AIMCLEAR loves making space on our blog for contributed posts from our friends, partners and competitors in the marketing landscape. There are so many brilliant marketers we admire and with whom we interact on our travels around the world.
This week, we open the door to the venerable Larry Kim, whose latest endeavor – MobileMonkey – is challenging boundaries in marketing (as we’d expect Larry to do).
With so much changing seemingly daily in digital marketing, Larry has some innovative ideas to tap Facebook Messenger as a powerful social marketing tool. Â Read on for Larry’s post!
By Larry Kim
Facebook advertisers have been watching the cost of ads climb over the last few years.
Then the organic Facebook News Feed algorithm update happened in 2018 and the cost of ads skyrocketed.
2018 saw CPMs rise upwards of 122% year over year in some instances. Advertisers have been forced to think a lot smarter about how they approach social advertising.Â
Facebook marketers who work in the organic space are also feeling the pain of the News Feed algo update with organic reach in the 0-1% range. I know my friends at AIMCLEAR have written about Facebook’s organic challenges at great length. Simply put, Facebook knows the value of its feed and they are not going to just give that prime real estate to brands. It’s now pay-for-play to get in the audience’s feed.
If you’re wondering if there are innovative ways to re-think aspects of your social advertising, particularly on Facebook, the answer is yes.
And the answer may well be to look at Facebook Messenger.
Here are 5 tactics you can implement today to increase Facebook organic reach and decrease Facebook ad CPAs:
- Run Facebook ads with the messages objective
- Chat blast — like email blasting in Facebook Messenger
- Send automated Messenger drip campaigns
- Use Facebook post auto responders
- Enable a Messenger chatbot as your website chat
1. Facebook Messenger Ads
Messenger can be a powerful way to put a new twist on a standard approach to Facebook marketing. For the purposes of this argument, I’ve stopped running Facebook ads except with the messages objective.
It’s purely for financial reasons. The cost per result for messages can be a fraction of other traditional Facebook ad objectives like traffic or engagement.
This activates the ability for the business to send future messages with mobile push notifications. Keep in mind, as marketers, we need to continually find ways to legitimately and ethically follow our audiences around the digital universe.
The leads a business gets from a messages ad have an advantage over those from a lead ad because of the magic of chatbot automation.
The business can follow-up immediately with new leads by programming responses delivered by a Messenger chatbot.
Here’s a Facebook Messenger ad campaign case study to illustrate. We’ve been running these messenger campaigns and, in some instances, are paying only $3 or $4 for contacts.
We automatically follow-up with the leads on Messenger with automated drip campaigns (more on Facebook Messenger drip campaigns in a little bit).
When we were running Facebook campaigns sending visitors to our website, we were paying $3 or $4 per click. At that rate, and our 2% website conversion rate, it cost about $150 for each lead.
Talk about an ad hack!
2. Chat Blasting
The chat blast is the new and improved email blast.
Whatever you send via email marketing can be delivered via Facebook Messenger. While not everyone is active on Messenger, it is a preferred channel for a significant portion of the Facebook user population.
The only difference is you don’t have to worry about spam filters or the promotions tab.
Add push notifications, and we’ve seen instances where brands see 80% open rates using Facebook Messenger.
How does that compete with your current Facebook organic post reach?
3. Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns are excellent for nurturing customer relationships, especially when your product or service requires onboarding or has a learning curve.
Like email blasting, drip campaigns are another example of a marketing tactic that’s traditionally done through email.
So you can stick with email and its 4% average click-through rate…
Or you can start delivering drip campaigns on Facebook Messenger, where click-through rate can hit a whopping 20%.
Building drip campaign automations for Facebook Messenger is a process similar to what you do with email but you can expect to get a lot better return.
Experience a drip campaign in Facebook Messenger here.
4. Comment Autoresponders
Comment autoresponders are another Facebook Messenger marketing tactic involving a chatbot.
It’s fairly straightforward to set up a Messenger chatbot to automatically respond to a user who leaves a comment on a organic Facebook post.
When a Facebook user replies to the chatbot autoresponder, they become a Messenger contact (hint: you can now send follow-up messaging to them).
A comment guard is one of the best ways to grow your contacts.
Comment guards, naturally, perform well on posts that are sure to generate a lot of comments.
Leave a comment on this post and see a comment guard in action.
5. Website Chat Widget
Traditional website chat is a great conversion booster. People who message your website chat are 6x more likely to convert than those who don’t.
But the pay-off can be even better when you use a Facebook Messenger bot as your website chat. Â
When your website chat is powered by a Messenger bot, everyone who messages your site becomes a contact that you can follow up with.
Automation via bots drives value for the business AND the user. The user can get answers to FAQs instantly, with no queue or wait time. The business gets the contact info of a new lead they can continue to nurture. Also, it’s important to note that a live operator can take over the chat at any time.
No longer are visitors anonymous, nor does the chat history vanish as soon as the conversation ends.
You can also use your chatbot builder to send follow-up messages after the fact.
With a website chat widget powered by a Facebook Messenger chatbot, the conversations turn from dead ends to leads, and are now also available as a WordPress chat-plugin.
Getting Ahead by Starting Facebook Messenger Marketing Now
As digital marketers, we all need to continually explore new avenues to reach captive audiences via social channels. Chatbots may or may not be the answer for your particular brand, but are worth exploring as part of an integrated digital marketing strategy. Â
Facebook marketers and advertisers: consider the power of automation and the reach, engagement and cost efficiencies that come with chatbots in 2019. Facebook advertising presents huge opportunity for brands to connect with audiences in what seems much more like a 1:1 relationship. Done well, FB advertising – combined with chatbots – can boost your performance and enhance the audience’s perceived connection with your brand through a personalized interaction.
If you have any questions, I’d love to answer them and tell you all the Facebook Messenger marketing hacks I’ve learned in the last year building MobileMonkey.
