Being a behavior analyst you probably cringe seeing parents in the grocery store or at the park delivering ineffective interventions and unintentionally reinforcing undesirable behavior.
As a sales and marketing professional I cringe too. Only my cringes happen when I see behavior firms making these 3 mistakes in their advertising.
#1 Never boost posts on Facebook
The most easily corrected mistake on this list. Oh look you have a notification on your business page! This post is performing really well. Boost this post for $10 and 2000 more people will see it. What the notification should say is “would you like to donate $10 to Facebook for basically nothing at all. If your post is meant to be an ad, take some time and use Facebook Ads Manager. If you are unfamiliar there are plenty of tutorials to help (including Facebook’s own tutorial).
The main reasons to use ads manager instead are.
#1 Better targeting options. (The people who see your ‘boosted’ may not be in your target market.
#2 More data to see if and how it worked. More than who saw the ad using ad manger opens up deeper analytic on that particular post.
#3 The campaign objective options allow your ad to perform better.
If you have a post that is performing really well you can run ad to that post. When you run and ad to a post you don’t have to start over again with likes, comments and shares.
#2 Never Send Paid Traffic to your website
Instead use landing pages. You can use awesome tools like Click Funnels and Leadpages to make great looking landing pages without any technical skills. I personally use Click Funnels but either are great tools that will get the job done.
Your website is the hub of information for your business and I bet your website is just that. There’s a home page, services, pages, about page and contact page. People can find out your hours, types of insurance you take, phone number, blog, social media handles and general announcements. It’s all too distracting and ineffective when driving people from an ad.
Imagine your ad as a movie trailer and your landing page is the movie. The goal of the trailer is to get you to buy a ticket to the movie. You watch the trailer and it’s amazing. You go to see the movie and it lives up to expectations plus more. That’s the kind of relationship your ads and landing page should have.
Another great thing about landing pages is that you can do A/B testing. You can create a normal landing page and create an identical landing page to test how potential clients respond. You can tweak one element of landing page B and split traffic to see which one performs better.
Too often I see great ads promoting center based services or in-home support and I’m immediately taken on a scavenger hunt to the find info relating to the ad.
Build Landing Pages for each of your services.
#3 Never avoid video because production is too expensive.
Professional videos have their place in marketing but for most agencies they are expensive and unnecessary. A profession video shoot can cost anywhere from $500-$5000 depending on who you ask. They can take weeks or months to produce, coordinate, edit and revise before anyone actually sees it. And imagine putting that kind of time and money in for a video that doesn’t move the needle for your business.
Secondly, people have become very aware when they are being advertised to.Videos shot on cell phones consistently outperform in all key metrics on all major platforms. In other words its okay for your video to look okay. In this current marketing landscape sometimes you have to blend in to stand out.
Don’t over think it.
Tips for making a great video
Tip 1 Bring Great Energy.
Tip 2 Make sure people can hear you clearly
Tip 3 Avoid music in the background (avoid copyright infringement)
Tip 4 Brand your videos either in editing or wear a shirt with your company logo
Tip 5 If the video ad is generate leads keep it under 2 minutes it can go longer if its an informational add.
If you found these tips helpful.
Far Side Consulting is a Marketing agency focused on driving results for Mental Health and Behavioral Health Practices.