AMY PORTERFIELD: Hey there, Amy Porterfield here. Welcome to another edition of the Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. Today is a special one. We are celebrating the 50th episode. I am so excited because I know you might think I have had more than 50 episodes. I have been doing this for a while. But just until recently haven’t I been doing a weekly podcast.
We are finally at #50 and we are going to celebrate today so I am mixing things up a little bit. You are going to be able to win a prize and I have a cohost today. So instead of just bringing someone on to interview, I am doing things a little bit differently and I have asked my really good friend, Rick Mulready, and when I say really good friend, I mean it; we hang out a lot here in San Diego. I have asked Rick to cohost with me today.
We are like Regis and Kathy Lee because we are cohosting today.
Rick Mulready: What?
Amy: Yes, you are Regis, for the record.
Rick: Okay.
Amy: And I am Kathy Lee and we are going to cohost the show all about paid advertising. So Rick, or Regis, thanks for being here with me today.
Rick: Isn’t it Michael Strahan. Regis is no longer there.
Amy: You just want to be someone bigger and badder, I just know it.
Rick: Exactly.
Amy: Okay. You can be Michael. But Regis and Kathy Lee sounds so much more fun.
Rick: Congratulations on this being #50.
Amy: Thank you so much. I can’t believe we are finally here. I think it’s going to get to #100 really quickly if we are doing a weekly show now. But I am really happy to be at #50.
Rick and I were talking before we came on and I thought one thing that would be really fun would be to give away a prize. So in honor of my 50th episode I am giving away a membership into my signature program, The Profit Lab.
It’s all about how to build business funnels so that you can grow your email list and profit from your leads. I launch this program twice a year. It’s coming out in May 2015. So if you want to win a membership into the program you can leave a review for my podcast.
Just go on iTunes and search for Online Marketing Made Easy, leave a review, and when you do that anytime between now and March 20 I will pick a winner to win a membership into the Profit Lab. So leave a review and you could be my big winner. This is in honor of our 50th episode.
Rick, today we are talking about paid advertising. The reason I wanted you to come on and cohost is because you actually have a podcast all about this, right?
Rick: Yes, The Art of Paid Traffic.
Amy: It’s kind of kicking butt right now. It’s extremely popular. It’s really good. Tell people a little bit of what it’s about so they kind of know what you’re about.
Rick: I basically started this podcast because everybody had been asking me to do something like this. I looked around and there was no other podcast that was strictly about paid traffic. So I wanted to get into it.
I am so passionate about it because, #1, I have been doing it for almost 15 years. But, it has such a negative connotation to people. They don’t want to pay for traffic or think they can’t afford it or they think you need big budgets for that, and that sort of thing.
I really wanted to break down those types of barriers for people and explain how they can use paid traffic strategies. We are talking everything from Facebook ads to LinkedIn ads to copy.
I write native advertising, which we will talk a little bit about today. Every aspect of paid traffic is discussed on the show. I bring on experts in those fields where I am not an expert. For example, YouTube ads, which we will talk about today as well, I bring on an expert and we do an interview on it.
The idea on the show is for my listeners to leave with one or two actionable things that they can go and test on their business right away. It’s been a lot of fun.
We obviously talk about Facebook ads. I do solo episodes about that. I am not afraid to bring other Facebook ads people on the show as well. I just recently did that. We do Q&A episodes. It has been a lot of fun.
Amy: What I love is that they are short and to the point. They are really actionable and it doesn’t take a long time to get the really good valuable info from it. So, I really like your format too.
Rick: That was very intentional. My previous podcast could have been anywhere from 35 minutes to an hour. Most shows out there sort of fall into that timeframe but I kind of wanted to change it up a little bit and do something a little differently and shorten the episodes.
One thing I am finding with trying to keep it around 15 minutes, I am not cutting them off at 15 minutes. If we are in a really good conversation then I want the episode to be as long as it needs to be. I don’t want to cut people off.
Amy: They are usually pretty short and really good. So there are a lot of different ways to use paid advertising that you are going to talk about in the show, right?
Rick: Exactly.
Amy: Cool. So I can’t wait for all of those episodes to come out too. It’s a fairly new show. So, definitely go check it out, the Art of Paid Traffic. That’s right, right?
Rick: Yes, exactly.
