If You Don't Get a Lot of Website Traffic, Use Facebook's Love for Video to Find Your People
In my previous post, I talked about website visits: "An unspecified number of people visiting your site for an unknown amount of time, reading an unknown portion of its content and taking either no action or an unknown action. That's what website visits are. But, they can be useful. "
And so can video views.
In 2016, Facebook was obsessed with CRUSHING IT in the video department. They wanted to crush "IT" and they wanted to crush YouTube, Periscope--you name it--in the process. This fact is mildly interesting for personal use of Facebook and it's fun to futz with Facebook Live and all.
But it's really interesting for Facebook for Business and using Facebooks Ads to find customers.
Because video ads are really cheap. You must supply the video of course, but uploading a video directly to Facebook ads and then targeting the ad at cold (cold = they have never heard of you) traffic doesn't cost you nearly as much as promoting a blog post and getting a user to click.
Setting up this ad is relatively simple: Set the objective of the ad to "Get Video Views" and upload your video. You can even set up captions right in Facebook Ads Manager.
Depending on the target audience and the quality of your video
In a recent campaign I ran for a client who has almost no website traffic, we paid about 2.5 cents per view of her entire 40-second video.
If I had targeted the same cold traffic with a link to a blog post on her website, I guarantee you we would not have been 2.5 cents per click. We could have been paying more like 50 cents a click. That's almost 200% more, for those of you who like getting your mind blown by big sounding numbers.
Put another way, we reached 1,000 people for $25. If we had tried to get them to click to the website, it would have been more like $500.
But we haven't even gotten to the part I'm excited about! Here is why I'm really excited about this: we (you, anybody) can now use Facebook Ads' Custom Audience feature to create an audience out of video viewers.You don't need people to go to your website to make a Custom Audience out of them.
And you can specify that you only want to include people in your audience who watched 50% or more of your video. So you know you're not creating an audience of people who are getting counted because the video played for a second or two while they were scrolling.
This is a huge breakthrough! If you just don't have the numbers or the money to advertise clicks to your website to strangers, you may still be able to carve out a budget to create an audience of several thousand people who have demonstrated that they are interested in your topic.
Here's how to create the custom audience:
Choose Audiences from the top menu
Click the blue button in the top left that says "Create Audience." Then click "Custom Audience." Choose the Engagement on Facebook option. Then click Video. Here's where you get to specify a video audience that watched at least 50% of your video:
Once you've created this audience, you can build the ad that offers them the coupon for the free class. Just remember to target this video audience when you are setting up ad targeting.
To recap, the steps are:
1. Create an informational video (don't close with a promotion or try to sell anything). This is news your audience can use. Keep it to 1-3 minutes.
2. Buy an ad with the video and target cold traffic.
3. Create an audience out of the people who watched 50% or more of the video.
4. Re-market to them by buying a second ad where you target only them and ask them to do something that's a heavier lift, like sign up for your email list.
Questions? Leave them in the comments.
If you want help setting up this particular ad type, find out how to work with me.