Why We’re All Using Facebook Wrong
Ad costs are rising. Here’s how to cut em in half while making people love your brand and actually enjoy buying from you…
I was watching this show a while back.
Black Mirror.
I think it was the second episode.
The one where everyone lives in a box, through a screen.
This one:
I guess it’s commentary on how we live our lives. Addicted to our screens. Mindlessly going about our day.
A funny thing keeps happening.
As the main character (his name escapes me) goes about his daily activities, he continues to get interrupted by ads. He then has to spend some of his points to skip the ad and keep doing what he’s doing.
(I realize this is kind of a shitty recap of the episode — it was a long time ago and I only watched the first half of it, so bear with me.)
The thing is… this kind of reminded me of how most marketers and business owners approach Facebook advertising.
A “prospect” is scrolling mindlessly through their newsfeed, looking at stuff their friends posted, and all of a sudden… WHAM!
An advertisement.
Most of the time, our eyes don’t even stop to read… unless it’s an ad from someone we already know, like and trust.
Unless it’s coming from someone we’ve accepted into our threshold of limited attention… we’ll most likely glaze right over. And we’re skipping it because we don’t really care about what you’re trying to sell us.
So… that’s always the tricky part:
How do you get people to know, like and trust you? How to you begin forming that bond between the customer and your brand?
There are a lot of ways to do that. This article could be miles long.
But there’s one overarching rule to follow that will facilitate this bond, make more people engage with your ads, and could even lower your costs.
Create Ads That Are “Facebook Native”
Why do we go on Facebook in the first place?
Is it too look at ads?
No.
Not it is not.
You go on Facebook because the TV show you were watching lost your interest… and now you need a fresh supply of dopamine.
You weren’t sure if someone messaged your liked your photo since you checked it 180 seconds ago… so you must check again.
You are waiting in line at the DMV and have 2 hours to kill, so you figure you’ll just catch up on everyone you’ve ever known’s lives and current political gripes.
So, we dive into the newsfeed, desperate to be entertained.
And we are met with ads.
Sometimes though, we are pleasantly surprised.
Because sometimes, we encounter ads that are native to what we expect to see.
They aren’t jarring and intrusive — sometimes they blend in with our newsfeed and satisfy our desires.
They are “Facebook Native.” And they get more engagement and clicks than any other kind of ads.
Facebook is where thinking goes to die
My business partner first told me that. And I think he’s absolutely right.
No one goes on Facebook to become enlightened or even to learn.
We go there to be entertained.
We go there to look at stupid shit that makes us laugh.
Or stuff that makes us hungry. (Tasty has about 100 million followers.)
Or stuff that gets our blood going.
Or memes that confirm our worldview.
It’s a very lizard brained… very primal form of entertainment.
We want to watch shit and look at stuff that engages the simpler part of our brains.
We want to be entertained. We don’t necessarily want to be sold to.
Obviously there are some contexts where selling is welcome — IF we already have abond established.
But most of the time, we want to be entertained.
There’s A Spectrum
On one end, there’s a hard sell.
And on the other end, there’s pure entertainment.
Toward the beginning of the relationship, you must grab people by blending in with the context their used to. By entertaining.
That’s how you get noticed now.
You can’t always sell right out the gate.
Sometimes attention comes first. I’ll admit, not always… but a good enough amount of the time.
So think to yourself… is your advertising meeting people where they are at in terms of attention and interest?
Or are you putting out ads that are going to get scrolled right on by?
One Way To Get Noticed
One way we’re slashing ad costs is by using something we call The Traffic Pinball that uses a quiz as an entry point into our funnels. It works incredibly well for e-commerce businesses.
People want to be entertained. They want to learn more about themselves. They want to do something to eradicate their boredom.
And this system we’re using does just that.
We’re not selling anything. Not yet.
Attention first.
Then, the bond.
Then, the pitch.
It’s working really well.
A funnel we’re testing out using this approach is getting leads for $0.81. It’s early. We just started running this test. But when I was sending people straight to a lead magnet, I was getting leads for between $5-$9.
We’re finding that people click our ad, become a messenger subscriber, then a large percentage enter their emails to get their quiz results. So for less than the cost of a regular email sub — we get a messenger sub and an email sub… and still have a chance to send people directly to an offer afterwards. And it actually converts a small percentage of people the very same day, on that first contact. (This is obviously a very basic description of how this works, but it’s really not that complicated.)
There’s obviously a lot of factors here with any kind of Facebook Ad Campaign, but the point is…
- You gotta always test new approaches
- You gotta find ways to bond with people before asking their money
- You gotta create ads that are native to what people WANT to see and engage with
- And you gotta make your stuff entertaining.
Plain and simple.
If you’d like help doing this, just reach out to me and I’ll show you how you can start getting more leads that convert for your ecom business without having to increase your ad spend.
Do me a favor… hold down the “clap” button until it reaches 50. And if you liked this article, please share it with any e-commerce business owner who wants cheaper leads.
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