Amy: Good. I would feel so bad if I got it wrong. When I first wrote the Facebook marketing book, Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies, every time someone introduced me as the author they butchered the title. So now I am always scared to butcher everybody else’s title.
Rick: You’ve got it right.
Amy: So we are going to talk about, like you said, YouTube advertising, Facebook advertising, something called native ads (which you are going to love because it takes your blog posts and turns them into a lead-generating machine, so we are going to talk about that).
But before we get into those main topics, there are two things I want to tell you. First of all, I want to tell you guys that we have a free giveaway, just like all my other shows, a PDF giveaway. In this show Rick and I put together something really special. We are going to show you how to put together a highly-converting YouTube ad and a highly- converting Facebook ad.
It’s the anatomy of a highly-converting ad. We will break it up for YouTube and for Facebook. That’s the giveaway for this show and it’s really valuable. You can get it at http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/50download or you can text 50download to 38470. So go ahead and grab that right away before you forget. It’s going to be really valuable when you sit down to put together our ads. I’ll mention it a little bit later in the show as well just in case you forget.
That’s one thing I wanted to cover. The next thing I wanted to cover before we get into the specifics is this idea that you don’t have a big enough budget to run ads or, Rick I know you’ve heard this one a lot too because we talked about it, you don’t feel you have time to learn to do all of the ad “stuff.”
We were talking about this and you have a really great perspective on not being able to do this for your business right now. What were you saying?
Rick: For your listeners who might be thinking that, they keep hearing about people who are having success with their Facebook ads or are trying YouTube ads or whatever it might be but they don’t have time to do that. I would encourage them to look at what they are spending their time on in their business.
If they don’t have time to look at ways to automate their leads and sales coming into their business and spend the time on learning what those things are and how to do those things, then it might be an opportunity to look and really take inventory of the types of things they are spending their time on in their business.
It might be a case where, if they are saying they don’t have time to learn Facebook ads or YouTube ads, these strategies are things that will bring them an automated stream of leads and sales into their business. Maybe they are spending time on the wrong things in their business and it is not freeing up that time to learn the automation side.
It is probably a good idea to start inventorying or just looking at how they are spending their time in their business and what types of things they are spending their time on that might be taking them away from these other forms that are very likely going to automate leads and sales for their business.
Amy: I totally agree. And that just reminds me, in Episode #47 you can go to my show notes and check it out, I interviewed Todd Herman, my personal business coach. That PDF giveaway in that show was basically an assessment of how you are spending your time. For seven days I challenged my audience to really put into categories where they are spending their time and what they are doing.
You will notice that a lot of times you are spending time in a category that is not very valuable for you. You will understand it when you check out Episode #47. But I think that is a good place to start if you are thinking you don’t have time for this paid advertising stuff. You may think it is interesting but that you don’t even know how to figure it all out.
I want you to check out Episode #47 for information on getting clear where you are spending your time now. But second, I also want you to really think about the fact that when you spend time on advertising, Facebook ads or YouTube ads or whatever you might be doing, you are actually cutting through this social media noise, all that clutter that is out there.
What Facebook ads and all other ads allow you to do is get out in front of the perfect audience so that you are not wasting your time on Facebook searching for the perfect audience and having your posts fall flat. Or you aren’t spinning your wheels trying to figure out how you are going to grow your email list.
When you invest in paid advertising, even $5 per day to start, you elevate your brand above what everybody else is doing.
Rick and I were also talking earlier how most people don’t use ads. They listen in, you are listening now, to figure out what it is all about but then they don’t take the action to actually implement it.
You actually get to stand out from everybody else when you take the steps to implement. So my challenge for you today is to learn one new thing about paid advertising and really keep an open mind. It does not take a huge budget to make this work. It takes $5 a day or $10 a day for a few days, to start, is a great place to start if you have never done ads.
But I want you to start thinking what’s one thing you can take action on right away just to see how this might work for your business, Facebook ads are the #1 way that I’ve grown my email list. I use webinars and promote the webinars with Facebook ads. I know Rick does the same thing and it works really, really well. There are so many different ways to do it.
So, Rick, if you’re cool with it, let’s start out talking about these native ads you have really been talking about a lot, learning about a lot, and they are very doable, especially for someone just starting out with ads.
