The matchbook cover was the first small business website. And it was revolutionary.

Joshua Pusey, a Philadelphia lawyer, invented the matchbook in 1892. In the 1940s and 1950s, detailed artwork and strategic marketing plans launched the matchbook cover to the top of marketing successes. Customizing a matchbook cover essentially put your business on the map, much in the same way as a business website does today.

The digital age has invented and reinvented exciting and revolutionary ways for small businesses to put their professional feet forward and compete with bigger businesses. And it all begins with a simple, yet compelling small business website.

If you have been on the fence about whether implementing a small business website is a good decision, now is an excellent time to break through the inertia of inaction. We hope to overcome your objections and help you to position your small business for success. Here are seven reasons you need a small business website.

Small Business Website Benefits

1. Business Credibility

A 2015 study performed by Verisign reported that 84% consumers believe that small businesses with websites are more credible than ones without an online presence. To take it one step further, the study also concluded that 65% of consumers consider a company branded email to be more credible than a generic email account such as Gmail, Outlook.com, AOL, or Yahoo mail.

The days of matchbook advertising are long gone and to remain relevant and credible, small businesses must invest in a small business website. Looked at another way, if all your competitors have websites and your business doesn’t, who do you think looks more credible?

2. Business Discoverability

The same study by Verisign also reported that 9 out of 10 consumers rely on the internet to locate and evaluate local goods and services. Understanding these numbers and the online habits of consumers makes it difficult to understand why 46% of small businesses do not have a website. But for the 54% that have developed their business website, they benefit from a clear advantage when considering discoverability.

In a 2015 survey by Redshift Research, and commissioned by GoDaddy, it was found that 59 percent of very small businesses (made up of one to five people) don’t have websites. Of those, 12 percent have Facebook pages.

Additionally, the same survey found that 83 percent of the surveyed businesses that do have websites said “their online platforms gave them a competitive advantage over businesses without websites.”

With over 3.5 billion Google searches occurring each day, your customer could be seconds away from locating and patronizing your small business. Business websites allow potential customers to access your business and learn about your products and services 24/7.

3. Relatability

The ability to relate to a defined audience and build relationships is a game changing benefit of creating and maintaining a small business website. Using your site to tell a story about you and your business begins the relationship.

Understanding your audience and how your product or service could provide a benefit to their lives continues to strengthen the relationship. Using your website to earn and retain a customer is the ultimate goal and the result of successfully relating to and serving the customer.

Consumers are more likely to visit your website to learn about your business than they are to pick up the phone and call. Replying to emails and social media comments is a great way to build trust and personalize your small business experience.

4. Flexibility

While your business may still have a need for printed advertising materials, these items tend to be costly, especially when they need to be updated. In today’s world consumers expect to see fresh marketing campaigns and information on a continuous basis. Small business websites allow for demographic information, services offered, business hours, and pricing to be edited at any time for no cost.

Easy to use website platforms, such as WordPress, are user friendly even from mobile devices and allow for ongoing updates. Having the flexibility to keep your audience informed encourages strong relationships and keeps your customers coming back.

5. Business Sales Tool

Although a small business website serves many purposes, the main objectives are:

• To inform
• To engage
• To convert

The most effective ways to use a business website to this end is to provide high quality information, learn about who your audience is, what they want, and create a sales funnel that nurtures them through the sales process. Small business websites allow for automation of the sales process and for sales to be converted at a much higher rate than traditional sales methods.

6. Market Expansion

Perhaps your business began by serving a local community. Maybe your business is a brick and mortar business that would like to expand to a larger market. The ability to expand the market of a small business is one of the most lucrative benefits of creating a small business website.

Making your products or services available across time zones and even across the world can grow your business and revenue exponentially. Regardless of their geographical locations, the people who visit your website are there because they have expressed an interest in what your business offers. Use that to your advantage.

7. Web Presence Analytics

Unless you specifically ask each customer who comes through your door how they found you, you may not know the origin of your customers or which marketing campaigns work. Using your small business website as a marketing and analytics tool will provide real time data about the following:

• Demographics of your website visitors
• How visitors find your site
• The number of monthly/weekly/daily visitors to your website
• Which website pages are most visited
• How many pages visitors access per visit
• How much time they spend on each page
• How frequently visitors return to your website
• More in-depth analytics data will also be available.

Conclusion:

The days of people pulling out the bulky, printed copy of the Yellow Pages to find your business are gone and they won’t be returning. Having a website for your business is a “must have” and not just a “nice to have” element of being in business. Not having a website puts your business at a competitive disadvantage.

If you already have a small business website, but are not receiving one or more of these seven benefits, it may be time for a web presence assessment to help your business get the most of it’s website.

Thank you for visiting our website. Send us a message today to learn more about how we can help your business grow. We look forward to working with you!

CALL (813) 616-3828

What is WordPress THEME?

A WordPress theme is responsible for complete design in your WP website. It includes colors, backgrounds for the footer, header, main and any other section. The theme is also responsible for layout elements, for example, what sidebars we have, where they are located, site width etc.

Watch the example how you may change the WordPress theme layout using the theme layout positions and assigning widgets to them.

