Dennis Yu, Chief Technology Officer at BlitzMetrics, joins the Perpetual Traffic experts to discuss why keeping it simple on Facebook can go a long way for your business. We’re going to talk about boosting posts, and why they are your bread and butter. Boosted posts work for B2B, for small businesses, for entrepreneurs, for freelancers, for consultants, and marketers on a small budget.
For anyone that’s ever thought they don’t have the tools, or the audience, or the resources to advertise on Facebook, this is the episode that will help you get started.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
- The advantage of boosting a post before you build a campaign in Facebook Ads Manager.
- How to know when to boost a post and when to turn a boosted post into a campaign.
- How boosting a post can help you find your content “unicorn.”
- What Facebook ads and speaking on stage have in common, and how this will ultimately make people come to you.
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Resources from Dennis
Episode 29: Tell Your Brand Story With These 4 Ad Types (…While Still Generating Sales)
Episode 36: What is Facebook’s ‘Relevance Score’? (…and other questions!)
Episode 42: 2 Facebook Campaign Metrics that Drive ROI
Episode 49 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):
| Keith Krance: | Welcome to Episode 49 of Perpetual Traffic. On today’s show, we’ve got a great guest for you that I know you’re going to love. This guest, Dennis Yu, was actually one of my first mentors—one of the first guys I reached out to with a random question about Facebook ads back in 2009 or 2010, I can’t even remember. It was a long time ago. I emailed you and you emailed me right back, and we got in this thread about the optimization of having too many ads inside a campaign before we had ad sets and all that stuff. Really excited to have you on!
It’s Ralph, it’s Molly, it’s myself, it’s Dennis Yu. |
| Dennis spoke at Traffic & Conversion in 2016, and Dennis Yu, like I said, he’s been one of my mentors. Some of his clients include the Golden State Warriors, Jack Daniels, Red Bull, some of the biggest soccer teams in the world, and tons of other companies, but not just big brands. Today, we’re actually not going to talk about strategies that work with big brands. We’re going to talk about keeping it simple, and he has a lot of experience with small business owners. Dennis, first of all, thank you for coming on. We really appreciate it, and we’re excited to have you! | |
| Dennis Yu: | You guys are awesome! Thanks for having me. |
| Keith Krance: | Dennis has a really cool strategy that we’re going to talk about today. And Dennis has some really interesting numbers from boosting posts.
Question for you guys and the audience: Have you ever gotten stuck, or felt frustrated with how complicated Facebook ads can be? |
| Ralph Burns: | I’m raising my hand. |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah. |
| Keith Krance: | We do every single day. If so, if you’re raising your hand right now, I think you’re going to be excited because we’re going to talk about a simple strategy. Dennis, I’m going to let you talk about it. It’s something called boosting a post, you may have heard of that? |
| Dennis Yu: | We have articles on why we think boosting posts is crap from years ago, but I have done a complete 180. I was joking with you guys earlier, it’s like coming out of the closet on this thing because there are Power Editor snobs. There are people that are sophisticated in the API, and we’re one of the heaviest users of the Facebook ads API and analytics, so we’re sophisticated. We understand the technical details and all the different kinds of ad units and tweaks that you have associated with them, but that’s not what we’re here to boast about.
