How can a small business use Facebook and Instagram ads effectively?

I don’t have any loyalty or even interest in Facebook as a brand. Because ultimately, none of this is about the exact platform.

I’d tell people to buy a full-page ad in ‘Vogue.’ I’d tell people to go buy outdoor. Someone please offer me some billboard space.

But we’ve reached the point where nearly all traditional advertising costs far too much.

People aren’t paying as much attention to billboards or TV commercials or magazine ads these days. So the inventory price is going up, because companies still need to make a profit on their airtime or publishing costs, while advertisers’ interest in using them goes down.

Big companies and institutions are lazy, behind the curve, and about to flood the market with money, but for the time being, smart small businesses have an opportunity that won’t exist in a few years.

But before you go out and start investing your money somewhere, you’ve got to change the way you look at marketing in this new world.

A New Medium

When people started moving their attention away from radio and toward television, everyone was like, “Well, the people who used to pay for radio are going to be paying for television now.”

When they went in to make TV ads, they took their radio scripts to a camera and said “Hold up this picture while we read the script.”

They didn’t understand the new format, so they did everything wrong. When you start using a new medium, don’t try to replicate your old advertising using this new tool.

The same thing is happening right now as our attention and time moves off of TV and into the internet, and then specifically into Facebook and Instagram.

Most marketers know by now that copying TV ads into the Facebook platform doesn’t work, but nobody’s having the deeper conversation about what actually works.

So if you sell something to women in their 40s, does that mean you need to go out and create video content featuring a 40-year-old actress? Should you test your messaging as a tweet before you shoot a video? Is your brand best represented by a few long blog posts, or a lot of short-form content?

Most people, even marketers, do not get what it takes to win the day.

The ones that do are in the middle of building enormous and valuable companies.

Early and Aggressive with Facebook

Case in point: the mobile shopping app Wish. It was started by some guys from Google who worked on AdWords.

It makes billions of dollars in sales every year now, and in my view they’re the one and only company out there that can actually compete with Amazon.

What did Wish do differently? What was their big secret?

They invested nearly all of their advertising dollars into Facebook and Instagram ads instead of TV and print.

The companies that are out there dominating right now are the ones that were early and aggressive with Facebook.

Amazon did the same with Google: about eight years ago, when Google AdWords still had room to grow, it was by far the largest buyer of Google search ads.

MVMT Watches was able to grow sales into the tens of millions and Wish into the billions, with a lot of help from influencers, Facebook and Instagram.

Over 90 percent of Fortune 500 consumer-packaged goods brands are losing market share, and yet they’re still spending the vast majority of their ad dollars on programmatic digital ads and TV commercials.

I find that incredibly interesting: people who are running businesses that have to make money are placing bets differently than the huge brands.

Because this isn’t about me being a pretentious hipster who finds TV and the radio “beneath me.” This is about knowing where the eyeballs are, and where the sales are happening.

Set up Successful Social Campaigns on Instagram and Facebook

Here are some of the things I would do, and the way I would do them, to set up successful social campaigns on Instagram and Facebook.

Plenty of businesses make two, maybe four pieces of content a year, and they dump huge budgets into each one.

Split your customer base into 20 to 100 segments and then create content or products that appeal to each of those groups. If I loved the Jets and I saw an ad with a Milky Way in the seat next to a guy wearing a Jets hat, I’d perk up.

You’ll see a much bigger reaction from the audience because the content fits with the context in which they’re consuming it.

When you tighten up the targeting, the CPMs will get higher. That scares most advertisers.

But you can’t say the same thing to everyone and make it come across authentically.

Because when you were trying to get one message to reach everyone, you had to be as general as possible to appeal to the most people. The mainstream companies will make a generic slogan like “Open Happiness” for Coca-Cola or “Taste the Rainbow” for Skittles.

Is a really deep connection that resonates within a small circle worth more than a fleeting and forgettable message that can reach millions more people? A deep connection is absolutely worth more.

I see brands and companies chasing the cheapest form of attention they can get, and then wondering why it doesn’t seem to be making their brand any stronger or producing any sales.

But the strategy I’m about to tell you is how I’ll turn even the most hopeless skeptic into a marketing evangelist.

Step one, in my view, is to make a long-form video that hits all the notes you want to say about your company, product, or service, and then get it in front of 100,000 or more viewers.

Step two is to retarget anyone who watched two to three minutes of it with an ad that has a call to action to go to your site and buy something.

And I promise your conversion rate will surprise you.

I think it’s absolutely crazy that a brand would spend $200,000 or more on a television or radio commercial, based on what a small group of people in their office thought and feedback from a few focus groups.

But there are smarter ways to pick your creative.

I’d tell you to start with a tweet and then make a blog post. Then, if it gets a reaction, make a picture. If it gets a big reaction, make a short video clip. And if that does well, invest in a bigger production.

Think of your anchor content as a Super Bowl commercial, an entertaining and memorable piece of media that tells the world why you’re in business and who you serve.

Every year when Super Bowl time rolls around, you hear a lot of talk about how the commercials cost too much. Nearly everyone watches them, in real time. Then, after the game, the same commercials do incredibly well on YouTube. It may seem counterintuitive, but the Super Bowl is actually underpriced, because the attention is so massive and the reach is so huge.

There’s a reason the big brands spend so much money and energy on those Super Bowl commercials. At that price, and with all that reach, that commercial becomes synonymous with the company.

If you’re a small business on Facebook, the same theory holds true.

Sure, no small business can afford a Super Bowl spot, but everyone can make something that has the right to spread. What Dollar Shave Club and Purple Mattress did was to create one signature piece of video and push it out on social.

If you get it right, that one anchor video could drive serious sales and build a strong brand at the same time. But it only works when it’s good.