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What To Do With Results From Split Testing

Rather than using blunt force to completely cut off audiences that aren’t performing as well, consider that at the right price, nearly any audience can be profitable.

That means bidding and budgeting can make “okay” audiences perform as well as any other audience, such that we allocate marginal dollars to where we get the most marginal return– a core microeconomics principle.

So lower budgets on lower performing audiences to see CPL go down. Then manual bid, if still necessary to force down the CPL. This is a more elegant approach than basically excluding an entire audience.

A great Corporate Stay in Vancouver

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

I’ve been to Vancouver half a dozen times– an easy 2 hour drive from Seattle or a short flight up from Portland, SF, or LA. My favorite experience was hiking Grouse Mountain with Brad Twohig, before he become a big-time venture capitalist and before I became 70 pounds in the obese category.

This is Canada’s San Francisco, in my opinion– clean, high tech, and very outdoorsy. There are tons of tourists (Asians, like me) and much to do downtown. When I was there a few days ago, I saw a movie and caught a bunch of Pokemon. I’m at Level 29 now.

For those trying to save money, I’d recommend you fly into Seattle and then drive or take the super scenic Amtrak up. When I bought Brad’s ticket, which was for our trip to see our buddy Markus Frind, it was under $250 round-trip from New York to Seattle, even last minute. Had I bought a ticket from New York to Vancouver it would have been almost triple that.

The folks at corporatestays.com reached out to me as an influencer, offering me a free stay at one of their locations in exchange for an honest write-up.

So I chose their downtown Vancouver location (Vancouver, BC– not Vancouver, WA), among the many they have in North America, South America, and Europe.

It was on the 20th floor, right next to the stadium and the SkyTrain—high enough that you can actually look into the stadium and see the scoreboard.

I was there on business, so there wasn’t time for going to any of the games.

But I did manage to go to a restaurant that is now my favorite one in Canada—Chambar.

Chambar

It was so good, I went there twice. Unbelievable lamb shank and desserts. And with the Canadian dollar worth only 76 cents against the US dollar— everything is on sale!

I’m a frequent business traveler, doing over 300,000 miles per year, so convenience and simple luxury is key. Being right in the middle of downtown is great.

The condo itself was what you’d expect from a 3-star hotel. Having a kitchen was nice, if you’re staying somewhere for a long time and wants some comforts of home. I was on the road for the last two weeks in San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC, Miami, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, and other places.

The washer/dryer was nice—and they included the soap packets, too. Saved me the effort of going to a fluff and fold, which is what I typically do on the road. I won’t pay $100 to do laundry, normally preferring to pay $10 to drop off my luggage of clothes and pick it up 4 hours later.

The condo has some standard features like a doorman, small gym, and outdoor pool/jacuzzi. It was snowing outside, so I wasn’t “that” badly interested in going in the jacuzzi..

The whole check-in and check-out process was fast and efficient. Better than what you’d typically get through some other services.

The condo I got was well priced as well– way cheaper than a hotel. The bed was comfy, too. No pics of the bathroom, since I feel weird taking pictures there.

Surgeons don’t leave the emergency room to go out to knock on doors

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

You spend all this time talking to potential clients– they appear to have money, interest, and clear need for your services.
But somehow they don’t buy– they went with someone else, balked at the price, were just milking you for free consulting, or turned out to be jerks.

How do you avoid all this?

Know that surgeons don’t leave the emergency room to go out to knock on doors.

Imagine that you run a hospital and somebody waltzes into the emergency room.
They demand that you parade out every single type of surgeon and specialist you have.
Each one has to explain what they do and how they do it.

And all the while, you’re hoping that this patient will buy one of the procedures.
But the longer you spend answering their questions, the more you know it’s costing valuable time.

If you’re a consultant, freelancer, or agency, do you see what’s happening here?

Unless they have clear pain, don’t try to sell them on a surgery.
And unless they walk into your emergency room, don’t go out of your way to talk to them.

