Facebook’s organic reach sucks, even though it is the biggest social media out there.

This indicates two things.

1. Facebook wants you to spend your cash to reach more people.
2. Most probably, your target audience is using Facebook.

More than two billion people are using Facebook per month.

It’s insane.

But…

Is there any way to reach out to your target audience on Facebook without spending a single penny on Ads?

Yes, there is a legit way, and that’s called Facebook groups.

For almost four months, I’ve tested Facebook groups to build my personal brand and acquire new clients for my content marketing services.

Thankfully, I have got some great results in terms of getting leads and building my brand as well.

Over the past few months, I have been able to generate more than 15 leads for my content marketing services, and out of them, I’ve worked with 7 clients.

And, obviously, providing great content was the most important part of my study.

So the burning question is:

How to get leads and build your personal brand on Facebook groups without spending a single penny of Ads?

This is what I’ll answer in this blog post.

In case this is your first time here: Hey, I am Rafiqul, a content marketing practitioner, and I love writing stuff related to content marketing.

Let’s deep dive into the structure of this article.

Step 1. The right way for finding the right FB groups

This is the hardest part.

The first thing that most of you have done is searching for the largest groups in your niche.

But believe me.

“The larger the group, more leads you’ll get” is a myth.

Instead, look for the quality of the posts and engagement that those posts are getting on a daily basis.

You may easily find some large groups in your niche with more than 100k members.

But not all of these groups are worthy enough to invest your time.

Why?

If you see the quality of the posts, then you’ll have an idea.

What do I mean by that?

Here is what I mean.

Another one.

All of these posts are from a digital marketing group that has more than 198 k members.

Now, will you invest your time and effort to create content for a group that is full of spams?

The decision is yours, but I won’t recommend it.

I hope you got an idea about which groups to avoid.

Now, the question is how to find Facebook groups that meet your goal?

Here’s what you need to do.

First, write down your goal.

●  Do you want to be a trusted expert in your niche?

●  Do you want to get more leads for your business?

Have a clear goal

Make sure you’re crystal clear about your goal.

For me, it was to build my brand and be known as a good content marketer.

Once you identify your primary goal, you need to go deeper into this.

That means don’t just write that; my goal is to get leads for my content writing services’.

Make it more specific like, “My goal is to get leads for my email copywriting services from the United states.”

Got the difference?

The idea here is to know your customers very well.

Next, you need to search Facebook groups the right way.

Let me cite an example.

If your goal is to get targeted leads for your email copy-writing services from the US, then what will you search for?

●  Content writing groups?

● Copy writing groups?

Have a quick guess.

Even though nothing is wrong in this way, you can still do a lot better.

Here’s how.

Since you’re providing copywriting services (imagine), that means your audience is using some kinds of email marketing tools.

True?

And some of the most popular email marketing tools are:

●  Mailchimp

●  Active campaign

●  Convertkit

● And many otters.

Still, agree?

Then why not search for Facebook groups operated by these email marketing companies?

Reason for this?

Because members from these groups are more likely to be interested in your email copywriting services.

At least the chances are pretty high.

Here’s a group by Mailchimp that I found while researching for this article.

Here’s another relevant group.

Trust me.

People will rarely try to find Facebook groups this way.

All they will do is search for the generic terms that everyone is searching.

Best of luck to them.

 My tip for you is to understand your customers as much as possible.

Becoming obsessed with your customers is the only way to become good at it.

To make it to the next level,

●  Read books or magazine that your audience might be interested in

●  Talk with your real customers

●  Consider Quora, Reddit, Answerthepublic

Here’s an in-depth article that I’ve written on customer understanding that might help you.

Don’ts:

●  You don’t need to be active in too many groups.

●  Make sure to align your goal, your audience, and Facebook groups.

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Step 2: Create content consistently for at least 2-3 months

Now, this is a decisive factor.

Even if you’re putting the best ever content without being consistent, I don’t feel it’s going to work.

Yes, there will be exceptions.

But when you’re not well-known in your niche, without consistency, it is going to be harder.

What I recommend is to start posting content even if it’s not the best that you can put.

You’ll start understanding what works and what’s not.

But the fact is, without having any long-term content strategy, you’ll find it hard to stay consistent.

Here’s the strategy that I use over and over again.

Content repurposing is probably the only way that is going to save your lots of time.

In case you’re unfamiliar with this term, this is how Brian Dean defines content repurposing.

The strategy that I follow is to start with one pillar content.

For you, a pillar content could be a YouTube Tutorial video, webinar, in-depth Blog Post, or even podcast.

