Funnel Archives - BlitzMetrics

How to create, edit, share, and boost a WHY video

Do you have a WHY behind what you do? People are more likely to buy from someone who has a story or mission that they identify with. We believe that the best way to share your stories or mission in an engaging way is through the use of a WHY video. A WHY video defines your reason, or your passion, and it is important to utilize the power of video content and social media to effectively share this with your desired audience.

Video is the most powerful ingredient of your personal brand, starting with your story and amplified by the stories of your ambassadors. It starts with you. Whether you’ve been regularly creating content for 10 years or have never written an article in your life, you’ll be able to easily create a WHY video by following this step-by-step process.

Before filming your WHY video, it is important to consider what your strategy is. There are three main components that make up your strategy: your goals, content, and targeting. When you go to produce or distribute a piece of content, think about what your end goal is. What type of content do you need to produce to achieve this, and what demographics or audiences should see this content? This is the idea behind Goals, Content, and Targeting, or #GCT. By considering these components for your own strategy, you will be able to produce and distribute much more effective video content.

Once you have an idea of what content you’d like to create, it’s go time! There are 4 main components to filming your video. The first is to begin with a hook, or something to quickly capture your audience’s attention as they scroll through their feed. This could be done by movement or something you say. Once you have their attention, you must retain it by bringing them along a journey that will ignite pain or pleasure for them. Here you could tell a story, show a success or failure, or clarify a benefit. At this point, the audience is ready to be presented with a solution or resolution to the story, and you can show that what you offer is that solution. Now the audience is ready to be given a call to action. What should they do as a result of hearing your message? Although these 4 components are more general to any one-minute video you make, they can be applied to producing a WHY video and should be considered when making your own.

In making any video, the key is not to overcomplicate it. No need for fancy equipment– have a friend film you on a cell phone camera, or if you’re by yourself, you can take a selfie video. We have found that vertical or square videos with captioning often perform best due to the fact that they fill most of the screen on mobile devices, which is where the majority of social media users will be. This style of video also comes across as more feed-like and personal, and something people will be much more inclined to stick around and watch as opposed to a professionally-made advertisement.

The biggest issue we see people run into in making their videos is camera shyness and overthinking what they’re going to say. These can both be overcome with repetition and practice, but our biggest piece of advice is to allow yourself to speak from the heart. We believe that sharing your authentic self is much more natural and powerful, because people trust people. As our CEO Dennis Yu says, “Being real is more important than being perfect.”

If necessary, you can edit your video with a headline, captioning, lower-thirds, etc. These help to optimize your videos for views even when people don’t have their sound on.

Once you have the final version of your WHY video, you’re ready to share it. You can upload your video to multiple places, including your Facebook public figure page, LinkedIn page, Twitter, etc. We call this process of sharing a piece of content to multiple platforms “cross-posting”, and by doing this, it will help you to reach more people. Write compelling copy, add automatic subtitles if you don’t already have captioning, and click “Share”.

After publishing your post, the final step we recommend is to boost your post on your Facebook public figure page using the Dollar a Day strategy. (If you have not already created a Facebook public figure page for your business or personal brand, we highly recommend doing so). Boosting is when you put some spend behind a post to help it reach more people who you’d like to see your content. By spending as little as one dollar per day, you’ll be able to gain enough information after several days to help you determine if the post will be a likely winner, based on how it compares to the Standards of Excellence. This low-spend strategy also allows you to test multiple posts and audiences at the same time without breaking the bank, so you can then determine which is receiving the best engagement and should continue to have spend put behind it.

Congratulations! You’ve just successfully created, edited, shared, and boosted your WHY video. This same step-by-step process can be applied to creating any one-minute video, and we highly recommend following this process of determining your goals, content, and targeting and amplifying your video using the Dollar a Day strategy in order to effectively produce, publish, and distribute content going forward.

(P.S.– To see examples of WHY videos, be sure to check out the many videos we have on the “Why” section of our website)

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.

Your Idea of a Facebook Funnel is Backwards

By Logan Young 6 Comments

In the Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising, Perry Marshall and Keith Krance demonstrate the typical funnel, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom:

The three layers (audience > engagement > conversion) allow you to cast a wide net, so then you can conceivably lead people down a path of engagement and remarketing.

And it would appear that Facebook agrees with this approach, as you can see in their training:

Facebook even pushes this further. When you create a new campaign in Facebook, you start by choosing an objective within this three-layer funnel:

But what these last two images don’t show you is that the funnel is actually NARROWEST at the top and WIDEST at the bottom.

It should actually look like a cone. In this article you’ll understand why you need to “flip your funnel” (a term I’m stealing from our friend Neil Patel) to get Facebook ads to work properly for you.

Here’s how the funnel should really look:

Admittedly we’ve been preaching the standard funnel for a long time, so we’re embarrassed to admit that the old ways aren’t as effective anymore.

Social proof is your true converter. Boosting posts only requires a dollar a day. A micro-budgets targeted to a micro-audience, and then oCPM does the work for you.

Use small saved audiences to build awareness, custom audiences to drive engagement, and lookalikes to achieve conversions.

AUDIENCE

We used to be vehemently opposed to boosting posts.

It was the joke of social media marketing– a technique only for noobs, certainly not us pros that use Power Editor.

But then Facebook let us boost against custom audiences and various combos of saved target audiences.

And that let us execute the Dollar a Day strategy with ease. And we do mean ease, 80% of our work we could do right in the timeline, never having to go to the Ads Manager or Power Editor.