But what about generating leads, you say?
I can’t just sit there hoping that if I build it, they will come– we have to sell, right?

Yes, and you do that by putting out a lead magnet– a demonstration of your expertise.
And you qualify these people by using the “strategy assessment” to get their goals, content, and targeting.

In other words, if someone comes to the emergency room, the doctors aren’t going to just start operating.
No matter what the patient “thinks” the problem is, the specialists will take blood, x-rays, and diagnostics.

And you know that most patients are wrong in their self-diagnosis.
They also believe that they can get a heart surgery for the price of heartburn medication.

Same thing, right?

We follow a process called MAA— short for Metrics > Analysis > Action

As much as the would-be patient wants to get straight to action, we always follow these 3 sequential steps.

Metrics is to collect vitals via bloodwork, x-rays, and such– called the “strategy assessment” and access checklist.
That means we have not only their GCT (goals, content, targeting), but access to their analytics and ads.

Analysis is where they must pay for our time, so we can properly diagnose the issues and make a recommendation.
We don’t do this for free– our time is valuable and they must respect it by buying a “Power Hour”.

Action is the treatment plan, which could be surgery, medication, hospitalization, or other procedures.
And like any modern hospital, every procedure is governed by a checklist with the price associated with that package.

Are you operating with this efficiency– to not waste time with hypochondriacs, tire kickers, and witch doctors?

Are you making sure that you’re charging properly for your services by not giving out free consulting, even if you need the money?

But it’s XYZ MegaCorp, you say!
And all the more reason that if they’re qualified (heard of the BANT acronym?), they can put down whatever you charge for an hour.
We charge $750 for the Power Hour, but others may charge as little as $97.

For actual implementation, do you have a checklist for you and your people to follow, so you can create “repeatable excellence”?
If not, then you have random outcomes and too much manual, custom effort.

Logan Young is our Director of Operations, and stresses the importance of setting client expectations to keep things running smoothly:

“It’s essential to establish aligned expectations with a client from the get-go. If you let a client dictate the terms of your process, they will only continue to do so once you start implementing, questioning your practices and techniques at every step along the way”

But every client is different, you say!
You want room to be creative and to not be a robot cranking out objects on the assembly line.

The Tesla Model S is a template, too– and not low quality, mass production.
And every major surgical procedure has nuance, but is still governed by checklists, all the way down to how to scrub your hands before starting.
Do you think these doctors are just robots?

If you’re an agency, consultant, or freelancer, embrace the power of process.

The summary flow is this:

Strategy Assessment > Power Hour > Package

And this aligns with MAA: Metrics > Analysis > Action.

Implement this and watch your client headaches disappear, your lead gen struggles go away, and your operations run more smoothly.

5 Tips to Make Facebook Your Lead Driving Machine

By Alex Ownejazayeri Leave a Comment

Facebook’s lead generation capabilities are powerful. With the right strategy, you can drive warm prospects to landing pages, registration forms, or checkouts for no more than $1.

And yes…

… it’s possible.

Tip 1: Get your plumbing in place.

What’s Plumbing?

It’s the term we use for tracking. This includes analytics and tracking pixels aka “tags” that you can add to your site using Google Tag Manager.

Without tracking, there’s no attribution of conversions to specific ads or landing pages. This means lost revenue, since you’ll be paying for ads without knowing which ones are driving sales.

Plumbing is critical for analytics, driving more revenue from abandoning audiences, and for creating lookalikes (to find similar customers). By putting users into buckets you can remarket to them, creating a personalized customer experience – a step in nurturing folks through funnel logic.

Pro Tip: Use the Facebook pixel instead of the Conversion Tracking pixel, since Facebook has shifted away from it.

We have a do it yourself guide with checklists to help with implementation.
Tip 2: Boost to audiences that are warm.

Use custom audiences (your email list or your website traffic). They’ve already opted in and consume your content, so they’re more likely to want to hear more or buy.

