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In this episode of the Gay Business & Marketing Made Easy Podcast I give you an inside look at the upcoming ‘30 Days – 30 Voices – Stories from America’s LGBT Business Leaders’ podcast project that goes live on June 1st! I share a couple of snippets from a few of the interviews I’ve already done. Then we dive into the big area of online marketing with a specific focus around utilizing Facebook advertising to promote your lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) friendly business.
Just a reminder for first time listeners – this is a bi-weekly podcast which alternates between expert interviews from amazing leaders in the LGBT and diversity space and me teaching you about business etiquette and marketing tips for successful LGBT marketing campaigns. This week we focus on online marketing tips!
I talked about my win of the week being that I am 100% done writing and editing my book. You can find details about the book here. It is not yet available for purchase but will be soon!
Then I play 4 audio clips from a few of the interviews I have done for the ’30 Days – 30 Voices – Stories from America’s LGBT Business Leaders’ podcast project. This podcast series asks questions like;
- What was your “aha” moment when you realized this is what you should be doing in life?
- For listeners who are looking to market themselves to the LGBT community, what advice would you give them to be successful?
- As an LGBT person (or ally) how have you been able to leverage that status in your business.
They answer these questions and many more! In this episode you’ll hear from;
- Richard Oceguera of Richard Oceguera Coaching
- Dawn Ackerman of Out Smart Office Solutions
- Bree Gotsdiner of Publicly Related
- Evan Urbania of ChatterBlast Media
These shows are so packed with valuable information and nuggets of wisdom from some of the best and brightest LGBT business owners, allies and leaders in America. I hope you get a sense of all of the great things these 30 business leaders reveal and you are looking forward to hearing more in June! Click here to learn more about the line up of guests that will be featured in this podcast project.
The next thing we discuss in this episode are the benefits of online marketing and the importance of having strong calls to action in your marketing efforts. In Episode 007 of the podcast I briefly talked about Facebook marketing campaigns and received several e-mails after asking for more information. So I provide 3 primary benefits of using Facebook which are;
- Fairly inexpensive. It can be as low as $1 day
- You can be super specific in your targeting
- You can get people to your Facebook page to build a relationship and engage with them.
This episode follows a real life example of a company needing online marketing advice. A listener reached out to me with this question “Is there ANY advice you can provide to help us reach our target market better/faster/more efficiently? We would GREATLY appreciate it!!” I share some specific insights around their online men’s accessories business. You’ll be able to translate these tactics to your own business. I also explain how to set up a Facebook advertising campaign.
Links mentioned:
- My book editor, Sara Calabro’s website.
- Check out the sponsors of this podcast at the Human Performance Academy.
- The next webinar will be on Tuesday, April 30th from 1PM-2PM EST. I will be hosting a webinar that will teach you about how to do business with and market to the LGBT community. The best part about this is that we’ll be doing a live Q&A at the end of the webinar so it’s your chance to ask me questions you may have. You can RSVP here.
- Leave me a review in iTunes!
As always thank you for listening to the show!
Would you prefer to read the transcript than listen to the episode? No problem! Read the transcript below.
AUDIO TITLE: Episode #9 – Online Marketing Tips
Jenn T Grace:
This is the Gay Business and Marketing Made Easy Podcast, Episode Nine.
Intro:
Welcome to the Gay Business and Marketing Made Easy Podcast where you’ll learn how to do business with and market to the LGBT community in an authentic and transparent way. We’re talking about the $790 billion lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender community. We’ll help you grow your business, gain market share and impact your bottom line. And now your host – she’s an entrepreneur, a marketing maven and an advocate for the LGBT business community. Jenn, with two N’s, T. Grace.
Jenn T Grace:
Well hello, hello, hello. This is the Gay Business and Marketing Made Easy Podcast and this is episode number nine. I am your host, Jenn T. Grace and I’m super excited to be sharing this episode with you today. As a note to those new listening today, this is a bi-weekly podcast which alternates between expert interviews with amazing business leaders in the LGBT and diversity space, and me teaching you about business etiquette and marketing tips to successfully reach out to the LGBT market. I have jam-packed episode to share with you this week. We are going to talk about online marketing, specifically around Facebook marketing, as well as talking about the importance of having really clear calls to action in your marketing endeavors.
But before we get into that, I do want to share with you my personal Win of the Week. This is something that I started a couple of episodes back and I’m getting some really great feedback from the listeners, so that’s fantastic. So if you’re listening to this and you want to reach out to me and talk to me about a personal win that you’ve had this past week, please do so. I can be reached at Jenn@jenntgrace.com and I really, really enjoy hearing from you and hearing about your business endeavors, and what’s working, and what isn’t working, and of course the more information I know about you, my listener, the better I can tailor these episodes towards you. So please reach out to me as you have been, thank you very much.
