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Lesson Info

Content Amplification Explained

Now we've been hanging out a lot. I want to make sure that we don't lose track of where we are so you've mapped your value journey. You have a sense of the process by which strangers are transformed into friends into customers and hopefully into raving fans. You've clarified your messaging and your value proposition. Right, you know why you deserve to exist. You understand from a statement of value perspective why you deserve to exist and that's so critical cause in my experience a lot of times people under market their business because they don't believe enough in what they're doing. I think that clarifying your message is as important for you personally and your team for believing in your mission and what you're doing as it is for the outside group cause you will fight hard to grow what you have if you believe and know that it's good. And sometimes we're too dang close to it. We've got to be reminded of it ourselves. You've crafted your perfect offer. Right, you know what you're goin...

g to say right at the outset to get their number. You know how you're going to take them from there and where you're going to go on your first date and you're going to make sure that that first date sets up a second and a third and a fourth and so on. Now it's time to increase awareness. Getting back to what I said before everyone wants to start with awareness. That's where everybody wants to start. How do I get more traffic, how do I get more traffic. My guess is many of you came here today hoping that I was going to talk about traffic. Here's the sucky thing about traffic, it always changes, there's always something new. Facebook's always changing their rules. There's new ad types coming out. Google's changing their structure. I don't know how many times Google from a search perspective has tweaked their algorithm. If I were to tell you here's how you go and drive traffic today it'd be wrong tomorrow, but the principles and the processes they're going to stay the same and at the end of the day don't forget what I said there's no such thing as a traffic problem there are only offer problems. If you have an offer that converts and you are able and willing to spend more than your customers to acquire, than your competitors to acquire a customer. If you're able and willing to spend more than your competitor to acquire a customer you will win as long as you also deliver value over and above what they do. You'll win and you'll deserve to win. But awareness needs to happen last. We don't want to pour water into a leaky bucket and that's why we're doing this step last. All right, here we are and our goal is to get you more customers by leveraging authentic marketing practices. All right leveraging the stuff that works today. So I'm going to talk to you about traffic and how to go and get it, but again I want to talk to you about it in the context of a framework of structure, not purely in the tactical, though we're going to get in the weeds just a little bit more here. First let's talk about what doesn't work. Search engine optimization all by itself it doesn't work and if you've been burned, anybody here like been burned by the SEO, like used car? Yes, I cut you deep huh? Still stings, yeah no I mean it's, no one can really guarantee that they're going to be able to get you ranked and the reality is the arms race is over and Google has won. All right, the people that win today, the brands that win today in search are the brands that are adding the most value cause they know everything. They know if you're going to a website and immediately leaving. They can do all the on page you want, drive all the inbound links, but if a bunch of people go there and immediately leave they're going to be like that's a worthless thing drop it down, right. And apart from that there is no I am number one for this thing, everybody's search results are a little bit different based on their own search patterns. So chasing this you know mythical unicorn that is search and free traffic it's not the game that it once was and I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, but the way you compete and win in search is by providing amazingly awesome top of funnel content that people want, great content still wins. All right great content wins. Also just saying you know what I'm just going to go nuts on social. I'm going to go crazy on social. I'm going to do the posting and praying, right. I'm just going to post, post, post and hope that people see it. Nobody's seeing it anymore. There was a time early on in Facebook and Twitter when people were seeing what you were posting. It's not happening today, right, it's not happening today. The big brands are the ones that are winning and simply buying paper click ads and other advertising to pages like this where you're asking strangers you know to give you their number, this doesn't work. I remember when it did by the way. I remember when you could drive people to a website and it could just say sign up for my newsletter and people will do it. Who in here remembers you've got mail? Right, remember logging into AOL and hearing you've got mail and you were excited that you had mail. You were actually happy, you were like ooh yeah right. Nuh-huh, now you're like you've got mail, of course I do, like we don't need a voice telling us we've got mail. I freaking know I've got mail. I've got thousands of mail, right I don't want anymore. So this isn't it either. Let's talk about what does work. What does work is content amplification. Okay, content amplification is the awareness strategy that I believe that everyone else, that everyone in this room needs to be deploying, okay. This is how you build awareness for your brand in a way that will absolutely scale, in a way that will build brand equity. All right in a way that will build brand equity and that follows every principle and process that we covered thus far. So let's talk about what content amplification is. Now I want you to mentally picture the value journey in your brain. Hopefully I've shown it enough that you've got a clear enough picture of what it is cause the way that content amplification works is we start as the name would suggest with content. We start with one amazing piece of content. So what stage, when we think about one amazing piece of top of funnel