You can build lookalike audiences from these lists to find similar customers too.

Website Custom Audiences (WCAs) are retargeting audiences who have visited other pages, but have not ended up on your “success page”. This “bucket” is typically full of folks right at the bottom of your funnel who need only a nudge to convert.

You must have plumbing in place first– otherwise Facebook can’t do the targeting for you.

Tip 3: Create similar ads to choose “winners” and boost evergreen

Ads manager allows you to “create a similar ad set”. When targeting audiences, start off with interest, workplace, and even behavioral targeting, but don’t do these all at once. Create similar ads with a few specific interests and boost them all at once.

Once the ads start picking up traffic (over 500 impressions), pick out the interests that are performing the best (low Cost per Engagement (CPE), high relevance, high engagement).

Start combining effective interests together to start building saved audiences that you can boost to directly from future posts.

This “scientific method” of targeting is great for discovering ad/audience combinations that can be boosted evergreen.

When a piece of content drives consistent engagement at a CPM of $2 or less, set it as “ongoing”, so it can continuously push traffic through your funnel (this can be done on Twitter and LinkedIn too).

Alison Herzog is an expert marketing strategist, thought leader, and figurehead for women in the workplace. We promoted an article about her on our Facebook page using this method.

We promoted against 5 different interests and compiled an ultimate “engagement” audience, which made a massive jump from a max of 27 engagements to 119. The relevance score sat at 8 for some time with a CPE of $0.17 (before the audience started to burn out), indicating or goals, content, and targeting were all aligned.

Tip 4: Video. Video. Video.

Have you scrolled through your news feed lately? Video is hot on social and with Live being Facebook’s latest release, it gets favored in the news feed.

Use every opportunity to create video content, because it will drive excellent engagement for a fraction of a penny.

Tip 5: Micro-targeted ads

Some of these companies that are spending 20k a day target broad audiences and lose money doing spray and pray advertising.

Facebook lets you micro-target using the Dollar A Day strategy– the biggest bang for your buck on social.

Hint: you can do this on Twitter and LinkedIn too!

Because you’re targeting audiences of less than 1,000 people, you stretch your ad spend for maximum impact – hitting just the influencers.

Do you have complaints about the new iPhone? What would you like to say to Tim Cook?

Or perhaps you’d like to avoid the round and round with customer service like we did with Uber.

We have a guide on this featuring stepwise checklists, so you can do it too. This is the ultimate form of lead generation, since you incept the executives and influencers at the companies that you’d like to work with.

Who’s your dream client? Write a blog post or article on a high authority site and micro-target them.

Then let me know, so I can applaud you for it!

Have you used Facebook for lead generation? Let me know how in the comments below (tell me about your saucy lead ad tips).

Humanizing B2B: Connecting with real people in a machine-driven world – Interview with Kelsey Carroll of HPE.

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

One of our main goals at BlitzMetrics is bringing out the human element in an otherwise machine and data-driven industry– to give it that human touch.

Kelsey Carroll leads branded social content for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Prior to her current role, she ran PR for an independent film studio in Austin, TX and then got her start in marketing with the integrated agency, W2O Group. When she’s not reviewing ad copy and creative, she can be found eating Mexican food and seeking out the perfect karaoke song.

She recently answered some of our questions and shared some advice on the importance of the human element while applying it to B2B campaigns:

Why is being human important (especially in B2B tech)?

The robots haven’t taken over (yet). While it’s true that many commoditized, repeatable tasks have been automated, B2B tech sales has remained a largely relational person-to-person business. People like doing business with people that they like and trust… it’s that simple.

But how can a big brand come off as likable, relatable? Being human is important, especially in B2B tech, because we believe there is a person behind every transaction and we attempt to connect with those people through shared experience. For example, one of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s key partners is Dreamworks Animation. Instead of saying, HPE FlexFabric increases rendering efficiency, we might lean into the story that families love Kung Fu Panda and HPE technology makes that possible.

