How will digital marketing evolve in 2017? The experts make eight predictions and detail what they’re paying attention to in the new year. Listen so you can stay ahead of the trends and change your traffic strategy accordingly.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
- How the “Me” and the “We” cycles affect your business and how you can leverage it to your advantage.
- How you can build your brand’s personality, which will make your paid traffic more profitable.
- Dominate Web Media’s approach to the overcrowding of Facebook advertising and Ralph’s advice for dealing with ad load.
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Episode 02: Acquiring Customers One Pixel At A Time
Episode 03: Facebook Video Ad Game Plan
Episode 56: How DollarBeardClub.com Generated 100 Million Video Views in 13 Months
Episode 72: How DigitalMarketer Generated 500% ROI in 3 Days Using Facebook Messenger
Episode 77: 7 Biggest Traffic Takeaways from 2016
Dominate Web Media’s Facebook Ads Specialist Certification
Pendulum: How Past Generations Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future by Roy H. Willimas and Michael R. Drew
The New Definition of Branding (And 4 more ways digital marketing will evolve in 2016)
Episode 78 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):
| Keith Krance: | Hello, and welcome to Perpetual Traffic Episode Number 78. Today we are talking about the future. First of all, happy new year. Hope you had a great new year and you’re really excited, excited about 2017 and are planning on making this an epic year. I know we are. Lots of awesome stuff happening. If you haven’t listened to Episode 77, make sure you do because on that episode we talked about things that have been working really well, things that were big wins for us, seven things specifically for 2016, and some of those were real recently, and a lot of those things, as well as all the stuff that we’ve been talking about on this show, will continue to pick up steam. I believe a lot of these things are trends and will continue to pick up more steam and become more and more successful, profitable, and valuable for your business. All right, and now Molly with her predictions for 2017.
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| Molly Pittman: | Hey guys, Molly Pittman here. I have three pretty simple but fairly exciting predictions for 2017 when it comes to traffic. The first one really piggybacks off of what I said in the last episode when I talked about the biggest takeaways from 2016 and how excited I am about Facebook Messenger ads. In 2017, I predict that we continue to see more and more adoption of different channels of communication.
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| I think that next year we’ll be sitting here saying, “Wow, if you are not using Facebook Messenger to deliver order confirmation or if you are not communicating with your prospects and your customers through Facebook Messenger or SMS, or any sort of live chat, you are really missing out.” I think this year will be the year that we really see consumers expecting that level of communication, that speed of communication with brands.
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| I think that consumers will expect to have their questions answered almost immediately from brands if they have questions about products or services that they want to purchase. I think this coming year will be even more about immediate communication, live chat, Facebook Messenger, so if you want to learn more about that, definitely refer back to the last episode and also Episode 72, which is all about Facebook Messenger.
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| I also predicted in 2017 we will see a difference in attribution, so I think in 2017 we will see people really living out this idea of creating a traffic system, and definitely refer back to Episodes 2 and 3 if you want to learn the basis of how we think a traffic system should run, but I think that as video becomes more important, as building this relationship with prospects becomes more important, we will see a difference in the way people attribute revenue to certain ads.
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| Right now you still see brands and people, and even at DigitalMarketer we will run one campaign that we expect to attribute leads and sales to, and while that’s important to be able to do that to really move the needle in your business by launching one traffic campaign, I think this year it’s going to become even more important to build that relationship by running a video ad that entertains prospects first, then retargeting with a Lead Magnet or retargeting with a blog post or retargeting with an ad that opens in Messenger so that you can have a live conversation, and then running those more direct response style ads that actually ask them to buy.
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| In 2017 I think you’ll see fewer people talking about how many leads and sales one ad generated, which is exciting for me, and I think that you will see people starting to look at attribution in terms of I spent $1000 this week on media and I made $1000 this week from media, therefore I broke even and I’m happy. I think you’ll see fewer people attributing leads and sales to one particular ad. I think you’ll see people looking at media spend as a whole, and revenue and leads generated from all of their media spend as a whole because people will really start to realize that they must build this relationship and they must run different types of ads that build that relationship and that it can’t be done with one campaign.
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| My last prediction is exciting and it’s pretty simple. I think that Facebook will continue to get easier to use and that the platform will get even smarter. In 2016, we saw Facebook add a ton of new features and products to the platform, which was really exciting. We also saw the algorithm really get a lot smarter as we talked about in the last episode. Simply, I think it will only get easier. Facebook will only get smarter.
