I received a message from my long time friend Will Murray of Murray Property Management about Facebook marketing, boosting post to be exact. This was my answer to him, in my attempt to differentiate Facebook boosted post vs Facebook Ads.

Hello Will,

Thanks for reaching out to me. From looking at your website, it looks like you all do a lot of different things. I am going to give you a few pointers that should help you find more success not just with social media marketing, but digital marketing in general.
One of the first things that you must consider is that you must have conversion goals. In your case, these conversions would strongly depend on lead capture. On your website you have 10 different verticals of services and it is great that you have pages for every service. However, you website only has one generic form on the contact us page. You should have a form on every page that ask specific questions that related to the type of project. Your forms should be set up to have unique auto responders that send the prospective customer additional compelling information. The list of contacts captured should be added to you e-newsletter that you should send at least twice a month. Of course someone needs to call these leads back once they have come in.
Realize that your website is the cornerstone on your digital marketing strategy. It in not the silver bullet and can’t do it alone, but almost all of your digital effort should be designed the to funnel business back to you website.  Your website must have an effective conversion method in place. Here is a good example, my website has an interactive quote builder on it. At the completion of the form the prospects email is captured, they get a copy of the quote sent to them and I get a lead sent to my email. I call the client, knowing much about what there are looking for and more often than not I close the deal. Normally the deal that I close is bigger than the one the was provided by the quote calculator, because I ask more questions and uncover more needs. http://4cornerscreative.com/get-a-custom-website-quote/

Behavior targeting and re-targeting have become the 2 most effective forms of online marketing. If you and not familiar with either, the evidence of both is when you see adds throughout your online experience that actually resonate with you as a consumer. Some of the ads are targeting you because you (your IP address) fit a particular profile and the other ads are following your from a website that you have visited. In a nutshell this is behavior and re-targeting. Here is a short video that explains both.

Facebook Ads allows you do a good amount of both re-targeting and behavior targeting. It is much more affecting that boost. Not long ago, Facebook changed its algorithms to not give as much exposure to boosted post and “Likes” have a different type of value as well. The number of likes, does not equate the amount of exposure your post gets anymore. The is why you now see a number of how many actually saw your post below your business page posts. The screen shot has “288 people reached” and not the full 2065 people I have following my page. Don’t get me wrong,  Like are still important, just not as important as most would think. This is not a popularity contest. This is a competition of conversions. FYI I started my new Facebook page on February 9th 2016 and I already have over 2k likes. 622 this week alone. If you want more likes, I can do that all day every day. But that is not your silver bullet. aspire post

The “LIKES” just make you appear to be more credible and that is good, but it does not always equal more dollars in your pocket. Facebook Ads is where it is at today! The image below shows a start of an ad campaign that I can set up to specifically drive traffic to my site. You should see the blue button that says “create a pixel”. The pixel is a section of code that you would easily add to your website that allows you to collect prospective customer’s information included their IP Addresses when they land on your site. This allows your to essentially chase them with ads throughout there facebook experience. If you had a search engine re-targeting campaign in place, it you would be able to follow them with ads all over the internet.
facebook ad campaing page

When I set up my campaign I can tailor my strategy to target people with in a certain age group, income bracket, location, based on interest, race, sex and much more. The best part about it is that they do not have to be followers of my page for me to target them with ads. If the fit my criteria, they see the ads.  Here is a video that will show you home to set up a facebook ads campaing and how effective it can be.

I hope this information helps you and that it is not more information than you were looking for. I am going to add this to my blog today and link it from my social platforms tomorrow, so this was a good exercise for me as well..lol. Of course I can help you with all this. We can talk this week. Let me know a good number and time to reach you at. You website looks like it is build the Joomla. I know joomla really well and would have no issues with working on it. Although, I prefer WordPress. It is much easier for my clients to learn and gives them more independence.