Since people are getting better at spotting and avoiding ads, how can you make sure your ads attract the right users’ attention?

Let’s say you’ve done everything right in the social advertising world, according to Dennis Yu. The plumbing is set, your targeting is on point. You’ve optimized the process so your content has landed in front of the right people at the right time. You’ve “hacked” the mysterious algorithms (!) But, there’s still a person on the other end receiving your message. That person can skip, scroll past or even block your ad if it’s not useful, entertaining or valuable. Ads that attract and attain the right users’ attention are usually the ones that embody at least one of those key attributes.

How can content marketers make an emotional connection and get an audience to care about their brand?

As content marketers, we need to be honest with ourselves. Even though I am not necessarily the target customer for B2B tech sales, I’m always asking myself, and challenging my team to ask themselves, “Would I share this? Would this make me smile? How useful it this?” It has to pass the human litmus test, or else it will get scrolled past, skipped over. There is such a competition for people’s attention these days and any the most captivating, through-provoking, visual content will be worthy of anyone’s time, let alone your target customers’.

Social media provides a unique opportunity to make a connection, then track behaviors and responses to form a relationship, over time. From awareness to interest, to consideration, and ultimately, conversion, the narrative should remain consistent. It’s like someone who goes from being a stranger to acquaintance, and then a friend who becomes your best friend. The person doesn’t change, you just get to know them better, while they build credibility and gain your trust.

What’s the best channel to reach a B2B audience?

It depends on what your goal is, of course. If you’re going for more of an awareness play, I say, go where the eyeballs are. Facebook and Instagram’s ad tools allow for some pretty sophisticated targeting, plus they reach almost 2 billion of the world’s population.

Since one-to-one social selling is more about finding that exact right person within a company that makes the buying decisions, LinkedIn is most likely the best channel to search and locate for that person. With tools like Sales Navigator you can track and qualify leads all within the LinkedIn environment, which seems pretty efficient.

What advice would you give to a brand that doesn’t have a big budget for creating content or promoting it on social?

I think a common feeling towards social media marketing for small businesses is that they tried it and “it didn’t work.” Marketing on social media isn’t any easier than any other method, but it’s far more efficient.There are a variety of different levers that can be pulled, like width and depth of your targeting, and small tweaks in graphic or messaging. The more disciplined marketers will A/B/C/D/E test these different variables in order to optimize.

Sometimes smaller brands can create their own attention by being the early bird as social channels roll out new features. As we saw with Facebook Live, the News Feed has been favoring live content and brands who leveraged saw a bump in engagement and reach.

All in all, focus your efforts on one or two pieces of hero content that tell your story in a visual way. Once you nail down who your specific target audiences (the more specific the better), try promoting it for just a dollar a day. It’s a small enough budget that you can learn as you go. Once you’re more comfortable and you’re seeing a response, you can add fuel to the fire as you optimize.

What are your predictions for 2017 marketing trends?

Share of attention is shifting to dynamic & easily-digestible, mobile content

There’s a palpable tension building as mobile migrates toward mostly-video (i.e. Snapchat, Instagram) slamming into the fact that no one has the patience to watch videos that aren’t extremely captivating. The problem– or opportunity, if you’re savvy– is that by nature, every brand cannot create “extremely captivating” content. The cream will always rise to the top. Consistency is key for strong brand awareness. If a brand has a strong narrative in place, it’s easy to translate it from LinkedIn to Twitter, and maybe even Snapchat. Every marketing campaign should have a strong, concise message that is easily replicated across different platforms.

Remember these takeaways:

Show that there’s people behind the brand. Focus on relatable messages rather and shared experiences.
There’s people on the other end receiving your message- so make sure your message captures their attention and meets their needs.
The best channels for reaching B2B depend on your goals, but LinkedIn wins due to refinement and access to decision makers.
For small budget efforts, focus on content that tells your story and target a highly refined version of your intended audience with a $1.00/day budget. This provides a test bed to play around and optimize your message to see what works.

