Hello! This is Manuel again, the Facebook Marketing Ninja, back to share another blog article with you. Today, what we’re going to do is take a deep dive into the subject of understanding that MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT YOUR CUSTOMERS. The reality is that MOST OF THEM AREN’T EVEN A PART OF YOUR IDEAL AUDIENCE. These are absolute facts.
Majority of the people out there aren’t interested in what you have to say — or in what you have to offer, and in reality, THIS IS MORE THAN OK. And today, I’m going to tell you why.
At first glance, this may seem like a difficult subject to read about, or to accept. When you look at the title, it seems so “negative”. The thing to bear in mind here is that things aren’t always as they seem. In actuality, this is a VERY important topic, so please approach this with an open mind.
I read somewhere not long ago that “The key to FAILURE is trying to please everyone.” This is a simple, but pretty profound quote, and it is very true.
When our minds are open, this quote can actually serve to BRILLIANTLY remind us of how important it is to UNDERSTAND the following:
- WE ALL NEED CUSTOMERS. As business owners and brands, customers are the lifeblood of our businesses. We need customers to survive. It all begins with at least one customer to patronize your business. Without customers, you really don’t have a business.
- WHO YOUR IDEAL (TARGET) 🎯AUDIENCE/CUSTOMER IS. As a marketer, it is VITALLY IMPORTANT to be clear and specific on WHO your ideal customers/clients are. Being vague about this is of NO benefit to you. While it may actually be true that your ideal audience includes all adults who are over the age of 27 and have children, these are still not particularly well-defined parameters for the purpose of marketing. I’m not simply talking about demographics and general data…actual DETAILS are needed here. The more details, the better, in fact. WHO IS this person (your ideal customer)? What does he/she like to read (books/magazines subscriptions /e-books, kindle)? What do they like to eat? What device(s) do they use? Where do they live (and with whom)? What do they like to watch on TV or online? What music do they like? Career information? What really DRIVES this person…and What does he/she drive 🚘? Is he/she an Amazon shopper? What is their level of education? What courses have they taken or shown an interest in? What celebrities do they follow on Social Media? What are their DISLIKES, even? I think you’re starting to get the picture now…
- WHO YOUR IDEAL (TARGET) 🎯AUDIENCE/CUSTOMER IS Knowing and being able to identify who your customer ISN’T is just as essential to your success as knowing who IS. 😉Sometimes THAT IS THE SECRET. (Have you ever heard the saying “You’ve got to be clear about what you DON’T want in order to be clear about what you DO want”?)
Once you have a true grasp and understanding of these principles, you can then be well on your way to finding the customers and audience that are JUST RIGHT for you, as well as learning and knowing HOW to find them.
All too often, I’ve found that this is something that people don’t work hard enough at researching and finding on the Facebook advertising platform. You’ve got to keep in mind that in the Facebook world, there are so many people using it, so many demographics, so many socio-economic levels, and so many different areas, that if you don’t work hard enough to understand these audiences and find them, then you’re going to lose every single time.
I realize that even veteran marketers who have been in the game for quite some time still make the mistake of giving in to the temptation of thinking too broadly about your target audience. After all, it seems logical to want to sell to as many customers as possible, right? (Well, there goes that word “seems” again…and once again, this is another thing that is NOT as it seems.) This brings to mind another quote out there where someone said “When you try to speak to everybody, you speak to NOBODY”. This makes a lot of sense in this context. TRUST ME when I tell you, guys…Your business will transform the VERY day that you recognize that everyone is not your customer. So the operative and KEY 🔑 thing is to figure out WHO your customer is, AND what they want so badly that they will give anything to have it, and then go communicate to THEM…in their language.
YES, it’s going to take a little time and some effort to do the research and find out who these people are, but once you DO, and you know it with certainty, it will be so WORTH it. Your growth will be EXPONENTIAL AND EXPLOSIVE, because you will be talking to the RIGHT people who ARE interested in what you have to offer and what you have to say to them…And IT DOESN’T COST YOU A SINGLE PENNY to figure this out. You’ve just got to be willing to invest the time and effort to ensure your own success and the success of your business. It’s as simple as that. Once you really GET it and how it’s done, You’ve changed the game for your brand FOREVER. It’s a skill that can never be taken away from you.
