Welcome to episode 366 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris.
As I talked about last week, we talked about the fact that it’s a little bit launch season. People are launching. So one of the things I wanted to talk about today is what you need to do, on social, and really what you need to do about your social, before you launch something. This could be a new program. This could be a new offering. This could be a new opt in. This could be a new podcast. Whatever it is that you’re launching, I want to talk about some things that I want to do in regards to your social, before you open up Facebook and say, “Hey guys I have a new XYZ, go buy it please.” All right? All right.
Number one, build your plan.
I know, and you’re going to notice a lot in these next three steps, or this one and the following two steps rather, that it sounds a lot like planning your launch. I want you to apply the same logic to your social. This is called building a social media strategy, and it’s absolutely critical. So number one, build your plan. Know exactly what networks you’re using, what kind of targeting your using. If you’re targeting organic posts as well as your ads. What kind of content to share? When do you share? Where do you share it? How frequently do you share it? Where do you pull your other people’s content from? Built that all out into a plan.
This does not have to take weeks, and months, and years. We build them for clients in the matter of about 10 days, because we’re usually doing more than one, and we have other things going on. You could probably sit down and do yours in a couple of days. Maybe even a day. I’m not asking you to build out content. You’re not gonna write content at this point, but what you’re going to look at is, who is my audience. What are my networks? What are my types of content? The reason I want you to do this prelaunch, even if you have a general strategy in place, is now you’re looking at a very specific topic.
So maybe you’re launching a new podcast all about your subject, and you’re gonna have really killer guests. Well, for the two weeks before the podcast launch, I would be featuring other people’s content, from exclusively, those first few guests. That way, I’m getting my audience excited about hearing from this person. I’m giving my audience name recognition on whoever it is that going to be on the show. If this is a program, maybe you’re building a program all around counting Macros. Maybe you’re a health coach, or a personal trainer, and you are launching a program all about Macros. Great, I want to see Macro content. I want to see content about Macronutrients, Micronutrients, calculating them. I want to see content from you, and I want to see content from other sources. I want to see conversational content. So just engagement focused content, around Macros.
Maybe you are a business coach, and you have a killer sales call training coming up. It’s all about executing a successful sales call. I want to hear, I went to see rather, content about sales calls. Facebook lives about sales call tips, podcasts, blog posts, guest posts, other people’s content, everything is going to be around and supporting sales calls. That doesn’t mean everything is gonna say, “This is how you do a sales call.” But this is how sales calls make for a smoother sales process. This is the one fundamental tip to getting more sales calls. This is about doing more with sales calls. This is about best time of day to do a sales call. I don’t know, whatever it is. How many sales calls do you do a day? Those kind of things. Do you see what I’m saying? It’s focused, and that comes from really building a plan.
Also, really cool thing is when you build a plan, guess what, you know exactly what to do, and exactly when to do it. Is never going to be a point where you run into, “I have nothing to say today.” And that’s horrifying when you’re at a launch. The reality is, launches are exhausting. So as little thought as you can put into the day to day, of getting things out, the better, because your brain is going to be doing 847 other things. It doesn’t matter how much help you have. Okay? So build your plan.
Number two, map out your content.
This is where I actually want you to start constructing some of your posts. I always work backwards, especially in a launch window. So I’ll say … Let’s just pull a real-life example here. We have Backstage. Hit the Mic Backstage open year round. It’s Evergreen. It’s always available. Right? That awesome. It’s fantastic. It means I’m in launch mode constantly, essentially, because there’s no cart close. There’s no sort of ups and downs of push, push, push, chill. No, it’s always kind of a certain level of, “Yes, this thing is here.”
So each month, we kind of focus around what’s going to be new in backstage. That’s a lot of what I’ll talk about on the podcast, and my Facebook Lives. Now, because it’s open all the time, it is not as constant. It is not as … This month inside Hit the Mic Backstage, we have a four ad, ad strategy to reengage a stale audience. That’s the brand-new training that came in backstage. This whole month isn’t about Facebook ads. However, we did that because it’s launch season. So a lot of the podcasts this month are kind of about launch stuff. That training would fit very well if you are listening to this show, because we’re talking about launching. That’s something we do pre prelaunch, is we run those campaigns. So it fits in maybe a less obvious way. If that makes sense. But anyways, so what we’ll do, is we’ll run content around that theme. We’ve got that new training up, that’s what were going to do.
Or sometimes, we’ll pick an older training. One of the most popular reasons for people joining Backstage, is there’s an entire training on Facebook ads in there. Power editor, boosted posts, ads managers, targeting, pixels, all that stuff is inside Facebook Guide, which sits inside of Hit the Mic Backstage, which is fantastic. So sometimes we’ll say, “You know what, we don’t have a new training on Facebook ads this month, but we’re talk all about Facebook ads. We’re gonna put out a new opt in, and that’s gonna be our subject.” And guess what? That so we talk about every Tuesday on the podcast. It all feeds to the new opt in. We kind of do a faux launch around it, a soft kind of launch around it.