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| I don’t think that there will ever not be a need for media buyers or for a podcast like this and for people to teach others how to use the platform because when it comes down to it, you have to have a good offer. You have to know how to write copy. You have to know where your target market is, but I do think that the day-to-day clicking the buttons inside of the platform is only going to get easier, and I also think that once you find a winning set of campaigns, once you really hit the nail on the head, I think that scaling is going to become a lot easier because Facebook is getting smarter and I think you’ll almost see it being sort of like an autoplay option where they almost scale the campaigns for you.
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| Again, these are just predictions, but this is what I see in 2017. Of course, we will always be here to guide you and lead you and share with you the latest and greatest in what’s working, but I hope you’re having a great holiday season and I look forward to sharing more with you in 2017. Thanks for listening to Perpetual Traffic.
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| Keith Krance: | Last spring 2016 I was talking with Frank Kern and he’s a client of ours and I was talking about one of our other clients who’s a friend of mine who he knows, and I was telling him how they were looking at possibly investing in real estate or the stock market to invest some of their profits from their business and he’s like, “Dude, why don’t you just go tell him to go buy more Facebook ads?” because he knew what they were doing. He knew they weren’t spending a ton of money on their Facebook ads every single day but that they were working really, really well, and it was funny the way he said it because that’s just how Frank is. He’s just so matter-of-fact, and it’s so true.
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| The funny thing is that a lot of people look at traditional investments like the stock market, real estate, gold, precious metals, ETAs, 401(k)s, you name it, and they look at these investments and they might advise you or tell you to invest in here or there depending on where you’re at with your life, and people are excited if they get an 8% to 10% or 12% return in the stock market. People are excited if they get a 15% or 20% return in real estate, and it goes on. Of course, the more passive investment it is, the less of a return you’ll typically expect and be happy with, but when people look at their business, and we’re talking about a time when we don’t know how long this is going to be.
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| You’ve got to make hay while the sun shines. We’re in a period of time right now where we can leverage these social platforms like Facebook like nothing you’ve ever seen before. It’s not going to last forever, so where are you spending the majority of your time, energy, focus, and money? The 80/20 principle works in all facets of life, and where are you spending that time where it will make the 80% different, or where are you spending that 5% time where it can make the 95% difference?
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| If I look at some of our clients, and I actually did this in a video. You can see all the screenshots inside Wicked Reports, but I was looking through Wicked Reports, which we use with a lot of clients, that measures ROI, and it doesn’t end after 28 days so you can go back and look at the whole year, what you spent on Facebook ads in January and how much that specific money generated, so whatever you spent in January, how much money all year did it generate?
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| We talk about ROI all the time and we’re excited. I’ll get a text message from Ralph and be like, “Hey, check out this client. We’re getting a 3:1 ROI or a 7:1 ROI,” and typically those are like a one-day snapshot or sometimes seven days, or maybe sometimes 30 days and people are always looking at their advertising and they’re like, “Okay, I want to break even after seven days or I need to at least double my money after seven days or after 30 days.” They’re not looking at it comparing it to traditional investing where you have to annualize out your return on investments, so if you invest $10,000 in real estate and a year from now you have $12,000, you’ve just made 20% on your money, but that’s after one year, not after seven days, not after 30 days, so I was looking at some of this stuff.
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| One of our clients just spent $25,000 in June, which generated 81,000. This is intellectual property, so that is high-profit margins. For your e-commerce and physical products it’s going to be different, but yeah, that’s a 300% ROI, which is amazing, just great, but you actually have to annualize that out. If you want to really find out how much that 25K brought in, you have to see how much those clicks brought in over the next year and that money spent, and we can do that, so in the video, you can go to dominatewebmedia.com/2017. I talk about our certification event. I walk you through some of this stuff and show inside Wicked Reports.
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| Up to December 13, 2016, that 25K had actually generated $157,000 total revenue. So, it generated $81,000 in June, and then over the next almost 6 months it generated another $75,000, and that’s the total ROI on that money just from that 30 days in June. And then, I give another example, a much smaller example, of back in January with another client where they spent $1,777 and generated $2,000.46, so they made about $300 on their money, which was about a 15% return, in January 2016. But if you look at Wicked all the way through to December 13, when I made this video, another $6,400 was generated from those clicks in that month of January, so actual revenue was $8,464 on that $1,777 spent, which was a 476% ROI annualized out from that January, and that doesn’t even take into consideration the increase in leads, subscribers, customers, so when these people stop advertising, of course their sales are going to go down, but they don’t stop because you’re building that brand, you’re building your following, your Facebook fans, your Twitter followers.
