Mr.Farmville

Do you know how to use a Facebook Page to get sales and new business? We’ve seen (and helped) a number of Fortune 1000 companies use a process that works. We’ve proven it also works  for medium sized businesses. The same model also could be used for small businesses as well.

There are two basic steps:

1. Build Audience
2. Inspire Audience
3. [Hey! Where's the third step, where we pound them with sales messages?]

It isn’t there. Everything in Social Media is indirect, but we still manage to get through the AIDA marketing process:

1. Awareness: Fans are found with advertising by targeting prospect interests, and only a few of these are exactly who the company is or what they sell. This is how we build Awareness.
2. Interest: Contests arouse the interest of all entrants. Only 0.1% or less of entrants win. The other 99.9% want the prize product or service more than they did before the contest. Contests increase Interest, and possibly Desire.
3. Desire: Positive word of mouth on the page itself shifts people from Interest to Desire.
4. Action: We leave the Action up to the prospect. Social Media is wooing, not pushing; more of a seduction than a call to action. It’s a lot like dating, actually. Pick-up artists are the only direct marketers in the dating world.

How Do We Break Down The Audience We Need to Build?

• Existing Customers: If we only go after existing customers, we don’t get new business. But we need existing customers to give testimony to prospects. So we try to get our email databases to fan our Facebook page.
• Prospects Who Are Ready to Buy: How do we identify prospects on Facebook who are ready to buy? It’s not as easy as in search marketing where the search phrase tells us their intent (“buy running shoes”). Search marketing plucks low-hanging, ready-to-buy customer fruit from the Tree of Search. Facebook marketing harvests people with relevant interests and evokes the core dream or desire your product or service helps customers fulfill. That’s where the Inspiring Your Audience part comes in.
• Psychographic Prospects: Not everyone who Likes your page is ready to buy. They’re only in the Social Media List phase of the Six Spheres of Social Media Marketing. But they’re the right prospects according to your customer psychographics. If you look at the Likes of some of your existing customers, you’ll see the kind of things they like. Interest targeting in Facebook ads for fan acquisition is a tough topic, so I’ll address how to brainstorm that in another post.

The Two Main Facebook Audience Types:

When you use Facebook ads to build an audience, what are you looking for? You need two types of fans: prospects and buyers.

1. Relevant Targeted Prospects

These are the psychographic prospects. When you go after them, you can get a high Facebook ad CTR, which means a low CPC and low Cost Per Fan (CPF). You get a lot more of these than the buyers. They’re less likely to buy now, and some may never buy. They may not give you their money right away, but they serve two critical functions:

• Social proof: Anyone skeptic of your brand is more like to become a fan and prospect, and your prospects are more likely to buy if you have an impressive audience size.
• Viral agents: If you run contests or ask fans to share, you’ll get more pass along and more reach if you have a bigger audience.

Some companies balk at the idea of building fans and putting ROI off into the future, but there’s no way around the dating phase of Social Media marketing. Thinking about it as a two-phase process makes it possible for you to get that ultimate positive return from your Social Media investment.

2. Immediate Buyers

You can use Facebook ads to try to get immediate sales. You’ll get a lower CTR, so your CPC will be higher. You’ll get many fewer of these than the psychographic prospects. But these are more likely to buy now and again in the future. There’s nothing wrong with doing this, but if this is all you do, you’ll miss out on the unique advantages of Social Marketing.

If you go for the sale immediately, these buyers may or may not Like the page. They may forget to come back for a while. But you should be using your website and your email marketing to guide people back to your Facebook page, and you need these people to give testimony to the prospects. They can sell your products and services for you.

My advice is to do both. Spend some money building your audience. Engage them and inspire them. And spend some money getting direct sales. Get those people into your email list and bring them back to Facebook.

And then you’re doing a fair amount of what I call the “Complete Facebook Marketing System” (read here) …

Brian Carter is a Facebook advertising consultant, social networking trainer, and SEO guru. And he loves whiteboards.

Source: All Facebook