My personal win this week…
So my personal win this week is that I have indeed finished my book. Last podcast I shared with you- I believe it was for the first time that I was even writing a book, and it’s exciting that this is something that’s been on my bucket list since I was a child. And I’m excited to have it done, I worked with an amazing editor who really helped me focus what I was talking about, and helped the transition from chapter to chapter; she was just absolutely amazing. I may as well plug her while I am thinking of it, her name is Sara and she can be reached at her website which is www.SaraCalabro.com and she is a fantastic writer and editor so if you need her for anything, please head over there and of course don’t forget to mention that I sent you.
So this book has been an absolute labor of love. And I really hope that you enjoy it, and if you want to get a sneak peak at it because it is not yet available to purchase, but it will be very soon. So if you want to head over to the website and just check things out and see at least what the cover looks like, and look at the summary and let me know what you think, I would love for you to do that. And you can do that at www.JennTGrace.com/book. And I really hope that you provide me with your feedback, because of course I always love to hear it.
A preview on a project I’ve been working on..
So the next thing that I want to talk to you about, and actually give you a little preview on, is the project that I have been working on for June. As you may know, and I’ve been kind of cryptic and alluding to this for a couple of episodes now, but I’ve been working on a project to celebrate Pride month in June in my own way. And I had an epiphany in the shower, and I don’t know where you do your best thinking, but for some reason in the shower seems to be the hotspot for me. And in February I was thinking about all of the amazing conversations I have with people, and how many really, truly amazing business owners that I get to talk to on any given day. And I think that that’s one of the things that I absolutely love the most about doing what it is that I do, and it’s just the interaction with other people and listening to people’s stories and learning about their businesses, and learning about the struggles they may be having or the accomplishments they may be having. There’s just so much goodness and richness in what people have to say, and I find that there is never a good enough platform for people to really get that message out. And you may recall that I’ve talked about the reason for starting this podcast, and it really was due to two very specific conversations I was having back in September. And when I got off the phone with both of these people, I just walked away with this like ‘ah-ha’ moment of my own of, “Wow these people have such brilliant, amazing stories that nobody knows about. So how can I do my part in telling other people about their story and letting them share their story?” So the podcast itself stemmed from that, and what I have done- and if this is an episode that you’re listening to and you’ve listened to previous ones you’ll see that I do alternate as I mentioned at the top of the episode, but I alternate between having an expert interview and episodes like this one where I’m talking to you and educating you around a specific topic. But what I have found is that I know more people than I have time to interview. So if there’s 52 weeks in a year and I do this bi-weekly, and I’m doing bi-monthly having an expert interview, that really only gives me the opportunity to talk to twelve people. And I know way more than twelve amazing business leaders.
Celebrating Pride month…
So the epiphany that I had back in February was how can I celebrate Pride month, but also be sharing the stories of such amazing people with you? And what I decided to do was create the 30 Days, 30 Voices: Stories from America’s LGBT Business Leaders Project. This project will begin on June 1st, and every single day in June I will be releasing a new podcast episode that is a specific interview with an amazing business leader across the country. And this is so exciting for me, I have about half of the interviews are already done, and it has been quite the labor of love, just like the book was. Because it takes a good amount of time to schedule interviews with people, record the interviews, edit the interviews, put them together in a nice pretty package with a bow essentially. And it has been amazing. I have had so much fun with this so far, and I have talked to such great people, and I’ve been asking them a pretty standard list of questions because I want to show cohesion in all of these episodes. So I want anybody to be able to listen to episode fifteen on June 15th and have that be similar in style to the very first episode. So I have been going off a prepared list of questions. Some of those questions include what was your ‘ah-ha’ moment when you realized this is what you should be doing in life? Or for listeners who are looking to market themselves to the LGBT community, what kind of advice would you give them that will help make them successful? And then another good one that I’m finding awesome answers to is as an LGBT person yourself, or an ally to the community, how have you been able to leverage that in your business? And the responses that I’m getting are so fabulous, that I really, really, really cannot wait to share this with you. And what I wanted to do today was just play a couple of snippets from four of the interviews that I’ve done. So I have about fifteen or sixteen of them already recorded and ready to roll for June 1st, and I have plenty more scheduled between now and then.
Conversations you should really know about..
