Living in a digital world that requires you to “pay to play” usually isn’t as wallet-friendly as we’d all like. Most of us are on a tight budget, which doesn’t always go well with our online marketing goals. The good news is, we’ve got a bullet proof plan to help you decide where your money is best spent. After all, we want you to have the biggest bang for your buck.
Where to spend money:
- Offer ads. Whether you’re an event, venue, or destination, your main source of revenue is butts in seats. This means that your online ticket sales should be a main priority for your online marketing. The good news is, Facebook advertising has evolved to such an advanced level that you can actually drive traffic straight from Facebook to the page that you sell tickets. Hello, cash flow!
By clicking the “get offer” button, your page visitors are instantly directed to a revenue-generating place. When the average cost of a Facebook ad is somewhere around $0.25, you’re basically paying a quarter to get someone to make a purchase. That’s a pretty big return on investment compared to the cost of your tickets.
- Posts that get visitors thinking about themselves. Posts like this tend to create more of relationship between viewers and your brand because they appeal to emotion. The more attached a consumer is to a brand, the more trusting they are of the brand and the more likely they are to spend money on that brand. For example:
Wording like this gets parents thinking about their kids as well as their own inner-child, thus tugging at their heart strings.
- Posts that involve your partners and sponsors. This shows that you’re “bigger than yourself” and also helps to pull in from the fan base of the partner you’ve tagged. Your partners and sponsors are always going to have loyal followers, and if those followers see your affiliation, then you’ve already got your foot in the door!
- Posts that are fun. First and foremost, you want to be a resource for entertainment. After all, people are coming to social media as an escape from boredom. So why not make your page one of the most fun to interact with? It’s okay to do a business plug every now and then, but remember the 80/20 rule. About 80% of your posts should be fun, and 20% should be promotional.
Where not to spend money:
- Getting page likes. This is a “vanity statistic,” and it’s more valuable to spend money where you will make money. Unless you’re starting from scratch, chances are that you already have a large fan-base that you can use as an audience—this will only continue to grow as you post. When you create offer ads and link posts, there is a “like page” button built in, thus making it unnecessary to also spend money on page promotion ads. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t spend a little here and there, but you definitely shouldn’t put all your eggs (money) in this basket.
From our experience, spending (or not spending) money in these places has proved to give us the biggest bang for our buck. The most important thing is to pay attention to your fans and what they interact most with, and focus your dollars there. After all, if you’re not watching and listening, you’re not learning about your audience’s behavior. Facebook advertising involves quite a bit of trial and error, so we want to make sure that you had our inside scoop to help you stay ahead of the curve!