Are you thinking in terms of business-to-business, or human-to-human?

Publishing Your Unpublished (Dark) Posts on Facebook

By Kyler Patterson Leave a Comment

If you’re running ads on Facebook, you probably already know what a unpublished (dark) post is. Just in case you don’t know, it’s a post that is used to promote your message to people without being on your Facebook page. I wrote an article on the HostGator blog if you need more detail on what a dark post is and how to create it.

Dark posts are great because you can do many different things with them. One example is that you can run different ads to test how a message will perform in front of an audience. But after you’ve found the winning message, what do you do now? Recreate the post and press Publish?

Sure – you can do that. But then you lose the value of the ads you paid for, the social proof. All of the likes, comments, and shares are now gone because it’s a new post.

With this post, I’m going to show you how you can publish your post live to your page so that it can begin earning organic reach. Since it already has social proof from the paid reach, it will publish to the page with the same reach and hopefully gather more engagement.
Please watch this video for more details. If you are unable to watch the video, I’ve included the steps below.

Step 1 – In your ad manager, click the hamburger on the top left of the page.

Step 2 – Hover over “All Tools” and then select the Page Posts option. This will show you all of your dark posts by default. If you need to, you can change your page on the top left.

Step 3 – Select the post you wish to publish. You can use their search feature to help identify your post.

Step 4 – Next to the search feature is the Actions drop down. Click that and select Publish. This will publish the post live to your page.

I hope you found this tip to be helpful. If you have any questions about these steps, or what you can do in Facebook in general, please leave a comment and we will be happy to give you more details.

How to save and edit Facebook Live videos

By Max Darby Leave a Comment

If you’re doing a lot of Facebook Live videos, perhaps for a conference, then you may have lamented the inability to edit it. There’s a quick way for you to download any video off of Facebook- here’s how:

On a desktop device, right click and select “Show Video URL”:

A box will pop up. Copy the URL that appears in it:

Now paste it into your address bar, but replace “https://www.” with just “m.”, so that it looks like “m.facebook.com/….”

You’ll now see the page in Mobile mode, which comes with the ability to save the video file as a .mp4. Simply click “Play” and then look in the bottom right corner.

Your browser will download the movie file into your Downloads folder:

You can now open it in any movie editor to do with as you please. If you don’t have one, you can use an online tool such as online-video-cutter.com to trim out unwanted sections:

And that’s how simple it is to download and edit Facebook Live videos! Note that you can also use this on normal videos as well. Perfect for building your speaker reel or snagging that perfect little clip.

Automotive Social Media Charlatans Exposed

By Marlena Solomon Leave a Comment

I have been a part of the automotive aftermarket for over seven years now. Companies and brands of all shapes and sizes are realizing the relevance and power of social media. While their efforts are admirable, many are not capturing the characteristics of the aftermarket that make it unique from all others. That being said, there is a stark contrast within the measurable, mechanical world of the automotive aftermarket with the fluffy, mysterious world of social.

Bobby Likis host of the Bobby Likis Car Clinic radio show.

So I was wondering…
Does the mechanic ask you what type of wrench to use in fixing your car?

Would you trust a Ferrari mechanic who has never seen a Ferrari before?

Pros fix your problems, have legitimate certifications, and can provide a well-defined outcome with reasonable certainty.

But in social media, we have no such thing yet.
So to avoid being a self-proclaimed social media expert, focus on being a driver (no pun intended) of business value in your area.

There is an assumption that if you know how to post to a social media account is sufficient.
This ability alone does not make you an expert.

The automotive aftermarket segment is like no other, with companies that operate as B2B, B2C and hybrids of both.
Knowing the tone and personality of the brand, and having an understanding of the customer base and audience will allow for good content and even better targeting.

If you don’t know about antifreeze, you’re not going to be able to credibly write content for Prestone.

If you don’t know about how to modify Corvettes for maximum performance, you’ll fail responding to die-hard Lingenfelter fans.

