Webinar: Small Business Facebook Advertising

Hello and welcome to today’s joint webinar with Hibu and MarketingBitz. This is Joe from the MarketingBitz team and today’s discussion will explore Facebook advertising for small businesses — latest updates and tips for success.

Dana Cutler and Nick Hopkins from Hibu will be presenting today’s material and before we get started, just a few housekeeping items in case you’re unfamiliar. MarketingBitz is a resource for small businesses to learn everything they need to know about important digital marketing issues. MarketingBitz was created by the Local Search Association which is a not-for-profit trade association representing the local marketing space. LSA has roughly 300 members around the world and Hibu is one of these members.

On MarketingBitz, we provide a number of resources like articles, webinars like this event, reports and a lot more, and we cover topics ranging everything from search engine optimization and social media marketing to email marketing and digital marketing strategy. You can visit marketingbitz.com to learn more. I also wanted to flag a report that we put together alongside Hibu last year that offers a comprehensive view of Facebook marketing tactics for small businesses. This is partly what inspired our decision to conduct today’s webinar and you can access the report at marketingbitz.com/reports.

So with that let’s go ahead and get started.

Thanks Joe. I appreciate you having Nick and I both on this call. Thank you everybody for joining today.

My name is Dana Cutler. I am the AVP of our digital Go To Market department here at Hibu, and we also have Nick Hopkins, who is the AVP of our Digital Product Management with Hibu as well, so he’s going to go through a little bit of this information as well.

A little bit about Hibu in case anyone on the call has not heard of us — we are a digital marketing company. We offer solutions for hundreds of thousands of local businesses. We focus on the small- to medium-sized businesses across the U.S. Our solutions that we provide for for businesses like yours are listings management online as well as reviews, websites, social media, search engine marketing, online display and search engine optimization. We partner with some of the largest names out there online including Facebook — we became a Facebook Marketing Partner back in September of 2016 which allowed us to be one of the first that focused on SMBs, so we’re pretty excited to talk to you a little bit more about Facebook and some of the dealings that we have with them.

Some of the topics that we are going to cover today are the Facebook privacy things you’ve probably seen a quite a bit in the news in the last few months about Facebook’s privacy as well as some of their updates to their News Feeds and their overall platform. So we’re going to talk about some of those changes and how they impact SMBs. We’re also going to give you some tips on how to do posts… what type of Facebook Page you should have… and some of the information you should include on that, and then also some really effective advertising — how your ads should look on Facebook — and then we’ll just go through some additional resources and things that you can reference after this call. So with that, Joe, I’m going to introduce Nick to talk through some of the Facebook privacy changes.

There’s really kind of three areas that have have come out as a result of all of this that, you know, fit where Facebook has made changes in their systems. The first one is around how they manage user privacy. So they’ve been they’ve been very proactive about you know making changes to their systems to make it easier for consumers to go in and understand and see their privacy settings. They’ve consolidated all those privacy settings into one place and then they’ve been proactively pushing their consumers to go into those settings and manage them appropriately so that consumers aren’t surprised about the privacy settings that they have any access that third parties like advertisers might have to that information.

The second area really is they’ve started limiting the amount of data that can be shared back and forth with third parties so bringing in third-party data from other data management companies and associating that with Facebook user information. While that doesn’t necessarily technically step over the lines of privacy, it doesn’t expose consumer data to consumers it does make some consumers a little, you know, a little queasy maybe about about the access that Facebook has to their data, so they’ve been starting to to squelch

that a bit and we’ll talk a little bit later about what impact that has on on your ability to target on Facebook.

And then finally, they’ve tightened controls — and this is something they’ve been doing over the last few years — you probably heard about the Cambridge Analytica scandal where you know we’re access to your third-party app was given to some consumer information… it really been tightening down the controls on how apps can access access and use consumer data.

So the biggest impact that all of this has is really around that the targeting capabilities within Facebook. So as they started to eliminate the matching of third-party data with with consumer data on Facebook, they eliminated what are called partner categories within Facebook, and this is where Facebook was taking third-party data from companies like Axiom and matching that against Facebook data to to attach things like “income” and “home ownership” and other kinds of demographic and psychographic profile information against Facebook users, and allowing advertisers to use that data at the target.

