Transcript:
Eric: Hello. What is up? And thanks so much for tuning in. Every once in a while, I like to get tactical on the Actionable Marketing Podcast. This week, I want to get intimate with Facebook. Now, I was scrolling along and I came across this article. It said, "How We drive $22:1 ROI from Cold Traffic, Using Facebook and Promoting Content." You heard me. That's $22 back for every dollar spent promoting content. That's the secret sauce. What I'm talking about is just too good to be true.
I had to find out so I brought on the authors. They are Daniel Hutt and Freyja Spaven with Amp My Content, and it is a fantastic article. It is this beast, this 30,000-word definitive guide to paid promoted content on Facebook. They lay down some of the logic behind the success they're finding. They share their secrets. They break down how to research promoted content and design, what's the copywriting you should use to catch attention then, finally, the most important piece: how are you casting the ROI and testing the success of your paid ads in Facebook.
It is a good, goody goodie. I know you will enjoy it. I can't wait to launch into it. My name is Eric Piela, the host of the Actionable Marketing Podcast, and I can't wait for you to check out this episode. Buckle up because it's time to get amped. All right, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Actionable Marketing Podcast. This is a fun episode. I've got my guests, Daniel and Freyja. They are coming to us from the Bay of Plenty from New Zealand. Welcome to the show.
Daniel: Thanks for having us.
Freyja: Thanks so much for having us, Eric.
Eric: Absolutely. It's fun to have you on. We were chatting before the podcast started. You guys, I'm very jealous. I'm recording now. It's literally -10 outside of our office here, it's a blizzard, and you're talking about money and catch the surf in a couple of hours so I'm extremely jealous but I'm happy you're able to join us. It's going to be an exciting episode. I would love if you could just let our listeners know about you. You guys, this is the first episode of Actionable Marketing Podcast where we've had two outside guests on at the same time, and so this is really cool. Daniel and Freyja, why don't you let the listeners know a little bit about yourself and how you've come to work together?
Daniel: I am lucky enough. Freyja is my partner in work and in life so she puts up with me in both areas. It's a crazy story. We are in New Zealand but we're from the UK and, at one point, we were going to get kicked out the country because I was too old and we needed a visa. We're looking for loopholes, and we saw that you could get an entrepreneurship visa and you could stay. We took a lesson on Photoshop for design. We designed a tee shirt and put it on Facebook, and we woke up the next day to three or four sales.
Within five weeks, we were in five retail stores and then it escalated from there. I managed to quit my job, the one I was working in at the time. We started selling online, learning everything we could about marketing things and then started writing articles about paid ads, and those articles went on to be the Top 10 of All Time on inbound.org. We've had Freyja write in the software space as well. We've had the #1 content on Hacker News, Top Content of 2017-2018 on Growth Hackers and things like that.
We got together and basically decided to start Amp My Content, which is where we teach people how to write more effectively how to promote content, basically how to make it more efficient. If you are time-poor, you can write less often but get more traffic from that content. I'm the ads nerd and Freyja you're the wizardry behind the content and the editing, right?
Freyja: Yes, that is well. Thank you for your compliment but, yes, I try to write as much as I can.
Eric: I love the juxtaposition of the two skillsets and how you guys have come together. What a fun story and what a cool entrepreneurial story like, "I'll do some Photoshop and, boom, I'll sell some tee shirts," and now you guys have a great business. That is the reason I had you on the show. You guys reached out. You talked about this amazing beast article, the Definitive Guide to Paid Promoted Content on Facebook, and that's what we're going to dive into today.
You've talked about the success you've had and some of the cool accolades for some of the content you've created, both of you, and that was the precipice of bringing you on the show, is because you wrote this really, really compelling article. In your words, it's an eight-chapter, nearly 30,000-word beast, which I love. I love that. Who says long-form content is dead, baby? I love it. The title was "How We Drove $22:1 ROI from Cold Traffic, Using Facebook and Promoted Content," and I'm like, yup, I'm going to have them on the show.
It's really a topic we haven't dove into tons here on the Actionable Marketing Podcast, but I knew it was something that our listeners would be eager to hear about because I think, as we jump in maybe to our first question set here, we've all come to realize marketers that organic Facebook traffic is dead and gone and, really, having to figure out how to use promoted and sponsored content especially in Facebook, I think–there's still opportunities maybe in other platforms, but especially in Facebook–it's really got to be a game plan for our marketer.
