There’s one thing away in my business that’s critical.
Take it away and I’m lost. The business stops growing. Eventually, it withers away and dies.
There are many important things in what I do. My funnels. My webinars. My offer. And all matter.
But if these are the engine of my success, then something must give fuel to this engine. And my own “gas station” or tanker filled with kerosene is my Facebook Ads Manager.
It’s my ability to reach millions of people, at any day or hour and to talk to them on their terms. It’s the tool that allows me to make sure that my message gets to people who enjoy it, who need it, who are actively looking for solutions and who can afford me.
My FB Ads Manager is basically what feeds my business and gives it life. Everything else from the offers I develop to the conversion steps a lead goes through to the sale and customer support starts with a single click.
And that click comes from Facebook, from a campaign I’ve created.
This is a big deal.
And to understand why, let me explain what were your options for lead generation before Facebook and modern PPC.
Back in the day, which wasn’t that far back anyway, you had only a few options of bringing traffic. All of these were expensive and not quite a science.
Let me cycle through them fast.
First – banner ads.
You’d buy space on a website where you hope your leads would visit and pay per 1000 views. You had no control over who would see your ads and pay no matter your results.
There were a few websites that charged you per click but these were few and far in between as it wasn’t very profitable for them.
Second – SEO.
Search engine optimization is still important, and it works today. I’m still using Google to find things online. Sure, a lot of the traffic moved on platforms like Facebook or YouTube but we search for stuff.
And if you can get on the first page for your desirable keywords, then you’ll get a steady stream of traffic to your website. But back in the day, SEO was the wild west.
This is because Google was not great at fighting black hat SEO marketers. This means that the first page was filled with false websites or sites optimized for ranking with SEO content or content farms. Also, you could have bought links to PR 8+ websites and rank easily with this.
So if you were a fair marketer, you stand a small chance against marketers who were simply gaming the system. Fortunately, Google became good at fighting these things and now it’s almost impossible to pull the same stunts.
Third – content networks.
These were quite interesting.
To build one, you’d create 30 – 40 websites on a topic then write content for each one. Since ranking websites was far, far easier than today, you could get a lot of organic traffic for cheap.
Then you’d sell banner ads or guest posts on these websites. The downside with content networks from what I remember were that they’re unreliable. Since new websites were constantly taking over the first page of Google, one day such a website may have brought you a steady stream of traffic and next week, it’d stop working at all.
What else do we have?
We have guest blog posts. This is paying to post on other people’s websites.
We have SMS marketing. I don’t think this ever took off because people hate receiving advertising text messages.
We have Google Adwords.
This is still a viable option but compared to Facebook, there’s a big difference. They’re damn expensive. You do not understand how much Google Adwords can cost. We’re talking about $4 per click when you can get the same on Facebook for just $0.5. You enjoy Google’s network and from this point of view, they’re far better than Facebook but it’s so expensive I don’t know when it makes sense.
We have YouTube SEO.
This is creating YouTube videos that rank high to drive organic traffic. All good until Google changed the ranking system. Now the only real way to get traffic from YouTube is to create actual good content.
And the list could go on.
But almost every single one in this list suffers from one or several faults.
FIRST – It’s not targeted. You display your message but you don’t even know if this is your marketplace. While you can get general demographic data, it’s still a shot in the dark.
With most of these methods, it’s like saying “I’m going to Milan to sell my fashion products”. This is good because Milan is full of people interested BUT most of them are not. So you’d pay just as much to reach your prospects as you’d pay to reach people who are not interested.
SECOND – They’re difficult to re-target. The miracle of modern traffic generation is using re targeting. This means that if someone visits your website or shows interest for a product, then you can reach that person again and again.
This is a crude way of saying but you’re gaining visibility to people who qualified themselves.
THIRD – They’re not performance oriented. With Facebook you end up paying only for people who click on your link or take an action. You don’t pay just for visibility although you could set it up like this.
This means that there is a direct correlation between your traffic expenses and your income. It’s like having your own team of salespeople you pay only on commission.
You can not set up a campaign to pay only on a sale, that’d be absurd, but that you can pay only for results, only for people who reach your website is amazing.
Facebook PPC changed the online field. It is the first tool that makes it easy to target the right people, with the right message and to pay only for actions. It allows you some neat techniques (Facebook pixel!) and it is user friendly enough that anyone can set up a campaign.
The second best is Google PPC (AdWords) but I honestly don’t believe it is worth the price. The difference though is that with Facebook PPC you reach within this platform. On Adwords, you reach almost all the Internet, as everyone uses Google and many have AdSense installed on their website.
So if you’re not using Facebook PPC, do so now. It is, as of December 2018, the most effective way to reach your target market and to feed traffic to your funnels.
Are you using Facebook PPC?
What about all the other venues? Have you tried them?
Best regards,
Imran
