Show Notes
Making this one mistake could cost you time and money.
There are a lot of factors that go into making an online business successful, but online advertising is absolutely one of the fastest way for you to accelerate growth.
In this episode we’re going to cover why boosting Facebook posts is the wrong way to advertise your ecommerce store.
Check out our Ecomm Accelerator Process free training, a proven system to help frustrated store owners become the impactful store owner and generate consistent sales in their store. Watch the training now for free: https://www.optimizedstoreowner.com/ecomm-training
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Transcript
Aaron [00:00:00] Hey, guys, welcome to another episode of the marketing natives, we have an exciting episode for you. If you're one of those people who have been trying to figure out Facebook as maybe you've been boosting post, but just don't know why you're not getting the results that are consistent to drive sales for your e-commerce business. This episode unpacks everything that you need to know in this framework and structure to help set you up for success. We're going to be talking about our economic accelerator process, which is a five part proven process to get you consistent sales online. But then we're going to really cover deeply wired why you cannot continue to boost post and why it's a huge waste of time. We're also going to give a really good insight into ways that you can find your ideal customer through Instagram. And it's probably something that you've never thought about before. So if you are interested in any of that or you have an e-commerce business that you're trying to grow and scale online, this episode is for you. Enjoy.
Narrator [00:00:55] This is the marketing natives providing actionable ways to grow, improve and succeed in your business and now your host, Christian and Aaron.
Christian [00:01:10] So actually, remember when I used to go back to like chamber meetings and things like that, there was someone who would always advocate to boost posts on Facebook. And that was basically his way of saying that that's the type of advertising that you need to do on Facebook. And I would argue that most people think when they think of Facebook advertising, a lot of people think of just boosting a post. And because they're you know, they're spending money, they're they're spending that money on Facebook. It's an ad technically, and that's their their whole world of Facebook ads and how that works is, yeah. Just boosting posts. But I think we can all agree that that is absolutely the wrong way to advertise, especially to advertise for an e-commerce store. If you're wanting to grow an e-commerce store, boosting Facebook posts like this person was telling you there, it's absolutely the wrong way to to do it. And yeah, I think both here and I would cringe every time we would hear that. And even to this day, when we hear people saying, you know, we tend to ask them that question, have you run any Facebook ads before? And they say, like, oh, yeah, Abus post like I run ads. And that that's just like the complete wrong way to go about doing Facebook advertising.
Aaron [00:02:45] Yeah. The interesting thing for him was that the well, I guess if we step back like Facebook's side, what they want is like for you to choose an objective that you want your audience to to do. And for the longest time, whenever we were talking about that guy or you're mentioning he was just boosting posts. And what it does is it gives you a lot of likes, but a lot of likes don't really mean anything. So it's like, you know, for his to his purpose, it was mainly for like local businesses. So he was trying to get a bunch of, like, spending drive traffic to those locations. But a lot of times those lik es were for people who weren't even local e-commerce business, a little bit different. But even then, it's not really feasible for you to do a like or an engagement campaign and try to get that person. Just because they like your stuff on Facebook doesn't mean that they're going to go buy something. So I think that's why this is going to be such a great episode for those who are e-commerce store owners is because. There is a certain there's certain steps that you need to take to be successful online when you're running ads, because if you don't do them, then you may become part of the the group who says that online advertising or Facebook advertising doesn't work when that's not true. We know it's not true because we see people get results every day, but more importantly to some people just don't set it up correctly. So I think that's why we are just huge advocates to to a different way to approach advertising and why boosting is so bad or not bad, but just not it's not the right frame for for marketing, for any e-commerce business.
Christian [00:04:21] Right. And I mean, if you think about it, try to come up with any company that is running boosted posts on Facebook and that is just killing it on sales. Have an amazing customers like it. It's just not the case. Like whenever you think about companies are doing really well. They're actually having a well thought out strategies, their goals and the type of ads that they're using are definitely not boosted post. They sure they may use this post as part of their strategy. Maybe, but if you look at deeper down into exactly what they're doing, you'll find out that they're using more advanced strategies, more advanced tools that Facebook provides for advertisers and companies.