But there are four conversations that I wanted to just give you a little preview on so that way you have a better understanding of what you can expect come June 1st. And I really hope that this helps get you excited and gets you engaged in what’s going on here. And then of course I have- I’m already thinking to the future and thinking of how I could keep doing this every June for Pride month. So what I would love to hear from you on is is there somebody that you know that is in business that just has an amazing story to tell? If you do, please reach out to me and let me know what that information is or who that person is.
And as always you can reach me at Jenn@jenntgrace.com. But you can also head over to the website and look at the blog that goes with this podcast. So you’ll be able to find that at www.JennTGrace.com/009, that is for episode number nine. And you can leave a comment there, you can reach me however if you really find that there’s somebody that you feel I need to interview. Because I’m always looking to meet new people and tell their stories.
So as I just mentioned I have four small snippets that I want to share with you, and I chose four so I have a nice gender balance of both male and female. And so the first snippet that I want to share with you is about a minute and a half clip from Richard Oceguera, of Richard Oceguera Coaching which a New York City based coaching company and Richard is actually the author of an upcoming book called, ‘Converting Your Community to Cash; Monetizing Your Connections.’ And I’ve known Richard for quite some time now, and I’m personally really looking forward to his book because he really is talking about how to leverage and make the most of the connections that you already have, and I think that that’s something that my listeners are interested in so of course I cannot wait until that comes out and I will certainly make sure that everybody is aware of it. But when I was talking with Richard, I was asking him if there was anything in specific that he wanted to share about what he learned when he was writing his book, and this was part of his response.
Richard Oceguera:
Let me say it this way, I’ve interviewed several successful business owners in the process of the writing the book and I’ve asked them what they think is the number one mistake that they see other people do in a networking environment.
Jenn T Grace:
Good question.
Richard Oceguera:
Yeah. And consistently the response to that question has been not listening to the other person. And we’ve all been in it, I’m guilty of it myself, and it’s pretty prevalent but just as human beings let alone people in business, we’re not really trained very well in how to really effectively listen to another person. Because when we’re in a conversation, oftentimes we’re sort of waiting for them to stop talking, we’re formulating what we are going to say in response to something that they’ve said to us. We’re thinking about someone else or something else, and usually not making really good eye contact, and in a networking environment where there might be music playing and lots of people talking and lots of people around you, a lot of things to be distracted by; we’re not giving our 100% focus and attention to the person who’s standing right in front of us trying to create a connection.
Jenn T Grace:
So there you have it. That is, like I said, just a really small snippet of a solid forty minute or so interview with Richard, and he shares some brilliant insights, as does every single person that I have been talking to. So onto the next one, and this is from Dawn Ackerman who is the cofounder and CFO of Out Smart Office Solutions, who is based in San Francisco, California and Seattle, Washington. And the conversation that I was having with Dawn was around how you handle business failures.
Dawn Ackerman:
You know you really have to be careful.
Jenn T Grace:
It’s the nature of the beast.
Dawn Ackerman:
It really is the nature of the beast. And you have to make sure I think that as with any relationship you get into, that your coming from it with the same mindset, and that you really want- you have to have common goals, and common- and know if the business is successful this is what we are going to do. If the business is not successful, this is what we are going to do. But you kind of- you know, it’s not easy. It’s just not easy.
Jenn T Grace:
So that was my interview with Dawn Ackerman, and as I had mentioned after Richard is just these conversations have been amazing and they are revealing so many good insights that I find that every single business owner should be able to relate to. So regardless of what your business is, if you’re a nonprofit or you’re a business that’s just starting out and you’re within your first year, or if you’ve been in business for fifteen years, there’s definitely something from every single one of these interviews that you will be able to take away. So I want to share the next one, and that is with Bree Gotsdiner who is the founder and director of Publicly Related, which is a PR firm headquartered in Orlando, Florida. The audio in this interview is her response to my asking her how she found her way into the public relations industry.
Bree Gotsdiner:
I got started when I was in high school, surprisingly, as an intern for my Congressman where I worked with the media and worked with his constituents and really got a feel for the power of the media to influence voters and the importance of communicating very clearly with constituents. When you had a target demographic it’s incredibly important, I’ve learned, to hone a message and deliver it well for that demographic. And I took that knowledge when I went to college, and I joined a firehouse. And as a firefighter, I put out all the fires and did everything the other firefighters did and once the situation was under control, reporters started showing up and they wanted to ask questions. And I’d usually be the one they’d ask. And again, I realized the power of the media to spread a message; whether it was telling people where to shop and what to buy, or it was more educational about how to protect themselves. The media was the key, and it very strongly influenced people’s perceptions of the fire or the disaster, and how to respond to it.