content what stage in the value journey are we referencing? Which stage is it, one, two, or three? Come on guys you got this. The engage stage, stage number two, exactly. So what you wrote down, that one amazing piece of content, that's where it all begins, okay, that's where it all begins. Now what everybody wants to do is they want to buy advertising and they want to drive advertising directly to the page that makes them money. Right, they want to drive advertising directly to the page that makes them money. What I'm going to suggest you do instead is buy advertising to your content. Amplify and advertise to your content. Now I know what you're thinking, but if I buy advertising to a piece of content how am I going to make any money. Well hopefully you've got some conversion devices that some of the people maybe click off and they go over to a landing page and it goes up to the subscribe stage. Right cause they clicked on this ad or maybe there was some calls to action embedded in the content, right. Hopefully some people come over here and they click over. In our experience that's always going to be less than two percent. Okay, less than two percent of the people who click on this ad, view your content, will then click and go, even click to go over here and once they get over to your landing page where you're asking them to subscribe or to convert, you're going to have a fraction of those people, depending on what you're asking for anywhere from you know on the low end a few percentage of points to if you're asking for an opt in maybe up to 60 percent. Okay, this is called relying on the kindness of strangers. Those handful of beautiful souls that see an ad, view the content, they actually consume it, they engage enough that they want to go to the next step and so they click over. This is a recipe for spending an enormous amount of money and running out of cash were it not for the next step. But it's there, now the beautiful thing is the people that go over here and view this, while only one to two percent of the people will actually click through, 100 percent of the people you will drop a retargeting pixel on them, on their browser. So who in here knows what retargeting in? My understanding is that you can then serve an ad to them wherever they may be on social, on the web that is specific to that content that they've already seen. That is exactly right and what you said there that's specific to the content they've already seen is specific, is really really critical, right. So in this case this was an ad related to Facebook marketing going over to content related to Facebook marketing. So now what I have the ability to do is drop a pixel on there that says okay all the people that hit this are clearly interested in Facebook marketing so Google, Facebook, YouTube, start showing advertising to these people and only these people who went to this page. So now we can run a secondary ad campaign that then brings them back to the landing page. This today is where the money is made. Now what everybody wants to do is they want to drive from here straight to there. What we have found is that if you are willing to pay for the click twice you will in the aggregate spend less per click. That sounds crazy because you're paying here and then you're paying again here, but the way that the campaigns are set up and the way that Facebook and Google are rewarding advertisers today is it's all an equality score basis. So if you have a high quality ad, meaning your advertising to content, guess what people like that. And do you know what they do, they share it. They share that ad. They say this is great stuff and they share it with their friends. So now you've got a lot of free clicks coming from over here because you're not just asking for something. You're going first, you're delivering value in advance. So that brings down your ad costs and then furthermore with these people because you're only advertising to a handful of folks that are really really targeted. They're targeted, they saw an ad once, they clicked through, right and now you're following up with them about the thing, you're continuing the conversation that was begun here the click through rate is phenomenal, quality scores are high and the conversion rates when they do come are through the roof. This is content amplification. Buying advertising to content so that we can build a pixeled retargeting audience, that we can build that retargeting audience. We're going to come back and talk a lot more about retargeting, but I'll guarantee you've experienced this. If you've ever been to a website and all the sudden it seems like that website's ads are following you all over the place, that's retargeting. Done wrong it's super obnoxious. I remember my wife complaining one time. She's like I will never shop for underwear for you ever again because I went one time and now all the sudden I got like dude's crotches following me all around, right. And I thought it was nice of her to pretend like she didn't like that. But if it's done and it's the same thing and you get in this how bout now cycle where (mumbles) how bout now, how bout now, how bout now, how bout now, that's irritating. Right, but if all you're doing is showing a different ad continuing the conversation it's not and I'm getting to know the brand, it's following up. Right, it's following up, it's like hey we met at this thing we should go connect sometime, following up, instead of following up via email you're following up via advertising. That is how retargeting works and this is the big, big, big secret to driving traffic today. It is getting harder and harder and harder to buy advertising. You know the Facebook newsfeed is pretty much full. Have you heard this? It's pretty much full, right. So Facebook is picking and choosing which ads they're going to show. Do you know how they're picking? Which ads do their users like the most, which ads are the highest quality cause they know maybe somebody else is willing to spend more but if that's a low quality ad people are going to stop using their platform. They're going to go away, gone, splitsville, they lost their customer, they lost their user. That's where their value is so they are picking the advertising, allowing the ads to exist in their newsfeed that are of the highest quality and that's exactly what this delivers. Now I want to talk about this and we're going