How to amplify your leads and sales on Facebook
Seeing successful digital entrepreneurs posing their wealth on social media can make it seem easy, but what you often don’t see on Facebook and Instagram is the effort that goes behind achieving all of these.
Behind every $1 million in sales announced there is often $900,000 spent on ads.
You’ve seen the attractive results plenty of times, but we are going to show you the journey, how Facebook works, and how to use it to get those coaching clients!
In my latest podcast episode of The Coach Tribe podcast, I had the pleasure to interview Sherri-Lee Woycik, a Facebook marketing and ads expert with more than 50k followers and 12 years of experience. So who better to show us how to leverage Facebook to get coaching clients than someone who masters the platform?
It is essential to understand that Facebook is not a sales platform but a relationships platform. Many people think that having a Facebook business page and telling people what they do is enough to make people buy their products. But most Facebook users disregard cold messages from people they don't know. They are not there to be sold to by strangers, but most business owners entirely ignore creating a relationship between themselves and the buyer, which is the key.
How do we build relationships with prospective buyers on Facebook? Definitely not by cold messaging people or just posting about our business. We do this by getting to know our prospects and understanding their needs. Add to this a good understanding of how Facebook works and how to make the algorithm favor our posts on newsfeeds, and there you have it - "the secret sauce" exposed!
Business Page vs. Personal Page
Some people start their business from their personal Facebook profile and think that's their business presence. However, when we start our personal profile, we agree to Facebook's terms and conditions (rarely read fully by anyone who uses Facebook). But the terms and conditions clearly state that we are not allowed to do business on our personal profiles.
Many people are simply unaware of this rule and get away with this violation because Facebook doesn’t notice it for a while . But every once in a while, Facebook goes on a binge and deletes personal profiles of people who use them for business purposes.
Just a few years ago Facebook shut down 800,000 profiles of people violating this term. That means 800,000 businesses and all the effort involved gone with a simple click.
In other words, it is always better to be on the safe side and set up your business profile. Another benefit is that business profiles give you more insights into your audience and engagement, which personal profiles lack.
Hacking Facebook algorithm
Facebook only works because people spend their time on Facebook. So, Facebook wants us to help them keep people entertained and on the platform for as long as possible.
If our posts are not engaging, people will quickly scroll past them or, even worse, leave the page and go somewhere else. Firstly, we have to make sure to produce scroll-stopping content. Secondly, 80% of the time, we should create content about our readers and their opinions, making them feel seen and heard. The rest 20% should go into promoting ourselves and our offers. Remember, it is all about building relationships.
As we master the skill of creating engaging content, which attracts a lot of likes, shares, and comments, Facebook will start showing it to more and more people. But why?
We should look at the Facebook algorithm as a sorting tool as its purpose is to show the most engaging and fun posts to people's newsfeeds. It is like a frequent shoppers program in a grocery store. If the store knows you have been purchasing paper towels with them and a month later you have not shown up to purchase them again, they will send you an invitation to buy more paper towels. They know this because they have tracked your purchasing habits. Facebook does the same thing. It tracks what content people engage with and how long they interact with it to offer a more personalized advertising experience. This way, the targeted ads are more likely to be somewhere within our scope of interest.
Thus, we want to create content that will be able to "have a life of its own" - content that will be engaging and stimulates people to comment and have conversations about it. This way Facebook will see that we are posting something that makes people spend more time on Facebook!
When creating content, we should always ask ourselves: is this content incentivizing people to say something? Is this post going to provoke two-way communication? Our content should always evoke certain emotions in people to make them feel like they have to say something about it.
Another great way to increase engagement is to go back and answer some of the comments under your posts, as the algorithm also accounts for that. It would be best if you tried to reply to comments in real-time, as this will trigger the algorithm to show your post to more and more people.
Sherri-Lee recalls a video she created in 2017 to test out lead magnets. She had 50 comments on it, spent a dollar a day on advertising, seven dollars over a week, and generated a couple of leads. Later in January of 2022, somebody found that video and commented on it again. It then kicked off a chain reaction showing it to more and more people as Facebook saw that people were still interested in that content. Like this Sherri-Lee was able to generate leads from a video she made five years ago.
Overall, there are several ways to interact with your audience in the comment section. The main thing is to make these conversations meaningful and keep things going.
Generating leads without ads
Sherri-Lee shares the story of a client who generated 27 leads in 16 days without paid ads. Will 27 leads build a massive business overall? Not by itself, but it is a great start. If a person generates 27 leads every 16 days, at the end of the year, they will have 615 leads. Different story, right?
According to Sherri-Lee, the key to everything on Facebook is visibility. There are almost 3 billion people on the platform with 60 million business pages. With this massive volume of users and posts they generate each day, we have to find a way to stand out in the newsfeed while also connecting with the right people.
Nonetheless, to get leads without ads, it is crucial to build up informal engagement with our Facebook followers or group members. We can push simple but engaging content every single day. For example, Sherri-Lee, who works with coaches whose clients are mainly women with kids, sometimes posts a question targeting parents - "how long have you been a parent?". This kind of question is a great way to engage people in the comment section as it does not intrude on people's privacy, and it is a simple question. If she gets 50 people to comment, she already has identified the list of possible prospects.
Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are another great way to attract prospects to the content you make. For example, if you create a workbook, eBook, or a template about a certain topic you teach, you should also create a landing page for this lead magnet on your website, where you will drive all the traffic and ask people to give their emails in exchange for the resource. You will then "own" the audience and be able to include them in one of your email marketing sequences.
