2018 seems to be the year content began making a steady decline. Why did this happen? Well, Facebook obviously figured out that they need monetize the hell out of what we have and exploit it- or something like that.
Did you have a Facebook page years ago? Remember the organic growth?! Remember how you could sell things without spending a DIME in ad budget?
Yeah me too. The truth is- the first Facebook page I ever started was in 2012. Wow – were things good. I was a full time student monetizing my side hustle to the point where I was making more on Facebook than I was at my government job.
How’d I do it? Well first of all- It was magical.
I posted pictures of my commercial paintings and people began flocking in. I treated my business page like my personal page. I just posted stuff non-stop and people loved it. I paid my entire tuition, went on fancy trips, and bought over priced clothes- I was really living every students dream. I was in show homes, working with interior designers, all using FREE methods of Facebook.
Now you’re reading this thinking, hey I could do that! Not so fast Becky, things have changed a lot since then.
I began managing my first customer Facebook page in 2017. I started to realize posting wasn’t enough and I need to do ads too. I could run ANY kind of brand awareness campaign and it did well. So I ran pointless ads ALL DAY every day- and I got some pretty good results. I’d pair it putting out fairly engaging content- but content was a gamble. Sometimes you’d sink and hook, and sometimes you’d have crickets. So if you’re paying your content manager a lot of money- you hope they aren’t getting you crickets and once in a while hit it out of the park. However, what are you paying per post? Realistically, you’re paying for them to experiment, and you’re only actually paying for the good ones that hit home runs.
I’m sure I have every single content manager out there saying, you’re wrong, you just need to have more engaging content- yeah, yeah. So that you gamble all day every day if the internet is gonna’ dig into what you’re saying. Guys, that’s a lot of work. You’re gonna’ pay someone a shit ton of money trying to figure this out. Do you know how much a good video costs? I do, ‘cause we sell ‘em. Truth be told, you can’t get into a good production video for under $1,000. What if the internet doesn’t like it? Oh boy- you just invested over $1k into a video that has a relevancy score of 1. Now what? Lol.. That’s why we do predictive marketing.
Okay, so direct response marketing, what is it, and why do we love it? To make a long story short, it’s a method of putting out a highly targeted, special type of ad that stops your target market in their tracks right then and there and forces your audience to act now. The action we want can be several things, but ultimately we want to make them a subscriber- or pay money now. We have about a million different methods- though chat bots are super hot right now. We can then give them another offer that ‘causes them to engage in a behavior AGAIN right then and there (request quote, book now, buy now etc.). So now we’ve pretty much killed 2 birds with one stone- but there’s more. Now they are a subscriber to us- we can now direct market to them through several methods! Some examples are re-target them with new ads (specifically to the behavior they engaged in- ever see an ad for something right after you put it in your cart? Yeah that.), DM them, e-mail them etc. We put them right through our sales funnel until they spend money. If they spend money, at a later date, we begin re-marketing them to come back (this can now be done for free depending on the method you choose). The intent is to maximize their life time value and keep them coming back for more.
I’m not slamming on content management or brand awareness at all. It totally has a place in this world- good content helps shape perception of your company. What I’m saying is, good content costs good money and it doesn’t have a predictable ROI, especially considering Facebook throttles down your organic reach when you’re just posting content. Hell, we offer content management! What I’m saying is, if you’re looking for a measurable, predictable way to generate revenue, direct response marketing is the most efficient bang for your buck!
However, if you have the budget to do both, do both!