I think everyone's starting to experiment and figure out what works, but when I saw that killer ROI you guys had, I said, I've got to have them on the show. I want them to share with everyone how in the hell they figured that out. Maybe just start by talking to maybe at a high-level overview what was the experience and what drove you to writing that.
Daniel: Amp My Content is fairly new. It's about five months old, and everything we share are all personal case studies and things that we've taken on. We wanted to create this post that really stands out in the niche because, obviously, content marketing is very competitive. For people who've read Garrett's book, the "10X Content", it stands out that people can't compete with. The reason we wanted to write this guide and make it so in-depth is we know a lot of friends who are small business owners who have funds but they can be time-poor.
It's difficult for their content to actually work for them. They can't leverage it, and so we wanted to create this guide where we're not against SEO or anything like that, but there's so many benefits to promoting content rather than just writing new stuff all the time. You're getting in front of new audience who are just like your previous customers so it's going to help you scale and things like this, but if you can do it on automation with paid ads and if you can do it at a profit, it means you can pretty much run a small team because it's only me and Freyja and sometimes we have an intern working with us, and we can get all those results.
At the moment, we are running paid ads, and it didn't start at this point but, right now, for every dollar we spend, we make $22 in return. It's a very simple process. It's like everything. When it comes to marketing, it's the subtleties. If you tweak this a little bit and if you change that, it's going to be 10 times more effective. At its most simple, we have an advert that goes to a cold audience, people who have never heard of this before. That drives them to a piece of content. In that content, we have what we call a hyper-specific next-step offer. It has some kind of lead magnet that is highly-efficient and then, over time, via email and things, we can make the sale. That's pretty much the overview of how it works.
Eric: That's great. I love that you're pulling from real examples and work you have done. You're still a fairly new joint organization. Now, you both have longer-standing careers, but coming together at Amp My Content, you're really showing what's working for you, and I love that. I think it was a step that I saw in the article that, right now, there are 83.6 million blog posts written every month. There's just an over-inundation of content out there.
I definitely get the idea of, "Hey, let's leverage all we know that we can get." There's a lot of things that are great about promotion via Facebook, the targeting. Understand who your target audience is and the research you can do. It makes clear sense to me, and it doesn't cost tons of money. That's the beauty of Facebook especially. You can get a lot of reach with not a lot of money. I think that's important as well.
Obviously, it's hard to break down a 30,000-word article in a 25-minute podcast, but I think, if we do, you've really broken it down to a couple of sections that maybe we can cover and aim questions around. You've broken it down into research, planning, ad design, copywriting and testing. Maybe we'll start with the first, which is research. What should we be doing then? I'm doing Facebook right now, it's going okay and I'm clearly not getting $22:1, but I'm getting okay. What kind of research would I start doing to maybe re-tweak the type of promotion I'm working on right now?
Daniel: I'll quickly say before I get into it that you do need good content. You can't just push traffic to weak content.
Eric: That's a beautiful disclaimer. I love it.
Daniel: If the content doesn't work at all, you're really going to struggle. You also need to know your business numbers simply because a lot of the reasons that people don't do paid ads or they don't work is because they don't know if an ad is profitable because they have no idea what they should be aiming for. We cover all that in the guide, but if you know those things upfront, it makes it so much easier because it gives you goalposts to aim for.
When it comes to actually writing the ad, I kind of cheat in that I do research before we even write the content. I will normally do a sequence of interviews with the ideal reader. I will go into my subscriber list and I'll normally send an email out saying, I'm looking for people in this topic, and I will interview people who have already solved this problem, so perhaps people who have already tried paid ads. I will interview someone who's thinking of trying paid ads and then I will interview someone who has written content but has never done paid promotion.
The reason I do that is because it helps me improve the content. Marketing really is connecting someone from A to B, from their problem to resolution. All we are trying to do is we're trying to put that language into that content so that they can connect the dots and they can understand. By speaking to those people in three areas, people will always tell you what they think you want to hear rather than the truth, like that is guiding them.