Jenn T Grace:
So that was part of my conversation with Bree who had some really valuable advice around PR and how to leverage it in your business. And the final thirty second snippet that I want to share with you is from Evan Urbania who is the CEO of ChatterBlast Media which is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And in this response he’s talking about a piece of his journey and how he came to founding his current company, so let’s have a listen.
Evan Urbania:
As a result we had grown substantially in the last couple of years, I’ve got six employees now, we have a really wide range of clients. But kind of in the same vein of my recording studio days, you know it just began with an idea, started by trying, and ultimately found a way to make it work. And it wasn’t without any success- without failures rather, it’s always kind of a journey and a process, not just an event.
Jenn T Grace:
So that was just a small piece of my interview with Evan Urbania, and like I keep saying, these conversations have been fabulous and they’re really revealing a lot of information around business, and specifically with that question around how to market to the community successfully, they have been hitting on every single point known to mankind in terms of how to effectively market to the LGBT community. So everything that they’re talking about really ties in to what I’ve been teaching you and talking about, either on this podcast, or on my blog, or on my webinars.
So I really, really hope that you are able to get a sense of what this project is all about, and hopefully all the great things that you feel like you can learn from it. So if you want more information on the lineup of guests who I interviewed or will be interviewing for this project, you can head over to my website at www.JennTGrace.com/30days30voices. That’s 3-0-days-3-0-voices, no hyphens, underscores, anything like that.
Back to the episode..
So now that we talked about the 30 Days, 30 Voices Project, I do want to hop into the marketing piece of things today. And today I want to talk to you about Facebook marketing, online campaign, identifying really strong calls to action, and everything that I’ve been doing over the last couple of weeks all seems to be colliding into this one area that I would love to share with you because these are conversations that I’ve been having with my clients, that I’ve been having with colleagues of mine, and I find that if a topic keeps coming up over and over again that it obviously should be shared with multiple people. So if you’re listening to this and you are new to the online marketing space, I’m going to attempt to break it down in a really simplistic fashion, and if this is something that you want more information on, please reach out to me via Facebook, email, however, and let me know that you are looking for more information around this because what I can do is prepare a podcast that is exclusively around setting up an online marketing campaign for Facebook.
Benefits to testing your online marketing efforts via Facebook..
So I want to start off today with explaining what I feel are three primary benefits to testing your online marketing efforts via Facebook. And the first of those- so what I’ll do is cover the three primary benefits and then we’ll go into them a little bit more in detail. But the first benefit is that it’s fairly inexpensive. If you’re considering doing a marketing campaign on Facebook, you can do it for as little as a dollar a day. And of course the smaller amount of money you put in, the smaller amount of return you’re going to see, but you can start testing the waters for as little as a buck a day. And that is certainly a far better value than if you were putting a $300.00 ad in a directory somewhere. Of course putting ads in directories has its own value, but it’s much, much more difficult to test that out than it is to play around with wording and content and copy via Facebook. So that’s the first one.
And the second one is that you can be super specific in your targeting. And that’s the one thing that I love the most about Facebook and why I promote it to a lot of my clients, is that Facebook allows you to be so incredibly specific with your targeting that it’s almost a little bit scary. So think of it as like a user, and how much information that you are putting about yourself on Facebook, and then basically think of it as Facebook turning around and using that to their advantage and to advertiser’s advantage. We’ll get into that in just a minute.
But the third primary benefit is this is a way that you can engage your audience, get them either to your Facebook page, or get them to your website and use that to build a relationship with them. Engagement and relationship building are really critical and they’re exceptionally critical in your online marketing endeavors. A lot of times I’ll talk with people and they just assume that if they have a Facebook page, and they’re updating it on a regular basis, that that’s enough, but it’s not enough. You need to engage your audience, you need to have conversations with them, you need to provide ways for them to talk to you. And you have to do it in a way that’s best for them.
So if we’re going to dive a little bit deeper on these three primary benefits, let’s just start there with the relationship building piece. And this does tie into calls to action quite nicely as well. It’s if you have a Facebook ad campaign that you’re putting together, and you’re trying to get people to come over to your website, or come over to your Facebook page, you need to make sure that you’re finding a way to engage with your audience, and find opportunities to have a dialogue with your audience. So if you go over to my Facebook page, I post every- at least on Tuesdays and Fridays with my new blog post. But throughout the week I share information that I found from other people’s pages, a lot of times I’ll be asking questions, occasionally I’m just saying, “Hey, it’s great to have you here. It’s so great to have such a strong following, and I really appreciate you.” And I find that- and this is a tip that I’ll share with you because it’s been working really well for me, is that when I’m posting information to Facebook that is about me personally, and it’s about my journey in this endeavor and in my business; those are the ones that get the most engagement. And Facebook has a great feature at the top on its page that shows you what posts have the highest levels of engagement, what posts are being clicked on, which ones are being shared. So Facebook provides a lot of analytics and what you really have to do is figure out what’s working best for you. And just because your post isn’t being clicked on doesn’t mean that people aren’t reading it. So it’s really important to have Google Analytics or another analytic-type software set up on your website so you can see how much traffic is coming from what source.