Rick: Before I get into that, I didn’t want to interrupt you before, but you were talking about the entrepreneurial scorecard download. I printed one out for myself and have them on my desk right here because I think it is such a great exercise to do; where are you spending your time, a $10 task, a $100 task, a $1,000/hour task, and that sort of thing. It’s a really great exercise to do.
Amy: Good stuff, right? The more time you are spending in that $10 or $100 task that you should be outsourcing, right there is your time to learn how to do some paid advertising.
Rick: Exactly. And your paid advertising can go into that $1,000 or $10,000 type of task.
Amy: Good call.
Rick: So we are talking about native ads. Native ads is kind of one of those buzz words. I saw an article yesterday that said something like, “Can we kill the whole native advertising term already?”
Amy: It has already caught on too much?
Rick: It is already getting overused. All native ads, for those of you who don’t know what that term is, all it really means is an advertisement that is sending people to a piece of content. Whether that content is a blog post or a show notes page for a podcast, it is some form of content you are sending somebody to rather than a direct opt-in form or sales page.
They are in magazines and newspapers all the time. If you are flipping through a magazine you will see a sponsored ad (it will say that at the top) and it looks like content that is a part of the magazine.
Amy: Yeah, yeah!
Rick: That’s native advertising. The article or content they are showing looks like it should be appearing in that particular magazine or newspaper and online it is no different. The idea of native advertising, for example let’s use Facebook ads as an example: Rather than drive your Facebook ad to an opt-in page or to a registration page you send people to a blog post.
You are actually promoting a blog post from your ad. You are adding value to people on Facebook. That is something we should talk a little bit about here and how Facebook is shifting a lot with their advertising. You are promoting a blog post. You are sending people to the blog post and from the blog post you can build what we call two lists.
You can retarget people so you have a tracking pixel that will track people who come to that blog post page to build a retargeting audience that you can turn around and show ads to again on Facebook.
That’s a very warm list, if you will, of people because those people clicked on your ad or organically went to that blog post. Then you also have an opt-in form on that page in the side bar or in the middle of the post or the end of the post giving you another way to build your list as well.
You are building a retargeting list and an email list.
Amy: I love this so much. Let’s go back. Don’t let me forget, I want to talk a little bit about retargeting and pixelling to make sure people understand. And I want you to make sure you touch on how Facebook ads are shifting and how Facebook is looking at that.
I just want to make sure everyone really understands how this can be used for their own business as well. So I am going to give you an example of how I’ve used it.
I have the Profit Lab program coming up in May and what I’ll do before that, about a month before that actually launches, I will create a series of blog posts that relate to the content in the program. It’s going to be content that would attract the perfect, ideal audience that would also want to buy the Profit Lab program.
In the Profit Lab I talk about list building and I talk about Facebook ads and building your funnel for your business. I will create a few different blog posts around those topics and then I will run ads to the blog post.
When people click on the ad they will come to my blog post and I will use a pixel on my site (we will talk about that in a minute) so that I can actually have a list of people that clicked on the ad. They have obviously been interested in the content. I can retarget those people when I start running ads for my promo webinar for the Profit Lab. So it’s like a built-in list.
This is a great thing to do, especially if you have a small email list and you want to expand your reach. So Rick, talk to us a little about the whole retargeting and the pixel because for someone who hasn’t done it before it’s a little bit confusing.
Rick: It is. It’s one pixel. Facebook is actually moving away from this term a little bit. But the website custom audience is basically Facebook’s retargeting pixel. Each account has one pixel. A lot of people get messed up there in a sense that there are conversion-tracking pixels (multiple) but only one retargeting pixel.
That pixel gets placed on your website on the website’s theme between the head tags. If you have no idea what I am talking about where that would go, just grab the pixel and send it off to your web guy because that’s exactly what I would do as well.
Amy: Me too.
Rick: Then you set up your audiences. What I mean by that is you set up who you want to be tracking and what pages you want to track. So if you want to build an audience of anybody coming to any page on your website you can do that.
Or maybe it’s your podcast pages, like your category pages on your website. Or, if it’s a specific blog post they are talking about here you can track the people who are coming to that specific URL.
This is super fresh in my mind right now because I am rereading the book, 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall, it’s an amazing book. Have you read it?
Amy: No I haven’t read that one.
Rick: I’m going to send it to you because it’s amazing.