By speaking to people who have already solved the problem, they'll give you the real reason and how they feel now. That's really important because you can use that to resonate with people who have yet to solve it. Saying you want more traffic is great but, in reality, you want to be able to just sleep well at night and spend time with your kids. If you can put that into words and use the language that they use, it's going to be much easier.
By speaking to people who are very cold as well, I can also talk to people who are not even on the spectrum yet and don't even know what their problem is. By doing that at the early stages before I write content or even if I'm going to improve and update content, it makes it really easy then to write an advert afterwards that ties into that. It's so easy to write the ad because you are literally just writing an ad to those emotions to people at the start, to the people who have had that realization and then get the click across. Right now, we're getting email opt-ins for about 53¢ in New Zealand which is about 30¢ in the US. Straight away, because the content is good and the ad is good, it means that our ad's more likely to be profitable.
Freyja: I will say as well that one of the big mistakes that we see is people creating a great breadth of content and not really showing their expertise or highlighting their expertise in their content by going deep into a subject that is very, very broad, which is fine, but it doesn't really work for when you are putting spend into a piece of content. It's much better to go deeper and spend the time on the research and really understand the customer.
Daniel: That is one thing as well. If you are a small business owner or a freelancer and you're listening, you're better off spending all your time improving one piece and getting one working ad rather than trying to send traffic to 10 different pieces of content and seeing which works because it takes time. Most ads start at a loss. People don't realize this, but you might spend $4 and get $1 back. Sometimes, that could be as simple as Facebook just doesn't have enough data yet and hasn't ran for long enough, but it's usually because you need to tweak the image, and the
headline, and things to get a better-performing advert. If you're spending all your budget in 10 different locations, you're never going to have enough data to get one ad that works effectively.
Eric: Fascinating stuff with Daniel Hutt and Freyja Spaven with Amp My Content. I hope you're enjoying the conversation.
I wanted to pause because I have a favor to ask as I always typically do at this time of the show, but I want to hear from you. I want to understand the type of topics you want to hear about this year. Are there certain guests you'd love to have me bring on the show? Tell me, and you can hit me up at podcasts@coschedule.com. Give me a piece of your mind about what I should cover and who I should talk to this year on the Actionable Marketing Podcast. I can't wait to hear from you.
All right, back to the show. Say you've done that and say you've done the research. I love the idea of talking. Actually, it's been a common theme over interviews, is the value of having conversations with real individuals to help with your content and even some of your marketing that you've done. I love that. What's the next step then after you've done that?
Daniel: In our guide, all the chapters are broken down so that you take action on a specific step, one after the other. You do the research. You write the ad. You create the ad. That stuff isn't difficult. The beauty, really, or probably the thing that we should talk about because people want to know is how to test the ad to get it to a point where it's profitable because that's a bit nerdy and it's another area that I see a lot of people fail on.
Yes, ads start at a loss and we need to test them. If we're using a newsfeed ad, which is what we talk about in the guide, we do that because it's a big image and we can put a lot of text into it. How much text do you need? You need as much as it takes to convert that person. Sidebar ads and things like that, they don't have all that text area so it makes it more difficult to convert. They work great for warm leads and things like, "Hey, did you forget this thing?" For a cold audience, that's where we like to start.
When we're testing, if you think of the Madman era if you've ever watched the TV show as I'm sure a lot of people have, what we want to do is we want to create a focus group of people who are ideal for your article. We specify and we keep niching down. They have to like this, plus this, plus this, plus this. I like to make an audience of about 1000 to 10,000 people of the ideal people who are perfect for your piece of content.
The reason I do that is I want to create an advert that resonates the most with those people if possible because if we were to test 52 variations of an ad, we might get one ad that gets a lot of clicks, but it might get clicks from the wrong people. It might get clicks from people who are not actually right for your offer, but that particular headline and image is just so click bait-y that those people keep clicking and things aren't going across. That's a big thing. It's testing with the right people and getting that message connected with those guys.
The thing is the more specific you get with your ads, the more Facebook will charge you to show them. It's supply and demand. That's okay at this stage because all we're trying to do is we're trying to show these ads as much as possible to these guys, see what they click, see what they don't click, and see what they dislike so that we can find all the variations that work the best. We use a sequence of A/B testing called bottom-up testing.