Themes are often accelerated by theme frameworks that allow users to change many options and fit website to Your requirements ( for example WordPress themes created by PixelEmu ). You can download a ZIP file with the theme and install it in your WP dashboard or install theme directly from wordpress.org repository (free themes). Each theme has files and folders inside. Some of these files can be templates.

What is WordPress TEMPLATE?

A template in WordPress is a layout only for certain pages. In most themes, you can find files single.php or archive.php – template for single post view and archive view. This structure makes that all views can look completely different.

Except for these default WP templates, there are special templates for certain pages (not every theme has these special templates). They are separate files that can be applied to every page in WordPress. You can use them by selecting the desired template in this select when you are editing page:

A template can be used for pages where you need completely different look.  Or you just simply want to display left and right sidebar when a theme has only one sidebar.

Remember that you can’t just install template like a theme in a dashboard. A template is a part of a theme and if you need to add a new template to an existing theme you need some coding knowledge (HTML, CSS, PHP).

Do you have a business and don’t have a website – or a website that makes people shake their head and click away? If you said yes, it’s almost as if your business doesn’t exist.  In this modern era, people and companies are on the internet for information. Why do you think people visit a website? It’s primarily to find information. And if you’re in the business world, information is critical. You need to have a website for your customers. It needs to contain information about what you can do for them.  Below are just a few of the advantages and benefits of having a website for your business.

Less Expensive

Have you ever advertised your business through various forms such as printed media, radio, television or by other means? It’s expensive! Investing in advertising is necessary, but it takes a lot of money. Having a website will make promoting your company far less expensive.

Advertising

A website is more environmental friendly when it comes to advertising and marketing. There are lots of ways to advertise your products or services through the internet. One example is Facebook ads, an advertising feature offered through Facebook. Another one is called SEO.  This is a major advantage for your business. Having a good SEO service provider can boost the ranking of your website which quickly results in increased sales and higher profits.

Satisfaction

Having a website will be more convenient for your customers and leads. Make it easy for your customers to purchase from you! Many will be more likely to visit your website, rather than driving a car to your physical location and browsing for your products. From a customer’s point of view, it’s better for them if they don’t have to ask anything. They can just find what they’re looking for on your online site.

Increase Customers

Most businesses have local popularity, but what about potential customers outside their city?  A website can help you generate more customers. Not just outside your city, but worldwide. The internet offers a global community. With a website, your business will be visible around the world.

Accessibility

Have you ever experienced having to turn customers away because it’s closing time? Well, you don’t have to close the doors of your website.  An online site can be visited any time of the day or night. People will look to your site instead of going to your shop because it is more accessible. Just make sure to post enough information about your products and services.

Access to Info

Did you know that if you own a website, you can actually track everything that is happening on it? You can even look for information that will tell you how many people visited your site, or how many people messaged or emailed you. You can access the progress of your website and view all its pages. You can even make an update anytime, making it much less expensive than printed material.

Fresh

Smart business owners create a blog page for their company. Having a blog to post fresh content will keep your website attractive and fresh.

Links

Links are very important to viral marketing. If you have many sites linking to you, it is like spreading the word about your company all around the world. If you have a good website with good content related to information, products or services, people are more likely to link your website to theirs. This means they recognize your website as valuable.

Better Relationship

Having a website can build better relationships with your customers. You can send messages instantly to your customers through email. Also, your customers can review your products online and can also leave feedback for you and your business. It’s best to always send your customer a message. This is essential for building a good relationship with them. You can even give them more information about your business through messages or emails.

Increase Sales

If you are a business owner, more visitors  leads to more potential sales. That’s how your website will help you. You can drive more people to your site by consistently updating and promoting the contents of your site. The more informative your site is, the greater the possibility of increasing your sales.

Opportunity

A website gives you the opportunity to prove your credibility. You have to tell your customers why you deserve their trust through your website. This can earn positive feedback for your service and products. Also, your website serves as a place for a potential investor to explore what your business is about and what it can do in the future.

As voice search gains market share and RankBrain becomes more influential in Google’s core search algorithm, the need to put a webpage in context is increasingly important to improve search visibility and SEO results.

What is Schema Markup?

Schema markup, found at Schema.org, is a form of microdata. Once added to a webpage, schema markup creates an enhanced description (commonly known as a rich snippet), which appears in search results.

Top search engines – including Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex – first started collaborating to create Schema.org, back in 2011.

Schema markup is especially important in the age of Hummingbird and RankBrain. How a search engine interprets the context of a query will determine the quality of a search result. Schema can provide context to an otherwise ambiguous webpage.

Via Schema.org:

“Most webmasters are familiar with HTML tags on their pages. Usually, HTML tags tell the browser how to display the information included in the tag. For example, <h1>Avatar</h1> tells the browser to display the text string “Avatar” in a heading 1 format. However, the HTML tag doesn’t give any information about what that text string means—”Avatar” could refer to the hugely successful 3D movie, or it could refer to a type of profile picture—and this can make it more difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content to a user.”

Does Schema Improve Your Search Rankings?

There is no evidence that microdata has a direct affect on organic search rankings.

Nonetheless, rich snippets do make your webpages appear more prominently in SERPs. This improved visibility has been shown to improve click-through rates.