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| As you run advertising, your YouTube subscribers, you have this machine, this perpetual traffic machine, you’re doing a lot more for your long-term brand, so you have to look at everything from a longer-term perspective. Where do you want to invest your time, your energy, your focus, your team’s efforts, and of course your money? Where can you get the most return?
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| I feel like over the next couple years this paid traffic that we talk about on the show, if you can find a better investment I’d love to hear about it, especially if you own a business. If you own a business that has customers and has great products that makes an impact, I feel like it’s your duty to put the effort into this stuff, so how do you do it? If you’re going to run paid advertising, where should you focus your energy and what strategies do we think will work?
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| First of all, let’s talk about what I think won’t work or will continue to decline over this next year and beyond. One of those things is being so focused on the short-term results-driven data and fear-based marketing. For example, let me read an excerpt out of one of my favorite books called Pendulum by Roy H. Williams and Michael R. Drew. This is such an amazing book. You can’t even buy it new anymore on Amazon. You can get the audible, but you can also buy the book through eBay and stuff like that, but it was written in 2011 and it’s crazy, some of the stuff in here. This is what Ryan Deiss said about it:
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| “In business, fortunes are made from predicting and writing trends in the marketplace. Match your product or message to current trend and you look like a genius. Match it to a declining one, it could cost you everything. Pendulum tells you when and why and how these trends have occurred in the past, when they’re likely to occur in the future, and how you can position your products and services to match what the market really wants, even before the market knows what it wants. Pendulum is the closest thing to a crystal ball that any business owner, manager, or decision-maker will ever encounter.”
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| That’s what Ryan said about it, and Peter Diamandis said something very similar: “This is a great tool to understand and even predict business and social trends. The whole book is about these series of 80-year cycles of society, and really they’re two 40-year cycles and it breaks it down to smaller cycles within those 40 years, but we’re in a We society. Right now, we’re really going towards the end of a We society and then we’ll be going into a Me society again, so Me equals push, We equals pull. 2003 to 2043 will be a We for all Western society.”
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| People assume the Internet and social media are driving today’s society. The truth, however, is quite opposite. It is our We society that is driving both the Internet and social media, and this might not make sense to you now. If you read this book it will make a lot more sense, and wait until you see some of the things that he’s predicted, even the current presidential election here that I’ll read here in just a minute, but basically the book is about this 80-year cycles that we go through and it’s because of generations, the way we’re raised, the way generations and families raise each other, and we’ll go through these 40-year cycles being in a We period and then 40 years of being in a Me period, but there’s a lot difference at the end and beginning of these cycles as you head towards a Me period or towards the end of a we cycle, so how do you take advantage of this?
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| Well, we’ve all seen social media take off and we’ve seen brands leverage social media, big brands, small brands, personal brands, to grow their business, and we’ve seen that shift. What I’m here to tell you is how to really leverage things even more and how to use paid traffic to amplify and ignite this entire process and build a better system but also have that ROI in mind so you know you’re spending a certain amount and getting a certain amount back.
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| Here are a couple examples. Number one is what do I mean by being not so focused on short-term results-driven data? What I mean by that is people spending all their time and energy split testing two or three versions of their ad copy or images and making big decisions on that or testing two different landing page headlines and looking at that immediate data, looking at click through rates and opt-in rates and spending all their time running traffic like that, which is how you leveraged Google AdWords back in 2003 to 2010.
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| That’s how you made a killing on those types of platforms. You found people that had intent, were searching, the clicks were cheap, and you just ran it like a scientist. If you want to win in 2017, and beyond, you’ve got to think holistically and think long term. How does everything you’re doing make an impact on that viewer, that user, your audience? What impact are you making with people who don’t click on your ads or who do click on your ads but don’t opt in because they’re busy or they got distracted?
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| Here are some examples. You’re seeing things like Facebook Live takeoff. We’re doing a lot of things like running longer form video ads where we’re teaching in that video. We’re giving three tips. We’re giving some great advice. Maybe we’re running entertaining types of videos, but what this does is this builds value, this builds a long-term value. You can build your warm audiences now because Facebook and YouTube. You can build audiences based off how long people watch your videos.
