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Transcript
How do you take the local social media content that you’re already creating and turn it into a machine that generates customers for you every day? I’m going to show you the simple strategy to get that content in front of the right people and make sure they sign up for your offer so that they turn into a customer.
Introduction
Hi, I’m Dave. If you’re new here and I help simplify complex marketing strategies, Now, if you look at how most local businesses approach social media, you’ll find some very common threads. Most businesses post regularly. Quite often they have someone on their team that is dedicated to posting, or the owner does it themselves.
They’re looking for interesting things to post, events to talk about, new offers that they have in store, and that’s all great stuff, but it’s not part of a system. Trying to grow, Social media especially Instagram and Facebook organically in your local market is tough. It’s a lot of work You’ve got to get a lot of content out there But content is not all you have to do you need to be following all the other creators out there in your local market follow All the potential customers comment on their stuff try and build followings and you never control the actual audience that follows you If you go look at your follower count and dig into it, you’re gonna find people in different cities different states different countries Those people are never going to buy from your local business, so what’s the point?
You’re always hoping that that next post goes viral and gets a whole lot of views and a lot of new subscribers and followers and people who will comment and come to your business, but you have no control of that either. If something does get a whole ton of views, They’re almost never in your local market.
So even if you do go viral, it’s not going to do anything for your business. It might make you feel good for a while, but your business isn’t going to grow, but I’m not here to preach doom and gloom. The good news for you watching this video is that almost all the other local businesses who are your competitors in your market are doing it the same way.
So just by watching this video all the way to the end and learning how to do this, you’re going to have a leg up on all of them.
The Mindset Shift
Okay, the first thing I’m going to talk about here is probably a bit of a mind shift for you, because it involves paying for traffic. This doesn’t mean you have to invest all of your revenue into a paid media strategy that does nothing but get you likes.
What I’m talking about here is a small, regular budget that has proven outcomes and generates you customers more efficiently the longer it runs. We’re not talking huge cash outlays, massive ad budgets, we’re not talking big agencies. You can do this yourself for a small budget. Now when I’m talking about paid ads, I’m referring to Instagram ads.
Taking the content you already have and using some budget to put it in front of your ideal customers. So all that work you put into your organic content is actually being shown to the people you want to see it. That’s worth paying for. And the three most important things you need to remember here are that you get to control the audience over time.
You get to learn what content is the right content for your audience and make more of it, making your time more efficient. And over time, you only have to put money behind the content that you already know is going to work. You already watched my video on the three types of content local businesses need to be creating right up there somewhere. This thing gets better over time, more efficient over time, and generates you more customers over time, which means you can invest more into it and get further and further ahead of your competition.
Think of it this way. If I offered you a billboard in Timbuk2 that was going to be seen by 500, 000 people every day, but none of them could ever buy from you, but it was free, or I offered you a room full of 100 people who all live locally to you, And all need the product or service that you offer. And I said, Hey, it’s $5 to reach them, which would you rather have?
You’d rather pay, right?
Using the Ad Platform in the Right Way
So hopefully I’ve helped you understand what the value in paying for Instagram ads is. Now, let me show you a simple Instagram ads hack that allows you to get in front of those people using small budgets and get them onto your own list where you can contact them over and over and over again, where they become customers and then repeat customers and then loyal customers.
Let’s show you an example of how this works. I’m in my Meta Business Manager here, and I’ve got up my Instagram posts, and I’m going to select this one right here. It’s a reel. We’ve been talking about those reels at the top of the funnel. You’re going to click this boost button. This is not the old fashioned boost.
This is the new way we boost things. We have more control now. What we get when we hit that boost button is the opportunity to select a goal and select our audience and put our content in front of the people we want to see it. A lot of people make a mistake here when they’re selecting the goal. I want you to be really simple here.
Get more profile visits. When your ad goes live, there’s going to be a button. That button is to send people to your Instagram profile. You’ll get more likes. You’ll get more engagement. You’ll get more followers. Followers. That’s fine. Because what we’re trying to do here is get people to comment and engage.
I don’t want your goal to be get comments. People will automatically do that. It’s going to be more natural. It’s going to be more authentic. All right, going down advantage plus creative, leave that on that. Let’s the algorithm do fun stuff with your creative to make it resonate with more people. You don’t need to touch that.
