use Facebook?

Facebook advertising has definitely increased in popularity, with an increasing number of businesses using the platform to gain new leads and stay connected to their existing customers.

Plus, there are solid stats that highlight how useful incorporating Facebook can be for your marketing strategy:

  • A total of 1.6 billion users see Facebook ads, out of which 1.21 billion are between the ages of 13 and 34.
  • An average Facebook user clicks on about 12 ads every 30 days.
  • Approximately 80% of social reference to e-commerce sites stems from Facebook.

Converting visitors into customers should be super easy on the platform then, right? Sadly, this isn’t the case.

You see, all your marketing efforts will backfire if you don’t have a carefully planned Facebook ad campaign in place – one that is impactful and is supported by in-depth knowledge of the platform’s best practices.

There is no shortage of gurus who will run Facebook ads for you too, so how do you find somebody who will get you actual results?

Our team at Neil Patel Digital has created this handy guide to help you find the best Facebook ad consultant who knows what he’s doing, without wasting your marketing budget or talking in circles.

5 Ways a Facebook Ads Consultant Can Help Grow Your Business

You’ve heard of multiple businesses having success with Facebook and Instagram ads, but you haven’t been able to make them work for you.

So what went wrong? 

If you want to explore Facebook as a means to advertise your products and services for maximizing sales and generating leads, you need an expert. 

Developing a winning Facebook ad strategy comes from experience and expertise – something that a Facebook ad consultant can offer. After all, it pays to be really good in your chosen field and have a track record of success.

Here are a few ways in which a Facebook ad consultant that help grow your business:

Extremely Advanced Audience Targeting

If you consider yourself a savvy business owner, it’s natural you would want to take full advantage of everything that Facebook marketing offers. 

This is precisely what a Facebook ad consultant can help you achieve.

Since consultants are experts, they can develop ads that target people by demographics, location, gender, income level, age, interest, education level, and behavior, among other factors. In fact, the expert will know targeting options that you may not have even heard of!

For instance: Did you know Facebook permits you to target an audience based on the recent purchases made?

Additionally, a consultant has the know-how to create custom audiences, lookalike audiences, and layer targeting options, each of which allows you to get very granular with your targeting.

Easy Adherence to Strict Facebook Protocols

Facebook is like a strict teacher from school who likes to maintain discipline and decorum. 

The platform’s main lookout is to protect users and their sentiments so that they continue using Facebook. They don’t want them to be annoyed by frequent ads or get insulted by any sponsored post.

Basically, creating a Facebook ad that gets approved isn’t easy – you have to remember a lot of rules.

You can end up wasting a lot of time, with a serious threat of getting your account flagged if you aren’t careful. 

Facebook rejecting your ads doesn’t necessarily mean that they were offensive or irritating. It’s just that they didn’t meet the intricate rules and regulations the platform has to protect its users.

But guess who knows all these rules and regulations? An experienced Facebook ad consultant.

They can use their expertise to create attention-grabbing ads that not only force the viewer to take action but also comply with rigid Facebook policies.

Help Boost ROI Through Remarketing

If this is the first time you’re hearing of remarketing or haven’t yet utilized this excellent tactic to manage your ads, hiring a Facebook ad consultant is definitely wise on your part.

Remarketing is a powerful way to target people who have already visited your website, which, in turn, can be useful for driving up your ROI. And not only website visitors, but you can also connect with those who have used your app or given you your email address.

The consultant takes advantage of these people who are already engaged with your brand, and hence, may only need a little bit of coaxing before they take the plunge and finally place their order. 

To build your remarketing audience, they develop a system to tag your website visitors with a cookie.

Trust us, remarketing on Facebook can be very useful for increasing your revenue without breaking the bank. Facebook ad experts set up the whole system so you can continue to build your business around the clock.

Help Maximize Your Facebook Ads Budget

Your Facebook ad budget is a small part of your overall marketing budget. 

If you plan on using paid ads, you might also be targeting customers on Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. Consequently, you cannot afford to waste your money on a single channel, as it’ll reduce your funds for other initiatives. 

Since a Facebook ad consultant knows the ins and outs of the platform, the possibility of errors is considerably less when compared to an amateur. The former also use intelligent tactics to maximize budgets and conversions on ads sets.

For instance, most consultants increase ad set budgets by 20% every 2 to 4 days. This warrants a gradual increase, which doesn’t trigger a new learning phase, ensuring more stable performance. While it’s true that growing the budget does take time, your ad set life will be longer with fewer performance dips.

