339 – Keith Krance Reveals 3 Facebook Enhancements Every Business Owner Must Know

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Keith Kranc is a recognized expert on Facebook advertising. In this episode of SuperFastBusiness he reveals the top 3 current Facebook enhancements that can change the way you market and significantly improve your rate of conversion.

In the interview:

00:46 – This episode’s guest expert
01:37 – What’s in store
02:28 – How Facebook experts learn their stuff
05:52 – Remarketing done via Facebook
09:23 – Some stats to think about
10:31 – What Facebook wants
12:00 – Who Keith does not work with
13:22 – How to succeed on Facebook
15:28 – On Copyblogger’s no-Facebook move
18:10 – How content influences purchase decisions
20:37 – Topics discussed so far
21:34 – Website custom audiences step-by-step
23:03 – Look-alike audiences
26:41 – Optimized bidding
31:22 – The big takeaway
34:09 – A quick summary
35:07 – Facebook or Google Adwords?
39:43 – Wrapping up

Hear more from Keith at the JamesSchramko live event

 

 

Tweetables:

3 Facebook enhancements you should be aware of [Click To Tweet]
Facebook wants to be boring. [Click To Tweet]
Boost your bottom line with these Facebook strategies. [Click To Tweet]

Transcription:

James: Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness. I’m James Schramko. Today, we are delving into the explosive world of Facebook. There’s a lot of people involved with Facebook. I mean it’s got most people certainly in Western countries. Our own Facebook, it is a minefield for novices, it is a playground for experts. And today, we happen to have an expert. Welcome Keith Kranc.

Keith: Thanks James! I’m super excited to be on the show today. Appreciate it.

James: We’ve been knocking about a few times before you came over to my event in Manly early this year. You are a Facebook expert, you’ve just published a book about Facebook. Tell us about that.

A book about Facebook
Keith: Sure. I’ve actually just recently published a book called “The Ultimate Guide To Facebook Advertising” and it’s co-authored with Perry Marshall and Tom Meloche. It’s actually the second edition. The first edition was about almost 3 and ½ years ago or so. And I wasn’t on that one. However, I wrote 90% of the revision of the new one, and it’s a physical book in Barnes and Noble. It’s all over the world, Amazon of course. It just got published. Lots of good stuff in there and we’re doing a lot of cool things with Facebook right now.

James: Today, we’re going to cover the 3 major Facebook enhancements that you can tap into. I think it would be also worth to sort of cover what’s happening on Facebook. It’s one area that I leave to the specialists, especially running paid campaigns. I have a feeling that if you’re going to be doing that for your own business, you really are going to have to invest a lot of time and energy to become quite the expert on it. Or you’re going to end up not being able to get the same results as an expert, who you might be able to contract or hire in.

You’re in the field where you train people to be Facebook experts. Some of them using it on their own business, some of them becoming contractors who help other businesses as their entire agency style living. I’m really interested in the stuff that you’re exposed to and one thing that I’m curious about is where do you learn this stuff about Facebook? How does the experts learn the stuff before the rest of us?

Becoming an expert in Facebook
Keith: Good question. Great question now especially because we buy all the programs out there, and I pretty much buy every course, or program, or launch around Facebook ads that comes out. And then I give it to my team. I give access to my team, I go through it. A lot of times, we can tell pretty easily who’s just running kind of campaigns for their own self, or maybe they’re a “guru,” and they’re running ads to people that in most cases already kind of know who they are. Or we can tell if somebody’s running a lot of campaigns in a ton of different industries; whether they have clients, whether they’re an agency, or maybe they’ve got some kind of a certification kind of thing going on. So we can usually tell pretty quickly.

But for us, one of the main sources of income is actually managing campaigns for clients. So, we do have an agency, Ralph Burns, my agency, he’s my partner. He manages the core business on that side of the business. And also, helps oversee the coaching. And so, we do manage client campaigns. We don’t have a ton of clients. Our fees have gone up quite over the last couple of years; however, that’s one of the reasons why we now are putting a lot more focus in not only just training people want to do with themselves and learn it, but also people like you mentioned that might have their own agency or they want to start their own agency, or they’re just a consultant and they want to make some extra money.

