Hey there! My name is Gary Nealon.
Little bit about myself - I’m an entrepreneur and have built several companies. Some successful, some not. And I think that’s pretty important to mention because in the world of entrepreneurship, failure is all part of the game, right? After declaring bankruptcy on my first company, I picked myself back up and started again.
This time, I was determined to hack the kitchen industry. Sounds crazy, right? It was right before HGTV and the DIY Network really became popular. Lots of people were selling kitchens, for obvious reasons. We’ve needed kitchens (in some form) since the stone age. I kept noticing that many of these companies had websites but all required the buyer to go into a store or call someone to discuss design. There was no point, click, buy a kitchen online option.
So I created one. Happy to share that we’re now 10 years in and last year we did $30M in sales and this year, we’re on track to have our best year yet and looking to do $40M in sales. This would not have been possible without mentors, colleagues and friends sharing what worked for them, what didn’t work, testing, reiterating, testing again, reiterating again. You know the drill.
I have been grateful for every entrepreneur who has shared with me and given back to me, so I wanted to do the same and share a Facebook strategy that has worked incredibly well for my ecommerce biz. And no - there’s no strings attached here. Not selling my services. Not selling a product or download. Just a firm believer that giving back is important.
A lot of us are using Facebook business pages to grow our business and a lot of us are getting screwed (for lack of a better word) by the algorithms in place. I figured out a fantastic way to hack it. And I get asked about it all the time, which is why, when a friend mentioned he’s been sharing his best practices, strategies and lessons here, I thought - why not?
Oh and I’ll be monitoring this thread. Drop your questions and I promise to get back to you.
OK - How Did I Get This Crazy Idea to Leverage Coffee?
Love coffee? Me too. Who doesn’t? Coffee plays a pretty huge role in our society, but unless you’re a barista or coffee roaster, if your business isn’t coffee beans, it may be a weird concept to use it for marketing. Yes, espressos will help get you moving, but if you’re selling gardening supplies or pools, coffee likely isn’t part of your sales dialogue, right?
So what if I told you that I used a love of coffee (and gardening, and cooking) to grow my company RTA Cabinet Store to over $30M in sales and create an audience no competitor could ever touch? That last part - about the audience NO competitor could ever touch? That is even MORE powerful than 8 figures in sales. Trust me.
Staying Ahead of the Competition
It’s inevitable that your competition will be watching everything you do. That’s why they’re your competition. For us, the competition began watching us like hawks five years ago. At the time, we were small, but we were mighty, growing steadily each month.
Of course, as a result of our success, our competition was watching us extra closely. Soon we noticed that the cost of the keywords we were targeting were rising exponentially. We quickly discovered that our competitors had caught on to what we were doing and were copying our ads word for word.
We were frustrated, obviously, but we knew we had to do something and fast if we were going to stay ahead of them and keep the customers we’d worked hard to secure. It was this sense of panic and urgency, to save our audience, that helped us develop a pretty nifty little Facebook marketing strategy that saved the day (and grew our business).
There’s Got to be a Better Way
Once the anger subsided, we got serious about finding a better way to identify our customers, engage with them, and keep them. To date, we’d set such a wide net, we were really targeting anyone and everyone. Everybody needs a kitchen, right?
Upon diving deeper this time around, we actually discovered that we had 4-5 very specific customer profiles. This realization, meant a shift in everything. It changed how we marketed, what sales copy we used, and how we targeted our customers. It also meant that we took a look for the first time at what hobbies and interests our customers share. Not surprisingly, a lot of them loved coffee. After a few cups of our own coffee, we had a thought.
What if we could reach our audience on social around a shared passion?
Ditching Branded for Personal
To refocus our attention and energy on subject matters our customers actively care and talk about, we got started by creating Facebook pages focused on their hobbies and interests. This meant creating pages about gardening, cooking, and you guessed it - coffee. Despite Facebook’s low organic reach, we were pleasantly surprised when we began seeing audience engagement on these pages.
We really didn’t want the momentum to stop, so we decided it was time to invest some money. We began by allocating $500-1000 per page and doing $10 boosts to posts that were getting a lot of engagement. By developing our new customer profiles earlier, we had excellent demographics that allowed us to target by age, gender, other pages they like, and location.
By focusing on personalized, human approaches, we were able to quickly reach 60k followers per page.
Consistency is Everything
Once things got personal, we knew we needed to keep the engagement going, which meant consistency and frequency were key.
Here’s how we ensured we were always on track and how you can too:
-- We posted 3-4 times a day with content that we knew would interest our target audience.
-- We chose fun content that we knew our audience would share. We used memes, videos and funny images.
