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Jun 11, 2019

I woke up to a text from a client the other morning that said mate I need your help. 

I love my clients and this client in particular has done just about everything I’ve asked. But, at the end of the day you can’t take the trader out of a businessman.  

I got myself a bargain., he said. They started asking for $6000 for that newspaper ad, but I negotiated them down to $2000, mate it’s a bargain…..But! There’s only one problem I need the artwork by lunchtime today. Mate, can you get it done? 

In truth there was probably more than one problem. Like do you really need to spend $2000. Is it really a bargain? Why do you think they offering discounts? 

As it turned out the same day that the half page colour advertisement ran in the daily newspaper, was the same day that we had started a Facebook campaign to generate clients for this client’s loyalty list. 

Now, just two weeks later let me compare and contrast the results. 

I chose to wait two weeks before doing the comparison because the Facebook campaign ran for 14 days and has only ended this morning.  I imagine other than my client who has the newspaper from 14 days ago on his desk, the bulk of the print copies of that newspaper would now be in landfill! 

The half page colour print advertisement looked great, sadly it was on the left-hand page, but it was early in a special supplement.

All of my clients competitors had also been coerced to advertise and as such my client felt he was at least in there with the rest of his industry.

 With regards results, well honestly how do you know? Without a coupon (which is a bit old fashioned, nowadays) there is no real way to tell in this client’s business whether they entered his retail outlets because of the advertisement or not. 

So, to be fair, the newspaper advertisement did a reasonable job of positioning my client alongside his competitors in a special supplement which he was probably expected to be in. But this privilege came at a cost (albeit discounted) of $2000 plus artwork of around $350.

 Now let’s look at the Facebook campaign. 

When I first met my client, his daughter had done a fabulous job of cultivating for his business a vibrant and responsive Facebook page. She had incrementally built the page to have around 3000 followers, the size of this following has allowed us to test the market with our messages and offers very quickly. When we find a message that resonates with the followers, we then spend money as a sponsored post. 

This particular Facebook campaign was promoting a message that resonated extremely well and as such we had a fair degree of confidence that it would produce strong results.

 To put things into context, I need to backtrack a little and tell you more about my client. 

He is a successful businessperson and he understands how to get rich in business. He understands that in business what one really does is multiply capital by leveraging assets. Until I joined him, he had never really made the connection that his business marketing should also be treated with exactly the same mindset.  

What I had been encouraging him to understand was, that in marketing the capital is the money that is invested into advertising and the assets are the campaigns and products that turn that investment into a profit. 

Up until this point when he managed to screw the daily newspaper down to an irresistible deal, I thought I had him no longer thinking about “products and promotions” but rather thinking about assets and ROI with all of his marketing. 

Obviously, I have more work to do, but I have a hunch that after he has heard this episode he is likely to see what I mean! 

Back to Facebook.  

The sole purpose of this campaign was to get email addresses from interested prospects.

 Knowing that most people aren’t going to buy the first time they see your offer this campaign was based around giving something valuable and free in exchange for the prospects email address. Remember we had tested this concept on our Facebook followers and knew that the likelihood of market acceptance was high. Our plan, once we had the email address was to build a relationship of trust and value and not necessarily to make a sale. 

Thanks to a function inside Facebook where one can create a lookalike audience similar to the attributes of the people who currently follow our page, we could target with a considerable amount of confidence a whole new populous of people that were likely to respond to our offer. 

As the email addresses started to enter our campaign funnel in considerable numbers, we began to see their reactions to our pre-formatted auto responder emails series aimed at developing trust. Yes, all the preparatory work had been done and the fruits of our Facebook advertising was to benefit from this work. The beauty of course is that this campaign now exists (Facebook ad copy, lookalike audience, website landing pages, the valuable bribe, auto responder emails, the lot) and can be activated at will. (Sounds like an asset to me!!!!) 

Knowing that in every sales situation, there’s always an action or series of actions that a prospect typically takes before they buy. We call these actions response indicators and they are the key to any campaign success.  

For example, in a car buying scenario, people rarely buy a car without first taking it out for a test drive. Therefore, the test drive is the response indicator. 

This is why when you go to a car dealership, the salespersons first priority is to get you to take the test drive. 

Here is how this was applied to this campaign. 

We sent traffic via Facebook to a landing page on our website that advertised a free report in exchange for the prospects email. 

In order for the prospect to trust us enough to buy, they needed to read the very report they opted in for. The act of them reading the report was the “response indicator” in our campaign.  

Shocking statistic reveals major opportunity 

Research shows that 50% of prospects are never going to access the information they opt in for. 

This means your chances of making the sale are immediately cut in half because statistically speaking, half of your prospects never made it to the first “response indicator”. 

Obviously, we had a cure for this, and this was by creating a sequence in our campaign whose sole purpose was to simply move the prospect from one response indicator to another until ultimately, they purchased. This was all pre-set in our auto responder campaign and worked a treat. 

How did we know that a buyer came from this Facebook campaign? 

Well unlike in print advertisements it is still cool in emails to include coupons. In our case we simply offered a small bonus for every purchase of over $150. 

In summary, the 14-day Facebook campaign yielded 384 new prospects, all now onto our database at a total cost of $75. 

What is more we were able to track that to date $3898 has been received from these registrations. 

Plus we still have them on our database (as we like to call them Traffic we Own) and receiving our auto responders which will continue to drive them bit by bit toward incremental response indicators that finally sees them attend the retail outlet and make a purchase. 

Here’s how the numbers ended up: 

Total spend: $75 

Total Opt Ins: 384 

Total revenue collected to date: $3898 

For every dollar we spend on that Facebook ad, we got back $51.97 within 14 days. 

Plus we got 384 new email subscribers and created tons of goodwill with them.

 So I’m sure more will come from it. 

He is the bottom line. 

It’s true. 

The fortune really is in the follow-up. 

Just not in the way you’re used to. 

You can’t bludgeon people with pitches and offers and expect it to work. 

But if you have a truly dynamic campaign that tracks user behaviour and responds accordingly you can see your sales grow like nothing before.

 So, there you have the comparison warts and all.  

I’m sure my client is likely to opt for a print media advertisement again, and when he does I just have to make sure that we run a dynamic social media campaign with a pre-prepared sales funnel at exactly the same time to pay for the print ad and make some money at the same time. 

Does this story resonate with you?