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Drive Attendance to your local event with Facebook

Sold Out!  That is what we like to hear from our clients who choose us to help them with their Facebook event ads. WSI Connect has been creating and running Facebook Ads for our clients who host monthly workshops and annual events. Our ads have helped drive attendance for local events and increase awareness around services.

Are you using Facebook ads to drive attendance to your local events? Read on to discover our step by step approach we take in creating Facebook ads.

Creating Ads from your Facebook Page

If you are short on time and do not want to use Facebook Ads Manager, you can boost your event and posts directly from your Facebook page. Working directly on your page is easier, straightforward and quick.

Boost Event

From your event list, click on Boost Event.

A pop-up will open where you can customize your objectives, add an image, adjust targeting, and set the ad run time (1 day, 7 days, 14 days).

Boost Event, Increase Ticket Sales vs. Reach More People

The above images show how your event will appear to viewers based on your objective. Where one directs individuals to a ticket website, the latter objective drives awareness. People that click interested or going, cause your event to show up in their friends’ news feeds.

Boost Event, Ad Creative: Text

In this section you’ll want to describe your event and why people should attend. I like to keep the descriptive area to no more than a paragraph or two. For workshops, I’ve started using the following format:

    • EVENT TITLE IN ALL CAPS (or other priority information)
    • Short Description
    • DATE IN ALL CAPS

Boost Event, Ad Creative: Add an Image

When you click “Boost Event” the ad will automatically populate the cover image used on the event page. You can select a new image from your photo album or upload a new one.

Boost Event: Audience

Facebook provides a couple of prebuilt audience selections for you: People who like your Page and People who like your Page and their friends. You may also customize your audience based on interests, demographics, and location.

Boost Event: Budget & Duration

Choose or enter your desired budget and ad run.

Tip: For events such as workshops, run your ad 3 to 4 days before the date. We’ve seen better performance on ads the closer they are to the event date. If you’ve dialed in your targeting you should see a low cost per clicks and increased registration. All other types of events, you will want to time your ad runs with the heaviest concentration of budget leading up to your ticket deadline date or event date.

After completing the above steps, you’ll be prompted to enter a credit card for payment and you can boost your event.

Creating Ads from Ads Manager

I prefer to create ads from within Ads Manager because I can use multiple images and videos and duplicate successful ads easily. From your Ad Manager, select Create Ads and choose your objective.

Ads Manager: Objective

Awareness, Consideration, or Conversion
For events, I recommend “traffic” under the Consideration objective. The steps will be similar to above when setting your audience, budget and duration.

However, within Ads Manager you can edit where your ad is seen (image below). The majority of our clients are not on Instagram, so I always edit the placements and primarily use Facebook and the Audience Network choices.

Tip: If you are creating an ad strictly for Messenger, you will want to edit the placements to only include desktop and mobile feeds (as pictured below).

Ads Manager, Ad Format, Media and Links

You have several choices. I use a mix of single image ads, carousal ads and occasionally video ads.

Be sure to direct users to a meaningful, straightforward link that has the information they are expecting.

Tip: Be sure to enter the direct link to your ticket site or dedicated event page on your website. Users do not want to go to a main page where they have to hunt for more information. On May 10, Facebook announced that they are essentially cracking down on ads that lead to a low-quality web experience. In essence, ensure your link sends users directly to the information they are seeking, without disruptions such as pop-ups.

Whether you choose a single image or carousel ad format, choose images that clearly show the type of event and the purpose. For instance, in the above example, the images chosen were from the previous year’s event. The text creates a sense of urgency, the image gallery shows what happened the previous year: winning raffles, auctions, pre-party VIP, dancing, and food.

Facebook Ad Success Example:

The image below shows a workshop with a four day ad duration. Through targeting specific audiences and directing them directly to the registration page, this ad realized an ROI of 35x.

With over 1 billion daily active users on Facebook, your event is competing for attention. Learn how to do this correctly and your events will flourish.

If you have any questions about how to drive attendance to your local event with Facebook or any of our other services, schedule a discovery call with us today.

3 Levels of Facebook Marketing

For businesses trying to generate leads on Facebook, learning the different options is essential. Especially since posts from business pages are rarely displayed in your follower’s time line if they are not promoted. For businesses to gain visibility on Facebook, they must spend money. When I first started advertising on Facebook, I (admittedly) thought it would be straightforward and easy. Science behind it? Smh. While Facebook seems to constantly tweak their platform, the basic three methods remain the same (for now):

  • Boosting (Beginner)
  • Ads Manager (Advanced)
  • Business Manager (Expert)

To utilize the information in this post you should already have a well-optimized Facebook Business page and have permission levels of Advertiser or higher.

POST BOOSTING

This is the easiest way to promote your content. Your posts can be done directly from your page and it is fairly straightforward.