Most of the times when I see people giving up and quitting they say, “Well, I tried. I was working hard on finding an audience. I kept on doing Facebook advertising and it just didn’t happen”, when the reality is that they didn’t try hard enough.
Facebook ads is a process of discovery, but the fact to remember is that IT IS A PROVEN PROCESS. You may have to run ten to twenty campaigns before you actually find a winning audience, but with tenacity, and through TRUSTING THE PROVEN PROCESS, YOU WILL FIND YOUR WINNERS. A perfect analogy I have for this is in regard to the world of baseball.
In baseball, if you are a hitter (also called a batter), your job, of course, is to hit the ball. Here’s the thing: If you actually hit the ball three times out of every ten attempts, You are considered to be very successful! Did you know that? The Hall of Famers, the best performing athletes in the history of the sport of baseball ⚾️ have only batted about 380 at best, meaning that for every ten at-bats, they only were able to actually hit a good hit, or getting to the bases safely three to four times maximum.
Well, very much like the game of baseball, that’s the reality of what is going on today with the game of Facebook and Social Media ads. People don’t try enough. They don’t take enough “at-bats” until they find that winning audience, and they do such a great disservice to themselves and their businesses by not following through with the PROVEN process. Because if you think about the great enormity of what we have in front of us today which is one single family of GIANT platforms (I’m speaking, of course of the Facebook-owned platforms), this one single media organization can give you access to an enormous wealth of people, and to generate unlimited traffic. All you have to do is understand how to find your audience, trust the process and FIND them.
Let me tell you another thing. The best audiences do not actually care so much when you put creatives in front of them. If you are talking to someone who’s balding and doesn’t have much hair on their heads, and you give them a solution to growing their hair, then you’ve got your message in front of the RIGHT people, who are highly likely to WANT to know more about what you have to offer them. In a case such as this, even if your creative was quite bad, they will STILL respond to your message. But, on the other hand, if you are creating a million dollar video production with incredibly aesthetic artwork, images, graphics designs, and all these bells-and-whistles, but you’re putting your solution for male pattern baldness in front people who have full heads of hair, well, you’re going to lose every single time. I’m saying all of this to drive home the point that creative is secondary to finding the right audience. You have to work on understanding who your audience is, FIRST AND FOREMOST.
One of my main areas of concentration throughout all my training, in my articles and podcasts, my videos, and my seminars, is the fact that I am constantly emphasizing the point that people are not working hard enough at learning and understanding their audience, and they don’t persist enough in going through the process of locating that group of people who actually ARE willing to hear their message, and who WILL genuinely want to engage with them because they actually DO like, need and want your product and/or service, and the fact that you have a viable solution to their challenges and “pain points”.
Let’s talk about another example of a very common concern among people today: Obesity; being overweight. Let’s say that you have a brand that offers a solution to the widespread problem of obesity and being overweight. Well, the fact is that sadly enough, some people really don’t even care. Many overweight people are not necessarily interested in handling the problem. That group of people who don’t care ARE NOT YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMERS…at least not YET (stay with me here; and I’ll explain what I mean when I say “yet”). So, what you have to do as a marketer is find the people who are actually interested in handling their problem. And that requires targeting. Here’s one more example: Let’s say, for example, somebody dresses horribly and they are always looking disheveled and ragged, wearing shirts that are dingy and/or stained and wrinkled, bad quality shoes…they just don’t buy any nice clothes at all, even though they can actually afford them. You might think, “Wait a second…maybe what I have to do is find these people and promote to them because they need to dress better.” Well, if they themselves don’t care about dressing better, and they are content with wearing dingy, ragged apparel, then it’s not going to do you any good putting your messages in front of that person, because THEY ARE NOT YOUR CUSTOMER…at least not YET. They aren’t interested in what you have to say or in what you are offering…well, not YET, at least. So, it’s not just about finding people that have the problem, it’s equally important to find people that want to do something about that problem. They have to actually WANT the type of solution that you have to offer them. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT TO THINK 🤔 WITH.
