Pop quiz:
What advertising platform allows you to publish an ad for millions and millions of people without paying a single penny?
Answer:
But how?
You would think that to promote your personal brand to millions of people you would have to pay a lot for it, right? Well not yet. Using the Facebook advertising platform in a very creative way, you can spread your personal brand to your target audience for absolutely nothing.
How?
Well, if you’ve been on Facebook lately, and you likely have, you’ve probably noticed by now that ads appear in a lot more places than they used to. Chances are, you’ve seen some of these, read them, and maybe even clicked on some of them.
But you probably haven’t played with the back-end of the advertising platform to discover all the possibilities of Facebook advertising.
The Facebook ad platform has two distinct features that will allow this tactic to work for you to promote your personal brand.
1.) A CPC billing option (cost per click)
2.) The option to insert an image
Do you see where I’m going with this?
No?
Ok, let me explain.
Cost per click means that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, so if you intentionally keep your clicks low, you can reach millions of people for a ridiculously low cost.
Normally, this would not work, but the fact that Facebook allows you to insert images in your ads gives you the possibility to promote your personal brand using the images of your recognizable brand, or the images that you hope will become recognizable.
It can be a photo of you, your logo, a book cover, an event, whatever you want. It should only represent your brand and should be consistent throughout your ad.
On Facebook you get three fields to compose your ad.
Your holder
An image
And your ad copy
Now obviously the better your ad is, the more clicks you will get on that ad, right?
But we are not going to look for clicks here. Clicks cost money and we don’t want to spend money. We only want to promote your personal brand. We only want to make our name known to raise awareness that we exist. We want to establish a name in the market.
So how do you do this?
Easy. Create an intentionally dull and boring ad, and advertise it for an extremely wide target market. That should be pretty easy, right?
The strategy explained
Put your name as the headline. Put a common personal branding photo of yourself as an image (make sure it still catches the eye). Then write a boring, mundane copy about yourself.
Your goal is to reach as many people as possible with as few clicks as possible, without looking like a total jerk.
Yes, there is a fine line here, but if you walk it well enough you can put your face in front of ridiculous numbers of people and still look pretty good for next to nothing.
And in case someone clicks on your ad, you don’t want to send your traffic outside of Facebook. Shitty ads turn bad on the back end so your money will go to waste.
Instead, drive traffic to your internal Facebook fan page. Clicks are cheaper for Facebook pages. This way, you will get some fans that you can then market to.