So we now help them kind of grow that side of the business. So not only we help them, but we also get to find out what they’re doing. We call it like a little mini “brain trust” so we can find out what’s working and what’s not. So really what we kind of have, it’s kind of this big lab, we’re experimenting all the time. One of the reasons why I said, “Hey, we should touch on these 3 big enhancements,” which we can touch on them a minute here, but is because we’ve been testing a ton lately or the past few months on some of the stuff, especially with some of the changes that Facebook has made recently with their bidding. And they’ve really changed everything.

Like the stuff I was teaching 6 months ago, and with bidding, it’s completely different now. It’s crazy. So we wouldn’t know that unless we were managing clients in a lot of different industries.

James: So it’s massive exposure.

Keith: Yeah.

James: You got more data.

Keith: We’re over 3 million, quite a bit over 3 million in an ad spend, that doesn’t include all the guys that we’ve helped become consultants, and our students. That’s just our clients. Under management we’ve generated over 200,000 leads and subscribers and several million dollars in sales directly from Facebook.

So does that mean we’re the best in the world? Absolutely not. But we do kind of have to stay on the cutting edge in order to…

James: I’m sure there’s a balance. I’m sure that some people are spending a fortune, however they’re not inclined to teach others, or maybe they can’t, maybe they’re not good educators. Maybe they just keep their secrets private. But you’re one of the guys that’s actually doing it, getting exposed to a lot of stuff and has the ability to publish a book, to speak at events.

You’re coming down to speak at my next event and share some of the stuff that will be current at that time. When you’re up there talking about what’s relevant right then and there, that will be up-to-the-minute data based on millions of dollars of ad spend. So it’s pretty exciting stuff.

Keith: Right, right, cool.

James: OK, so tell me, what are some of these enhancements we should be aware of?

Facebook enhancement 1: Remarketing done via Facebook
Keith: Sure, sure. I would say that there’s 3 big changes that Facebook has kind of recently rolled out over the past 6 months or so. And if you’ve been running ads, at all, you’ve probably heard of a couple of these. But one of them is basically website custom audiences. And website custom audiences, what that is is Facebook’s version of retargeting, or remarketing.

And your audience is probably pretty familiar with retargeting. Do you want me to give you a quick overview in case people don’t know what remarketing is, in general?

James: Well, give the simple explanation, just in case someone is listening for the first time and they’ve never heard of Facebook or you, let’s say. What is retargeting?

Keith: Absolutely. So basically, let’s say somebody lands on your website. Kind of like, let’s say you land on a site like Nordstrom.com, or Amazon. And you decide not to buy that product, and you leave that site, and you end up back on Facebook. Or maybe even you end up back on Mashable.com or something like that.

Well, what happens is sometimes you might see an ad, a banner ad, or maybe a newsfeed ad that’s in the Facebook newsfeed, that is that same kind of product or something related to that business. And the only reason you saw that was because you had already visited that site. So the powerful thing about website custom audiences on Facebook, which is really becoming game-changing is there’s a few reasons. But number one, it’s cross-device capable.

So what happens is, we tell everybody, all of our students, all of our clients, right now, even if you’re not ready to do any marketing on Facebook, even if you don’t want to run Facebook ads or anything, if you’re getting traffic to your website, get that website custom audience pixel on. Like today. After you’ve finished listening to this entire podcast, look it up. Go to YouTube, go to MySite, whatever. There’s ways to figure it out, but go put that pixel on your site because what’s going to happen now is Facebook is going to start tracking every visitor, whether they’re on a mobile device, whether they’re on a desktop computer, that comes to your website.

And you can separate it out to all these different, you can categorize your website, that’s a little bit more of an advanced strategy we can cover. We can cover some of that at the event, but the point is is that these audiences, they call them custom audiences because that’s really what they are. They’re like lists, OK?

In my opinion, with our clients, we actually focus just as much on these audiences, these website custom audiences, as we do as building our email lists. Because in my opinion, it’s almost just as important as an email list. A website custom audience list – these are assets.

The crazy thing too, is you can start to optimize your ads down the road based on these audiences, and create other audiences around those. You can do so many things that most businesses right now aren’t aware of, but it’s super powerful. Facebook’s getting smarter and smarter, so those website custom audiences are kind of your core. If you already have organic traffic, this is the best way to convert warm traffic, convert people that haven’t actually bought yet into customers.

James: It’s one of the major steps of OwnTheRacecourse, which I’m teaching, where you put everything on your core website, this custom website pixel is just going to be a boomerang, bring people back to your message at any time.

