Most businesses think they fail because of a lack of time, money, or resources. The truth is, they fail because they lack customers, and their only strategy to get them is asking friends, family, begin’ for referrals, or spamming people in their DMs. Companies that thrive, don’t chase, they attract. In this blog, I’m going to show how to generate leads with social advertising that make selling easy, effortless, and entertaining. Let’s begin.
1. What are you selling and why?
In order to generate leads with social advertising first of all you need to understand what are you selling and why you are selling. Here are a few steps to understand this question:
– Identify the product or service to sell
Creating an ad that sells on social media is all about what you say and who you say it to, however, what you say in an advertisement changes based on what you’re selling.
For example, what I would say to sell your website design services is different than what I would say to sell your logo design services. Now, that sounds obvious, but I see companies bundle their entire product suite together in one ad and that’s usually why it fails because the message doesn’t resonate.
For example, I may need a website because I’d like to capture leads. And I may need a logo because I’m going to a trade show and I want people to be able to recognize me. So if I’m writing an ad, how can I speak to both, at the same time? And the truth is website design is probably going to be more difficult to sell because it’s typically more expensive. So, half the battle with social media advertising is just choosing a product or service that’s going to be easy to win. And all products and services are not created equal to sell.
So I’m going to show you a simple exercise to identify which products are going to be easier to sell. Ask yourself these five questions and I want you to rate your answer one to five.
- Number one. Can you explain it in one sentence and can a fifth-grader understand it? Go ahead and give yourself a five if you can do that and give yourself a one if this is difficult for you to articulate. Because if you can’t articulate it, then selling it online is going to be almost impossible.
- Number two. How desirable is your product or service? For example, life insurance gets a one, ’cause nobody wants life insurance just like we don’t want to go to the DMV, and on the flip side of that, coffee would be a five because everybody’s obsessed with coffee and tea these days.
- Third. How noncompetitive is your niche? Five if there’s not a lot of competitors. One if everybody and Joe Schmo are doing it. For example, real estate agents, owning a gym, or some kind of fitness program, very competitive niches.
- Next. How affordable is your product or service in the eyes of your potential consumer? When they look at this will they think it’s expensive? And if so give that a one. Or will they think it’s extremely affordable? And if so give that a five. The more expensive usually the more thinking required and the more resistance that there is.
- And lastly. How much content do you actually have for that particular product or service? In other words, if you don’t have any images if you don’t have any videos demonstrating the product or service how the heck are you going to sell it? There’s a total of 25 points you could’ve earned. The closer to 25, the likely easier it will be to sell that particular product or service. If the number’s low, then I’d recommend abandon ship and to get started, sell something a lot easier.
– How to determine the best way to sell your product or service?
How to determine the best way to sell When creating social media ads, we tend to focus 90% of our effort on what we sell and who we sell to. But we spend very little time on how we’re going to sell it.
In this blog, I’m going to show you two exercises to help you identify the most effortless ways to sell specifically for your business.
Number one, we got to remove the resistance. What do I mean by resistance? Anything that would deter a potential customer from taking action. For example, asking someone for their personal information, name, email, phone number; asking someone for their time, talking on the phone, or scheduling an appointment; asking someone for their energy. Hey, come to my event and leave your house. Even asking someone to stop what they’re doing and watch a video or read an article. That’s all resistance. Listen to me. People take action when emotion exceeds resistance. So, the more resistance there is, the more difficult it will be to sell your product or service and you will not able to generate leads with social advertising.
Most of the ads that you create will have one of these objectives: watch this video, gimme your name and email and phone number, schedule a time to chat, purchase online, or come to one of my events. And these are listed in order of difficulty based on the level of resistance that they create. Now, just because something’s high resistance doesn’t mean you can’t sell it. It just means you have to spend a little bit more time, you might have to be a little bit more persuasive when choosing how you’re going to be selling. And you also have to take into consideration you and your team’s skill set. So, in order to do that, I want you to take a moment and I want you to rate yourself on a scale of one to 10, your sales ability on the phone, on camera, on video like this, and also your writing skills. Now, whichever is your strongest, choose a methodology that complements it. For example, if you’re not good on the phones, don’t ask people for the phone number ’cause it won’t help you. And if you’re not the strongest writer but you’re great on video, ask them to watch a sales video as opposed to read a sales letter or an email.
So in summary, in order to create profitable ads and generate leads with social advertising, make sure you have a low-resistance offer and you have a sales method that fits the strength of your organization.product or service?
– The hidden in plain sight secret to making ads profitable
The algorithms on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are always changing, the costs are always increasing, and day by day the competition is getting tougher. So how the heck do you make advertising profitable and generate leads with social advertising?
