TRANSCRIPT
#78: Steal This Effective Facebook Ad Strategy,
with Alex Caragiannides
This is the transcript with Alex Caragiannides. The episode is transcribed automatically. Therefore there may be mistakes. However, this will make it easy for you to refer back to anything you heard in the episode. Press "control + F" to find keywords in the episode.
[00:00:00] Alex Caragiannides: So you have to have a really good message. That's aligned to your target audience to be able to use these social media platforms, specifically Facebook, the right way to get people's attention.
[00:00:10] Laura L Bernhard: Hello entrepreneurs. I'm your host, Laura. Elburn hard. Welcome back to the marketing bound podcast, where we offer inbound marketing tips to get you more traffic, more leads and more success.
[00:00:20] This week I interview marketing agency, owner, Alex, Kara need Adidas. He shares how to leverage these seven Facebook ad objectives, the order in which they should be used and how long each campaign should run for his strategy, builds a community around your brand and sets you up for generating leads. The Facebook world is a highly saturated market.
[00:00:45] And in this episode, Alex lays out what needs to be done to win on the platform. If you need help with your Facebook ad campaigns, this episode is for you.
[00:00:58] Alex Caragiannides: Wow.[00:01:00]
[00:01:08] Laura L Bernhard: Thank you much for being here on the marquee bound podcast
[00:01:13] Alex Caragiannides: so much for having me, my pleasure. Okay. This is
[00:01:15] Laura L Bernhard: going to be super fun. We're going to be talking about Facebook ads. A very first question I want to ask you is, is the Facebook ad space saturated.
[00:01:26] Alex Caragiannides: Is the Facebook ads space saturated. Great question.
[00:01:31] And the answer is 100%. Yes. It's been saturated for a while, so this is nothing new and it's not a bad thing. Right. But you got to understand all kinds of businesses are using the Facebook ad network to market, to their audiences. So it's not just one industry or a handful of industries. It's all kinds of industries.
[00:01:51] So for example, if you're a real estate professional, You're not really worried about other competitors that are other real estate professionals in your [00:02:00] market. You should be worried about other businesses that are soliciting your same clients. So your Amazons, your McDonald's, your Nike's, your Coca-Cola is all kinds of businesses are soliciting your same client for their attention.
[00:02:13] So the marketplace, or in this case, the Facebook ads network being saturated in my head as a marketer, myself is actually a good thing. If you know how to market and use the platform correctly.
[00:02:28] Laura L Bernhard: Okay. So I know you're okay. So Alex has a specific order on how to use Facebook ads and we're going to go through each one later.
[00:02:35] But before we do that, I really want to ask you blatantly, should people still use Facebook ads in your opinion?
[00:02:44] Alex Caragiannides: First of all, a quick is. Okay, but there's obviously we got to go a little bit deeper than that. Just if it depends what the, it depends what the objective is, right? It depends who your target audience is.
[00:02:55] The thing about Facebook is there's. I mean, I can't tell you exactly the numbers, but I know there's, [00:03:00] there's a lot of active users over 2 billion, maybe 3 billion active users, right. It doesn't mean all the active users are your target audience or your clients. So, number one is you got to identify who your, who your client is.
[00:03:12] Who's your target audience. And most of the time. I'd say almost, you know, 90% of the time. Plus they're socializing on faces. Okay, so people should use Facebook, but it depends on the strategy. In my opinion, the strategy on Facebook should be more retargeting because people are socializing there. People are searching for your product or service on Facebook.
[00:03:35] That's not how the platform is built. People are socializing on Facebook, interacting with their friends and family posting what they did over the week. Again, putting a videos, but that's where the objective could be very beneficial for something. To get their message in front of somebody while they're socializing, because Facebook's built around actions and behaviors.
[00:03:57] It's not built around searching like Google and YouTube [00:04:00] as a search engine. They're both search engines. They're the biggest search engines on the planet. So when somebody goes to Google or YouTube, actually searching for information, when somebody goes to Facebook,
they're not searching for information, they're socializing, but the good news is with Facebook.
[00:04:13] You can target people based on actions and behaviors. So to answer your question, a hundred percent, you should be using Facebook as part of your marketing strategy. I want to repeat strategy. That's where most people are missing. They don't have a strategy. They just want to run some ads on Facebook, but they don't know what they're looking for.
[00:04:32] So if you have a strategy, Facebook's a great platform.
[00:04:35] Laura L Bernhard: Okay. So before we get into the seven steps and how you should use Facebook ads, I want to know what was the old way of using Facebook ads and why doesn't it work anymore?
[00:04:46] Alex Caragiannides: Well, the old way of using Facebook ads was just, just run ads, right? Just put some money.
[00:04:50] What are the ads manager account? And if you're a realtor, just an example, I'm referencing real justice. I work with realtors and I work with mortgage professionals, but this applies to any industry, but if you're a realtor, [00:05:00] the old way of marketing was I have a listing. Uh, I have a coming soon. I have a, just so, and I'm going to advertise that I'm going to put some money behind an ad.
[00:05:09] I'm going to promote the property, or I'm going to promote myself as a real estate professional in my area that I worked. And if you're looking to buy or sell, you know, you could use my services that doesn't work. Right, because there's so much solicitation happening and not just on Facebook, by the way they say us, right.
[00:05:27] We're we're the biggest consumers. And they stay in the consumers. We get solicited over 2000 times a day. I didn't even understand how that number was real, but it is real actually. It's more than, yeah. Because when you take into consideration radio billboards on highways, ads, uh, all these social media platforms, you know, magazines, postcards.
[00:05:48] If you take all these ways that you can be solicit. We're being solicited a lot. So the problem is the way people used to market on Facebook was just run ads, but that's not going to [00:06:00] work anymore because you're not going to get people's attention like you used to because the people's attention span is very limited in short.
[00:06:06] Now there's something in our brains called the reticular activator. Basically what that means is what you focused on is what you're going to see more of, for example, Here's a perfect example, a recent one. So, uh, I just relocated, uh, to, to New York and we're looking for a new vehicle for me. We have a family van for my wife and kids for us, and now I need a more of a commuter vehicle for me, so I can have a car and I could do what I need to do.
[00:06:31] So I'm looking at a Chevy. Tahoe's the new Chevy top before I started looking for a Chevy Tahoe. I can't even tell you the last time I saw a Chevy Tahoe on the road. Okay. Uh, just recently we decided we're going to get us to every tower now, everywhere I look, I see Chevy Tahoe. It's not because the Chevy Tahoe just came into the market.
[00:06:52] It's been on the market. It's in my particular activator now. So I'm focusing on it. So now I get to see it everywhere. It is. [00:07:00] Same in marketing. So when somebody is looking to buy a house, they're going to be more, uh, more in tune with advertisements on particular homes, particular areas than if they weren't looking to buy a house.
[00:07:13] So you have to have a really good message. That's aligned to your target audience to be able to use these social media platforms, specifically Facebook, the right way to get people's attention. And most people don't understand that as a strategy again. Yeah. Yeah,
[00:07:27] Laura L Bernhard: of course. And also I wanted to add, that's why you can't just be putting ads everywhere, because if people are not thinking about buying a house, for example, they're going to completely ignore your ad.
[00:07:38] So you have to break through somehow and okay. Let's go through the seven different kinds of, yeah. I have ad campaigns and as I want to name them, and then you tell me what it means. Yeah, and how to set it up.
[00:07:52] Okay.
[00:07:52] Alex Caragiannides: So I'm going to speeds up our campaign objectives. Yes.
[00:07:57] Laura L Bernhard: Campaign campaign objectives. And I [00:08:00] have them in this specific order.
[00:08:02] Okay. Is that you want to get more likes and followers to your business page. So explain to us why that's the first one and how it kind of
[00:08:12] Alex Caragiannides: works. Yeah. So let's, let's talk about first Facebook and how it's built. It's built around algorithms. Okay. It's not human beings, monitoring platform. There's way too many users.
[00:08:23] So they have hundreds, if not thousands of algorithms that are automatically kind of like Intune based on activities and actions. So the number one campaign objective that I, I like to start with with all our clients, and I recommend this for my coaching clients is what you just said. It's a likened follow campaign.
[00:08:40] So what you're doing is you're targeting a specific audience. And the good thing about Facebook is you can still target based on actions and behaviors. So again, I'm just gonna give you an example on the real estate side. This is very relevant to all industries. Okay. But on the real estate side, if I'm a realtor, The first thing I want to do is build a business page.
[00:08:56] Okay. Business pages are free. I have over 400 business [00:09:00] pages. Okay. They're free. You can have as many as you want, but the way we build our business pages for our realtor clients is you want to be more of a community page. Okay. It's not me. The realtor, it's more of the community that I'm serving. Like just an example.
[00:09:14] I lived in San Diego, so I would have a page called San Diego lifestyle and homes. It's not about me as the realtor or my broker. It's about San Diego and living in San Diego. So once you build your business page, okay. In this case, it's a community page. You want to target people that have interests and behaviors and actions like they're looking at Zillow, they're looking at registering, they're playing with mortgage calculators.
[00:09:36] They're first time buyers, they're house hunting and Facebook understands these actions, behaviors based on what your brow. So once we, our sand down, we're going to target that audience. The first thing we want to do is have a light and follow our page. It's much easier. To have somebody like and follow your page if it's not a specific real estate page.
[00:09:59] And if it's more [00:10:00] of a community page, especially if it's in a demographic that you want to work, maybe you live in the area or you work in the area and it's a 15 mile radius around that, like little pin drop. Now you could target those people, people that are homeowners, people that are renting and you want to have them like, and follow your page.
[00:10:17] The more likes and followers you have. The more Facebook rewards you and the more the algorithms were working in your favor, you want to have this campaign running indefinitely. So I like to run these campaigns. I mean, you can run these campaigns as little as a dollar a day. Which is $30 a month. Um, I recommend $5 a day.
[00:10:34] So it's all based on your budget, but these run indefinitely, it's like putting gas in the car. You always want to put gas in your car, have at least a half a tank up to a full tank. This is how you want to do it with your life and follow up camp. So hope that makes sense.
[00:10:49] Laura L Bernhard: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, because I was going, I was going to ask like, okay, how long she did these campaigns, but my question is, how long should you do these campaigns before you start this next campaign objectives?
[00:10:59] [00:11:00] So the next one is brand awareness. How long do you have to do the likes followers for your business page before you do the brand awareness?
[00:11:07] Alex Caragiannides: Yeah. Great question. So the likened followup campaign, once you start it, it should run indefinitely, meaning whatever. Okay. And you can lower it as low as $1 a day.
[00:11:17] You always want that engine moving. Cause you always want the algorithms working in your favor. So I would say if you're starting fresh, no campaigns, you start off with your likened fall campaign. I would say two weeks, 10 to 14 days later, then you add the second campaign objective, which is your brand awareness objective.
[00:11:36] And that runs parallel. At the same time was your likened follow-up campaign. And with the brand awareness objective is just one of my favorite objectives, by the way. It's exactly that it increases your brand and it makes your brand more aware in front of your target audience. So now that you're getting likes and followers, You're getting people that like, and follow your page.
[00:11:57] Facebook is not what it used to be in the sense [00:12:00] that if you post, if you, if you have a post, whether it's an image, a video, whatnot, it doesn't organically do well anymore. It used to not anymore. Okay. Now Facebook says, Hey, you want to use our platform? You want to get your message in front of your target audience.
[00:12:14] Right. So the organic reach on Facebook unfortunately is very low. It's like one or 2% of who likes and follows your page will actually get notified and see your posts in their newsfeed. Now they can go to your page or community page and see your posts anytime they want, but it's not how it used to be.
[00:12:30] Okay. So we have to put a little bit of money. And awareness campaigns. And I like to run brand awareness campaigns on different types of posts. It doesn't mean I'm trying to increase my brand as a realtor or my brokerage. Just my message. So I content is so important on social media platforms. You got to have content that's relevant for your target audience.
[00:12:50] In this case, you're going to post it hopefully daily on your Facebook page or community page. And then once a week I run right and awareness campaigns. So every [00:13:00] Monday I'm gonna run an ad as a brand awareness campaign toward particular posts. Maybe the one that I did last week, I got some good organic reach and I'm going to run that for seven days, Monday through Sunday.
[00:13:12] And then the following Monday, I'm going to pick a different post, right? So this strategy works 52 weeks. Every week, you want to run a different brand awareness campaign and what this is doing, it's complimenting your likened follow-up campaign, and it's getting the algorithms to continuously work in your favor.
[00:13:29] And what you want ultimately is Facebook to reward you. And we'll talk about different campaign objectives later, but we're building the base here. We're building the base and the foundation. Okay. So I want to
[00:13:39] Laura L Bernhard: point out that. On top of your like, and follower campaign, your brand awareness campaign. I know that you see, you have to post about four times a day in your.
[00:13:50] Facebook community page that you just discussed, right?
[00:13:54] Alex Caragiannides: Yeah. But the minimum is two minimum is two a day, [00:14:00] two posts a day, 14 posts a week. That's the minimum. Okay. And again, you should learn how to leverage technology to automate this. Okay. But the minimum is two preferably four times a day. So if you're going to do only two, I'd recommend like an 8:00 AM and a 4:00 PM.
[00:14:16] And your time. If you're going to do four times a day, I recommend every four hours from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM. Should I be 8:00 AM noon? It'd be 4:00 PM. It'd be 8:00 PM. Okay. But again, minimum two times a day. And then best case scenario is probably going to be four times a day. Because again, you want the algorithms to work in your February and remember people aren't seeing these posts, like I said, it's only a one or 2% organic reach, so it's not like they're going to see your four posts every day on there.
[00:14:45] It's not, it doesn't work like that. People aren't on their platform on, on their cell phone, going through Facebook all day. Every day, the average is one or two hours a day. It's crazy. The average consumers on Facebook want to charge the day, but that's spread out throughout the day. That's [00:15:00] why you're you're you're in a good spot.
[00:15:02] If you could do at least an ADM or 4:00 PM, even better spot, you can do eight noon, 4:00 PM and 8:00 PM. And again, we want the algorithm, Morgan, your favor. Sorry to cut you off. No,
[00:15:12] Laura L Bernhard: no, no. That's, that's a great, that's good information for people to know. It gives people like a template to follow. So what I wanted to ask you.
[00:15:21] Okay. For the likes and followers page, like I can guess. And you kind of put what the community is about. Tell people to follow it, but what do you put for your brand awareness? You, you said that you just kind of take posts that were doing well and you kind of put them out. As brand awareness as in like, Hey, work community.
[00:15:40] And this is what we talk about. Am I correct when I assume that? Yeah. Yeah. It's
[00:15:43] Alex Caragiannides: a great question, but let me go a little bit deeper. So, um, so I like quotes. I like images, motivation, inspirational stuff. So you want to mix your posts again? I'll give you an example, a real estate professionals. Remodeling shows are very popular.
[00:15:59] [00:16:00] HGTV is one of the best channels for people that own homes or want to whole homes. And the ones that people love watching the most are remodeling shows. You want to give tips. You want to give, uh, strategies for people that own homes that are buying homes that want to clean up their home. They're selling their homes.
[00:16:16] So it's not like you're not going to talk about real estate. You can. You're not going to talk about yours. Right. And I'm just going to talk about your services and your brokerage. You're going to talk about things that relate to people. Buying, selling a living, traveling channels are very popular. Food channels are very popular.
[00:16:31] So the good thing is you should be posting or at least running brand awareness campaigns are things happening in your name? That's a great post, right? So every Thursday, I like my clients to post something that's happening in the weekend, coming up. Cool things to do this weekend. 4th of July weekend, labor day weekend, may Memorial day weekend.
[00:16:50] Just give me an examples. That's a good one. Community spotlights, right? You, you live in an area. You have a 15 mile radius of where you live. There's a ton of communities [00:17:00] in that 15 mile radius. You could spotlight a different community every single week business spotlight. You live in an area, 15 mile radius, ton of businesses in your area, spotlight a business every single week, spotlight apart, spotlight an event, right?
[00:17:14] So it's people, places, things to do, events charities. You want to make your community page like a Google page. That's on Facebook. You don't want people going to Google to search, even though they're going to, you want people to come to your community page to find information about the community that you're serving.
[00:17:32] Okay, so you want to become the celebrity, the authority, the expert of your marketplace. This is how you do it. Okay. And when you want brand awareness campaigns, you're just going to pick a particular post. And I just told you that you're going to run that ad to that post. And the objective is going to be brand awareness, which increases your brand and gets that message in front of more of your target audience.
[00:17:51] Because now you're paying a little bit of money and this objective by the way is not an expensive objective. You can get away with a dollar a day on this one as well, $5 a day. But [00:18:00] remember you only run this per week. But you're running it every single week and it runs parallel to the light.
[00:18:06] Laura L Bernhard: Okay. Love that.
[00:18:07] So then if we move on to the third one, and then we go to video views. Okay.
[00:18:12] Alex Caragiannides: So now people are like, oh no, I have to
[00:18:15] Laura L Bernhard: put videos. So tell me what kind of videos people can post. And. Why is this important at this stage in the whole funnel?
[00:18:25] Alex Caragiannides: Yeah, let's cover the latter first, which is why this is important. And I believe videos is the best form of marketing.
[00:18:33] The cheapest form of advertising. Okay. Advertisers is when you spend money, marketing is there could be a lot of different marketing campaigns, videos. One of them, the video marketing is the best form of marketing. That's the cheapest that goes a long way. Okay. So Facebook owns Instagram. They own WhatsApp.
[00:18:50] They own, uh, DM, uh, Facebook messenger and Facebook is in competition with Google and Google owns YouTube. Okay. And you Google YouTube are the [00:19:00] two largest search engines on the planet. Facebook wants a piece of that market. So the more videos we put on Facebook, the more, uh, Facebook where your board in addition, video views are very inexpensive.
[00:19:12] The average video views about one. So as a marketer, if you understand this, you can get 10,000 video views for a hundred dollars. Why that's important is because those 10,000 video views that I could see who was. 50% or more of my video. For example, if I did a video on a community that I lived in and I wanted to promote the community and I did a video on it.
[00:19:38] And then I posted that video when I ran the ads, that video, which is a video of you campaign, and I spent a hundred dollars. And I got 10,000 views, which is pretty typical. I can then retarget the audience that watch at least 50% or more of my video, why that's important because if somebody is watching 50% or more, let's say it's a two minute video and they watch at least a minute or more.
[00:19:59] That's [00:20:00] probably somebody I'm going to want to stay close with. Right. So then I can retarget that audience and put them into different campaigns. So the third campaign objective. It's video views and video views are powerful and everybody, and yes, you made a comment like, oh no videos. Unfortunately, yes.
[00:20:17] Videos need to be part of the game. I don't care what industry you're in, especially real estate and mortgage. You shouldn't be doing a video tip of the week. Every single week. You could do a market up. One week you can do a community spotlight. Why don't we do a business spotlight one week? And then you could do maybe an FAQ, a frequently asked question video.
[00:20:36] Why don't we? There's four videos. There's one video every week of the month. If you do that consistently for an entire year, I guarantee you, you will have an advantage over your competition. Like you won't even be closed. The average realtor in north America does one video. Yeah, it's ridiculous. Um, so if you want a 52 times advantage over your competition just to a video every week, no, one's competing with you and, [00:21:00] and, and the more videos you do, the better you get at doing videos, right?
[00:21:03] The better you get people complaining, like they're not going to do in videos. They don't know what to say. They don't have a bin set up. Those are all excuses, obviously, because nobody's born a really good video person, right? I'm not, I was never really good on videos. I was never really good at speaking.
[00:21:18] I had the practice and I got very interested in it. And I'm not saying I'm the best person that does videos or the best person that speaks. Um, I'm just very comfortable, very confident. And I know my, and I know my industry. I know what I do. So if you're a real estate professional, you're a mortgage professional and you're really into your career.
[00:21:36] It shouldn't be an issue at all. Right. It's like having a conversation with somebody at a coffee shop and they're asking you about, Hey, how's the market, how's the market going? You're going to have a nice conversation with them because this is your business. That's how you got to look at it. Look directly in the camera.
[00:21:48] Like you're looking at somebody's eyes and smile and have fun and talk about whatever you want to talk about. There's your video and the more you do it, you're going to get at it. But video view campaigns. Ran [00:22:00] awareness, right? Awareness campaigns compliment the light and followup campaigns. So
[00:22:05] Laura L Bernhard: just before we get into engagement, I just want to add a lot of people get really, really stuck when it comes to making videos, because they're like, oh my God, what do I talk about?
[00:22:16] People ask me that all the time too. And this is for everyone listening. You don't know how much you know, and how much you can help people just having a conversation like you and I, what we're having, we can. We can chop this up into, into little videos and help a bunch of people. Right. And for everyone listening, that's the same thing.
[00:22:34] Like you help people every single day, you hear the conversations that you're having turn them into videos,
[00:22:41] Alex Caragiannides: right? Yeah. I actually, I want to, I want to compliment your quick tip. So any industry you're in again, I'm just going to always, I'm just going to keep it with real estate because that's who I serve, but this relates to everybody.
[00:22:57] Realtors for example, have frequently asked [00:23:00] questions that are very consistent across the board on the bicycle. And on the sell side. So if they're helping a buyer, there's typically about 10 or 15, FAQ's frequently asked questions that are very consistent, the same, and the same on the sell side. If you're helping somebody sell their property list of property, that's about 10 or 15 consistent questions.
[00:23:17] So here's a trick. Take those questions and record FAQ videos, answering those questions. On the buy side on the sell side, let's say there's 10 on the, by town in the south, you got 20 videos right there. Now those videos, not only can you use them on social media platforms, you can use those as follow up.
[00:23:36] You can send them out via email. You can send them out via text. You can transcribe the video into a word document, and now you have a blog article. Now you have an email broadcast. Here's a good one for you. One video could be redistributed eight different ways. Okay, you could post on Facebook. You could post on Instagram.
[00:23:54] You can post on your Google, my business listing. You could post on YouTube. You could post on LinkedIn. [00:24:00] You could transcribe it and have a blog article on your website. You can email broadcast it. You can text broadcast. It there's eight different ways. Okay. And here's a nervous thing. This is important because a lot of people struggle with they don't, they don't have time.
[00:24:14] All right. Just one of the biggest objectives I get. I said, why don't you do videos? Well, I don't have time. Well, we all have the same amount of time, right? It's 24 hours. All of us. Right. But here's a trip. All it takes is two hours. Two hours once a month. This is how I do it. One hour. You're going to time block.
[00:24:32] Let's say it's the first Tuesday of every month at 10:00 AM. Your time block one hour. And that's going to be your creative time. So that one hour, the first Tuesday of every month, you're going to have a creative time block in your calendar. And all you're going to do is create a me thing. Okay. What kind of videos do I want to record this month?
[00:24:50] All right. You're going to come up with the titles, the topics, the bullet points. You're not going to record the video. This is just creative time. And to do some research, what's trending, maybe typing your [00:25:00] area, the area you work, what's trending act like you're a consumer. And if you're serving buyers act like you're a buyer and buyers typically are looking for communities, best places to live in this area, cost of living in this area.
[00:25:12] That's really what they're looking for. Then I'll look into homes right away. They're not Zillow right away. They're not trying to get a mortgage application done right away. They're looking at community. Okay. So act as if you're a buyer, do some research on Google and YouTube and find out what's trending.
[00:25:26] And then come up with your list. Maybe a four or five topics, which are videos. That's one hour, you're done. Put your information down on paper. You're done then maybe the third Tuesday. Third Tuesday of every month, recurring every month you have a one hour time block called production time, and that's when you're going to actually record your videos.
[00:25:46] And I would, I would chunk my videos, meaning I would record four or five, six videos on one session. I took a record 10 videos in one hour, right? Once a month. That's what I would recommend you do now for only two hour commitment. Once a [00:26:00] month, you can create the videos, record the videos and distribute them one video tip every single.
[00:26:07] Laura L Bernhard: That's great. Great advice for everyone listening. If you need help, reach out to Alex,
[00:26:15] Alex Caragiannides: but you don't really need me. You guys can do this all on your own. Most people have is they just don't have a strategy. Yeah. And I think that's true.
[00:26:23] Laura L Bernhard: Yeah, the key is that people can do it alone and you just gave them a template
[00:26:26] Alex Caragiannides: to do it.
[00:26:27] So, yeah. Yeah. The key is strategy. So most people think they have a Facebook ads problem. Very rarely does somebody have a Facebook ads problem, but the technical part about running the ad is the least of your concerns. Okay. I run an agency, we have a, I own digital marketing and branding agency and the people that run ads for my clients.
[00:26:45] We run about 500 ads a week. They're in their low twenties. Right. You don't need a high technical IQ to run Facebook ads. That's not where the magic is. The magic is in the strategy. The strategy makes running ads easy, [00:27:00] not the technical part. Okay. Because you need a good offer. I mean, there's a lot involved in strategy, but I'd focus on that.
[00:27:05] That's what I'm focused on.
[00:27:08] Laura L Bernhard: Okay. So the force campaign objective is engagement. So at this point, are we still using the posts that we're posting in our. Facebook community every day. And then we're trying to get people to engage on these posts. Is
[00:27:24] Alex Caragiannides: that what you mean by that? Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
[00:27:26] Engagement is on, on social media platforms. Engagement is like, A comment, a tag, a share a video of you. Those are called engagements, right? Engagement is very important for us as marketers because we can retarget based on engagement. So let me give you an example. Let's say I'm driving on the highway and there's a billboard.
[00:27:45] The billboard has an advertisement on it. Let's say it's an attorney. Okay. And it's the attorney's name and it was a phone number. It's a website. So when I look at that billboard, as I'm driving, that's called an impression. All right. That's like reach my eyeballs, saw [00:28:00] the billboard advertisers sell space on that billboard based on how many people drive that highway and look at that billboard.
[00:28:08] Right? So example, a billboard on a, on a very busy highway could have 60,000, a hundred thousand impressions a month. Right? Maybe even more. Those are eyeballs. Okay. That's impressive. Impressions are very important for the platform. In this case, Facebook engagement is that same billboard. I saw it and I called that number.
[00:28:31] I went to that website, not as I was driving. Right. I went to my home office. I went in my office and I went to that number. I made the call. I went to the website. I opted in that's called the engaged. On social media platforms. Engagement is very important because we can retarget based on engagement. So if somebody tags my post shares, my post likes my posts, watches my video, that data, I have access to it as a marker.
[00:28:54] I can not retarget it. And put a different ad in front of them, send them to a different rabbit hole or a different [00:29:00] landing page or to my website or as a realtor. I promote maybe my, just list that to that audience. My just sold to that audience because it's a warmer audience. So engagement campaigns, which is the fourth.
[00:29:12] It's very important. And typically I like to run engagement campaigns on posts that are like, like question, right? So what would you prefer a vacation in the mountains or vacation in the ocean is just an example, right? That that will cause organic engagement by itself because. And then when you run an ad behind it, it just makes the ad perform better.
[00:29:34] And how you get more engagement. And remember you're targeting the audience that has watched your videos. You're targeting the audience that has liked to followed your page. Right? You're targeting the audience that you ran brand awareness campaigns to. So this is all coming together. I don't like marketing to cold traffic, meaning I don't like marketing to a cold audience.
[00:29:56] They don't know who I am. They never seen me before. I have to warm them up first. [00:30:00] Right. That's why we do a follow on light campaign. That's why we do a brand awareness champions. Why don't we do video views? Because now I am developing audiences that are mine as a marketer in their mind. And then I want to keep that audience in my ecosystem.
[00:30:13] And now the engagement campaigns actually gets its audience to engage like common tax. Yeah. And I'm building my audience. I'm building my audience. I hope that makes sense.
[00:30:24] Laura L Bernhard: Yeah. That's super important is that you're highlighting that you're not directing these objectives towards cold audience, a cold audience, right?
[00:30:32] It's the people that you're already engaging already, like your community page that have already gone through basically the three other campaign objectives, and then we're just adding onto it. So then the next one is to drive traffic. So this one seems like. Very important driving traffic to your website.
[00:30:52] Tell us how you
[00:30:53] Alex Caragiannides: do that. Jennifer's call a traffic campaign. It's exactly that it's [00:31:00] driving traffic, not necessarily to a website, I'm going to recommend driving traffic to a website because the problem with driving traffic to a website is there's too many options. Okay. You have too many tabs on the top.
[00:31:11] You have too much going on. And when you confuse a prospect or a lead, you lose the prospect or the lead. Remember that. So you don't want to confuse people. You want to drive them to specifically a landing page. So for example, if you're a realtor at this point, Now you've earned the right to promote your property.
[00:31:29] You've earned the right to promote, maybe adjust listed for an open house or adjust. So, and what you want to do is you want to take the same audience. That's been engaging in your other posts, watching your videos, and you want to drive traffic to a landing page. That's a simple landing page with one message won't call to action.
[00:31:49] So if you're promoting a adjust listed, it would be a landing page just to that point. Right. If you're promoting adjust. So it'd be a landing page too. Just that property, maybe images or videos of that [00:32:00] property. Maybe you want to promote a buyer guy. Maybe you want to promote a seller guy. Maybe you want to promote an FAQ video series.
[00:32:08] Hey, if you're a first time buyer looking to relocate to this area. Click below for a free video series of mistakes to avoid et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right? So that's what a traffic campaign is. You're driving traffic. I recommend to a landing page as one call to action. One message. Keep it very simple.
[00:32:26] Don't confuse your prospect and those run as needed. Those aren't running indefinitely, right? Those run as needed and they compliment the other campaigns. They all work. They all work together. So the,
[00:32:41] Laura L Bernhard: the drive traffic that's very much, let's say it's like an e-book. You want people to go to the landing page and then sign up to the ebook?
[00:32:49] Right? You're taking people off the platform for the
[00:32:52] Alex Caragiannides: first time. Yes. Taking somebody off of the Facebook platform. You're okay. Doing it. Cause you warmed up the [00:33:00] audience. When you're trying to take somebody off the platform, let's say as your first campaign, because that's what most people do. That's not good.
[00:33:06] It's a cold audience that Facebook, Facebook's not going to be happy because you're taking their clients out of their platform and you're redirecting them somewhere else. Not, not the best timing. It happens later on down the equation when the client or the lead in this case have warmed up. Awesome.
[00:33:23] Laura L Bernhard: Okay.
[00:33:24] So then after drive traffic, you have lead form campaign.
[00:33:29] Alex Caragiannides: Tell us about that. Yeah. So now we're getting a little bit more aggressive with our objectives at this point. This is what the sixth campaign in the equation here. Now we actually want to generate a lead and lead form campaigns. I love them. A lot of people don't like them because they don't have a strategy.
[00:33:47] That's why they don't like it because their leads are bad quality. Anybody at the top of the funnel. So a funnel to me is like top, middle. Right. That's a funnel. Anybody has a top of the funnel. You should not be trying to get a lead from them. It's too early [00:34:00] in this stage at this point, this is more of the bottom of the.
[00:34:04] We've warmed up this audience, we're engaging with them. They're watching our videos. They hit, they've seen our brand and followed our page. They've gone to a landing page and maybe downloaded a buyer guide. At this point, we've earned the right to try to generate a lead at the bottom of the funnel. And what happens in the bottom of the funnel with a lead form campaign is the quality goes up.
[00:34:25] And the cost per lead goes down. Quality goes up, hospitaly goes down. Why? Because we've warmed up the audience and the lead form campaign is basically like a landing page. In Facebook and they don't leave Facebook. So when somebody sees an ad, let's say it's a, it's a list of single story, a three car garage homes in a certain area.
[00:34:47] Okay. Remember there's riches in the niches as a marketer, you got to remember your audience deserves his own message. So if you're targeting a first time buyer and you want to just promote single story homes, there's people that only, we only wanted a [00:35:00] single story home, right. There's people that don't want to stay.
[00:35:02] They don't want to climb up the stairs and just want similar story. They want one lock. And if you target that type of real estate, that audience whoever's interested in, like that reticular activator ID I gave you in the beginning, whoever's interested in just a single story type of home is going to see that ad.
[00:35:18] And if they're in the market to potentially buy one day, not, not this month, maybe it's six months, a year, two years doesn't matter. They will be more inclined to click that ad and fill out a form, which is the lead form campaign. And now you have a quality level. The quality prospect, as opposed to, if you did this in the top of the funnel, and you've got a bunch of options, but nobody followed up, nobody answered the calls.
[00:35:39] Everybody's like, what are you talking about? I don't, I don't want to have a need for your services click. Right? That's why people say Facebook ads. They're bad because they're still strategy. And you're trying to generate a lead at the top of the funnel at this point, the bottom of that, you're in the right to generate a quality lead and your cost per lead is going to go down and your claw is going to go up.
[00:35:56] That's a lead form campaign objective, and those run as needed [00:36:00] as well. They don't run indefinitely. They run as needed as well.
[00:36:03] Laura L Bernhard: So the lead form campaign, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah. Um, a lead form that's already in Facebook, right? You're not providing a landing pager form. It's something that's already connected in the
[00:36:15] Alex Caragiannides: platform.
[00:36:16] Yeah. It's, it's a landing page in Facebook and asks for first name, last name, email, phone number you don't want to ask for too much. That's basically those are the four categories. That's all I ask. First name, last name, email phone number, and you want to separate the first and last name because it's easier to export the data and then you can upload it into your CSV file or your uploaded to your CRM.
[00:36:34] And it's easier when you have first name, last name, email phone number, but that's exactly what, okay.
[00:36:39] Laura L Bernhard: Awesome. Good bonus tip. So finally we reached the last one. And this is the reach objective, and this is by using retargeting. So I know you mentioned retargeting a lot before, but for people who might not know what that is just quickly explain what retargeting is.
[00:36:54] And then we can get into this
[00:36:55] Alex Caragiannides: objective campaign. And just so you know, this is my favorite campaign
[00:37:00] objective to run. Um, it's kind of one of those video views where the little money goes a long way. So retargeting is kind of like the foundation of marketing. For example, let's say I go to Amazon. And I look at by August boots for my wife.