Efficient Scaling of Facebook Ads

Scaling Facebook ad campaigns is very challenging, mainly due to the dynamism of the platform.

You need to constantly update your strategies and tactics when making changes in Facebook’s Ad Manager, and manage ad creatives. In short, it’s a continuous cycle of developing winning campaigns and fighting ad fatigue.

Any reputable consultant is well-versed in tactics that can make the process more streamlined and effective. Some of these tactics include: 

  • Using automated rules for scaling
  • Duplicating successful ad sets
  • Securing the lowest manual bid
  • Adjust your ad set budget according to performance

In short, they take care of everything.

Think of the consultants as Michelin Star chefs that have their own unique recipes for their client’s campaigns. They are ready to experiment, make mistakes, analyze, and automate, which ultimately boosts your business growth.

How to Get Started With a Facebook Advertising Consultant

Now you know you can grow your business by hiring an expert with Facebook ads.

The next step is to figure out how you can get started with Facebook advertising consulting. 

Just throwing money at the problem and hoping for the best isn’t a good strategy. You require a clear road map that illustrates your end goal, along with milestones that can guide you to stay on the right track.

We’ve compiled a list of steps below that can help you make sure you have the right person or people managing your account.

Find and Hire the Right Facebook Ad Consultant

Having the right person manage your ads account is like that essential puzzle piece of a puzzle that completes the whole picture – without it, it‘ll remain incomplete.

Before hiring anyone, make sure you do your best in researching and looking at the credentials of prospective candidates.

The following are a few ways to determine the capabilities of the prospect:

  1. Ask to see their past portfolios and results they have previously achieved for other clients.
  2. Find out whether they are familiar with your target audience and style.
  3. Good communication skills and a pleasant personality so you can express your wants without hesitation.

Another alternative is to use online hiring platforms, such as Upwork, Freelancer, and Reddit. Here, you can either post a detailed project description of what you need to be done or choose a freelancer profile from these marketplaces.

Seasoned consultants, which we highly recommend, usually ask potential clients to fill an inquiry form, and then schedule a call for a discovery call.

Hold Meetings to Set Out Expectations

Once you’ve selected your expert consultant, you should hold frequent meetings to discuss your goals and budget. They should know what you expect from the Facebook ads, how you want them to perform, and how often you would review or tweak them.

Even the expert should be aware of your vision and budget constraints within which he has to operate. Thanks to their experience, the consultant will help you set your goals, but the overall objectives should always come from you since it’s your company at the end of the day.

Remember, your expert wants you to be crystal clear about your expectations and the amount of money you’ll be comfortable spending on your advertising.

Review the Growth Game Plan

The fact that you hired a Facebook ads consultant means you want your business to grow.

You want to use their expertise in Facebook advertising and take advantage of their knowledge. So you should give them the flexibility to come up with a game plan for your advertising campaign. Let the consultant work out the details based on your input.

You can then schedule a detailed review of the game plan before giving the go-ahead. Make sure that you’re on board with all the decisions before the campaign goes live.

Get the Ball Rolling

The learning curve is a part of advertising – be it Facebook or any other social media platform.

There is no guarantee that your first ad campaign will be successful or as lucrative as you wanted it to be.

The funny thing is that it’s a good thing.

The first few weeks after your campaign goes live is a learning stage where you and the consultant get an idea about who engages with your business and how you can adjust your strategies to increase ad appeal.

Hence, don’t be afraid to set your plan in motion. The valuable data you get after the launch is the key to future success.

Monitor Results and Adjust Budget Accordingly 

Never max out your budget before reviewing your ad campaign performance. 

The Facebook ad consultant will collect, analyze, and provide you with all the relevant data about the campaign. He or she will also suggest tweaks that can help your ads perform better.

After implementing the suggested adjustments, you can work on incrementally increasing your budget. Even when your ads start performing better, you should continue monitoring and making adjustments over time.

The aim is to keep improving your ad strategy always, and the expert should be able to take care of this for you.

Measuring the ROI of Facebook Advertising Consulting Services

Let’s assume you hired a Facebook ad consultant, and have launched your first campaign.

How do you know you made the right choice with the candidate? Or are the ads effective in driving leads and sales?

The only way to find out whether your campaign was a success or not is to measure the ROI.

Ask yourself the following questions:

  • Are you okay with only building your list with no return on your ad spend for now?
  • Is your strategy to just break even with your tripwire?
  • Do you want to prioritize building your email list for a future launch?
  • Do you have any return expectations? Say for every $5 you spend, do you expect to make at least $10? 