According to a study by acmque, less than one-third of Google’s search results include a rich snippet with Schema.org markup. This exposes a huge opportunity for the rest. Very few things in SEO, today, can move the dial quickly. This can.

What Is Schema Used For?

• Businesses and organizations
• Events
• People
• Products
• Recipes
• Reviews
• Videos

Above are some of the most popular uses of schema. However, there’s a good chance that if you have any sort of data on your website, it’s going to have an associated itemscope, itemtype and itemprop

Adding Schema to Your Webpages

Using Microdata

Microdata is a set of tags that aims to make annotating HTML elements with machine-readable tags much easier. Microdata is a great place for beginners to start because it’s so easy to use.

However, the one downside to using microdata is that you have to mark every individual item within the body of your webpage. As you can imagine, this can quickly get messy.

Before you begin to add schema to your webpages, you need to figure out the ‘item type’ of the content on your webpage.

For example, does your web content focus on food? Music? Tech?

Once you’ve figured out the item type, you can now determine how you can tag it up.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say that you own a store that sells high-quality routers. If you were to look at the source code of your homepage you would likely see something akin to this:

<div>
<h1>TechHaven</h1>
<h2>The best routers you’ll find online!</h2>
<p>Address:</p>
<p>459 Humpback Road</p>
<p>Rialto, Ca</p>
<p>Tel: 909 574 3903</p>
<p><a href=”http://www.techhaven.com/menu”>Click here to view our best routers!</a></p>
<p>We’re open: </p>
<p>Mon-Sat 8am – 10:30pm</p>
<p>Sun: 2pm – 8pm</p>
</div>

Once you dive into the code, you’ll want to find the portion of your webpage that talks about what your business has to offer. In this example, that data can be found between the two <div> tags.

Now, at the top you can add in:

<div itemscope>

By adding this tag, we’re stating that the HTML code contained between the <div> blocks are identifying a specific item.

Next, we have to identify what that item is by using the ‘itemtype’ attribute to identify the type of item our webpage is about (tech).

<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/tech”>

An item type comes in the form of a URL (such as http://schema.org/tech). Let’s say, for example, that your site revolved around beauty products instead of technology. Your item type URL might look like this:

http://schema.org/beauty.

To make things easier you can browse a list of item types here, plus you can view extensions to identify the specific entity that you’re looking for. Keep in mind that this list is not all encompassing, so there is a possibility that you won’t find the item type for your specific niche.

Tracking back to the tech page, you want to tag the part of the webpage that contains the name of the business. You can do this between the <h1> tags.

Now, we’ll be using the ‘itemprop’ tag, which labels the properties of an item:

<h1 itemprop=”name”>Tech Haven</h1>

You can apply these tags to the rest of the page now. When using tags to identify item properties, it’s not necessary to tag the entire line, just the one portion the property is making reference to.

For example, if you have a line that says Address: 1234 w sunshine blvd, then you only need to apply the tags around the address itself and nothing else.

<h2 itemprop=”description”>The best routers you’ll find online!</h2>
<p>Address:</p>
<span itemprop=”address” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”>
<p itemprop=”streetAddress”>459 Humpback Road </p>
<p itemprop=”addressLocality”>Rialto, Ca</p></span>
<p>Tel: <span itemprop=”telephone”>909 574 3903</span></p>
<p><a itemprop=”menu” href=”http:// http://www.techhaven.com/menu “>Click here to view our tasty range of dishes!</a></p>
<p>We’re open:</p>
<p itemprop=”openingHours”>Mon-Sat 8am – 10:30pm</p>
<p itemprop=”openingHours”>Sun: 2pm – 8pm</p>
</div>

This code may look complicated, but schema.org provides examples on how to use the different item types, so you can actually see what the code is supposed to do. Don’t worry, you won’t be left out in the cold trying to figure this out on your own!

If you’re still feeling a little intimidated by the code, Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper makes it super easy to tag your webpages.

To use this amazing tool, just select your item type, paste in the URL of the target page or the content you want to target, and then highlight the different elements so that you can tag them.

Using RDFa

RDFa is an acronym for Resource Description Framework in Attributes. Essentially, RDFa is an extension to HTML5 and it was designed to aid users in marking up structured data.

RDFa is considered to be a W3C recommendation, meaning that it is a web standard, and it can be used to chain structured data vocabularies together. This is especially useful if you want to add structured data that stretches beyond the limits of Schema.org.

You can breathe a sigh of relief. RDFa isn’t much different from Microdata.

Similar to microdata, RDFa tags incorporate with the preexisting HTML code in the body of your webpage. For the sake of familiarity, we’ll look at the tech website once again as an example.

The HTML for your tech site would likely look like this before it was modified:

<div>
<h1>Tech Haven</h1>
<h2>The best routers online!</h2>
<p>Address:</p>
<p>459 Humpback Road </p>
<p>Rialto, Ca</p>
<p>Tel: 909 574 3903</p>
<p><a href=”http://www.techhaven.com/menu”>Click here to view our best routers!</a></p>
<p>We’re open:</p>
<p>Mon-Sat 8:00am – 10:30pm</p>
<p>Sun: 2pm – 8pm</p>
</div>

To begin, you want to ensure that the vocabulary that you’re using is Schema.org and that the webpage in question is making reference to a technology page.