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| A lot of people are going to start looking at their maybe Wicked Reports or whatever they’re using for their third-party tracking and just looking at overall ad spend with Facebook, YouTube, everything combined, and how does that affect their overall sales? Are their sales going up as their ad spend goes up, and less about trying to nitpick every single channel or entry point, okay, was this sale made from that first Facebook ad, the second Facebook ad, the YouTube ad, the email? Where can we attribute that sale or that lead to?
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| For some of you guys, affiliate marketers, and direct response digital marketers, you might be thinking, “What are you talking about? Oh my gosh, this is blasphemy,” but I’m telling you, this is where you have to think, because first of all, there’s no perfect system. You cannot track the exact point of every single conversion. It’s just impossible because people are on too many devices. No matter what the technology is, we’re getting better and better at this, but the point is they’re not looking long-term. They’re thinking, “Okay, how can we bait and switch somebody to click on an ad or to opt in?”
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| Just because somebody clicked on your ad or opted in, even, doesn’t mean that was the best headline to use or the best ad copy to use. They might have opted in based 100% on curiosity, not because you made a positive impact. They opted in knowing that they’re just going to get whatever you give them and use it or they’re very skeptical, and you’re starting out underwater in that case. It’s going to be a lot more challenging than doing the types of things we talk about on this show.
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| Don’t take this the wrong way. Running things scientifically is an absolute must. You’ve got to run your campaigns and be testing different images, ad copies, video intros, thumbnail images. All this stuff you want to continue to do. What I am trying to make a point here about is to not focus 80% of your energy on that stuff and 20% on the longer-term effect of what your ad is doing. That’s my point.
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| An example of what’s starting to work really well right now, and I think will continue to as we head into 2017, and beyond, is longer form content like Facebook Lives, Periscopes, or longer form videos like we talk about where you’re giving value to people before they have to opt in. They don’t have to give you anything, and you might run a 10-minute Facebook Live or an hour-long Facebook Live and give a ton of value and you’ll have people that know you and people that don’t know you on those webcasts, but then you tell them where to go buy something. You have a product, you have a service, and you can just direct them the right way.
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| Does that mean you don’t need sales funnels? Absolutely not. You absolutely need sales funnels and you’ll be generating leads and everything we talk about on the show. However, people are wising up. They know when they opt in for a Lead Magnet, checklist, or a cheat sheet that they’re going to go into a funnel and they are eventually going to get sold something. That doesn’t mean you can’t do that. Point is that just pay attention.
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| People are starting to wise up, so when you’re doing something like a long form ad or a long form video or a Facebook Live, which you can now continue to amplify with Facebook ads after it finishes, the impact you’re making on people is sometimes difficult to measure immediately, and that’s why we go back to this overall effect. How is everything helping out your overall bottom line and your brand as a whole, your Facebook ads, your YouTube ads, your social media, and all of these different channels?
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| You might have an ad, for example, where one ad might cost you $4 per lead and another one, maybe it’s a curiosity based short copy, get somebody to just opt in because they’re just super curious, and you might have another ad that’s costing you five and a half dollars per lead, and it’s difficult to tell which one is making you more money in the long run. We are starting to be able to see some of this stuff with tools like Wicked Reports and then a lot of the other tools out there where we can look back six months, seven, eight months down to the ad level and see how much money that generated, and with this longer form content, with Facebook Lives in these types of things, sometimes it’s difficult to measure the ROI, especially immediately, within the first week to seven days, 30 days, but the brand effect that you’re having on people, the relational equity that you’re building up here is sometimes difficult to measure, but in the long run makes you a lot more money.
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| Back to the issue of running things like Google AdWords in 2005 purely on a scientific basis. You might have an ad that costs you $3 per lead all based on curiosity ad copy, landing page copy, everything, even the Lead Magnet type, and then you might have another ad that’s longer copy or a video ad and it has more trust built into the whole messaging. Maybe you’re delivering value on the ad, maybe you’re not, but somebody opts in and it might cost you $5 per lead instead of three but the frame of mind that they’re in is completely different. They’re not coming into your funnel with their guard up. They’re coming into your funnel ready to consume all your content, open up your emails, show up on your webinars, and of course, buy your products or services.