Some eye-opening numbers
Keith: Exactly. And here’s the thing. First, before I uncover the second to you, is there’s a pretty interesting stat. Peter Diamandis (if you haven’t read the book, Abundance, it’s a great book), he talks about this in his book and you can search it online, he’s got a famous TED talk where he talks about his whole abundance mentality and towards the end of it he talks about the rising billion. And what he says is, there’s basically 7.2 billion people on the planet, and in 2010 there were just under 2 billion people in the world that were online, connected basically, connected to the Internet.

Now that talk was a couple of years old, so he predicted that by 2020 that number will have gone to 5 billion users connected to the Internet. Well, we’re in 2014 now, late 2014, almost 2015, depending on when you’re listening to this, and we’re now at 3 billion. So basically, he was pretty much right on as far as his prediction.

3 billion users. Facebook has 1.8 billion users. 1.3 billion active users. That’s like 43%, almost half of the world, the Third World, everywhere, the world’s population is on Facebook. The thing is, what people don’t realize, is that Facebook, there’s some articles about Mark Zuckerberg talking about this, Facebook does not want to be cool. They don’t want to be the next Snapchat, the next Instagram, even though they own Instagram.

The point is, they’re not trying to be a fad, they’re not trying to connect to 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds. What they want to be is a utility, OK? They want to be more like the phone system. They want to be boring.

And think about it. If you’re listening to this right now, how many private Facebook groups are you part of? Just a private Facebook group, where you stay connected to people maybe for a business, probably for business in most cases? Or, on the personal side, how many people have you recently connected to via Facebook that you haven’t seen because they were somebody that you grew up with or lived near you when you were younger but you haven’t seen them but because of Facebook you reconnected? I would be willing to bet, almost everybody listening to this right now.

So the thing is, though, when you were really trying to figure out your Facebook strategy, what we’re starting to really focus in on right now is this whole thing. There’s so many people on there, but kind of like in Spiderman, where Uncle Ben says, “With great power comes great responsibility,” well you can get your message pretty much in front of anybody on Facebook, but the question is, do you have a good message, do you have something of value? And so this is where people kind of get it wrong with Facebook, and especially Facebook ads. And this is something that we’re making a big focus on.

Keith’s manifesto
I just got back from Austin, Texas, I had a one-day workshop. Then we had a full-day team retreat, flew in our team from Netherlands, from East Coast, from all over the place, to meet with us, and we really were focusing on this, customers that we want to work with. Because we work with a lot of clients that run Facebook ads.

And we decided that we’re creating this manifesto, and this might sound like I’m sidetracking a little bit, but I’m not, so just stay with me here. We’re actually creating a new manifesto that’s going to be up on the top menu of my site. It says, “Clients who we don’t work with.” OK? And we’re creating this list of clients that we don’t work with, and people that basically, the only, number one, sole focus is money. Or people that sell a crappy product or service, said a little bit more eloquently.

James: Well, I think excluding people is very important. Disqualification is vital, so that you only ever work with the right people.

Keith: Yeah.

James: We actually, we created a filtering mechanism for our SEO business, which is a website check, and people actually buy the website check, and we let them know if their website’s suitable for us to work on or not, and we give them the report on their status. So it’s a great way to screen out jobs. Basically, working with the wrong type of client is a recipe for disaster for both parties.

If you want to make it on Facebook
Keith: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, we’ve found that if you want to be successful on Facebook, first of all you’ve got to have the right “Why” behind you. So a great book is called, “Start With Why,” that I’m reading and that my team’s reading, but the point is that once you’ve figured this out, and then you’ve figured out that you’ve got something of value, and this goes for your customers too, right? You know, really figuring out who you don’t want to be your customer, who you do want to be your customer.

Then, you have to try to really figure out, really understand the Facebook ecosystem. You see people, businesses that want to be successful on Facebook ads. I believe that you should spend, no matter how much time it takes, to figure this stuff out, even if you want to eventually hire this out, because like I said, those stats are pretty powerful. Half the planet pretty much is on Facebook right now.

But people need to spend more time figuring out how they can connect at a deep, emotional level with their audience or their potential audience. And then have systems in place to move them down into their sales process, instead of just putting all their energy into building a turnkey cash machine. Those days are over. You can’t just build a squeeze page and a sales letter. It’s just not going to work.

