Digital marketing is constantly changing. Facebook recently released its Messenger ads and we believe they could be a GAME CHANGER.
At EmberTribe we’ve been testing them like mad scientists. In this week's training video, we'll show you how they work AND how to use them to build a massive list of qualified leads.
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Facebook Messenger ads are still pretty new, but here at EmberTribe we've been testing them like mad scientists in the lab.
So we want to show you our experience with them so far and how you can put them to use to reach your audience.
First of all, what are these things?
There are two places that Facebook Messenger ads will show up.
The first one is as a conversation starter. So these are standard ads that are going to show up in your Facebook news feed, and when people click the call to action or they click on the link, they're going to start a conversation with you in your business page's messenger.
The other place they show up, is as a placement in peoples' messenger.
Now this only works if people have messaged you in the past. That's the rub. People have to have messaged you and have a conversation with you in their inbox with your business page already, for you to use this.
So for most people, you're going to start with the first option which is the placement in the newsfeed, the conversation starter.
Here's the cool thing about the conversation starter:
When people click, send a message, or whatever the call to action is, you essentially have them opted in to your Facebook business page's messaging platform. So it's really just like acquiring an email address.
When people respond to the ad, you can them message them for all time. Until they decide to unsubscribe or to block you, which of course would never happen. But the advantage here is that it allows you to build a list very quickly.
Consider the alternative that we're all used to using:
We pay for clicks to a landing page, we lose a huge percentage of those people who don't want to opt into your form, and then what we're left with is a smaller percentage of people who've opted into your email list.
Now with Facebook Messenger ads, you're getting people to respond directly and opt in to your messaging platform. They're not giving you their email address but they are giving you permission to have a conversation with them. And you can get those people for pennies on the dollar compared to sending them to a landing page to opt in or even using a lead ad.
So that's advantage number one, is that your able to get into that conversation mode quicker without the friction of a landing page in the form.
Other advantages, it allows you to start pre qualifying and warming people up, who otherwise might have all sorts of questions before they talk to your sales team or somebody else.
So, being able to warm people up through these messages, answer some of their questions, and get them to a place of deeper understanding before they go on that sales demo, or do the free trial or whatever it might be.
You're giving people more contacts before they start offing engagement with you.
Another advantage here is if you're thinking about maybe having multiple products that you sell, or wanting to have a higher lifetime value of your customer, you're able to start fostering that relationship, cultivating a relationship as you would with an email list, but the difference here is that we're seeing the open rates are way higher because people are used to getting messages from their friends or from their family, or from people that they're used to talking to in messenger.
So that little red bubble that shows up as a notification, it's like people are just used to clicking on that and figuring out what's going on here, who's sending this message. So at least right now for a portion of time, it beats email in terms of open rates.
I can already hear what you're thinking, you know, "how am I going to do this at scale? How do I manage all these messages that are coming in?"
My first answer to that, is to do this yourself, first. Don't try to introduce any sort of automation. Talk to these people. There's valuable lessons to learn when you start to understand peoples' objections, or the other things that they just don't understand about your offer or your message.
So it's actually a good use of your time to physically and manually respond to these messages yourself. And I think you're going to be kind of excited to talk to prospects through messenger in the beginning, because real people are responding to your offer.
When you do want to scale this out and you want to take it to the next level, scale your budgets and have a lot of messages coming in, there are tools available.
First, with Facebook, they provide something called 'Saved Replies'. So essentially you can make these pre canned messages, of the most common answers that you're having to give to people, and then you can just select those answers and send them really quickly.
So that's a great first step towards reducing the amount of friction there is here, and trying to respond to everybody at once.
The other tool that we've been really impressed with is a tool called a ManyChat, and it allows you to build a chat-bot to respond to people.
I won't go into a full blown review of it here, but what it allows you to do marketing automation for your Facebook messages. Initially, it allows you to select certain keywords, detect what keywords people are using in their message to you, and formulate a message automatically.
The other thing that we're excited about is just the automation sequences that you can set up.
You can set up an autoresponder over the course of a week or two weeks or three weeks, however long you want it to be, and essentially start nurturing these people as if you were doing it through email.
There's tremendous value in this tool in terms of building out sequences and keeping that conversation ongoing with people.
It also manages all your unsubscribes, makes it easy for people to opt out so you're not bothering people and kind of being counterproductive with your marketing plan here.
If you want to get started with this I think a really great first place to start is a campaign that we ran, which is a retargeting campaign. We used, basically remarketing to the different people who had visited our website.
You know, maybe they spent a certain amount of time on the website; and we gave them a chance to ask us anything, ask us a question and use that messenger as a way to take a next step. So this is kind of your warm traffic, the people that have already visited your site, they've engaged with your brand in some respect. Now give them a call to action in their newsfeed that lets them start a conversation. Make it easy for them to take that action.
So maybe it's ask us a burning question that you have, or share the one challenge that you really are facing right now that's keeping you stuck where you are. And that's going to allow you to then get permission to have a conversation with them and start that relationship.
You'd be surprised how much people crave that human to human contact. In a world where there's so much automation and forms, people really do respond to a live person who's going to share something back with them in dialogue.
So, try that out first, I think this is a great win for warm traffic when you've already got people and they're familiar with who you are and what you do, and now they're just looking for that next step to take.
All-in-all, we're really excited about Facebook Messenger Ads. But just like anything you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. So I'd suggest that you try this, you never know when Facebook is going to change the rules of the game.
You don't want to build your entire business on this, but I think it's a great way to diversify your approach. And obviously, try this new technology, that they've provided us as advertisers in their platform.