7 Tips for Marketing Your Facebook Groups – Does This Marketing Really Work?

We are constantly scouring the internet for marketing suggestions, so we have decided in our new “Does This Marketing Really Work” segment to test 7 tips we found to market your Facebook groups. In this podcast, we will implement the 7 tips in a recently formed Facebook group to see how we do. We are going to come back in 3 to 4 weeks after implementing the suggested marketing tips and share our results to see “Does This Marketing Really Work”.

Episode Transcript

Stacey:  Hey, everybody, :Small Business Stacey” here, and I’m out here on this beautiful day taking a hike with “Digital Dave”. If you hear some noise in the background, that’s because the fish are literally jumping out of the water, but, more importantly, there’s a lot of ducks here, and you’ve probably heard the saying, “Birds of a feather flock together.”

Actually, I’m going to show you something really cool while I’m here. Check out, if you can see it, this duck, who might literally bite my head off. I think he’s sitting on some eggs.

Anyways, what “Birds of a feather flock together” has to do with is that you want to build a community, a tribe, and one way to do that is with a Facebook group. Digital Dave and I are going to talk to you about some strategies that you can use of how you can use a Facebook group to build a tribe, a herd, a fence around you. Let me share with you some ideas of how you can do that.

Part of what Digital Dave and I are going to be sharing with you, not just today, but in three weeks from now, is answering the question, does this marketing really work. Not only are we going to share some strategies of why you should use a Facebook group, but we go out, and we’re constantly scouring what people are saying and out there preaching as gurus of marketing that supposedly works. We’re going to share with you later on some of these ideas, and then we’re going to come back in three weeks and share with you if that’s really working.

Going to start off by sharing with you some theory, why you should consider starting your own Facebook group.

Number one – is that it’s the perfect place to build an engaged community around the topic that you want to share about.

Number two – it’s a great way to build connections with the people in the group.

Number three – it’s a great way for list building. You can get people’s email addresses.

Number four – it’s a great way to do some market research. You can ask questions, throw some ideas out there, with your perfect target audience and see what they think about it.

Number five – it’s a great way to boost your credibility because it’s your group, and people are going to think of you as the authority.

Number six – is Facebook groups or a great way to monetize. You can sell your programs and anything else that you have in there.

All right. Now, I’m going to turn it over to Digital Dave, who’s going to share with you a little bit about this article that we read about with somebody’s supposedly being a guru on what to do and how to grow your Facebook group. He’s going to share with you literally what was in this article, and we’re going to use it on our Facebook group and report back to you in three weeks whether it worked or not.

Dave: Hey, everyone, it’s Digital Dave, and as Stacey said, we’re going to now take the suggestions. There were seven tips on how you can grow your Facebook group on a regular basis, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to walk through these tips, and in three weeks, we’re going to come back, and we’re going to actually say, does this marketing actually work? Are you actually getting any benefit from listening to this particular piece?

All right. Before I read the seven tips, I want to give you the statistics that we just started a Facebook group called Small Business Marketing Success, which right now has 29 active members on it. Our objective is to use these seven tips to grow this Facebook group.

• Tip number one is to add a link to your blog menu. Pretty simple. Just go to your blog menu somewhere and add a link.
• Number two, put your Facebook group in your email signature. All right. That’s pretty simple, too. A very simple thing to do.
• You want to share it on your YouTube channel. If you have a YouTube channel, you want to make sure, and I’ll add to that. We’re going to add to this. We’re going to share it on our social media channels, meaning that we’re going to put this link on our YouTube channel, obviously, but in our other social media accounts when we do posts.
• One of the things that was suggested is to make a specific graphic for your particular Facebook group, and I think this is a good idea, but we’re going to go ahead and do that because it was suggested.
• Then, take that graphic and place that on the sidebar of your website. We’re going to go and we’re going to add a graphic for our Facebook group to the sidebar of our website.
• Then we’re going to add it to our autoresponder emails. We’re going to tell people in our current autoresponders, the people that sign into our lead magnets and things like that, when they get into our autoresponders. We’re going to add into those autoresponder series that they should check out this Facebook group.
• Number seven, what is suggested is that you actually link to this group from other Facebook groups, meaning go and join other Facebook groups if you’re not already in them and put this link in those Facebook groups so that those people know that this group actually exists.

We’re going to come back in three weeks and we’re going to share with you, does this marketing really work?

I’m going to turn it back to Stacey, who’s going to wrap this up for today.

Stacey: All right, everybody. What do you think? Does this type of marketing work or not? Leave a comment below. We love to hear your comments, but remember to tune back in three weeks because we will be answering the question with live data. Does this marketing really work?

Three weeks ago, Digital Dave and I shared with you seven strategies of how you can increase people to join your Facebook group, and here we are three weeks later reporting back on those results.

Dave: Does this marketing really work?

Stacey: Dave, you want to share some of those quickly, the seven tips, what we shared in the beginning?

Dave: Sure. A few weeks ago, we talked about seven tips that were shared by another marketing expert on how to increase your Facebook group followers. We’re going to walk through those tips quickly again just to remind you of the seven tips, and then we’re going to give you the results that we got from implementing these tips in our own environments.

The first thing you want to do, very simply, is you want to add a link on your blog menu. Go to your blog menu and you will add a link, and Stacey will show you where we added this and some of the things that we did.