-- We identified 2-3 posts per week with strong engagement each week and we boost them in $10 increments.
This process will not only increase your organic reach, it will allow you to target folks outside of your current page followers and bring in new followers with content you already know shareable. It sounds easy, right? Because it is.
The Invite to Like Hack
Next we suggest a little hack that has done big things for our company. We were actively putting money into boosting our posts, but we realized the key to maximizing the ROI on this investment was through the Invite to Like option that many have never even heard of. Whenever you boost a post, click through to see who liked your post.
What you’ll see next is a little gold mine of potential audience members and customers who liked your post but haven’t yet liked your page. BAM. This number is often large, especially if you’ve put ad dollars behind it, so take advantage of these potential customers by inviting them to like your page.
Until you’ve hit 100,000 followers, Facebook won’t stop you from inviting these people to like your page. This strategy allowed us to grow a number of pages by several hundred followers a day, simply because we invited people who liked our posts to do so. To date, we’ve built up an audience of over 1.5 million people in our target audience that we now have a relationship with.
NEXT! Monetizing Your Facebook Followers
As humans in a digital age - we all feed off likes on social media. As a business owner, our likes are only as good as our ability to monetize them. As much as we love our Facebook pages and are thankful for the power they provide, we strongly believe that you should connect with your audience on multiple platforms. We never know when a platform could cease to exist or change their terms of service and leave you out in the cold.
Once we built our following over a love of coffee, gardening, and more, next came the strategy to get them off Facebook. And yes, you read that correctly. We did spend a lot of money to get them on Facebook, only to now pull them onto other channels.
We began by creating content that would interest our followers such as recipes and guides and turned them into downloadable content. We made these downloads free and in exchange, followers would provide their email address to receive their copy. This gave us hundreds and thousands of potential customers email addresses, which allowed us to pull them off Facebook and onto our mailing list. We could then create custom audiences on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to target them to other platforms, in addition to sending them direct emails.
Boom!
With our new captive audience of our target market, whenever we had a sale or new product, we could run ads to them and our competition was none the wiser. By linking ad accounts, we were able to run ads to this audience as RTA Cabinet Store, without these potential customers knowing it’s coming from a page about coffee that they follow.
In a sale we did over the holidays, we were able to increase our numbers to seven figures with a 40% decrease in CPA.
Creating Additional Revenue Streams
What happened next was even crazier (and totally unplanned.)
These pages we’d created were growing so rapidly, we were actually able to set up additional revenue streams for them. Each got their own blog where we continued to create content we knew our fans would love and share. This generated new advertising opportunities and our mailing lists continued to grow even further.
Soon we were spinning off entirely new businesses like Pure Taste Recipes, as a result.
Each page got its own sponsored posts for non-competing products that generate monthly revenue for us. This has allowed us to identify trending products in each niche that we can actually sell direct for an additional revenue stream and get the customers into our buying cycle. What we quickly realized was that rather than creating new products and then trying to find an audience for them, we could just create the audience first and then figure out exactly what they were interested in and source that. Wouldn’t it be nice to launch a new product and instantly have an audience that is looking for it?
Always Think Outside the Box
Five years ago, we were facing a lot of uncertainty on how to keep our customers safe from the competition. We could have easily called it a day and accepted that competition is all part of the game. Instead, we took a step back and got creative.
That creativity has helped us become what we are today and it contributed to over $25M in sales last year (we are on track to do close to $40M this year!).
If you’re in an oversaturated market or think your product won’t cut it against the competition, don’t give up just yet. Here’s a quick summary of how you too can think outside the box and stay ahead of your competitors.
Get to know your customers. For real. Don’t assume you know who they are and what they like. Do the research. Have some fun on Facebook. Build pages around your customer’s hobbies and interests. Remember to keep it non-branded, that’s the secret sauce. Share a lot of content. Shoot for 3-4 posts a day on your page and put ad dollars behind posts that do well. Leverage the Invite to Like. Invite to Like often. Sync your page(s)’s ad accounts with your main business account. Get ready to take it to the next level. Create ebooks, guides, downloads, contests etc. that will allow you to get your page followers’ email addresses. Grow your community by creating custom audiences with your new mailing lists on other social channels. Monetize the heck out of your community.
When I say it’s that easy, it really can be. Yes, growing additional Facebook Pages can be time consuming and require a lot of attention, but the potential sales you could be generating make it totally worth it.
I’d love to hear from all of you - have you tried something similar? How have you leveraged Facebook to grow your customer base?
And again - seriously, drop questions below. I’m excited to hear what you have to say and see how I can help!
Gary
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