Facebook has eliminated that as of about a month ago, and so now what’s what’s left in there is the ability for you to target around what’s called first party data within Facebook — that is, information that Facebook already knows about those users that you… those users have provided themselves within the Facebook experience. Now this isn’t actually a net loss to SMBs. What has happened in the past frequently is DIY users who are going in and setting up their campaigns on Facebook have often over targeted — that is, they’ve often seen all these things Facebook allowed you to do to target their ads and they’ve selected all of them that they thought were appropriate, and they end up over selecting… over targeting… which reduces the reach of their campaigns and ended up increasing the cost. We’ll talk a little bit more about new ad targeting and how this applies to making your ad campaign most effective on a later slide.

Here one important thing is, you know, this probably hasn’t all played its way out, so there’s still privacy issues going on still scrutiny around Facebook legal changes and legislative changes that are happening in Europe and the U.S., so expect more of these kinds of changes to come down the pike… but so far, the impact of all this has really been limited to the the ability of the target around some of those detailed parameters. So the important thing to remember is that despite all this noise, despite all the press that you know around privacy, despite all the changes that Facebook has made, Facebook is still one of the best platforms out there for small businesses to connect and to connect with consumers if you combine the penetration that Facebook and Instagram together have into the consumer audience in the U.S., which is enormous, with the amount of time that those consumers spend on Facebook and Instagram… it is still the largest pool of consumer eyeballs out there for small businesses to reach local consumers and engage with

those local consumers and turn them into customers.

So now I’m going to turn over this back over to Dana and she’s going to talk a bit about the changes that have happened in the Facebook News Feed and the implications that has on your posting strategy.

Thanks Nick. So yeah, back in January, some of you may have seen some things about Facebook changing their News Feed, and while that is going to change the end user and what they’re seeing in the News Feed, we want to talk primarily about how this is going to affect small businesses. Mark Zuckerberg actually went on record and said one of our big focuses focus areas of 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent, so what it’s important for small businesses to remember when they’re doing any kind of posting that really kind of remembering the reason Facebook was established in the first place — it was built to bring people closer together and build relationships. So if you kind of think that in mind, the these changes really aren’t that that hard to overcome.

So the priority that Facebook is now giving to posts is anything that is sparking “meaningful social interaction,” so if you think about it, most people are using this on a mobile device or you’re scrolling through — and what Facebook wants to do is make sure that things are kind of that “thumb stopping” as opposed to you look anywhere ever you know you go to a restaurant you go to a coffee shop you know the store walking along the sidewalk everyone is looking down they’re looking at their phones and oftentimes you see people just kind of meaninglessly scrolling through a News Feed, and what Facebook is working on is making sure that consumers are, you know, the time spent on Facebook is done more actively — so reducing the time they’re spending passively scrolling where their thumb just keeps going.

So they’ve set up their algorithms to actually rank posts based on several different factors. Number one, they really want to see that one-to-one engagement versus just reacting, just liking and so forth, so that’s how they’re tapping. They’re also really focused on building strong Facebook presence so businesses that are utilizing Messenger not only to have conversations back and forth with some of their customers may be setting appointments through Facebook. They’re also gathering reviews — a lot of consumers, when they are seeing an ad or a post for somebody, they go to a Facebook Page, they’re looking for reviews from people that they know and trust and then looking at the comments. A lot of conversation, they’re going into comments and asking for more information. That is something that’s really going to boost in the ranking. And lastly, they are still looking at likes and shares, probably just not quite as heavily.

This all starts really with making sure you have that good presence… that good foundation… and having a strong Facebook Page. It is really important. Most of you on this call today probably understand having a website and making sure that it has all the information that is going to attract consumers to you. It’s oftentimes the deciding factor between you and maybe one of your competitors, and really the Facebook Page is very similar to that. More and more people are going on there for information, making sure it’s built out in a robust manner and has complete information out there. You can see as an example here, making sure there’s a focus area for services offers… posts their reviews… all of these different items make that complete Page and you really want to match that information to your website so you have a cohesive approach if somebody sees this and then goes to your website, and later they see another post in their feed or an ad, it reminds them because of that brand marketing.

So let’s talk a little bit about more about posts and how these News Feed changes… what they mean to you as a small business. Low- to medium-sized business types of posts really do matter. I put a couple examples on here from a local business that I’m familiar with — they’re very active, they’re constantly posting things that might get people to stop. It’s not just industry specific, it’s very focused on their actual business — things they’re doing, they’re talking about kids, things that are going to attract people and really having that “friends and family first” mentality.