Again, I can do that, because I’ve mapped out the content. So if I say, “All right, we’re gonna do a new opt in. We’re gonna go a full on Facebook ads, and we’re really gonna promote that part of the community.” I would actually map out what podcasts are we doing, and I would base that on the Facebook Guide that’s inside of Backstage. So I’m working backwards from that Facebook Guide, because that’s essentially what I’m promoting. Even though it’s through a membership site, that’s essentially the program I’m promoting. So I worked back from that program, through content. I worked back through that content to social. I worked back through that social, to what part of these posts are gonna need more ad focus, and what can happen really organically. Where can I find support pieces for that? That’s how we map out our strategy.
So this doesn’t mean full on writing every piece of content, but I do outline the content, and I will highlight what the social is going to be. Sometimes I’ll put example posts in, especially if we’re doing this for somebody else. I’ll put in, here’s sort of the six kinds of things I would suggest. You can basically model these for the rest of your content, so that’s what we do. That kind of gives you an idea of how we map it out.
Number three thing I want you to do, is set your budget.
One of the biggest Facebook ads mistakes we see, is people building Facebook ads, and then going, “Oh my God, I spent $500. I have no idea how that happened.” It’s a double whammy. A, you didn’t set a budget, and B, you didn’t then create ads that supported that budget. So if you have a smaller budget, your ad targeting needs to be tighter. If you have a smaller budget, I suggest leaning hard on look-alike audiences, and custom audiences based on your audience that you have already. So your email list, your Facebook page, engagement on your Facebook page, video views, likes, comments, those kind of things. But also, look-alike audiences that look like your audience that’s already purchased things.
So one of the things we do to keep our ad budget down here, is we actually have a look-alike audience based on members of the Backstage community, because guess what, if you already bought Backstage, you’re already a member. I want more of you. Right? So I build an audience based on what those people look like. Then we do refine that a little further, because sometimes it can look like not at all what I want. So we’ll refine that with their interested in certain things, or they’re between a certain age demographic, they live in a certain place.
I’m in the states, and I speak English. Unfortunately, it’s the only language I speak at this point. Something I’m going to actively work on changing here, very soon, because it drives me crazy, but that’s neither here nor there. But I only speak the one language, so I can only help people that speak the same language I do, unfortunately. So that needs to be in my targeting, because I would love to have a look-alike audience that spoke French. However, I would not be able to help them, because I do not yet speak French. All right?
So when you have a smaller budget, lean on those kind of things. Lean on those kind of targeting. When you have a larger budget, you can open up that refining a little bit more. Now your language thing should probably still be on point, but your age demographic could be a little wider. Your location demographic, as long as the language is on point, your location demographic could be a little wider, if that makes sense for your program.
Now, on the flip side of that, if you are a local brick-and-mortar shop, we have a client who has seriously, a three mile demographic for their locations, so that’s pretty tight. So we go a little wider on age. We go a little wider, and do men and women. We refine other places like income level, and job, and family status, and things like that, because his location is finite. It is a strict sort of border. You may be running into the same thing, and thinking, okay, well that’s gonna narrow my audience down to the point where it’s just impossible. No, play with the other points. Target in other ways, to make sure you’re getting the right people in that location demographic.
Again, the narrower you are, the smaller your budget. The smaller your budget is rather, the narrower you need to be. If you have a little more money to play with, your budget can be a little wider. My other thought is you have a bigger budget, create more ad sets. It doesn’t have to be that you open one audience up to a larger number, a larger spectrum. It could be that now I have some extra money to test with. Or, now I can increase my daily budget, and maximize getting in front of more of those people. All right? Okay.
So those are the three things I want you to think about, as far as social media is concerned, with your launch.
Oh, actually, one more thing, bonus tip. When you are thinking about your budget for social media, for your ad campaigns, A Facebook ads, not the only ads in town.
Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, all have ad platforms, Pinterest. So depending on your market, Facebook ads may not be the only option. In fact, some cases they might not even be the best option. I will say, four out of five times they’re the best option, but in some cases they’re not. So pay attention to that. Look at maybe splitting your budget across a couple of places.
But also, if you want to hire someone, you need to factor that into your budget. I have had so many potential clients get on the phone with me and say, “Okay, so yeah, I’ve got $1,000 ads budget, and I want you to run these ads over the course of four weeks. I’ll just send you the $1,000.” They didn’t budget for what it would cost for me to run that campaign for them. On the flip side of that, I have people who contact me who say, “Okay, I have XYZ budget to pay you.” And they don’t factor in their ads cost on top of that. I don’t know a single Facebook ads person, anyone who runs Facebook ads, in fact we don’t even run them anymore, we refer them out, but I don’t know of anybody who runs Facebook ads where the ads budget is included in their cost. There may be someone. I’m not saying they don’t exist, but you need to factor in if you want to have someone else running your ads, or even managing your social for you. Factor in that cost, in addition to the cost the actual ads. All right?
All right. If you would like to join us Backstage, and you would, because it’s the killer, awesome upgrade to this very show, and you liked this show, or you would not still be listening, in theory. Seriously, if you don’t like this show, and you’re still listening … Anyways. Anyways, it’s the upgrade to this. It’s the next step for the show. So join us over at hitthemicbackstage.com if you have not already. If you are already a member, don’t forget, we do have an Ask Me Anything office hours coming up. Plus we’ve got the Facebook group, and the VIP community, where you can ask questions anytime. So if you’re already a member, which I suspect you are, I trust that you are, I hope, head on over there and join us. I think that’s all I’ve got for you today. If you have any questions, at any time, hit me up on Facebook or Twitter. I will see you next Tuesday.
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