Ok, so now I’m going to talk to you guys about how you CAN build an audience out of even these people who “don’t care”, so that you will be able to “attract” and nurture them with your content, and become the “hunted” instead of always being the “hunter”: You can put videos and images out there; you can put valuable information out there and generate these people’s interest based upon these “pain points” that they haven’t put attention on as yet, and as a result of that, they can actually feel a NEED to address the problems that you’re able to provide solutions to. You’ve got to essentially help them to “wake up”. In the case of the overweight person (given in the example above), you’re talking to somebody who is unhealthy, in fact,they are DANGEROUSLY unhealthy. You help to make them see that their life can be shortened dramatically if they don’t make the necessary health and lifestyle changes, and they won’t be able to see their kids grow up, and they won’t be able to see their grandchildren because they’re not going to be around. If you’ll help them see that, they’ll wake up.
In the example of the person who’s not able to style themselves correctly and not dressing properly, with these people, you’ll need to somehow make them realize that they should have a better sense about how they want to present themselves in the world, have more self-confidence and take pride in their appearance, and how that improves their quality of life overall. So, there ARE things that you can do along the way to nurture people, and that’s why content works so well. It actually helps people to “wake up” and raises their sense of responsibility for their problems, which your business has solutions to help them handle. This actually reminds me of another quote. This one is from the late great Steve Jobs: “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until YOU SHOW THEM.”
So, that’s one key thing to keep in mind. But REMEMBER, The initial thing (and it is MOST IMPORTANT to do this FIRST) is that you have to actively work at understanding and finding your audience. If you don’t do that, you’re going to fail every single time. There’s no way around that.
The process takes time and effort because, as I keep saying over and over again (to REALLY drive the point home), Most people who are on Social Media are not your customers. They don’t care. Let’s say that we have approximately 170 million people in the United States actively using Facebook – and about 200 million people actively using Facebook and Instagram every single day. That’s a whole lot of people. Now, out of those 200 million people, most of them are not interested in what you have to say. You will have to find the several million people who DO want to hear 👂 what you have to say 🗣.
Now, here is something that is really practical for you. If you have been following my content for a while, you know that I talk about the Facebook Business Manager OFTEN. The Facebook Business Manager is a tool that gives you information about your audience, and about your potential audience. For example, if you go to https://business.facebook.com, and once you’re there, you can begin searching around for Facebook Pages, for celebrities, for famous brands, for famous stores, etc. You can actually start seeing their demographic information, which pages they like, what area they live in, and so much more. This is something that you need to understand along the way. You can use something in the Business Manager called “Audience Insights”. Back in the day, when major ad agencies and corporations like the ones in the Netflix show “Mad Men” (I don’t know if you guys have seen that show, but it was very popular for a long time on Netflix), only huge agencies like those were able to have access to this type of mega-powerful, multi-million dollar software that we, the “little guys” now have access to today.
If you go to https://business.facebook.com, then you can go to actual Audiences, in there you’ll have access to this free tool called “Audience Insights”, and you’ll be able to really dig in and begin learning all about your audience and gaining an understanding of them. Once again I’m going to tell you, Audience Insights is a FREE tool, and I highly recommend that you check it out. If you compare this with times past, let me explain to you how unique the opportunity is today. Back in the 1940s, 1960s, 1980s, even in the 1990s, all the major corporations and businesses wanted to do was capture as much information as possible about their audience. Their market research divisions dug deeply because they wanted to understand their potential prospects as much as possible. For instance: Do they like golfing? Do they like playing tennis? Are they married? Do they have kids? Do they like to go on vacation? Do they use credit? What do they do with their lives? Now what about what movies they like? What about the stores they visit? Do they like Gucci? Rolex? Do they like to shop at Walmart? All of this information is valuable. The more information an agency has, and the more info that a business has about a potential customer, the higher the likelihood is that the business could nurture them, close them and make them a customer. The reasons for that are quite obvious because when you have a lot of information about a prospect, a client, a customer, it’s easier to communicate with that customer and let them know how you can help them. Knowing your audience is the key to success.