Whatever the format you choose, make sure that the content is broad enough to get at least three small and valuable social media posts from that single piece of content.

To make it easy, just think about the broad topics that you cover.

Let’s consider the previous example.

So for email copywriting, you may create a YouTube video on “how to write emails that get a higher open rate.”

Now, if you’re covering this topic in-depth, you’ll notice that you have shared multiple key tips into that video content.

Next, you can repurpose those key elements and create a few social media posts.

In that way, you’re only focused on creating one piece of quality pillar content.

And, it’s a way better than looking for fresh content ideas every day.

Again, you can also start with a blog post, like I do,  if writing is your strength.

It becomes easier for me to curate multiple pieces of quality content from a  single blog post.

I always set a target of writing one blog post a week, and that single blog post gives me content for at least three days.

And this simple hack has allowed me to create:

At least 3-5 social media posts/ week

This is something I don’t think many people are doing.

Because of this consistency, I have been able to attract people’s attention.

(I haven’t taken permission, so I cannot share someone’s  details)

To learn more about content repurposing in-depth, make sure you read this blog post.

Step 3: Keep Experimenting

Once you’re ready with your content strategy, move forward to this step.

The fact is what worked for me might not work for you.

It depends on the niche, audience, etc.

So the only way to understand what type of content is working well, you need to experiment with content.

No, I am not talking about content formats like video, audio, or text.

There are many many ways to put your content differently.

Yes, you can do the same over and over again, but the fact is that “same is lame.”

Obviously quality of your content matter most. And by making it easy-to-understand for your audience will make your job easier.

Try experimenting with different kinds of content.

I have tried many kinds of contents like:

● Mind Map with detailed explanation

● Book recommendation

● Summary of blog posts (short format)

● Carousel

● QnA (Answers of queries asked by people)

● Screenshots

●     And many more…

Let’s see how it looks.

Screenshot is taken from twitter.

May be I wouldn’t get much engagement if I had just post the same information in simple text format.

This is why you need to keep experimenting to see what’s working best for you.

I hope you got the idea.

The best way to leverage this is by analyzing what the best people in your niche are doing.

By observing their content, you’ll get the latest ideas and trends as well.

So, keep trying different kinds of posts.

Because you don’t know what your people will love.

For me, I always get a good response to MindMap and Book recommendations.

But to find this, I had to experiment with a different format. Even I have to keep looking for more.

One more tip from my end for those who feel they aren’t great at putting good content.

I know many of my friends who want to share content but get stuck at execution.

Most of them think their content is not worthy enough to share.

Let me clarify my definition of quality content.

Quality content doesn’t have to be visually appealing or completely new that no one ever talked about this.

Any piece of content that adds value to your people solves your dream customer’s questions is quality content.

Let’s move forward to the next step, that is outreaching.

Step 5: Start Outreaching

It took me a long time to realize the fact that networking with like-minded people and experts in the same niche may not only help me to improve but also to get new opportunities.

For the past few months, I’ve tried to reach many marketing experts by using my content as a communication instrument.

As a result, I got work opportunities, collaboration to join projects, and some great buddies.

Your responsibility isn’t only to create great content but also to promote it to reach more audiences.

It’s like your every content piece is screaming to reach as many people as possible.

And it’s your duty to feed your content with the audience.

Enough talk, but how to do it?

After some time, you’ll understand that there are few persons in your group who are influencing most of the group members.

If there’s no one in that group, you may need to look at other groups.

Let’s take an example of a group run by one of my friends Himanshu.

Consider this group as your ideal group, where you can reach out to your target audience.

In this case, you’ll need to observe people who are influencing most of the members.

You can simply look for their post’s engagement (likes, comments).

Here Himanshu is clearly someone who has been able to influence this group member.

Here’s proof.

Even though the number of group members is only about 2.5k, his posts are getting on average 5 % engagement.

That is great.

I’m not talking about post reach; otherwise it could be much higher than the engagement rate.

Your task

So your first task here is to identify people who are able to influence your target audience.

Make a list of these influencers.

Next, make sure you’re engaging with their content.

Commenting on others’ content is the easiest thing you can do.

And also, the basic rule is to try to add context to your comment.

Adding comments like ‘awesome,’ ‘Great content, Brother’ won’t grab your targeted influencers’ attention.

Instead, add your perspective, whether you completely agree or not.

That’s just one side of the story.

Here comes the real game.

Along with engaging with their content, you need to create content that is worthy enough to share.

I am not just talking about posting content on the group.

Here’s what I’ve done.

I did a study for the state of digital marketing jobs in India.