Amy: I’ll put it in the show notes, guys.
Rick: Perry Marshall is kind of the Godfather of Google AdWords. He has written an amazing book about using the 80/20 principle in sales and marketing. One of the concepts he talks about is called racking the shotgun.
It’s a little aggressive, I know.
Amy: Whoa, what’s this about?
Rick: You are basically prequalifying people. By sending people to a blog post, those people who are going to your blog post are going to that page to read it. By doing that, they are raising their hand and saying they are interested in this topic.
When you have your product, Profit Lab in the case we are talking about here, they have already shown interest in a subject that is within Profit Lab. They are then more likely to be interested in getting on a webinar about it or something like that.
Amy: This whole shotgun thing, I call it priming the pump, I think that is a better way to say it.
Rick: We’ll call it that.
Amy: Yes, this is a great way to prime the pump. Just to be clear that everyone understands, when you are doing this whole retargeting strategy with a Facebook ad you are putting the pixel on your website and saying that every time someone goes to this blog post from a Facebook ad, tag them as someone that is interested in a certain topic.
That list of people lives inside of Facebook. You can then retarget that list inside of Facebook with a different ad that you run. So you aren’t collecting names and emails for this retargeting campaign, you are just collecting a really quality list as a special targeting audience, also called a custom audience, inside of your Facebook ads account.
What Rick said earlier, you can also ask for their name and email inside that blog post or maybe in the right column where the blog post is. You can get people to opt in so you actually have their email address and you have them in a special list for retargeting the next time you run an ad around this topic you are talking about.
Just to get into more specifics because we can’t do it all in the show, you have a really good podcast episode just about this, right?
Rick: Yes. It’s another shameless plug for my show.
Amy: But it’s good guys so I’m going to plug your show all the way.
Rick: It’s The Art of Paid Traffic Episode #5 where I have Laura Roeder on. Many of your listeners know who Laura Roeder is.
Amy: Love that girl.
Rick: She did this exact strategy. During that episode she takes us through exactly what she did. She spent a lot of money on Facebook ads. She spent about $20,000. But, for her return on that, she made $350,000.
Amy: Holy cow!
Rick: If you are paying out $20,000 and you are going to make $350,000 back…
Amy: I would do that every day.
Rick: I’ll do that all day long. We talk about that and she takes us through exactly what she did. It’s this whole notion of building two lists, if you will; a retargeting list and the email list. I just want to clarify one thing though, you are not just building a retargeting list within Facebook of people who click on your Facebook ad and go to your blog post, anybody who comes to that blog post, as long as they are a Facebook user, will go onto that retargeting list.
If you have organic traffic that is coming to your site and going into that blog post they will also be added to that list.
Amy: This is a really cool thing, kind of in a different direction, but let’s say if I were to go into my Facebook ads account and get that retargeting pixel, put it on my website, and set it up so that anytime someone goes to this specific blog post it puts them in my special custom audience. Even if I am not running ads it is still building that list for me.
Okay. This is important guys. If you aren’t even ready to run ads yet, use this retargeting strategy to start building these special custom audiences based on the content people are most interested in. This is segmenting at its best.
Just to be really clear, you can put the pixel on your website. You don’t have to be running any ads yet. When people go to those specific blog posts you are building a list inside of Facebook so when you are ready to run specific ads for a promo you have a built-in list of segmented people, right Rick?
Rick: Exactly. And I want to make sure people understand that we started talking about native ads and we were talking about pixels and so forth, this is all a part of the whole native ads strategy. We are driving traffic and using ads to go to specific forms of content. But when people get there what are you doing with them?
We are talking about retargeting them and we are also talking about making sure you have a list so they can opt in and you will be getting them via retargeting as well as on your email list.
Amy: Perfect. So that is a good point to make, Rick. That kind of leads me into the fact that you teased us earlier with the fact that Facebook is making changes and you have to pay attention to that. I know when anybody hears about Facebook changes their antennae poke up because this is a big thing for us to pay attention to. So shed some light on that.
Rick: You caught that?
Amy: I did for sure.
Rick: The first thing I want to say about this is for those of you who are running Facebook ads right now, make sure you are consistently checking out Facebook’s terms and conditions for their ads. Check the help pages and make sure you are up on the rules because if you checked it six months ago that’s not enough. Facebook is changing things all the time right now and you need to make sure you are up on the very latest terms and conditions.
