When it comes to digital advertising, Google Ads and Facebook Ads are the behemoths. In the social media world, Facebook is the category killer, dwarfing everything else and that means they have a tonne of data on people.
A lot of people find that creepy, some unethical, but we aren’t here to discuss the ethics of what Facebook does. It is what it is, for now, but what it does do is present you with a massive opportunity … if your target market is on Facebook.
Bob Regnerus is the author of the 4th Edition of the Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising. Bob has an uncanny ability to pull a person’s story out of their head and heart and engineer that into highly-responsive ads and creative. Bob has 22 years of experience in Digital Marketing and has served thousands of clients and industry leaders such as Dan Kennedy, Bill Glazer, Ali Brown, and Perry Marshall.
Bob joins the show to discuss what it takes to create a successful Facebook Advertising campaign.
This is part 1 of 2 of my chat with Bob so be sure to pick up the conversation again in Episode 35.
You can learn more at feedstories.com, connect with Bob on LinkedIn, and purchase a copy of the 4th Edition of the Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising here.
Enjoy.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
As part of the service, I have had this episode transcribed. Transcribing, proofing, and editing a podcast episode is A LOT of work. That’s why I use a service called REV who provide professional freelance transcriptionists who are vetted for quality. While they offer a 99% accuracy guarantee, I do not proof-read their work extensively. Instead, I simply copy and paste below and, as such, please note that this is not be a verbatim transcript of the episode and I have trimmed things like the intro, close, and mid-show ad.
Daniel:
Facebook is the category killer when it comes to users and volume. For a lot of small and medium businesses, it can seem like there is just too much going on and that they won’t be able to cut through to their target audience. Is that a valid take?
Bob:
It’s not valid, and here’s the reason why. The Facebook ad algorithm essentially has three components, the first is budget. So yeah, if you have a really high budget, you’re going to get your ads shown. But there’s two components that are actually more important. The first one is your click-through rate. So if you’re able to write a better ad than your competitors, no matter what they’re spending, that’s going to give you an advantage. And then the third component is your expected conversion rate on your website. So if your landing page converts well, that’s also a bonus.
So essentially what you’re doing, with those two variables you’re creating a discounting situation for yourself where you’re going to pay less than your competitors. Conversely, a poor performing ad, or a poor performing website, you’re paying a premium for the traffic. So I like to say, let the big brand advertisers pay the premium, because I know they’re not writing as good ads as we are, and I know their landing pages aren’t designed for response. So we can compete as small and medium-sized businesses against the big behemoths for sure.
Daniel:
I love that framing about discounting by writing good ads and having good converting landing pages. I think it’s a great point for people to keep in mind. Bob, is Facebook advertising, is a better suited to business to consumer, or business to business, or it doesn’t really make much difference?
Bob:
I’ll say this, business to consumer it’s certainly easier, okay, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t do business to business. In fact, most of the people, probably about 50% of my clients, are dealing in the B2B sector. I think the biggest thing that Facebook allows you to do in the B2B sector is establish your platform and become an expert. We’ll probably dig into this later, but if you’re the type of advertiser that values content and building authority, you’re going to be really successful as a B2B advertiser on Facebook.
Daniel:
How does a business use organic content? Because we can create organic content for free. Yes, we might have to pay to distribute it to as wide an audience as possible, but how does a business use their organic content in tandem with their advertising and partnership? Is that a consideration, or can and maybe should they exist in silos, ie. they work independent of each other.
Bob:
I like to think that content is medium agnostic. So I like to create a piece of content and leverage it in multiple ways. Certainly, like you said, when I create a piece of content, for instance today, I posted something on LinkedIn, I posted on Facebook, I posted on Twitter, I like to use it in multiple ways. I like to post it on my blog, even if it’s a video that lives on YouTube, I can post it on my blog. So I like cross platform and cross media indexing of content, and I think what it allows you to do is it gets you the point where it’s not overwhelming. You’re not writing individual content for individual platforms, I think that’s kind of a waste. People are going to follow you and do Facebook stalking, or LinkedIn stalking, they’re going to track you down on their media choice.
So really the only difference is kind of catering to the platform a little bit. So obviously if it’s video, you want to cater more towards a Facebook video, YouTube video, just the standard format there. And then if you’re more of a word person, you’re thinking about content that it’s going to be read on LinkedIn, or read on your blog. So I think that’s the only difference, but I don’t create a piece of content thinking necessarily, is this organic or paid? I just don’t view it that way.
Daniel:
Well, following on from that, can a business, or should a business, only advertise on Facebook if they aren’t keen or don’t have the capacity to even produce regular organic content for their page?
Bob:
I have clients that don’t produce any organic content, to be honest, they focus mostly on paid content. I love paid advertising because there’s an efficiency to it, and there’s a logic to it. Pay a dollar to make two, you know what you get. With organic content you’re at the mercy of the algorithms, and sometimes a piece of content will get picked up, sometimes it won’t. I kind of prefer the, hey, I have an expected results when I pay to get my content promoted, or I’m putting it in front of people on an ad.