For this example, you can search for “technology” on Schema.org to learn how to tag different elements. Typically, you’ll find examples near the bottom of the page that will show you how to use them in practice.

Simply click on the RDFa tab to view specific RDFa examples.

Next, you need to use the vocab tag combined with the URL http://schema.org to identify the vocabulary for the markup. To identify the page type, use the typeoftag. Unlike microdata, which uses a URL to identify types, RDFa uses one or more words to classify types.

<div vocab=”http://schema.org/” typeof=”technology”>

If you wish to identify a property further than you should use the typeof attribute.

For example, if you wish to further expand upon an address property you can use “PostalAddress” like so:

<div property=”address” typeof=”PostalAddress”>

Comparing microdata and RDFa side by side, the typeof attribute is the equivalent of the itemtype attribute found in Microdata. Furthermore, the propertyattribute would be the equivalent to the itemprop attribute.

For further explanation, you can visit Schema.org to check lists and view examples. You can find which kinds of elements are defined as properties, and which are defined as types.

Going back to our earlier example, the tech page would look like this after it has been appropriately tagged:

<h2 property=”description”>The best routers on the internet!</h2>
<p>Address:</p>
<div property=”address” typeof=”PostalAddress”>
<p property=”streetAddress”>459 Humpback Road</p>
<p property=”addressLocality”>Rialto, Ca</p>
</div>
<p>Tel: <span property=”telephone”>909 574 3903</span></p>
<p><a property=”menu” href=”http://www.techhaven/menu”>Click here to view our best routers!</a></p>
<p>We’re open:</p>
<p property=”openingHours”>Mon-Sat 8am – 10:30pm</p>
<p property=”openingHours”>Sun: 2pm – 8pm</p>
</div>

To aid you, every page on Schema.org provides examples on how to properly apply tags. Of course, you can also fall back on Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

Conclusion

Hopefully, any fears that you might have had when you heard the word “Schema” or “Structured Data” have been put to rest.

Schema is much easier to apply than it seems and it’s a best practice that you need to incorporate into your webpages.

The work may seem tedious. But given time and effort, you’ll be certain to reap the benefits from your labor.

Everyone is using Facebook these days. There are over 2.2 billion active daily users.

China, the largest country in the world, only contains 1.4 billion people.

The ‘population’ of Facebook is massive!

No wonder businesses all want to use it to promote their products and services.

The problem is, 62% of small businesses feel like their paid Facebook Ads are failing.

No one wants to be throwing money at ads that don’t work! What good is such a massive pool of potential customers if you can’t successfully reach them?

Thankfully, there are ways to fix this problem. You don’t have to be part of that 62%!

I’m going to show you the most common reasons why small businesses fail with Facebook Ads and how to fix each issue.

But first, let’s look at the big picture to understand the problem better.

The Problem Isn’t Facebook Ads
96% of all B2C marketers use social media posts as a form of content marketing. That leaves only 4% that don’t!

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Not only that, but out of all of the B2C companies using social media, 97% of them use Facebook!

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This means nearly everyone is using Facebook for business marketing.

If everyone is doing it, it must work, right?

Overall, only 3% of companies who participated in the Content Marketing Institute survey felt that their content marketing approach was not successful.

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Since I just showed you that over 97% of them were using Facebook, we have to assume they included that in these results.

And that means Facebook content marketing is successful for the majority of businesses, in general.

But small business owners seem to be struggling with success.

Manta surveyed 4,712 small business owners regarding their use of Facebook, and their results are similar to Weebly’s.

50% of small businesses feel they’re not getting a positive return on investment from Facebook.

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This is important for two reasons:

The pool of potential customers is so massive, that if you cannot do this right, you’re handing over a huge chunk of business to your competitors who succeed at it.
You’re paying for ads that aren’t providing a return, which means you’re just throwing away time and money.
Why is it that small businesses are failing at Facebook Ads when larger companies are not?

What are small businesses doing wrong?

Problem #1 – A lack of understanding of content marketing
I just showed you that the problem is small businesses and not Facebook Ads.

So what do small businesses have in common, that big businesses do not when it comes to Facebook advertising?

Let’s look at small businesses.

About one-third of small businesses fail within the first two years, and half of all small businesses fail by year five.

Why is the failure rate so high?

There is a range of reasons, from lack of experience to lack of cash flow.

Of course, these reasons for failing in business can also be valid reasons for failing in marketing.

Let’s start with the lack of experience.

Too many small business owners try to wear too many hats.

Just because you are an expert in your field, your product, or your service, does not mean you know everything you need to know about running a business.

Facebook Ads are not like an ad you pay to have in the local newspaper.

A basic understanding of content marketing is necessary to see success unless you’re just insanely lucky.

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Understanding social marketing and how it differs from traditional marketing can make all the difference.

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A typical approach through the sales funnel is actually a long and winding road across different channels, devices, and messages.

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Your first job, then, is to try to recreate this whole winding path within Facebook Ad campaigns.

You need to have multiple campaigns, each with different objectives, and target audiences with varying levels of intent.

That means we need to look at campaigns as a whole.

Then we need to find the bottlenecks and determine how steps right before or after them are contributing to the issue.