You know, the businesses and publishers, they’re going to come second, so if they put a kind of friendly spin on it and get people to stop and start looking a little bit more… clicking on their posts… reading more about the business… that’s what Facebook is actually looking for, and a couple of their tips… it’s really when you or someone in your company is doing posts on behalf of the business, you want to make sure that you are actually posting quality versus quantity. A lot of people think “Oh, I’m going to post every few hours each day” and that’s really not what Facebook is looking for. They’re looking for quality posts. They want to personalize. They want actionable things that are getting people to click on it, to comment. Again, remember those meaningful social interactions.

And something very relatable — the same company actually did a post recently… I am in Indianapolis and they actually did a post and they showed a race car driver the week of the Indy 500. It was very relatable, it was local, it was timely, and it was something that was kind of entertaining. They had a lot of interactions on that particular post so that’s ideal.

You also want to make sure that you’re doing offers. Anything again that’s going to promote engagement,  and always make sure as a business if someone comments on one of your posts, you respond to them and in a quick manner. You can actually see on here, this is a landscaper who actually is posting near Christmas and they’re talking about sales that they have on some of their different items within their store, and you can see on here that somebody actually said “Sure, what time?” because they’re focusing on it on a sale that day. And the company was very good to tell them we’re open 9:00 to 4:30 Monday through Friday, so again getting back to people that those meaningful social interactions and going to help with your posting strategy. So anything again that start conversations within the post, within Messenger, it gets people to review with them within your Facebook Page and set appointments, they love seeing that.

The thing is that is only one component, actually two components… we talked about the Facebook Page and then we talked about posting but it’s important to know if what you’re doing that you have to keep your expectations in reality posting isn’t enough if you’re wanting to actually get new customers in the door and grow your business. Organic posts… the visibility on average is less than 1%, so keeping that in mind that posting alone isn’t going to do it now. Forcing posts, a lot of people have asked that it is easy… it’s cost effective, but it is optimized to get liked and we talked about earlier, this is one of the features of that algorithm of ranking, but it’s really not grabbing new business… excuse me, it’s not designed to reach the new customers and drive that awareness.

Ads are where you’re going to do all of that. You’re going to bring in new customers Facebook gives preference to optimal ad types so you want to make sure when you are running an ad campaign and Nick talked about this a little bit more that you’re focused on either reach, traffic or leads, bringing all those three things in there making sure that your ads are built with those objectives. Also putting a Facebook pixel on your website so that you’re able to then track when somebody clicks on your website and you’re able to optimize your ad well and you know what increased demand which we we see more and more. There’s more competition to get into somebody’s News Feed, so that is increased demand, so we know the ad costs are likely to rise, but the optimal ads… things that are tested and are working well… those are going to be the most cost effective.

And with that, I’ll turn it over to Nick so he can go through some of those tips for your ad campaign.

Great, thanks very much, Dana.

So as Dana said, if you want to grow your business on Facebook, it’s important to go beyond just posting and putting organic content out there, and really be able to run effective ad campaigns. And there’s three elements that make and make a campaign effective on Facebook.

The first one is really choosing the right objective and so Dana talked a little bit about objectives. “Objective” in Facebook terminology just means the outcome that you’re trying to get from the ad. Facebook as a system supports probably a dozen or so different objectives — it’s growing all the time — they include things like app installs and video views and the like, but for most small businesses, they’re usually focused on three things. One is reach, and reach just means getting your ad and your message out in front of as many users on Facebook as possible. Traffic, which is really about bringing those users back in to your website in order to do more consideration around your business, learn more about your business, more of a direct response kind of mode than a brand-building mode. And then leads, which is really capturing information about consumers who want to do business with you and being able to remarket to those users.

And we’re also seeing increasing interest around messaging. Messaging is another objective that’s available within Facebook and as Dana mentioned before, messaging is a key signal about one-to-one communication between consumers and businesses that really lets Facebook see the value of your business on Facebook. The second area is really around ad targeting. I mentioned this a little bit before with the deprecation or the removal of some of the third-party data that’s being being used or had been being used within Facebook before, this is really about keeping your audience broad and not over specifying but still targeting people who are relevant to your business. So if you want to reach, say, millennial females, that’s still appropriate to go in and select females as your target audience and select an age range perhaps for your target audience… but what you don’t want to do is you don’t want to go get carried away with that and start selecting all sorts of different parameters because you think that you know people who drive you know red Ford Mustangs… you don’t want to go down to that level of detail. What you really want to do is let Facebook’s algorithms do the work for you and figure out the right users to show your ad to based on the objective that you’ve chosen in the first step here.