Now that’s something that I could get into- go down a rabbit hole on that I will try to avoid right now. But having good analytic software is really important and perhaps that’s something that I can talk about on a future blog post, or even a future podcast. But for today I’m going to try to keep it high level because it is a really, really big area of business and what I would like to do is share somewhat of- I don’t know if we could call it a case study or not, but let’s use a real-life example and figure out how these primary benefits of Facebook marketing and how having calls to action all kind of tie together, and we’re really going to use a real-life example. And this came from a gentleman who reached out to me via email and he found me on my Facebook page, and he’s just asking for advice. His specific- so he gave me a little bit of a background about his business which is a handmade men’s’ accessory line and he just launched an online store, and this is the first time that he and his husband are getting into this field. And he understands who his target market is, which is men who are 20 to 55, who tend to have a higher disposable income, and because of this he wants to appeal to the gay men’s market. So his question to me was, ‘Is there any advice you can provide to help us reach our target market better, faster, or more efficiently? Thank you, anything would be greatly appreciated.’
So knowing that he has an idea of who his target market, that is fantastic because as I have talked about in the past not everyone understands who their target market is, nor do they understand the importance of knowing who their target market is. And being a marketing nerd myself, I love to know the data and the analytics, and what’s working, and what isn’t working. So if you’re able to really define who your target market is, and perhaps you have three or four different target markets, at least if you’re able to break those three or four out you can test and see what’s working and what’s not working. So he already has his target market somewhat figured out in the 20 to 55 men with a focus or he would like to appeal to the gay men’s market. And my first question I would ask him if I were working with him one-on-one would be who is your competition? And that’s something that every business owner should know and should know very intimately. Who is your competition? And this can go for a nonprofit, this can go for a small business owner, this can go for a large company; it does not matter your size, your structure, or anything. If you are in business you need to know who your competition is. And I unfortunately have absolutely no clue who the high end retailers are for men’s clothing. It could be Saks Fifth Avenue, it could be Lord and Taylor, it could be Brooks Brothers; honestly, I don’t know, I don’t buy a whole lot of men’s clothing. Actually I don’t even know when the last time I have purchased men’s clothing. But what I will do since I have no idea, I’m just going to use those three companies as examples. So we’ll say Saks, Lord and Taylor, and Brooks Brothers; so we’ll just use those three companies. And we’ll say that those are the three competitors for this new men’s accessory company.
The next thing I would talk to him about doing is let’s get you on Facebook. And he didn’t identify to me whether or not his company had a Facebook page or not, but it’s really simple to set up a Facebook page if you haven’t yet already. However, the word of caution I would say to anybody listening is if you’re going to set up a Facebook page, you cannot just set it up and walk away from it. You have to nurture it, you have to be constantly talking to your audience on it, you have to be constantly updating it. It’s not just a set it and forget it type of tool. And this is where a lot of business owners make the crucial mistake, is that they’ll spend a lot of money key word optimizing their descriptions, they’ll make sure that they’ve gotten a good amount of people to the Facebook page, and then once they’ve reached that they just walk away from it. And the problem with that is if I’m your average consumer, and I find your website and it says, ‘Oh, go Like us on Facebook,’ I’m going to hop over to Facebook, and if the last post that you had out was in November of last year, the chances of me clicking on that are slim to none. And I’m sure there are actual specific percentages and data around that, but I don’t know that off the top of my head. I do know from experience that people are less likely to click if it doesn’t look like there’s anything of value there. So you really need to be updating your page on a regular basis. I would recommend updating it at least once a day; even I’m guilty of not doing that occasionally. But you want to make sure that you’re following what’s called the Rule of Thirds. And if you don’t know about the Rule of Thirds, I would pause this for a moment, grab a pen, grab a piece of paper and make a note of this, because I find that this is one of the top keys that will help make you successful in online marketing and even promoting yourself as a business.