However, there’s definitely some great specific types of lead magnets that we know work, that I’m going to talk about when we’re at your event in Australia. But at the same time, there’s a few things that we like to do that the business owners and entrepreneurs need to really understand, and there’ systems you can put in place, and this really kind of relates back to some of these new enhancements that Facebook has recently rolled out, things like website custom audiences.

You see, Facebook realizes that people need multiple touches in order to make a purchasing decision. So that’s why website custom audiences are so key. That’s why you should still be focusing on organic traffic, on podcasting traffic, you name it, SEO, Google pay-per-click, there’s tons and tons of ways to get traffic, right? I’ve got a whole list of all the other social media channels.

Did Copyblogger have the right idea?
James: Well, I think I’ve tried just about all of them and I’ve strained it down to the ones that work for me. And interestingly, some people, like even major players, have said, “Oh, we’ll just switch off our Facebook page altogether. Like Copyblogger did that recently and I’d be really curious to find out your viewpoint on that.

Keith: Yeah, that’s an interesting one. I saw that post in Facebook and you know, Jon Loomer wrote a great article about that, a rebuttal.

James: I read that, too, and although he’s obviously got a bias, being a Facebook expert… So everyone’s got their own dog in the fight, but as an outside observer with no stake in it, I’m not a Facebook expert. I am a community custodian, and I have resisted the urge to start Facebook groups because I believe that Facebook is literally the last place a business owner should be going to get their focused business information.

And the excuse that they’re already on there anyway doesn’t cut it with me. Why the hell is someone on there all day anyway? I thought, OK, well it’s interesting. And then when I read that post about it, and you go to make a comment, and they don’t have comments either. They’ve pushed that away to Google and Twitter. So these guys are certainly radical, but what works for them almost definitely won’t work for the average person. This is after years and years of building a strong machine. But I imagine that a lot of people will look at that, and think, “Oh, I’ll just turn off my Facebook page, too.”

Keith: Yeah. And that’s the main thing. That was my main issue that I had, that was my biggest problem that I had with that article, because like you said, they made a decision, and they’re using kind of the 80-20 principle, and they want to focus 80% of their efforts on where they feel, the channels that give them the biggest bang for their buck. So that’s fine, however they are definitely leaving a lot on the table because the one thing is if you have a huge organic following, like they do, then if you’re not getting a hundred percent open rate on your emails, and you sell products, then you have to be, I believe you should be running Facebook ads.

James: Yeah. My first thought was, how are they going to run Facebook ads without being on it, because…

Keith: They can’t.

James: Because if they know their relevance, their context, their conversions, surely it could be leveraged. I run Facebook ads too, you know. Exactly what you’ve been talking about. People who have visited my site, who haven’t yet purchased. It’s a nice way to reach out to them. So everyone’s got to take into account what they’re trying to achieve. But it is an unusual thing to have happened.

How content drives buying decisions
Keith: Yep, yep. So there’s a great stat that Jay Baer talks about in his book, Youtility, and in 2009, the average consumer consumes 2.3 pieces of content before making a purchasing decision. It’s perfect to your OwnTheRacecourse philiosophy, and… 2.3 pieces of content before they made a purchasing decision, and in 2010 it jumped up to 5.3. And then in 2011, it doubled again to 10.4.

So in 2011, two years later, the average consumer consumes 10.4 pieces of content before making a purchasing decision. Now if you’re going to buy a swimming pool, that might be 30 pieces of content. If you’re going to buy a T-shirt, that might be three. But the average is 10.4, and that was a few years ago, so you know that number’s higher now.

This is the reason why we need to be using things like Facebook website custom audiences and we should be amplifying content on our blog and then using website custom audiences to retarget people back into maybe a lead magnet or a webinar or a sales page. And people need multiple touches. This is why if you’re getting traffic, like Copyblogger’s massive organic traffic, then you should be emailing people, but guess what? You’re not going to get a hundred percent open rate, I guarantee they don’t have a hundred percent open rate on their emails, and they sell a lot of products.

People are on Facebook, half the world is, and they should be running website custom audience ads at least to people that know who they are. Because you know, you’re talking about the ROI and that kind of stuff, it doesn’t look sales-ey, if you’re offering value, so you’re going to hurt your audience more by spamming them with an email every single day than you are running a Facebook ad like that, properly. And then your ROI’s going to be probably anywhere from 2 to 3 to 1 up to 10 to 20 to 1, depending on what you’re selling, if it’s people that already know you.