Aaron [00:05:17] Yeah, one of the. So if we could give kind of like a framework here, hopefully through the podcasts, we can walk through some areas that you should have set up to be successful for the e-commerce business. And no one is to set up a business manager account. This allows you to overarchingly manage your ads in your campaigns in a more robust way versus just clicking a button and saying, I want to target this person because you don't need to get complex, but you do need to be able to see your data at a different level. And so the easiest way for you to do that, we actually have videos on YouTube. We can go check it out over a bitbranding on YouTube, and we have videos of how to set this up. But you can go to business.facebok.com, and that will start you through. It's a very easy process to create your business manager account. But what this will allow you to do is just to get access to all the tools that Facebook has. When you boost a post, you have access to maybe third or fourth of all of the actual tools that Facebook offers people who advertise.
Christian [00:06:23] And I think that obviously our recommendation would be that even if you don't use all these tools that you do sign up for business on Facebook dot com and sign up for the business manager account, like you're saying, like you have all these tools, it's free. Anyone can use them. But a lot of people are not going through this process. And it may be just because Facebook may not make it as inherently clear that, you know, this gives you all these super powers. But like I said, even if you don't use them, still have that in place. It's an important stepping stone into creating campaigns that actually work and then actually sell well because of all the tools that come with it. It just makes things a lot easier in the long run.
Aaron [00:07:10] Yeah. So once you're set up, I want to kind of move into. So you've set up the business manager. But more importantly, before you even start creating a campaign, it's to figure out who your audience is so that you can go back to business manager and use the tools correctly. And one strategy that we implement is, is using Instagram. So Instagram is very valuable because you can actually see what other people are following. So if you are a business who's going after, say, you're an e-commerce business and you're trying to find say you're selling clothing and you're looking for somebody who's your ideal customer, or are you looking at a competitor who is exactly doing the exact same thing as you? Well, you can do is go look at all of the people who have commented on that post or on their posts and see some consistency between the person who's followed, who's commenting. Those are kind of quote unquote, super fans, and then go over to those profiles and see who those super fans are following and most importantly, what hashtags that they're following. And from the hashtags, then you can start making out a list, which I know this sounds like it may be a little bit more cumbersome, but I promise you will save you a ton of dollars later, which is OK, look at what hashtags that they're using and find people who are using certain hashtags and then look at those audiences. What are their interests there? Do they do they love to go on vacation? Do they love golfing or whatever that may be for your brand? You need to know and answer those questions for you, but then those may be like little pocket. Interests do you can find that somebody else may not have sort of, because if you're trying to sell clothing, you know, one of the most popular searches for clothing is like an interest base where it says, I want to target people who are interested in clothing. Well, that's what everybody else is doing. What's a way that you can kind of stand out so you can use Instagram to find your ideal audience and that will put you at a much better position to be an advantage, I guess, over somebody else who just goes out and one boo suppost only or even if they have business manager, just pick some interest and just it kind of goes the shotgun approach.
Christian [00:09:19] Mhm. Yeah. And I think that's, I mean that's genius to use Instagram in that way because I guarantee you a lot of people are not doing the strategy that you just talked about and. Yeah. I mean it's, it's absolutely genius. I would say it takes some time because not not everyone has their their account public. Right. So if you were to do some of the research and you're going into some of these people who are following or superfans, but then you find out that they have private accounts. So that could make it a longer process because you have to find the right person who has a public account who can you know, you can actually then see who they're following, what hashtags that they're following, geolocation, different things like that. But, yeah, I think that's that's awesome to use Instagram in that way to do audience research, which I guess a lot of people. Probably do something similar, but don't do it with the intention of, you know, researching their their audience for for their Facebook ads and then, you know, once you figure out those things, then, um, I guess how can you use that?
