Pay to Play, Or Play Around, It’s Up to the Social Media Director

Social media is so great—legions of new customers can find you on The TweetFaceTube and just like that, you are in business!

I am sorry. I misled you. The above lede should have read: Wake up—your social media followers are not customers and a great many of them are not your prospects, much less qualified leads.

Paid Social Moves Product

Jerry Daykin is a client-side marketer. He recently chose to testify on behalf of paid social on Twitter.

Luckily for me, given that it was my job to build the strategy & run the darn things, Facebook, Twitter & co’s decent paid media products, Promoted Posts etc came soon after and those channels became the high reach, ROI led, brand & sales driving powerhouses we wanted them to be.

— Jerry Daykin (@jdaykin) April 1, 2020

I like the way he summarizes his goals. He sought “high reach, ROI led, brand and sales-driving powerhouses” and he found them in the social media platforms’ paid products.

Facebook Ads, SMBs Need Them

Facebook for Business is featuring several case studies, each with a unique take on how the platform’s paid promotional products were used. In each case, the results are impressive, which is to be expected. They are case studies and part of FB’s funnel.

Case study or no, there are plenty of cheerleaders for FB ads outside of Facebook’s inner circles. Larry Kim, the founder of MobileMonkey and WordStream, writes:

Calls to businesses are way more valuable than clicks on websites. That’s why Facebook’s Call Buttons are game changers.

Think about mobile Facebook users. They see an ad, click on the Call Now button, and the lead is captured. Amazing.

Kim is correct, provided you know how to use FB’s targeting tools, how to create multiple content-rich campaigns with clear calls to action, and how to parse the data on a daily and weekly basis, in order to make critical adjustments on the fly.

My Facebook Adverting Case Study

In 2018, I worked closely with a business coach and one of the things I learned was how to construct Facebook ad campaigns for my own coaching offers.

Here’s an ad that helped me attract people to Better Copy By Design, a private Facebook Group (which is still active and accepting members).

I also created a 35-minute recorded walkthrough of the material for interested parties, and I used another Facebook ad to generate signups.

The ads worked. I spent about $25 per day for a few months and people joined my Facebook group and people signed up for the workshop delivered in webinar form. To make a longish story much shorter, the webinar is where I lost people. It wasn’t good enough to hold their attention all the way through or drive them to set up an exploratory phone call with me.

So, the ads worked but I didn’t convert, because my information magnet wasn’t strong enough. Lesson learned.

Why haven’t I fixed the webinar and begun again? Because during my months of work on this project, I learned an even larger lesson. I learned that I correctly identified a pain point that many designers have—they don’t want to write the copy, and are unprepared to do so. I also identified that they were not prepared to pay to solve this pain (that they’d learned to live with). More lessons learned.

I walk through this personal case study simply to say, rock your FB ads. I will help do so, but first make sure you have your landing pages, community pages, case studies, and every touchpoint in the digital funnel dialed. Or conversions will suffer.

By the way, there’s also a dedicated FB group for Adpulp readers called The Internal Creative Review. Ask to join and let us know what’s on your mind and on your plate.

PREVIOUSLY ON ADPULP.COM: Social Media Managers Are Brand Activists, Not Chorus Girls