Meet Facebook Ads Expert Jon Loomer, The ‘Accidental’ Marketer and Online Course Creator. He shares his experience with, tips on, and insights into both marketing itself and online training, he calls himself an “accidental marketer” and revealed that he started providing online courses just to see how’d it go. Despite being a successful Facebook marketing coach, author, speaker, and strategist, he didn’t set out to be a marketer at first.

His first “real job” after graduating from college was as a telemarketer. But he was always uncomfortable doing it. “Any sales-related job I’ve ever had I absolutely hated it.” he said. He was “hung up” on sales people, whom he considered as “deceptive.” A self-confessed honest person by nature, he didn’t see himself as a sales person at all.
Even though he didn’t like sales people in general and never took a business course, he got good at sales.

He moved up along the corporate ladder and landed a high-ranking job working as Senior Manager at Fantasy Games for the National Basketball Association (NBA) in 2007. This was when he was first exposed to Facebook. The NBA partnered with the social media giant to create its Facebook group and an app. He was the admin of the group.

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His first major job involved marketing, but he didn’t realize it at the time. Nevertheless, he became so good in it that the person who hired him at the NBA suggested he apply for the job of VP at Strategic Marketing for the American Cancer Society Great West Division when he moved on from the league. He did. He oversaw all of the digital marketing planning, experimentation, piloting and execution in his division, including social media strategies, email marketing, Facebook applications, and mobile application development and strategies. He also led the development of the first ever ACS iPhone app, More Birthdays.

In the fall of 2011, he decided to use his expertise in Facebook marketing to start his very own business, “Jon Loomer Digital”, with the goal of “helping other businesses maximize social media that makes a difference.” In less than two years, he built a profitable, self-branded business around JonLoomer.com, his very own website that serves as the most complete online resource of advanced Facebook marketing tips and tutorials which is updated almost every day.

His site has been just as successful. Not only has it gained over four million page views, Social Media Examiner recognized it in January of 2013 as among the top 10 social media blogs of the year. In February of 2014, he decided to start his very own online training program. Despite having a thriving business and a popular website, getting into online training scared him.

He was unsure and worried that no one would take his training program. He didn’t know how he was going to do it. He didn’t know if there were any legal issues he needed to be aware of. He stressed over all of the uncertainties until the day he decided to send his email list of 5,000 people a message with a PayPal link asking whether they would pay for his training program in advance. More than 1,000 of them did.

Fast forward into the present, he now has the Power Hitters Club (PHC), a growing online community for Facebook marketers to share, learn, and help one another. To better serve his community, he’s working on turning PHC into three websites:

1. PHC Basic for first-time Facebook marketers
2. PHC Elite for seasoned professional Facebook marketers
3. A website for entrepreneurs

Jon Loomer’s Tips for Facebook Marketers and Online Trainers

Build a long-term relationship with your audience instead of just selling to them.

Having been in business for 10 years now, Jon has learned that people really respond to transparency and not being pushy.

Being able to convince someone to buy something now gets you money right away, but it doesn’t let you build a genuine connection with the customer where you gain his trust. Without it, there’s no guaranteeing he’ll buy from you again and again and again or promote your business. An effective way you can gain your audience’s trust is by providing them with helpful content without expecting anything in return. It shows how sincere you are to help, encouraging them to put their confidence in you.

Promote your product(s) or service(s) to people you know

Selling to strangers his hard. Increase your chances of making a sale by promoting your product(s) or service(s) to people who have shown interest in them. They include those who have visited your website, signed up to your newsletter or online program, or liked or shared your content.

Be in it for the long haul

Whether you’re doing a Facebook campaign, providing an online course, or both, know that seeing results takes time. It requires a lot of work. For example: Jon has been writing a blog post every week for over five years now. He writes the content and promotes it to the people who have visited his website by sharing it to his social networks and email list. When they visit his website, a lot of them subscribe to his email list or like his Facebook page. He didn’t achieve this overnight. He only saw results after repeating the process and making tweaks until he got it right.

Learn as much as you can about targeting

Before marketers targeted potential customers based on such general information as age and location because these were what they could get. Now there are tools that can give you much more granular information on your audience.

On Facebook you can target the people who:

• Have visited your website
• A specific page or section
• Engaged with your posts
• Watched your video(s)

Having such specific information lets you send your audience a very specific message based on their actions, instead of blasting everyone and hoping someone responds, improving your chance at getting a positive response.

Find out what works for you

Jon started online training by offering static courses. Everything went well until the members of his community complained that the content was outdated. Facebook and Facebook marketing change so much so fast, so he started offering live trainings that he can tweak every month to keep up. This and membership have completely changed his business for the better.

If you’re just starting out with Facebook marketing, run three campaigns:

1. One campaign promoting your content that’s useful and helpful with no strings attached to build your audience
2. One campaign building your email list of the people who have visited your website
3. One campaign promoting your product(s) or service(s) to the people who have subscribed to your email list or visited your website

At first, focus most of your budget on your target audience who don’t know you yet. As your connections, network, or following grows as more and more people visit your website or get included in your email list, start shifting your budget to them.

Last Take-Away

Looking back, Jon learned how important it was for him to figure out what he was good at, what he was passionate about, what he wasn’t good at, what he hated to do, and what is really the reason he was doing everything he was doing—his wife and three kids. These are the driving factors for his business, pointing to even more success for him in the future.

Aside from JonLoomer.com, you can connect with Jon through Facebook and Twitter.

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