We still think boosted posts are your day-to-day bread and butter, how you get stuff done. Even if you think, “Well, I’m too good for that. I’m all about targeting and Power Editor and bulk changes.” You know what? Boosted posts, we’re not ashamed to admit that the majority of what we do all day long is boosted posts. And the same concept, which will be for another podcast, will work on Twitter and work on LinkedIn, because of the idea of microtargeting. Boosted posts work in unsexy areas like B2B, small biz, entrepreneurs, freelancers who have no money, consultants, and all these people who feel like, “I don’t have the budget or the audience or the tools, or it’s just me.” |
| Molly Pittman: | Or, “It won’t work for me!” |
| Dennis Yu: | You know, I love when people say it. Because I’m like, “All right, that’s less competition for us.” |
| Molly Pittman: | Before we get going, number one, I love this conversation because it really is the simplest thing you can do via Facebook ads. It’s the simplest action, and it’s funny that the four of us are on here talking about how effective it is. Number two, it used to not be something we suggested because the results weren’t worth the investment. But I couldn’t agree more; we’re getting great results from boosted posts. Before we dive in, can you explain exactly what that is? |
| Dennis Yu: | A boosted post is when you have a post on your page, not your profile as a user but your business page, and you click the big blue boost button from the timeline. You’re effectively saying to Facebook, “I’d like to promote this post.” Then you assign a particular budget against it, and you don’t get to choose what your cost per click is. You don’t get to choose your particular objective. There are 15 business objectives, and most people want conversions. But with a boosted post, Facebook is going for engagement. So it’s a combination of reach and engagement. What happens when you click the boost post button is you’re allowing Facebook to figure out who in your audience is most likely to engage, and based on the signals of who’s engaging, they will continue to show that post to other people that are related to that, and boosting posts will work at a dollar a day. |
| If you try to make ads in other interfaces, they may shut you out at $5 or $10 a day, but you can do the dollar a day thing. A lot of people complain, “Oh, Facebook wants to make me pay. I don’t have any reach; this is their scam to try to make sure we’re paying.” That’s not what it is, and it’s not that they’re squeezing you. Some people say, “How can you boost posts? They’ll cut your organic reach.” That’s not the case at all because they have a set percentage of inventory that they’re showing for ads anyway. | |
| Boosting posts is saying, “I would like my post to be seen.” There may be a range of business objectives like awareness, engagement, or perversion that people want. “I want leads. I want people to check-in. I’m trying to sell my product. It’s ecommerce. I’m trying to grow my business.” All these business reasons, boosted posts actually cover almost all of them. The boosted post is the big Easy Button. You don’t have to go into Ads Manager or Power Editor or the API, which are the three other ways we can create ads. This is simple. You click the blue button, you can select an audience, which is key, and we’ll talk about saved audiences and how you set that up properly. Then you just say, “Look, I want to spend ten bucks over ten days, or a dollar in one day.” Then you just let it go, and it does its thing. It does all the stuff for you. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah. |
| Dennis Yu: | If you have the right content and the right targets, that’s the big IF, if you have the right contents and targets, it will work for you. |
| Keith Krance: | Okay, just really quick to preface here: If you’re listening right now and you’re like, “Oh, he’s just saying this because his clients are the Golden State Warriors. They’re the number one basketball team in the world, and that’s why they’re able to do this.” I’m playing a little devil’s advocate for the people listening at home right now, wondering, “Is this really true?” But before I let you answer that Dennis, I want to preface that before Dennis’s history in the last 10 years or so with Facebook, he was actually the Head of Analytics for Yahoo.com I believe, and American Airlines, so you’re a numbers guy. You’re an analytics guy. I know you’ve got a lot of experience with these bigger brands, is this something that’s also going to be good for somebody that is a consultant or B2B? |
| Dennis Yu: | Yeah, I can just rattle off three or four examples in the next minute just to show you. One of our guys, Tyler Doyle, got a job by spending like 87¢ on Facebook by targeting people who work at a particular agency or a particular company, saying, “I really would like to work at your company.” Then it goes to his post on why he’s amazing and what he knows about the company.