  • Audience: Any audiences you’ve created and saved will appear. You may also create a new audience and specify by gender, age, location, and interests. The interest targeting is limited compared to what is available on Ads Manager or Business Manager.
  • Interest Targeting via Post Boosting
  • Budget and Duration: Adding a budget and selecting a duration of 1, 7 or 14 days will quickly give you an estimated reach.
  • Some posts work better than others. This will vary from business to business. Some audiences prefer pictures while others interact more with technical information. It is important to know which posts work best for your audience.
  • Payment: You can select a payment method or change the existing one.

Boosting posts directly from your page is quick and easy and optimal for sharing status updates. If you are looking to capture more leads, increase brand awareness, sell more tickets or drive traffic to your website, I recommend delving into Ads Manager. 

ADS MANAGER

Once you begin to create ads you will need to stay on top of how they are performing and how much money you are spending. You can do this from Ads Manager. It keeps everything in one place allowing you to fine tune your campaigns, see which ads are working well, and keep track of your spending.

Using Ads Manager allows you to be a bit more creative with your Ad copy. From Ads Manager, you can choose from a single image/video or multiple images in one ad. You may also use multiple images to create a slideshow.

Everything starts at the Campaign level, and within each campaign you define your targets, and within each target, you design and test. A quick analogy is to think of it as one of those cheesecake samplers – the one that comes with eight slices and two of each flavor. With the cheesecake wheel representing the Ad set for your target audience, the different flavors become your design and testing. You’ll quickly see which “flavor” appeals most to your audience and, thus, performs better.

Power Editor

There is quite a big difference when using the Power Editor within Ads Manager.  Quite simply, using Power Editor gives you more options and allows for deeper targeting.

Creating Ads within Ads Manager, Power Editor or Business Manager opens up the targeting possibilities.

BUSINESS MANAGER

If you are going to have many different ad campaigns running at the same time, want to equitably share the accountability across your organization, grant different agencies access, or pay for some ads from a different source, then you should consider using Business Manager. Business Manager is ideal for agencies and organizations managing more than one Facebook page or Ad account. However, be sure to carefully review Facebook’s setup guide, because once you claim an asset (Page, Ad Account, App) inside Business Manger, it cannot be undone.

Claim Your Own, Request Others

Only, only claim those assets (Facebook pages, ad accounts, or applications) that you expressly own. Once an asset has been claimed within Business Manager it cannot be changed. So you don’t want to claim a client’s page, instead, you may request access to it. Let your client decide if they want to use Business Manager. If they decide otherwise, you will still be able to manage the account.

Facebook has done a great job at publishing setup guides and webinars to train and update users on how to use Business Manager.

We’ve helped many of our clients leverage Facebook to increase leads and grow their business. Let us know if you need some help with your Facebook Marketing. We would be happy to learn more about your goals and objectives. Contact us today to discuss your online marketing needs.

How to Master Social Selling

Social Media Shift: The Dawn of Social Selling

Are You Moving Online With Your Customers?
Marketing involves the promoting and selling of products and services. If you’re a marketer you’re essentially a salesperson, even if that’s not how you perceive your job. Most people think a “sales” role consists of these typical activities: endless cold calls, prospect meetings and a whole lot of proverbial doors slammed in your face. But in today’s business world, the tenets of selling are evolving right along with the core focus of marketing. Consumers no longer stand for being forced and bullied into a decision; instead, they prefer to build relationships with brands, gather information and eventually come to an informed conclusion on their own. Your job as a marketer or a salesperson is to do a better job of highlighting the value of your products and services than your competition.
 
Social Media Is Changing The Business Landscape
The ability to adapt is one of the most important components of success in both business and marketing. This willingness to pivot and take risks is especially important for truly great digital marketing campaigns due to the fast-paced nature of the Internet. One aspect of the digital space that is significantly shifting the business environment is social media. While some companies are still getting acquainted with the idea of social selling – using social media platforms to generate leads and close sales – the early adopters are busy reaping the benefits.
The simple fact is that in order to sell, you need something very specific: a potential customer. Logic follows that to interact with potential customers, you need to be where they are (waiting for them to come to you just doesn’t cut it). This is exactly why websites and strong digital branding have become such a vital part of marketing over the last decade – if you don’t have the website customers expect it makes a bad first impression. As consumers flock to rapidly growing social media platforms, social activity is becoming just as critical as an engaging website.
From a numbers standpoint, the stats speak for themselves. Recent Forrester research shows that 91% of B2B IT buyers are involved with social media. On the other end of the spectrum, studies found that 78.6% of salespeople who use social selling out performed those who were not using social media. Essentially, social media platforms are like giant, can’t-miss conferences that literally never stop running. The people who attend achieve more success – it’s not a coincidence. Do you really want to actively ignore an opportunity that big?

