Most small business owners are terrified to press the red button.
Not because it’s going to initiate some catastrophic event or set off the emergency alarm, but because they are paralyzed by the camera.
Small business owners that can’t make videos are like sprinters trying to win a race with shackles around their ankles
Facebook is a film to play platform. [Read more…]
To master a skill and become world-class, we all know it takes 10,000 hours, a rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. That gets a little bit old though doesn’t it?
Is there a way to truly master Digital Marketing in short amount of time?
For the most part, probably not.
Especially if you consider the definition of a master: someone who acquires complete knowledge or skill on a focused topic. Even world-class performers won’t consider themselves “masters” having the humility in knowing there’s an infinity of nuances to learn and hone.
But is there a way to become good?
A way to become great?
A way to become world-class?
Hell to the Yeah.
Take my friend Logan Young who was coined the King of Facebook by StartCon, Australia’s Largest Startup & Growth Conference.
He’s the co-founder of BlitzMetrics, a digital marketing company that implements social campaigns for some of the biggest brands in the world like the Golden State Warriors, Nike, and MGM.
He’s an internationally known speaker and speaks at some of the largest stages in Marketing like Social Marketing World, VendastaCon and Growth Marketing Conference.
You know how people say they’re good? Try this one for size.
One time Mark Zuckerberg came up to Logan and asked him for a picture.
In a world of so many self-proclaimed Marketing “experts” and “gurus” out there, it’s easy to lose sight of who has real credibility. Those who get unsolicited praise yet alone get asked for pictures from guys like Mark, now that’s true authority.
Another way to see if someone’s truly an expert is to ask if they’re someone who publishes their knowledge freely and openly.
Logan has written extensively on his blog and gives world-class value on Facebook Marketing.
Did I mention he’s only 27 and he started 2 years ago?
Hard to believe but everything is true.
So how did Logan become a “master” at Digital Marketing and how can you become a master as well?
Not so long ago, Logan was a high school student working at a Subway getting paid minimum wage. One time as he was working he was even held-up at gunpoint.
Just several years later, he became a student at Brigham Young University and studied advertising.
It wasn’t until he reached out to Dennis Yu, a Marketing Pioneer, that he started his apprenticeship and quickly closed the gap to become world-class in the span of two years.
He found a true Master.
Dennis Yu is an internationally renown speaker on Facebook Marketing. He’s keynoted for the Biggest Stages in the Industry such as L2E, PubCon, and Conversion Conference.
Dennis has over 50,000 hours of Digital Marketing experience and it’s taken him a lifetime to get there.
Through mentorship, Dennis quickly handed the keys of the kingdom and taught Logan everything he knew about Digital Marketing.
The only way this was able to work was Dennis systematized his decades of experience through a collection of checklists and documented processes.
Logan went through a phase of Learning, Doing and Teaching.
At the start of his Marketing Career, he was working on his foundation and drank the water hose of knowledge and technical expertise Dennis was throwing at him.
Then once Logan grasped the material, he began Doing and working with clients like the Golden State Warriors and Ashely Furniture.
Eventually, he gained the competency to teach upcoming young-adults and now manages and is head-trainer for the 53-person company he co-founded with Dennis, BlitzMetrics.
All along the way, Dennis offered him the guidance and mentorship but at the end of the day, it was Logan who implemented.
Hard-work was critical to the recipe.
In fact, the first time Logan met Dennis, Logan drove 13 hours to meet Dennis and every minute along the way, he studied the marketing materials Dennis gave him.
When it comes to mentorship, Dennis was Logan’s Yoda.
It was as much as Dennis mentorship that helped Logan become a master but also Logan’s diligence and relentless work ethic. So let’s say you have the discipline and work-ethic.
How do you identify your Yoda?
Unfortunately, without some skin in the marketing game, it’s very difficult to identify who’s truly a pro and who’s a fake.
Amateur Marketers get away with just knowing one new feature or one new tool to stay ahead of the customer but that doesn’t mean they’re true experts.
Here are some guidelines for identifying a true master:
Consider these two factors, and you’re well on your way.
Logan started off 2 years ago with minimal knowledge in digital marketing. (The guy was working at Pizza Hut 2 years ago!)