Last week I did a bunch of traveling. I just got in two days ago from Sydney, Australia. Four days ago I was in London, and six days ago I was in Miami. So I booked a hotel on Hotwire, they screwed it up, gave me the thing with the wrong number of rooms. I wrote a blog post on a throwaway blog that has no traffic, and I targeted that against people who work at Hotwire, and I got it resolved. |
| The easiest way to do a boost is if you have something that’s interesting or has high authority. What is the workplace? What are the employer targets? Not the people who like Red Bull, or Rosetta Stone, or who like DigitalMarketer, but the people who work at these places. The people who work at The New York Times. | |
| The first step in boosting is when you want to do inception, which is to think like a journalist, to incept the influencer to write about you. Who are the people you would like to influence? That are more likely to retweet you, more likely to open your emails, more likely to meet with you at the trade show, more likely to do whatever it is that you’re trying to get them to do? Because you’re trying to incept them, not by selling, but by demonstrating you have authority and knowledge and sharing that openly. | |
| Boosted posts work most powerfully when you think like a journalist, and you’re trying to incept the people who influence your customers. Not your customers directly, but the people who influence your customers, so what are those magazines, publications, TV shows, conferences? What are all those different kinds of audiences? Create those as Saved Audiences inside the Ads Manager. That’s one trick. | |
| One of my friends has a pizzeria in Chicago, and he doesn’t know a thing about Internet marketing. His name’s Andrew. The food’s delicious; it’s La Gondola, actually, if you’re ever in Chicago. He will boost posts where he’ll say, “Hey, tonight, check out this lasagna.” Or, “Check out what we have on Mother’s Day.” He’ll just post pictures of food. The guy is not technical or anything like that; he doesn’t know WordPress. He’ll just boost that to several audiences. One audience is all the food critics that write for the newspaper. He will get some number of likes and shares, and of course, the cost per engagement is higher when you’re trying to influence the influencer, but it’s so worth it because he gets written up. | |
| One of my friends, he is a budding musician. He’s actually an Internet marketer. He does social media for an insurance company, very boring stuff, but he’s also a country musician. His name is Kale Tyson. What happens if you’re a starving musician? Everyone has friends like this. They only have enough money to master one song, right, so that’s their one song. We took that and we had a Kickstarter, or, Indiegogo, and we promoted that to the people who work at Rolling Stone, who work at the Grand Ole Opry, who work at Sony Music. Not only did we fund the Kickstarter to the full amount, but then he got featured as one of the Top 10 New Artists in country music. | |
| Keith Krance: | Wow. You only need one guy to pick that up to start the momentum for the rest of them to see it. |
| Dennis Yu: | I’ll give you one more example. A friend of mine—these are weird friends, I know, I apologize in advance—he has all the rights for Elvis, for the royalties; to be able to sell bedding and pillows and sheets and that kind of thing with Elvis. There are people who want this sort of stuff. So we spent a dollar a day targeting the people who work at Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas and are in purchasing or marketing and HR, PR, and that kind of thing. Not everyone at every Walmart; that’s a lot of people. Sure enough, his stuff is being distributed in Walmart, which sounds too good to be true.
This is not a one step, boost one post and then you expect the riches to rain down from heaven. This is like working out. You know in the long run it’s healthy, but you’re not just making a blind shot in the dark. |
| I remember somebody came to me and told me how they had boosted one post and it didn’t work. Which is probably one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever heard, the phrase, “I’ve tried it, and it didn’t work.” That’s like saying, “Hey, Keith, I went to the gym because I’m seventy pounds overweight. I went to the gym and I worked out really hard for two-and-a-half hours. Afterward, I stepped on the scale and I looked at myself, and I wasn’t all cut and chiseled like those people in the magazines, so you know what? Your advice to work out and all this is a total fraud. Because I tried it, and it didn’t work.” | |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, Dennis, I couldn’t agree more with that. We’ve been boosting posts on our Facebook page for about four years now. Every time we post a piece of new content or a new blog post goes up on DigitalMarketer we post it to our Facebook page and then we will boost the post. We’ve consistently been doing that for four years and there are a couple benefits.