Once you figure out the answers to the above, talk to your consultant about the same.

Ask the expert what increase in revenue you can expect in the first month of launching the campaign, and in case the ad performs poorly, what remedial measures would they take to ascertain a consistent ROI.

Measuring the ROI of your Facebook ads is dependent on the following data:

  • Spend
  • Clicks
  • Connections or leads
  • Cost per lead
  • Customers
  • Cost per customer

Tracking ROI from social media can be a nightmare. But having a consultant on board equips you with the right knowledge about variables and tools that can simplify tracking, cost association, and revenue measurement.

Your ROI will tell you whether you’re getting results or not, providing you a bird’s eye view of the whole campaign.

4 Point Checklist for Finding the Right Facebook Ad Consultant

Are you wondering how to hire the best Facebook ad consultant for your brand that understands your requirements and can successfully deliver results?

Below, we‘ve created a detailed checklist to help you walk through the entire hiring process.

Objective Advertising Expertise

To get results on Facebook, you need to create impactful ads that can deliver results.

Hiring a consultancy can be your first step to ensure this in case you don’t have first-hand knowledge about how things work. 

Whoever you choose to be a consultant should have the skills to help you meet your goals – Whether it’s generating revenue, locking in more leads, or getting more click-throughs.

A dead giveaway for this? Having an exciting portfolio that boasts of successful companies and brands. 

A Facebook advertising consultancy that has worked with diverse clients will understand the nuances of creating ads that leave a stronger impact on the viewer.

Look for Relevant Experience

As mentioned before, the marketplace is filled with freelancers claiming to be the best, but only a select few have the experience and expertise to back it up.

A Facebook advertisement consultancy should have the brain and muscle to guide you through the process and help you attain your business goals. 

So whether it’s an individual or a team, make sure they have the experience and knowledge to create and maintain successful ad campaigns. Figure out the following questions:

  • How long has the consultant been creating Facebook ads? 
  • Has the consultant worked with clients in your industry?
  • How do they handle communication and reporting of the campaign?
  • What do they do when the campaign results are poor?

The consultant should have a hands-on approach for advanced audience targeting, customer engagement, and eye-catching copy creation.

Well-Versed in Copy and Analysis Best Practises

Advertisement consultancies should be familiar with the latest Facebook advertising software and tools – pretty much anything required to ensure the job gets done and gets done well.

For Facebook, in particular, expert knowledge about Facebook Ad Manager, Facebook Pixel, and Power Editor is crucial. This gives better access to data that can be used to create creative and effective advertisements to increase popularity and promote growth.

Find Out What Others Say About the Consultant

Your chosen consultant should be experienced and have a good reputation.

Look for social proof like previous client reviews and testimonials to gauge the overall capabilities of the prospective candidate. This will help you understand more about their work ethic and determine their suitability for your company.

96% of customers go through testimonials before making a purchase decision since it indicates a higher possibility of a similar experience in the future. 

Moreover, having plenty of testimonials means the consultancy has been consistently delivering positive results.

Wrapping Up

You’re at a higher risk of losing money when you don’t know how Facebook advertising works.

Hiring a consultancy gives you access to the right knowledge and experience. From identifying targets, running ad campaigns, and monitoring results, a Facebook ad consultant will take care of it all.

So yes, choosing to work with a reputable team of expert consultants is undoubtedly the best way to maximize results on Facebook and reduce the risks of spending thousands of dollars in vain.

The post Facebook Advertising Consulting appeared first on Neil Patel.

How to Use Events to Optimize Your Facebook And Google Ads

Your website is bustling with activity. Visitors are constantly interacting with it.

But are you taking full advantage of everything that’s happening on your website for your paid marketing? 

Every interaction a visitor has with your website… a pageview, a click… can be used to better understand your audience. 

And when you understand your audience you can target them in a smarter way, and get more bang for your buck from your paid campaigns on Facebook and Google.

Both Facebook and Google refer to these user interactions as Events. They allow you to track them using a tracking code installed on your website.

What Are Events?

Events are user interactions that don’t involve loading another page on your website.

In e-commerce, the prime example of an event is Add to Cart.

Another event can be filling out a field in a form, as opposed to a form completion that usually triggers loading a “thank you” page. Filling out one or more fields without submission (also known form abandonment) can also be recorded as an event.

In essence, you can record any action a user makes as an event, such as watching a video, clicking on a link, or even downloading a PDF.

Why Events Are Important

Events are important because they indicate the intent of your website visitors and which ones are more likely to become a customer or a lead.