In short, the answer is popcorn. Have you been to the movies recently? The tickets nowadays cost a small fortune but that’s not where the theaters make most of their profit. Once you show up to the theater, then they sell you candy, soda, and popcorn for three X to 10 X the cost. This is the difference between losing money and making money with advertising. If all you have is a product, then you don’t have a business.
I’ll give you an example here. The upsell of doing it faster. Think Amazon Prime, you can either pay to get something delivered in two to five days, or you can pay extra to get it overnighted.
2. Identify your audience
The second step in lead generation with social adveritsing is to identify your audience, who they are, how they will intteract with your adverisment. Lets underatand the audinece:
– Identifying who’s most likely to buy
Once you establish what product or service you should be selling and how to sell it with social media ads, the single most important question you should ask is who’s most likely to buy it? One of the greatest mistakes when advertising on social media is trying to sell everyone at the same time.
Look, what motivates women to buy is different than what motivates most men to buy. What motivates a 22-year-old single male is different than what motivates a 42-year-old married male with three kids. Therefore for every audience, we want to target, we must create a new ad, starting with who’s most likely to buy. And to figure that out, we have to stereotype, yes I said that and answer these questions. One, how old are they? What gender are they? Where do they live?
Here’s one of my favorite targeting methods. What TV shows do they watch? What books do they read? What influencers do they follow? What events do they attend? What groups or associations do they belong to? What special occasions do they celebrate, or what emergency are they currently dealing with?
For example, if I wanted to run an ad to entrepreneurs, I would ask myself what TV shows do entrepreneurs watch? What’s the answer? Shark Tank, of course. So all I’d have to do is go into Facebook, type in the answer Shark Tank and target anyone who likes the show. Or I can go into YouTube and show my ads on old Shark Tank episodes. Think about how powerful that is. The reason why we answered these questions is that these are all targeting features on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube
. A lot of people think that advertising is techie, but the truth is with just a couple of clicks you can log into the platform and select exactly who you want to show your ads to. So to show your ads to who’s most likely to buy, simply answer these stereotypical questions, log in to Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. Click the button and start advertising.
– A big reason why most advertisers lose money
A big reason why most advertisers lose money is that the cost of their social media ads is greater than the amount of money being generated from them. What makes this even more difficult is the cost to run advertisements is constantly increasing.
So how do you get cheap clicks and impressions when advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube? Well, first you must understand how they make money. And as publicly traded companies, their focus is to make sure investors are getting an ROI. And one of the primary methods of doing that is charging advertisers, like you and me, per click
Let’s take a look. If Advertiser A shows an ad 100 people, and two people click that ad and let’s say Facebook charges $1 per click, well, in this example, Facebook would make $2. Now, if Advertiser B shows an ad to the same 100 people, and five people click that ad, and Facebook still charges $1 per click, then Facebook would make $5. So if you’re Facebook, which ad would you choose to show? Obviously Advertiser B, because making $5 is way cooler than making $2. In addition, even if Facebook charge 50 cents to Advertiser B, they would still make $2.50, which is more than the $2 they would make charging Advertiser A $1, and only getting two clicks. So, if you want cheap clicks, create advertisements that get clicked. The more relevant and entertaining the advertisement is, the more likely they are to click it. The reason why most people fail in social media ads is people don’t understand relevancy, engagement, and entertainment dictate the price.
– How to get attention in today’s competitive business climate
First things first, because of the internet, there’s never been an easier time to start a business. But for that same reason, there’s never been a more competitive time.
So how do you get customers to buy from you when they have so many options? The answer is, you stand out. The brand that gets the sales isn’t the best brand, it’s the most recognized one, assuming that they trust you. On most social platforms, there are three different types of advertisements that you can create. One is written, another being image, and the third being video.
I’m going to teach you how to grab attention leveraging video specifically, because this is the best medium to create trust, educate your customer, and it’s really affordable on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, sometimes as cheap as a penny a view. So no excuses. So, here are four easy ways to get attention with a video well.
- Number one is by asking a questioning look, the number one reason why someone is going to continue to pay attention to your video is curiosity, meaning they need to know what happens next, they need to know what you’re going to say next, it’s a true cliffhanger, and in addition to that, making the question unusual. So for example, if I was writing an ad to get your attention, I may ask you a question like, when’s the last time you took a shower? Now at first you were like, what the heck really, why you ask me when I took a shower? But watch how I transition them. When’s the last time you took a shower? I’m asking because I know as an entrepreneur, sometimes the day just can blur by, it gets stressful, we get tired, and sometimes yes, we may forget to take a shower, when we’re trying to figure out how to keep our business afloat. See, the unusual questions kept you listening, so you paid attention.