You want to put your Facebook group link in your email signature.

You want to share it on your YouTube channel, and we actually expanded on this a little bit and said we were going to share it on our social media channels. It’s not just on YouTube.

We’re going to create a graphic for our Facebook group, and we’re going to share that on social media, as well as on our website. We’re going to put it on the right-hand bar of our website.

We’re going to add a link in our autoresponders.

We were going to link to our group from other Facebook groups.

We implemented these seven strategies about three weeks ago in our own environment, and we’re back today to share with you, does this marketing really, really work?

Stacey, what do you think?

Stacey: Well, let’s share where we were, which our group, the Small Biz Marketing Specialists, or actually Small Biz Success Facebook group, we started with 28 people in our group. We implemented some of these strategies, and we’ll share with you here some screenshots of what we did (in the video).

You want to drive that part, Dave?

Dave: Sure. We’re going to switch over here to our screen, and we’re going to look at what we actually did to implement these strategies. Here, you can see that we were able to increase our membership from 28 to 38 in three to four weeks. Now, that doesn’t seem like a lot, but that’s 25%.

Stacey: I will say we literally did nothing these past three weeks because I was in the process of launching my new book, which just came out last week, Small Biz Marketing Made Easy, and Dave and I were planning a trip where we went to the Indy 500, and we took 10 days off. These were literally passive strategies.

Dave: Exactly. That’s what we want to share with you is that there are strategies to improve your Facebook followers. These were seven provided by another expert that we would consider to be passive strategies, but when you look at it, did they really work? I’m going to say they did. I’m going to say they actually did. To get 25% increase in the number of members we added to this group without really doing much of anything I think is pretty good.

Stacey: Maybe go through some of the tags here. I’ll share what we did. This is our YouTube channel. You added a link in there of the different ways that people can connect with us, one of being the Facebook group.

Dave: There you go. We added it on our other social media, like we said.

Stacey: This is a sample of the email, and there’s a link at the bottom where they can click to join the Facebook group, nice and easy way to do that. This is in the email signature and all of the autoresponders. There’s a link at the bottom there where they can join the Facebook group. Actually, if you click the first tab, which is our website, you added a pull-down option, Join the Small Biz Marketing Facebook group. Those are some of the examples of how we implemented these strategies.

I will say that the majority of those who joined our Facebook group did so from the blog and from the email.

Dave: Great.

Stacey: Those have the best response rate for us.

Dave: Oh, great. Again, the idea of this show is we really want to take other people’s ideas and implement them in our environments and rally just show you does this work, so when you go to implement this in your marketing, you can use some of the best strategies that we find out there today. That’s all we have on the results of this particular episode of, does this marketing really work? Stacey, I think you wanted to share with our listeners some stuff we got coming. Do you want to do that?

Stacey: I want to also elaborate, though, on these Facebook marketing strategies because I felt that these were very passive. In a way, they were like a build it and they will come- and they did. Ten people came, but if you’re going to invite people to your Facebook group, I would suggest being a little bit more proactive and certainly ask people. I’ve had a lot of people join my group because they’ve heard me on podcasts, and a lot of this traffic also came because of the launch of the book, people hearing from you. I would suggest that if you want to be more proactive, I actually have a client who has run Facebook ads to run traffic to launch her group and get it up and running. She’s in the real estate niche.

Dave: That’s a great idea.

Stacey: This was a great strategy, and she’s getting a lot of active engagement from people doing that.

Dave: I would think Facebook likes when they are advertising for their own platform, right?

Stacey: Yeah. Facebook loves-

Dave: Probably going to work.

Stacey: They sure do.

Another strategy maybe is to offer something free, a really great piece of content, and give people a reason to join your group, and they will. The only caveat to this, Dave, is that you can’t just build it and they will come because if you have a bunch of people in your group and you’re not actively participating in it, people are going to leave. If you’re going to spend the time and effort to build a Facebook group, make sure that you’re going to be active in it every single day, hosting engaging questions and get people involved. You can do this by offering Facebook Lives and webinars and posting helpful content.

The whole point is it’s a group of similar-minded individuals who want to engage with you, so make sure that you do that, and I have no doubt that your Facebook group will be a big success.

Dave: I agree. I think those are great tips.

Stacey: Moving on, are you living the small biz life? Maybe you can relate to one of these mugs. In memory of when I could sleep in, small biz life, or this one. On, let’s see. I reheated this coffee once, twice, three times. It’s cold, #asmallbizlife.

I know you can relate as a small business owner. We’re going to start using this hashtag, #asmallbizlife, and we would love to know if you have any quotes or sayings that you think could apply. Maybe we’ll add it to a mug or a T-shirt, or maybe have a whole line of small biz life items. What do you think, Dave?

Dave: Now, that would be pretty darn cool, wouldn’t it? Anybody who’s a small business owner, you know what we’re talking about, and we want to be able to have you share your small biz life with other entrepreneurs like yourself.

Stacey: (singing) It’s a small biz life…

Dave: We’ll have our own jingle. We’ll have our own jingle, too. How about that?

Stacey: Leave us a comment below. How would you describe your #asmallbizlife. We’d love to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in today. This is Small Biz Stacey and Digital Dave. We’re here to help your business grow, get your marketing done, and help you become a small biz marketing whiz. Bye-bye.

Dave: #itsasmallbizlife.