BlitzMetrics

  • For Business
  • For Students
  • Training
  • Contact Us
  • Quickstart
  • Training
  • Contact Us

Video Trends and Insights for 2019

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

What are the biggest trends in video for 2019?

  • Vertical video— in 15 second and 60 second formats, designed for sound off in Facebook and Instagram stories.
  • Video for DTC (direct-to-consumer) companies that sell via highly produced entertaining and funny stories– like the Harmon Brothers and Chamber Media produce.
  • Video replacing email for real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and other sales professionals– short video replies are more powerful than text-based replies via tools like Bomb-Bomb.
  • Video analytics starting to mature– going beyond cost-per-view and average watch time towards depth in sequence and increased propensity to purchase. Facebook has the most robust video analytics on paid and free traffic, while YouTube is concerned with privacy.

How should marketers work with videos to amplify digital marketing performance?

Marketers need to integrate video capture as part of their operations– not just to collect fresh testimonials at the point of delivery with customers, but to gather product feedback to improve their offerings.
They must make video a central, internal function– so instead of video being the realm of a freelancer who comes in to shoot and edit once in a while, video becomes a skill that everyone on the marketing team understands and practices. Everyone has a role in collecting video, being on video, doing light edits via free video apps on their phone, and boosting video.

Think of video like email was to mailed letters. Forty years ago, there wasn’t email, so all communication with businesses and customers was via physical letters that we mailed through the post office.  Video is now the new medium, so everyone must learn how to use it if they want to be part of modern communication with customers that are under forty years old.

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: 2019, Digital Marketing, Funnel, insights, marketing, roles, sales, trends, Video

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:

image001

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:

image003

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

image005

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:

image007

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:

  1. Influencing the media
  2. Surprising and delighting friends
  3. Fighting back when the big company abuses you
  4. Growing your client/customer base
  5. Getting more speaking opportunities
  6. 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.

image009

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.

 

Filed Under: audience, Framework, Funnel, The 9 Triangles Tagged With: AEC, audience, conversion, engagement, Funnel

What is the best way to determine a page’s ROI?

By Dennis Yu 3 Comments

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:

  • http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/the-definitive-guide-on-how-to-calculate-earned-media-value-emv/300073
  • adweek.com/socialtimes/measuring-social-roi-with-tools-already-at-your-disposal/300117

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.

image001

 

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.

 

Filed Under: Facebook, ROI Tagged With: DMA, facebook, Funnel, ROI

Facebook can predict if you’re gay and like ice cream

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

Networked Insights saw declining mentions of iPhones by teens as a signal for Apple’s depressed earnings forecast

What women most want is ice cream, while men want cars says social analytics firm NetBase.

Facebook can predict if you’re gay or exactly where you’ll be in one year from now within 50 meters with high accuracy (Hey, do you like Spongebob and work out on Wednesday mornings at the gym)?

Moneyball for social media? Not so fast.

After all, it sounds reasonable:

Grab all the mentions of a company across all social channels, categorize the sentiment using the latest LSA techniques– then correlate to their stock price.

Predict how your posts will do or even suggest content tweaks based on what will happen in the future. React to tomorrow’s news today, proclaims one social startup.

BUT REALITY IS MUCH LESS SEXY

  • A liquor company wants to know if they run Facebook ads, what the impact will be on incremental sales.
  • An entertainment company with the most popular TV shows wants to measure whether social engagement drives more TV tune-in, which yields more ad dollars.
  • A B2B marketing company wants to drive not just leads, but sales-qualified opportunities via Facebook.

Of these three cases, which do you believe has actually measured social ROI with hard dollars?

If you guessed the last one, you’re right.  It’s Marketo and they’ve traced revenue all the way back.

But the entertainment company can’t definitively tell yet. Nielsen has a product called Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) that will show unique and total reach across different demos, broken out by digital vs TV.  They’ll show efficiency in reaching your target– even performance by Facebook ad campaign (if you spend at least $100k a month).

Their Watch Effect product certainly measures correlations between activity in social and TV, and may start to demonstrate incremental lift within segments that we define.

The CPG company wants to know not just increased awareness of the product (it’s already well-known in the target market), but how much incremental trial comes from stronger promotion on Facebook against the right audiences.

There is the DataLogix and Facebook partnership where point of sale data is tied back to actual Facebook users. Where the audience is big enough, it shows correlation, but not causation.

The new partner category targets allow you to segment your existing audience by loyalty card and other POS/retail data.

BUT HERE’S THE BILLION DOLLAR QUESTION

What’s truly driving incremental sales?

Correlation is not causation:

  • We know that a popular TV show will drive more social activity– so these will trend together.
  • We know that your existing real-world customers are more likely to become fans– so we can’t say that a fan is worth X% more than non-fans. Yes, you’ll still see a ton of “research” on this.
  • And there are still plenty of folks trying to buy fans and grow engagement, often with puzzling results.

But you and I know that if anyone can truly answer this ROI question, they control how all marketing budgets flow. If you can demonstrate clear profits– that you can put in one dollar and get back 20 dollars– who wouldn’t go all-in?


WHAT THE FUTURE REALLY HOLDS

It’s not about predicting the future– that’s a gimmick for news coverage.

It’s about measuring the hidden impact of social on ROI in other channels. Yes, the ROI of social doesn’t happen in social:

  • When you build you presence on Facebook or wherever, you have greater awareness, which increase the CTR on your Google ads. The higher CTR, in turn, drives more brand searches (for your name) and increases your account’s Quality Score (influencing what you pay per click). Have you ever thought about what caused people to search for your company name on Google?
  • When you run a custom audience on Facebook (uploading your email addresses like so), some people will click on the Facebook message, but more importantly, your email open and click rates will increase for folks who saw your message on Facebook. Do you know how to measure this? It’s easy.
  • When you run Facebook ads targeting people by job title or even to get your messages into the newsfeed (60 minute tutorial here), people see it, but might not click on anything. You see a picture of ribeye steak from Texas Roadhouse in your newsfeed on your iphone, then decide to pull into the restaurant as you drive by. No last click, coupon, or trackable link to your sale.

The real meat of social ROI comes from tying together all your data sources and tracking back to revenue events.

So if you can’t measure the ROI, even via indirect lift testing, then it doesn’t exist in our book. But at the same time, you might actually be hitting a home run in social, but don’t notice it, because you’re not measuring the impact in your other channels.

Some stuff just isn’t measurable yet or ever will be (although the NSA may beg to differ), but shouldn’t you at least be collecting unified reports across all your marketing channels to get full credit for your efforts?

 

 

 

Filed Under: Analytics, Social Media Tagged With: CPG, Custom Audience, Datalogix, facebook, Funnel, Measuring, Netbase, Networked Insights, Nielsen, OCR, Online Consumer Ratings, Predictive analytics, ROI, targeting

Useful Materials

A Guide to Getting the Most Out of Facebook Events

Growth Hacking on Facebook

Useful Online Tools

Copyright © 2019 · BlitzMetrics - Genesis Child Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in