If a visitor watched a video on your website, it demonstrates an interest in your offering. 

In e-commerce, even if a visitor did not complete a purchase, an abandoned cart shows a high purchase intent. Sure, something has prevented the visitor from completing the purchase, but any visitor who got that far is worth your attention. 

By tracking events you’ll be able to make a more focused offer to these users in your paid campaigns.

How you may ask?

By injecting the events tracking data into your paid campaigns and using this data for more precise targeting and an optimized offering.

Think about it, if you can group together all the visitors who watched a certain video and set up a customized campaign for them that referenced what they saw in the video, wouldn’t that make for a far more effective campaign than a generic awareness message?

It sure will.

Let’s discuss how you can use event tracking to get more out of your ad campaigns on Facebook and Google.

How to Set Up Events on Your Website

With both Facebook and Google, you’ll need to use code for setting up events on your website.

So lets go over how you do that…

Setting Up Events Using Facebook’s Pixel

Standard events on Facebook include:

  • View content
  • Search
  • Add to cart
  • Add to wishlist
  • Initiate checkout
  • Add payment info
  • Make purchase
  • Lead
  • Complete registration

Here is the official Facebook guide for setting up events.

First, you need to verify that you already have the Facebook Pixel code embedded in the header code of every page of your website, between the <head> and </head> tags. If you don’t, first go ahead and insert the base Pixel code.

Next, select the event that you wish to track for a specific page from Facebook’s list of events. Let’s say Add to Cart event, which looks like this:

fbq(‘track’, ‘AddToCart’);

Paste the Add to Cart event code above the </script> tag.

Here’s how it should look:

Here’s what each number in the image stands for:

  1. Your header code
  2. Your base Facebook Pixel code (the ID number is unique to every website)
  3. The specific event code

You’ll need to repeat this on every page you want to track one or multiple events. Each page needs its relevant event code.

Event Tracking Setup Using Google Analytics

You can also track events in Google Analytics for even more insight. For event tracking in Google Analytics, you’ll need to create custom code snippets for every event.

Here is the official Google Analytics guide for setting up events.

The code is then added to the link code of the item or action you want to track so when the item is clicked, it will be displayed as an event in Google Analytics.

The event code is made of four elements – two required elements and two optional elements:

  • Category (required) – defines a group of actions you want to track
  • Action (required) – the type of action you want to track
  • Label (optional) – for your monitoring convenience, stating what’s the event is about
  • Value (optional) – assigning a numeric value to the event; can be monetary value, or just a scale

The basic structure of an event code looks like this:

onclick=”ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘Category’, ‘Action’, ‘Label’, ‘Value’);”

The code should be added within the href link code, before the link text:

<a href=”www.examplewebsite.co.uk/pdf/company_brochure.pdf” onclick=”ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘PDF’, ‘Download’, ‘Company Brochure – PDF Download’);“>Download Our Brochure</a>

In the example above, no Value was assigned to this event.

There Must Be a Better Way

All this event data needs to be injected into your paid campaigns in order to optimize them but before we get into that, let’s talk about the elephant in the room.

Code!

Dealing with code isn’t ideal for marketers. It’s just not our forte. 

It holds us back since constant optimization is one of the core principles of online marketing. 

And when you need your development team for every act of optimization, well, it’s not ideal.

Is there a better way to track events on your website? Yes. There’s a tool called Oribi that offers exactly that – no code event tracking. 

Oribi tracks every interaction on your website, page views, and button clicks, automatically. It collects all this data and makes it all available to you. Even when you make changes to your website, like adding a page or changing buttons, events are updated dynamically. As said, all of this is done without any code business on your behalf. 

Here’s how event tracking looks in Oribi:

The value here is apparent. You don’t need to decide which events to track, and you don’t need your development team to track it for you. Everything is tracked for you. You just need to follow the data.

Using Event Data to Optimize Your Paid Campaigns

Now you can use all this event data that you collected so diligently to better segment and optimize your paid campaigns and get more return on your ad spend.

There are two main objectives for tracking event data:

  1. Internal – being able to analyze how visitors are interacting with your website and from that optimizing the UX (user experience)
  2. External – exporting the data to your paid campaigns to better segment them – group together audiences according to their place in the funnel and specific interests in order to deliver more relevant messages

Let’s look again at the Add to Cart event. As mentioned, adding an item to a cart shows a high purchase intent. These visitors, even if didn’t complete the purchase, declared their interest in your product.