Number one, it’s built our page. Most of the fans you see that like DigitalMarketer have come from our boosted posts. |
| Another benefit is all of the social proof that shows on our blog for those posts. So you’ll click on the article and you’re like, “Wow! This post has 5,000 likes on Facebook. And this one has 2,000 likes on Facebook.” Most of that is coming from the boosted posts. So it cost us a few hundred dollars, which might seem like a lot if you want a few thousand likes, but we’re able to build that social proof.
Just really speaking to the consistency and making sure people are consistently seeing your boosted posts in their news feed, especially if they’re full of really valuable content. |
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| Dennis Yu: | It’s like a workout schedule, right? |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah. |
| Dennis Yu: | You’ve got a schedule, you’re going to work out every day 4:00 to 5:00, even though you’re busy.
Another friend started a software company selling high-end security to directors of IT inside big companies. That’s not the kind of thing you’re going to download for 99¢ from the iTunes store. This is the kind of thing that’s $100,000. It takes lots of meetings. It takes many touches. It’s the B2B kind of play. |
| Keith Krance: | This is the exact type of business that most people would say that doesn’t work with Facebook ads. |
| Dennis Yu: | What happens when you know your final has multiple touches? The whole awareness, interest, desire, action. There are multiple touches. They need to see what the other customers are doing, understand other case studies, understand what the features and benefits are, other people in the organization have approval or their technical evaluations. There are different people who are involved in a complex B2B sale, for example. If you have the segmentation by job title, by where they work, by the related tools that they use, by the shows that they go to, then you can drip them into a funnel. |
| You know with email marketing, you have auto responders and the Invisible Selling Machine like Ryan does, that kind of stuff, there are all these different ways of just dripping content into people until they buy. It’s the same thing that you do on Facebook. I’m surprised people haven’t realized Facebook is the same as email, except you don’t have to own the email and you have more ability to target because you have external triggers. You can target by lots of things that you don’t have access to in email. | |
| Ralph Burns: | So, Dennis, as a self-proclaimed Power Editor snob, which I am, I will say this: Nearly every one of our agency clients actually does boost their posts internally. We don’t manage their pages per se, but it does help with fan engagement, and obviously for posts that we’re promoting to larger audiences, it gains that social proof. My question is, why wouldn’t you go into Ads Manager or Power Editor? Why would you just do it as a boost post? What’s the advantage to it aside from ease? Is there anything else that you see? Increased reach, increased engagement? What’s your sense there? |
| Dennis Yu: | The biggest challenge you have against you, especially if you’re an agency and you’re serving multiple clients, is time. You just don’t have enough time. The ability to boost posts right there gives you a huge advantage in the cycles of optimization because I believe that massive iteration cycles will always beat the smart consult. I want to put the work, the heavy lifting, on the algorithm—to learn for me rather than me trying to guess, or trying to think what’s going to work or not. If I just boost a bunch of posts and put ten or twenty bucks against them, I’m going to learn a lot more than trying to figure out this perfect strategy and not make mistakes. |
| I don’t want to go into all the things that Power Editor can’t do versus whatever. If you boost a post, you have access to your saved audiences. I don’t believe that it’s easy to create ads against saved audiences. You’ve got to recreate these audience combinations. If I were faced with the next step of Power Editor, the Ads Manager, I would allow the reusing of these complex audiences. These buckets. Look, for all the lazy people out there like me, I would like to pre-make all my audience buckets from the super, super narrow dollar-a-day meaty inception to the larger lookalikes where I’ve got something that’s converting and I want to get more at the bottom of the form or whatever. I would just like to be able to have that stuff run evergreen so I’ve got a number of posts that I’m boosting, evergreen, against audiences that I’m refining. So then I have the stacking strategy because after six months I might have fifty posts, each of them are spending a buck or two per day, but in combination because each of them is a minion. | |
| I don’t think of it as advertising. I think of boosted posts like paid messengers where I’m paying for delivery against a specific content target. And I’m going to scale up different points in the funnel, like Molly said, and that builds the brand. That builds awareness. Then you can measure the ROI against each of these, and you just can’t do that very easily in Ads Manager or Power Editor. If you’re an agency or if you’re in-house marketing or you’re a small business person, 80 to 90% of what you should be doing, if not more, is boosting posts. All day long. | |