Explanation of the Rule of Thirds…
So the Rule of Thirds is essentially that you should be providing one third of your content in whatever form it may be- one third of it should be about yourself. So one third of it can be- I wouldn’t recommend a complete shameless self-promotion, but you could even do that as long as it’s only a third of what you’re doing. So you can be talking about specials you have coming up, something that you’re working on, any number of things like that. So in my case, you know a third of what I’m talking about is usually about projects I’m working on, what’s coming up, it’s my book is coming out, I have this 30 Days, 30 Voices Project coming out; that’s my- that’s the top third of me talking about what I’m doing.
The second of those thirds is talking about industry-specific content or things that are happening in your sphere, your circle of what you’re doing. The next piece is me providing information around the LGBT community that I haven’t written, or isn’t from my thoughts specifically. It’s articles that I find about what the Supreme Court is going to do about Prop 8, or about DOMA. And it’s like that I saw on Facebook yesterday where I believe Ireland has now- I don’t know how the hierarchy works in Ireland, but their top people have declared that same-sex marriage should be legal in Ireland and that’s really good information, and granted it doesn’t affect me as a US citizen but there are plenty of my readers and listeners who are from Ireland. And I’m just spreading the word because it’s strength in numbers, it’s getting more information out there, it’s getting people to understand that the LGBT movement is much broader than where they are alone. So the LGBT movement isn’t just what’s happening where I live in the state of Connecticut, it’s happening globally. So a third of the content I’m providing is around things like that.
Then the other third of content is usually kind of like the fluff. The fluff things that you’re just spreading messages about. So my fluff stuff and my industry-related content, a lot of times end up meshing together just because it’s the nature of the beast. So I’ll forward along or provide from Facebook infographics that are talking about something LGBT-related. In some industries that would be considered the fluff. And I’ll give you a good example. So if you’re a dentist for example, and your practice is around cosmetic dentistry, and there are cartoon images that are either making fun of cosmetic dentistry, or are- you know something laugh about, that would be fluff for them. That would be sending off those comics. And I suppose if I came across something that was some kind of fun comic that wasn’t too crude, I would post that on my Facebook too, and that would be the fluff.
So you really want to have a good mixture of what you’re talking about. You don’t want to be boring, you don’t want to be self-promoting too much, but you need to be engaging and engagement is the key to have anybody who wants to stay and hang around on your Facebook page.
So for this new company that focuses on handmade men’s accessories, we would need to figure out what that all looks like. So if he’s starting a Facebook campaign, or if he’s starting a Facebook page, you want to make sure that you have the time to commit to keeping it up-to-date. Then you want to make sure that you’re following the Rule of Thirds. And then finally you want to set up some sort of ad campaign to help bring targeted traffic to your website or to your Facebook page. I would say that the best bet would be to try to be getting people to come to your page, and then really engage with them there.
Setting a Facebook ad campaign..
So the next step you want to take is setting up a Facebook ad campaign, and setting up a Facebook ad campaign is really easy. I do this for a lot of my clients because oftentimes they just don’t have enough time in the day to do this. But it’s actually fairly easy. I think the biggest key and challenge to a Facebook ad is making sure that you’re using the right language and the right verbiage and that does take a good amount of trial and error. And I have Facebook open on my computer now, and the first step if you want to set up a Facebook ad is go to the button on the left hand side that says Ad Manager, just click on it. And if you’re listening to this and you’re actually trying to do it, so I’m essentially walking you through it, just feel free to hit pause and then we’ll continue. But once you’ve clicked the Ad Manager, click on Create Ad. And the first thing it’s going to ask for you to do is choose a Facebook destination or enter a URL. And ideally you should be choosing the Facebook destination of your particular page. And it will show your page at the top, and then the next step down it says, ‘What would you like to do?’ And it has three options, and it’s get more page likes, promote page posts, or see advanced options. And what I would recommend for you here is to click on the first one that says Get More Page Likes.
