Step-by-Step: How a welding company erected a Facebook presence for $6 a day

Kelly Householder works at Infusionsoft, a company that produces marketing software for small businesses. The company encourages employees to have a small business of their own. So Kelly sells welding plans for $19.97 online for DIY welders — should you want to make a folding table, workbench, welding cart, or other object to prove your manhood. He had just over 1,000 fans on Facebook and produces content regularly. The plight of small business They have a page, but aren't exactly sure whether things are working. So they dutifully keep posting content, since the consultants remind them of the 1.2 billion people that are on Facebook. And maybe they bought some software or hired a social media expert. If they're lucky, this is what happens: Organically (without paying), he's getting 400-500 people to see his posts. Kelly has tried boosting posts sporadically, at the recommendation of Facebook and other consultants. The boosted posts get a lot more engagement. But is it worth it? Do you know how much it costs and whether it drives sales in the long run? Answer: don't boost posts. It's the crack of Facebook marketing — a quick hit, but not smart. A boosted post is convenient. Instead of one-offs, what you need is a simple strategy that builds up your audience, engages them over time, and nudges them to buy when it's time. It's called Audience, Engagement, and Conversion. Read how it works here. You don't buy a wife at the store — you endure the courtship process. You nurture social customers over time. You water and tend a garden that produces veggies a couple months after you plant the seeds. And when you do, Facebook is there to amplify your existing marketing efforts. You're social, not self-promotional. Here are the 3 funnel steps: AUDIENCE He has one campaign dedicated to just getting fans using page like ads. $3 a day and he gets fans for 20 cents each. So that's 15 fans a day at a steady trickle. He's targeted an audience of 22,000 people — all specific welding interests. In the last few days, he's spent $8 to get the 41 fans, but also drove a whopping 244 photos views, too. That's pennies per engagement. And his CTR is 4.8%, which is a sign of relevancy — that he has good content and is targeting the right folks. These are all FOF (Friend of Fans) ads that ensure anyone who sees the ad also sees that one or more of their friends likes it, too. Being in the newsfeed helps, too. So if your ads have less than a 1% CTR, something is wrong. ENGAGEMENT Now we want to make sure that our posts are being seen in the newsfeed. This is what we'd want a boosted post to do, but use Facebook's Power Editor (a free tool made by Facebook) to create these ads. Kelly has ads targeting his fans, friends of fans that like welding, people who work at welding companies, farmers, and even blue collar folks that own their own homes. The ad that performs the best, at over a 10% CTR, is the one targeting his fans. Not a surprise. He's spent only $1.46 to make sure his 1,400 fans see his messages in the News Feed (the Facebook homepage). The super high CTR means that he doesn't pay much for the traffic. In other words, if you double your CTR, then you pay half as much per click/engagement. When targeting fans, you should regularly get 2-3% CTR on engagement posts and perhaps half that on non-fans. Of course, fans are more likely to interact, so you must separate out your ads to see the effect. CONVERSION If you've got your audience campaign driving new fans and your engagement campaign warming them up, then your conversion campaign is ready to get them to buy. In a conversion campaign, you set up dark posts, also known as unpublished posts, to make sure your offer is seen by fans and people on your email list. Kelly has a few ads in his conversion campaign. Two of them are at 6% CTR and one is at 10% CTR. This is excellent, since it drives his cost per click down to 8-10 cents. He's running an offer to a free pack of 10 welding plans, targeting welders, of course. Solid targeting functions like throwing raw meat in front of starving lions. And he is targeting his existing fans, of course. The 10% CTR is fantastic. He's uploaded a custom audience of a couple hundred emails, which matched down to 100 users (50% match rate). But they haven't produced any impressions yet. Same for the lookalike audiences, which you can make from an existing custom audience. WELDING IT ALL TOGETHER Believe it or not, we ran through this entire process in about 40 minutes. That's how long it takes to create a dozen ads. If you're really fast, you're cloning existing ads to test out new targets, which takes seconds. Kelly of DIY Welding Plans is on the right, while I'm on the far left. It's the continuous optimization process that matters. You want to spend 15 minutes twice a week on your campaigns, not all day and then getting burned out. If you're wanting to get in shape, you'd do a few light workouts a couple times a week, not go crazy in a mega-workout and not be able to exercise for a month. I hope the 3 campaign technique of Audience, Engagement, and Conversion simplifies your life. This works well for small business owners, agencies, B2B lead gen, and even enterprise. Love to hear how it works for you!

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Step-by-Step: How a welding company erected a Facebook presence for $6 a day

Dennis Yu

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Dennis Yu