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Marketing via Facebook can be inconsistent and intimidating. A Facebook ads expert discuss in this episode how to use Facebook to target your exact, ideal audience.
This week:
01:20 – The business of helping businesses with Facebook
03:55 – How to deal with Facebook’s inconsistencies
05:55 – James’ social media experts roll call
06:15 – Facebook done correctly
07:00 – “80/20 Sales & Marketing” by Perry Marshall
08:41 – Own the Racecourse as the perfect example
09:35 – Target your exact, ideal audience
10:46 – The detailed walkthrough at SuperFastBusiness Live
10:52 – The ideal Facebook ad route
13:18 – Do it yourself or hire a professional?
14:30 – Create campaigns by target audience
16:10 – The Frank Kern page as starting point
17:30 – Should you use tools that target private groups?
18:25 – SuperFastBusiness as a completely organic site
20:02 – One of the best new enhancements on Facebook
22:05 – Average percentage of opened emails
23:35 – How can Facebook give you a 100% open rate?
24:23 – Creating a look-alike audience
25:55 – Target a specific topic
28:20 – Doing hyper-segmentation
29:45 – What is custom audience web retargeting?
32:03 – Mike Rhodes’ invisible list and remarketing
32:28 – Keith’s recommendations
34:51 – Problems on people posting abusive comments
36:26 – Core action steps
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Tweetables:
How to deal with Facebook’s inconsistent platform. [Click To Tweet].
What is the 80/20 approach? [Click To Tweet].
How to target your audience on Facebook. [Click To Tweet].
How can Facebook give you a hundred percent open rate? [Click To Tweet].
What is custom audience web retargeting? [Click To Tweet].
Transcription:
James: James Schramko, here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Another guest interview today on a popular topic which is getting more from your advertising dollar and specifically, we’re talking about what cannot be ignored, a huge platform of Facebook.
And I’ve brought along my friend, Keith Kranc, to talk about it. Good day, Keith.
Keith: Good day mate. Good day James.
James: That was a very good Aussie accent – better than many I’ve heard. You run a website called DominateWebMedia.com and you are in the business of helping people with Facebook. I’d like you to tell me a little bit about your experience with Facebook and I know that you’ve been a co-author with somebody rather famous in this space.
Let’s find out about your education/services/experience and then we can roll into some top tips for our listeners.
Getting to know Keith
Keith: Sure. Sure. Sounds good.
So, I first started, really kind of fell in love with the whole Facebook ads game, really three or four years ago. I actually self-published a book about 2 ½, 3 years ago and I don’t really promote it anymore because it’s already outdated and the book that you referenced in the opening was the one I’m co-authoring with Perry Marshall which will be out in the fall published by Entrepreneur Magazine, “The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising.” So, I’m excited about that.
But, so I started giving in to Facebook ads a few years ago when I really just realized the ability to get your message out in front of your exact, ideal, target audience. You see, I used to, prior to my online business, I used to own a multiple brick-and-mortar businesses and part of two different franchises, I ended up owning about four or five different locations depending on the time. And before that, I was an airline pilot for about 6 years.
But, while I own these brick-and-mortar businesses, it was, you know, for one to get a good $2,000 on a halfway busy road or a lot more than that, in a much busier road. And so, just that experience alone and all the stuff we did with, you know, traditional marketing and you have experienced with all the stuff you guys would do with the car dealerships. But the ability to just literally set up that ad up for free and as long as you have a good message, you can get out in front of your exact, ideal, target audience and then you’re paying on a, you know, 20¢, 30¢, 40 or 50, or 60¢ per click basis.
And so, once I understood that you could do that with Facebook, I just fell in love with it and I just went all in. And since then, now we have, literally, my account is under management over a million dollars spent on Facebook ads alone which I generated 150,000 plus leads just over past couple of years. Several million dollars in direct sales and the lifetime value of those are much higher than that with the different clients that we kind of managed behind the scenes and so, it’s an exciting time.
Within the last year, the changes that have been made, the enhancements to the platform, really ever since Facebook became a public company, is when really the platform started really improving because they know they’ve got to generate revenue, right? To generate growth in the stock.
James: Yeah. Well, it seems like they’ve been changing a lot. They certainly changed on me. I think I was one of the earlier people advertising on the Facebook platform and I’m talking about many years ago. And then at some point, my account got flagged and it looks like it’s back up now.
So, how do we deal with the inconsistencies on that platform?
Dealing with the inconsistencies of Facebook
Keith: Good question. So, the account stuff, that’s a whole, that’s a tough one to deal with because there could be so many things that can kind of happen but as far as the inconsistencies with Facebook, the one thing that, if anybody’s listening to this podcast, the one thing that we’d really want you to take to heart is you have to figure out a way that you can somehow provide value and build instant rapport with your Facebook ads.
