This interview with Dennis Yu of BlitzMetrix is part of the Convirza Webinar Series. The following is the Q&A portion of the interview.
Interviewer: Well, we’ve got a couple of good questions here Dennis I want to throw past you on this. You mentioned with B to B it seems like, obviously the titles would be more of a B to B thing. Have you seen, you know, effective B to C campaigns in terms of targeting precise people with interest, is that how you would target a B to B customer in this situation?
Dennis: Okay, so… I’m sorry do you want to talk about B2B in targeting?
Interviewer: B2C, we’re getting a few questions on B2C actually, how to voice the target B2C.
Dennis: Okay, well there’s a couple ways to think about B2C: you’re either national B2C like you’re selling potato chips or you are locally trying to get people to come into your real estate agency or they’re trying to move or there’s some kind of life stage here local, right? You’re national or you’re local so let me address those real quick. If you’re national then that you’re really doing is stealing from your offline media budget to try to be a little more effective with your anding. When I see anding I mean this. Let’s saw, let’ name somebody. Someone name somebody just as an example and we’ll just start with the United States. You want to name somebody?
Interviewer: We’ve got Brad Pitt. We have physical therapy targeting physicians or targeting parents with teething babies, any sort of target.
Dennis: Oh, okay. Gotcha. I’m going to move over into Power Editor and I’m going to show you what is now my favorite thing which is called partner category targeting. So, let’s say here I’m targeting, let’s pretend that I’m left of the page and I’ve created a placement and I’ve got a page that’s around. You said moms with babies that are teething? What is teething, how old are they that they… six months to a year?
Interviewer: Yeah, six months to two years probably.
Dennis: So, let’s just say I have a landing page around that and I have content around that and it’s interesting and what mom’s not going to like some pictures of babies, right? Especially babies with kittens and bacon and you know that, puppies, all that kind of stuff. Obviously, you know the audience right? Well, I’m not just going to come in and precise interest target, so in this case here I’m just going to create a new ad. You know what, I’m not, I’m in someone else’s page. I’m, if you don’t mind, just going to go ahead and close all of this other stuff. I’m going to target… and you know the accounts on the right side change real quick right? So if I’m in the US I start out with like 160 million which is obviously too big and I’m not going to say I’m going o target all moms because that’s too big too because you know, you’re a mom and your kid’s now 40 kinda like me where my mom still thinks of me as a kid. So, if I come in here and I type in ‘moms’ that’s not going to work for me. There’s too many.
What I need to do is target them by their life stages. So, look at this, look at partner category targets; now, when you open this you may see anywhere from a few dozen to 500 plus depending on how good you are at all this stuff. Here we have demographics, now partner category targeting is based on actual information on what you bought with your shopping cards because if you know you got the super market card, you got four boxes of cereal for five bucks you have to register for an Albertsons card that sort of thing. Household size size job roles, what they bought… this is actual information so I can take this. People bought gas, we’ve all been credit, I have this and I target them by how many kids they have. Let’s see, where can I find this one. Donate to bettering causes. Those who have actually donated. Actually in the broad category target I can target the moms let me do that real quick.
Actually, I can’t do partner and broad category targets at the same time so hang on a sec here. I can target those people who have kids that are 0 to 6 months or 1 year old or all of this in here. Actually if you go to Booksmetrix.com and go to the bottom on the left we’ve actually given you lists of all the counts here of everything and I’m having trouble clicking in here. It doesn’t want to load for me. There’s a bunch of targets here where there’s auto intender, they’re about to buy a car, they have a car, their car’s only a year old, their car… and so all of this is here. For some reason it’s not opening up this window. Oh, I know why; I’m in someone else’s account and I can’t see everything in here. In mine I can see everything. I think we’ve probably spent enough money that we can see everything. I don’t see everything here. Yeah, home value, residence, all of this. There’s some other ones in here but I’m not seeing where I have… what kinds of items they’ve bought so have they bought cough and cold medication?
Have they bought online? If anyone here is selling products online or they have a sass model you can target not only people who have that particular interest but have bought online too so it’s going to convert a lot better so if you’re doing B2C you’re going to combine your precise interest targets for moms and you know, things that moms like. You know, I love my kids or whatever that might be and these other kinds of targets or I’m going to upload my custom audience target which is my email list and the look alikes and other sorts of interests here, right? Broad category targets so the key to B2C especially is you have to and things together otherwise your audience is too big. Now, with Ad Words like we mentioned with dentists you get a keyword and that’s it. But, with Facebook you can say ‘and’. And they’re women, and they’re 25, they’re 40, and they live in a certain city and and this, and they’re in my list, and I want to hit them in search, and I want to do it inside the news feed, and I you see and, and, and, and right?