| Keith Krance: | So that’s the key. I want to make sure we don’t gloss over that too quickly. One thing you’re saying is instead of trying to create a campaign with several ad sets and all these different targeting groups and then start to test different messaging, instead, you could test different messaging so much faster, especially when there’s new content coming out, with boosting. Then you’re letting the Facebook data, the users, quickly tell you what is good and then, now take the time to start going in and creating a website conversions campaign with forty different audiences. Is that kind of what you’re saying? |
| Dennis Yu: | Yeah, and to go one step further, if you’ve got these audiences set up and the frameworks set up, you’ve got people at the very top who are trying to incept the media, or these influencers who are going to write about you, that whole thing we just talked about. Then you have the people you’re trying to get in as a first touch in terms of awareness and what have you—that’s another bucket that you set up based on interests and lookalikes. |
| Then you have another bucket of custom audiences. Meaning people’s who’s emails you’ve collected, or the pixel’s triggered on them, they abandoned the landing page, they didn’t do something, they’re a fan but you don’t have their email or whatever combination of all these advanced kinds of matching. Then, at the very bottom, you have other, more complex combinations of retargeting. Where people who’ve done this and this and this. Those are all different buckets along your funnel. If you’ve mapped out that journey and you’ve tied content against each of those stages in the funnel—imagine that we were drawing the funnel—you see what that looks like in your mind. You’ve got this funnel and content associated with different points along that framework. Then you’re going to boost along the way so that the majority of your campaigns are going to run on autopilot. | |
| The only stuff you’re really going to be tuning are two things. One, you’re continuing to boost new things at different points in the funnel, which is just lightweight trying stuff and seeing what’s working. If it works, you just let it run forever. If it doesn’t, that’s fine. Ninety percent of your stuff is going to fail, if not higher, but you’re going to find some winners that will just continue to stay on. You keep layering that on.
Two is traditional conversion marketing. Where you’re driving people to a landing page that’s a website, links, website conversions, or some kind of cost per acquisition thing. That’s the tuning that you would do across any other channel. What’s really neat is when you find something that works in email, or you find something that works in another channel, you can reuse that in the Facebook. |
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| Molly Pittman: | To speak a bit more about what Dennis just said, another great strategy if you’re posting onto your Facebook page organically and you see a post is getting higher engagement than usual, that’s a good time to boost a post. Or consider turning that particular post into some sort of ad because you know the relevant score is going to be high because it’s already getting such good engagement. Whether you’re posting organically or you’re just boosting, a really smart strategy is if you’ve boosted a few posts and see one of them has a particularly high relevance score, you can actually go into Power Editor and Ads Manager and set up campaigns that are optimized for website conversions, video views, clicks, other objectives outside of page post engagement, but you can select that post ID as the ad that you want to use for that campaign. You’re using this ad that you know has a good relevance score and will probably resonate with your audience because it already has, via this boosted post, but use that ad for another objective like a conversion or a click. |
| Dennis Yu: | So DigitalMarketer has a big enough community that even organically when they post stuff they get enough feedback to determine in general whether they have a winner in terms of engagement. Most people don’t have enough reach. They have like 50 reach or 100 reach per post, which usually isn’t enough. So the idea of putting a couple bucks against it to see if it wins is a good way to sort of force the algorithm to accelerate your test to see whether something’s winning. |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah. |
| Dennis Yu: | Then you can extend it. Put more money against it.
Video is the other thing people aren’t talking about with boosting posts. |
| Molly Pittman: | Totally. Pretty much using these boosted posts as a testing ground for relevance score because we know how important that metric is. If you’re using these boosted posts to test different ads, especially that relevance score, then you’re going to save yourself a lot of money in the long run when you go to set up campaigns for other objectives. |
| Keith Krance: | Yup, yup, exactly. If you go back and listen to Episode 29, we talk about how to tell your brand story with four ad types.