And so, if you have high value content and then you have something at the other end of that that you can sell whether it’s a service or a product or your local brick-and-mortar business, how can you, you know, quickly build rapport with somebody or provide high value whether it’s a coupon for a local business, or whether it’s some kind of an educational download or whether it’s a testimonial video that you can pop up as a video and amplify that or maybe, it’s just a “how-to” blog post? Those type of things.
How you can kind of do that, and have systems in place to move those visitors into subscribers, and eventually, into customers, clients and returning customers and clients. But, you know, going back to your question about the inconsistencies, that’s one of the things that is frustrating. I mean it changes so fast. We’re teaching this stuff, like, holy crap.
The Power Editor changes every single month. The whole ad platform, I mean, literally, you know you’ll do a training and you’ll do all the screenshots and these videos and then the ad manager is completely different like, a week after it’s published.
James: It’s crazy. I looked up my oldest ads and I was actually using Facebook advertising in April 2008. So, it’s sort of actually been… way back, and now I think I’m actually getting, alright, I’m thinking, is this 2014 already? That’s like 6 years, pretty incredible, really. So, now, I’m speaking to other people to find out about Facebook because that’s what you have to do.
I’ve had all sorts of social media experts on SuperFastBusiness. I’ve had Facebook discussions with Jen Sheahan and Victoria Gibson. I’ve had Pinterest discussions with Michelle Macphearson. I’ve talked about Instagram with The Betty Rocker.
And here we are with the update on Facebook and I’m sure that you’ve got some new news for us about what’s happening there. But, what is the right way to use Facebook now? And we’re recording this in 2014: what shall we be talking about if we’re taking a clean sheet approach to this? We’ve got our business here, we’ve got our website.
We might have an offer, we’re not in the MLM niche or something that Facebook don’t like. We’ve got you know, a good offer that is good for people, that they think is acceptable, how do we approach it?
The right way to use Facebook in 2014
Keith: What I like to do is I like to teach, I call it, kind of, 80/20 Facebook marketing sketch.
James: That’s a familiar concept.
Keith: You like that? Actually, it’s a Perry Marshall claim there. So we run Facebook ads for his 80/20 book. So, that’s a great offer and in a second here…
James: And a great book. I want to talk to Perry Marshall about his book and I was candid enough to offer him this platform to come and talk about it but I also was in the foreword of that book. It really changed my 2013 reading that book at the beginning of the year and reviewing it for, I guess, a little note in the front cover. But the whole 80/20 approach is a soft spot for me. I even take it to the 4 percent:64 percent ratio, the fractal part, that little 80/20 of the 20, and that’s what I’m looking for.
If you could tell us the core things that you must know about Facebook, that would be awesome.
What you must know about Facebook
Keith: Sure. Sure. And the thing is, when you’re thinking about, let’s say, you have a business that, what I’d like to tell people to do is try to kind of give it a budget. So, let’s say you have some type of offer. Let’s say, you have a landing page that you want to drive traffic to. First of all, you have to have a Facebook-appropriate offer.
OK? I call it a Facebook-appropriate offer or a kind of lead magnet. If you want here, in a second here, I can, I’ll give you a list of offers that work on Facebook in a minute here. But first, what we’d like to do is let’s say that you have a great landing page or maybe you have a sales page with a low end, low price part that you can drive targeted traffic to with Facebook.
What you want to do is maybe spend your 80 percent of your budget driving traffic to that core offer, some kind of a, maybe some kind of a direct response so people have to enter their email, you know, have to take action once they get there. And maybe, you spend your other 20 percent of your budget on amplifying your high value content and you’re kind of building that engagement level and building the fan base. And so, for example, perfect example is Own the Racecourse.
So, people that follow you, hopefully, they are creating content, and they are posting that content on their blog whether it’s a video that turns into an article, etc. etc. Whether it’s a podcast. Whether it’s a slideshow, whether it’s a written article, OK? You start your content on your blog and hopefully you have some good systems in place on your blog, like where you can capture leads, create strong calls to action throughout your website.
Now, if you take that content and post it up on Facebook as a status update on your business Facebook page, now what you can do is you can amplify that content, OK, with Facebook ads. You can literally set up a campaign that is targeted to your, kind of exact, ideal, target audience that you know resonates with your business or service. And what you can do is you can set up a small budget, like $5 or $10 a day. OK? I’m talking 10 or 20 percent of your budget is this small strategy but it’s really, really powerful in my opinion.
It will really build your brand. It will build your goodwill. And it will increase your conversions on all of your other stuff. And so, what you do, is now you can post that piece of content that’s hosted on your blog. You can post it on Facebook.
Then, you can now target people that like, say, Tony Robbins, like tennis or like triathlons. And now, you can bring that traffic to that post and they click on that post with the image on that post, guess what? They get taken to your blog or your core website. OK? And they don’t have to opt in.
You’re not requiring them to opt in or anything like that. What you’re doing is is you’re building goodwill. And then hopefully, you have retargeting in place and so on your website, so you have some kind of retargeting pixel whether it’s AdRoll or Perfect Audience or now, Facebook’s own web retargeting. And you’re kind of building that, we call it, invisible list.