Mastering Social Selling

While it may seem like a daunting task, getting into a daily social selling routine is relatively simple. It just takes 30 to 60 minutes a day and a lot of practice, patience and determination. To get you started, here’s a look at our framework for a social selling routine:

  • Choose platforms: do some poking around and try to determine which social platforms are most popular in your market. Pick two to start – you can’t afford to be overwhelmed or discouraged. Get acclimated to the social environments of each platform and set up and optimize your profiles.
  • Research and share: one of the keys to social media is sharing the right stuff. Don’t just share the first article you find and never share something you haven’t completely read. Do your research and only recommend posts and articles that you truly believe bring value and enrichment to your potential customers.
  • Connect: whether it’s LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or Google+ it’s easy to see who is engaging with you socially. So ensure that you connect, follow, add or circle anybody that seems interested and, you know, be social!
  • Measure and follow-up: an upside to social selling is that every social platform is easy to use, no matter your location or device. This means you can cut down on speed-to-lead time by quickly engaging with people who share your content and immediately responding to messages and inquiries, even while you’re on the go.

This has simply been a brief outline as to why you need to consider social selling and how you can get started. Dedicated social selling is becoming more important to keeping up with the competition and meeting your sales goals. For further information or guidance on how to better understand and develop a social selling strategy, contact us today!

Social Media for Professionals: LinkedIn and Google+

Social media has become an integral part of the personnel sourcing and job hunting process. Today, more and more companies rely on the Internet to research the candidates (including outside consultants) they plan to hire.  This makes it important to take a strategic approach when it comes to building your online reputation. Effectively leveraged, social media can help you create a strong personal brand and widen your reach across a wide array of job markets, industries, and organizations.

While there are many social media platforms that can help you build your network, there are two that all professionals should definitely consider and keep up to date – Google+ and LinkedIn. While the latter has now become synonymous with job search / hiring, the former can help you establish a strong online presence that you can leverage to enhance your reach. These two platforms alone can help you build a relevant network, and create and exchange information and ideas to give shape to your personal brand as a professional.

Linking Via LinkedIn

LinkedIn has become the most popular professional network in most parts of the world. Clearly, it has several advantages over traditional job portals thanks to its social media strengths and the fact that it is primarily driven by quality content.

  • LinkedIn allows its members to connect with each other. You can connect with like-minded individuals from the same profession and explore available job opportunities through this network.
  • It is a handy research tool. Most companies worth their name are present on LinkedIn with specialized digital marketing teams continuously generating content or strategizing to make their presence felt online. You can utilize this content along with inputs from your network to research a potential employer and their business before an interview.
  • You can identify the people that matter. Within minutes, LinkedIn can offer you insights into who the key persons in your area of interest are at a company you want to work with—as an employee, as a vendor, as a business partner, and so on. You can connect and engage with them to explore the possibility of a potential opportunity in their company.
  • You can build credibility. Your profile provides details about the people in your professional network, the companies you have worked with, and the capabilities you bring to the table, among other factors. Features like endorsements and recommendations add even greater credibility to your profile. 

How To Make The Most Of LinkedIn?

  • Develop your LinkedIn profile like you would your resume. Highlight your strengths and capabilities early in your profile page.
  • Create interesting content and share it with your network. This will help establish you as a subject matter expert. The more original content you post the greater the benefits, including search engine rankings.
  • Build your network. Identify people within your industries of interest and connect with them. Join relevant groups and make your presence felt within these micro-networks.
  • Post regularly on various forums and comment on topics that can demonstrate your expertise and show that you have a unique perspective on matters of interest to your network.
  • Use the right keywords while building your profile and even while posting in forums. This will help both, your search engine rankings and your association with certain specific skills and capabilities.
  • Let’s connect Luke Middendorf – LinkedIn

Enhancing Your Online Presence With Google+

Where do we all go when we want to search for information?

Google. Where else? No other search engine today comes even close. A strong presence on Google+, is therefore, a definite advantage. However, as Google says, Google+ is now more than a social media platform. It has integrated various other offerings from the Google stable such as YouTube, Google+ Communities, Hangouts, Google Local and Reviews, Google Analytics, Google+ Ripples, and Google Mobile to provide a single window platform that can have a significant impact on your SEO.

How can you take advantage of Google+?