They are ‘worth your efforts’ to continue and court them in the hope they will complete a purchase in the future.

But they are all different, and you can better understand them based on the item, or items, they chose. 

If you could, for example, group together all those visitors who added a shirt and then group together those who added a pair of shoes – wouldn’t your customized paid campaigns for these two distinct groups be so much more valuable? 

You’ll be able to deliver a highly relevant message, or offering, in your ads.

This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as segmentation and optimization of your paid campaigns that can be achieved with event tracking.

Two Main Use Cases for Ad Campaign Optimization Based on Event Tracking

Both Facebook and Google offer very strong optimization capabilities for their ad campaigns.

There are two objectives for this:

  1. Ability to segment your audience in order to deliver a highly relevant message (the more segmented the audience is, the more relevant your message can be)
  2. Ability to reach new audiences that are also relevant to your offering

Let’s look at how these objectives are achieved through specific features in Facebook and Google ad campaigns.

Facebook’s Retargeting and Google’s Remarketing

The simplest way to explain the Remarketing feature is this:

When you visit a website, a tracking cookie is installed on your browser (yes, that’s the famous cookies message you now see everywhere). After you leave the website, you begin to see display ads from that website.

This is the remarketing feature: it allows advertisers to show you ads of the website you visited on other websites.

The ads can be general, just a reminder of the brand, but they also can be more personalized. The more directly related the ad is to the content you viewed, the impact it will make, thus increasing the likelihood of a purchase or return visit.

Let’s say you browsed a vacation apartments website. You looked at apartments in Lisbon, but didn’t make a reservation. A couple of days later, while scrolling down your Facebook feed, you all of a sudden see an ad that says “Still thinking about Lisbon?” 

Now that’s powerful. It will stop your scrolling. It will make you think about Lisbon again. If you clicked the ad, it would take you back straight to the Lisbon section of that vacation apartments’ website.

So by tracking events – in this case browsing a specific page – you are able to deliver highly targeted, super relevant, and hopefully mighty engaging ads to audience that already demonstrated interest in your offering.

Facebook’s Lookalike Audience and Google’s Similar Audience

The simplest way to explain the Lookalike (Similar Audience) feature is this:

Based on your audience attributes, Facebook and Google are able to target similar people and show them your ads.

Behind this simple explanation, there is a highly complex algorithm able to locate people with similar interests, demographics, location, and professional background.

Facebook and Google are able to do this thanks to the vast amounts of data they have on their users.

Let’s say you track a video as an event. The video is a top-of-the-funnel content that explains the benefits of using the app you are offering. Website visitors who watched the video are “recorded.”

You can define the visitors who watched the video as a specific “audience” in Facebook or Google Analytics. 

Then, the algorithm finds similarities between the visitors who watched the video and based on this data, can show your ads to other people who never watched the video but share the same similarities with your audience.

This is an incredible tool to expand your potential audience and reach people that are likely to be interested in your offering. This gets you more value on your ad spend.

Connecting the Dots: Events, Audience, and Targeting

So, now you know how Facebook and Google can help you refine and optimize ad campaigns, but what is the process to set it all up?

The first part of the chain is identifying the events and inserting the proper codes for all pages and types of events. We’ve already covered how to set them up, both on Facebook and Google Analytics. 

How you define an event is crucial for the success of the campaign and determines which strategy you’ll use either remarketing or a lookalike (similar) audience.

Once you have the events set up, it’s time to connect them to your ad campaign. In this context, “connect” means enabling Facebook and Google to use the data collected from the event tracking to optimize the ad campaign.

Facebook Event Tracking Ad Optimization

Let’s start with the easier of the two. 

Once you inserted the event tracking code to the various pages of your website, the events data is available for you on your Ads Manager. 

As opposed to Google, where you need to first import the event data from Google Analytics to Google Ads (we’ll get to how to do it in a sec), on Facebook this action is taken care of for you.

Still, you’ll need to locate this data. Here’s how:

First, log in to Ads Manager and click the Pixels tab…

Then, on the left, choose “data sources”, it will take you to your pixel…

Now you’ll see a general breakdown of your events…

And to give you an overview of this report, a few things you should know:

  • Events received is the total number of events recorded by the pixel
  • Top events list the highest-performing events
  • Activity shows the number of events recorded per day for the past week

Now, I want you to click on the “details button”.

Here you can see the actual breakdown of events, by volume and date. You can segment the visitors based on their actions, as we discussed before, or use the different segmentation for Lookalike audience creation.

