What Really Happens on a Facebook Marketing Expert Call?

Has your email inbox recently been receiving invitations to schedule a Facebook Marketing Expert call? If so, you likely manage a business account in Facebook (or multiple!). You may also have been regularly spending a decent amount of money on Facebook advertising and other social media services. We, too, have been seeing these emails for a while now for multiple Facebook business accounts that we manage. Instead of ignoring them, the enticing “earn $50 in ad credit” line officially won us over. Hook, line, and sinker. We’ll lay out what you can expect from a Facebook Marketing Expert call based on our experience.

Facebook is always watching your business account. Like any other advertising platform, they want you to spend more money with them. However, they also want to provide guidance, best practices, and strategic advice to help you reach your goals in Facebook. If you’re not sure what your goals are for Facebook advertising just yet, it’s probably best to think that over before your Facebook Marketing Expert call.

How to Prepare for Your Facebook Marketing Expert Call

Before your call, you’ll likely be asked to write down what your goals for Facebook advertising are and any questions you may have. If you don’t give those to them, be prepared to hear what they have planned to offer. Are your Facebook ads focused on brand awareness? New leads to your website? Conversions on an ad? Be prepared to share this with the Facebook Marketing Expert.

It’s also helpful to know your audience well before the Facebook marketing expert call. For the account we arranged the call for, we normally have three or four different target audience segments. Make sure to have all this information handy. The Facebook consultant will ask you about them along with your goals, so that they can recommend certain tactics in Facebook Ads Manager.

The main questions you will be asked at the start of the call will most likely include:

1. What are your goals?
2. What is your monthly budget?
3. Do you normally use images, videos, or both for this Facebook account?

Based on these questions, the Facebook Marketing Expert will offer strategic advice on how to reach your goals.

What to Expect from the Facebook Marketing Expert Call 

The first thing that surprised us about the Facebook Marketing Expert call was how short and timely it was. Do not expect to have all the time you need on the phone with them. And if you do want more time, you’ll most likely need to schedule multiple follow up calls. The call ended up being no longer than 25 minutes, and the consultant talked pretty quickly. You will be scheduled into a 30-minute slot with a Facebook Marketing Expert, and they won’t run over time. We assume that they fill their days with these back-to-back calls.

Now, let’s say you tell them your main goals are brand awareness and leads to your website. Their priority is to offer strategic advice on how to reach those goals effectively in Facebook. You’ll first learn what type of ads you should be focusing on, and they’ll recommend a budget.

What They Recommended for Us

For this particular client, a dermatology practice, I told them our goals on Facebook were just as mentioned above, brand awareness and leads to our website, or prospective new patients. As a side note, Facebook is just a small portion of the digital marketing services we handle for this client today. Along with social media services we also handle their paid search (PPC), analytics, Local and regional SEO services, reputation management, content creation, and more. So, the budget for Facebook is not the top priority, but an important one, nonetheless.

Facebook is a crucial platform for this dermatology group to maintain brand awareness and share updates about their practice and news in the dermatology world. It also helps bring leads to their website (ultimately boosting their SEO efforts) through blogging and other content creation. After explaining this to the Facebook consultant, here’s what she recommended for us:

1. Stop boosting Facebook posts.

That’s right, instead of boosting posts, they recommended that we start creating ads through Facebook Ads Manager. Keep in mind, this is not new to us, and we expected them to say this. We have created ads through Ads Manager before. In fact, you can check out our ultimate Facebook Ads Guide if you’re new to navigating Ads Manager and creating an ad. However, it’s not the route we normally take for this client due to the type of content we publish on their page and their goals.

The Facebook consultant noted that engagement through boosting posts does not guarantee success, which is true. However, if you’re focused on brand awareness in particular, engagement is still positive, and you’ll want to continue to grow your Facebook audience and engagement over time. We do believe that Ads Manager is the way to go when trying to run a longer campaign, especially if you’re looking for leads or some type of conversion. You might want to look into Facebook lead ads, which will help you with a number of marketing objectives, but especially knowing your audience. If your objectives include market research, customer feedback, or even increasing conversions, Facebook lead ads may be the right solution.

The Facebook expert then quickly ran us through an overview of using Ads Manager at the campaign level. If you’re going to do this, you’ll definitely want to create a Facebook pixel so that Facebook can help capture your audience. Using the pixel is almost like having a camera on your website. Once you have the pixel, Facebook saves that data. When you go to choose an audience segment for your campaign, you can choose traffic from your website. This way, you won’t have to add detailed targeting – you can focus on the audience that already has an interest in your business and has been on your website before.

2. Try using Facebook Carousel ads.

Facebook recommended carousel ads for a brand awareness campaign. If you’re going to use a carousel ad, you should make sure it is tied to a campaign that fits. For instance, for a campaign solely focused on brand awareness to a new audience for this dermatology group, Facebook recommends creating a simple carousel ad like this:

• The first slide with the business logo
• The next few slides detailing the different services the business offers (in this case the different types of dermatology services)
• Finishing off with a final slide that has a strong call-to-action

Not sure what a carousel ad looks like? Carousel ads are exactly what they sound like – an ad with 5-7 (or less) slides that turn, like a carousel. You’ve likely seen shopping ads on Facebook in carousel form. Here’s an example of part of a carousel ad we’ve created before:

Well… that’s about it. As we mentioned, don’t expect to have all the time in the world to pick the Facebook Marketing Expert’s brain. Rather, come prepared with your audience, goals, and a list of questions that you may not understand or would like to learn more about. If we had a different set of goals, they probably would have recommended a different type of ad or strategy.

Know What You Want to Learn from the Facebook Marketing Expert

The best way to get the most out of a Facebook Marketing Expert call is to set your expectations for it. Know what you want to learn from it beforehand. If you don’t get enough time, you can always schedule another call. They did send a follow up email based on what we talked about. This included some additional helpful articles, so we could dive deeper into things after the call. And because we scheduled the call based on an enticing way to earn $50 in ad credit, we did receive the ad credit to the business account a few days after. Bonus!

We all know that social media management and advertising is a large part of digital marketing today. It encompasses brand awareness, reputation management, paid media, and more for small and large businesses. However, in addition to social media, we recommend having a strategic digital marketing plan that includes digital analytics, SEO services, Local SEO, reputation management, and more.

We hope that you now feel confident to schedule that Facebook Marketing Expert call. You could potentially even earn some ad credit along the way! Still not feeling confident about your Facebook marketing and advertising strategy? Get in touch with us today.

​Root & Branch is a digital marketing team with operations in Pittsburgh, PA and Jacksonville, NC that provides a wide variety of digital advertising and analytics services for B2C and B2B companies. Root & Branch is a certified Google Partner agency and focuses on paid search (PPC), SEO, Local SEO, digital reputation management, digital analytics, and social media management.