The machine is smarter than you. Your button label is going to be visit Instagram profile. Leave that the same too. See, this is really easy. Special ad category. I don’t have a special ad category because I’m not talking about politics. I’m not talking about real estate. I’m not talking about loans. Based on your page category, if you have to select a special ad category, please do it.
If you don’t, your ads won’t run. Now we get to the fun stuff, the audience. Do not leave this at automatic. This is your secret sauce. What we need to do here, if you haven’t created one before, is create a new audience. This is where we’re going to go find the people that you want for your business. Let’s give it a name first.
Local business audience. Is this an advantage plus audience? Yes, it is because we want to find the right people and the algorithm will find those people for you. We do not want to get too detailed here on our targeting. It’s as simple as selecting gender, age, and location. No more than that. Don’t get into this other stuff down here.
Detail targeting. The algorithm will charge you more for that. If your business is specifically targeted to a specific gender, select that here. In my case, it’s not, I’m going to select all age range. Who are you targeting for my ad? I’m going to skew a little bit older. I’m going to go 25 and I’m going to cut it off at maybe 55.
You select who your ideal client is and set the age range and the gender appropriately. Now we’re going to look at locations. This is where it gets really cool depending on what kind of city you’re in. I am in a smaller city, I’m targeting a smaller city here, so I just pick the city I’m in. If you’re in a bigger city, you can do some really cool stuff by dropping pins, adding locations, and building a map of exactly where you want to target people.
That’s it, no more detailed targeting. You save that audience. Once that audience is saved, select it. They’ll be sneaky and try and make you take that automatic audience again. Select the one you just created. I do recommend you always save it and not just use a new one every time. This way it’s much faster and easier for you to get more predictable results.
Okay, now you’ve got your audience. You select your schedule and duration. I’m going to start it today. I’m going to run it for seven days. It can be 30 days. It’s however long you want to run this experiment and set your daily budget. I’m not going to tell you to slide this all the way up to a hundred.
Let’s try 5 a day. What does that give us? Facebook’s going to tell us we’re going to reach about a thousand people every day, and we may get five to 22 clicks. This is never accurate, but it gives you an idea based on how much you’re spending. I’m fine with 5 a day for seven days. It’s a 35 experiment.
And of course I’m getting charged tax. So that’s going to cost me 40. Okay. Onto placements. We’re running this out on Instagram because it’s an Instagram ad. That’s it for placements. That’s all you have to think about. Okay. So how is this ad actually going to generate you new people into your own list?
Let’s go back to the content itself. This is the post we’re boosting. It’s a vertical video like we talked about before, but let’s look in the description here. I’m telling the user to comment blueprint if they want me to DM the next thing that I want them to look at. So if they comment, I’m going to automatically DM them the information they’re looking for.
And this is the power. And I’m going to show you how to do that next.
The Automation Secret Sauce
And this is where we do it. I’m over in my marketing automation software now, and I have got a trigger at the top here that is connected up to Instagram, to my account that is watching for a comment that says blueprint on that post, as soon as that happens, it’s going to respond to that comment.
With my own comment, it’s going to say, Hey, check your DMS. Thanks for showing interest. Please check your DMS. So right on the comment on Instagram, they’re going to get a response from the page. Then our bot springs into action and we get this interactive choice within the DM that we send them. We’re going to ask them what they want to do next.
Do they want to watch the full video we talked about in the short video? Well, then they can hit that button and we’re going to send them a link to that full video. Or do they want to get that blueprint that they commented for? If they click the, get the blueprint button. We’re going to send them another message, and that message is going to be the actual file that they asked for.
In this particular case, I’m just sending them the file directly on Instagram because I’m trying to get engagement. I’m trying to see how many people I can get this blueprint into the hands of. If this particular ad was more focused on getting people into my marketing automation software, getting their email address and phone number, I would change this.
Instead of sending them directly this URL, I would send them to a landing page on the site that had a form where they put their email address or their phone number into that form. They get added into my CRM, they automatically get emailed or messaged, the blueprint, and now we have them onto our nurture sequences.
Interested in Doing This?
Now that you see how this system works, can you see how you are able to spend less time every month on your social content, and let the system generate you customers on autopilot? If you have any questions about this, or anything else to do with your digital marketing presence, join our “Ask Us Anything” waitlist to get your invite to the next FREE session:
