Adomas BaltagalvisFacebook Advertising Expert
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Facebook advertising expert with $2mn+ spent on Facebook ads for clients. Specialising in lead generation and sales for online businesses. www.adomasbaltagalvis.com


Recent Answers


Scott shared some great tips that I completely agree with!

From my personal experience, starting out as a Facebook advertising freelancer was tough, especially at the beginning. However, I already had a few assets that really helped me out.

First, I invested a ton of time into learning as much as I can about social media and Facebook marketing and advertising. That allowed me to get a two-months long unpaid internship at a social media agency, where I learned more about Facebook marketing and advertising with real clients.

Then, I was able to get a 1-year-long traineeship at a travel agency, where I learned even more about online marketing and received much more experience managing Facebook ad campaigns.

During that time, I also started a personal blog where I began writing about social media, marketing, and especially Facebook advertising. I'd say this was the most crucial one into advancing my career.

I suggest you to google an article called "8 Steps to Getting What You Want… Without Formal Credentials" on Tim Ferriss blog - it's absolutely brilliant and I used it to guide my own effort.

In short, you really must earn someone's trust before you ask something. You can do that by creating useful and valuable content first and using that as a proof that you know the subject. You can then take it and show it to a potential customer and suggest to implement everything for free, but for a testimonial and case study.

If it goes successful, do it with another person, and another, and another. Find clients on Upwork or contact them directly, or ask your friends for referrals. Complete a couple projects and then start asking for money. It's a long process but it is definitely achievable.

I hope that helps!

Adomas Baltagalvis


Hi,
I agree with both Cory and Brian on this one - you might be able to start off by yourself, but it's very likely that you will need some guidance later on. And I'm not just saying that because I'm managing other people's FB campaigns or do coaching.

We don't know much about your business, or which country it comes from, but the main thing you have to know is the cost of advertising in the US - it's significantly higher than in the rest of the world, reaching the CPMs of $20 or even $30 and more for some very specific audiences (that's $20+ just for getting 1000 impressions).

That means that a 'small scale' campaign in the US can cost up to 10 times more than in South America, Eastern Europe or South East Asia, for example. If you want to do that in the US and run some split-testing to analyse a few audiences, offers and ad designs, the bare minimum will probably be around $1000/month on ad spend.

Talking about agencies, some of them take a fixed fee per month, others charge a percentage from your total ad budget - that can vary from 15% to 30%. So you will have to ask yourself whether it's worth for you to experiment with ads, or if it's better to hire someone to help you, when the cost of a mistake is very high.

If you plan to spend $1000/month, and we can help you improve your ad campaigns by 10% after a single call by helping you with the right setup, audience selection, split-testing and optimisation... you're already in a positive. :)

I've had some great results from helping businesses optimise their Facebook ad campaigns - let me know if you need any help with yours.

Cheers!
Adomas


Facebook are incredible for making a first impression exactly because of the targeting - you can target not just by the location (country, states, cities, zip codes), gender and age, but by a huge variety of other choices: education, relationship status, job industry, income, interests, behaviours... everything is there!

However, Facebook ads work much better for B2C companies rather than B2B. The simple reason: why do people go to Facebook? Why do You go to Facebook? - to engage with friends and family members, to find some interesting things, catch up on the news. But people do NOT go to Facebook with an intention to buy.

So, even with the incredibly power of interests targeting, there's so little you can do. For example, if you were promoting legal services, you could continue doing that for years and years without any success - if I didn't have any legal case, I wouldn't take any notice into the ads.

On the opposite, if there's already a heavy need for your products and if they have a short 'life', the awareness campaigns can quickly generate immediate conversions too.

So there's a combination - in most cases you need to use the brand awareness campaigns with the acquisition campaigns. Best of all, you can use the Facebook remarketing to target even your current clients, subscribers or website visitors and generate conversions in that way.


A lot of great advice here.

On top of that, here's a brilliant article by my friend from a startup called UniPlaces - I hope you'll find it useful! http://albuquerque.io/what-we-did-to-grow-student-marketplace-uniplaces-by-1000-in-2014


Hi,

you can start off by using Google Hangouts, which is free and not too difficult to set up: http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/hangouts-on-air-for-webinars/

And once you're ready to go, I'd suggest GoToWebinar - they're one of the most popular webinar tools out there.

Cheers,
Adomas


Howdy,

first, it's a pitty that we don't know much about the product you offer or the exact target audience (country? city? age? interests? family status?), or your goals (what kind of sales? how many? what's the acceptable cost per acquisition?), as it makes any advice less relevant.

From the general point of view, I would base the strategy on the short term goals and long-term goals, and would develop the activities accordingly.

There are many different channels that can be tested, but the first questions must be asked before getting into them: 1) target audience 2) they're biggest problems and dreams 3) where do they spend time 4) what are your goals 5) what is the budget.

If press is working fine, continue that, just find a way to convert that exposure better - if people come to your website, do you have any lead magnets to offer in order to get their email addresses? Do you have a set autoresponder campaign? Do you use remarketing on Facebook or Adwords to bring those visitors back?

Content creation is a major driver of organic traffic, but again, it would depend on the product and the competition. You mentiond your customers are asking questions, so you probably have a lot of space to create educational/informational content on your site that would drive organic traffic and could also be used for paid campaigns - promoting them on social networks with ads.

Search Engine Marketing, Adwords & BIng, could also be an option, depending on the competition and your budget - some keywords are much more expensive than the others, but you might find ways to bid on very specific long-tail keywords that convert very well on the site at a reasonable price.

To sum up - it's really, really difficult to tell without knowing more details. The above mentioned things are some of the activities that can be taken. I'd focus primarily on setting the sales funnel in such way that you'd be generating emails first and converting them into sales next.

I'd be more than happy to have a chat with you, in order to learn more about the business, so that we can come up with the best strategy for the promotion. Let me know!

Best,
Adomas Baltagalvis
www.AdomasBaltagalvis.com


I'd first start with quite a strict split between: 1) advertising on social networks and, 2) communicating on social networks.

Let's start with advertising. As Moon Ahmed mentioned, you have three primary networks you could advertise on, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and each of those has their own advantages and disadvantages. Facebook is brilliant as you can use very precise interests targeting to reach a killer target audience. You can also use the so-called Custom Audiences to advertise to your current clients and Website Custom Audiences to advertise to anyone who visited your website - those will be incredibly targeted people and you can remind them about your services. As for Twitter, you will need to test many other B2B business handles to check if you can raise interest among their audience. And LinkedIn - well, that is the absolutely best tool for making B2B connections and you can truly find businesses and people who are in your target audience. However, LinkedIn ads are the most expensive from the three, so be ready to pay as much as $5 for a *click* and potentially even more. Even if it's expensive, it sure is worth trying out.

Taking a step back, instead of just promoting your services with ads, I'd really focus on lead generation. An absolute must in these situations is a strong lead magnet that you would then promote - it can be a free guide, an ebook or even a free live webinar that would solve your perfect client's problems.

Now, talking about the communication, this is were the going gets tough for B2B companies. First, you MUST understand your target audience and the network. As someone who's worked with plenty of B2B to B2C companies, I can tell that it is very, very difficult to promote B2B activities on Facebook. And the main reason for that - people do not come to do business on Facebook. Let me repeat that - people do NOT come to Facebook to do business. Instead, they come to engage with their friends and families - to be social. So that's our primary goal for Facebook communication - we promote less of our B2B services on Facebook and more of the actual people. That builds trust and makes stronger relationships. And that's what I'd suggest for you - introduce your employees, show your office, what you are working on, where you're participating, etc, and people will trust you more.

As for Twitter, their search is the most powerful thing ever. Just use it to look for people that are struggling with problems that your business can solve, and jump in to help them.

And finally, LinkedIn. So far I've been very happy with LinkedIn and that's where we've taken our entire B2B communication to. The spreadability of ordinary posts on LinkedIn is amazing, and even with just a few hundred followers we can reach thousands of other people. As people go to LinkedIn to do business, the communication fits right it.

I hope that helps! If you'd like to discuss this topic even further, feel free to give me a shout.

Cheers!
Adomas


Hi!