Dennis, we talked a bit about relevance score before we hit record and hopefully it’s something you want to expand on. How to optimize your boosted posts and how the exponential difference your relevance score can make. This is why I love this strategy because you can quickly test different types of ad styles. This is one of the reasons why we love video, and we love longer copy ads because we see the relevance score go up by three or four every single time immediately. Dennis, could you talk about the relevance score’s impact on your click costs and how big of a difference it can? |
| Dennis Yu: | With Google, you have the equivalent of a quality score, which is very similar to a relevance score. The reason it matters is it affects how much you pay for the base traffic and how much you pay per engagement, or view, or conversion, or what have you. The idea of a relevance score is across any kind of ad, it’s not only for boosting posts, and relevance is the intersection between content and targeting. Is it relevant? The reason why it’s exponential, as opposed to arithmetic on Google, is you have this viral factor where if people like it organically or through paid then their friends will see it. That creates social proof. It’ll increase your CTR when there’s better social approval. |
| There are three components, which are your CTR, your positive feedback, and your negative feedback. Just like with Google, it’s on a 1 to 10 scale, but on Facebook, it’s a logarithmic scale. You guys know the Richter scale? A 6 Earthquake is a hundred times more powerful than a 4. That’s base 10. We find that, and of course, you want to go for a 10, there is a high 10 and a low 10. That can be the difference between a cost per view of .0001, or just a penny, or whatever. | |
| Keith Krance: | Tell us more about how Google is arithmetic and Facebook’s is exponential and logarithmic. |
| Dennis Yu: | Google is trying to maximize how much money they’re making on their base traffic, so we talk about a CPM, that’s a cost per thousand. But Facebook has gone a step further than that. Rather than trying to make the most money per thousand impressions, Facebook wants to try to make the best user experience. |
| In Google land, let’s say Keith and I are bidding against each other as advertisers on a certain keyword. We’re both bidding a dollar per click, but Keith has twice the click through rate. Then your cost per click will effectively be half because your quality score will be double mine. Google’s looking at this and saying look, “I’m still trying to make the most I can per thousand impressions.” If Keith has ads that get clicks twice as often, then Google is going to make twice as much money. All those people paying a dollar per click. | |
| On Google, you’re going to pay the same base price for the traffic, so when you are able to 10x your CTR, your cost per click is one tenth. Everyone understands the arithmetic math there, but on Facebook you have an exponent because the cost of the underlying traffic is better too, and you get that performance increase because your engagement rate’s higher. So you have this doubling up factor that occurs. That’s why if you have a really good piece of content, which we call a unicorn, that’s why you want to be boosting posts to identify unicorns that you’re going to continue to put money against because you’re going to go all in on things that are working. | |
| We’ll spend, literally, I kid you not, we have some posts we have spent half a million dollars on and they have run for over a year. They just keep building the quality score. Instead of frequency burnout your social proof is increasing because it continues to send feedback into the algorithm, saying Ralph Burns likes this and then all of Ralph’s friends are see that. That ad now becomes more effective because it has social proof. Social proof doesn’t exist in Search. | |
| Keith Krance: | Yup. It’s a snowball. |
| Dennis Yu: | That’s why you don’t have the exponent, right? |
| Keith Krance: | Or Google Display. Exactly, and this is why people who have built their business originally by creating high-quality content, organic content, when they go and they start running Facebook ads, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. It’s so easy for them because they understand creating good content is what matters. People who are coming from the pure direct response world, sometimes they get so stuck in trying to have perfect, benefit-driven headlines and copy that it backfires because it’s not highly engaging to the audience, and they don’t realize that they’re getting penalized by 10x per click in a lot of cases. |
