Capturing Organic Value from Facebook Advertising

As I mentioned in many previous posts, organic traffic from social media and Google/Bing creates the bulk of incoming Internet traffic. That’s what makes the stock of Facebook and Google the most desired stocks in the stock market.

And increasingly, Google and Facebook are monetizing everything they do, and FREE traffic isn’t something they want to give away. So organic traffic is being strangled by all the internet monopolies. Just viewing the upward Facebook stock price and Google stock price tells us these companies are monetizing more traffic and selling more ads.

It’s at this point that we must advertise to be seen at all. And those who can’t advertise are at a severe disadvantage. However, if we combine paid and free channels in our strategy we could create even brighter results. We have to be creative and crafty, and become analytics experts to discover the best way to create and capture organic leads via paid advertising campaigns.

Although it’s tougher to get reach and visibility organically, you could use paid channels strategically to feed your free organic traffic flow, and better capture leads. Smart marketers use channels to build lasting, long term value — continuous return visits and building more traffic through more content. Paid channels can benefit from utilizing organic content.

FaceBook Ad Campaign Optimization

This post isn’t about Facebook ad campaigns. You can visit WordTracker.com and set up campaigns with them to organize and optimize your ads. And you can manage Facebook ads via Facebook’s ad manager interface and manage them yourself. This post is about leveraging paid ads to boost your free traffic.

Competing with Big Companies

Since I began internet marketing, my job was to compete against well funded mega-sized companies. I learned how to compete and build an advantage. Today, that competitive spirit is vital since the big companies have an overwhelming advantage. It’s a tough era for small business.

If you’ve noticed that most search engine rankings are dominated by big companies, it shouldn’t be a surprise. The fact is, money talks. In fact, it’s persuasive and powerful in many ways. Even if their online content is weak, it still gets seen, and visibility is everything.

So when you decide to spend a lot of money on Facebook or Google (and fattening up Facebook’s stock forecast and Google’s stock price), you should take a moment to see how you might improve your free organic traffic strategy via your paid exposure. Doing so might not help you convert leads better but also capture long term equity. The knock on advertising is how temporary it is. Consumers and prospects forget fast and many are brand agnostic.

Impact, relevance and trust are tough to create via ads. It’s something beyond ads that builds a solid connection with prospects.

Paying for Reach and Making it Work

Capturing or generating organic social media success via paid channels isn’t easy. However, savvy marketers have been using paid Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, and Google ads to boost their organic success for a long time. The smart ones do this strategically.

As you can see, Facebook is king of the social channels.

Getting reach to the right audience is vital even if you have to pay for it initially. If your connections or new leads see your post, they may decide to click through to your article, share your posts, or link to your article on your website. This is very valuable. Using Facebook only for direct conversions is likely not going to work for B2B service firms.

High involvement purchases such as Realtor home listing services and online marketing consulting services takes time. Familiarity, trust and relevance have to be carefully built. You may have to make a big impact several times in order to generate the emotion needed so they’ll contact you.

Relevance, Trust and Engagement

So trust, engagement and relevance might actually be KPI’s you need to track. By the way, most social media platforms have very basic analytics solutions. There’s no usable insight for improvement let alone predicting future customer actions. You need to know how social is working within your complete marketing campaign, not just the number of likes and shares and so on.

A comprehensive analytics solution is very important. In fact, you may want to use an AI based funnel optimization solution and integrate your social activity to it. See more about that on AI Marketers.

If you’re going to buy a Facebook Ad campaign, you’ll want to know what your goals are and what your key performance indicators should be. Then your analytics software can tell you whether you are being successful and what is driving that success. Good analytics is everything in online marketing, and it’s the same for measuring FB success.

The SEO Value is Underappreciated

It’s difficult for Google and Bing to determine why someone linked to your great article. They just crawl links on web pages and find the link to your blog post. And those links will boost your search engine rankings. Your campaign then has many objectives to build big success such as visibility, engagement rates, shares, comments, likes, clickthrough rates, sales, contacts, new inbound links to your website, along with new Facebook friends.

Facebook Campaigns

⦁ discover which topics are going to work for you and set up to test their success
⦁ discovery which of your posts to boost or use in ads
⦁ discover which ads created the best engagement/conversion rates
⦁ discover which media (graphics/video) in your post used worked best (tagging)
⦁ discover which topics/headlines/visuals worked best (e.g., picture of a house with for sale sign might work best)
⦁ measure stickiness levels of visitors from your posts (how long did that visitor stay on your site and did they come back later)
⦁ discover which pages were linked to from other websites during the campaign (SEO software tracks that)
⦁ discover which pages were shared most (sharedcount.com)
⦁ segmenting your audience using FB’s AI system to discover better conversion rates

It’s a Big Job

This is time consuming work that needs expertise and a good budget to do well. The best way to carry this out is to hire a marketer with multiple talents and capabilities. They’re might be some learning involved, but one consultant/producer is going to be focused on your long term, continuous needs. That long term commitment is the real value.

Content expertise in your field (tech, financial, real estate, consumer products etc.), SEO skills, social posting skills, personal dedication and analytics insight means it is a challenge to find a provider. There are social media marketing companies, but they’re lacking in expert SEO and content creation skills. And they may not want to invest time in learning your specific business.