Today, he is at the forefront of Marketing Innovation and just this past weekend was asked to be on the Board of Advisory for Mobile Monkey, the top Facebook Messenger platform company, founded by Larry Kim of WordStream.
Follow Logan’s footsteps and seek out a true “master” at Digital Marketing. Do that and you’ll be able to take a shortcut your time.
You never know, you might be on CNN one day weighing in on Facebook.
This weekend I talked to Dennis and he said it took him 20 years to get to the point where he’s at and in just 6 months through his training and mentorship he can get guys like Logan and guys like me to that stage.
If you want to learn more about the processes and checklists Dennis has spent 20 years on, start by following our BlitzMetrics Facebook page and bookmarking our BlitzMetrics Blog.
I can’t promise you’ll be the King of Digital Marketing in 2 years but I can guarantee you that you’ll be taking the fast-track.
____
Kenny Hoang is an Entrepreneur, Speaker and Mixed Martial Artist. He is the Manager of Optimization at BlitzMetrics and Founder of Adapt Modern, a boutique agency servicing MMA Gyms and Martial Arts Schools. He publishes thoughtful essays and practical how-to’s on the topics of growth and impact, marketing fundamentals, and artificial intelligence at kenny.app.
A few months ago, the social media community had been on fire about a comment made by Mark Williams, an executive at LiveWorld, Inc., on a post of Dennis Yu, Chief Technology Officer at BlitzMetrics, saying that hiring offshore at $3/hour rate is exploitation.
Ironic isn’t it? Considering his role at Wal-Mart was managing the negative social comments about how they mistreat their employees.
This statement gained a lot of comments and reactions from different people.
Standard wages are relative to the national economy.
John Jonas, Founder of onlinejobs.ph commented “The original trolling was actually about the ethics of paying someone a different amount than what a job was “worth”. That argument doesn’t hold up even in the USA as companies move from expensive places (San Fran) to less expensive places (Utah) to save money. Sometimes the moves are necessary just to stay in business.”
More of his comment are shown in the image.
The standard cost of living varies from country to country, and so does the standard wage. A dollar in the Philippines goes much further than a dollar in New York City. Ten dollars will pay for much less stuff in America than its equivalent in peso will buy in the Philippines.
As such, paying someone a wage based on their economy is in no way exploitation – this is what Matt Plapp, Head ROI Expert at Driven Media Solutions said in his comment; giving examples of how his friends in Kentucky, New York and L.A. have the same job but all paid different wages based on the economics of that region.
Outsourcing gives growing businesses a competitive edge.
The natural outcome is for businesses get labor from less developed countries because they can hire at a lower cost than they can locally. Thus, reducing cost but not compromising the quality of work.
Outsourcing benefits not just the clients but the employees as well. John Huntinghouse, the Digital Content Manager for Epic Marketing, said, “Outsourcing a great team = better results for the clients and improved living wages for employees. This is a main driver of how countries grow, economically speaking, to allow them to thrive and have higher standards of living. Every life matters and efforts in improving the lives of families in other countries shouldn’t be constantly viewed as a negative.”
Let’s take a look at some of the comments made by other business owners who outsource.
John remarked on the pains of hiring locally and expressed how VAs in the Philippines helped him achieve his mission.
Julia McCoy of Express Writers shared her thoughts on hiring offshore.
Chris Ducker, also known as the the “Virtual CEO”, a serial entrepreneur who owns and operates three businesses in the Philippines, also made his comment about his incredible Filipino staff.
Jeff Hunter, an Outsourcing Tycoon said he does not discriminate when it comes to talent.
And the accused, Dennis Yu, who actually treats his VAs like family.
There is no doubt VAs can make reliable, cost-effective employees for businesses, but how do they feel about their wages?
Here are the comments of some of BlitzMetrics VAs that are paid with a starting wage of $3/hour.
Ping agreed that the same job in New York won’t get you the same pay in another state and that $3/hour is just the right rate for new hire.
“I don’t feel exploited.” Alain said. He believes he is receiving a fair rate as the cost of living in the Philippines is lowered compared to the Western countries. And, as his skill set grows, so will the pay.