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Aaron [00:11:17] One good thing is that Facebook has what's called like the interest explorer. It's one of the tools you have inside a business manager. It's not available for boosting post. But what's good is that you can go and find things that you researched so you could have a Google sheet or something or Google doc doesn't matter of a list of, let's just say, 20 interest. You found commonalities between your target market. Now you can go start typing those into Facebook interest, explore. And hey, if 10 of them work, you can start testing ads running to that. So you set up your campaign and then you could set up your ads at level, which is like your audiences and in your audience level, you could test out those interests that you guessed it. Are your did research on pretty good guessing at that point and run your ads to those audiences. And then what you want to do is wait for Facebook to tell you I wait. And this is a common like hopefully little nugget here is wait 72 hours before you make a decision. You need the ads to run. You need to give them time. You need Facebook's algorithm machine learning tool to actually learn. So let it run for three days. And then at the bare minimum, if it's doing well for all of them, keep running it. But you should have a couple of winners. And then what you do from those winners that you would create a new campaign and spend more budget on that. And that's how you would start to pick winners and move people out of, like, testing, because what you're doing right now is just creating testing campaigns. So I'd test them on Facebook. And Facebook will tell you very clearly which ones are the winners and which ones are the losers and then continuously do this. It becomes a cycle. But the caveat here is that so many people want to go the boosted post route and then they don't get success because the ads don't work. But it's really the question you have to ask yourself is, are you putting in the work for the app for Facebook to work for you? Because it's not just going to spend a hundred dollars a day and just find some random person for me. You have to put in a little bit of work and that's what you need to do with the testing phase.
Christian [00:13:18] Yeah. And yeah, just like you said, like, I think the the learning phase is also something all of you don't talk about, which is just letting your ads run for a little bit. Right. So Facebook actually has the opportunity to send it to the right people for and then for people to actually respond to that or maybe not respond to that. So this. This. Testing phase, um, a lot of business owners could think that it's maybe counterintuitive because they're not making money right off the bat, but it's absolutely crucial and necessary to do testing. And, yeah, you you're spending money. Um, but again, it's it's a. You call it a learning phase as well as well, where Facebook is learning and you are learning about your audiences, you're learning about what works, what doesn't work, so that then you can spend the right money on the right things versus right off the get go, like you're saying. But suppose just more of a shotgun approach, no real strategy. You don't know what works, what doesn't work. So all this process that we're going through is just trying to figure out, like you said, those winners and see what actually works and double down, like you said, pour gasoline on the fire on what's actually working.
Aaron [00:14:38] Yeah, absolutely. So what's interesting is that, yeah, as it's going through that learning phase, you're also just kind of priming your audience to and there's so many different factors are going into this, which we won't go granular on. But the more that you run with Facebook, it doesn't matter how much you spend with them. But the longer you consistently spend with them, the more that it's going to prioritize you over somebody else to. So as you're going through that learning phase, even though you may not be getting the return that you want, just think of this is just a portion of your marketing and marketing goal is to not necessarily lead to it is to lead to sales, but marketing is to get you in front of potential customers. And what you're doing for Facebook is, OK, how can I get in front of thousands of people versus, you know, maybe have a retail location? You may not have an opportunity if it snows or rains to get in front of a thousand people a day. They may have a higher conversion rate there. But with Facebook, you have an opportunity to get in front of people, thousands, if not tens of thousands of people every single day, consistently, no matter what's going on. So it just opens up the door and it's it's needs to be looked at a little bit differently than just your traditional brick and mortar, if that's the route you're going to. And one thing that allows you to grow in scale with Facebook is the automation side of things. So if you're able to find winning campaign, so say you do the testing, the Christians say, and you let it run for a period of time, you find some winners and then you create a new campaign with just the winners. You can actually set up rules inside of Facebook. We may do a video on this as well. There's nothing out there right now that we have. But you can also just go to YouTube and search it for rules, Facebook ad campaign rules. But you can set up parameters to where if the campaign is doing well, it will automatically spend more or decrease or scale or do anything for you within the platform. This is not available through boosting. If you choose to post and you say, hey, I want to run for one hundred dollars, it's going to spend your hundred dollars and whether you get results or not, OK, in business manager, you can say if I'm making two to three times my money, I want to scale that and it will scale it automatically at midnight and you can be sleeping and literally letting Facebook do the work for you. So there's so many possibilities there that allow you to grow without you having to put in the time and effort you put in the time and effort, find the right audience and then the growing and scaling part. You can let Facebook do its magic. So pretty cool.