[00:37:14] Okay. August boots. I make the purchase or I don't make the purchase. I leave Amazon and I'm browsing on the internet. I go to my G suite for my Gmail. I'm looking at ESPN to look at my sports. Now, all of a sudden, August boots are following me. All right. That's called retargeting retargeting as the foundation of all kinds of marketing, every business retardants.
[00:37:37] Okay. That's it's the cheapest form of advertising and it goes the farthest, just like the video views. So the last campaign objective we do now, we bring it all to you. So based on video views, based on engagement, based on people opting into my lead forms, maybe my buyer, guys, that audience. Now I'm going to retarget.
[00:37:57] Now you want to [00:38:00] put your image, your, your, your services in front of them everywhere they go. Now you've earned that, right? So now what I recommend is if you're a real estate professional, you have banner ads on Google and the banner ads is I'm a real estate broker in this area. I'm here to serve you. You want them following you everywhere on Google.
[00:38:19] You want to do the same thing on Facebook and Instagram. That's the last piece of this puzzle, but you've earned the right to do it because they've seen all your other stuff. You've led with education. You've led with entertainment. You've led with inspiration, right? You weren't salesy at all, but not the end.
[00:38:35] It's okay to reach your audience once or twice a week in their newsfeed with who you really are and how you can help. As it relates to buying and or selling for investing in real estate.
[00:38:47] Laura L Bernhard: Yeah, because now you've built that trust. They know who you are. They're not strangers anymore. So just to wrap this up, because this has been quite interesting.
[00:38:57] Is there something about Facebook [00:39:00] ads that you want the audience to know that I may not have asked you?
[00:39:04] Alex Caragiannides: Yeah. I mean, what I would say is this Facebook advertising is a longterm strategy. Okay. It's not sure. All right. The results, the exponential growth of your Facebook account and running ads really, really, uh, works in your favor over the long haul.
[00:39:23] Okay. So if you're going to get into Facebook and I recommend everybody does everybody, you should put a piece of your marketing budget into the Facebook platform. I recommend you do it for the long. So again, if you're a real estate professional, Facebook should be part of your strategy. Instagram should be part of your strategy.
[00:39:39] Google and YouTube should be part of your strategy. LinkedIn should be part of your strategy, email, broadcasting, every week. Part of your strategy, texting part of your strategy, right? These are all components of your strategy. To deliver your services, your message in front of your target audience. So you can serve more people.
[00:39:57] Okay. But just look at Facebook as [00:40:00] a long-term play, not a short-term play because if you're in it for the short run, you're not going to get an ROI. You're going to quit too soon. The biggest issue I see with people that come to me for consulting so they can take a look at their Facebook account is number one.
[00:40:13] They quit too soon. And number two, they don't have. Okay. So develop a strategy, take these seven components. We just talked about roll a bit deeper at each of them, everything I just shared with you, you can do your research online and go even deeper. Okay. And then develop your own strategy. Identify who you're really serving.
[00:40:31] So if you're a realtor again, you don't just serve everybody. Yes. You can do business with anybody, but that's not going to work in your favor. You want to have maybe a, a couple lanes you focus on. So if I'm a realtor and I want to focus on. Okay, that's great. That's a good start. But you got to go a little bit deeper.
[00:40:47] What kind of buyer is it? Is it a first-time buyer? Is it a veteran that just got out of the military? And I was relocated to a different area. Is it a luxury buyer? Is it an investor? Right. All those that I just told you are different [00:41:00] messages. It's going to get their attention. Same thing with the seller.
[00:41:02] Typically a first time buyer is going to eventually be a first time. A first time seller is a very different message. It's going to get their attention to something that's so five or six properties before, or as a flipper or as a, for sale by owner. All right. So start off with identifying who your target audience is.
[00:41:17] First, then based on that target audience, build a message. That's going to get their attention and then decide what platform in this case, you're talking about Facebook, you're going to use and develop your strategy based on these seven campaign objectives we just talked about and go in it for the long.
[00:41:33] Okay, don't give up going for the long haul. As long as you're in business, you need to advertise and market your services, but this is just a unique way of doing it. That's going to put you in a different category. I call it a blue ocean, and it's going to give you a distinctive advantage over your company.
[00:41:49] Laura L Bernhard: I love that. Well, Alex, thank you so much for sharing all this information with us. Just let the audience know where they can find you if
[00:41:57] Alex Caragiannides: they need your help. No problem. At all my website, it's the [00:42:00] best place to go. I have a ton of free videos. I have a free masterclass on there on how to use social media, digital marketing, the right way.
[00:42:07] I recommend all of you. Watch that master class about 20 minutes of your time. I have a lot of different stuff that you guys could look at read, watch. And my website is B S M vault.com as B as in boy, S as in Sam, M as in Mary, a vault like a bank vault, V a U L T. B S M vault.com. Go on there. Research. You need me all my information is there.
[00:42:30] Awesome. Thank you so much, Alex. You're welcome. Thanks for having me.
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