So it makes a big difference. People with organic followings really need to take some time to learn this stuff, and it’s easier for them. Shoot, they don’t even need to really figure out the bidding and everything that well.

James: Well, the analytics show them.

Keith: Yeah.

Discussed so far
James: They know exactly where it’s at, and you know, I’ve got this simple idea of just doing more of what works. If you take your winners and you scale them with a little bit of magnification, it should improve your results. So that was an interesting segue.

So just to get back to this, we’ve talked about website custom audiences, that was your first main topic. We had an action item to install the custom website pixel on your website. You’ve talked a little bit about having the right lead magnets, and you’ll certainly develop that more when you come down and have a chat to the crowd at SuperFastBusiness Live.

Keith: Yup.

James: You’ve talked about organic traffic and making sure that you are getting multiple touchpoints, and certainly that’s been true of my analytics and of what I teach, is you put your core message and then you syndicate that to the places where people are, and people can’t escape you if you have multiple touchpoints. If they’re on your email, your RSS, YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and maybe throw in a Pinterest or a LinkedIn, you’ve got someone covered. And it’s not hard to do this. It sounds like a lot, but it’s super, super simple to do this.

So just tell me, what are the next things that we should be aware of?

Some stuff you should know
Keith: Sure. I have a feeling there might be some people wondering this. Really quickly, on the website custom audiences, in case you’ve never done it, Basically, once you’ve got a Facebook ads account, on the left side, it’s going to say Audiences. OK, you’re going to click on that, and then on the top right side, there’s a little thing where Create an Audience, and then you’re going to select Custom Audience, OK? And then under that, it’s going to say, Website, so Website Custom Audience, and then what you’re going to do, is they’re just going to give you a pixel, and you’re going to copy that and you’re going to put it in the head of your site, basically the same place you put Google Analytics.

So once you put that code on one time, on the main head of your site and a lot of them will have Settings, just tell your developer where he puts Google Analytics, and that is going to go sitewide. Down the road, you know, a week later, a month later, you can segment all your stuff. But that’s the key. That’s what I want you to do after this podcast. I just wanted to hit on that, in case people, so they can do that.

James: That could be the one main output from listening to this, is you’re going to start having the ability to reach people who have come to your website. That’s a huge one.

Keith: It is, and you’re going to look at it, and you’re going to be able to look later on tonight or tomorrow and you’re going to see that audience growing everyday, and you’re going to be like, “Oh my gosh,” you know, you’re going to see your email list maybe building, maybe you’re getting 20 more people added to your email list every day. But you’re getting 150, or a thousand a day added to that audience. It’s really inspiring and motivating.

Innovation 2: Look-alike audiences
It’s cool. So you’re going to do that, and then, one of the reasons why you’re going to want to do that, is because the second big enhancement that we’re tapping into in a big, big way right now is called look-alike audiences.This is where I can tell Facebook to create an entirely new unique audience based on similar likes, interests and behaviors as one of my audiences already. Like my website custom audiences.

So for example, I can tell Facebook to create a look-alike audience based on all the visitors of my blog. Or, I can tell Facebook to create a look-alike audience based on only the visitors that landed on the thank you page of my lead magnet. Or, I can tell them to create a look-alike audience based on the audience of the visitors that landed on the thank you page of my product.

So tell them to create a look-alike audience based on the likes, interests, behaviors of my buyers and customers. That’s a big deal. You can also create them based on conversion pixels that you’re using for other campaigns. Or you can create them based on a Facebook page, basically a Facebook page that you’re an admin of.

So what you do now is you create this new look-alike audience. However, there’s a couple of different things to think about. Number one is, it’s a large audience, so typically it’s about 2 million people, 2.1 million people in the U.S., if you’re doing U.S. It depends on the country, but let’s just say 2 million. So you don’t want to typically target just that look-alike audience only, because it’s probably going to be too broad, it’s just not good enough.

However, where you start to make some really good gains is when you start to target things like target somebody that likes Frank Kern, for example, and also is in your look-alike audience. Or maybe you want to target somebody that like triathlons. Maybe there’s a million people that like just a general term triathlons. And then, you say they need to like triathlons and they need to look like my customers.

So you might have this 2 million people in this look-alike audience but then you have this 1 million people that also like triathlons, and then you say, hey, they need to like both of those, they need to be in both those audiences, guess what? Now it narrows it down to maybe 300,000. All right, so now you have this 300,000 person audience that ‘s a lot more targeted.