to go into this step by step, but is anybody just completely lost and it's fine to admit because I said we were going to get in the weeds a little bit. This is a little bit more you know advanced when we're talking about how this works. Anybody have any follow up questions about any of the core concepts here in the room or at home? Yeah, what you got? So I'm familiar with the retargeting in the sense that I get retargeted a lot, but it is one of the areas that I'm not as familiar with from a tactical standpoint. Yeah. So like a question that popped up was you know how much from a budgeting standpoint does retargeting like, you know how much would you need to put on that to really move the needle and retarget because I do understand the importance of it, but don't really have much experience in actually doing it and doing it well. So when I jump into it pretty soon I want to make sure that I'm doing it the right way and not just throwing money through the black hole. Yeah, of course, now the nice thing about retargeting for better or for worse is you can only spend so much because you're only advertising to a select audience. You're saying I only want to show this ad to people who hit this page, or people who hit these categories of pages, right. So that's way less than saying you know hey Facebook show my ad to anyone who's interested in digital marketing. Right, there are a lot of those people, but now if I'm saying show this particular ad only to people who went here it's less. So what I recommend that people do when it comes to budgeting is think about what you're spending right now and I would say initially allocate 20 percent of your ad budget to content amplification. Allocate 20 percent of your ad budget to content amplification because this does take a little bit of while, little bit of time to come back around. Right, 20 percent though you got, right now in your campaigns you got 20 percent of waste guaranteed. You know you got 20 percent of your campaigns that you could pull back. Put all that towards this and then for the rest of your budget spend as much as you can on that retargeting, it won't be much. Your goal should be to spend the vast majority of your budget on retargeting, because what that means is you're spending the bulk of your budget on people that have already clicked once, people that are already in your pixeled audience, people that already have some familiarity with your brand. You're spending your budget on follow up, not awareness. But because this is just by its nature a smaller group you're going to spend a lot less. So in terms of a percentage that's spent on retargeting, spend as much as you can. Right, spend absolutely positively as much as you can cause that's going to be your highest ROI traffic and it's going to come back fast, yes. I want to clarify so how do I, what is the difference between who I target in my initial ad and who will be retarget. So let's talk about Facebook first. So Facebook allows you to to do targeting based on, do targeting based on interests, it let's you do interest based targeting, it allows you to do targeting based on geographical location, different keywords, they have a lot of different targeting options or you can set up what they call a custom audience and a custom audience is either you uploading your own list, right, or you can set up a custom audience that is built over time based on people coming to your website as a whole or people coming to specific pages. I'm going to give you some links and resources that will go in depth, I'm not going to go step by step into the process of doing it because literally they change exactly how it works about every other week. I'm trying to understand the whole thing. So if I choose for my initial ad, I chose the interest, the demographic Yep. The location, whatever, so the retargeting with the pixel will happen only to those who open Only those who clicked on the ad. So the first one about interest targeting and all that, now what you're probably doing right now is sending all those interested parties to some type of money page, right, where you're asking, you're maybe asking for an opt in, maybe you're asking for somebody to buy something, right. What I'm suggesting is don't do that. Send it to an amazingly awesome piece of content, could be a blog post, could be a video. Right, first drink's free. Deliver value in advance. What you're going to find is that this ad is the ad cost of those clicks goes way down. Right, it's going to go way down because the quality is so high. You're also going to get a lot of free clicks for people who share your ad. Right, the chatbooks, that chatbooks video, that ran as a video ad, a sponsored video ad. That's how my wife saw it initially and she shared it with all of her friends. She shared an ad with all of her friends. Why, cause it was freaking hilarious. It was so true. Right, if you've got great content amplify it. But we're not simply going to rely on the kindness of strangers, we want to do follow up through retargeting. Just to take that a step further. So we leverage a lot of video. When you say drive I guess from the ad to the content, you're talking about a video they're really just viewing it right there, right, so what are you actually driving them to? Like a landing page to see the full video or? Yeah, great question, so what you can do is you could have the video be in the post itself and sponsor that video content to where it's great or you could have it be a snit bit, you know a shorter video and have people click to go and watch the full video on your site and the answer is to do both. Do both, one may work better than another or it's just going to mix it up, right. Some people watch a short video, some people watch the whole, but the idea is the same. You just kind of collapsed the step. You know as opposed to people clicking to go and view it, both of these are happening at the same time, but in Facebook if somebody views a video on Facebook you can still set a retargeting pixel based on the fact that they viewed it. And you could say I only want to set this retargeting pixel if somebody watched it for at least 30 seconds or a minute or five minutes. Does that make sense? It's pretty freaking slick. All right so let's dig in. I think as we get through and I begin to break this down it's going to make more sense, but this is a fairly advanced concept.