The social media expert dies

Sure, there still will be colleges offering degrees in social media.

And the need for strong measurement in social isn’t going to go away either.

But the one-dimensional social media expert will be extinct.

If you don’t have deep vertical expertise for a particular client, you can’t help them in their social media.

Sorry. Just won’t work.

Your knowledge of how to pin and tweet won’t make up for lack of vertical knowledge.
Same is true for whatever set of tools you employ.

Here’s Rob Schermerhorn, who is a Ferrari mechanic.

Because he’s able to post content that Ferrari owners relate to and because he knows where Ferrari owners hang out (Ferrari Chat), when he runs ads, he gets leads.
This is the GCTA viral cycle:

Goals: Drive leads for his Ferrari tuning service
Content: Lots and lots of examples of him tuning Ferraris over the last 20 years– going faster for cheaper. You’d be surprised at what penny pinchers these guys are, but that’s another story.
Targeting: Ferrari owners, not the 18 year olds who are fans of the Ferrari page. Choose the right interests and demographics. Income works, too.
Amplification: This is where we run ads, but we call it “amplification” instead– the combinations of content and targeting to drive relevant traffic.

These are the mechanics of social media amplification.

Miss any part of this cycle and the wheel collapses.
If you don’t have awesome content, all the analytics and targeting in the world won’t save you.
If you don’t have proper targeting, no amount of measurement or content will win.
If you have clear goals, solid content, and strong targeting, but no amplification– well, you still might win, but you’ll be running on a donut tire.

How are you doing against these factors?

They’re not magical.
It’s just that not many people get this owner’s manual when they get their Facebook page, twitter account, or whatever network profile.

How to get your audience to segment themselves

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

Today, a few members of the Blitz team tuned into “4 Steps To Creating Personalized, Segmented Campaigns For Your Audience”, a Perpetual Traffic podcast featuring Ryan Levesque. Here’s our thoughts:

Why is it that people won’t stop sending cold email blasts and spending countless ad dollars on broadly targeted, misfiring ads? We know ads are most effective when they cater to specific “buckets” of people – targeted audiences.

We’ve seen this with remarketed ads – ones that follow you, coaxing you to convert. With plumbing in place, businesses can track behaviors, like when you visited the Nike site and spent an hour deciding whether or not to buy the new “Free Runs”.

Details like this allow for the most personalized digital ads experience – tying a user all the way to a specific product that they’ve shown interest in, but haven’t yet purchased.

Ryan’s developed a unique process to magnify and segment his target audiences – he just asks prospects about their concerns. It was in the niche industry of Orchids (yes, plants!) that he tested this method.

Ryan’s “Ask” method, is driven by quizzes and “Deep Dive” surveys.

“Find out what their pain is in a very deep and profound way. Then you learn specific language patterns, echo back that pain in their exact words, and solve it for them.”

– Ryan Levesque

When you group folks into these “buckets” you can customize your funnel and user experience. Nurturing leads down the funnel is key to a campaign’s success. Nothing better than marketing to people’s self-addressed needs.

After running surveys, Ryan realized there’s 4 main concerns or questions that folks had:

How to get your orchid to re-flower
How to re-pot your orchid
How to save a sick or dying orchid
People who are given an orchid as a gift.

He customizes user experiences through quizzes and survey. People who received an orchid as a gift would be directed to a landing page on “How To Care For Your New Orchid”.

The power in this technique comes from the target audience’s sense of being understood.

You’re essentially asking, “What can I do to help you?” and creating a solution that they’ll pay for. We’d like to test this and see what power can come from pairing surveys with large WCAs to create a double whammy effect.

Don’t settle for our summary. Check out the podcast to find out more on how Ryan went from $375/mo. to $25,000/mo. with his Orchid business and continued to apply his method for others.

Are you using remarketing techniques? How about surveys and quizzes? Let us know how your campaigns are doing in the comment section below.