Getting the most out of your audiences
And you can do this in a lot of different ways. You can combine look-alike audiences. You can kind of just get creative. That’s what we do. We’ll have some campaigns where we’ve got like 4 look-alike audiences in one, because we’re trying to go out for some wider, broader audiences that we haven’t been able to tap, because they’ve been too broad, you know, and they wouldn’t be able to convert very well.

James: And the more specific you get, the higher your conversions, the lower your ad spend.

Keith: Exactly, exactly. And you need a hundred people in an audience to do this, so once you have a hundred people, this can be an email list that you upload, OK? It could be visitors on a site. You just need a hundred people. The more you have, of course the better it’s going to be.

So is there any rules of thumb? Basically the big rule of thumb is to overlay as much as you can. So that’s really the best way I can explain it to you.

James: So layer upon layer of specificity. It’s like those exam marking templates where you put the answers sheet over the exam and it reveals only the correct answers?

Keith: Yup.

James: For teachers to mark the papers, remember in the old days?

Keith: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right, exactly.

James: Just like, get your filters right, and you can spot the winners easily.

The third enhancement: Optimized bidding
Keith: Yup, yeah, exactly. And so the update, Facebook is updating these audiences every week, so you just have to test, you know, it’s not perfect. But one thing I do know is Facebook is getting better and better as far as getting smarter and smarter. And that kind of probably leads into the third big enhancement that we’ve been tapping into, which is the most complex.

There’s really no way I can really explain exactly how we’re using optimized bidding. What we’ve done, in a nutshell, over the last, especially the last 90 days or so, this has come from following other experts, also talking with a couple of people. Like one guy we talked with, he’s doing almost a million a month, on his Facebook ad spend. And then we kind of confirmed this with our Facebook ad rep, we get to get on a call with once in a while, and email back and forth with any questions that we have.

And basically, we’re asking about this bidding situation. What’s the best way to use optimized bidding with Facebook? Because we’re seeing, you know, different results than some people are teaching out there. And this kind of goes to that whole thing, where that’s why it’s so important, I believe, that you follow somebody that’s actually doing this every single day in a lot of different markets.

But basically, Facebook has different ways that you can bid. But what you can do now with Facebook is you can bid based on conversions. So I can tell Facebook to, “optimize my campaign” based on webinar registration conversions. Or based on sales conversions.

James: Yup.

Keith: OK? And what they’ll do is that over time, once you start to get some volume, they’ll start to go out and they’ll find. I mean, that pixel, they call it, it’s like a real, live thing, it’s crazy. But that conversion pixel, they will start to get smarter and smarter and your conversions will come down. However, if you don’t have enough data, it’ll end up costing you more money.

So basically what we’ve found, if it’s a brand new client or like a brand new campaign or account, that if we try to go right into optimized conversion-based bidding, then sometimes the performance isn’t as good. We’ve found that it can be better just using kind of just basically clicks to website and kind of manually setting the cost per click. Like I said, this is a little bit complex, but I’m going to give you just the overall basic what we found. OK, how does that sound?

James: It sounds good.

Keith: OK. So basically what we’ve found is that, in order to tap into this optimized bidding, that Facebook needs a lot of conversions. So we try to get 20 to 30 conversions within a 24-hour period, so like 1 to 2 days. On some cases, it’s even been 2 or 3 days. Just because I’m saying this right now, doesn’t mean it’s absolute, concrete, OK?

That’s the thing about Facebook, it changes every single month. But this is what we’ve found, and this is also what our ad rep has told us is the case. And what this is called is ad pacing. It’s probably part of the reason why, it’s part of our algorithm.

There’s an article online that explains what ad pacing is, but it doesn’t explain it very well, it’s a little bit confusing. But basically, the more data that they have, the better. Then what you do is, we use lifetime budgets. I’ve never taught this until recently, so if you go buy my course and you look at the bidding stuff that I talked about before, four months ago, we would say typically use daily budgets, it’s a lot easier to implement.

James: By the way, Keith, what is your website? I’m sure people would be interested to check it out.

Keith: Sure, sure. DominateWebMedia.com. So you can go there and I’ve got free articles, a 9-step blueprint you can download for free and stuff like that.

James: Perfect.