You and too many things and the audience gets to small so just make sure if that thing says less than 20 you’ve gone a little too far or your list is too small or something like that, right? B to C you don’t have to worry about that because the audiences are pretty niche. So, we’ve got about ten minutes left, maybe we’ll take a few questions and I’ll continue to go through some of these slides as we go through these questions.
Interviewer: That’s great, let me read a couple of these that people are asking or I’ll go back through and read a few that have been asked during the webinar itself. What is your ideal range, if you will, in terms of size, targeted size. Which are low end and your high end both for B to B and B to C? You have a range there that’s ideal?
Dennis: If you have a product or you’re in a vertical that’s inherently share-able as opposed to feminine products or something that’s sort of embarrassing where someone’s not going to share that they’re trying to get cosmetic surgery or they’re trying to have a kid or that they just got in trouble with the law. If you have a product or a service that is share-able like an agency and you’re talking about marketing things, then you should probably have 20-30% of your TPC budget in Facebook. So if you’re spending ten grand a month on Google AdWords you should probably spend two or three thousand on FaceBook. Of course that’s just a starting point, if you find that your ROI is way better on FaceBook then you would increase that. Now [Inaudible 00:49:36] that you’re spending on Facebook, you want to have your audience sizes be such that you’re not managing more than a couple hundred ads at once.
The reason why I’m saying you have to look at your total budget size is if you’ve got a hundred thousand dollar a month FaceBook ad budget, you probably don’t want to target down to people who are audiences of a hundred, right? Because that might be a little too small. Maybe you’re looking at a thousand, or maybe you’re doing some automation in Power Editor where you’re doing lots and lots. Like look at this, in Power Editor, let’s say I’ve got this ad that’s working- if this ad is working I can copy it, or I can take this entire list of ads and I can copy it and paste it. I can create a hundred ads, one click, right? Or in one right click. That kind of thing.
So your audience size is a function of your budget. Generally when we’re testing, I like to have audiences that are maybe a thousand, two thousand. If it’s something really micro-targeted like B to B and I just really want to hammer things. It’s an audience that’s so high-quality I just want to reach them all no matter what it costs, then maybe I’ll go down to an audience of a hundred and I’ll force-bid it at a ten dollar CPC. So if you’re not getting traction, we get this question all the time, if you’re not getting traction because you’re taking the default CPN or you’re just, whatever, just force bid it CPC at ten dollars.
Let me show you an example of that. Let’s see. There is an article in the L.A. Times talking about how brands are complaining that they’re not getting the exposure of the newsfeeds, so this is a great piece of research and the L.A. Times came to us and we came in and gave them all this data. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. But here it is, now we wanted this to get more exposure so we took this, we posted it onto our Facebook page saying, “Hey! What do you think about blah-blah-blah?” and what I told you before is I took this and I pasted it as just the URL, directly here. But it’s better to promote it as a post, right? And then I’m targeting all of the people who work at The Wall Street Journal, at Mashable, at The New York Times, and all these other places and guess what? We got coverage in all those other places.
So I know all the PR people who are thinking, “Wow. This is what I need to do. This is a whole new guerrilla PR instead of the email spamming people like me to write articles.” You know. For me, “Our client just released their new product, you need to cover it!” No, I don’t think so. You put out great content, and that great content… People like me who are on the hook to write an article everyday, believe me we’re very approachable. If you’ve got some interesting stuff to say, we want that, we want to be able to post it, right?
I’m writing articles all day long on all Facebook and these other sorts of places. So this is a great way to get huge exposure, and the audience is here so if I target- let’s say I had this as a post instead of this thing here, and it was, this page and I’m choosing a particular post. Let’s say that it was a post and I just mentioned the URL, there’s this one here, and I want to target all the people who work at CNN. How many do we have? Three hundred or four hundred or whatever the number is. You’ll see the number on the right side as it refreshes. Two thousand people right – that’s probably a little too narrow. I’ll take all the people in Atlanta. Then you start to get a lot of power. So don’t think about how big the audience is, don’t think in terms of, “I just want more fans or want to target more.” Think about making sure that you’re getting a high CTR and that it’s being very effective for you. If your CTR is not at least, say, half a percent on the right side, one percent of the news feed, and five percent in the mobile news feed- then you’re not doing your targeting good enough.