And I can go, we don’t have time to go into detail on how to really put this stuff up, you know, exactly each step by step and I can explain that at your event, when I’m speaking at your event. And so, I can walk people through on what sort of tools to use for this and stuff. But, let’s say you’re doing this now, what’s happening is, people that see that post, they’re getting likes on your page, they’re getting traffic. It’s helping your search engine optimization.
You’re getting more so-called signals. People are sharing your posts. People are sharing your blog posts because you’ve got the, hopefully, the so-called share buttons on your blog. OK? And then, you might have retargeting in place wherein when they leave your blog and if they don’t opt in, you might have, you know, maybe 10 or 15 percent of the people that land on your blog that opt in via one of your calls to action on your site.
And then, the other people, they’re going to leave. And guess what? Now, you can have an automated, you know, a banner ad that shows up on Facebook when they go to Facebook the next day or maybe, to a new site if you’re doing web retargeting, and you can bring them to your offer. Maybe it’s a landing page, it’s a free checklist or a cheat sheet or a video series or maybe it’s right to your product page if you’re an e-commerce store and you have a good kind of low ticket frontend product that you can pitch.
And so, what you’re doing is, is you’re kind of doing this for let’s say, 10 to 20 percent of your budget or maybe 30 percent. And then maybe, the other 78 percent or 80 percent of your budget, you’re driving traffic to a good offer that you know will work with Facebook. OK? And so, what’s happening is that you’re kind of building goodwill with this other stuff, you’re continually building your brand. You’re driving traffic to your website.
But, that’s a small part of your budget. And you really can get your content out to the majority of your fans on a very, very low budget by doing this. And if your ultimate goal is to really just generate leads and sales, let’s say you have an event coming up or you want to fill up a webinar, then, yes, you’re going to focus that 80 percent on that lead generation. And when I said we’ve generated 150,000 leads on the last couple of years and literally, about almost 60,000 leads in the last 3 months alone which is a few of my clients and most of those are over 35 years old and up.
And with those, we’ve done just driving traffic to a good landing page with a good offer that people will opt-in for and you know, they’re added on to your list and you can go from there, turning them into a hotter prospect into a customer. So…
Outsource or DIY?
James: Nice. Well, I just want to say that so far, you’ve given us a perfect rundown on how we could get going. Are you doing this yourself or are you hiring someone to do this?
Keith: You know, it really depends on your situation. Absolutely. You know, if your ultimate goal is just to get traffic and you just want to create content, focus on your business, focus on sales then maybe you hire out somebody then they can do these all for you. OK? We do this for clients. You know, on a case by case basis and you can also learn how to do this yourself.
If you’re a consultant, or you’re a coach or something like that, then I would recommend learning this stuff and doing it yourself at least for a while or maybe hiring somebody to kind of, maybe a package where it’s more like consulting done-with-you kind of program and you can really learn your target audience because you do learn a lot, you know, even if you’re hiring somebody to do it for you, I’d still recommend getting involved as much as possible so you can learn like what audiences convert, which ones don’t.
So, for example, if you’re running a lead generation campaign, we’ll typically separate out, let’s say for example, we’re driving traffic to a page that teaches you, you know, how to become an author, and how to write your own book in 2014. And, what we like to do, typically, is separate out each campaign by target audience. So, literally, in some campaigns, we might have a hundred different campaigns with a hundred different audiences so we can really, really see which audience performs best.
Because realistically, yes, you can go down, be even more granular to age levels and stuff like that even though you can kind of get that with the reporting. But it’s really nice to see, OK, Tony Robbins – that converted well. The other guy – that didn’t convert too well.
You know, public speaking, OK, the cost for lead was a lot lower there then let’s scale on that one. Let’s maybe take that one and refine it and see if we can take the audience tighter, the age group tighter. But’s that’s one tip.
Just really try to separate out your target audience as much as possible. And tell, let’s say you find the core 9 or 10 audiences that, you know, your best 9 or 10 and you just want to amplify a blog post. What you can do is you can save that audience inside the Power Edit and you can save that, let’s say, it was, 9 different interests and then over time, you felt those were your kind of best 9.
You can save that as a saved kind of audience and Facebook will remember, OK, it was 40 year olds to 65, it was these 9 audiences, it was United States, Australia, New Zealand, UK and Canada. And then what you can do as quickly, just ignite it to your kind of core audience. I call it core gurus. You know, social media gurus is kind of my audience, right?
James: Yeah. Everyone seems to put a link to, everyone seems to use the Frank Kern page as the starting point in the IM page.
Keith: That’s a good page to target. If you’re in the IM space, yeah, absolutely. You know, Frank Kern, Ryan Deiss and those guys. Some of them, you know, some of the names you can’t target… typically, if a, Facebook page has a really long name, like, Brendon Burchard for example, Life, Love, Matter, I think what’s called, “Live. Love. Matter.”
