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The Utah DMC Blog

Driving Leads & Conversions with Facebook & Instagram - February 2018

 

SLCSEM Feb 2018 Update

 

How B2B and B2C Use Instagram to Win New Customers

Our first speaker of the evening was Sweta Patel. Sweta Patel is a startup marketing advisor and founder of Silicon Valley Startup Marketing. She has consulted more than 200 startups and high-growth companies. One of her specialties is Instagram marketing—growing a following and making sales through Instagram.

Sweta’s Top 5 Instagram Hacks

  • Hashtags - Instant DiscoveryPut 3 to 4 hashtags throughout your caption—not just piled in the first comment. Engagement is the biggest key to getting to the top posts of that hashtag. Use longtail hashtags that are more localized and specific.
  • Best Live Story PracticesUse hashtags in your live stories. Ask your audience what they would like to see. Base your live stories around contests and giveaways.
  • Post TimesResearch when your audience is most likely to be on Instagram. Try to post around 3 times per day.
  • How CTAs work in your favor - Without a clear call to action, your audience won’t know what step to take next. In your posts, ask them to visit a specific URL or to visit the link in your bio.
  • Increasing the reachWith Instagram’s algorithm, people will only see your posts if they search your name, turn on notifications for when you post, or engage with your content. Be sure to use hashtags, ask followers to engage with your posts, and ask them to turn on notifications for when you post.

Instagram Engagement

Build an engagement slack group to get you started. Direct message several other similar accounts and ask them if they wouldn’t mind joining a Slack group. The purpose of the group will be to let all of the participants know when you’ve posted, so that they can like and comment on the post right away. You will all help each other receive instant engagement.

Find the right influencers on Instagram to build up your following and increase engagement. Do some research and see what influencers you could create a partnership with in order to have them promote your brand.

sweta patel & susan wenograd.jpg

 

Our second speaker of the evening was Susan Wenograd.

Funnels on Fire & The Brave World of Bots

Susan Wenograd is a nationally recognized strategist and practitioner in the PPC space, including AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook Ads. She is a recurring speaker at SLCSEM and speaks at digital marketing conferences across the country.

In her presentation, Susan revealed the number one mistake advertisers make with Facebook ads—running conversion campaigns when they shouldn’t. Advertisers frequently optimize towards a high-value action, but conversion campaigns have the highest CPMs (cost per 1,000 impressions). Not to mention, Facebook recommends 50 conversions a week per ad set for a conversion campaign.

Advertisers also won’t reach as many people as they would like. The reality of the auction is that your targeted population is more than you’re actually reaching. Your audience definition scale may read 1,400,000 people but in reality, you’re reaching far less.

The Problem with Using Only a Conversion Campaign

  • They are expensive
  • They limit your audience
  • Folks need more than one ad experience to buy/convert.

The Solution: Create a Funnel

  1. Awareness - Lower stakes = lower cost. Use cheaper campaign types to cast a wide, cheap net and identify interested users. (e.g. video views, reach, website clicks, post engagement)
  2. Consideration - Target users who watched 10 seconds of a video, users who interreacted with posts, or submitted a lead.
  3. Conversion - Use progressive messaging and retarget users that visited your site.

Facebook Ads Pro Tips

1. Scaling Budget: In general, keep to scaling ad set budget 20% every other day.

2. Higher relevance score equals lower CPM and a higher reach.

3. If your audience is smaller than 50,000, go with a website click or reach campaign—not a conversion campaign.

What Is on the Horizon?

Chatbots—automated conversations via a flow of triggers, questions, answers, and options for the user— are the future. Chatbots bring fast, personalized messaging to a whole new level. Use them to retarget website visitors who abandoned cart or as a resource to help people with frequently asked questions. We will see chatbots used more in the future as a tool in social media marketing funnels.

Topics: social media social media optimization social media advertising paid social