| Dennis Yu: | Or worse. Just like you said, Facebook has now built a system that rewards you for doing a good job and exponentially penalizes you for saying stuff like: “Buy my stuff now.” “It’s on sale.” “20% off.” “Our stuff’s better than these other people.” Those are straight up ads. That’s straight up selling and it’s interruptive. It just doesn’t work. Google works because people are searching on those keywords and they’re looking for it. |
| That’s why we think video is so powerful. You’re more likely to get higher engagement because you’re more likely to create good content. It goes back to what Keith said: You have to create good content or you’re actually teaching something—you’re not just shamelessly selling. You’re trying to show and not tell them. You’re not just saying, “Buy my stuff.” | |
| Keith Krance: | Exactly. We’ve talked about it before, on video ads. Some of our clients have videos that they’re longer; they’re six to nine minutes, but we’re teaching and providing value. Then, at the very end, we have a call to action. A lot of times it’s easier to do that selling part to re-target warmer audiences. If you do something where you’re providing good value, guess what? People will share the heck out of it. |
| Dennis Yu: | Yeah, and for direct response marketers, we’ve got a couple of these in the agency who have taken awhile to come around to the fact that you can actually engage and provide value upfront while you’re actually selling. You can help them by actually helping them right now in a video, or in a blog post, or whatever it happens to be. Then you can turn it, you can pivot to the actual pitch. That’s really what works best on Facebook because they reward you for that engaging content. This is exactly the way we promote this sort of stuff, even if we’re going directly for a sale or for a lead. We still try and combine or compress a lot of that content, so that we provide the value upfront, and then the next logical resolution, is the next step, is the lead or the sale. |
| Keith Krance: | And if they like the video, they’re going to click through. Later, they’re going to click on another ad you have or they’re more likely to open an email or they’re more likely to give you their email. Just like if you were to speak onstage, you know that you never sell onstage, you shouldn’t, you’re trying to educate. Then people will come up to you afterwards. It’s the same kind of thing, right? |
| Ralph Burns: | It’s a great analogy. |
| Dennis Yu: | If you try to sell onstage the organizers will say, “Get out of here. We’re not going to invite you back.” |
| Ralph Burns: | Mm-hmm. |
| Dennis Yu: | You just have to trust. Direct marketers have trouble getting around this because they’re all about ROI—get the median sale. You have to trust that if you put good content out there they will come to you.
One of my friends is a housekeeper. She has maids that go around and clean people’s houses, rich people’s houses. She doesn’t know anything about video and Facebook and websites and this kind of thing. She doesn’t even have a website, actually. She was afraid to get in front of the camera; I understand how this is. But we coached her, say who are you, what’s your business, and what do you do. Just answering a few of these simple questions. We recorded her with a crappy little iPhone. No fancy lighting or big Hollywood production stuff. We put it out there and the cost per view is down to 2 or 3 cents; she’s booking clients. |
| You don’t need the fancy $5,000 video setup. You don’t need any of that kind of stuff. The point is to get that video so people know who you are. If you have any kind of product where it’s sold through people, it’s sold through relationships, they want to know who you are. | |
| Keith Krance: | Exactly. You have to get over the hump and that fear and just start using video. It’ll change your business and change your life. It truly will. You’ve got to do it. |
| So Dennis, taking it back to real basics here. There’s a guy who has a local seafood restaurant about five miles from here. Every single week is he boosts his posts for Tuesday Night Specials, Thursday Night Specials, and then Friday Night Happy Hour. He puts five or ten dollars behind the post. He says like half the people who come say they saw him on Facebook. | |
| For people like that, I think that’s a good example we’ve used before, but what other types of examples could you say or show to people to start simply and get their foot in the door? Then maybe get to a higher level of complexity inside the Ads Manager later on. What would you recommend for those folks? | |
