How to Develop Situational Awareness

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Anyone who has seen the Bourne Identity might be interested in the notion of situational awareness. There’s a scene toward the beginning of that film where Jason Bourne is trying to work out his identity. He’s alarmed at the way his own mind has been trained to work and explains that within minutes of walking into a diner, he has assessed the weight and strength of other patrons, memorized the car number plates of the cars parked outside, identified the exits and even noticed that the bartender is left-handed.

This kind of training really does exist among intelligence officers and military personnel. It’s called ‘situational awareness’ and it essentially involves being able to quickly and easily identify key facts about your surroundings. 

Situational awareness is important for everyone though and certainly for those interested in cultivating a warrior mindset. Situational awareness allows us to identify potential threats faster so that we can avoid or neutralize them. It allows us to move quickly and efficiently when the situation calls for it and ultimately it lets us keep ourselves and others safer.

The problem is, most of us have our mind on other things: things like our office, Angry Birds, debt, relationships, and the girl at the office with the short skirt.

How do we get our minds back in the game and start paying attention to the things that matter to us and to those we care about?

The OODA Loop

In the excellent Art of Manliness article, writer Brett McKay describes a method used by Air Force fighter pilot/military strategist John Boyd. OODA is a four-step process that tells us to:

Observe

Orient

Decide

Act

First then, you must observe. This means that you mustn’t completely relax and kick your feet up. In neuroscience terms, you mustn’t let your ‘default mode network’ kick in (essentially, you must keep your mind on what’s happening). You should be relaxed yes, but also alert.

Position yourself in any room in such a position that you can see the maximum number of people and avoid letting people get the jump on you. A good example would be the corner of a room with your back to the wall. Remain near an exit where possible.

The next step is to orient, which in this context means looking for specific things. Establish a ‘baseline’ by thinking about the normal behavior and conditions for a certain area. Look out for examples of deviation from this norm. Does someone look uncomfortable? Is someone inappropriately dressed? Is there a noise that shouldn’t be there?

Next, decide whether or not to act and how to act. Have a plan of action and do not hesitate. Trust your instinct at this stage and if in doubt, practice caution. Someone acting suspiciously or potentially violently? Try moving away from them, or alerting them to security. Find an area that has an unusual vibe? Then get your family out of there.

Practicing these tips could one day save your life and at the very least, they will help you to adopt a warrior mentality that will be felt by those around you.

Failing Fast is the Secret to Paid Facebook Ad Success

Let’s get one thing clear here. Nobody likes to fail. Do you? I know I don’t. But the problem is until and unless you’re willing to fail quickly, chances are you’re not going to get optimal success from your paid Facebook ad campaign.

The reason for this turns on the concept of testing. Let’s face it. Most people do not know the perfect ad to run for their Facebook ad campaign. It just doesn’t occur to them. It just doesn’t land on their lap. They don’t just dream about it. It comes about through serious trial and error.

This means that you have to come up with an ad and run test, after test, after the test to get to the right kind of ad. If you do not understand the concept of failing fast, then this whole testing and optimization process takes far longer and costs so much more than it should. It’s all about throwing spaghetti at the wall and figuring out what sticks. You have to do this very quickly with as little money as possible.

Here’s how it works. You run many, many small tests and spend very little money on each of these tests – maybe $1 maximum. You then spot the failures quickly. Let me tell you, zero speaks loud and clear. There is no guess work involved.

What is a little bit tricky is when all the ads that you ran seem to have roughly the same score. That’s when you have to make a judgement call, but usually, you will be able to spot the failures quickly. They just don’t produce results.

Once you’ve identified the winners, you then optimize them and you run the test again. If you keep getting improved results, you stick to this process of optimizing them. Otherwise, if it seems like you just hit a brick wall, you move on. You get over it, it’s a failure, and you move on.

It’s okay to fail. Keep that in mind. Stop fearing it. This is a learning process. What’s important is that your failure doesn’t burn you. It should cost very little, as far as money and time are concerned.

Once you’ve committed to this process of either optimizing or moving on, you should be able to find patterns. You should be able to connect the dots as to which ads have a higher chance of succeeding and which ones will probably fail again.

You then focus on the ads that show a lot more promise, as far as conversion improvements are concerned. You keep optimizing them while paying very low money. 

Once you are convinced you have found the right ad, you then pour cash into your ad campaign. That’s when you scale up.