Keith: So basically in a nutshell is we found recently, this might change in 90 days when I’m in Australia to be honest with you but right now, we’re using lifetime budgets and we tried to get 30 conversions within a 24 to 48 hour period and then we want larger audience and use lifetime budgets so what we found is let’s say we found 4 or 5 interests that work really well or we use Facebook audience insights and let’s say we looked up InfusionSoft and it will say that people who like Infusionsoft also like Marketo and Eloqua and some other things right? So we’ll take 3 of those that we know will work so use them in some other campaigns and we’ll combine them into one audience. So we used to not do that. We used to separate everything ‘cause it’s much easier to track right?

James: Yup

Keith: We separate our audiences… We still do this to get the data but then we start to combine them into some cases and then overlay them with some look like audiences and then put them in this lifetime budget and then FaceBook will just optimize it and literally it’s kind of crazy but it can work really well and so I don’t want to go too much on a depth in that. People are probably glazing over by just listening to that last 3 or 4 minutes.

The main takeaway
The big point to take away from here is that if you really understand FaceBook and you do what we talked about in the first 20 minutes of this podcast and you understand that you got to make an emotional connection with somebody, you’ve got to provide value, have a great lead magnet and then be moving people down in your sales process and then be doing things like amplifying content and using website custom audiences to bring people back using testimonial videos, those types of things. And then getting like the bidding absolutely perfect, isn’t that big a deal. It’s just going to help you scale out even bigger.

So don’t get stressed out about that because in my opinion, getting the bidding and stuff right, that’s the last thing you need to worry about. That’s why it’s the last one we do in our trainings because if you get the other stuff right, you can be really successful and that just helps you to take it to the next level.

Most people think that they always wanted to hear all these tips and strategies about ninja targeting and bidding and all that but they don’t realize that getting their lead magnet absolutely right, finding 1 or 2 testimonial videos that you can run as a video ad in Facebook and link out to your offer, is game changing. I would rather you spend 2 weeks incentivizing your audience to send you a good testimonial video because that can take a losing campaign and turn it into a winning campaign.

James: Right. That’s like everything with paid advertising. You start out with a theory about what you think is going to work. You refine, refine, refine. You probably burn a little bit of budget in the beginning, but the game is to find something that converts beyond $1 for every dollar spent, and then you’re home free because you can crank that up.

Keith: Exactly. So the bidding stuff, don’t stress about that right now, literally. I would especially encourage you to come to Manly, to James’ event because Ralph will be there, my agency manager will be there the whole weekend. If you want details on bidding, we’re going to cover some of this in the presentation.

But if you want more details, we’ll be able to answer that kind of stuff for you. What I would focus on is getting your offer right, getting your targeting right, and then really figuring out where you can amplify content. Because with Facebook, the goal is, what we always try to do is we try to engineer a process to quickly get somebody to like you and to trust you. And then smoothly, move them down into your process. And just use things like website custom audiences.

And we amplify a lot of content. We send people to blog posts all the time. We spent 20% to 30% or more of our budget, driving traffic to blog posts and then we just know that even if they don’t opt in, it doesn’t matter because they’re on that list, they’re on that website custom audience list, that invisible list. And then the next day, they might see another ad that goes to a webinar registration page or a lead magnet, or a live event sales page.

Summing it up
James: Fantastic! Now I just want to finish of with; firstly, a quick recap. Tell me what do you think the 3 main enhancements are, if you just want to summarize this. We started with website custom audiences.

Keith: Yup, website custom audiences. And then look-alike audiences, which are basically a new unique audience based on an existing…

James: Scaling up from your existing ones saying, “Hey, let’s just magnify that.”

Keith: Yup.

James: And third one?

Keith: And then optimized bidding. Basically, once you understand Facebook, Facebook will do the work for you, and they will. We’ve taken some cases and we’ve cut our cost per lead by 50% to 60% to 70% in some cases by using our optimized bidding. So it does work, but you’ve got to do it right.

James: So it’s an artificial intelligence Facebook robot that says, “Here’s the conversion you’re trying to replicate. Let’s go and get some more.”

Keith: But they need the data. That’s the big takeaway.

Facebook versus Google Adwords
James: More data, better result. Fantastic. Now, I saw a post yesterday I thought was curious. Someone was asking about should they bother with SEO and someone answered, “Look, better than SEO is Adwords and better than Adwords is Facebook.” I thought that was a somewhat general answer. How would you describe the difference between Facebook ecosystem and Google Adwords ecosystem? If you were to try and summarize that in short.