So right below Get More Page Likes, there is a little box that says Your Ad, it says Headline, it says Text, it says Landing View, and Image. So if we are talking about this men’s accessory company as an example, keeping that throughout, what we would want to do is put some sort of headline there that is juicy. That really resonates with who your target audience is. And since this men’s accessory line isn’t specifically towards gay men, but gay men are a part of that target market, what I would recommend doing is setting up multiple campaigns. So you would want to set up a campaign that focuses specifically on the gay men, but then you want to set up one that’s focused specifically on men. Maybe you want to break it down with men from 20 to 30, men 30 to 40, and men 40 to 50. And it does take more time because you’re really outlining different target markets, you want to have different language and different verbiage for both. What you would say to a man who’s 20 versus a man who’s 55 are likely different. So you want to play around with the text there and really just keep poking at it, keep looking at it, keep trying to figure out how to make it different. But not only to make it different but to make it successful. So then there’s a spot where you can upload an image, and in this case if this were my client, what I would do is recommend getting a picture of a male couple and of course I would love for it to be an authentic male couple, so somebody who’s actually bought your products. And make sure that the accessories that they’re wearing are very prominent in that photo. And mind you, the image that’s available is only 100 pixels by 72, so it’s a really tiny thumbnail but what you would want to do is have that thumbnail match the header of your Facebook page. And if you don’t want your Facebook page to be exclusively to gay men, then what you would want to do is make sure that your Facebook header is really inclusive. So have a couple that’s a gay male couple, have a straight couple; as long as your products which are the accessories are really what are being focused on, it will show how inclusive your company is and that alone will help drive traffic.
So this is really just talking about getting your ad squared away. But then the next thing you want to focus on is choosing who your audience is, and this is the number one reason why I love Facebook advertising. Because you can be so incredibly specific, or so broad, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. So for example, and I’m looking at the Facebook dashboard right now, and you can choose a country, a state, a city, or a zip code. And I have a client now that I’m working with that I have about eight different campaigns set up that are around specific zip codes because I want to know in real good detail how people are finding the campaign, and how or who are clicking. So even though zip codes- it may seem like the same verbiage should be spoken to all of them, yeah and at the end of the day in this case, it’s the same content and the same language to all of those eight ads. But they’re hitting up different zip codes so I’m able to see who from what town has more interest in this particular product. And in some businesses that may or may not matter, in other businesses it may matter a lot. So if we’re talking about a business that’s really local, so perhaps it’s an eye doctor and their practice only has four towns for the most part that people are coming from. What we would want to do is start with those four towns and see who we can engage, and who we can get interested in the product or in the service in this case.
But the next thing it lets you do is it lets you pick ages, and you can go from age 13 all the way up to I believe there’s actual no max, but it lets you go up to 64. So you have an opportunity here to identify your exact target range. So again, if the messaging is different for somebody who’s 20 to 30 versus 45 to 55, this is where you’d want to make that happen. So essentially what Facebook will do based on the parameters that you give it, it will only show your ad to people who have identified that information in their profile data. So think of yourself. Do you have your birthday written down in Facebook? Do you have your year? So if you don’t have your year in here, then even if you are 45 you’re not going to show up- that ad’s not going to show up on your page because you haven’t identified your exact age. So what you could do is do it so it’s 20 to 30, or maybe it’s 20 and then no max. So then that way anybody will show up in that search. So like I said there’s a lot of ways that you can be really specific and target, and I am just a stickler for knowing where information is coming from. So that’s why I go out of my way to make a lot of smaller campaigns so I can see where the best bang for buck is. Because at the end of the day, you do have a limited marketing budget, so you may as well be knowing exactly where that money is going.
Why the “Interest area” is so important on Facebook..
And I think the most important thing of Facebook, and this will conclude this section, is the interest area. So it gives you an opportunity to type in very precise interests, or really broad categories. So in this case, I can go in and I can type in ‘Saks Fifth Ave’ or ‘Lord and Taylor’ or ‘Brooks Brothers.’ And essentially what this will do is it will display your ad on anyone’s page who has identified that they like the Saks Fifth Ave page, or the like the Lord and Taylor page, or they like the Brooks Brothers page. So here’s your opportunity to get in front of your competition, and this is why knowing who your competition is so important. Because now Facebook allows you to directly market to your competition, which is fabulous when you think about it. So knowing who your target market is, knowing where people are hearing about you from, all this starts to come together, especially in online marketing because you do have so much control. So that’s why I like using precise interests, because essentially if you’re trying to market to the LGBT community, what you could do is only target people who like Brooks Brothers, and the Human Rights Campaign. And it may only bring up 100 people, it may bring up 2,000 people, it may bring up two million people; you absolutely have no idea but the beauty of Facebook is that it shows you who your audience is right on the top right hand side. So right now I have it selected as men who are between the ages of 20 and 55, who live in the United States, who like either the Saks page, Lord and Taylor, or Brooks Brothers, and who are also part of the broad category- so there’s a second section down that you can choose broad categories. And in this case I’ve picked retail and shopping, and then luxury goods, and fashion. So essentially what happens here is that it says the potential audience for my criteria is 631,060. So now you know exactly how many people are on Facebook that you could target that fall into this criteria. And what you can do is essentially keep creating different ads and make them broad, make them small, make them so they’re so incredibly narrow that there’s only 200 people who are interested in it. As long as your messaging and your calls to action are really clear, you’ll be able to get people to click on your Facebook ad, get them over to your Facebook page, and then engage with them. Then you can find out how you can serve them better, you can find out what they’re looking for. So maybe your men’s accessory line doesn’t carry hats, and everybody is saying that they’re really looking for some unique hats. Now you know that information, and if possible you can add hats to your line of accessories that you’re offering.