You don’t do this right off the bat. You should avoid doing this when you get out of the gate. Instead, this happens last. 

Unfortunately, a lot of businesses have it completely opposite. They start with a tremendous amount of money and they blow through all that cash and time, only to have very little to show for it.

Instead, follow the secret of failing fast and you should be well-rewarded.

How will Demographic User Interest identification cut back Your Facebook Ad Spent?

One of the largest challenges to Facebook promoting is paying an excessive amount of per click.

This is one of the most common rookie mistakes people make when they try their hand at marketing on Facebook. They focus on coming up with “the best looking ad”, but they get their interest targeting wrong.

They end up paying $0.75 cents to even $1 or more per ad click. As you can imagine, this can get really expensive quickly. This is where demographic user interest profiling comes in. You have to figure out the right mix of interest, age, gender, and other demographic data points so you can reach the right people who engage with your ad the most.

Facebook will show your ad a certain amount of times and then, it would automatically price your clicks based on an auction model. If it turns out that a lot of the people seeing your ad don’t want to click through, your per click rate goes up.

But if it turns out that for every 100 exposures of your ad, a lot of people click through, your ad gets shown more and the per click rate remains low. This is why demographic and user interest targeting are so important.

How do you get this demographic information?

Well, people who fail with Facebook marketing simply make up demographics. They make educated guesses as to who their target audience members are and they just run with it. These people usually end up with very little results.

The better approach would be to build a Facebook fan page, promote it organically, and let it attract a natural amount of organic likes. These are real people. You did not pay for these likes. These people were not forced to like your page.

After enough time has passed, you use the page demographics of your user base to launch lookalike audience campaigns to promote your website or promote your link. The key here is to find the most active and engaged demographic. Using your Facebook page audience insights will definitely clue you in on which subgroup of users to target the most.

The worst mistake you can ever make on Facebook

While you can afford to screw up on content selection or engagement strategy on FB, there is one thing that you cannot do. It is simply off limits to you. Don’t even think about it. What am I talking about? Do not buy page likes or post likes. Seriously. No joke. Real story.

You probably have heard that you can get lots of ‘social proof’ if you buy fake users or fake likes.

You probably have heard from hypesters and other hucksters on online marketing forums that if your account has enough likes, others will be drawn to you. Real users will be drawn to you.

Well, that may be true but you will be paying a high price for this fake social proof. Your engagement levels will suffer and most of your page fans will never get to see your content.

 If you think that is bad enough, wait, it gets even worse. If you were to pay for an ad campaign on FB, chances are your lookalike audience profile will not work.

What is a quick solution? Just don’t use fake likes or buy followers in the first place

Can Facebook Really Deliver eCommerce Sales?

One of the biggest misconceptions about Facebook’s marketing potential turns on whether Facebook can be a good source of traffic that actually buys stuff from online stores. For every positive story you hear of merchants killing it with Facebook traffic, you’d probably hear dozens more merchants who are frustrated with Facebook.

They really cannot make heads or tails of Facebook’s traffic, as far as their e-commerce sales are concerned. They’re drawing a blank. They just cannot, for the life of them, convert a heavy volume of traffic from the social network into actual buyers of products.

The bottom line is that there are many horror stories of low e-commerce conversions. I’m not saying that there are absolutely no conversions at all. Nobody can make that claim.

But the problem is, you cannot run a successful online store with a few sales here and there. You need some sort of stability. You need some sort of increasing or at least, a stable predictable conversion rate. You need some sort of minimum baseline of predictable conversions.

The reason why a lot of people have these horror stories is because they focus on the direct sale. They think that if they post an ad on Facebook selling some sort of trinket and if they show it to enough eyeballs, that people would buy.

That is a common misconception about Facebook and this can get really expensive very quickly. It really can. This pretty much makes up the bulk of low e-commerce conversion horror stories involving Facebook. They’re all about a direct ad that fails to generate that direct sale.

The truth about Facebook e-commerce conversion rates

Here’s the good news. Facebook can deliver e-commerce sales. However, often times, it’s not in the form that you would like. Seriously. You have to be more creative. How does this work? Well, Facebook traffic can convert if you retarget.

In other words, people who have found your website on their own and who have gone to internal pages might have a Facebook account. The next time they log on into their Facebook account at the same time you’re running a retargeting campaign, your ads will be visible to them. Your ads will remind them to go back to your shopping cart, or to your website. This has been proven to increase ROI.