- The next thing you can do to grab attention is to use props. So two of my favorite resources to do this is amazon.com, and another website called shindigz.com, and they just have random props that you can order for cheap. Now the idea for a perfect prop is something unique, or something that feels out of place. For example, if I started off a video ad, and I had this yellow tape, and the first question I asked you was, Hey, can you keep a secret? And then I put tape over my mouth or something along the lines of that, or whatever, you get the point.
- And next is music. Two of my favorite resources are audiojungle.net, and artlist.io. I love these because you can search for music by emotion. So if you type in the word mad or sad, you can download songs for like seven bucks that you can legally use in your video ads. Because if you tried to download something from the radio and you put it in an ad, they will reject it, they would not allow it. So, these are two great, affordable resources.
- And then the last thing that I highly, highly recommend you do, is changing your environment. If you go to Google and you type in the top 10 most interesting places in your city, drive to one of those locations (mumbles) your video there. Something else that you can do, is going to a website called storyblocks.com, and all it is, is a library of video footage that you can download. So if you want to be on a beach, you can literally search the word beach and download a file. if you want fireworks in the video, you can type in the word fireworks and download a file. So, using those four things, even if you think you’re boring or you’re not charismatic, your videos will be entertaining.
– How to communicate effectively in an ad
It’s not what you say, but it’s how you say it. Look, the only reason people don’t buy from you is that they either don’t know, like, trust or believe you. How you would talk to your mother is different than how you would talk to your friends, which is different than how you would talk to your significant other, hopefully, or even a stranger. That’s because how we communicate is largely dictated in our relationship.
So when you’re creating your ads, you should be speaking to people according to the strength of the relationship. And relationships are simple. They’re either cold or they’re hot. And depending on the temperature, communication will be drastically affected. Typically, your current customers will be the hottest and the coldest are the people who have no idea who you are, and the warm people are somewhere right there in the middle.
Most of the time when you’re advertising, you’re going to be advertising to strangers. And strangers are cold. So that means you’re going to have to educate them, bribe them, and charm them. Here’s what I mean by educating them. If no one’s ever heard of your product or service, in your ad, you will have to spend a significant amount of energy explaining who you are and what you do. Bribing them, remember this. The value is created after the experience. So if no one’s ever tried your product or service before, the more likely you’ll have to lead with an incentive, 10% off, 20% off, try this for free. And lastly is charming them.
When you first meet a stranger, you’re going to have to work a lot harder to get them to like you and you’re going to have to show your personality. You’re going to have to smile. And by the way, people love when you mess up, because it shows that you’re human. So in summary, before you write or film your ad, ask yourself, “Am I talking to someone “who is cold or hot?” This doesn’t mean you can only advertise to cold or hot people, it just mean you should create different ads for each group to increase your chances of selling profitably.
3. Attract attention of your customer
The difference between an ad making money and losing money is simply the message. I’ve heard a lot of people say, “Facebook doesn’t work, oh no!” and the truth is, if it’s not working, that’s a user error, because Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, their only job is once you pay them, is to put a message in front of who you tell them to put a message in front of, just like a billboard, or print advertisement.
And if people aren’t buying, I hate to say it, but it’s because the message sucks! So how do you create a message that sells? Here’s a simple exercise to do it. Get out a blank piece of paper. Take a pen or a pencil and draw a giant capitalized letter T across that paper, and on the left-hand side, I want you to write Problem. On the right-hand side, I want you to write the Consequences. And the top left corner, write the audience of who you’re speaking to and be specific. And ask yourself this question: What are the three greatest challenges that your ideal customer’s facing that your product or service solves?
For example, if your product is fast internet, and you’re advertising to employees at a corporation, then the problem is slow internet and the consequences are late assignments, extreme frustration, and even not finishing tasks on time. So now if we take this simple worksheet and we turn it into an ad, just add these words, “Is there anything more frustrating than.” And then when you put it all together, it sounds like this, “Is there anything more frustrating than slow internet? “It takes forever to do the simplest task, “and it’s probably costing you a fortune. “Let me upgrade your internet “so you can spend less time buffering “and more time profiting.” Simple ad, right? So to create your next ad, follow this template and plug in your business and watch the sales come flying in.
– How to turn a boring message into the straight fire
Hey, want to know a secret? Nothing loses money faster than a boring advertisement, so here are some quick tips that you can use again and again and again to turn something boring into the straight fire.
- Number one, stop using big words and industry-specific words. A confused mind never buys, so clarity is key. A simple rule of thumb: if a fifth grader can’t understand it, don’t say it. So, here’s an action step. Go through your advertisement, and any big words, copy and paste them into Google, and look up synonyms for that word, and then insert the ones that a fifth grader would understand.