Daniel:
And it’s repeatable as well, isn’t it? You can look at past campaigns and potentially predict how it’s going to perform where, as you said, with organic content you’re at the mercy of the algorithm, but also at the mercy of whether it actually hits a sweet spot with engagement with your audience.
Bob:
Yeah, absolutely. The predictability is key. I think a good way to put it is this, there’s going to be a couple of media that you end up being really comfortable with and really good with. So it may not be Facebook for you, I’m not here to tout Facebook in any way, but you may find that, you know what, I really jive with YouTube, and I’m really good at producing YouTube content. And then you may use the other platforms to lift up YouTube as your primary channel.
I’ve got clients that primarily advertise their business on LinkedIn, and I’m one of them. I’m the type of person I’m looking for higher end businesses, so ironically, I don’t run a ton of Facebook ads to build up my coaching program, I actually build relationships on Facebook, and I use Facebook to prop up my LinkedIn strategies. Does that make sense?
Daniel:
Absolutely makes sense. Yeah, you’ve got to go where your audience is, right?
Bob:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Daniel:
Well, as I said before, Facebook, it’s a category killer when it comes to the total volume of users and traffic, and with that comes great targeting ability, because they’ve got so much data on people. Can you maybe outline some of the targeting functionality that people can find in Facebook that it provides when people are looking to set up and run ads?
Bob:
Yeah, Facebook is very powerful. The fact that they know everything that you plug into your own personal profile. They know exactly what you like, they know what you’re reading, they know what you stop on, and that’s kind of creepy. But then it extends off of Facebook. So the Facebook pixel is installed on billions of websites so they know your behavior, so they know what you buy, they know what you land on. So Facebook knows a lot about you.
And it became really real to me a number of years ago, I actually had a face-to-face with the head Facebook engineer who is in charge of the people that code the ad algorithm. And he told me, he said, “There’s two things that we could do really well and there’s one thing we can’t, here’s what we could do really well. Number one, we could target better than you. So don’t try to outsmart the algorithm. Number two, we can bid better than you. So ask Facebook for what you want, which it’s called a campaign objective. Because the thing that we can’t do well at all is ad creative, because essentially creative has to be developed by humans. So focus all your effort on ad creative.”
And that was really eye-opening to me because what it said was, number one, machine learning can really take the burden of finding your potential customers. The best way to do this, Daniel, is to have what we call lookalike audiences, and lookalike audiences are simply models of other audiences. No matter what country you’re in, you have this ability. And the key to making a really good, a great look alike audience, is use the right model. And so what we teach in the book is you want to have a model of your customers. If you don’t have a good list of customers, then you want to use a list of email addresses. And if you don’t have those, then model your top visitors to your website. So there’s always something we can model that will allow Facebook to understand, based on behavior, who are people that are absolutely targeted for my business and for my offer.
Daniel:
The Facebook head engineer was essentially saying to you, don’t try and game the system. Don’t try and outsmart the algorithm, but for years, you’re old enough, like I am, to remember how we used to be able to sort of game systems with SEO and things like that. Do you have many businesses coming to you who have spent a lot of time and focus on trying to game the system and try and figure out the shortcuts rather than actually trying to focus on the creative and get that right?
Bob:
No, not in recent memory, because I think what people… Google itself lends itself more gaming, because the interface is extremely complex and things are more hidden. Now I’ll say this about Facebook, they try to simplify the interface, but it changes quite a bit. In fact, it changed twice in the time that we were writing the book, which was frustrating because we had to keep changing our screenshots. But Facebook has become a little bit more devious in hiding certain settings and so forth, but Facebook is so straightforward in terms of its targeting and bidding strategies, and people inherently trust them more, and I do believe they work.
Google advertisers who come over to Facebook have a difficult time because they don’t trust the machine, but Facebook advertisers generally trust the machine because the machine has generally been good to them. Now that’s a big wide ranging statement there, but in general I trust the targeting, and I do trust the bidding strategy. I do focus 80% of my time on a campaign that’s really thinking about developing good creative copy for my ad, and the right media image or video for my ad, because that truly is the differentiator in the Facebook algorithm.
Daniel:
You mentioned there about Facebook interfaces and changes and settings, and some settings might be hidden or moved. Should people simply just use their normal Facebook business page account to set up and manage ads, or are there tools that can help them on that front?
Bob:
You know, there are tools. I’ve tried them, I found them to be more cumbersome than they were worth. I find Facebook ad manager is sufficient, the business manager is sufficient and simple enough, and fast enough for me to use. So I have not used any tool, gosh, in the last five years.
Daniel:
Bob, I’ve got a few listener questions that were sent in, and so I thought I’d ask them.
Bob:
Excellent.
Daniel:
Kind of at the right times in terms of how they relate to the previous question, and the first comes from Kieran May from Accross Business, and he asked, “Facebook has been promoting Facebook Business suite. Is this something to pursue, or is it just another attempt to be all things to all people?”