It's what they do in product design where they will test all elements of one thing and then they'll keep the winner, remove all the failures, and then they'll test the next element. For example, we will test the image, and we'll test maybe just four images to find the one that gets the most clicks.
Eric: You're keeping the copy static but you're altering it? Beautiful.
Daniel: I'm only ever testing one thing at a time because in a multivariate testing, we would test every single possible connotation, but if you only had four images, four headlines and four calls of action, I'm bad at math but I think that's 52 different ads that you would be running at once. You would be running them all to this focus group, and it will cost you a lot of money to get to that point. People have money for ads but they don't always have a heap of cash. They don't have 10 grand they just stand on.
By doing simple A/B tests one at a time, the ad improves every time we run it so we're getting some clicks and we're getting some emails that will become customers but, at that point, we're just paying for data to figure out which version is getting better. If you have the budget, then multi-variant, AdEspresso and A/B testing, all the variations, boom, fastest way to find out what works. If you don't have that and you're just getting started and you only want to spend $5 a day, we'll test the image first, we'll find the winning image, and we'll remove the failures.
Every future ad keeps that image, and then we'll test a headline, do different variations, and keep the winner because how people actually consume a newsfeed ad is not how you would think. If they scroll down and the image gets their attention, then they read the subhead to see, "Is it relevant to me? Is it worth me spending any kind of brain energy to actually stay focused on it?" Freyja's laughing at me.
Eric: I'm laughing as well. It's funny because it's true.
Daniel: That's how the brain works. The brain works on three tiers. We work on this lizard brain, mid-brain and neocortex. Neocortex is where all the logic and stuff happens, but we're pretty much on autopilot all the time because we're trying to save that energy for fight-or-flight situations or if we need to make an important decision. The image in the headline, one gets their attention and the other says, "Yes, this is about you," and then, all of a sudden, it filters through and they say, "Okay, well, I'll stop to pay attention." Then, they scroll back up and read the text above.
It's important to know what sequence people read these ads in because otherwise, if you're trying to start out with a strong intro at the top, no one's reading that yet. If the image isn't getting any attention, no one's going to click on it and actually read the ad. We test these things, and it's more expensive because it's a specific group. Then, what we do once we found the ad that's getting the most clicks, at that point, we might even be making a profit so the ad is performing the best. What we do is we expand very broad and we let the machine-learning program that Facebook has start to take over.
Eric: That's a great question. At what point do you guys say, "Here's what I can tweak," and at what point do you let Facebook do their algorithm work?
Daniel: Once I've tested with that focus group and I know that these particular variations are the best, from that audience of people–maybe they are agency owners who write content who want to do paid ads in a specific country–once I know that that ad gets the most clicks from those people in my focus group and it's going to be more expensive, I might remove all kind of criteria apart from country and interest, so content marketing.
What will happen is the price will immediately drop to show that to people. Then, I will tell Facebook that, usually, I'll have a conversion goal. I want people to opt in to this article. What I'm trying to tell Facebook is, "Track this data because it's important, the people who take action, how long it takes for them to take action," and things like this because, as the machine-learning program starts to get more data and we're spending less money but showing it to more people, it starts to pick up on all the information and it says, "Okay, well, this person's now opted in, and this person, and this person."
Because our advert is fine-tuned to a particular audience and focus group, they're the same people who are going to opt in when we broaden the ad. Facebook picks up on all that data and says, "Hang on a minute, agency owners are converting higher. I'm going to show it more to agency owners." The algorithm itself starts to get more specific but they don't charge us more. In reality, they start to charge us even less because the experience and the relevance is going up.
Eric: I love that. There's a loop in the system where you figured out where you've done your tests in advance, you know who's going to be clicking, you open it up and you already know what's going to resonate with most, and so Facebook picks up on that so you're spending les because your demographics aren't as finite, but Facebook's algorithm is working to say, "Hey, I'm going to render this to more people who have already been enjoying, liking and subscribing to this type of content already because I want you to be happy so you'll spend more money with me in the future." Correct?