- Number two, use their own words. Go to a review site like Amazon or Yelp, and identify what I like to call hot buttons and hate buttons. Hot buttons are reasons that made them happy to buy, and hate buttons are why they never want to do business with a company again. In your ad, promise and deliver the hot buttons, and promise to never deliver the hate buttons.
- Number three, use cool quotes. Go to Google, type in an inspirational quote, and then hit Images, and you will literally get thousands of images with quotes on them. Pick one that you like, and make sure to cite your source. In addition to that, use metaphors and similes and analogies. Social media advertising is kind of like gambling. The upside is tremendous, except the odds are in your favor as long as you know the rules.
- And lastly, number four, break down the fourth wall. In other words, talk directly to the audience as if you’re having a conversation with someone in front of you. In this day and age, people know when they’re getting advertised, so start talking to them like they’re humans. There you go, from boring to straight fire.
How to get people to take action
You can have the best message in the world and the best offer in the world, but if you make it difficult for people to get what you’re offering, you’re going to lose sales and you can’t generate leads with social advertising.
Here’s how to create a call to action that gets people to take action:
- Number one, make sure it’s singular. An easy rule of thumb is you get one offer per ad. And again, a confused mind never buys so don’t ask them to like your page and call you and email you and comment and subscribe and like this and you get the point. Choose the option that’s closest to profit. So if you have no idea how to turn a like into a sale, don’t ask for the like. Ask for their phone number.
- Secondly, make sure it’s low resistance. The more work involved, the less likely it is to happen. Some of my favorite call to actions click here and I’ll send it to you. For example, an e-book or something like that. Next is click here and I’ll ship it to you. Free plus shipping offers work amazingly. And lastly is click here and I’ll save you a spot like for a webinar in an upcoming event. And lastly, make sure your call to action is easy to remember.
4. Make a professional video ad
Have you ever wondered why some videos looking amazing and some videos look eh a little questionable? It’s these three words, angles, lighting, and sound. Angles. The two angles I recommend using is one, the tight shot. The tight shot is this right here. You can see emotion. It dictates to the audience how to feel.
Remember, when you are on camera, you are a mirror. So if I’m happy right now, you can see that I’m smiling because of the tight shot, or if I’m really upset with you, da da da da da, that’s contagious.
And then the second shot that you want is the wide shot and that’s the angle that shows what’s going on in the scene. For example, when it’s wide, you can tell if I’m in a professional setting in a studio or if I’m hanging off a cliff or if someone’s sneaking up behind me, it establishes the scene and tells the viewer what’s going on without saying a word. Now if you’re wondering, how can I record both of these angles if I only have a phone? Well you can either film it twice or use an old phone you have in a drawer that doesn’t have service but that’s still functional. And lighting. The difference between something looking professional or unprofessional is almost always the lighting.
So I recommend getting some box lights from Amazon that are usually cost you around 60 bucks and comes in sets of three. One light for each side of your face and an additional light illuminating the entire shot. Have you ever looked at your phone in your gallery and you’re like, “Why does this look horrible “and this looks amazing?” It’s probably because of the lighting.
And finally, the sound. Use a lavalier mic. Those are the ones that just clip on to your shirt. You can get them for $5 on Amazon, they plug right into your phone. Nothing turns off a viewer more than a horrible sound. Another option I’d recommend is using captions so your viewer can watch your video without sound. Implement these three things and your videos will look and sound professional using nothing but your cellphone.
Is advertising actually risky?
Let’s call it what it is. The reason most people are afraid to use advertisements is because they’re afraid to lose money. Most people believe that advertising is expensive because television and radio have dominated the industry. And they typically lock you into these crazy contracts for months, or even years, regardless if your ad is making money or not.
Think of social media advertising like a faucet. You can turn it off or on at any time so you can limit the amount of money you’re potentially losing. Look how affordable and powerful social media advertising is today. If you spent $10 a day and you’re paying five cents a view that would put your ad in front of 200 targeted viewers a day. And if you did this consecutively for 30 days you’d spend only $300 and get in front of 6,000 targeted viewers. Out of 6,000 targeted views do you think you can make more than 300 bucks? I hope you said yes. Because this is the entire objective of advertising. And this is how you grow your business fast. It’s to make more than you spend. If you can spend $300, show your ad to 6,000 people and make $600 in sales, that’s doubling your money.
So what’s the next step? To spend more money because when you make money from advertising it’s an asset, not an expense. We’re living in the golden age of advertising where you can make double, triple, or 10X your money versus an average stock will make you a return of what? Two to five percent? Come on people! Start advertising and if you found this blog share it with your friends and colleagues. Get out there, take action, start advertising and I look forward to hearing about your results.