While having time to enjoy his family and hobbies because of the flexible schedule, Tom is okay with his pay as he gets to work with awesome brands. “Exert more effort if you want to rise faster,” he said.
G’Ralz explained why $3/hour is way above than the minimum wage in the Philippines. He values the relationships built and the opportunity to create impact more than a few extra dollars per hour.
Kim feels that she gets more than what she contributes right now. The training and guidance from the company helps her improve everyday. Besides, nobody said it’s going to be $3/hour forever!
Working is never about JUST the pay.
More than just receiving great pay, we, employees seek more — satisfaction, good work relationships, and training and development. We are all human beings, after all.
Being treated as family is what really counts. That’s why I am just so blessed to be part of BlitzMetrics! We are not machines, we are a team working together from different parts of the planet, coordinating online and in person.
And, we don’t just work and learn, we also love to have fun!
Pardon the crappy picture. ☺
So, to sum this up:
A $3/hour STARTING rate to work from home with a flexible schedule and a very supportive team is definitely a great catch for us here in the Philippines. You see, I’m a full time mother and a full time employee at the same time. Others may see the pay as exploitive but believe it or not, I earn more than my husband gets from working locally!
If exploiting can help build a family’s future, then I’d love to be exploited! LOL
That’s my take. How about yours?
P.S.
The power of the community has turned Mark Williams around to see his error. He said that it was not his intention to hurt anyone’s feelings or disparage anyone and he apologized to everyone he has offended. Now, he is studying the programs of BlitzMetrics and sees the awesomeness of the VAs — loyal, joyful, hard-working people.
The media continues to contort this Cambridge Analytica-Facebook story. I was just on CNN International to shed some light on this “scandal.”
1) Facebook cannot solve this problem.
There was no data breach. It was never possible for Cambridge Analytica to use that data for personalized targeting.
This is a user education issue disguised as a security problem.
2) Almost everything you hear about this situation is horribly misinformed.
Cambridge Analytica, the self-proclaimed experts, and the media are not engineers, so they manipulate the public for whatever story sounds best to them, regardless of the facts.
3) Government regulation isn’t the answer, either.
These smart, underpaid lawyers, some who have data science backgrounds, understand that “something must be done”, but don’t have a technical solution when the masses willingly give away their data to any app, social network, manufacturer, or retailer.
4) The situation is only going to get worse.
Holding attention is the primary goal for Facebook, since more attention means more ads served. The algorithms of Facebook and Google use Relevance Score and Quality Score to seek the highest engagement rate, so incendiary content naturally wins.
5) People will gradually see Facebook as the obvious scapegoat.
Facebook will be the lightning rod, while the massive network of companies that have truly scary data powers (I’ve seen what they do first-hand and you have never heard of them) will quietly keep growing.
6) The thing that will perhaps kill Facebook is their reaction to regulation and public outcry, not the actions themselves.
In the midst of their crisis, which they have only finally admitted is a problem, they ignore advocates like us who understand the system and have 3rd party, objective authority to educate the public about how to behave online.
Here’s my take from my recent segment on CNN.
HOWELL: From an insider perspective, an industry inside or like yourself. I’d like to get your thoughts about Zuckerberg’s apology, saying that they didn’t do enough at the time.
YU: George, it wasn’t much they’d really could have done because there is no way that by sharing someone else’s data that they could have used that for targeting… the data was only available to the particular app that collected it.
They didn’t have a security or a privacy breach… Someone shared data that wasn’t even really usable, right? So, Facebook had to apologize for breach of trust, but there wasn’t a privacy issue. So, they are trying to apologize for something where there’s not a clear problem or issue to solve.
Howell and I have discussed this several times on the air now. Here’s a video of another one of our segments.
Facebook’s Data Woes w/ @dennisyu of @Blitzmetrics https://t.co/M4Chuj9UGS
— George K. Howell (@GeorgeHowellCNN) April 1, 2018
Since that broadcast, Facebook has taken drastic action by removing data from the ads interface and rolling out a timeline for the removal of third party data from the platform.
Facebook is taking preemptive measures to get ahead of the regulators in Washington, as Zuckerberg goes to Capitol Hill.
