Hey, good morning internet fans, it is Ryan Perry with Simple Biz Support. Today is Wednesday, therefore it is Social Media Wednesday, and as usual I have Sarah Giometti in front of a fish tank. Sarah Giometti is with Provaro Marketing. Good morning, Sarah.Sarah Giometti: Good morning, Ryan How are you?

RP: I’m doing wonderful. We are debunking social media myths, and you are in front of a fish tank, so I’m assuming we’re talking about social media is so simple that fish in a fish tank could do it.

SG: Well, maybe not quite that simple.

SG: Yeah, just a little change of scenery for me today; my daughter’s in town, and it’s…

RP: I like it; it’s very relaxing. I feel calmer already, so thank you.

SG: You’re welcome. See, maybe I should do it here every week.

RP: Yeah, I like it. We’re going to talk about… Or we’re continuing the debunking myth about social media. And we’ve been kinda talking about ROI, how do we really track? Is there a way of tracking conversion? How do we know if our social media time and energy is actually working towards our benefit? It’s real easy to be able to just say, “Oh, something works.” Or, “Something doesn’t work.” But without tracking it, how do we really know? So, we’ve been covering that the last couple of weeks. In today’s episode specifically, we’re going to talk about how to really funnel traffic in a very specific way, that we can actually track conversion and where things are going. And we’re going to use a term called a “squeeze page.”

RP: And a squeeze page is basically a page on your website, or it could be on another server, but typically it’s on your website, that has a single purpose. Before we get into that detail, the big question is, is how do we get that traffic to the squeeze page in the first place, so that we know where it coming from? That way we can kinda follow the breadcrumbs if you will.

SG: We’re going to keep to social media driving traffic to that in this episode. There are lots of options you can do. The really easy one, and we talked about it before, is using shortened URLs, tracking links. I use either Bitly or Google, and that’s the GOO.GL. But those are quick ways for you to just see really quickly if anybody’s even clicking on it, and that’ll lead you to wanting to dig into your analytics to see then what are they doing if they have clicked on the link. So, that’s a really quick way for tracking it, but you can also use on Facebook, they now have rolled out the “Call to Action” buttons. And you can set it up to be a, say, “signup”, “book now”, whatever it is that you’re trying to do. “Buy now” is there… Or “shop now” I think is one of the other options. There’s a whole bunch of options, but you can use those buttons and put the link in there. And again, you can put the trackable link in there, and then you’re tracking if people are clicking that button and sending people to your website.

SG: And then advertising. And you can either use the trackable link or the straight link, ’cause using the regular link, you’ll be able to go into your Google Analytics and view how much traffic has come from which social media platform. The trackable link just gives you a really quick, easy way of to see if anybody has clicked on a link. Analytics gives you more information on what they’ve actually done once they’ve gotten there. So, you definitely want to make sure you’re tracking; the squeeze page is a great way for getting information from people. So, you want to give them something free, maybe a free report, or a free white paper, or a free video series. And you collect their, at least their first name and their email address, ’cause having their email address is gold. ‘Cause they’ve willingly given it to you for you to communicate. They’re giving you permission to continue to communicate with them, via their email.

SG: So, now you’ve got them in both places, you can communicate with them on social media and via email, and you’ll have a much higher success rate of them converting into a sale down the road.

RP: Sorry, I gotta unmute the microphone. Okay, so perfect. So, we talked about trackable links before, which is great, because they have their own analytics, or tracking that’s real easy to see. So, the idea here as business owners, I guess in this case we’re really talking about, we’re pushing… We want to push traffic to your website. And there’s two different ways. Let’s just talk about Facebook since it’s the biggest beast in there. Mark Zuckerberg has just announced he’s terribly happy; he’s got two million business, I think, on Facebook, on their Facebook pages right now. So, if…

SG: That’s actually… So, it’s two million Facebook business pages advertising. There’s about 25 million… Yeah.

RP: Advertising, okay.

SG: Yeah. The people paying… The people paying the Facebook bills, the two million…

RP: Yes, I understand. I understand why he’s excited, he’s got two million businesses spending money every month. And if you imagine if it’s just $5, I know a lot of people are spending more than $5 each month, that’s quite a bit of… Quite a chunk of change. So, yes, Mark, you’re very, very welcome. So, we really have two ways of driving traffic, one is going to be the organic. On Facebook, we have a link that goes to a specific page, a squeeze page. Or we can pay for traffic, and it’s going to go to that squeeze page. So, what I want to kinda do is actually show you some examples, so let me turn on my share screen here, make sure I get the right screen. And what we’re looking at right now is going to be the Facebook page.

RP: So, if I go in and I want to type something, I’m going to type in a URL. Instead of just typing in “Simple Biz Support”, which is going to drive this message to my homepage. The problem when you do that is everything else is going in there. People who automatically look for me are going to type in “Simple Biz Support”. General marketing information has my web address, so all this information’s going into my homepage, and if you look at your Google analytics, it’s really hard to extract, well, where exactly did that information come? How many people actually came from this, and more importantly, what did they do? So, the idea is, if we create a page on the website that is not viewable by the public, and that is, this is an old page, I don’t use it anymore. This is, gosh, probably 5 years old; this was one of the most basic ways, and all this is, is just a contact form. And in this case, I was offering a free SEO report, and if you wanted this SEO report… And now this is something I could post here on Facebook, and then boom! It would land here, and I would drive traffic, not just to “simplebizsupport”, but to simplebizsupport.com/freeSEOreport, and that would drive people here.