  • Build a profile page on Google+ to let Google know of your existence. While there is no stated preference, there is enough evidence to show that Google does favour content hosted on its products when throwing up search results.
  • Create backlinks to your blog, website, and LinkedIn pages using Google+. Also ensure that these links can be shared by those who visit your profile.
  • Upload content and make it shareable on Google+. The more shares you can manage the better it is in terms of SEO for your profile.
  • Build the right connections. The Circle function offered by Google+ helps segregate your contacts. This is a valuable tool you can use to employ targeted messaging and relevant communications.
  • Let’s connect Luke Middendorf on Google+, WSI Connect 0n Google+

Contact WSI Connect to help you plan and leverage social media for businesses.  WSI Connect is a digital marketing agency located in Concord, CA.  We service the San Francisco Bay area and help our clients grow their profits through strategies such as search engine optimization, online advertising, website optimization and social media. 

Social Media for Businesses: Twitter and Facebook

Social Media for Businesses: Twitter and Facebook

Engage to connect

Social Media for businesses can be a powerful way to boost SEO, engage new prospects and communicate with existing customers.  Facebook has almost twice the number of users than the population of both Canada and the United States combined. Twitter has close to 200 million users. Reaching out to this online universe can be more useful for business than leveraging any other medium that you can think of. These two major social networks have cut across geographical boundaries and evolved to a stage where even traditional advertising barriers such as age and language can’t hold back their stupendous growth and popularity.

More and more businesses are now looking at ways to effectively utilize social media in their digital marketing strategy and reach out to their clients and prospects. Yet, only a few have been able to successfully enjoy the benefits this medium promises. Most businesses seem to think that having a social media presence suffices. Some even make the effort of posting and updating on a regular basis. Yet, they fail to see the traction they were expecting and soon give up. Why?

The most common mistake that business are making with social media…

The key to social media success lies in understanding that it is all about building relationships with your online network. Ironically, most businesses often seem to forget this social aspect of social media activity. You need to engage with your target audience on these platforms to meet your goals. And that engagement can only come from providing value not from making noise.

What should your social media objectives focus on?

  • Brand Building: You no longer need to depend on expensive television commercials or advertising in the leading print publications. Social media can help you build your brand online.
  • Win new customers: The immediate benefit of being a recognized brand is business growth. You can leverage social media to drive traffic to your website and even foot traffic to your store.
  • Customer service: You can leverage social media to interact with your customers and answer queries or address any complaints they may have.
  • Feedback: You can be in regular touch with your customers to understand their requirements, concern and feedback, and utilize the information to improve your product or service offering.

Now let’s look at how you can develop a strong social presence on Facebook and Twitter to get the most out of your social media marketing across these dominant social properties.

Build Brand Awareness and Increase Traffic On Facebook

Facebook sees more than three million likes, comments, and shares every single day. If you can build a strong network on this platform then even half a percent of these likes and shares are enough to set your business soaring.

Begin by building online relationships with your existing customers. Provide them incentives to help you reach out to their networks. Word-of-mouth marketing continues to remain one of the most powerful mediums ever, and Facebook enables this. A strong presence on Facebook matched by good products and services can lead to your business becoming part of the conversations in your network. This, in turn, will lead to recommendations to the larger network, thereby, enabling you to reach new prospects and extend your circle of influence.

Track metrics and drive profitable social campaigns

Facebook Insights, Facebook’s proprietary business page analytics tool, enables you to track the activity on your page. This insight helps you to understand what is working for your business, and accordingly tweak your campaigns to gain maximum mileage. However, you would need to gain some expertise in garnering actionable insight from the vast amounts of data that the tool lays at your disposal. Key metrics that you can track using this tool includes page activity, demographics of your visitors, new subscriptions and people who have unsubscribed, and posts that are getting maximum visitors.  You can leverage this information to fine-tune your campaign for greater effectiveness.

Join Conversations and Demonstrate Your Brand Expertise On Twitter

Twitter can help you spark conversations about your brand. It can also help you meet potential brand ambassadors who will indirectly promote your business.  By following conversations within your industry you can gain insights into your business as well as the mindset of your prospects and customers.

Build respect for your brand

Identify the people who are interested in your brand, seek out forums which your potential customers regularly follow, and zone in on the individuals who are considered leaders in your business. Engage them in conversations and position yourself as an expert in your industry. You could even set up periodic discussions on Twitter by leveraging the hash tag feature. Provide a call-to-action that encourages them to either visit your website or register for a newsletter or even connect with you for a free consultation.

Conduct market research by talking to current and potential customers

Use Twitter to keep your finger on the pulse. Hear what people are saying about your products or services. You can leverage this information to become more client-centric in your approach. You can similarly use Twitter to listen in on what your ideal prospects are saying about your competitors. This can provide valuable insights into what your target audience is really looking for and where the gaps in the industry exist. Research who the key influencers are in your market and work on gaining their trust. Engage with them to encourage discussions about your brand. Gain first-hand knowledge on trends and best practices; match those with your market and customer intelligence; now plan your strategy accordingly!

Contact WSI Connect to help you plan and leverage social media for businesses.