It was a research-based article and also one unique piece of content.

Sharing this article makes sense because:

Next, I shared that article with people whom I wanted to connect with.

Let me also share the template that I used to outreach.

Hello sir, I have been following your work for the past few days. I really appreciate your work.

It might seem very selfish, but I thought getting feedback from you will really help me to improve myself.

I recently did a study to understand the current state of digital marketing of India and put all my hours of results into this article.

Article link: (your article URL)

I would like to get feedback from you on this if you have some time.

Thanks.

(I did a little improvisation to make it more relevant for you)

But keep in mind that share only when your content is share-worthy.

How do I know if my content is worthy of sharing or not?

There is no exact answer; after all, you’ll understand your niche better than me.

But things you can definitely look while creating content to outreach are:

●  Uniqueness- Is your content the primary source of any information? (Research-based or statistical posts works better)

●  Expert Roundup

●  Trending topics

Again don’t restrict yourself within these ideas.

Go deep as much as you can.

I just got an idea while writing this blog post.

If I am creating content (Blog post, YT video, etc.)consistently, then why not share my channel URL to experts in our community by asking,

Could you please give feedback on my channel?

I am giving my best effort to publish one great piece of content (blog post/ YT video) every Monday.

But I’m not sure about how effective my copy is.

Since you’re an experienced and trusted expert in our community, I thought of getting feedback from someone like you.

If you can spare some time for me, it will mean a lot to me.

Thanks.

Again, you can also come up with a better idea than this.

I hope you got the idea.

Okay, let’s move forward to the next step.

Be prepared

Let me share my journey.

I used to share my content on the HubSpot group (For content marketing learners).

When I see in the past, I notice that in the initial stage, I rarely got any engagement in my posts.

You might say:

Maybe it was the issue of poor content.

But, not really.

I am still sharing a similar kind of content, but the story is different.

What I’ve learned is:

You might not get attention (engagement on posts) in the initial stages (you’re lucky if you get).

And that’s okay.

There is only one-way To break the chain,

This is consistency.

Here, I am not trying to portray myself great but to help you understand the importance of being consistent.

The moment you start popping up on everyone’s notification, you’ll start getting noticed even if you’re posting shitty content.

But that’s not your goal, I think.

Be so consistent that group members can recognize you by just looking at your posts and your profile picture.

It really happens.

It depends when you’re going to read this blog post, but you can join the ‘HubSpot content marketing pros’ group to check whether I’m saying honestly or not.

Also, remember that not getting much engagement initially doesn’t mean people are not noticing your work.

It happened to me as well. Not everyone tends to engage with posts.

The endpoint is to accept the fact that initially, you won’t get that much engagement.

One mistake I see often: People just paste the links of their blogs or YouTube videos. Well, this is not the right way to do this.

That doesn’t mean you should never add URLs.

But make sure that you’re adding at least a summary of the blog posts and youtube videos.

In this way, members will understand what value they get from their blogs.

You can take inspiration from this.

Instead of putting your link directly on your post, try to put some effort and tell your audience the summary of your content (URL).

If you want to dig deeper into this, read the article about content creation with consistency.

The Last step

Eventually, this could be the first step, as well.

Let me explain.

Once you keep doing the above methods for at least 2-3 months, you’ll either start seeing some results or nothing.

If you’ve decided on the right kind of group, then It is more likely to give you a good return.

But if somehow you don’t see such a significant result, then this could be your first step.

That means you can start with any other groups or on any other platform.

Don’t lose hope, and don’t see this as a failure even if you don’t get clients from your effort.

At least you owned the discipline of creating content consistently.

This is not to demotivate you but to show you a different side of the same story.

What worked for me might not work for you.

Also, you may see better results than me.

A small tip from my end for you.

Look what other people are doing in your niche.

●  What types of posts are getting good engagement?

●  Observe why is this happening?

Start modeling the best performing posts, not copying them.

I know when I say “start modeling other’s ideas,.”

Many of you will hear, “start copying others ideas.”

The choice is yours.

But there is no substitute for being transparent and honest.

Final words

To make you understand that this method is actually doable, I have attached some screenshots that I’m getting just because of my content.

Gallery.

One interesting thing that I would like to try in the future is giving this method a try on different content formats.

Obviously, the overall process might change depending upon the content channel, but the fundamental is still the same.

And the fundamental is all about Providing value/ helping your audience + Consistency.

That’s all.

Will it be too much if I ask you to share this blog post to spread the knowledge?

If not, then please do so.

I would appreciate it.

Thank you for reading this much.