So, here’s a long name. So, for some weird reason, Facebook has a glitch that if it has a long name, you can’t target it. So, if you want to build a big Facebook page, you don’t want people targeting your fans, then create a long name.
James: Well, I know that people do target my fans as well because they’ve figured that I’ve got a pretty solid audience. I’ve got a very organic audience. And I know these tools that actually allow people to go and scrape or harvest the IDs from every single private group and I know people are mining out groups like Zentrepreneur, the Internet Marketing Super Friends group. Are these tools allowed or are they a little bit black hat?
What’s the story with that?
Keith: OK. That’s a great question. This is really going a lot around right now. There’s a lot of people that this is one of the core kind of strategies they teach. And I can’t tell you right now you know, which way to go.
The one thing I will tell you is that right now, honestly, I’m probably giving up a little bit because we’re not doing that just to declare it really, really safe just because a couple of people I know that are, that have pretty good ends with Facebook. One of my friends, Dennis Yu, who runs with a lot of the guys over there at Silicon Valley, now he told me directly that people are getting their Facebook accounts shut down for that.
The organic, long term approach
James: It makes sense that they would be pushing the edge and as someone who has lost their Facebook account privileges before and I’m not even sure why. If I had to guess, I think it might have been some of the CPA office I was promoting 5 or 6 years ago, not the stuff that I was promoting at the time when my account got turned off. But, it seems that it’s turned back on again.
I don’t even know if I’m officially banned or not but I certainly haven’t used anything devious or untoward. But I, you know, one of the things I teach in Own the Racecourse is to not be platform dependent. But I don’t do anything to upset platforms anymore. My SuperFastBusiness site is completely organic. I don’t do anything tricky. I don’t use tools.
We don’t do SEO in the old sense of manipulative link building, all of that stuff. Left that in the past with my oldest sites, some that I even turned off as a result of some test sites, etc. And I encourage any listener, don’t take the shortcuts. Just do the organic, good, long term approach because it’s a long game and it is an inconvenience if you do lose your privileges.
Keith: Yeah. Absolutely. Especially how good Facebook is becoming lately and how much better the targeting is becoming with partner categories and where we can, it’s just unbelievable. But, yeah. I mean according to the terms of service, you know, they’re supposed to be, kind of opted in, those people are supposed to, if you’re… The Facebook user ID, you know what’s that for, is people to create an app.
You know the opt-in apps where we kind of opt in and that’s what that’s for. And so, it’s going to be…when they start cracking down, supposing, I’ve heard they might start cracking down this year. It’s not that difficult to find somebody to speak about the names. It’s very easy for their algorithm to find a bunch of similar data points.
So, it’s definitely, it works…as a strategy, you can get some laser targeted leads but use it at your own risk is what I say.
Uploading email addresses and creating groups
James: What about this other option of being able to upload your email addresses and create dynamic groups there?
Keith: OK, so I’ve got Facebook custom audiences. I’m glad you asked. It’s one of the things that I want to touch on on this call is, one of the best aspects of Facebook, one of the best new enhancements why we are becoming even more successful with Facebook. So what Facebook custom audiences are, these are super powerful for two really, two ways.
One, to get higher quality, higher, highly targeted leads, you know new leads in your funnel but also, how to really bring more existing subscribers back into your sales funnel and to promote, you know, existing events or whatever it is. So what you can do is basically, upload a CSV file of email list or phone numbers. So, I can export, let’s say, export the name of 10,000 emails out of my InfusionSoft account and I can upload that CSV file to Facebook.
You can do it via the Ad Manager or the Power Editor but to create a similar audience, you have to use the Power Editor which I’ll talk about in a second. So, what you do is you upload a custom audience in Facebook and then Facebook will match up those emails with their existing Facebook email. So, let’s say out of those 10,000 emails, maybe 6,000 of those are the same email they use to log in to Facebook with.
So now, about an hour later, voila – You have 6,000 persons, target audience you can use to target your ads, to… and so, this is really powerful. It’s like, basically, you can now, because, what’s an average open rate, 15 or 20 percent? You know a good open rate is probably 20 percent or higher?
James: The emails? Man, I’m getting 70 or 80 percent but I think I’m doing things a bit differently to other people. That’s from my super customer lists. Certainly, the other half 50-plus percent, but my even my mass list, you know the ones like 20,000, my mass… You know it’s like a baby, a baby list for the average Internet marketer. But, for 20,000 people I’d be disappointed if I don’t crack 20 percent opens for my house list.
Keith: Perfect. Me too. My goal, typically on my list, is to kind of, to get above 20 is my, every time, and then yeah…
James: And it’s really worth pointing up that Office Autopilot only counts one open per a customer. If you’re using Aweber or something, they’ll put the same person out. There are people that their email at 20 times which blows my mind but they count every time as a new open and it inflates your open rate.
Keith: I don’t understand that all the time why you’ll see something, when somebody opens an email like they went out like 2 weeks ago or month ago? What? What? Seriously?
