Initiating the Sale. Happiness was suffering
I needed a life change. I was averaging 80 hour work weeks; that’s pretty much 12 hour days, 7 days a week… I was regularly traveling from Thursday to Saturday night for work, and these weren’t fun work trips. These were 18+ hour days of intensely physical and mental efforts. It would take two days of rest to recover from my travel, and I could only take one day off before I’d be back at work. I was constantly too busy and tired to enjoy time with my wife and friends. And I was wound tighter than a tiger on a hunt. I needed a change.
I desperately wanted to focus on what I enjoyed most, marketing and advertising. But here’s the kicker, I OWNED and operated my own business. We were an event marketing and production company that traveled the country putting on mid-sized events for 2 to 3 thousand people. While being a business owner has some great benefits, a flexible job market is not one of them. I ran a bunch of different financial models to see if a major pivot could work. In the end, selling was the best option.
Non-Traditional Way to Sell A Business
There are really two ways to sell a small business: Blast your network and hope, or use a broker and give them 10% commission + fees. I didn’t want to use a broker because I thought it would take too long and I didn’t want to give them a cut of my blood, sweat, and tears. I decided to go DIY on selling my business. I was going to leverage my digital marketing skills to drive qualified leads and close the sale myself.
Within a couple days I had a fully integrated marketing campaign ready to launch. It would leverage the powers of email, email automation, Facebook ads’ audience targeting, Facebook retargeting (ads that creep), a precisely designed landing page, a video designed to captivate and intrigue my audience, a slew of business metrics, and to close the lead, the tease of gaining access to the complete financials and budget forecast. To gain access to the financials, all an interested party needed to do was complete a short interest form with 3 questions and click a box agreeing to an NDA. With the right information provided on the interest form, an email was automatically triggered to send the company financials to the lead. This resulted in 12 qualified leads and 2 interested buyers within a week. I spent just $300 on Facebook ads. this is where that 100,000% ROI (Return On Investment) comes in. Yes, it’s a bit misleading, but talk about a radical ROI!
The inside scoop on how I did it.
That 10,000 hour rule made famous by Malcolm Gladwell… yeah, surpassed that years ago with digital marketing and Facebook ads. I’ve developed countless campaigns on Facebook and Google from scratch to drive customers and profits. I’ve created video and photo ads, established best practices for budgeting to get the best ROI, analyzed tens of thousands of lines of data, implemented those “creepy” retargeting ads (they work), learned how to leverage every piece of ad tech available on Facebook and Google, and spent over $3,000,000 of ad spend to drive significant returns for my businesses and my clients.
I took my expertise with digital and designed a campaign with a single, very focused goal: sell my event marketing and production business. The first step to achieve my sales goal was to define a very specific audience: event owners. Event Owners is actually too specific of a job title, there isn’t a large enough audience to target. I expanded beyond the straightforward job title and targeted job titles who could be an Event Owner. In the case of small audience sizes it’s better to target too many people than not enough. My final targeting ended up like this:
The Facebook Ads audience targeting used to sell my business
Target Locked. Fire the Creative!
Now that I had the audience targeted, I needed ads to get their attention. I created two different Facebook ads that called attention to the event owners using imagery of the event with a bold text overlay. The text overlay is typically not something done with Facebook ads because it’s seen as too salesy, but in this case it was necessary to be sure my audience would instantly recognize that this ad was different.
This was ultimately the Facebook ad that was clicked on that resulted in the sale of my business. Tracking and conversion pixels allowed me to know this information.
Once their attention was piqued by the ads, I sent leads to a landing page where they were shown a simple sales video (see below), shown the sale price, and enticed with an incentive they really wanted: the financial statements and a list of assets included in the sale.
In order to get the financials, all an interested person had to do was complete a form with basic background information and answer three quick questions about their company. The most important question to me was the last one, can you afford it?
A simple form to qualify leads for the sale of the business. This information fed into my CRM system and then triggered an automation email based on the response in the form.
Email Automation is Vital to Deliver Timely Message
Once the form was submitted, an email automation would trigger the financials to be sent to those who answered the last question “yes.” I’d follow up via email with those who answered “No” to figure out if they were in fact a viable lead.
Each lead was tracked in our CRM system. I reached out as soon as possible to each lead to answer questions and gauge interest. In under a week, on less than $300 in ads, I had 12 viable leads and two verbal offers to buy the FroYo Run. I spoke with both in more detail to get a feel as to who they were. I ended up selling FroYo Run to the company I thought would best take care of the brand. While he wasn’t the highest offer, he was close. And his passion was evident. That means a lot to me.
Facebook Ads Work for B2B and B2C
There were no brokers involved. No employees helping to execute. Just me and my proven digital tactics. If you master Facebook’s Ad tools and understand your target audience’s mindset, you can achieve radical ROI from Facebook Ads. You may not be selling a business, but if you want to increase your sales and profits, consider my agency to execute your digital marketing. Check us out at mystemic.com