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| The smart and savvy might do a Facebook Live once a week where there is maybe four different segments and then take those four segments and turn them into four different YouTube videos, use Facebook ads to continue to run traffic to the entire full Facebook Live so it looks live in the newsfeed but it’s actually the recording running as an ad. Now you’ve got four videos broken up and you can build up your YouTube following that way or YouTube channel or use them for all kinds of different things within your organization. You’re seeing some bigger brand television shows doing this very, very good right now. Not that many, but there’s a few of them out there. “Speak for Yourself” is doing this really well. It’s a Fox sports show with Colin Cowherd, and just watch what they’re doing. You’ll see some pretty good little tips there with taking a show, turn it into YouTube content, and then when you add paid traffic into this stuff like we teach here the sky really is the limit.
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| Another interesting point from the book Pendulum is that we are entering the downswing of a we phase and we’re just finishing up basically a balance period where there’s a lot of transparency, authenticity. People are going from extrinsic motivators like big houses and cars to intrinsic motivators like autonomy, mastery, and purpose. That’s from ’93 to 2013. As we go towards the end of the we phase we’re going into the out of balance phase where it will be more about we, the good and righteous defenders of truth and beauty against them, the evil, sinister malefactors intent on destroying our way of life.
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| That’s the next 20 years what’s happening, and he compares it to some interesting times. He even talks about the similar zeniths, which is 1943 times, 1943 when Adolf Hitler was the German promoter of I’m okay, you’re not okay, and then Joseph Stalin was a Soviet promoter during his great purge, and Senator Joseph McCarthy was the American witch hunt specialist with the help of the Un-American Activities Committee, so how does that affect right now?
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| On the upside, the zenith of a we offers some very specific marketing opportunities. Self-definition branding, if you will, is no longer determined by who you include and what you stand for. Instead, it becomes a function of exclusion. Who do you exclude and what do you stand against? You’ll see a lot of people doing this really, really well right now, and this is going to be very, very critical over the next year and beyond, next 10 years, next 20 years, and you’re saying it right now with the presidency.
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| Check this out, page 190. Remember, this was written five and a half years ago, and Roy talking about this time we are in right now. He talks about some scandals like Newt Gingrich taking the goodwill of the public and his campaign staff are granted, and he said, “I believe in the second half of this upswing into we, we’re going to elect political candidates who will lift brooms during their speeches and promise, ‘I’m going to clean up Washington.'” Sound familiar? President-elect Donald Trump sounds a little bit like that, so it’s crazy. You read this book and you’ll see a lot of things that Roy specifically predicts, and if you look back at history it’s all happening as we head into this phase, so we have to understand this, and how can we do this?
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| Well, one big way, I think, is to build personality around your brand. How can you do that? How can you build a tribe by standing against what you don’t believe in? A perfect example of this is Dollar Beard Club. We actually had Chris Stoikos, the founder of Dollar Beard Club, on Episode 56 of the podcast, and that’s exactly what he has done. They’re standing against razor blades and people who shave, but it’s true. It’s about building a brotherhood of people that grow these long, mangy beards, and you might be listening and thinking, “How can I build a personality? I’m not a personality-based brand. I’m a corporate company.”
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| You can do that, and you have to do that. We see a lot of this right now with some of our clients we’ve had for a long time, some of our potential new clients, how can we do video, how can we create a personality? You have to create a personality around your brand. This is going to be the key to standing out in the future and the key to being able to handle what’s coming ahead. I think there’s going to be a lot of probably huge, massive hyper change over the next three, four, five years. You’re going to see it quickly with who we have an office in the US right now.
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| Here’s an example of how to do this when you’re not a personality-based brand, or if you used to be but you want to transition yourself out, and DigitalMarketer is a perfect case, used to be a personality-based brand. It was Ryan Deiss, and he has done a great job of transitioning to a brand, a DigitalMarketer brand, and you’ll notice that Ryan is not out in front as much as he used to be but he’s been very intentional about who does represent the DM brand and that they represent that same character diamond that DigitalMarketer is, which is people like Molly and Russ, and he’s intentional about why they are out front and doing talks and in the public eye, because they represent the character diamond, which is marketing savants, but they’re also in the trenches giving you step-by-step solutions, yet they screw up sometimes but they admit it when they do screw up and they show you what they did wrong and what they did right.
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| DigitalMarketer has done a great job of this, and how can you do that over the next year or two? This is going to make all of your paid traffic so much more profitable. You’re going to be able to outspend your competition, you’re going to be building a much bigger asset overall with your audiences and your subscriber base. You’re going to be able to sell a lot more products and you’re going to be able to handle the change that’s coming our way.