RP: Now, why… One thing that’s really important is that when you look at my menus, there are no links that go to this SEO report. The only way people could get to this page is because I push them there. And if we’re really specific, if I’m only on Facebook and I’m pushing people directly there through Facebook, then any analytics that I have on this page, I know directly resulted from Facebook. So this is a real basic iteration. There are some technicalities here. Ideally in a squeeze page, you wouldn’t actually have access to the rest of the website, and we’re not going to go into the details, the real quick answer though is you don’t want to give people shiny objects and go, “Let me go here. Oh, let me go here.” We really want to focus on the message.

RP: So, the second iteration of this was an actual free consultation, thirty minute consultation. I had a video in here that promoted myself, and this is starting to look a little bit more of what a modern squeeze page is. This one’s a couple years ago. Again, I don’t use this anymore, but again, it’s got its own URL address, and there’s no links on my website, so I know where this traffic came from. The other place you could use a squeeze page is if you’re selling product, and you want to actually send them to a sales page. So here’s one. I’m not asking for any information, I’m going, “Look, I’ve got this package; it’s $49 a month. I want you to buy. Click ‘Buy now’.” So now I can look, okay, you want to know tracking, where are things going, as we get more advanced, I can look at the Facebook analytics, how many people actually clicked or viewed this ad, how many people actually clicked the ad? So we have viewed versus clicked. How effective was the campaign?

RP: Then I know how many people landed on this page, and I can also determine how many people bought. So now we have that bread crumb, when we can actually see how effective is this. If I’m not getting the conversion on this page that I need, then I know I need to make changes to this message, so that this “Buy” button is more active. Now, let’s go into the final iteration, and actually this is a real basic design I threw together for this presentation, and this is a true squeeze page in the sense that you’ll notice that there’s no reference to my website at all. The only thing you have is a logo. A typical squeeze page you have a message, it could be video, it could be long text, and then basically what we’re doing is we’re asking for a name and email, submitting, and now we can push people into a marketing funnel, where we can actually email to them.

RP: But again, just like in this last one, if I know how many people viewed my message here, and I know how many people clicked on it, I know how many people came to the site, and how many people are signing up. I can go, “Is this advert working for me? Do I need to change my message here, so that my conversion rate is higher, or maybe I’m driving a lot of traffic here, but I’m not getting great conversion”, and trust me, the way this is set up, you’re not going to, unless you have a fabulous offer. Is this message working? Yes or no. But now at least we’ve established a bread crumb that you can follow as a business person to say, “Okay, where in the system, where in the steps, are things breaking down? At what point do I need to fix things?”

SG: Yeah, absolutely. It’s using the driving traffic and landing pages, and having them being true landing pages where there’s no shiny objects of links to click off of it, so you’re driving them to this page for one goal. They have one task, and you want them to complete that task, which is give up their information, or buy. Whatever that one task is. But because there’s no other way for people to get to it, you can really drill down that you know that people who came from Facebook or Twitter, whichever platform you’re using. You’ll be able to see they got there, and how many people signed up, and that’ll tell you where… So, if they’re not signing up, then there’s probably something wrong with the message on that page, especially if you see that a lot of people clicked through from the social media channel that you’re using, then you know the problem isn’t with the social media channel, it’s with the message on the page. If people are not responding on the social media channel, then you’ll know to change up that message and imagery as well.

SG: So it’s a really simple way for you to be able to easily track what you’re doing to see if it’s working. I also still want to caution though do not post that link to that product or that give away on a daily basis, still stick to the 80/20 rule. You can run that… Run it, run it with an ad, throw $5 on it, see how it performs, but don’t do it again for at least another week. Fill in with the rest of the content so that you’re still sticking to the 80/20 rule where you’re selling to people less than 20% of the time. You want to be careful with that.

RP: Yeah, I think that’s definitely something people have to pay attention to because as business owners we want to sell, sell, sell, and if you create this great product, it’s the first time you created a squeeze page; we’re so excited; we’re like a kid at Christmas. We just want to tear that present open; we want to use it, use it, use it. The problem is just because you’re excited, and you want to use it doesn’t mean everybody else out there does. So, be very judicious in the way that you do push that out there. The other thing is if we… When you land on a squeeze page, the other thing you could do if you have a complicated message or a long message, the other thing you could do is you could do a long format and then have call to actions throughout that buy action, and that’s another way to try and figure out trigger points. Or you might actually have a couple of pages that people have to go through, especially if you need to figure out if people are really serious or are they just tire kickers? You can actually have ’em land on your squeeze page, and you can kind of filter people out based on their decision and have two options.

RP: One option, you keep on going down; it’s kinda like the red pill or the blue pill, which one do you want to take? One will take you down the rabbit hole. And when you do that, you can lead people down and you can start filtering people out of your sale cycle that you want. So anyhow, there’s a lotta options. The key thing I want you to realize though is that there’s a bread crumb there; there’s a trail of information that you can now determine is this working? Yes or no. If it’s not working, where is it breaking down? If you want to get really crazy you could get into A and B testing and go, “Okay, how can I do a 2% increase in conversion by making subtle changes to the site?” Again, it all requires tracking. We’re not going to go into the deep, deep detail about that because it’s 10 o’clock, and our time’s up, and I think we covered a lot of information so there’s a lot of information to take in. If you have questions, feel free to respond to this video below. Sarah is at Provaro Marketing, provaromarketing.com, and then of course myself, Simple Biz Support at simplebizsupport.com. Sarah, I appreciate your time. Any last words?

SG: Nope, I think we covered it.

RP: Alright, awesome blossom. As always, I appreciate your time, and we will be here next week, same place, same time, and maybe there’s a fish tank in our future, we’ll see what happens.

SG:Maybe.

RP: Alright, take care.

SG: Bye.

RP: Bye.