James: Yeah. Yeah. OK, partly, I think they’re forwarding it to people and getting it a few opens on the same email. I think that’s partly it. And partly, I think people just forget that they ever open it or something weird is going on but it, it does blow my mind. And the other thing is I don’t think those email systems actually count every pixel.
That’s not following everyone’s pixel when they’re going into the inbox or maybe screening it or whatever. Or, the other one, like me, having a podcast is they’ll see the email and then they’ll go to their iTunes and start listening to the episode. So, the email allotted them that there’s an episode that didn’t necessarily open so I’m a bit wary of the numbers, the stats… but, in any case, let’s get back on topic. You’ve got your percentage of opens and you know which lists are responsive?
Keith: Yeah. And so, what you can do now, obviously, it gets better in a second here though, but what you can do is you can target those people with their Facebook ads so now you can kind of, you know, get 70 percent open rate or even if it’s 50 or maybe it’s 10. Now, you can go to almost, on Facebook, a 100 percent open rate because you can get that message out in front of them and you can run a CPM bidding ad where you’re only paying for a thousand impressions.
Let’s say you’re paying, you know, $3 for a thousand impressions and even if it’s, you know, the list is, say, 6,000, we’re talking about $18 or something like that to get out in front of all your existing audience about some kind of an offer. You know, maybe it’s an opt-in for a webinar, or something like that. But they work really, really well. And so, any list that you can get access to, it has to be an email list.
It can’t be an address list, you know that you can buy for direct mail. It’s got to be an email or a phone list. And, you know the phone list don’t match up very well. So, however, the next thing that you can do is you can create a similar or look-alike audience. So, any custom audience that you upload into Facebook, so I recommend uploading any type of segment of list you can.
You know, your entire subscriber list, your buyers, your buyers from the last 18 months, etc etc. Really, break that down and upload as much as you can because you can now create a similar audience. So, I can upload that, let’s say that 6000-person list. Or let’s say it’s only 500. It doesn’t matter. I can click on that list and I can create a similar audience.
And now, Facebook will create a whole new unique audience, based on, about 6 data points where they will now create a new audience with similar traits, you know, psychographic and demographic data as your list and it takes just a few minutes and that list will be created. Now, mind you. That list is usually about 2 million large. So, it’s always about 2 million – it’s a very large list.
But, where the kind of the low hanging fruit comes in, this is really what you want to pay attention to so write this down if you’re running ads right now or if you’re getting ready to run ads. Running ads to a campaign, a lot of times, for example, a target audience might be too large, kind of too broad, right? For example, in the triathlon space, #triathlon is like a million. A million or two or something like that.
And so, for us to sell triathlon training courses, you know, generate leads in that, is, it’s a lot better to go after like the names of triathlon like Iron Man. The specific names of cities of specific triathlons or products to sell. You know, certain products and stuff like that. You’re going to be much better off.
You know, maybe it’s an audience of 150,000 or 2 or 3 or 4 hundred thousand. You know, those are pretty good audience sizes that you can, you know, get pretty good results from. You know, if you’re talking about upper than 800,000 to 900,000 to a million, it’s going to be tougher to get convert or try to get it more précised and get it more narrowed down.
However, if you take, let’s say, you have an audience that’s a million to… maybe it’s just like email marketing or something general like that which you know, you’ve run some ads up on audience and you just, you can’t get your cost per lead down enough or performance isn’t very well, isn’t very good. What you can do is you can layer that. So, you can take, you can add that similar audience to your ad.
It’s a similar audience to your list or to your list and your buyers and then they have to be in that similar audience. I mean, also have to be, in that, you know, #triathlon. Hash, in Facebook targeting, it just kind of means it’s a general. It’s typically more broad than other things. And so, that’s what it looks like in the ad manager.
That’s why I said hash. It just looks that way in the ad manager. It means it’s kind of a general – anybody that’s kind of related to that topic or could like that topic. So, let’s say, instead of targeting triathlon which is a million one, or a million two, or that similar audience which is 2 million, I can target somebody that likes triathlon and also, is in my similar audience.
And now, all of the sudden, it goes to like a 240,000-person audience, highly targeted. So, you went from one out of a million or the other one out like a million two and all of a sudden, put them together and they have to land on both of those and now you have 250,000-person audience that’s highly, highly targeted. So, that’s a great way to use custom and similar audiences. It’s kind of the next level thing.
James: I saw a tip from Jason Parker. He mentioned you put a tracking pixel on your thank you page and then he also said you can capture the email addresses of your buyers and then you can start marketing specials just to buyers of your custom audience, you buy an email segment.
Keith: Yup. Exactly.
Hyper-segmentation and Facebook’s own retargeting feature
James: So, do you do any sort of hyper-segmentation, like that?
Keith: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, that’s kind of, kind of what I said a second ago a little bit. So, what you might do… his own buyers, right?
James: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah. So, you’re going to upload segment lists as much as possible. So, one list is your regular subscribers and then another one is your buyers and you can exactly. So, they’re kind of, the similar audience strategy is kind of the next level thing but the first level is absolutely, targeting, you know, specific higher level products to those buyers. And, it just, absolutely, yeah yeah. Absolutely.
So, another thing you might do is you might, for example, when we did our webinar promotion with Perry for our program we did a few weeks ago, is, we had about 3000 people register for the webinars, the promo webinars. So we upload that into the custom audience and then run reminder in, reminder Facebook ads to the offer page for you know, the next week. And then you can also do that to remind them to, you know, show up for the webinar but if the webinar’s already happened, you can run that, that ad reminding them to buy.
It takes them right into the order page. Similar, with you know, e-commerce, you can do the same thing. Now, the other thing that you can do, I don’t want to go into this too much. It’s brand new in Facebook and I can touch on this more at the event and stuff, at your event.
But, Facebook now has its own retargeting. It’s a custom audience feature and so it’s called, Custom Audience Web Retargeting. And so, what they’re doing is, is basically, like using Perfect Audience or AdRoll but it’s a little bit better except you can’t do the rest of the web retargeting like on Oprah.com or other blogs or your sites. It’s Facebook only.
But, what you can do is you can put your Facebook retargeting pixel on your website, OK? And then Facebook will start to build that audience. So, instead of putting like Perfect Audience for targeting pixel, you’re putting your Facebook retargeting pixel. And now, you can use Facebook to run retargeting campaigns.
So, I can put that pixel site-wide and then that audience will grow every day. So, it might start out with zero. And then tomorrow, there might be a hundred visitors on it. So, then tomorrow, the next day, there’s 200 or whatever.
If there’s a thousand a day, it’s 2,000. And so now, I can run, let’s say everybody that lands on my blog, I can now run a cutback custom audience campaign bringing them back to my free offer or to my webinar or to my event. And then of course, you can create separate audiences inside your ad manager.
So, I’ll create another audience which is people that landed on the thank you page. OK? Or landed on the sales confirmation page. So, what I can do is run these Facebook retargeting ads to people that landed on my website and then I’ll exclude the people that landed on the thank you page. So those folks are not going to be delivered those. And so these are highly targeted that are not going to cost very much at all, you can bid really low.
And you can kind of, really get your message out there and you can be out there a lot. I mean, you can get, you can build frequency up over and over if you want. And, people, a lot of times people need, you know, a few times to, before they could make a buying decision.
James: Yeah. I think Facebook combined with free marketing seems like a magic formula. You can find the customers with specific interests, send them to your site. You don’t have to squeeze them anymore because you got them on the invisible free marketing list.
That’s something Mike Rhodes talks about. He mentioned that at Fast Web Formula 3, the event that I run. He talked about the invisible email list and in fact, he’s coming to the event as well to talk about what’s new with remarketing especially on the Google side of things. So, there’s this tandem Facebook-remarketing, and of course, this Perfect Audience, AdRoll.
Do you have any Google and which ones?
Keith: Yeah. Well, I only have, the recommendations I have for you is Perfect Audience or AdRoll because they give you the option to be able to advertise in Facebook and the rest of the Web. OK? So, you can, if you want, like in Perfect Audience, I can create a sidebar campaign or I can create a Facebook newsfeed campaign or I can create a web targeting and I can upload a 300×250 banner, you know, all the different banners you see.
And that, that can show up on any other new site or any site that basically has AdSense available. So now, Facebook’s new web retargeting, this is brand new, this is 2 weeks old. It’s only been around for just in February and this is where, the good thing about the new Facebook one is you actually have more options because with Perfect Audience or AdRoll, basically, you only have one ad option.
It’s a link post with a square image – what used to be, they just changed that but it’s basically a link post ad or it’s a sidebar ad. That’s it. If you’re using Facebook and you’re building that list, you can run a video ad, you can run a Facebook offer, you can run all the different types of ads, plus, the pixel, it’s not cookie-based. It actually works on mobile and apps.
So, somebody’s mobile, you kind of build that invisible list which you won’t be able to do on Perfect Audience or AdRoll because it’s kind of a browser-based cookie. You know, we’re getting on the more technical stuff here but, but my point here is that you can at least put that pixel on your site and see if that, if that list will start to grow inside your Facebook ad manager so…
James: Well, I think, accumulating a large list on AdRoll and on Google, I think I have 100,000-plus people now. And that’s just from driving people to my main content blog. So, if I would have the perfect inventory of tools it would be, my own blog, then Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and my own email that’s driving traffic back to it repeatedly and then leveraging that with remarketing.
It just turns it into a big list building/product sales machine but the Facebook component is such a big part of it and kind of looking forward to getting back into it. I noticed just before my account stopped for whatever reason last year, there was a lot of people making abusive comments on the promoted posts. Is that still a problem?
Keith: OK. Good point. People still do that. But, you know what, I’m seeing it less and less than we used to see it because they’re getting used to it.
