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Facebook Marketing for Startups

Ankur Sharda
Ankur Sharda

David Lörincz is a leading expert on Facebook marketing from the Czech Republic. Here’s his guide on how to use Facebook to help market your startup.

You’ve probably heard of Facebook. As a startupper you probably also knew Facebook marketing is something you should know about. However if you’re like me, you know all about Google strategies and next to nothing about Facebook strategies. I once used Google ads to build up a tutoring business, and the ads worked perfectly. Since then I’ve heard of some people trying Facebook and not getting great results so I never bothered to look more deeply.

I was recently spent a month on Koh Lanta hanging out at Kohub (kohub.org) while working on my local shopping search engine tuggle.com.au. Along with other great people I met David Lörincz, who is a leading expert on Facebook marketing in the Czech Republic. Not only does he have a detailed knowledge about how to use this often misunderstood platform, but he’s also a great guy to hang out with. David has a background in the cut-throat world of ecommerce, so he’s been right at the coalface when it comes to figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

Why use Facebook advertising

Marketing is a big word, it covers more than just advertising. It looks at how to transform people who don’t know you into “your visitors, then to customers and potentially into your ambassadors. Along with advertising it’s also about customer service and the creating the right content to engage with your audience”.

“Facebook has tools that let you handle your marketing for free. However if you’re starting from scratch it often makes sense to use the paid advertising options to accelerate this process and grow your business faster”.

Build a relationship before you try to sell

The most important thing I got from David was that Facebook ads need a different thought process compared to Google advertising. Google ads are displayed to people who are actively searching for something, if you have what they’re looking for, you can start trying to sell them straight away. Facebookers are different. They’re usually not thinking of making an immediate purchase. Instead they’re usually entertaining themselves by by talking to friends.

So rather than trying to make a sale or offer a deal, Facebook advertising is all about starting a conversation and leading that conversation into a longer term relationship. Building a relationship is about helping your potential customer solve their problem. Everything from your ad content to your call to action should be thinking of their problem, and trying to find a way to solve it.

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David’s key advice is, “don’t talk about features, talk about your product’s benefits and how they relate to the customer’s problem, such as increasing conversions”.

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Getting Audience Targeting Right

One of the strengths of the Facebook platform is the geographic and demographic granularity that you can get. Being able to target ads very specifically coupled with careful testing is the key to a profitable campaign. The big mistake people usually make is targeting very generic profiles, e.g. people between the ages of 20-30 in New York City. That usually doesn’t go very far.

David says:

Relevancy between audience and ad creative is the is the key. Let’s look at an example. Do you want to sell food for dogs in Australia? You can target the audience who like dogs in Australia.

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And you get 3,500,000 people? Cool? No. That’s what beginners do. It won’t be that successful.

We need to be more specific, so let’s target people who like labradors. Chances are most of them own one, rather than just being enthusiasts.image4

And then we design spectacular creative that matches what we know of our audience.

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Now they will click like a crazy. It’s really relevant for them. You can do the same for different breeds pitbull, staffordshire bull terrier and others. Test, review results and make improvements.

It seems when it comes to targeting it’s a one-two punch. First you have to choose a specific niche and then target the copy to that niche. Having a generic ad even if the niche is very specific won’t work. If I had a labrador I can see how the ad above would at least pique my interest, which is more than I can say for 99.9% of ads that I see.

Tools and Automation

Facebook provides lots of advertising tools for free – Audience Insights, Power Editor, Business manager. However the eco-system is enormous and it often helps to use tools to speed things up.

David uses Zoomsphere (zoomsphere.com) for scheduling content, analytics and customer service and Qwaya (qwaya.com) to setup automated rules, schedule campaigns and track conversions on websites in connection with Google Analytics.

Here’s an example of the Content calendar in Zoomsphere with labels and different colors for different kinds of content.

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If you’re working with a team, this gives everyone a high-level view of the campaign, and gives team members a chance to discuss issues in a systematic way.

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In Qwaya you can see your results in graphs so you have the right data to make important decisions. Here you can see ‘cost per link click’, ‘cost per conversion’ and ‘total number of conversions’ in time.

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You can also pause your ad or ‘ad set’ based on automated rules (and there are plenty of other useful things as well).

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Good luck!

Facebook is often a great big unknown. I think many of us think we understand how Facebook works, so we don’t care to delve more carefully into what’s possible. I’ve heard of people trying Facebook and not getting great results, hence they stop and don’t come back. Chances are they’re making some of the rookie mistakes that David has talked about.

In particular I found David’s explanation of linking demo/geographic targeting with with specific ad-content really helpful.


 

The right tools can really help you with your business, but the most important thing is to have the right strategy. David can help you with that. Write him an email to [email protected] and set up a Skype call.

You can also follow him on twitter @davidlorincz

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Ankur Sharda

Ankur Sharda

Web, data, startups ... semi-nomadic
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