Facebook can also deliver e-commerce sales through squeeze page marketing. In other words, you use Facebook to recruit people to your mailing list. It’s actually your mailing list that’s doing the heavy-lifting, as far as selling stuff to your list members go.

Another way Facebook can deliver e-commerce results through your business is through a Facebook page boost. Basically, you create a Facebook page and you target lookalike audiences based on the interest of people who already like your page.

Then, you send out content. Using this content, you can profile the interests of the typical high-engagement members of your page. Once you get this very important piece of consumer intelligence, you can then run lookalike audience campaign on Facebook targeting people with those same interests.

The idea being: if you know the interest of the person who actually buys from you and you advertise to another person with the exact same set of interests, the chance of that second person buying is much higher than a complete and total stranger.

The bottom line? Yes. Facebook can deliver e-commerce sales, but you have to use its tools the right way. You can’t just go in there, advertise an affiliate link, or a direct link to your Shopify store, or a direct link to your product, and expect a sale. It doesn’t work that way. Sure, you can convert every once in a while, but chances are you’re not going to get the results you’re looking for. You have to use it using the techniques outlined above.

The Secret Sauce behind Ad Retargeting

If you’re reading this article, you’ve probably heard all sorts of things about Facebook’s ad retargeting technology. Let me tell you, most of the things you’ve heard are absolutely correct.

Perhaps you’ve heard that ad retargeting enables merchants to bring customers back to their shopping carts so they can buy something. That is absolutely true. It doesn’t work 100% of the time, but it works enough to make quite a bit of a difference.

Similarly, ad retargeting also enables merchants to drive people back to content pages that would eventually convert customers into paying buyers. That part is true as well.

However, despite all the excitement about ad retargeting technology, there is a secret sauce that you cannot ignore. Seriously. If you understand how the secret sauce works, then you would know how to craft together a more effective ad retargeting campaign.

On the other hand, if you remain clueless regarding this element, chances are your campaign would probably be hit or miss. Often times, it’s more of a miss than a hit.

What secret sauce am I talking about? Proven interest. That’s right. When people come to your website, they have a proven interest. Ad regarding essentially gives you a tool to bring those people back to your website.

However, here’s the problem. If you’re just going to bring them back to the home page, you’re wasting your time. Real proven interest boils down to internal pages. That’s when you know that this person is serious. That’s when you know that this person actually is engaged enough with your content that they would go to internal pages.

I’m not just talking about one main page. I’m talking about secondary pages or other internal pages. In fact, the deeper you get them into your website, the better the results. This means that they have looked through other content, they’ve somehow figured out how everything works, and they’re more likely to convert later on.

This is why if you’re running an ad retargeting campaign, it’s really important to focus on bringing back people who have gone into an internal page and not just the home page.

Two ways to retarget

Now that you fully understand that ad retargeting is all about getting people who have gone to an internal page to come back, there are two ways to retarget.

You can remind them to go back to where they left off. Maybe this is a purchase page. Maybe it’s a shopping cart. Maybe it’s some sort of article that goes into a conversion page with one click. Whatever the case may be, you just remind people to go back to your website and they end up where they left off.

The other way you can retarget is to pull them deeper into your website. This is an often neglected strategy when it comes to ad retargeting, but this is actually quite powerful. You have to understand that not anybody’s going to interact with your content the exact same way. Some people will find themselves very deep into your site, others will find themselves in a fairly shallow or common secondary page.

The key here is to pull them deeper from that page, but not necessarily driving them to a sales page. In other words, you’re just going to be pulling them deeper into your content, but not necessarily dumping them into a shopping cart, sales page, or any other type of conversion page.

This is how you get better sales. You condition the mind of the visitors so they voluntarily drill deeper into your site until they eventually convert.

Maximize ad retargeting’s results

How do you take your results to the next level? It’s very simple. Instead of pushing sales with your content retargeting, push your squeeze page. This is the page that recruits people to your mailing list. It will be your mailing list that will do the heavy-lifting of converting that visitor into a buyer.

Of course, if you already have people showing up at your shopping cart, then your ad retargeting should focus on bringing them back to the shopping cart. But outside of that, if you’re dealing with people who stop short at content pages, push them to sign up to your squeeze page and let your mailing list convert them eventually.