For example, back in 1960, these business people would take their prospects out to play an 18-hole round of golf, and therein they would commence to build a relationship with that prospect. What that allowed them to do is to communicate to the prospect directly, and be able to direct the conversations toward something that they (the propects) like. Let me give you an example using myself:
I am a Dallas Cowboys’ fan. If you guys haven’t seen that before, you can go through my Instagram feed, through my Facebook profile, etc., and you’ll find that I talk about it all the time. This is something that I’ve been passionate about for a long time. So, Facebook KNOWS that I am a Cowboys’ fan. They know that I have been a Cowboys’ fan for a good 16 to 18 years or so. Well, actually, Facebook has been around for 14 of those years, so they know for sure that I’ve been a Cowboys’ fan. If a marketer has a company with authorization from the Cowboys to make and sell merchandise and they’ve developed a line of coffee mugs, custom apparel or things like that…Whatever it is, they can then use Facebook’s information to communicate with individuals like me directly, saying something along the lines of “Hey, it’s awesome to be a Dallas Cowboys’ fan. Let me give you something here.” For me, if somebody is selling me, for example, a microphone, a charger, a phone case, a shirt – basically if they’re selling me something with the Dallas Cowboys’ brand insignia on it, then I am more likely to be responsive. And that’s basically what having the right information about an individual can do for your brands.
Understanding what your customers like (as well as what they DON’T like) is absolutely key to being able to expand your business and communicate with those particular customers in a manner that really hits home and gets them to respond. This is the single, most important factor in Facebook advertising.
People in general have been quitting before they actually find their winning audience. My advice is: DON’T QUIT BEFORE THE MIRACLE HAPPENS! I say “miracle” because the shift in your results will be absolutely miraculous if you stick with it, and keep testing until you find your winning audiences. Do NOT quit! Keep going, and follow the process, and you WILL be successful!
This subject brings a story to mind; I believe the story is called “Three Feet From Gold”. It’s a true story about this guy who got caught up in the “gold fever” during the gold rush days , which was back in the late 1840s and early 1850s, so he staked his claim and started digging. After a lot of hard work, he found a vein of gold ore, so he covered up the ore he found and returned home to raise the money for the machinery that he would need to bring the ore to the surface.
He raised the money and travelled with his nephew back to the site to make their fortune.
Things started well and before long, they had enough to clear their debts. They were excited, and figured that everything from there on would be profit and things were looking good.
Then the supply of gold stopped. The vein of ore had disappeared.
They kept on digging, but found nothing.
After a while, they quit in frustration and sold their machinery to a junk man for a few hundred dollars.
After they went home in disappointment, the super-smart junk man who bought their machinery called in a mining engineer who checked the mine and calculated that there was a vein of gold just three feet from where the man and his nephew had stopped digging.
The junk man dug, struck GOLD, and went on to make millions from the gold mine.
The other guy went back home, paid back everyone who had lent him money and was determined to learn from his mistake in giving up too soon.
The moral of this story is that “Quitters Never Win, and Winners Never Quit!”
If you are one of those people who has tried and quit before finding your winning audience, IT’S NOW TIME TO GET BACK IN THE GAME, stick with the process and take the PROVEN SUCCESSFUL ACTIONS until you win, because if you DO, with tenacity and patience, YOU WILL WIN. There’s absolutely NO DOUBT about that. Again, like I said in the “baseball player” analogy, you will miss more than you “hit”— A LOT more in fact, at first. It’s par for the course. So KNOW that. But REMEMBER, it only takes 3 “hits” out of every 10 attempts to be a hall-of-famer! In order to be successful in Facebook ads, you have to be willing to actually keep trying to find your audience actively. There are a lot of tools available that you can use which are going to help you find that audience. Remember that “Audience Insights” is one of them.
Now, for example, if you are familiar with the Business Manager in the Facebook advertising platform, when you select an objective, let’s say you want to run a traffic campaign to drive people to your website, you can select an option called “Split Test” (there’s a little checkbox). Once you select Split Test, you have an option to choose up to five different audiences that you want to test out. And what Facebook will do is actually rotate all the different ads that you choose to have going, or you can run one single ad. Whatever it is that you set up as the creative between all these different audiences, they (Facebook) will tell you which one is the winner. You can now use that information to scale your business 📈, scale your ads and build other campaigns with that particular winning ad set.