The good news is that Facebook helps you with this right out of the gate:

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Depending on your selection, your objectives and ads should be completely different.

Is your problem low sales?

Start with conversion campaigns.

Make sure all the basics are covered.

Create a ‘tripwire’ to scale down complex or expensive areas.

Focusing on being simple and straightforward should do the trick.

Are you trying to create consideration-building campaigns?

You need to actively re-engage people who are familiar with your business.

That means recapturing past visitors.

You should be using Dynamic Product Ads to see who has viewed product pages.

Focus on getting people to download eBooks, white papers, and checklists or try getting them to attend webinars.

Make sure you use marketing automation for all of this stuff to make it seamless.

Is your priority simply increasing awareness of your brand?

Prioritize expanding your reach by optimizing ads for website visits and clicks.

Aim to promote content that will appeal to the widest possible target group.

And make sure you try carousel ads to test different messaging to see what’s most effective.

Problem #2 – No strategy, plan, or measurement system
Of course, I realize it’s not as cut and dry as ‘learn content marketing and you will be a success’!

I also realize how many hats a small business owner has to wear and how limited your time can be.

So I’ll take you through several specific areas where small businesses tend to fail with Facebook Ads and how to quickly fix them today.

First off, as with any part of your business, the biggest mistake is not having a strategy and plan.

There is massive potential to grow your business using Facebook, but if you don’t have a clear vision of how you want to use it or what you want the outcome to be, you will fail.

Facebook is just another business tool. It is used by different businesses in different ways.

Over 72% of small businesses said they want to use Facebook to raise awareness.

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If this is your goal, then a low click-through rate doesn’t accurately measure whether you were successful or not.

Before you try anything else, figure out what is your goal of using Facebook.

The top goals for small business owners in the Mantra study were:

Building awareness
Attracting new customers
Getting phone calls from new customers
Increasing website traffic
Improving customer retention
Once you know your goals, then figure out how you’re going to measure success.

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To make sure you’re picking the right posts, you need to establish engagement benchmarks.

This will help you decide whether or not a paid promotion will be worth it.

Keep in mind that benchmarks will vary between companies based on their goals.

To set an engagement benchmark for your company, you’ll want to look at your current number of followers, past engagement rates, competitors’ engagement, and your overall Facebook goals.

You’ll also want to determine how much value a click and conversion hold to your company. This will allow you to view your campaign in terms of monetary value and compare it with other advertising expenses.

A monetary value will also help justify the time and resources you put into Facebook Ads.

The benefits of maintaining an active presence on social media will only increase as time goes on.

Especially if you are a small company with little social media presence, a little effort will go a long way.

The best way to start is to define your goals, whether that be brand awareness or strictly conversions.

Plan a content strategy around your goals and desired brand personality.

Then, you’ll want to know who you’re talking to. Consider your current customer base and the type of audience you want to attract on social media.

Developing a deep understanding of your audience will help you create more engaging content and, therefore, create more effective paid ads.

Once your content is flowing, you’ll want to start tracking your KPIs so you can prove that your social media is successful.

Keep in mind that the average conversion rate for Facebook Ads is only 9.21%

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The report also showed that the average conversion rate is highest in the fitness industry, at 14.29%, and education, at 13.58%. It’s the lowest in the technology sector, at 2.31%.

If you’re expecting Facebook Ads to provide a 50% conversion rate, of course, you will feel like they’re failing!

That being said, Facebook does produce the best ROI of all social media platforms.

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How do you know your plan is working?

Test it. Continuously.

You need to test different offers to understand what works and adjust your plan accordingly.

The problem with the standard recommended A/B tests is that most fail.

To make matters worse, they’re incredibly hard to get results from if you’re not already converting well.

You shouldn’t even bother with A/B tests if you don’t yet have at least 1,000 monthly conversions.

Any single test should have a minimum of 250 conversions before you can believe the sample size.

The companies with the highest conversions aren’t even testing variables (which is what most A/B tests do).

Instead, they’re testing different offers.

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That could mean one e-book but on completely different topics.

Both topics should be top of the funnel topics that appeal to a variety of people.

Both can also apply to the same segment or target group such as startup founders.

The only way to know which one converts best is to roll the dice and see.

That’s why planning without checking the results can mean failure.

Problem #3 – You’re not investing enough time.
58% of small businesses are only spending an hour a week on their Facebook marketing efforts.

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Why is this a problem?

Because 3.3 million items are shared on Facebook every minute!

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If you’re only active on Facebook infrequently, then your ads will never be seen among all the other noise.

There is simply too much volume.

Social Media Examiner surveyed social media marketers and found out that on average, they post on a branded Facebook page 8 times per day.

Imagine how quickly your ads are getting lost in news feeds if you only post once per day.

According to Mantra, an hour a day is even more time than most small businesses are investing!

The same survey indicated that 58% of small business owners put less than an hour a week into Facebook marketing.

Social media can’t be an afterthought. You will fail if you think of it this way.

As of March 2017, almost two billion people are monthly active Facebook users. Chances are most of your target customers are among those billions of people.

39% of marketers have increased their posting frequency on Facebook over the last 12 months.

If you only post infrequently, your potential customers likely won’t even see your posts.