Let me just roll through a couple of these other things real quick here. So this kind of stuff we’ve done testing, with custom-audience targeting we’ll get a 40% click-through rate. The average on Facebook is .040% so we’re getting a thousand times better, not a thousand percent, a thousand times better CTR. Think about how you might do that. So Carry Bugbee [SP] gave us a tip. You can’t get very far starting on Facebook right now without spending money on ads – guess what, they’re a publicly-traded company, you have to. It’s no longer possible to build critical massive ads that are pay-for-play depending on the type of business, so you’ll probably need to offer deals now and then.
By the way, the offer is the post-hype that gets the most traction and most morality – but it also gets a lot of hating, too because people will say they didn’t claim it, so think about that. Facebook definitely requires a bigger investment, that’s true, Facebook ads are a way to get yourself into the news feed, mobile CTR’s are way higher. We’ve done this test where we’ve seen since, we have about a trillion impressions by the way on Facebook. I’m pretty sure we have more data than anybody – if anyone has more data, or knows of anyone that does let me know. But across these pages that we’ve got admin on we found that in September most of them lost about 50% of their traffic – which is just amazing. Of course Facebook said because the news feed became more competitive, and your content’s not as interesting, and you need to post more often and sort of thing but you have to advertise to make up for that difference. When you advertise you can make up for it and then some if you’re a passion page, because you get sharing.
Sharing is worth more, you can see where that’s coming from, and let me show you. I know we’ve got a couple of minutes, let me show you a couple of quick examples of how that works. People say, “What’s the biggest brand?” and they say ‘Coca-Cola’. Coca-Cola? I don’t think so. Coca-Cola has 64 million fans. 841,000 people talking about them. Less than a million. You know they spend money on advertising, and they spend a lot. I’m one of the few people I think that’s got admin on that page. So if I look at- and this is the only time I say the F-word- ‘I Fucking Love Science’. I know people are nodding. Look at this. Five million fans, and 3 million people talking about them. More than three times the engagement rate. It’s just one girl out of the U.K., this is what we call a passion-page. She’s posting amazing content 30 times per day and it’s interesting, right? And that causes tons and tons of sharing.
There’s another one that’s just like that. Her friend [Boy-Tech], he’s this Polish immigrant guy, I love him to death he’s hilarious. 670,000 fans, only one percent as many fans as Coca-Cola, yet he has more engagements. Just one dude. Of course, being Liberal, he’s talking about guns, and gay marriage, and any time there’s something going on he’s talking about that, right. Amazing, right? So he didn’t get penalized, these people we call passion-pages don’t get penalized. I’m here in the headquarters right now of [Desseret Club], Salt Lake, with our buddy Mike [Jenson] and they run a bunch of social pages and passion pages, you know I love my family, my grandmother is awesome, all of these family-oriented things because that’s what the church is about and that generates amazing sharing. Instead of ‘Please buy my book’, I don’t think anyone’s going to become a fan of ‘Please buy my book’. I mean maybe they will, but you know. So think about that.
Okay a couple more tips, I’m going to blast through these because we have some friends. Our buddy Nathan; he’s amazing. He’s probably one of the best users of GoToMeeting in terms of like a live webinar. If you go to one of his webinars, oh man, you are in for a treat. It is so much fun. It’s like a siren song, you need to plug cotton in your ears; he’s so good at getting people excited. The best word of mouth comes from tangible events where consumers connect with your brand so he holds these live webinars and demonstrates and gets people all worked up by showing them how powerful this software is. I say on top of that that you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit. His stuff is effective because he’s knowledgeable, he knows what he’s talking about, and he’s not just promoting some random thing. So if you’re interesting you’re able to multiply that, but Facebook’s the multiplier, it’s a big email engine, it’s the new postage stamp if you will. You’re delivering to the P.O. box. If you don’t have interesting content, all you’re doing is you’re multiplying crap. So you’re multiplying, awesome, but you’re multiplying crap. Doing a live webinar we’re asking you to engage, he’s getting people to like their page, he’s saying, “Hey. Please text to 82665” which is Facebook, and get people to fan your page by just texting to that number which is F-Book. So he gets people in the real world, and he gets them excited, and he follows up with them. And look at this, here’s proof of that occurring.
How about we’ll go for five more minutes, I want to be sensitive to the time here, I know a lot of people have to go, but maybe we’ll just go for five more minutes because we got a late start.
Interviewer: That’s fine, that’s perfect.