Bob:
So the Business Suite in relation to, it’s mostly for use on the phone, being able to manage from a mobile device when you can’t be on your desktop. So I haven’t played around at all with Business Suite, I’ve been so focused in on putting together the book and putting together coaching and things like that. It’s fairly new and I haven’t dug deep into it, so that’s one that I think the jury is still out. But I do know that their push is to help you manage your ads better on mobile platforms because so many of their users are mobile only, and it’s been really difficult if you have to manage any ad accounts from your phone or your iPad, really difficult. So I know this is their attempt to try to ease the burden on those ad managers for sure.
Daniel:
Bob, that’s a great base so far. So let’s start to talk in a little bit more detail. What products are available within the Facebook system, because people may have heard terms, and you mentioned some of these earlier, but terms like targeting and retargeting and boosting, dark posts, pixels, messenger ads, links with Instagram, maybe even bots, et cetera. What sort of tools are available and people should be focusing on?
Bob:
Well, from a strategic standpoint, there’s two things you’re thinking about. There’s going after cold traffic, and there’s retargeting traffic. So what I teach in the book is the bottom up strategy. Focus first on your bottom up funnel and retargeting, because no matter what happens, you’re getting traffic to your site every day, and it’s not just coming from Facebook. If you have any organic presence, direct traffic, maybe you’re running some Google traffic, whatever the case may be, you want to set up your retargeting on Facebook first, because that’s the most profitable and the easiest traffic to convert. It’s the most inexpensive traffic to convert. So start there, build your nurturing strategy.
People, especially if you’re in the service business, if you have a higher price or complex product, people need time in order to make a decision whether or not they want to buy from you. So be prepared to nurture those folks and lead them by the hand over the time it takes them to make that purchase decision. Then and only then do you go and shift towards a cold traffic strategy and start to scale and bring cold traffic in. The advantage of building your retargeting campaigns first is that the day you start that cold traffic, you’re already retargeting it. So that’s the one thing.
Inside of Facebook, you know that right now Mark Zuckerberg and company is having some issues potentially, but they have multiple platforms inside of Facebook. So you can run ads that target Facebook on mobile and desktop, Instagram mobile and desktop, WhatsApp, and a number of platforms. They also have an entire network called the audience network, which is you being able to show ads to people that play apps on devices across the planet. One of the things that I stress to people is, if you’re starting out fresh, don’t be worried about all the different types of products that Facebook has. There’s also Stories, which mimics Snapchat.
So there are dozens and dozens of what they call placements inside of Facebook. I tell people, focus first on the mobile and desktop newsfeed on Facebook. Get that working, get that converting, then step over to Instagram, because there’s some slight differences in the way Instagram works than Facebook works. Move over there, get it working there, and then start trying these other placements. You’re going to overwhelm yourself if you try to create an ad that caters to all these placements the first time coming out. You’re going to be confused by how it’s set up, and how it works, and how they differ. So start with the mobile and desktop newsfeed, shift to Instagram, then shift to those other placements as you get success.
Daniel:
The Facebook engineer told you to focus on ad creative because they’re not great at it, it needs human interaction to make it happen. What can you tell us about static image ads versus video ads versus carousel type ads in terms of when they may be best suited, and the pros and cons of each?
Bob:
You should attempt to create a variety of advertising. Meaning, don’t just go with static ads, or don’t just go with video. You’re going to hypnotize your audience, so to speak. So what I like to say is, I love video. I own a video marketing company called Feedstories. We prefer video, Facebook prefers video. In fact, this is going on four years ago, everything they talked about was video. I remember, there’s a couple speakers from Facebook and Instagram, and they essentially both said, we’re video companies now. And you can see this, how Facebook and Instagram have evolved into video companies.
There’s inherent advantages to using video. Number one, it’s much easier for people to consume video on mobile devices. It just is. It’s very hard to read a lot of text on a device. So mobile video especially is really easy for people to consume. And just a reminder, this is just an aside, but if you’re going to do any video on Facebook, make sure you have captions on, because most people tend to watch videos with the sound off because they’re in places where they have to have the sound off.
So we like to use a lot of video, but static images are also okay. What I would ask people to do is use more realistic looking photos versus archival or stock photos. If you’re using stock photos or archive photos that you get from, iStockphoto or Getty Images, or something like that, you’re basically letting people know that it’s an ad. I mean, you want to appear alongside pictures of family, friends, food, pets. You want your content to blend in, yet stand out. But don’t stand out because you’re lazy and use the stock image. Use an image that is more realistic, reflective of your market, it gets their attention, and engages them into the ad.
And then your other consideration really is copy. I always get a question for people like, do I use long copy or short copy? And the answer is, use enough copy to tell your story, but lean on the side of short copy until you get good at writing longer copy. This is just a skill that people have to develop. You’re going to waste a lot of time and waste a lot of money if you try to write long copy and you don’t engage people. The long copy we end up writing tends to be very much in a story format, so that people stay engaged and will read all the way through. Don’t try to plug your whole sales letter into an ad, because people will not read it. Try to drive them away from your ad to your landing page where they can be focused, but people will read long ad copy if it’s engaging and it’s kind of a story, and it captures their curiosity, or it entertains them. That’s when long copy really works on Facebook.