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According to Post Planner’s research, 75% of the engagement you get on your posts happens within the first 5 hours.

After that, engagement pretty much dies off.

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This means if you aren’t posting regularly, you’re basically history.

While there are roughly 60 million businesses using Facebook pages, only about 4 million of those are actively posting on their page.

A stale business page could actually hurt your business more than no business page!

Anyone who comes across your out-of-date page may wonder if you’re still open or even a real business.

Facebook is the kind of thing that needs to be done right or not done at all.

Be honest with yourself about the time and resources you are willing to commit to your company’s Facebook page.

I should also warn that it is possible to go too far in the other direction as well.

Posting too much will overwhelm people with your messages to the point where they start tuning you out.

What’s the right frequency? Aim for 3 to 8 ad appearances per person over the life of your ad.

This can help make sure that your ads don’t become white noise.

Avoid setups like this one:

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A frequency of 38 won’t just make people tune you out. It could turn potential customers into haters!

Problem #4 – You’re not investing enough money
Going back to the Weebly survey of small business owners, 82% have spent less than $50 on a Facebook Ad campaign and more than half didn’t buy Facebook Ads at all.

Less than $50!

In comparison, most successful B2C marketers spent an average of 26% of their entire marketing budget on content marketing (including Facebook Ads).

I can guarantee you this was more than $50!

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Not only that, but 37% of them plan on increasing that spend over the next year.

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But most small business owners surveyed by Weebly don’t want to spend any money on a paid campaign.

I get it. It can be hard to throw money at ads when you don’t know if they’ll work.

The good news is that you can experiment with organic posts to understand what resonates best with your audience before spending any money.

Look at the engagement of your current social media posts. If you have a post that’s creating a lot of organic engagement, it may be a good post to turn into a paid ad.

It will have a much better chance of success.

All ads on Facebook are basically just regular posts. The only difference is that you’re paying Facebook to maximize your reach.

Only a tiny fraction of followers will see your regular posts.

The reach of organic posts has been steadily declining as Facebook updates their algorithm.

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Regular posts also don’t give you the ability to target specific people who are more likely to click on them.

When using paid advertising, you can target the people who are likely to be interested in your brand based off interests that they have expressed in the past and other data that Facebook has collected.

Today, reliance on free, organic results on Facebook will doom you to failure.

Organic posts reach only about 2% of your fans!

This means that 98% of your Facebook page’s fans may not see your posts.

That’s a huge loss of traffic!

Not to mention that the 2% you’re reaching are people who are already your fans!

Good luck reaching new audiences organically.

The situation is slightly better for smaller brands, but it’s still only about 6% of your fans that you will reach with organic content.

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Let’s face it, social media for businesses has changed. It’s now a pay to play arena.

If you are trying to reach a wider audience with your Facebook posts, you’ll need to use Promoted Posts and other advanced Facebook Ad strategies.

Problem #5 – You’re not targeting the right audience
It’s not that small businesses contacted by Weebly weren’t seeing any returns on their ads.

It’s the quality of the returns that seem to be in question.

According to the feedback, small business owners did get clicks and likes but struggled with sales conversions.

“Although I may get clicks or likes, it doesn’t always translate to more money coming through the door,” one owner says.

Putting it simply, another responds, “Lots of impressions but almost no conversion.”

“When businesses don’t see the results they hope for, it’s usually because they haven’t done enough testing of their ad copy, visuals, and the ideal combination to target the right audience,” says Vitruvian Digital Advertising founder Kristie McDonald.

The potential audience on Facebook is massive.

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Only a small percentage of them will actually convert.

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Small businesses aren’t asking themselves the right questions to determine an effective target market for Facebook Ads.

Have you been guilty of only defining your audience by their gender, age, and income?

If you’re choosing the simplest of criteria to let Facebook know your target audience, you’re going to fail.

You need to use more powerful insights into the behaviors and unique interests of your ideal audience.

That way you can deliver your ads only to people most likely to want what you have to offer.

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Make sure you don’t just combine your demographics with every interest and behavior you can think of.

You need to set the criteria for only one or two interests and behaviors at a time.

If you try to go too wide, you will just spend a lot of money on audiences that don’t convert well.

You need to get laser specific in telling Facebook who you want to show your ads.

Make sure you’re targeting custom interest and lookalike audiences.

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Use a social listening tool to monitor updates and sentiment.

This will tell you if what customers mean matches what they are saying.

Sometimes what they tell you is most important to them isn’t actually the most important thing.

You can use social listening to divide the market by interests instead of the typical demographic data.

Listening also allows for better personalization of ad content.

This is really valuable since 71% of consumers prefer personalized ads.

Whether you are relying on organic and paid advertising, the personalization of your brand is what will set you apart in the long run.

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Once you know who you’re trying to reach, you can work on the type of content that will resonate with each segment.

Make sure that you use your value proposition to set your product or offer apart from the competition.

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Remember that the value proposition needs to be phrased and marketed differently for audiences in each stage of the funnel.

Use your ads to get the right message to the right audience instead of trying to blast everyone with one message.

How do you know you successfully hit the right audience with the right message?

Facebook has a Relevance Score that will tell you.