Dennis: Okay good, I see people here. That’s good. Our buddy Olly, now he can [reply to] any sponsored post right through [Yaz] Manager on Facebook, change the duration time, set up your own budget, click on boost post… So if you’re promoting a post, never click the boost button. That is designed just for small businesses to target… Well, it used to be that you could target your fans, but now it targets all of your fans and all the friends of those fans, who likely are not going to be relevant for what you’re trying to do. Any ad you run has to be socially relevant, meaning a friend has endorsed it, or liked it, or connected to it; and it must fit within your target audience. Both of those conditions must be true.
Then I had lunch with my good friend, [Maria Smith] and she said, “You want people to see the interaction’s organic, not have the sponsored label. I typically wait a few hours until I have comments.” So what she’s talking about, is she posts something on Facebook. You know [Maria Smith] she’s got a million twitter followers and she goes around, you think I speak a lot? Man, she is. I don’t know how she does it. But she’s got her books, and all the stuff… I can go on and on about how I love [Maria Smith]. But anyway, she does promote some of her posts, but her tip, is she doesn’t promote the post immediately because she wants to show the organic content. So let me show you an example of how that is here. So if I just go to our page on [Blitz Metrics], and you can see, it’s a little bit slow here, isn’t it? The internet slow for me? By the way, we’re watching our analytics which will, it’s free by the way our engineers haven’t figured out how to tie in billing so if you go to dashboard.blitzmetrics.com you can play for free. It’ll take us a couple months to figure out how to do it. Why is this not loading? Okay here we go. Let me just show you something. Let me show you an example of how organic page and viral work together real quick. Okay. I should turn a little crank to make the internet go faster.
Alright, see this? [Mahri] and calamari, or [mori] like Ferrari. And there she is, she’s holding up a dish of calamari. I couldn’t help it, but I had to order calamari when we were at the restaurant, and she of course prettied her hair up- she always looks great- now look at this. Organic, 328, viral, 17,000. We only have three thousand fans on our page. How’s that possible? Is that surprising? And then we paid for 6,000 impressions, or 6,000 reach, which is however many impressions that is, right? Isn’t that amazing? So people say, “Well I’m not getting exposure.” Well, what does this 17,000 mean? I’d love to hear people in the comments. What are they, what do they think, what’s causing that? It’s because people are sharing, it’s because they’re liking, they’re passing it along. And that’s generating; it continues to get pushed back up into the news feed. Your post probably lasts 45 minutes to an hour in the news feed- did you know that? You post something, then it just dies, unless someone else keeps it alive by commenting, or liking, or sharing- it just basically falls down the newsfeed because in the hours since then all this other new stuff is happening, and your stuff just falls down to the bottom of the newsfeed, right? So. If you have the high engagement, and you have stuff that is truly share-able like this, then it works really well. Don’t promote it immediately, we’ll talk about Rosetta Stone another time, but they basically are tying it to revenue.
They’re having all their channels work together at the same time. So they’re running TV ads, something at Barnes and Noble, they’re running the same stuff on Facebook, and they’re testing like crazy. You know which of these ads performed better? See of these ads here? You’d never know, I’d never know, I thought I’d know. If we have more time I’ll talk about who it was and when and why, but you’ve got to bring them down the funnel, you’ve got to set up your ads in a wedding cake. And if you’ve got a fancy wedding it might have many layers on it, right like this Tower of Pisa kind of thing- but you’ve got to set up these different layers. The base layer you’ve got your page-post ads, right, which is there to drive awareness here. Interest where you’ve got sponsored stories and that’s why Facebook has ad-combos that drive these things together so you create a page-like story, and why you want to create a fan, and then you have custom audience targeting which is there to drive people all the way down to a sale. To your iFrame landing page, to collecting email addresses, to get them to check out, to you know whatever your offer is. The search ads I was telling you about are kind of a function of both, but it’s more kind of toward bottom of funnel so when you stack all of these together and you look at your analytics, you can figure out where you need to spend your money.