Logan was just on CNN talking about what Facebook and its users can expect in coming weeks. We already know some of what’s coming.
We’ve seen the specific action plan Facebook put in place to remove third-party targeting options. Here’s a note from our Facebook rep at Blitz:
“Specifically, over the next six months, we will remove the ability to use Partner Categories, a targeting solution that enables third-party data providers to offer their targeting directly on Facebook. While leveraging third-party data is a common industry practice and we’ve put good protections in place, we believe this step will help improve people’s privacy on Facebook.
They are banning ad accounts left and right with no appeal process—their judgment is swift, and their ruling is final.
Meanwhile, we see ads like this on LinkedIn.
If SnackNation were to try this on Facebook, they’d get shut down in a second.
While Facebook takes the heat, everyone else is quietly making ads on LinkedIn, Twitter, SnapChat, Quora, and other places that have crazy good targeting and hardly any oversight.
But the average Facebook user isn’t privy to this, and good luck trying to explain to the media with their pre-formed bias.
Unable to educate, Facebook must APPEAR compliant, so they removed most of the publicly visible targeting options, which they acknowledge weren’t used heavily anyway. It was just a few people making noise to the media on something that could happen, but in practice never did.
And all of this noise when, in reality, the data and targeting under the hood only grows more powerful.
The Facebook money-printing engine hums along just fine, with advertisers hooking up their business via the Facebook IV and pressing the vending machine style buttons for the business result they want.
Besides, it seems that everyone forgot they have to delete Instagram too.
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.
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.
We’ve seen so many companies who are competent at traditional PPC get destroyed when trying to do Facebook advertising. Let’s cover the most common mistakes and how to solve them:
There are no software packages that will save you from these pitfalls– you or someone in your organization must develop the targeting, ad copy, and landing tabs that reflect your unique selling proposition. In the same way that great traditional PPC has tight linkages between the keyword, ads, and landing page– on Facebook, you must have tight interests, ultra personal ad copy, and many interest-related posts.
In 2012 Amanda Palmer made history by raising $1.2 million on Kickstarter. The secret to her success in her words: “my backers— almost twenty-five thousand of them— had been following my personal story for years”.
Marketers often get obsessed with targeting, the main headline on the landing page, sales letter, video script, etc.. and forget about the most important part which is building relationships and trust.
In this article, I’ll share the story of my friend Emaline Delapaix where for a total of only $24 spent, she ran a successful crowdfunding campaign.
Not only that but for each €1 spent on Facebook ads she made €37.48 back.
The secret? She is no stranger to her fans. Through the years she has shared her personal story with them, from her struggle with depression and bad relationships, to her activism against animal cruelty.
There was a point in her career where she got sick for two months that affected her income negatively; not just the inability to work but also in the form of medical bills. Consequently, she was not able to fly back home to see her family after five years of living abroad.
Having experience with FB ads, I suggested running ads targeting her FB page fans and how it wouldn’t cost much to reach her 3000+ fans via ads.
Emaline made a post on her fan page which I promoted via Facebook ads to make sure a maximum of fans would see it.
So how did the campaign go?
For a $24 ad spent, we reached 956 fans and got 103 clicks to the crowdfunding page.
But most importantly €815 was raised as a result. 100% of the Traffic came from Facebook.
Most importantly, as a result of the campaign, she was able to visit her family in Australia.
One of her fans even sent a private message apologizing for not being able to help before the beginning of the next week.
Now how often do marketers get messages saying: ‘I am out of money, I am sorry for not being able to buy your product yet.’ Most likely when marketers get messages, it is people complaining about seeing their ads.
When marketing a service or a product, there are two possible approaches:
A while ago a friend got her laptop infected by Malware. It blocked her screen, saying it was the police and she needed to pay a fine.
I helped her get rid of Malware, and later while talking with her father, he revealed that he asked if she trusted that the cleaned everything. She replied that it’s not that she trusted the software, but that she trusted her friend.
It is the same with marketing. People trust their friend’s endorsements over any other form of marketing.
In the A.D.D age, where companies bombard users with thousands of ads, if you want to get noticed and influence people to take action, then you’d be wise to start by focusing on building trust.