The other thing that’s really important is that is to take advantage of Facebook’s pixels. So if you have the ability to do this, you want to go in and generate a Facebook pixel and put it on your website, and what that opens up is the ability to retarget people. And that means if somebody comes to your website and maybe doesn’t convert, doesn’t call your business, doesn’t do business with you at that point, you can remarket them — so you can show your ad to them when they’re on Facebook later on in the day or later on in the week.

The other thing it opens up is the ability to build what are called look-alike audiences — and this is where Facebook looks at all the people who have visited your website based on that pixel and builds a profile of those visitors and then goes and finds other people within the Facebook network, so people who are similar to other people who have done business with you or visited your website before… Now both of those things come with some constraints because again because of privacy and because of the need to make the data accurate, you have to have a certain number of users within that pixel now that pixel audience in order to do the retargeting and the look-alike audiences, but it can be an incredibly powerful thing once you reach that scale.

Then the third big thing is really to focus on ad quality. It’s really important to remember that a lot of users are going to be coming in and seeing your ads on mobile devices, so you want to choose images that are mobile-friendly… but there’s some other important things as well.

So one of those is really image quality, and image quality in this context doesn’t just mean the visual quality of the photo that you’re using within your ad, but it means making that photo match the expectations of people who are on Facebook. Facebook is an incredibly personal medium, people are on there talking to their friends and family and so forth, and personalizing your business on Facebook is a big part of what makes it successful. So you can see this example here on the screen where on the left hand side, very high-quality image but not very personalized compared to the one on the right hand side that shows the staff of this eye care company… and when we switched from the image on the left to the image on the right, you see a 61% increase and the people end up clicking on that because it resonates much better with the user on Facebook.

The other thing that’s important to realize is that it’s easy to look at those images on the previous slide and see the difference between them, but consumer response is really unpredictable. You know, what you think is the best image for your ad may not actually be what works best with consumers, so it’s really important to test. You want to test different images, you want to test different copy if you have different aspects of your different selling propositions around your business… you may want to build multiple versions of your ad copy to reflect those, maybe try different calls to action. Facebook supports a variety of different calls to actions like call or a message or learn more and you may want to try those because they’ll generate different response from consumers as well.

And you can also try different ad formats. Again, static images, video slideshow, etc… Facebook supports the whole range of different ad formats and different placements as well. You can select whether you want to open up Instagram, Messenger and Marketplace for your ad campaign to run as well as just in the normal and a core News Feed. And then it’s important to really keep your ads fresh, so you want to keep a supply of good images that are working well, rotate those through… seasonality for some businesses is important. You want to make sure your message makes sense in the context of the user who’s coming in and what they’re looking for from your business (next slide).

And here you can see an example of this. This is a campaign where we were doing A/B testing between two images. You look at the one on the left-hand side, you could argue that that’s a more stunning, more visually appealing, more artistic image… but when we actually ran this against the image on the right-hand side, that drastically outperformed the one on the left, and again that’s around the personalization of that. So you can see, as we bring the business owners in, you show them standing with their equipment, it’s a much more personalized image and there was almost a three-fold increase in the clicks that we got on this campaign over the same period of time just because of the difference in the images here.

Now I’m going to turn it back over to Dana now to talk about some of the additional resources you can get access to.

Thanks Nick, and again thank you for everybody for joining. You’re going to receive a webinar link in your email after this call and Facebook encourages sharing — so do we — so please feel free to share that if you would like this. You will also receive a Facebook Marketing Checklist that we’ve put together for you. If you have additional questions, we would love to help you. If you want to increase the traffic or just learn more about the programs that we offer to SMBs, please either give us a call at 855-900-4939. You can also go to hibu.com… very specific to this particular update from the information that Nick and I have shared today will be on there, so you can actually get more information or get a recap of the information that we’ve talked through today. And Joe, if you want to take it from here, I appreciate your time.

Okay great, yeah so, with that, let’s go ahead and wrap up. I want to thank Dana and Nick for conducting today’s webinar and thanks to all of you for listening in. If you have any follow-up questions, you can email us at info@marketingbitz.com. So thanks again everyone and have a great day.