The better you are at targeting the right ad message to the right audience, the better your click-through rate will be and the lower your cost per click.

facebook ads relevance score vs cpc
AdEspresso decided to test this measure. They discovered that when they ran the exact same ad, but with better targeting, it got a much better Relevance Score.

Not only that, it dropped their cost per click and gained them four times more clicks when compared with the poorly targeted ad.

You can find this metric by going to one of your ad campaigns, going down to a specific Ad Set, and then looking in the lower right-hand corner.

The scoring system is one to ten, with one being the worst and ten the best.

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Problem #6 – Stop trying to go for the cold sale
This is some of the feedback from one of the survey respondents who told Weebly that Facebook Ads don’t work:

We very rarely have ever gotten sales through Facebook. We feel that ‘Friends’ on Facebook would rather interact than be sold to. Trying to sell via Facebook is like walking around at a party and passing out business cards trying to sell your products to friends who would rather be socializing than dealing with a sales attempt.

It sounds to me like this person was trying to hard sell on a cold audience.

Socializing is the new way of selling.

If you only plan on pushing cold sales on social media, you might as well forget Facebook. At least that’s what Emily Pope, a small business marketing expert from Fundera thinks.

A good Facebook page strategy consists of a healthy mix of feel-good content, information your customers need to know, and a small bit of advertising. If you’re not set up for that or want to focus only on hard selling numbers, you’ll be wasting your time on a Facebook page.

In other words, you want to focus on benefitting and giving content to your consumers before asking them for anything, especially a sale.

To get the most out of Facebook, engage with your online community in positive ways.

How can you fix this?

Remember the sales funnel.

You need to build the relationship from the beginning on the funnel.

My guess is that this business owner isn’t used to coaxing customers through the funnel.

If you’re only used to selling to people once they walk into your store, you’re used to the hard sell strategy that works on people ready to buy.

This means you’re missing out on huge sales opportunities, even outside of Facebook!

On social media, you need to build trust before you can push a sale.

This isn’t something you can do with the occasional monthly post (see problem #3).

One quick way around it is to build a working relationship with influencers in your market.

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Facebook works extremely well for retargeting.

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This is one of the best values of Facebook Ads.

Why?

This audience is four times more likely to convert!

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One reason for this is that these customers are already familiar with your brand and your product.

It’s no longer a cold sell.

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No one is hanging out on Facebook looking to make a purchase.

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Refer back to problem #1. You’re going to need to build multiple ad campaigns, one for each stage of the sales funnel.

Otherwise, you’re not going to be able to compete with all of the reasons they logged into Facebook.

Stop trying to jump right into the sales pitch!

Problem #7 – Understand that Facebook is a business
Some of the small business owners surveyed said they don’t believe the promise that paid posts will reach a larger audience.

Small business owners seem to begin to distrust Facebook right at the very beginning of an Ad campaign before there’s even been time to see results.

When the ad order is placed, most small business owners reached by Weebly were left saying, “Show me people. Where are the people? There are no people!”

You need to remember that Facebook is a business.

While it may seem like just a free place to hang out and socialize, it’s not.

You need to treat your relationship with Facebook the same as you would any business partnership.

You will only get a return out of it if you invest in it.

For example, linking a Facebook Pixel to your e-commerce site can have huge benefits for you.

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Facebook also loves this because it provides them with tons of audience data.

If you see Facebook as anything other than a business, I’m betting you’re too uncomfortable to link all of your site data to them.

But as a business, if you don’t provide profit to them in some way (either information or money), then they have no incentive to help you succeed.

Facebook has proven results. They’re old in the social marketing world.

This is not some new kid on the block who is still untested.

The list of brands who’ve been successful with Facebook Ads goes on and on.

Facebook has an entire database of successful case studies.

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Those results aren’t just for big business either.

Check out this ad for Design Pickle, (a startup):

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Design Pickle offers unlimited graphics requests.

This ad is directly responsible for almost $6,000 in monthly recurring revenue for Design Pickle.

How?

They used it to target highly qualified leads. Leads who they then sent this survey:

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They chose so many questions on purpose.

They used it to weed out people who were just looking for a freebie.

That meant they only got leads which were more likely to convert.

Their campaign generated around 500 leads.

30 of those leads turned into subscribers of their $200 per month service.

They estimate that their customer lifetime value to be around $1,100.

This means the one Facebook Ad resulted in an amazing 633% ROI!

If you want Facebook to work like this for you, you will have to change your viewpoint.

Treat it like a business and be willing to invest time, money, and some of your company and customer data to get an amazing return.

Conclusion
Almost two-thirds of small businesses are failing with Facebook Ads. You don’t have to be one of them!

Remember that Facebook Ads work.

There are proven results that work for companies of all sizes, and the huge majority of businesses use them for content marketing.

The problem is not with Facebook.

It’s with how you’re approaching Facebook.

Treat it like a business partnership.

Make a strategy, determine what you want out of it and how you’re going to measure your return.

Be prepared to invest more time and money into it if you want results.

As long as you invest wisely, targeting the right audiences with the right messages, you will see a positive ROI.

Facebook wasn’t designed as a place to cold-sell customers.

It is social media. Be social. Build relationships. Connect with influencers and your audience.

Those relationships can still be profitable!