Daniel: Exactly. It's also from a reader user experience. If that ad is starting to resonate and actually getting people to opt in, then it's saying, "Well, you must be sending these people to something that they really enjoy so we're going to show it to more people because we want our readers to have a good experience as well because, otherwise, they'll stop using Facebook." That’s why it works so well because we run paid traffic in so many different channels.
We could do YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google Ads, but those platforms, especially Google Ads, is for a hot audience. We could target a keyword that's relevant to the article, and that's great but it's a red ocean. It's competitive. Whereas Facebook, people are on there to be entertained so we can go out totally Blue Ocean to people who don't even know they have a problem, and we can be sending that content and trying to actually entertain them so they are scrolling through their feed, and they're bored, and when they click and when they read an article for six minutes and then they opt in, Facebook is going to say, "Hey, this demographic of people clearly likes this," and so they lower their price and they start showing it more and more to those people who are converting. Those are big things that I see people make mistakes on.
Eric: I love that. It's almost a beautiful hack, is really what it is, to understand the algorithm, understand how Facebook promotion works and use it to your advantage. That's fantastic. I love it. I think you touched on something at the end there. We think about Facebook, and this is even personal. As we're trying to market and sell CoSchedule, you bring up a good point: People want to be entertained in the Facebook medium. When they're there, they're looking for sometimes a release from work, sometimes just to be entertained. What type of copy and ad works best in that scenario from your testing, and what have you seen that usually is a dud?
Daniel: My goal is Blue Ocean. I want to try and talk to people who don't even know that they need the thing yet ideally. If I think of the article I'm sending them to, I want to go two or three steps removed and, in the advert, I want to try and educate them to the point where they're ready for the article, if that makes sense, rather than just focusing on people who have the problem and want to read this thing right now. What additional couple of sentences can I add in so I can talk to people who are even a few more steps removed?
As an example, if it was CoSchedule and you were talking about how to organize, set up and run your content for the year or something like that, I might write an advert for people who are writing content but struggle with content right now and address particular writing issues that they have like writing at the same time of day, using templates to get started, specific objections that they have, waiting for willpower to kick in, getting them on board that writing isn't difficult; instead, it's about having specific systems and processes. At that point, they are probably ready to read an article about organizing your writing for the entire year, and that would tie in directly to an article on CoSchedule.
Freyja: One thing that works really well for these efforts is case studies and highlighting your product. We call it Band-Aid solution where we say, "Right, we're addressing this." CoSchedule does excellently content with their content, by the way. […] used CoSchedule before. I would like to see how you solve my problem in a real-world scenario. You're talking about you're about to set up your content calendar for the year, here's how you can do it, and here's how you would do it with CoSchedule.
If I see that in my Facebook feed, I'm going to jump on it because I love what I do and I also want to save myself a little bit of stress coming into the New Year, and any numbers that you can throw in as well because I want to look at other companies who are a little bit further ahead of us and understand what they're doing to make sure that they are successful. I don't want to be looking at huge companies like Coca Cola and how they're managing their content strategy; I want to be looking at companies that are just a little bit further ahead than me. If you've done your research on the backend and can understand who I look up to in the industry, you can start using them as examples of leading learners.
Daniel: Sometimes, it can even be yourself as well. That works really well if you would talk about how CoSchedule or your team got past this problem and especially if you talk about the failure and struggle before them because that's where your audience is right now and that's really going to resonate because saying, "I have the solution is great," but, as people, we think we're special snowflakes. We'll say, "Yeah, you've got that solution, but that works for you. You don't know my problem."
If you explain your problem and it connects with mine, I'm like, "Hang on a minute, if it worked for those guys, then it could work for me as well." We connect with that. As Freyja was saying, the closer you can give examples that are more relevant to me, the more it's going to connect.
Eric: This is great. I'm laughing because I'm thankful for that wonderful advice I'm also getting in this wonderful interview as well so let me know what your billable rate is per hour after this. This is great. I love the examples. Hopefully, to everyone listening to those examples can resonate with their own business. I love the tangible advice that you're giving. I thank both of you. To wrap things up, let's talk about that ROI piece.
Should we be tying our ROI to number of email addresses I'm able to grab from my content? Am I tying it all the way back to the number of new customers I was able to get from this piece of content? Am I looking at impressions? Where do you guys typically see with the Facebook promotion piece–and maybe it probably it depends on what their goals are–but where do you find Facebook promotions, specifically, is working the best for you?