I think Facebook ads would work for you the best. In general, Facebook ads are amazing at building awareness among key target audiences, so I'm sure it can help you achieve your goals. AdWords rely entirely on searches for different keywords, so you won't be able to run a quick campaign.

What I'd start with is using the Audience Insights tool (http://www.facebook.com/ads/audience_insights/) to find the most precise and relevant interests for the target audience. I can tell that you can use 'Patrice O'Neal' as an interest for your targeting, so that's already great. However, it's a small audience (~40k in the US), so you will need to find some additional similar interests (Facebook is telling me that 'Jim Norton' and 'Opie Radio' could be close too?).

Next, it will depend on the country where you want to do the promotion. If it's the US, your costs will be the highest - the US is the most expensive location. So you'll need to check your results by different demographics in the Ad Reports. I'd also probably go by choosing exclusively Desktop News Feed and Desktop Sidebar ad placements, as I doubt people would be actively sponsoring projects on mobile.

So that could work amazingly well to reach that audience, raise awareness, and get them to contribute.

Some additional ideas: I'd really think about whether you can produce any viral type of content. If that's a documentary, maybe you can have '10 facts no-one new about...', 'secret photos of....', 'the hidden truth of...', 'List of XY best jokes of...' (or something along those lines) and create an article on that. Then, I'd push that to StumbleUpon and Reddit, and also use their advertising platforms to promote it. They don't offer as precise targeting options as Facebook, but you never know what could catch up and spread virally.

If you'd like me to help you with Facebook ads, give me a shout and I'll be glad to assist you!

Best,
Adomas


Hi,

sadly, knowing the names of your customers is not enough. However, if you have their email addresses or phone numbers, it is possible to use the so-called Facebook Custom Audiences and create a custom list of those people.

You would upload the list of email addresses or phone numbers to Facebook and it will anonymously match them to individual Facebook profiles - after that happens, you will have a custom target audience that you can reach with any ad campaigns. This can be very powerful, as you can reach exactly just your current clients or subscribers and create highly-targeted advertising campaigns.

If you had such information (emails or phone numbers) and needed any help with creating Facebook custom audiences, feel free to get in touch and I'll be glad to help.

Cheers!
Adomas


Hi,

"Look buddy, you don't want to spend on a CPM model, so we'll force you to start to pay more for your CPC because your offer is so niche, that you'll waste our impression inventory and not even make us a penny" - love it!

As you probably know, Facebook advertising is based on the auction principle - every single minute Facebook holds thousands, even millions of mini auctions for the limited advertising space on the platform. The same way your ads get a 'quality score' on Google Adwords, Facebook will also use plenty of algorithms to give some kind of a quality score to your ads - if they're good, you might pay less, if they're worse, you'll need to pay more to get your ad shown, otherwise you'll loose the auctions and your ads won't be shown at all.

The reason your ads stopped being displayed, is, quite obviously, that something changed and you started losing the auctions. A) Maybe the competition for the same target audience increased tremendously during those days - if there are 100 more advertisers that want to reach those people, it will naturally increase the minimum bid. B) or, the quality of your ad campaign decreased. One of the big factors of the ad quality score is the click-through rates - and I'm assuming it is the main reason your ads weren't showing up anymore.

Meet Facebook Ad Fatigue. The problem/challenge with Facebook ads is that they're very short-lived. Just by looking at the results that you shared, the campaign peaked on the 2nd day - and that happens for 90% of ad campaigns. If you're reaching the same small audience, which doesn't engage with your ad during the first few days, there are very high chances they won't engage with it at all. After a few days people get tired of ads, the click-through rates decline, your ad quality score declines accordingly, and you either stop winning the auctions or you need to increase the bids to keep them going.

I generally go with the oCPM bidding type and find it very effective. If the local audience is very small though, maybe you can try out CPM instead of CPC. However, the most important thing is to deal with the ad fatigue - by always rotating the ads, changing the visuals, the ad copy, even the campaign objectives - so that the audience doesn't get bored and continue to engage with the ads.

Hope that helps, and if you'd like to discuss it further, feel free to get in touch.

Cheers!
Adomas


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