Using Facebook Ads to Drive Workshop Attendance

Sep 14, 2016 / By John Choi
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What’s Working Now: This advisor has found it is inexpensive to use Facebook advertising, which effectively boosts attendance at his workshops and is building a database of qualified leads.
Editor’s note: In this edition of What’s Working Now, an AdvisorRADIO feature in which Horsesmouth members tell us about recent success they have had running and growing their businesses, we hear from advisor John Choi who is marketing his workshops with Facebook. You can hear the full interview by clicking on the audio file below. The following article includes edited excerpts of John’s comments. For step-by-step guidance on how to create and target advertising on Facebook, see our article, “Facebook Ads: Action Plan for Attracting Qualified Leads.”

Quick Overview

Advisor: John Choi
Vernon Hills, Ill.

Years in business: 23

Firm: Epiphany Capital

What’s working now: Using Facebook advertising to cut down on direct mail costs in marketing workshops.

Facebook ads versus direct mail

I currently use direct mail to drive traffic to my Social Security and retirement planning workshops. However, I recently started using Facebook advertising as well. My goal is to build my own database of prospects using Facebook. With Facebook leads, you get people who have already raised their hand. It’s a warm market. You know that these people have some sort of Social Security question, otherwise they would not have clicked on your Social Security-related ad.

When you build 1000 or 2000 of these names over time—it might take you a year; it might take you two years—but once you have your list, your next seminar becomes much more cost-effective. You’re emailing, not mailing, and email costs exactly nothing. There always seem to be two or three folks that come to these seminars just from my email database. In fact, it’s close to anywhere between half a percent to one percent response rate.

This is a long game, but I don’t want to call it a two- or three-year experiment because I already see it working. So far, my budget has averaged $1,000 dollars per month, to use a nice round number. I’ve been averaging around 30 leads a month this way, with constant improvement. I’ve tweaked and optimized the ads since my last workshop and lifted my budget constraints as an experiment. I’m very pleased with the results. Within the past few weeks, I received 60 leads from my Facebook ads!

Because I only started recently, my advertising budget remains in flux. It’s best to start small and adjust as needed. I know people who drive traffic to their workshops using Facebook ads exclusively, and I promise you this: They aren’t spending the $6,000 dollars a quality direct-mail campaign will run you. Even if your ad campaign costs you $1,000 a month, you’re saving a lot of money.

Raising the buying temperature

When we started advertising through Facebook, our ad said, “Download this free Social Security report.” We averaged probably one download a day for a good eight months before we shut it off. When we re-ran the same ad with a different headline, we saw vast improvement, getting 26 leads within eight days. And since then, we’ve improved even more. The point is, the advertisement promises a free Social Security booklet in exchange for some basic information, including their email address.

Next, after they’ve raised their hands and downloaded our report, we follow up with the leads over email. The challenge is, I don’t know what their “buying temperature” is at this point. They could be 1 on a scale of 1 through 10. You never know with these type of leads, so we try to raise their buying temperature to the point that we can either get them to come to a live event, or invite them into the office for a face-to-face consultation.

You can speak to your leads on a variety of topics until they opt out because once you have their email, they have opted in to receive mailings from you. I have a 52-week series called “Social Security Tips.” Every week they get a Social Security tip, and they’ll keep getting them until they opt out of the series. We’ve also got a three part Social Security video series. Each video is about four to seven minutes long. And as the leads go through it, we’ll get notifications via email saying, “John Doe has gone through video one,” “John Doe has gone through video two,” and so forth. Once they’ve done all that, we know they’re serious. From there, we can send them more emails either inviting them to our upcoming workshop or inviting them to a one-on-one conversation.

Having said that, it’s a much lower barrier to have them come to a live event than a one-on-one consultation. The trick is that you have to have an upcoming seminar, or your advertisement won’t work. This tactic forces you to have an event once every other month at the very minimum, which is a good thing. Personally, I have seminars every month.

Here’s the secret of social media marketing: “Value, value, value, offer.” You give them something of value, like a whitepaper or a video. And you’re doing it for free, because it doesn’t cost you anything. There was an initial cost to shooting the video, but after that it’s all free. Then you throw them another piece of value, like a checklist. And then, finally, you make an offer: “We’re inviting you to a seminar.”

You can get a little bit more aggressive and invite them into your office, but you still shouldn’t ask them to buy anything. If you can get them to your live event and let them know a little bit more about you—get them to know you, like you, and trust you—that’s huge. I know if three people come in, one is a new client.

Advertising mechanics

We set the Facebook ad to display in a 25 to 30 mile radius around our office and the age ranges between 60 and 68. Facebook charges via views and clicks; so if no one sees it and no one clicks on it, you don’t get charged for it. If you’re selling $1 widgets, you want 500,000 people or a million people as your potential reach. But we’re talking about a high ticket, niche service, so I want to be specific in how I target the advertisement.

Now, the interesting thing about Facebook is that you can exclude or only include certain groups. For instance, I’m Korean—if I wanted to, I could choose to include only Asian Americans, or I could choose to exclude Asian Americans. That’s just an example, but it’s the next big thing in marketing: slicing and dicing and segmentation. You can say, “I only want to have people who subscribe to Food & Wine magazine because I’m thinking that people with a lot of means subscribe to Food & Wine magazine.” Now, when I’m building my Social Security list, I’m obviously not going to put those parameters in there, but it’s still an exciting possibility.

Regarding the placement of the ad: The user may see it on the right side of their screen. It may show up as part of the news feed. When they click on it, it takes them directly to a landing page designed to capture information. On my landing page, we ask for name, email, phone number, and town. You really want to keep your questions between two and four; I’m at the maximum.

Then, after they put in their information, they’ll hit a button that says, “Get my report now.” It takes them to another page: “Thanks for asking for the report. Here it is. Click this button to download.” There’s a variety of ways after the landing page for them to get the report, but the key is you can’t monkey around with this. You’ve got to give them the report right away—and when I say “right away” I’m talking about in the next two seconds. You cannot ask anything else of them at that point.

We call things like our report “lead magnets.” It’s basically free information that the users want—a guide, a checklist, or a whitepaper on the new Social Security rules, to give a few examples. Some people send out e-books. Personally, our lead magnets range from three to 20 pages. Social Security is probably the strongest lead magnet, because almost every American is going to receive some sort of Social Security. The vast majority of 300 million Americans: When they turn retirement age, they get it. There are 76 million baby boomers, so that’s your audience right there. I’ve personally found the most success with Social Security, but Medicare’s a great one, too. Every American at the age of 65 will have to go on Medicare, unless you’re covered by a large group plan; and eventually, even those folks will have to go on Medicare.

Advice to other advisors

If you’re going to do this, always set a budget, and be sure to automate your system. Remember what I said about lead magnets. Have you ever bought an airline ticket on the internet? You’re clicking the refresh button, because we’ve been conditioned to expect these things in 15 seconds or less. If you say to yourself, “I’ll get them the lead magnet when I feel like it, and when I get the email notification, I’ll send it out myself,” then you’re setting yourself up to fail. Who knows? You might be in a client meeting. It might take you an hour to respond. At that point, it might as well take you 30 years to respond. Could you do it yourself? Yes, but you’d have to quit your job.

As this marketing venture evolves, we’ll be looking at other kinds of social media, like LinkedIn and Twitter. I’m feeling especially confident about LinkedIn. Social media is, for the foreseeable future, the way marketing is going because it’s both cost-effective and targeted. It used to be that more targeted marketing was more expensive, but the internet has flipped the rules around. We can now have targeted, cost-effective marketing very cheaply compared to what we’ve gotten used to paying.

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