So Facebook allows you so many different unique ways to engage with your audience and find your target audience, and really improve the bottom line of your business. And as we’ve been talking throughout, I have mentioned calls to action a handful of times and calls to action are really exactly what they sound like, which is a call that’s making you take action. So what I always recommend people to do is as you’re online shopping, or you’re on Facebook, or you’re doing whatever you’re doing. Just stop and think of yourself as a consumer for a moment, and pay attention to what you’re clicking on. Are you clicking on things that are funny, or are you clicking on things that are serious? Are you clicking on things that have the read more here at the end of it? Really just start to pay attention to how you’re operating, and the more you start paying attention to that, the more you’ll start to understand the psychology behind how and why people are clicking on the things that they’re clicking on. So what you’d want to do in your ad campaign is just start tailoring your message a little bit. Make some of them funny, make some of them serious, make some of them educational, provide tips or tricks, or something to get people engaged, talk about yourself, find what is working for you and then really just run with it. And that’s, like I said, why online marketing to me is so exciting, because you have so much control, you have so much control over the message and you have control over what you’re asking people to do. So in the case of Facebook marketing, what we’re trying to get them to do is ‘Like’ your page. But we need to make it juicy enough that it’s worth their time, or what they feel is worth their time to ‘Like’ your page. But if we’re talking about calls to action outside of online marketing, so for example in email, and you’re sending an email that is talking about this great program you have, why not find a way to have a really clear call to action of what you want people to do? Because in a marketing perspective, what you need to always be thinking about is what is that next step, or action that you want somebody to take? You may know what it is, I may know what it is, but the average consumer doesn’t know what you want them to do next.
My call of action to you…
So if you head over to my blog and read any of my articles over the last- I would say two months or so, at the end of every blog I have a banner that says, ‘Want more information? Check out my webinar.’ And for me, that’s my call to action to you. I want you to read the information that you saw on my website and say, “Oh wow, that’s really good information but I kind of need a little bit more. What’s my next step?” If I don’t tell you what your next step is, you’re not going to know that I have a webinar that’s an option. You’re not going to know that that’s the next logical step. So it could be for that, it could be signing up for your mailing list, it could be signing up for an online workshop, it could be signing up or registering to attend an event. So really you just need to identify- you as the marketer are in control of what you want people to do next, but you have to make it easy for them, and you have to show them the path and not expect that through osmosis they’re going to know what that path is.
So that essentially is Facebook advertising, online advertising, and calls to action wrapped up in a really high level overview. And as I said at the top of this, if you are interested in me going into more detail, or perhaps doing an actual step-by-step walk through, in making something like this happen, just send me an email, reach out to me on my website, and just let me know how I can help you because at the end of the day, the reason and the purpose that I record this podcast for you every other week is so I can help educate you around business, around marketing, and even more specifically around how you can market to the LGBT community.
Wrapping up…
So I do have a couple of extra words that I would like to share now that we’re closing out the section, but I do want to have you listen to my sponsors from the Human Performance Academy, which has so many great resources and is an awesome website and they have so many free things on their site that I find value in, that of course I want to make sure that you know is available to you as well. So have a listen to their commercial and I will be right back.
Alright, thank you Michael from the Human Performance Academy for those great words. As I mentioned, definitely head over to their website which is www.MentalCompass.com and check out all the great things that they have to offer.
Upcoming webinars!
And now what I want to do is just share with you the date of my next webinar, and then we’ll say goodbye. So the next webinar I have available is on Tuesday, April 30th from 1:00 to 2:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. And this webinar will teach you about how to do business with and market yourself to the LGBT community. The best part that I’ve been finding about doing these webinars so far is the live Q & A at the end of the webinar, and it’s really just your chance to ask me specific questions that you may have. So if you are interested in hearing more about this, you can head over to my website at www.JennTGrace.com/webinars.
So as I mentioned before, you can check out all of the notes and information from this episode on my website which is at www.JennTGrace.com/009. As always, thank you so much for listening to this episode, if you’ve enjoyed what you heard, I encourage you to leave me a review on iTunes and if you’re looking to reach out to me, by any means please head over to my website at www.JennTGrace.com and I will talk to you real soon, thanks!