Keith: First of all, I think that people need to be focusing on creating super high quality content. And for me, we specialize in Facebook ads, but one of our number 1 biggest priorities moving forward in 2015 is putting a focus on creating super high quality, long, great posts.

James: Well, that’s right up my alley then.

Keith: Yup; that we can amplify with Facebook. Of course we can bring visitors to that post using Facebook, but they’re not going to be ready to take action because we’re targeting them because we know that they might like that. They’re in that audience. And then we can use retargeting to bring them back to the more sales-y type of offer. But if you create really high quality content, our goal is to continue to increase our search rankings and get a lot more organic content. Because organic visitors are always going to convert better than everybody else. Because they came, because they found, they were searching for an answer to that problem.

So Adwords, that’s replaced the yellow pages. So if somebody is trying to find a solution to something and they searched for it, and they find your site or they click on your Adwords ad, then you need to have something for them where they can take action right now. With Facebook typically, they’re not ready to take action yet, because they’re not laying in bed at night, thinking of how they can fix something specifically. Or they don’t have a leaky roof that they’re trying to fix. That’s why Google traffic is so much different.

With Facebook, what we try to explain to people is, if you’re going to run a Facebook ad, figure out a way that you can knock somebody upside the head and give them an a-ha moment. What you need to do is use Facebook to give them an a-ha moment of why they should be thinking about the problem that your company solves. Or the passion that your company helps or let them achieve.

Here’s a funny example. I did a consult with a guy who is launching a laundromat and a dry cleaners in Sydney. They don’t really know exactly how the business model is going to be exactly, but I’m like, Well, if you’re going to do a concierge service where you’re going to pick up people’s dry cleaning, it’s going to be tough to have an offer for that because a lot of people might move to an area and they’re searching for a dry cleaner, and that’s fine, you can run a Facebook ad with an offer for that. But Facebook ads, it’s going to be a little bit tougher, it’s more of a Google type of ad.

What you could do is you could have some stat that says, “Did you know that the average person spends 2756 hours in their lifetime doing laundry? Why don’t you save on that? We’ll come pick it up and we’ll do it for you.”

Facebook is like knocking them upside the head and making them think that, “Holy cr**, I’m actually wasting time. So I should be doing it in a better way.”

James: So it’s basically a disruption engine.

Keith: Yup. You’ve got to have something in front of that. That’s why we suggest very specific lead magnets. Very simple specifics.

James: So you could have a report, or an article, or a white paper, or a podcast talking about that topic. And then you just drag people. So we could easily run a Facebook advertisement to people interested in learning more about how to run Facebook campaigns and lead them to this podcast episode on my blog.

Keith: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

James: Cool. And how would you describe Adwords then?

Keith: Adwords, I would say, is somebody that’s actually trying to get in front of that person that’s specifically searching for an answer to a problem or a solution. I do a landing page presentation. And when somebody creates a landing page for an Adwords type of customer, it’s a one step further down the sales funnel. So if they land on a landing page from an Adwords campaign, they might be giving you their name, phone number, scheduling a demo for a software or something like that, or literally taking an action. Free trial for a software, could be coming for a free consultation, those types of things.

With Facebook, typically, you might not get great conversions for that because they might not realize they need that quite yet. Does that help at all?

James: Yeah. Adwords is for someone who’s already looking for something. It’s more like a phone book.

Keith: Exactly.

James: Yup. I get it. OK. Keith, you’ve been super generous. I think you could talk underwater for the next 5 hours because you’re so passionate about it, it’s obvious. And I’m looking forward to learning more. See you in a few months. I hope you got your surf gear ready.

Keith: Oh yeah!

James: Because the waves are coming.

Keith: I’ll see if I can break my record from last year. 8 out of 9 days, is that what we did?

James: Well that’s right. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so new be so brave in such big surf. You certainly got courage. That acrobatic airplane flying skills come in handy.

Keith: That’s right.

James: They still talk about you down at the beach now. Manly folklore.

Keith: It’s getting beat up, beat up. Still swimming out there.

James: Lucky you know your Facebook stuff. That’s all I can say.

Keith: Exactly.

James: Well, Keith, I look forward to catching up soon. Thanks so much for coming along the show.

Keith: Cool. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

See Keith Kranc onstage at JamesSchramko Live

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