It can be beneficial to tease your audience about lead magnets through Facebook posts or live sessions. Give them a glimpse of how this eBook or template can be helpful for them in generating more sales. As soon as they want more of this information, you can redirect them to the landing page.
Paid Ads
Before we pay for the ad, it is essential to test the product we are trying to sell. Is it working? Is it sellable? Answering these questions before spending money on advertising will save you from wasting a lot of money and time. It is better to test the product through organic marketing strategies first. Once you identify your audience and who is willing to pay for your product, you can target them directly via ads.
Now, sometimes people are unsure which ads to spend money on. Most of the time, engaging posts do well on their own. It is the content that hasn't done well that needs some assistance with paid ads.
When we pay for the ad, we tell the algorithm what to do and who to show this ad to. So the algorithm and all the tactics that work for unpaid posts do not work anymore. In this case, we give Facebook directions.
If you want to use ads to get in front of strangers, you have to be strategic about what piece of content to put out there. The purpose of these ads is to make people make micro-commitments.
These micro commitments are:
- Liking the page
- Liking the post
- Commenting on the post
- Sharing the post.
To increase the chances of people taking these actions, we can target Facebook ads to people who have already liked our page, are in our email list or have watched previous videos of ours. This will increase our chances of getting more micro-commitments from people who already know you and have previously engaged with your content. Later Facebook algorithm will come into play with a rolling snowball effect and show this post to more friends of people who have already engaged with it.
Suppose you are just getting started with a Facebook business page. In that case, Sherri-Lee encourages you to think about running a Page Likes campaign which can be a great headstart for your coaching business.
Facebook has excellent functionality to target warm leads (people who interacted with you and your content) on different levels. We can target people who have messaged us, who have watched our videos only for 10 seconds, 30 seconds, or 95% of the entire video.
Facebook has made the targeting system robust for our warm audiences. All we have to do is nurture them and keep them glued to Facebook. After we engage with our warm audience and nurture relationships, it is more likely that they will leave Facebook to go to our landing pages and sign up for our newsletters.
Interestingly, Facebook usually rewards people with high engagement with lower ad prices. If you promote a video for 5$ a day and it happens to attract a lot of interest and interaction, Facebook usually lowers the cost of the ad. This can help us reach more people with less money. Facebook ads can be very cheap and effective. A single like on your page that costs 10 cents can become a more significant revenue over the long run (because all of the likes and shares are very targeted).
Creating Facebook Challenges
Sometimes it can get very uncomfortable for business owners to continuously advertise their offers continuously. It can also become a problem if they give their audience so much information that prospects don't feel the need to purchase the full products anymore. There is, thus, a fine balance to reach, and coaches should be strategic about this.
To help her reach this balence, Sherri-Lee would organise online challnges. This online challenges are similar to an online course where participants receive daily tasks to complete with the goal of reaching a set result by the end of the challenge. So, for five days in a particular week, Sherri-Lee would go live every day sharing knowledge on a specific topic while offering teasers into her entire course. On the third day, she would strategically focus more on her offer: the first half of the live session would be pure value for the participants, and the second half would be about her services, going deep into the benefits they would get.
Repeating your offer can feel like you are annoying to your listeners, but our ultimate goal is to sell our products. The process of talking about our services helps to select for the most relevant prospects and weed out the ones who are not interested early.
It is ok for people who are not interested to unsubscribe from your mailing list or unfollow your Facebook page, and it should not influence your motivation to drive your business forward. Nevertheless, allowing yourself to be uncomfortable in such situations will actually move you forward.
You can try to organize Facebook challenges yourself and see whether these will resonate or not with your audience. You choose a particular topic that you will explore in depth over a couple of days of live sessions on Facebook. This way, you will have a chance to interact with your audience, and tease your products.
These live sessions can be 30-40 minutes or shorter, and each day you can present a specific problem and then offer a solution. As every problem you solve opens the conversation, people will need more of what you can offer.
You can interview people who have worked with you and have purchased your services to leverage the power of testimonials. Like this, your credibility will increase, and prospects might identify themselves and their stories with your clients and be eager to work with you to achieve the same results! It is also a good idea to mention income - money excites people and hooks them onto the experience and learning what you have to offer them.
It takes a couple of tries to find the best formula for these challenges that work for your business. Many people will do challenges and will not sell their products immediately. It takes practice to figure out what works the best with your audience, what topics they are interested in, and how to turn your prospects into your clients. The main thing is not to be discouraged by the failures we face when trying new things out.
Check here for Facebook Live tips and best practices.
"The key to being successful in challenges or workshops, whatever you call them, is to repeat and do it over and over again."
Our Podcast speaker Sherri-Lee ran challenges every eight weeks in 2020, and doubled her business. Every time she ran it, she learned something new and optimized her challenges to generate more and more leads.
According to her, the number one thing that everybody should know is that everyone starts a business page with zero likes on it. We have to trust ourselves and the system and know that it works!
This guide only briefly goes through the main topics discussed in our conversation with Sherri-Lee! To better understand the above concepts and get access to all the golden nuggets, make sure to watch to the whole discussion on YouTube here or listen to it on your favourite Podcast apps here.
Want to master Facebook yourself? Book a one-on-one session with Sherri-Lee on her Pensight page here.
Resources:
- Exclusive 100 Facebook groups handpicked for coaches
- How to grow your facebook group to 1000s members - complete guide
- Facebook Live best practices for coaches ebook
- Template for Facebook marketing calendar
P.S. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast so you can be the first to access these expert conversations that will help you scale your coaching business! 🚀