Since you are already in Facebook Ads Manager, all the information is available for campaign targeting and optimization.

Google Analytics and AdSense Event Tracking Optimization

It’s a two-step process. First, you need to define the events in Google Analytics, and then import them into Google Ads.

Step #1: Define the event in Google Analytics

In your Analytics account, click the “Admin” tab in the bottom left corner. Then click the “Goals” tab.

Select “+New Goal”…

Choose the “Custom” option…

Name your goal…

Select “Event” option…

Now you’ll need to refer to the four elements you defined in the event code you had inserted for the specific event. This:

onclick=”ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘Category’, ‘Action’, ‘Label’, ‘Value’);”

The Goal you’re creating will have a specific box for each value. It looks like this:

The text you are entering here must be identical to the text in the code. If it won’t, the event won’t be recorded.

You’ll need to repeat the process above with every event you’re tracking.

Step #2: Import the event into Google Ads

In your Google Ads account, click the “Tools” tab at the top navigation bar. Select “Conversions” from the dropdown menu.

On the left side of the page, click “Google Analytics”…

You’ll see a list of all the goals you defined in Analytics…

Select the ones you want to import. Then click “Import”.

And you’re done. The events you track on your website are finally available for segmenting your remarketing campaigns and creating similar audiences.

If you don’t want to this yourself, Oribi can also do it for you.

Conclusion

Event tracking provides you with valuable data on your website visitors, such as level of intent, specific interests, and place in the funnel.

This provides better optimization of your paid ad campaigns on Facebook and Google.

You should use event data to deliver highly relevant and effective remarketing ads to segmented audiences who have already visited your website.

You should also use event data as the base for creating lookalike or similar audiences for ad campaigns targeting potential audiences who have not yet visited your website. 

By optimizing your paid ad campaigns with event data you’ll be able to better engage users, increase your conversion rate, and get more of your ad spend which results in less money for more clicks.

Have you tried event tracking to help optimize your Facebook of Google ad campaigns?

The post How to Use Events to Optimize Your Facebook And Google Ads appeared first on Neil Patel.

How to Use Events to Optimize Your Facebook And Google Ads

Your website is bustling with activity. Visitors are constantly interacting with it. But are you taking full advantage of everything that’s happening on your website for your paid marketing?  Every interaction a visitor has with your website… a pageview, a click… can be used to better understand your audience.  And when you understand your audience … Continue reading How to Use Events to Optimize Your Facebook And Google Ads

How Business Venture Capital Sparks Innovation, And How Google and Facebook are Throwing Water on the Fire When it Comes to Online Ad Firms

Top Ways to Get Business Venture Capital and Keep Innovation Alive

Innovation is what keeps things moving.  It keeps industries from growing stagnant and encourages our economy to continue thriving.  In hard economic times, innovation is what pulls us out. Consequently, we need innovation to keep moving along.  Finding new and better ways to get things done is essential to our economy and our livelihood. It cannot happen without business venture capital however. 

If innovation is the fire that raises the hot air balloon of the economy, then business venture capital is the spark that lights the fire.  Of course you can always get corporate credit, and that is important.  However, there must be people with funds that are willing to support the innovation for it to do what it needs to do.  Name most any industry, and if innovation stops the industry will stall. As a result, growth will cease.  

Consequently, online ad firms are starting to see this in their industry.   It seems strange that, with the internet not going anywhere and continuing to grow, anything online should be in danger of stalling.  In the face of Goliath’s like Facebook and Google however, it appears that is exactly what is happening. 

What is Venture Capital Funding? 

It isn’t really hard to define venture capital.  At its core, it is an investment. Generally, these investment funds come from venture capital firms. These venture capital funds are used by the business owner to get the business up and running, and then the venture capital firm earns a percentage of the profit.

How Does Business Venture Capital Spark Innovation?

What does business venture capital have to do with innovation, or what does a lack business venture capital have to do with a lack of innovation? Consider the previously mentioned ad tech firm example. For a few years there was a ton of venture capital flowing into this particular industry, but there has been a steep decline in more recent years. What is happening with venture capital firms?

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For example, there were 260 deals between ad tech companies and venture capital firms in 2014.  In 2017 there were only 122. The decline is ongoing. Many of the smaller ad techs were not profitable, so they are consolidating or disappearing all together.  Without the business venture capital helping them out, there will not be many more making a go at it either.  

The problem is, those smaller companies are needed when it comes to innovation. If there is no one trying to beat Google and Facebook, or at least compete, then there is no one trying to find a better way to do things. With no venture capital flowing into the industry, the smaller companies aren’t going to be able to innovate, meaning they can’t compete.  