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| You want to focus on building up a brand personality but, if you can, also standing against what you don’t believe in. Dollar Beard Club is a perfect example of doing both. I’ve talked about how they stand against razor blades, but they’ve also built a personality around their brand, of course. You might just think, oh, they have viral videos and so that’s why they’re blowing up so fast. No. People are buying their products because of the message and the tribe that Chris Stoikos has built around the theme of manliness and being a part of a brotherhood of growing a beard, so this is why if you go look through all their videos they all have that same core message. How can you do that with your brand this year?
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| Those are my takes on 2017 and beyond, of course. I know this is supposed to be for 2017, but I want to talk about the next 10 years as well because there’s a lot happening right now and a lot of people are running around, I think, with fear, with excitement with all the changes, and what you want to do is be ready for it and capitalize on it. You will. I promise you. All right, now Ralph with his predictions in 2017.
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| Ralph Burns: | Hey, this is Ralph and this is my prediction for 2017 for Facebook advertising. One thing is for sure, that Facebook advertising is going to become more and more popular. We’ve got 3 million advertisers right now as of the earnings call that they did back in July of this past year, probably even more. At this point probably closer to 3.5 million, maybe in that range, so advertisers are increasing, and one of the things that’s happening is that the newsfeed, with more advertisers and more ads, is getting more and more crowded, so Facebook actually addressed this issue.
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| The term that they use is called ad load, and ad load is the number of ads that Facebook or Twitter, for that matter, show you in the newsfeed or news stream versus non-ad content. We don’t know exactly what the percentage is, like what’s the right percentage, but we do know that CFO David Wehner said this on the earnings call in mid-2016, is that they anticipate ad load on Facebook will continue to grow modestly over the next 12 months, so this is six months prior to today’s date, and then will be less of a significant factor for driving revenue after mid 2017, so basically the amount of ads that you see in your newsfeed will cap out in mid 2017.
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| He goes on to say that since ad load has been one of the more important factors in recent strong growth for revenue, they expect the rate at which they’re able to grow revenue will be impacted accordingly, which is somewhat of a non-answer, but basically he means that Facebook is going to be continuing to market its advertising as well as all its other services, but most importantly, advertising, really, advertising revenue, drives their earnings growth, so where are these advertisers going to go?
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| Well, we’ve started to test this pretty extensively at the recommendation of our partner manager in Austin, and we’ve started to go beyond just the newsfeed in the right-hand column, and we’ve started to do a fair amount of advertising using all placements, meaning Audience Network, meaning Instant Articles, Instagram, as well as the newsfeed for mobile and desktop as well as right-hand column, and we’ve got really good results with it, and I think the reason is that it’s almost like Audience Network and Instagram is like a safety valve that when the newsfeed is getting too crowded or maybe you’re being outbid by the competition and maybe your potential audience is on Instagram or Audience Network or even on Instant Articles, that’s when Facebook’s really smart algorithm figures out they should show your ad in those other mediums, so it doesn’t overcrowd the newsfeed, and this is an important point.
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| This means that you have to start looking at your advertising a little bit differently than you probably did about a year ago when we were talking about video and types of creatives. You now have to make them Instagram and Audience Network friendly, meaning that for Instagram, and we’ve been looking at this really extensively in the agency the last three to six months, is shortening a lot of our videos because video that’s over 60 seconds doesn’t play in Instagram, so therefore you’re missing out in that exposure in that other medium, in that other placement.
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| Knowing that ad load is going to cap out in mid-2017, the trend for us is definitely to diversify just showing ads inside the newsfeed or in the right-hand column and also look at these other platforms and the other placements and create our ads accordingly, and we’ve seen really good results with this, so that’s the one thing, I think, that is a big, big factor in 2017, is obviously the growth of video is huge, but you have to place it in the right way and you have to use it in the right way, and even, I think we’re going to be testing a lot of new things in 2017 with much shorter videos so that we can show it in Instagram, but also split testing it against our longer videos. We tend to like longer videos inside the newsfeed, mobile newsfeed, desktop newsfeed, as well as the right-hand column, and they’ve gotten really good results for us in the past, but you’ve got to stay ahead of the trends here, and we know that ad load is going to cap out in mid-2017, so look at other placements knowing full well that there’s going to be other advertisers, well over 3 million, probably in excess of 4 million, sometime that number will be hit in 2017, and change your strategy accordingly.