And people will always ask the question, “Well how much should I spend on conversion versus trying to get more fans versus trying to engage my audience?” and I say well it depends. Figure out where your bottle-necks are for your business, and figure out were the overall ROI is, it depends on how big your list is already and how much content you have, and how much traffic you have to your site. So for everyone it’s different. Never follow anyone’s rule. It says, “Oh, you should always post, at 3 PM on Wednesdays, and it should be 130 characters, and you should…” That’s all garbage. It’s unique to your business. I wish it was all that easy, right? So here are all these examples. Facebook is basically gigantic email database. All of the same metrics aren’t the same for email. Offset pixel, right, you track the conversion, tie it back to a cost-per-acquisition just like Google AdWords conversion, right? [Marcato] does that, loves to talk about how they do it. Cost-per-lead, you can have that dropped- of course you want to look at the quality, and you’re targeting people by their key-words, of course you’re going to target the people who are VP’s of marketing versus those people who use Google Analytics; they probably can’t afford [Marcato] right? And here are all the examples, you’re going to have different actions; if you don’t choose the kind of action you want by default it’s going to be photo-views. So you can use action-spec, which that looks code, I know, it looks kind of tricky here to action-page type story blah blah blah but you can choose a conversion, you can choose people like it, you can choose whatever that is; it works super well.
So we’ve got a bunch of tips here. We don’t have enough time to go through it, maybe a follow-up webinar, but happy to answer any final questions. I know [McKay] has a couple words to say. Sorry I went a couple of minutes over but I want to thank everybody; it looks like we didn’t lose anybody either, that’s great. I want to thank everybody for attending. If you’ve got any questions feel free to hit up any of us on Twitter, or in email, and we’re here to share openly we’re not trying to sell software, you know [McKay]’s got some great software but we believe that if you practice inbound marketing, thought-leadership, where you openly share all your best tips- that’s what we’re doing here- you can go ahead and implement this, it works I promise you. Every one of these things we’ve tested. If you openly share in your area, so with us we’re sharing about Facebook ads because that’s kind of our thing, but think about what is the thing you do? How do you openly share so that you can become the authority at your thing? You share that on Facebook and all the people will come in and say [Carry Bugbee]’s amazing. Right? Because she knows all about PR and social. Then those people do the work for you. I know we went through a bunch of stuff here and there’s a bunch of technical stuff, too, but the big old raw picture is use Facebook, use the word-of-mouth, use the people who love you in the real world to do the work for you. Amplify by taking your existing email list, your existing assets that are working; don’t create all these new assets. New posts, new landing pages, just reuse everything and amplify it to the people who need to see it and so advertising’s a way of getting all of that to happen where you don’t have to get creative. The creative is Mike [Jensen] just bought this book, “Okay, well then maybe I want to buy that book, too.” Right?
Alright, thanks guys, I’ll hang around for a little bit.
Interviewer: Dennis that was awesome, and compliments to you. I think we’re all very lucky for you disseminating that information to us because we’ve all been to some webinars where it’s really high-level practical, strategic stuff, and this was really, really good information. Specifically how to do it, and how targeted Facebook can be. We really appreciate it. The main question that we always get with these webinars, is are they going to be recorded, or is the webinar going to be recorded. Let me show you where the recording’s going to be found and then we can finish up here. This, you should be seeing here, is our webinar series page; so this was today’s webinar with Dennis. The recording will be on this page later this afternoon as soon as it renders and all of the video things that have to happen to video occur. So Logmycalls.com/webinar, and then it’ll redirect to webinar series, and the webinar will be here. So come and view that recording, and thanks for sticking with us for some of those technical things at the start to everyone who attended as well. And Dennis, thank you again for your time, we appreciate it, we know you’re a busy guy and it sounds like you’re travelling, too, which makes it even more challenging. So we appreciate it. Any final words from you, Dennis?
Dennis: Hey guys. We’re here for you, I happen to run a software company but the reason why we do that, is we are here to try and scale up everything we know. I know it is hard as a small business, or as a consultant, to do all of these things because you don’t have the benefit of testing against other peoples’ big budgets, or maybe Facebook’s not going to answer your phone call. We have that, so we honestly are here to help you. We’ve created a number of guides, we’ve made some software, some free tools, whatever you have… I travel a lot, but I always answer emails, so any questions hit me up on Twitter it’s [@DennisU] or hit me up on email, that’s actually the best way to reach my by the way I don’t even answer the phone, it’s [dennis@blitzmetrics.com]. I’m glad, you’re all busy, so thanks for spending time to attend and if there’s anything that we’re missing let me know, we can set up a follow-up webinar; very easy to do. If there are certain articles that you guys have an interest in I’ll certainly post about it, [so I write it all Facebook], but we’re here for you and I’d love to see everyone be awesome. If you’ve got maybe something that worked well for you and you want to be featured as a case study, let me know, and that way we can spread the love. If you’re on the same page about sharing and being transparent and helping others and teaching, even if you’re not being paid for it, then I want to talk to you.