Christian [00:17:11] Pretty I mean that alone, I would say it would be the number one thing to get business manager because. Yeah. You doing all the stuff yourself. This is not sustainable. And having this tool rules or automation's will definitely allow you to like sleep and make more money without having to worry about like, oh, did I turn off that, that I turn on this one like I said, you know, so I think this. Is super, super beneficial for everyone who's listening and who's just used to doing boosted post on Facebook and the opportunity that's out there within within Facebook. I know we're kind of just kind of going more of an overview of, um, this is what you should be doing. But we're not necessarily telling you exactly a more granular on what exactly you need to do. Obviously, we haven't talked about, like creative or copy or different things like that, but that's all to say. Like this process that we're giving you, it's 100 times better than just doing the boosted post. And if you're interested in learning more about this process, we have a free training. It's called the e commerce accelerator process is basically a proven system where we take frustrated store owners who maybe you're lacking sales or have not very clear direction. And we transform them into an impactful store owners. Right. People who can generate sales consistently drive traffic to their stores and can do for a fraction of the cost of people who are doing boosted post. Right. So in order to get to that, I don't know if this is the easiest link. Airness is the easiest link yet. OK, so you want to go to optimizedstoreowner.com/ecomm-training in there, you'll see the video, click on the video. You'll get access instantly. Instantly. It's about 15 minutes. We'll walk you through the e-commerce accelerator process. We go a little bit more in depth about some of the things that we talked about here today. And you will definitely learn something right. And you'll be able to implement something at least. But after you watch the training, then you'll be prompted to schedule a call with us. And yes, a lot of people are surprised that it's actually going to be us. It's going to be. And there's going to be talking to you on the phone when you schedule that phone call soon, probably. But yeah. Yeah. Very good to see your face. Right. But, yeah, a lot of people are surprised that it's actually us who are answering the phone. So. Yeah. And then if you're interesting, a little bit further into OK, I now really want to implement this and I want you guys to take care of this and take my business to the next level, then we'll be able to kind of walk you through and see how we can help you and your store.
Aaron [00:20:02] Absolutely, and I think kind of to wrap this all up to the economic side of the process, like the training is, the Christian mentioned this, too. I just want to reiterate the fact that you could literally go and implement a few things. And if you implement one thing correctly, you could almost double your sales. It's just literally one thing that most people neglect. So that's a huge part of it. But the Facebook and boosting posts, it's. It's just a waste of money at that point where there is a better way for you to spend your money and time. I would almost say to not even run Facebook ads if you're just going to focus on boosting post. So if you've gotten this far into the podcast, hopefully you're serious about growing your business and serious about the marketing side of things. And we just want to discourage you from boosting your post because we've just seen so many people waste a lot of money and then blame the platform when it was really just a process. And hopefully throughout this episode and into the show notes in our training, you'll be able to implement a process that actually works. You can get results for your business. So that's what it's all about. So thank you guys so much for listening. We are getting really close to two hundred. If you are somebody who's on Instagram, go over there, shoot us a D.M. and let us know who you'd like to have us interview or what we should do for episode two hundred. We're trying to figure that out, so maybe you can give us some insight into that, what you think. Maybe cool. And if you are listening for the first time, please make sure that you subscribe. It doesn't matter where, whether it's Apple iTunes, whether Apple podcast, rather whether it's Spotify, we're on every major platform and hopefully soon to ible. But make sure that you subscribe that you don't miss on any of our episodes. We've been doing this now for almost three and a half, four years for the podcast, and we have not missed a Monday yet. So every Monday you can expect bite sized piece of information to help you grow your business. And if you've been listening for a while, maybe you've been listening for a year or two years and you've just never had the chance to the time. We would truly appreciate it. If you go over to Apple podcast and let us know what you think of the podcast. That way we know how to make it better for you. Maybe like different guests, maybe like different things. What do you want to learn about? Give us an honest rating and review will not only shout you out here, but also take that to heart and try to make that happen for the show to make it even better for you. But we truly appreciate your time. And hopefully you guys got a lot out of this episode. We'll talk to you next time on another episode of the marketing natives.
Narrator [00:22:31] The marketing native's podcast is a production of BitBranding.