Now, about “Audiences” – there are actually MILLIONS of different audiences that you can select along the way, but you REALLY have to understand who they are. Yes, what we have in front of us is literally a faucet of information, a faucet of customers that you can turn on and turn off at will.
If you are struggling with getting more customers for your business, whether you’re a Realtor, an Insurance Salesman, an Amazon seller, an e-commerce seller, or if you have a brick and mortar store or have an agency and you’re running marketing for other companies… WHATEVER it is, if your business can handle more customers, you MUST realize that those customers and prospects are using the Facebook-owned platforms every day. You simply haven’t done a good enough job at putting your message in front of them...YET. You have to ACTIVELY put your message in front of these people until you find the ones who are willing to engage back with you. And that is done through understanding the Facebook platform, which I actually teach about a lot. If you guys have been following my content enough, I have mini-courses, I have these blog articles, I have podcasts, I have videos, I have a lot of things and I’m consistently delivering value every single day along the way. Why am I so obsessed with doing this? Because I like it. In fact, I LOVE IT. I love teaching and providing value. I like showing you guys how to be successful yourself. For me, that is my number one passion. Some may even say I’m TOO OBSESSED with it, but there’s no such thing as being “too obsessed” in my book. That’s LOSER MENTALITY.
For several years I put my head down, I worked and I built some incredible businesses. And now, I have an agency and I have decided to help you guys be successful as well and teach you, by opening up my books and sharing with you all that needs to be done in order for you to incorporate these strategies into your businesses. We’re fortunate to be living in such a unique era and that’s the reality. If you think about it, most of you who are here reading this article may remember what the world was without the internet. I know I certainly remember it. Now that I come to think of it, all 3 of my kids were born during the internet age so they’re not going to have the same experience. They’ve never known what the world was like before the internet. We are the only generation right now in existence, that really remembers how the world looked without the internet. Do you understand how big of a deal that is? WE, the generation between the ages of 30 and 50 years old… in about twenty or thirty years from today, we are going to be the last and the only generation alive that will ever remember our world before the existence of the internet.
The internet age is taking over the world, right? Well, the “pre-online” age dies with us when we die, when we pass on and our kids and generations to come are the only ones handling this planet. Nobody else is going to remember (or even be able to fathom) how this world survived without mobile phones and smart devices, without wireless signals, without computers, without electronics. Nobody else is going to remember.
Let that sink in for a second. We are riding a wave, that’s I have a webinar that is called “Riding the Facebook Ads Wave” because this era and this company (Facebook) is giving us a tremendous wave of opportunity, in which we can have access to a faucet of customers that we can turn on and turn off at will. Let me also share a viewpoint that I also want to communicate about this. If you have a business, no matter what type of business it is, your business is supposed to be improving the lives of other people, and making them better. If it’s not making things better, then, you really don’t have a business, and you should move on and get another business that DOES help people to enhance their some facet of their lives. But, if your business DOES makes the lives of other people better in some form or fashion, then it is your responsibility to figure out how to use this incredible faucet of potential clients that you can turn on and turn off whenever you choose, so that you can get as many clients/customers as possible, to the point that your problem becomes how to get more staff to help you scale your business to meet the demand. You should never have a problem in this modern era with traffic, with people, because you have access to an unlimited amount of them using the power of social media marketing that we have available to us today.
So, there you have it. That’s what we have today, guys. We have an opportunity right now that we want to maximize and just ride this wave like crazy because, in a few years, it’s going to be a little late in the game. I say that we’ve got a good 2, 3, 4 years ahead of us in which Messenger marketing is going to be a thing, in which Facebook ads will continue to dominate, in which Instagram is going to continue to capture the attention of the billions of people that are at our disposal. This is something that no other generation will ever have such a GOLDEN opportunity with as we do NOW, in present time. When my son grows up and starts doing advertising for his business, it’s going to be something that will have grown so massively and so popular that is going to be like television is today, crowded and expensive. In reality, we have to maximize this opportunity and understand that the Facebook ads platform is the right ingredient and the first step into jumping into this wave that we have in front of us.
I hope you’ve received a lot of value from this. Now figure out how you’re going to use it, and MAKE IT HAPPEN.
I’ll see you in the next article. 👋
