Facebook is trying to take over the world…
Facebook is trying to take over the world by incorporating their own tools…BUT there are still plenty of tools that enhance the customer experience and assist the marketer to make good business moves and decisions….and to stake their claim online.
In fact, Facebook is making it SO easy to depend upon their platform that many businesses do not need websites, email programs, schedulers, and so forth to do business.
Dumping other tools in favor of Facebook is a HUGE RISK to take, however!
If you rely on Facebook to do it all, you are allowing a platform that you do not own to determine how you can do business. Do you really want Facebook to control the outcome of your success?
Some of the assets you can own in the online world are:
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1. Your own website on a hosted platform,
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2. Contact info of your subscribers, such as emails,
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3. Digital material you’ve created that is backed up online.
WEBSITE
If you have a hosted website, such as a WordPress site where you pay for hosting with GoDaddy, Siteground, BlueHost, or similar, you own that digital space. You are paying for it, hopefully have automated backups and security measures taken into account, and so forth, to avoid outages, hacking, and other risks.
You do not own your Facebook profile or page.
Facebook owns your personal profile and business pages and can rip them out from under you in a second if you violate their terms of service, they go under, or whatever else they decide to do.
I personally have a cPanel WordPress website hosted with GoDaddy with the Divi theme and page builder from Elegant Themes to make it easy for me to design pages without having to know a ton of HTML coding. That doesn’t work for every type of business out there, but for the consultant who needs a place to keep the attention of potential prospects piqued, it works great. Many of my students have built their own sites with the training they get from Social Media Traffic School.
EMAILS
Contact info of people who have subscribed to your email list is also yours, as long as the person who gave it to you still agrees to stay subscribed. There are plenty of spam laws surrounding this. Most email marketing software programs give indicators of potential spam laws you could be violating when you are developing your funnels. We also go over these inside Social Media Traffic School‘s email marketing training.
Some instances can cause fines up of $40,654 per email. Read for yourself what the US Federal Trade Commission has to say.
Email marketing funnels are used to show authority of topic, build deeper relationships, and ultimately boost sales of your offers. The programs I use are ConvertKit and Kajabi.
I use ConvertKit for marketing purposes to utilize its powerful tagging and automation features. Marketing requires fresh approaches based on changes in the market, and ConvertKit really makes that easier for those who use email marketing to grow their businesses, show authority of topic, develop relationships, and ultimately sell offers to subscribers.
One of the things I love about ConvertKit is that they do not penalize you for having subscribers on multiple “lists” like Mail Chimp and other programs do. They use tags and only count the number of subscribers without duplicating them if they are on separate lists. The double-counting causes higher monthly fees for many other programs.
I use Kajabi to house my course materials for membership to Social Media Traffic School and two other businesses I own that are in development. I send out emails related to my courses through Kajabi, such as evergreen automation that doesn’t need tweaking, or announcements about new course material opening up each month.
Breaking my own rules here about hosted websites, I choose to use Kajabi for my membership site and course hosting because they make it so easy to develop fully-functional marketing funnels with a knack for delivering digital courses. Their program is designed for make learning easier for my students, and they have a fabulous reputation in the industry for supporting their clients.
I back up all my digital material and keep it organized as discussed in the next section.
DIGITAL MATERIAL
No matter what you do with your online spaces, keeping backups of your digital material and
assets is extremely important. I consider this almost as important as backing up pictures of my three children.
I use Dropbox.com to store, manage, share, and sync files automatically as I work on them from my computer. I also use Google Drive for project sharing with my mentors, team, and clients. In addition, I backup files on an external hard drive in case of digital outage or lack of Internet.
Vimeo is where I load videos online that I need to share or embed safely, as YouTube videos are not necessarily secure and can be found if someone who has access loads them into a playlist on their own channel. I also keep backups of my course materials on Vimeo in case anything happens with my membership site, and someone needs to access a particular video without having to log into the Kajabi members-only area.
In addition to keeping files backed up, I export contact information at least once a month, sometimes more if I am heavily marketing that month, of subscribers to my ConvertKit and Kajabi programs.
If anything ever goes away, having the contact information of your subscribers is all you need to start over with your business.
Facebook has a powerful place in this world.
With all this said about staking your claim online, Facebook is an incredible way to reach the marketplace through content marketing. Learning how to utilize the power behind their advertising system is crucial to reaching clients socially to start the relationships that build into trusted, business colleagues. LinkedIn is where most companies gravitate to for online social presence for business purposes, but Facebook has more data on its users than any other social channel. Facebook’s users have recently approached the 2 billion mark worldwide with 200-250 million users in the US alone. A combination of LinkedIn and Facebook outreach can take the social media marketing world by storm, as witnessed by this client.
President of Rail Yard Studios, Nashville, TN.
“My market consists of big company executives in the industrial space. Sally taught me how to reach CEO’s who aren’t scrolling Facebook. At a recent trade show, 10 big company CEO’s found me to personally congratulate me on my social media marketing and wanted to know how I ended up in their phones while they were checking their emails and stock prices. Now that’s how it’s done.”
Facebook advertising goes beyond the Facebook app.
Facebook advertising goes beyond the Facebook application by using the 1,500 data points they have on every American user and 500 data points on users globally. Flex targeting combined with marketing funnels, creativity, storytelling, objectives, and a bit of finesse gives an opportunity beyond comparison to traditional marketing methods.
Watch video: Learn about the most common mistakes made with Facebook advertising.
Click the blue image to watch a free video training on the most common mistakes made with Facebook advertising.
Because Facebook corners the market on advertising, it pays to spend time learning how to use it. Even though you don’t own the space and could run a fine business without it, it definitely helps to understand how to amplify brand awareness and lead generation to get in front of an entire planet of people meant for your brand.
To see how much Facebook pays, check out these case studies of advertising campaigns:
Sally Hendrick, Founder of Social Media Traffic School
Meet the author, Sally Hendrick:
As a keynote public speaker, Social Media Examiner Contributor and Founder of Social Media Traffic School, Sally specializes in target market research, marketing funnels, digital courses, and Facebook advertising strategies.
With 25 years as an actuarial statistician, Sally has been turning statistics into stories for companies to adjust and tweak their marketing programs to be effective. While working with solopreneurs and small businesses through her online academy of classes to help them plan their marketing strategies using social media, Sally also helps medium and large size companies create strategic marketing plans and train marketing staff to carry out company objectives. Her methods are used to successfully increase return on investment with social media, as traditional marketing tactics are bringing less and less return.
Sally resides in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband and 3 daughters.
Message Sally on Facebook to get in touch.