What’s the Solution?

In the ad tech world, the best solution is likely a third large competitor.  A third player in the big game could up the competition just enough to inspire the big three to start looking for ways to beat each other at their own game.  Competition is where innovation thrives. 

What about other industries?  It’s kind of a two-way street.  Venture capitalists like to see innovation, and startups need to find innovative ways to do what they do so that they can compete. To do that, they need funding.  In this way, innovation attracts business venture capital, and the more venture capital a business can get its hands on, the more innovative it can be. 

How Does this Affect You and Your Business?

You know you have to play hard or go home.  If you aren’t innovating, then you aren’t going to get the funds.  If you aren’t getting the funds, your innovation will never become a reality. So, first thing’s first. Get those creative juices flowing and find a better way to do what you do than your competitors. 

How to Get Venture Capital

Now that you understand how venture capital and innovation are related through the ad tech vs. Google and Facebook example, you need to know how to get venture capital for your own business. Keeping with the theme of sparks and fire, you will need to spark your own fire, a campfire of sorts, to attract potential investors.  Here is how to get the fire started, and what to do once you have them sitting around said fire.

top venture capital firms business venture capital credit suite

Gather Your Firewood: Research

Don’t just pick a random firm to approach about investing in your business.  You have to do a little research first. Venture capitalists do not make a habit of investing in companies that haven’t proven themselves.  Most want to see some proof of profitability.

Look for those that have historically offered funding to companies in the same industry as you that were in a similar stage.  If they typically go for businesses in health care and you are a tech company, they are probably not the right fit for you. 

Similarly, if they generally lend to those that have been in business for a minimum of 2 years and profit of at least $50,000 a year, and you fit that description, they may be worth talking to.  Be intentional with the firms you approach to cut down on wasted time and effort. 

Keep the Fire Contained

Do not blast every venture capitalist you can find on line with a cookie cutter email.  That is a huge no no. Not only will it not work, but they likely will never even read your email.  Back in the 80s there was an idea that venture capitalists would read unsolicited proposals, and they pretended that they did.  There is no pretending now. It doesn’t happen, and there is no reason to think it does. Email blasting is not a way to find investors. Keep your search concentrated and contained to those that are interested in your industry and companies in the same stage as yours.

Kindling: Work Through Your Network for the First Spark

How do you find someone then?  In addition to concentrated research, work through your network. Talk to friends, families, and associates.  Pick their brains to see who they know that may be a good fit for your business. Ask them to introduce you.  

Don’t have a network?  Better get to work! Starting from scratch to build a business network is hard, but it isn’t impossible.  Start by joining the local chamber of commerce. Next, take a look at any other professional organizations that may be a good fit for your business. 

Then, attend events.  Take business cards, go mingle, and make connections.  Events may include business after hours, lunch and learns, conferences, and workshops.  All of these offer excellent opportunities for network building, and you may even learn something along the way. 

Make it Inviting

If you are building a campfire, a few well-placed chairs or benches can make others want to join.  In the same way, a quick video or memo that will catch the attention of investors. This is what you use when you get that introduction from friends, family, or someone else in your network. It needs to be quick and to the point, just enough to make them want to know more.  

Snacks: The One Liner 

A spectacular one-liner never hurts.  This can be on your business cards, all over your social media, and anywhere else it may be appropriate to include it.  It should get across what you do in one look. Use familiarity and popularity to help with this. For example, one toy company touts itself as “The Netflix of Toys.”  There is no doubt what the business does, due to the fact that everyone knows what Netflix is, and of course, what toys are.  

Sing Campfire Songs: Develop a Relationship

If your one liner and memo or video work, you will be in further contact.  Spend some time developing a relationship. Don’t rush them. Let them get to know you and your business.  Business venture capital is not a form of quick funding. It takes time to build trust.  

What Does This Look Like Practically? 

Okay, so say you are at an event and someone you already know introduces you to a potential investor.  You visit a little and hand them your business card. Maybe there is a one-liner on it that really catches their eye.  They may ask you a few questions and you answer, then as you part ways he or she says “Very interesting. I’d love to know more sometime.” 

The next business day, when you get to work, send a quick email.  It should say something like “It was a pleasure to meet you at (insert event here.)  You mentioned you would like to know more about our company. I have attached some information.”  Then attach your memo or video. 

If they reply, you can work from there building the relationship. 

