Facebook is something of a seesaw when it comes to marketing value. At first it was a pointless endeavor for businesses, then it was the next coming of the Internet. Then it was a cash-sink and then again, the source of the best ROI online.
It’s hard to know exactly what you can get out of Facebook, and the constant back and forth nature of the marketing community doesn’t help.
Far too many business owners, for example, read the hype, started a Page and poured money and time into promoting it only to find that it gave them very little in return.
So how do you get MORE out of your Facebook Page while putting LESS into it?
You get smarter than the system.
Inbound Meets Outbound for Facebook Success
I read a fantastic post the other day on SalInbound.com. It was about how to leverage Facebook ads to drive traffic to the best content you produce for your Facebook Page.
We’ve been doing this for clients for some time now with great success. In August we generated 125 likes for one client with a $5 post promotion. That was a huge boost and it paid off big time when the post went viral and snared nearly 70 likes from a Fan Base of only 300.
But for as many times as we got likes for $0.04 per Like, we spent 20 times that on other ads. The simple truth is that Facebook can lead to big wins or big losses.
That’s why the inbound/outbound strategy works so well, but it needs to be tweaked to Facebook.
Here’s How It Works
The process is very simple. It’s really just three steps.
- Create an amazing piece of content
- Share it to Facebook
- Create an ad and target your ideal audience.
The goal then is to ensure only people who WANT to read things like this are finding it in their feed. Of course, there are other factors involved. Headlines, for example are huge – if you don’t have a good headline, you’ll never attract their attention and get clicks.
At the same time, you can’t expect to make a sale directly on Facebook, so the post on your site needs to include a call to action at the end to monetize the post. If someone clicks through and reads your blog post, what do they do afterwards?
Subscribe?
Read more?
Buy something?
Have a plan in place and customize it to the very specific type of post you just created.
The best part of all this is that it doesn’t require custom landing pages – you’ll use your blog for that – nor does it require huge ad investments. Most of our ads run for $5-$10 each and generate between 5 and 100 clicks to the blog (including a lot of likes on our managed Pages, which is a great side effect).
Combined with the surge in traffic it generates if someone shares it with a large group of people, promoted posts, when properly targeted can grow fast.
Other Facebook Strategies in Action
This isn’t the only strategy we use on Facebook to drive traffic to our site with minimal effort. We also run contests periodically to tap into large directories of contests, we share event-specific photos, we tap into hot keywords and more.
But in terms of cutting down your time investment while increasing results, the inbound/outbound method works great.