| Dennis Yu: | So for local businesses it’s actually easy to win. So if you’re a restaurant, dentist, chiropractor, lawyer, cosmetic surgeon, locksmith, whatever it is that you do, say, “Hey, I’m Ralph and I’m a locksmith. I’ve been doing this twenty years. I’ve got three vans.” Tell who you are and your story. You can literally tell your story in a minute or two. Then you have a couple other little videos on how you brighten people’s teeth, and how you won this award, and how you use the latest machines, etc. |
| If you break it up into little things that are each just like a minute, you get the benefit of multiple lightweight touches. We have a few restaurant clients who literally just post pictures of the food. So the proprietor’s running around tables taking pictures of the pizza and the pasta, the outside, and the fans that are saying good things. Ask people who leave reviews on Yelp and other places if you can use that on your Facebook and in your ads. Take other people’s words and take pictures of them smiling cause it’s an anniversary or a birthday—you take a picture of that, put their words there, and then it becomes word of mouth. | |
| Keith Krance: | Yes! Leveraging social proof. Take that and leverage it. |
| Ralph Burns: | That’s awesome. |
| Keith Krance: | What he just said right there is a very important thing that you can do in so many industries. Take a review, get approval by the person, take a picture of it or a screenshot, then post that on Facebook and boost it. Or if you’re in a different industry, take pictures or videos of the equipment. People want to see that! Every time I go to a restaurant page I try to click through the images and see what it looks like inside, the atmosphere as well as the food. It’s the emotion. If you see somebody or a family all laughing and having fun, take a picture of that and boost that on Facebook. |
| Dennis Yu: | It’s always a matter of putting good content in there and then giving Facebook a general signal on what audiences you have. If you’ve got these pre-made audiences like we talked about, you can continue to reuse them. Maybe you don’t have a video. That’s fine. Start off with a few of these images. The key is to be human. And everyone listening on this podcast, you already know how to be social. You know etiquette. You know how to behave at a wedding versus a church versus at the beach. This has nothing to do with Facebook magic secret SEO black hat tricks. There’s no trickery here. It’s using the system as it was intended. |
| Keith Krance: | Exactly. Talk to people on Facebook like you would at a party in real life. |
| Ralph Burns: | Facebook is just an electronic function. It’s a party you’re going to that just happens to be online, so behave the same way. At its core, Keith always talks about this, is the guy at the party who you don’t want to talk to that’s trying to sell to you. That’s probably the direct response marketer guy. Facebook is a social network. It is also an advertising network, but it was based upon a social network and then they added ads after that, so behave in the same way and you’ll get good results. |
| Keith Krance: | Absolutely, absolutely. Hey, Dennis, we’re running out on time here, so do you have any resources you want to refer people to? This has just been awesome! This is one of my favorite episodes. This is great stuff. |
| Dennis Yu: | I’m the kind of guy where I have to see it. I want to see it, step-by-step. So in the Show Notes you’ll be able to download the guide that shows you how to set up the saved target audiences; here’s how you set up content at different points in the funnel; here’s how you use video, we didn’t get a chance to really go deep into video; how to determine if a post is working or not and whether to put more money on it or kill it. These are step-by-step things and we think everything should be governed by a process. Every part of your business should be governed by a process so you have repeatable excellence, you have scale, and then you can delegate to other people. |
| I would love to see everybody do boosted posts the way you’re supposed to, and not say “I tried it, it didn’t work,” but actually do it. Find that it works, adjust your content and targeting, and kick some butt! And let us know what’s working for you guys. | |
| Keith Krance: | Awesome. This is great stuff. He’s giving away some really great resources here—a 15-page guide. All you have to do is go to the sShow notes, you don’t have to opt-in to get the guide. Dennis, man, this has been some really good stuff. I appreciate you bringing it. |
| Dennis Yu: | Yeah, thanks, Keith, Molly, Ralph. You guys are awesome! |
| Keith Krance: | All right, guys, we’re going to wrap it up here. We will talk to you soon. Bye-bye. |
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