James: Do you think, they’ve finally figured out that it’s actually how Facebook’s funded and that it’s part of the deal?
Keith: Yup, it’s part of the deal. They’re getting used to it. You’ll still get them once in a while, you know, “Get the f off my newsfeed.” Because they own their newsfeeds. It’s their newsfeed, right? Yeah. “It’s my newsfeed, I paid for that.” Or not.
James: Sure. They own Facebook, don’t they? I was so taken aback by the comments. They were sort of YouTube-esque. I asked my agency to stop running those promoted posts because I was just finding the negative energy was inconsistent with my core values.
So I’ve pretty much been going organic for the last year, and still managed to have tremendous growth, but I think a little gentle assist here and there would be something that I’d like. So I’m going to turn on the AdRoll soon and see what happens.
Alright, let’s break it down. You’re what I would call a technical talker. You have the ability to put a firehose of information, much like Ezra Firestone did in my e-commerce interview. I have to now strain this into a short action guide for our listener. What can we do? We’ve got a Post-it note and a pen in front of us.
We’re doing no advertising on Facebook. What are the action steps just to get started in the simple version? They can go back and listen to the complicated version, which has all the detail, but let’s just say, what’s the core things we need to do?
Core action steps
Keith: OK sure, great question. So first of all, go create your ad account. Do it right now, right after this podcast, if you haven’t yet. You go to Facebook.com/advertising. And to create your ad manager you have to actually submit an ad.
So just kind of follow the steps, and submit an ad, put it in your credit card, and then after you do that, it’ll take you to the ad manager. And then pause that campaign. So it doesn’t even need to be perfect, you don’t even need to put all the right targeting interests or anything like that in there. Just go to Facebook.com/advertising, click create an ad, create an ad real quick, put your credit card in, hit submit, then pause that.
So now, you have your ad manager. Now you can go in and mess around. Create an ad, get inside the interest targeting, and start looking at the different targeting capabilities. You know, start to get excited.
It’ll show you the potential reach, when you start putting in different interests and audiences that people can like, you know, people that like Tony Robbins or tennis or you know, in the partner categories you can do lots of different things if you’re in the US right now, however it sounds like those might be coming overseas, too, which is where you can target people based on their offline spending data and stuff like that.
But do that, and then when you create an ad, they’re going to give you an option. And what you can do is you can, if you have a Facebook page, you can click Page Post Engagement. And that’s probably going to be the easiest way for you to get started. You’ll select Page Post Engagement, and then you can just select the most recent post on your Facebook page.
Or you can kind of create one right in there. I don’t want to get too technical there, because you kind of need a screen record. But go in there and kind of stumble around a little bit, and do it. And then get inside and look around the audience and see the potential audiences that you can target. OK? That’s number one.
Number two is get LeadPages if you don’t have LeadPages. LeadPages in my opinion is one of the biggest reasons why so many businesses are now becoming more successful with Facebook ads. It’s so easy to create a high-converting landing page, connect that with your autoresponder, and go to Facebook and start driving traffic to it. You can even split test easily.
So LeadPages, create an ad. Another thing that you’re going to want to do is write this down, OK? Go to Facebook the homepage, just go to the Facebook newsfeed, and type something in, “pages liked by people who like James Schramko.” Pick a page, right?
So put a competitor’s page in there. Put your Facebook page in there. And what’s going to happen is, you’re going to see a dropdown of all these Facebook pages. They’re similar. Guess what? There’s your target audiences for your first campaign.
Now not all of those are going to show up in the ad manager, but some of them will. So search in Facebook graph search, “pages liked by people who like…”, OK, create an ad, and then what you’re going to do is the best way to start your ads really is to have it as a page post ad. So it’s like a post that’s on your Facebook page and you’re going to target people.
If you can, kind of that first day in the newsfeed, you’re going to be a lot better off newsfeed and desktop only, and you really kind of do better… I recommend typically targeting people on desktop computers until you have an ad that’s working and converting, then you can kind of scale more to mobile and into the sidebar and stuff like that.
What can you offer?
The other thing is, having an offer that works. Now if you’re creating content, you’re doing Own The Racecourse, do like I said before. Copy that link, paste it into your Facebook page, if a good image doesn’t pull, replace that thumbnail image with something that kind of stands out, just make sure it doesn’t have more than 20 percent text, because your ad won’t get approved.
Then go to your ad manager, create an ad, target that post that’s on your page as your post. You don’t typically want to boost your posts from your Facebook page too often, that’s not the best way to do it. You can’t target as well as you can in the ad manager. You can drive traffic to your blog, set up a small budget to do that.
And then if you want to really generate leads, set up a good landing page using LeadPages and create an offer. If you want, I can run down and give you a quick list of offers that work with Facebook. We have like 30 seconds. I know we’re running short on time. Well, here’s some great potential, kind of lead magnets or offers that work really well with Facebook.