 When to Pitch

This is a big question.  They may ask for a pitch as soon as they see your one liner.  They may ask for it after they are wowed by your memo or video.  It is more than a little likely they will want to develop some kind of a relationship before they decide they want to hear a whole pitch deck.  

Here’s the thing.  Regardless of when they want it, you need to have it ready before they ask.  

What Should Be in a Pitch Deck for Business Venture Capital?

A pitch deck is a power point presentation that serves up detailed information about your venture on a series of slides.  Following are some tips as to what slides you should include and what should be on them, as well as a few dress-ups that will really fan the flames.

  • Company Overview

This can be just a quick, four or five bullet point slide that gives a summary of the rest of the pitch. Consider it a sample designed to make them want to know more. 

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  • Vision or Mission Statement

Create a clear vision and purpose for your company and sum it up in one statement.  

  • Your People

Introduce your team.  Use pictures. They need to put a face with the people they are investing in. 

  • The Need for a Business Like Yours

Present the “problem” that your business will solve.  Show the need your product or service will fill. 

  • How Your Business Will Solve the Problem

Make the case for why your business is the ultimate “solution” to the problem previously mentioned. Spend some time explaining how it will work and what makes your business different from other solutions, if there are others. 

  • Introduce Your Product or Service

Introduce the product or service you will be selling.  Bring a prototype or drawings of the product, or if it is a service bring testimonies from those who have used it.

  • Is There a Market for It? 

This is where you define your market.  Who is going to use your product or service, how they will benefit from it, and what they can and will pay. This is also where you explain exactly how you will reach your market.

  • Who is Already Buying?

If you already have a customer base, like people already buying what you are selling, let potential investors know that in this section.  Try using logos investors may recognize where possible. They make a more lasting impression. 

  • Technology

If you have some proprietary technology, be sure to include that. Include any patents or copyrights.

  • Do Not Ignore Competition

You can’t write a pitch deck and ignore the competition.  Acknowledge them and lay out your plans for beating them. Note who they are, how you are different, and what gives you the advantage over them.

Also, make sure you research the competition. You will need to be able to answer questions knowledgeably.   

  • Traction

This many include things such as web traffic, downloads of any apps you already have available, early sales, partnerships, and testimonials. 

  • Tell Them Your Business Model

Tell them how the business will make money, how a customer will retain value long-term, or not, and what you pricing plan looks like.

  • How Will You Get the Word Out? 

Explain your marketing plan.  Those considering providing you with business venture capital will want to know which marketing platforms and channels you intend to use and what the marketing campaign will look like.

  • Financial Statements

It boils down to more than just an income statement and a balance sheet.  They need to know what you have, how much you are making, and how you intend to use what they give you.

  • The Ask

Tell them exactly what you want from them.  Lay out the amount along with what they will get in return.

A Few More Tips to Ensure you Land the Business Venture Capital You Need

There is more to a pitch deck than content.   That’s the important part, but if they fall asleep it won’t do you any good.  They cannot absorb what you are telling them if they are bored to tears. You need to make it pop.

Make it Look Good.

A mixture of crisp, clean design and eye-catching fonts won’t win it for you.  Certainly a lack thereof probably means they won’t make it far enough to even see the important stuff.  In fact, while content is crucial, design is just as necessary for the content to ever get through. It should be interesting, but not cluttered. 

Don’t Make It Hard.

Don’t use DropBox or something similar.  Stay away from crazy file formats. Rather, attach the pitch deck directly to an email.  Just make it easy. 

Don’t Get Long Winded.

A good pitch deck shouldn’t be more than 15 or 20 slides.  It seems like after that, most start to lose interest.  

Keep Acronyms to a Minimum

It’s too easy to misunderstand what you are talking about.  As a result, it is better to just say it the long way.  

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What Can We Learn from Facebook, Google, and the Ad Tech Industry?  We Need Innovation, and we Need Business Venture Capital to Start the Fire

It is no secret venture capital in the ad tech industry is declining. It is because giants like Facebook and Google are snuffing the fire. The verdict is still out on how this will affect the industry in the long-term, but it isn’t hard to envision how it is likely to play out if something doesn’t change.

Business venture capital sparks innovation, and a lack of it can for sure stifle it.  Understanding that through the phenomenon that is happening in the ad tech world right now is vital.  Above all, keep innovation alive in your industry by going after the venture capital you need to start and grow your business to its full potential.

 

The post How Business Venture Capital Sparks Innovation, And How Google and Facebook are Throwing Water on the Fire When it Comes to Online Ad Firms appeared first on Credit Suite.