Jewelry ECOMM Tech

The Importance Of Facebook Ads In Your Digital Strategy February 07, 2018 (0 comments)

I naturally speak to jewelers all the time about their digital strategy. From the companies who are on the newer side with their social media experience, there are two things I frequently hear.

1. “Why should I pay a marketer X amount of money each month when we can handle our social media ourselves?”
2. “Facebook doesn’t work/Facebook doesn’t work in my area”

Both of these responses come down to jewelers not understanding the work that goes into a real social media strategy. Let’s be clear - you absolutely should not hire someone to handle your social media if you have a digital marketing expert on staff who can do it well. But let’s be honest... do you have a marketer on staff? Or is it your secretary? Or your son’s friend? Of course, now it will be much easier for you to handle a chunk of your digital marketing yourselves with this site. Using Facebook the right way, without a doubt, is one of the most influential thing you can do for your store’s marketing success. It’s more than publishing cute cat photos on your page. There are real strategies. Two years ago, I worked with a jewelry store in Long Island. During our initial consultation, he explained he used to work with a different agency who specialized in social media for jewelers. He kept raving about the “really great stuff’ they would post on his page - like rings on top of pumpkins during Halloween season. “Then why are we having this conversation if you’re happy with the results this company is getting you?” I asked. He explained that they weren’t getting results, and didn’t see an increase in foot traffic or sales. News flash: then that’s not “really great stuff” that they’re doing. With the popularity of social media, it’s easy to assume that the average person knows how to run a company’s Facebook page. After all, we all use Facebook on a regular basis, right? Yes, we do - but those are personal pages, not business pages where you need to convert clicks and customers. Its important to work with someone who really, truly understands how to use Facebook ads properly.

Why are Facebook ads so important?

The main reason Facebook ads are so important is because its the easiest way to reach NEW customers. One common misconception is the reason for posting on your Facebook page. Facebook only shows your posts to 2% of your current followers. Yes, thats only 2% of the people who already follow your page. Of course, sometimes you want to promote to your current customers and followers. But it doesn't do much in terms of expanding your exposure to new audiences. If you’re spending your time posting pictures of your inventory on your page but you’re not also running ads, you need to know that you’re likely not reaching much of a new audience - you’re barely reaching the people who already follow you as it is. Ads allow you to reach new people who don’t already follow your page, so its crucial to growing your audience. Ads allow us to reach people who aren't already following your page - and reach them with precision.

Facebook ads let you advertise to your perfect audience with accurate targeting - very inexpensively.

I’m not one of these marketers who will tell you traditional advertising isn’t important. It is - multiple impressions are important, and if traditional ads bring more “touches” of your brand to your customers, then that’s great. But traditional ads lack the capabilities of online advertising, and they’re way more expensive. Facebook enables you to target your perfect audience for pennies. You can also choose to only pay when someone clicks - which means you pay nothing if you’re not getting warm leads. In real estate marketing, we’re able to target people that we know are likely to move, that are house hunting, and meet other criteria. For jewelers, we can target people based on time of year, buying habits, family relationships, income level, age, and more. If graduation is coming up, we can target parents of college students a month before graduation with items that make sense for college graduates. Its incredible how easily we can target the people we’re looking for with Facebook ads. Compare this to an ad in the paper, where you’re basically paying for an ad, sitting back, and hoping it works.

Facebook ads allow targeted list building.

Facebook has ads that specifically capture lead information, including ad styles that are specifically made to encourage visitors to enter their info for a consultation. Isn’t that exactly what you’re looking for? Can your newspaper ad do that? Can it display a highly targeted ad to your audience, that pops open an appointment request? Nope. But Facebook ads can. Its not all about what the ads alone can do, either. Sometimes the beauty happens when a customer comes to your website. But typically, Facebook is the first part of that funnel to get people to your site. If your website is optimized to convert visitors into customers, then Facebook is an unbelievable “first step” along the customer’s journey. Email campaigns are still incredibly valuable. With the right ad strategy and content, we can build our email list to follow up with customers.

We can change our strategy based on how we see our ads performing.

Facebook allows us to “split test” our ads. Split Testing is when you run different versions of something to compare the results. Putting an ad in the paper is a shotgun approach, where Facebook is a strategic sniper approach. We can design multiple ads with the same conversion goal and observe how each ad is performing. We can see which ads are getting the clicks, which ads brought customers all the way through the site to a sale, and then adjust accordingly.

Facebook ads allow powerful retargeting.

As I said a moment ago, sometimes the magic happens once someone clicks the ad to go to your site. If you have the Facebook pixel installed properly, you’ll be able to target secondary ads to visitors who come to your site and don’t convert into customers. Not only is this incredibly powerful because its showing multiple impressions to your audience (it typically requires 7-10 brand “touches” for a customer to remember your company), but you’re able to show tailored ads to visitors based on the actions they take on your site. Have you ever been to a site like Amazon.com, only to see ads of the products you were looking at shown to you again on Facebook? This is called retargeting. As a marketer, I can easily find the people who went to your site from clicking your Facebook ad but decided not to purchase after browsing products. Then I can show them ads offering a 10% discount. Then clicking on that ad would automatically generate that discount on the product pages of your site.

Facebook ads can prompt visitors to click intelligent CTAs.

The right CTAs (Call To Actions) can make a big difference in your strategy. Typically in a traditional ad, your CTA would be something like “come into our store to see this item”. With Facebook, however, it is much easier for someone to click a button on the screen than to make a phone call to your store. It sounds silly, but one of the beauties of online advertising is that it is very easy for someone to click something. You can create Facebook ad, for example, with a CTA that brings customers directly to an appointment maker. The process is streamlined, simple, quick, and very effective.

Facebook ads are a great entrance to landing pages.

Landing pages are a whole different subject. But in short, every single marketing objective you have should have it’s own landing page. Facebook ads are usually the best way to get visitors there. A landing page is a page on your website that is dedicated to a specific marketing goal. If you run an ad for a sale, for example, you should not bring someone to your homepage. Homepages are designed for general traffic - usually with photos of your store, the menu bar at the top of the page, listing of lots of products, etc. However, if you’re running a specific marketing campaign, you don’t want people to click on other parts of your site. You want them to take advantage of the offer they came to the site for. So you make landing pages that ONLY talk about the offer, and don't have all these other distractions on the page that can deter visitors. Because of Facebook’s incredible targeting capabilities, you can send custom tailored ads that bring visitors to the perfect landing pages. For example, you can be very specific with your ad and very specific with your landing page. This is much, much more likely to convert a customer versus sending an ad that says “we have cool jewelry” that brings them to a generic homepage. The strength of Facebook ads cannot be exaggerated. Facebook ads should be the backbone of your marketing strategy, period. If you’re not seeing results, you’re simply not doing it right.