Of course, a free report or guide, something like 10 Steps to Double Your Email Conversions on Your Blog. Checklists are great. Cheat sheets are great. Tool kit or resource list. Five Favorite Facebook Tools is one I’ve got. So Clay Collins has a great blog post about his five video tools. It was the highest converting offer he had.
James: Yeah, and the cheat sheet was my first online marketing campaign that I rode for years, and it was generating me up to 10 grand a month. With the cheat sheet, people love a way to shortcut a complicated process.
Keith: OK. So basically, one thing you need to think about with Facebook is: whatever your core goal is, whatever your core offer or product or service or the thing you really want customers to do, whether it’s buy a $100 product or a $1,000 product or get on the phone with you or come into your local business, that needs to be the second or third step in the process.
So with Facebook, you have to figure out a way to put something right in front of that. Like a cheat sheet. A cheat sheet is tangible. They know they can download it right away, it’s quick, it’s easy. A checklist, they know they can get it, they can consume it in a couple of minutes.
Then on that thank you page, you’ve already provided some value, now you can move them into giving them more information about your business.
That’s really what you want to think about with Facebook. What can I put in front of my kind of core goal to instantly build rapport, build value and give them something? And also have something that gets high opt-in rates. Those work.
Market or industry reports work. Free video series can work well. Webinars, teleseminars or live webcasts. However, typically webinars are going to actually do better if it’s like the second step. Maybe you have a cheat sheet, and then on the thank you page, you have a webinar invite.
Or maybe it’s two or three days later on the email autoresponder. So you’re going to be better off with ice cold traffic, with webinar stuff, if it might not be your first offer. Now, that’s not always the case. Webinars could be a great kind of lead magnet with Facebook, especially if you have a video on that and you’ve got a good kind of two or three minute video or a testimonial video. We love those.
So, free books work awesome, free book plus shipping, I mean that’s what we’re doing with Perry, you see Frank Kern doing it and I swear he’s copying our campaign we were doing six months ago. Surveys or a quiz for people kind of like in the financial world, maybe. Contests or giveaways are awesome. But you’re going to get a lot of people opting in there, you’ve just got to be careful because it’s kind of really top of funnel stuff there.
Local businesses coupon or discounts, local events or seminars are awesome for Facebook ads. You know, drive traffic to an event with your Facebook ads and then at your event you can offer some kind of your normal service. Low-priced products for e-commerce, or a gadget, those are great for Facebook ads. If it’s like a sub $20, sub $10 kind of cool product, then you can offer them that, and on the thank you page you can kind of move them into your core offer.
And then free trials for software work great too, or like Nutriceuticals. So those are some offers that work. Get a good offer, put a lead page on, create an ad, and start driving traffic to it.
James: I’m a big fan of LeadPages, and I think it’s just got to be the easiest way to get started. LeadPages plus Facebook equals email list.
Keith: Yup.
James: You can’t lose.
Keith: It’s awesome. And the retargeting is… that’s why I love it. You can drive traffic right to your blog now. As long as you have retargeting and some good strong calls to action, in a lot of cases, they end up becoming customers at a higher rate than they might taking them right to some super, highly optimized squeeze page. Right? It’s the long gain you want to think about.
James: Well, I can tell you one thing I’m thinking about, Keith, that whoever’s transcribing this post is in for a heck of a lot of work. You’ve delivered a huge amount of amazing training here, and I just want to say thank you and I’m obviously looking forward to you presenting at SuperFastBusiness Live, because I know you’re just going to take it up a notch.
So thank you so much for coming and sharing, I’m sure that there’ll be some questions, because it’s that kind of a topic. I’d love it if you could come back to the post on SuperFastBusiness.com and check out some of the questions from time to time.
Keith: Sure, sure. No problem, absolutely.
James: Thank you so much, Keith, and have a nice flight.
Keith: Alright, thanks. Talk to you soon. Bye.
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Feel free to leave your comments below
Wes says
Hi James, I notice you make the comment FB “doesn’t like” the mlm niche. This statement is just too broad. Regardless of the niche, marketers are to be providing great products, great services and great content. There are many direct sales, network marketing, mlm, etc companies providing just that. I think what FB “doesn’t like” are marketers who provide weak, spammy content and sup par products, regardless of the niche.
Wes says
Hi James, I notice you make the comment FB “doesn’t like” the mlm niche. This statement is just too broad. Regardless of the niche, marketers are to be providing great products, great services and great content. There are many direct sales, network marketing, mlm, etc companies providing just that. I think what FB “doesn’t like” are marketers who provide weak, spammy content and sup par products, regardless of the niche.
James Schramko says
It is a broad statement. Broadly, a lot of companies (like Paypal) have issues with the common MLM habits of douchebaggery, hype and lies. Dont’ confuse distribution channel with niche. They are different.
Michael Ippersiel says
“Douchebaggery” – I love it James!
Melanie Richards says
Awesome episode guys! Keith, you know your stuff, love it!
Mel Richards says
Awesome episode guys! Keith, you know your stuff, love it!
James Schramko says
Thank you Melanie