So ask yourself: are you building trust with your audiences, or just blindly serving content?
Want to read more by Dennis Yu? For more content follow him here:
http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/author/dennis
Did you know that 75% of Facebook traffic occurs from mobile devices around the world? So wouldn’t you think that mobile ad managing is the same way? Probably not yet because Facebook just launched its Ads Manager app a few months ago – while the Facebook mobile app itself has been around for years.
I’ll show you how to navigate through the app and gain definite kudos from your clients or for yourself as you easily manage their/your account via mobile:
Upon entering the app and signing in, along with the usual facebook blue, there are help texts along the way:
Let’s create a campaign! I’ll use my friend Dennis Yu’s page for explanatory purposes.
You can either boost a post you’ve made already, reach people near your company’s business address (location targeting), or send people to your website.
Let’s send people to his website:
From here, it’s easy enough to tell that the next step is to choose a picture from his page, or you can take a picture with your smartphone’s camera.
Position the picture as desired:
Create your ad copy that will intrigue your audience, (next step) to click on the ad:
While creating your ad, The Facebook Ads Manager app also allows you to add a Call-to-Action Button. Choose the button that fits most with your ad:
To help you out, Facebook includes the following about Interests.
“Facebook can help you reach people by looking at their interests, activities, the pages they have liked and closely related topics. Consider words beyond those that describe your business or brand.”
For example, a flower shop might choose an interest like “weddings”.
For more examples, we put online marketing, and online advertising:
Be elaborate to get the most out of your targeting, but also certain that the people you target will desire to know more about your ad.
Is this ad directed towards both genders? Choose accordingly, along with the age group (You don’t want to be advertising alcoholic beverages to underage teenagers!):
You’re almost done! Now just choose your budget and schedule and you’ve made your first ad!
*If you’re just starting out, Dennis Yu has an amazing concept of Facebook marketing with gaining results at just $5 a day.
Everyone wants to determine the ROI on their page likes and be able to directly attribute a page like’s value relative to a conversion. But there’s been confusion conveying this value in a way that’s measurable back to that bottom dollar.
So what’s the best way to track this or paint a better picture on the value of a like?
At the end of the day, if they attribute conversion value back to these likes, then they are interested in pushing the throttle a bit heavier.
To answer this age-old question on the value of a fan (just Google “value of a fan Dennis Yu“) we need to make sure we’ve got the “plumbing” in place to enable this measurement. Two foundational articles:
You have to connect the top and bottom of the funnel to tie fan (or top funnel) activity to hard dollar ROI.
Perhaps the easiest way is to look at pairings of direct and two step sequences, where one ad is sending non-fans (of whatever targeting type) to a conversion page and the other ad is sending that same target filtered to also be fans.
You’d expect that fans convert better.
And the difference is a rough form of lift testing.
Here’s a page from our weekly reporting template to see how to set up such a pairing.
But why assess just the incremental funnel impact of someone becoming a fan?
Why not look at the contribution from them joining the email list (which is like becoming a fan), visiting the site, searching on our brand terms, etc?
The heart of marketing automation is deconstructing complex interaction sequences into simple pairs.
And each pair is measuring the difference in conversion value between directly going from X to Y versus going to X to an intermediate step and then to Y.
There is a bit of chicken and egg here, since someone may already be a fan in real life, just not on Facebook.
It’s not possible to fully eliminate the correlation and causation issue here.
But if you really want to get that extra level of precision, then you’d set up factorial tests with these pairings by geo.
Some randomized DMAs (designated market area) would get the fan acquisition campaigns, while others don’t.
Beyond the directly trackable effects of fan growth, which is tied in closely with generating reach, we have the softer benefits of brand growth.
Measure this via aided and unaided recognition in brand perception surveys, increase in conversion or brand search volume, or general increases in engagement. There are mountains written about how to assess the value of a brand, independent of channel.
But for the immediate, direct hard dollar ROI of fan acquisition via Facebook, we’d set up these pairings as described above.
This lets us measure the incremental impact of fan acquisition campaigns, so long we take care to give these fans enough time to move down the funnel.
Marketing, not just social marketing, is about establishing these journeys and measuring the value of these nurtured touchpoints.