1. Facebook advertising is laser-focused

With seemingly endless demographics, behaviors, and interests, the most powerful feature of Facebook’s advertising platform is by far its targeting capabilities – the ones they’re able to provide as a result of their mountain of user data.

Some of those targeting options include:

• Location
• Education
• Work
• Financial status
• Generation
• Parental status
• Ethnicity
• Languages
• Connections to specific Facebook pages
• Behaviors

And maybe more impressive than all the user data they have on one-fifth of the world, is how they got it in the first place. When you “liked” the Boston Red Sox on Facebook, they added that to their pool of data. When you shared that “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” was one of your favorite books, they added that to their data pool, too. When you posted that status update to announce your engagement, they stored that as well. The bottom line is this: Every time you “like” a page, interact with a post, or fill out another part of your profile, you voluntarily submit data to Facebook they make available to advertisers.

It is safe to assume that almost every Facebook action you take is being stored and used by businesses to serve you targeted advertisements. That’s how the social media giant has been able to amass the majority of its data.

Let’s take a peek inside Facebook’s Power Editor tool to see how targeted we can get our ads:

This picture shows how Facebook advertising can target users.

For the ad set above, I’m targeting 25-30 year-old liberal, divorced, doctorate-holding, female General Motors mechanical technicians, who studied mechanical engineering at Harvard between 2008 and 2012, who have a child between 1 and 2 years old, own a Lincoln, speak English, are interested in XBOX or Microsoft, and are traveling within a 25-mile radius of Boston, Massachusetts.

Now, would I ever want to get that specific? Probably not. As you can see above, my potential reach is only 20 people. I just wanted to give you an idea of how focused you could get with Facebook’s targeting tools.

Use them wisely, and remember – even the most targeted ad won’t be successful if you don’t create a dedicated social media post-click landing page for it. And you can create as many free pages as you’d like right here with unlimited traffic!

2. You can potentially reach one-fifth of the world

With 1.49 billion monthly active users, more than one-fifth of the entire world is on Facebook. That means when you add up every member of Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, Facebook users still outnumber them all by more than 300 million.

Consider some of these other surprising statistics…

• 72% of online US adults visit Facebook at least once per month
• 968 million people use Facebook every day
• Users spend 20+ minutes on Facebook per day
• Facebook accounts for 15.8% of total time spent on the internet
• Facebook receives 1 trillion page views per month
• 11 million people use Facebook every 18 minutes
• Facebook adds 7,246 users every 15 minutes and 8 users per second
• Facebook has “Super Bowl reach” on mobile every single day!

There’s no question that there are people interested in your business on Facebook. All you need to do is find them.

3. Facebook has buying decision influence

Social media guru Jeff Bullas reported last year that a whopping 47% of Americans say Facebook is their number 1 influencer of purchases. That statistic is in line with other research that shows…

• 4 in 10 social media users have bought a product after “liking” or favoriting on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest
• Facebook leads the way as the network with the highest effect on purchasing decisions, with 30.8% of consumers saying it influences them more than any other platform
• 74% of consumers rely on social networks to guide purchase decisions
• Facebook is the most effective platform to get consumers talking about products
• 71% of people are more likely to purchase something based on a social media referral
• 81% of consumers say that posts from friends directly influence their buying decisions
• 38% of moms are more apt to purchase from brands that other women “like” on Facebook.

Facebook is able to guide our purchasing decisions because it has “social proof” on its side. We value the opinions of our friends and family when it comes to making a decision to buy a product or spend money on a service. Facebook knows this, and they leverage social proof in their ads whenever possible.

4. Facebook ads’ remarketing potential

When Facebook’s ad platform was first introduced, you could spend hours narrowing your audience with countless demographics, interests, behaviors, etc. However, you were limited to showing ads to the people who found your brand through Facebook. This was a problem for many brands because they couldn’t serve ads to some of their most qualified audiences – website visitors and email subscribers. That all changed when Facebook introduced “Website Custom Audiences” and “Lookalike Audiences.” Now, by simply copying and pasting a snippet of HTML code (called a pixel) onto specific pages of your website, you can target people who visit those pages with Facebook ads.

For example, I personally do not “like” Amazon’s brand page on Facebook. That means their updates won’t appear organically in my news feed at all. I have, however, recently shopped Amazon for a Kindle. Amazon makes use of website custom audience pixels because when I logged back into Facebook, you will often see the same ad appear again. This technique can be used for any type of product or service. Creating a Website Custom Audience for people who abandon your post-click landing page, while excluding those who made it to your “thank you” page, is a great way boost conversions.

With Lookalike Audiences, you can target your email subscribers on the social network. Or, let Facebook’s algorithm generate a target audience similar to those subscribers by uploading a list of email addresses. Both methods of remarketing have proven to be very effective. When Banana Republic and Secret Escapes’ marketing teams employed the use of Lookalike Audiences, they saw a 60% and 134% boost in ad click-through rate, respectively. Jon Loomer used website Custom Audiences to get email sign-ups at 2 cents apiece, and one online retailer reported seeing a 3200% ROI with the help of Custom Audiences.

Ready to get started with Facebook advertising? We can get started creating your ads right away. Contact us today and let use show you how easy it is to attract more customers to your  business.