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| Another really cool thing as far as diversifying your placement, and this has been rumored to be coming and it’s actually being tested right now, it’s in beta, is advertising inside groups inside Facebook, and this is really going to be interesting in 2017, and it’s groups on Facebook have been around for quite some time, so by 2014 groups had actually grown to 500 million users and it actually has its own standalone app and it’s even doubled in size thanks to buy and sell groups for e-commerce and other communities, so from families, clicks, we’ve got one at Facebook Ads University, we have a Facebook group.
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| DigitalMarketer has one, DigitalMarketer Engage. Those groups are not just fans or have an interest in, in our case, Facebook advertising. Those are active advertisers. Those are people who have paid money to get our advice inside our Facebook group, so inside the DigitalMarketer Engage group, those are people that are interested in digital marketing, email marketing, content marketing, Facebook advertising, pay per click on Google, all that stuff, so imagine if you are somebody who’s selling services for Facebook advertising, Facebook advertising consultant. Imagine the power of being able to advertise inside both of those groups.
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| Now, groups right now don’t have ads except for the right-hand side, but that’s going to be something that’s really, really powerful, so let’s say you’re targeting Manchester United interest. Now, that’s probably a 30, 40-million-person interest, but what if you could actually advertise inside of a Manchester United super group, super fan group, and you were selling apparel? Now we’re talking about totally kick ass targeting, so that’s something that I think is coming in 2017. If it’s in beta right now it’s probably going to get rolled out to other advertisers, maybe to partners like ourselves first and then to others after that, but super powerful, so that’ll lessen that ad load issue. Once again, that’ll be one more placement in which we can lessen the load in the newsfeed in addition to Instagram as well as Audience Network, and it’s going to be a really, really powerful targeting option, I predict, in 2017.
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| Now the good news with all this is that we’ve actually seen this in our visits to their Austin offices, is we’ve seen that what are you going to do with all these new advertisers, not only the ones that are brand-new, but also the ones that are legacy advertisers? Maybe you’re listening to this show here and you say, well, that’s all well and good. You’ve got a direct contact to Facebook, which we are very, very grateful for, but when am I going to get a rep?
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| Well, that’s something that seems to be a huge trend for them as well, so with the increase in advertisers and the maxing out of the ad load and going to different placements, my sense is, and we’ve actually seen this firsthand inside the Austin offices, is that they’re actually building and expanding out that office so much specifically for customer service, and customer service for advertisers, not just the regular users, but for advertisers, for you guys, you want to grow your business and you want a direct line of sight.
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| You want somebody you can call when you run into an issue instead of just going through chat or customer service which, quite honestly in the last year, has really improved tremendously. It used to be an afterthought, but I think Facebook has made a concerted effort to really increase the competency of their customer service representatives as well as chat. I’ve used their chat feature a number of times. We run into issues inside the agency. We don’t necessarily just go to our contact at Facebook.
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| There are certain things. When we have an ad rejected, we go right to chat, and sometimes we can get that, we just had one just this past week where we got it resolved just through chat, so I think that’s a big trend with the increase in advertisers. I think Facebook is making a concerted effort to really increase their touch points with their customers, take care of you guys that don’t have ad reps right now that maybe have, maybe not, a huge amount of monthly spend, but enough spend so that it’s significant, and I think Facebook looks at the small businesses that are maybe spending $500-$1000 a month or maybe a couple hundred dollars a week as advertisers that can substantially grow and grow their revenue using all the different placements, but the way in which to do that is to hold people’s hands, help them out, and customer service is a direct outgrowth of that, so we’ve seen that inside their Austin office.
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| They’ve been expanding that department greatly, and I think you’re going to see a lot of increased customer service and help for your ad account in 2017, so those are my two predictions for 2017 for Facebook ads. Hope everybody has a happy new year, and we’ll talk to you on the next show.
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| Keith Krance: | All right. Okay, that’s going to be it for 2017 predictions. Hope you enjoyed this episode and we hope you enjoyed riding along with us in this journey of 2016. It’s been a great time. Appreciate you so much listening to this show and these episodes. We love doing it. We are excited about the next year and what we are going to be bringing to you, and we’re going to be bringing data, of course. I know I talked about data, but we are going to be bringing you data and showing you how this type of messaging, this type of outlook, is affecting some of the campaigns that we’re running in a positive way or a negative way if it’s not working well, so we’ll let you know. Keep listening, and until next week, talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
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