Daniel: Ideally, every piece of content we create has a call to action. People need to be able to take a specific action on that content because it's pointless just sending them to it. We had this conversation yesterday. Imagine you are advertising a new burger at your restaurant and you send out flyers, and everyone comes to the restaurant but they can't actually buy the thing. It makes no sense. Sending people to a piece of content that doesn't have a call to action, all you did was you got them in the room and then you made no offer.
I like to collect their email for a number of reasons. One, it's an asset that we can use to promote new content. It's a very effective sales channel, but there's also a few other things. If you can get someone to say yes to a small thing, they're 40% more likely to say yes to a big thing. Some people will buy almost immediately when you make an offer, but they're more likely to buy just because they signed up. They said yes to one thing and then they commit to that principle and keep going.
There's also other things. We have a content academy. It's a product that we just started launching for things like this where we teach people how to write and how to promote content on different channels. It can take around 40 days for someone to find us and then become a customer. Now, if I'm running an ad and I'm waiting 40 days to see if it's efficient and making a sale, I'm going to go insane and I'm going to change it so many times.
This is the thing: You have to leave ads running for about three days for the algorithm to find its feet, but if I know how many leads I need to make a sale and I know how much I can afford to spend per lead, what I can do then is it gives me immediate feedback loop so I can say, "Okay, well, these people opted in. It was this price. That's below what I can afford to spend so that's profitable." Because the optimal happened almost immediately or a day later, it means that I'm getting a feedback loop straight away from an ad that was running today or yesterday rather than waiting 30 or 40 days for a sale to come through.
You can still track that sale. Facebook will say, "This person came in on this day, they opted into this, and it cost this much. When they purchased, this is how much it cost to make that purchase," and you had to get 40 leads or whatever. There's so many benefits to collecting email rather than anything else. It doesn't matter what industry you're in. You're going to make more sales if you have that asset instead plus you own that list rather than getting them to like your Facebook page or something, which you then have to pay to get them in front of. It's just such an effective channel to have, and it's pretty much the only way we make sales right now.
Eric: Yeah, we can echo that. Here at CoSchedule, I think we know our email list is our most valuable asset other than marketers. That continues to be even more and more true as social media platforms become more pay-to-play. I love that take on ROI. Like you said, with anyone understanding what your sale cycle is and how long will it take, to actually see it to full fruition based on some of the immediate–I love that 40% likely to say yes again if they say yes once. It's great, great stuff.
I know that we just barely got to the tip of the iceberg to use an old analogy. Where can people go to dive into this more? If they want to learn or they want to see your full post, where should they go?
Daniel: We're at ampmycontent.com. If you want to read this article, this massive guide, it's ampmycontent.com/promoted-content. It's all there. It's all free. It's basically a book on the entire subject. If you want to follow us on Twitter, you can follow us on twitter. Freyja is @ampmycontent, and I am @inboundascend. We'll be honest: We normally share a couple of articles but mainly photos of our cat, Ninja, and music that we've been listening to. This is the thing: We're not that huge on social media at all. We don't even try and get followers or anything because it's more effective for us to get emails from our content. If you want to see photos of our cat, you can find us there on Twitter.
Eric: I'm a cat guy. I'm all in.
Freyja: Great. Us, too.
Eric: Great. Thank you so much, both of you, and we'll make sure to include those links on our blog recap as well so people can just jump right to your content. Thanks so much for putting it out there. What a great gift to all marketers out there looking at promotion for Facebook. I know you've got some other end-all, be-all guides that are out there. Take some time and have a look at those. This is fantastic. Daniel and Freyja, thank you so much for being guests. I appreciate your time.
We'll definitely, definitely make sure that everyone gets access to this content because if you're interested, if you're struggling with Facebook promotion, if you're trying to figure out how to work it better for you, this is basically the resource you should run to right now if you're not. I appreciate it. You guys have a great rest of your day catching the surf.
Daniel: Thank you very much for having us. We appreciate your time, and also, people listening at home, I hope you found it valuable and actionable.
Freyja: Yeah, it's such a pleasure. We created this guide for the use of the marketing community, and we hope that it's really valuable.