The fundamental principle, and the rationale for boosting, is that sales (for this post we will assume that sales is our targeted action) can be thought of as, in large part, a statistical exercise. A certain percentage of people we reach (through FB, email, face-to-face) will take buy something. That’s our conversion rate.
We have 2 ways to increase our sales – reach more people, increase our conversion rate. My goal is usually to work on both – noting that the conversion rate will not be the same through all channels. Facebook often has a low conversion rate but it can make up for that with reach. Ideally you should have tracking in place to capture the conversion rate of your different channels or you are operating blind and possibly wasting money.
FB gives businesses an inexpensive and accessible way to build and maintain a large reach. However, it is important to chase quality, not only quantity. Likes are important because they tell FB to show our content in the feeds of more of our fan base. The most valuable engagement is comments and shares. If we allow our engagement to fall (by posting things our audience doesn’t engage with or by not posting) then we will have a large fan base (page likes) that isn’t seeing anything we post. By paying initially we will in some ways trick FB into giving our unpaid posts more reach. FB sees and posts and says “their audience likes their content” and it accords us more visibility.
A useful strategy for Facebook in the start-up phase is to build what I have heard called a “Passion Page”. Build a page that gets a loyal, engaged, following of people who are passionate about your cause, issue or product type before you begin selling. There is a very good case study that I use as a model for this and I’ve included the link below.
Don’t get frustrated. Working to a plan and don’t jump around and lose focus.
Story teller, story teller… spin me a yarn. Is a product or brand story just “spin”?
Your business story is not just marketing or sales “spin”. It’s vitally important. To be authentic and credible your story must resonate with your target customers. It must be relevant. For this reason, it is very difficult (but obviously not impossible), to make up something simply because you think people will ”buy” it.
When thinking about working out what your story is – and by that I don’t mean fabricating a marketing lie, there are many things that you must understand. Most businesses know that first and foremost it is important to know what is unique about their business and/or product; why people will want to buy it. What fewer businesses factor in is what competitors are doing and saying, and what is important to existing and future customers. It’s at this point that it’s not uncommon for me to hear businesses say that no-one else offers a particular product or does what they do – so they don’t have any competitors. That’s rarely true. If there is a need – then people are usually filling that need in some way. If you want to be the successful solution for that product need then you’ve got to understand the attraction and weaknesses of customer’s existing solution. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer!
Without doing that you risk telling a story that no-one cares about with product positioning that isn’t relevant.