You can literally select the post, the pre-made audience, and the budget, all right from your page.

Then navigate down the newsfeed, taking 20 seconds for each boost.

It’s so easy and effective that we demonstrate how to boost posts live at conferences.

Set aside your fear and give it a try.

There are 6 amazing things you can accomplish boosting posts:

Influencing the media
Surprising and delighting friends
Fighting back when the big company abuses you
Growing your client/customer base
Getting more speaking opportunities
Growing your personal brand

Each boosted post spends a dollar a day targeting narrow audiences consisting of only a few hundred people.

You might even accumulate 20 or 30 of these minions to do your bidding, stacking up more and more dollar a day posts running evergreen.

The strategy behind this is that people trust their peers more than they trust anything you have to say.

So you’re amplifying (advertising, in layman’s terms) what influencers in your industry and clients have to say, anything but what’s on your site.

Call it old-fashioned word-of-mouth but with a social media advertising twist to scale it.

ENGAGEMENT

You learned in your undergraduate marketing class that the average buyer must be exposed to your message 7 times before they even notice it.

84.7% of statistics are made up, anyway.

The point of “inception” in the above audience building phase is to implant the seed of trust. That way, when they see your next piece of content, they have a fuzzy familiarity with it.

So of course then they will click.

If they click on a link to your website, they become part of a website custom audience you can remarket to.
If they like, share, or comment on your post, they become part of a post engagement custom audience which you can remarket to.
If they watch your video for more than 3 seconds, they are now in your video view custom audience.
If they click “learn more” in your Facebook lead ad, they can give you their contact information in an auto-filled form.
If they install your app, you have them as a user and can ask for their email, too, among other things.
If they check into your retail store, they can be a check-in audience.

Whatever they do, you can reach them with the next message in your sequence, that’s remarketing.

But most people think remarketing is just those dumb ads that incessantly follow you around the web after you leave an e-commerce site.

Marketers are unaware that you can use Facebook’s ridiculously good database to remarket cross-channel:

Find out how many people have been to your site, but aren’t fans, and target exactly them.
Find out who is a fan, but hasn’t used your app recently.
Find out who is on your email list, but hasn’t seen your new products.

And so forth… until you have many custom audiences built up to remarket to.

I don’t know what percentage of spend average Facebook marketers dedicate to remarketing, but I’d guess it’s under 10%.

Of course, the “right” number depends on your sales funnel, but I’d say that 30% would be a healthy number.

Also in the engagement category is boosting posts to interest targets and lookalike audiences.

These audiences are far larger than the “inception” targets of the audience phase, so your engagement layer in the funnel has more spend and much larger audiences.

CONVERSION

Most direct marketers proportionately overspend on conversion, we typically see over 85% of budget spent on conversion. We think it should be about 30%.

And like the earlier caveat, every vertical is different. You may face seasonality, and flat out might not have any content funnels (common in B2B and local).

You’re running remarketing campaigns to drive engagement custom audiences into your conversion points, a lead magnet, free trial, tripwire, core offer, upsell, or whatever structure you have in place.

But the workhorse of your conversion campaigns are your lookalike audiences.

Facebook builds lookalikes from the seeds of your custom audiences; so the stronger your custom audiences, the stronger signal you send Facebook in building lookalikes.

Lookalikes can be as small as a million or even as high as 10 million, so don’t let that scare you.

We used to pride ourselves in being thoroughly targeted in our conversion campaigns, to boast of efficiency in reaching the right folks with creepy accuracy.

But in the last year, we found that too small of an audience won’t give the algorithm room to “breathe”, to do the work for us.

For example, we’ve tested with ZERO targeting on campaigns. These campaigns have not only gotten some traction, but many of these ad sets beat out our well-targeted ads.

The system learns when you feed it the right inputs and allow oCPM to do the heavy lifting.

And usually the client or agency messes things up when they meddle, since they inadvertently exclude audiences that would convert.

They also think they understand who the purchaser is, but are often way off.

If you don’t know about oCPM, it’s the default bid type selected when you choose a business objective.

So choose “website conversion”, “lead ad”, or whatever your goal and let Facebook whittle down to exactly the right audience.

Lookalikes are based on the same logic as collaborative filtering, which has made Amazon and Netflix so popular (people who bought A, also bought B).

For every custom audience that’s worth tracking (not every stage in your shopping cart, please, or every single landing page), you’d want to create a lookalike audience.

Find out who bought product X and might be interested in product Y that you offer.
Find out who didn’t buy product X, but looks just like people who love product X.
Find a 3% lookalike audience who looks like product X purchasers minus the 2% lookalike audience.

So your conversion campaigns have the largest audiences of them all, since you have a bunch of custom audiences and the related lookalike audiences (that are a couple million users each). And if it weren’t for oCPM, you’d blow all your money trying to hit everyone, instead of letting the system sub-target and bid for you.

CONCLUSION

Are you now convinced that your funnel needs to be smaller at the top and larger at the bottom?

If not, I hope you are working for one the competitors of our clients.

Just kidding, we hope that you’ve enjoyed the latest in funnel and ad targeting strategy.

While Facebook changing is a constant complaint, what you can glean from this is that they’re moving towards AI.

This means that eventually you’ll just input your goals, content, and targeting into the machine– then it will do the rest.

But until then, you have rebellious teenager (born in 2004) that you must treat just right to get the results you want.

Now you know the 3 types of audiences to create (custom, lookalike, saved) and how to use them in your 3 layer funnel.