With that said, I think it has taken them a little bit to get to this point, but they understand that the role of an advertisement on Facebook needs to play the roll of adding value to its users. The less salesy you can be with your ad, the better. They are looking for ads from advertisers that add value to Facebook users in some way. That’s why this whole discussion on native advertising is so important right now.
Native advertising is the advertising of helpful content that will add value to people. So that is why it is so important right now, Facebook is really looking out for the experience of its users on the platform. One way to do that is to make sure we are adding value and adding content to our target audiences.
Amy: That reminds me, this whole native ad concept, especially as it relates to Facebook advertising, has a huge perk for those that are running the ads. Tell me if you disagree with this, Rick. What I have noticed and what a lot of my peers that run Facebook ads regularly are noticing is that running an ad to a blog post for value first is incredibly cheaper in terms of what you are paying per click versus running and ad to, let’s say, an opt-in page.
Rick: That has kind of been a shift fairly recently over the past five or six months or so. Yes, because people want that content and when they get to a page that is not an outright registration page or opt-in page they feel it is good content. You can then turn around and present an ad at a different point with an opt-in offer that is relevant to the content they just read or a registration or something like that. It’s a very, very effective strategy.
Amy: It’s cost effective too, right?
Rick: Yes, absolutely!
Amy: Okay, good. I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page there. That’s the whole idea of native advertising. If you are new to all of this take a deep breath. I know we covered a lot. Anytime I talk about pixels my heart beats a little bit faster because I think I will confuse people because it’s a little bit complicated. And it is at first.
Just know that once you start to really sit down and understand it, it is not as complicated as it sounds. And the strategy is really effective. It’s easier than most ad strategies out there. You get to write a blog post, send traffic to that blog post, create a special list.
Just know it’s worth exploring if this is the first time you are hearing about it. It might not make perfect sense right away but start exploring it a little more and you will be pleasantly surprised just how doable it is.
Remember the challenge I had for you in the beginning, just choose one strategy you learn here today on the podcast and run with it to see if you can expand on it, learn more about it, and hopefully apply it to see how your brand can stand out above all the chatter that’s on social media right now that’s hard to get through.
Facebook ads and just paid advertising in general will get you through all of that clutter.
We are taking a deep breath. We are switching gears a little bit. Let’s talk about YouTube ads because they are pretty powerful too, right?
Rick: Yes. And part of the concept of the podcast is my journey through these other forms of paid traffic strategies that I haven’t done yet. YouTube ads is one of them. At the time we are recording this I have had 20 episodes and I would say that five of those 20 episodes have been about YouTube ads because I have been so excited about them.
I know you and I have talked off air about YouTube ads and how amazingly appealing they are. It is one of those things I almost don’t like talking about because more and more people will start testing it out.
Amy: That’s how I used to feel about Facebook ads. It was like a gold mine and you don’t even want to tell people about it. Then, of course, we cannot be like that.
Rick: YouTube ads are like that right now.
Amy: Tell me why you think they are so powerful.
Rick: The big thing is that a lot of people aren’t doing it right now.
Amy: Which is a perfect time to get onboard, guys!
Rick: Exactly. The idea of it is that with YouTube obviously owned by Google, and YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world, that’s a huge perk. The cool thing is that it is similar to Facebook in that you can target by topic.
If you are a yoga instructor you can target other yoga videos by category really, really explicitly. One of the things that has come up on my interviews on the show with the top five or six people in YouTube advertising who are experts in the world (these guys know their stuff, it’s amazing), in talking to every single one of them, I always ask the question of when I think of a video ad, like we talked before about pixels and you start to get a little nervous, I think the same thing when I think of video because I’m like, oh man, I have to be in front of a camera.”
Amy: Yeah! Not everyone loves that, including me. What do you have to say about that?
Rick: I have asked that question to every one of them and all of them tell me you don’t have to be in front of the camera. You can do slides like Keynote slides or PowerPoint slides and that sort of thing. Those are extremely effective forms of video.
You can be in front of a camera, obviously. You don’t have to but if you are comfortable being in front of a camera it’s not a case where you have to hire an elaborate production crew.
What some of the guys have said is that often times the ones done with just your iPhone are the best performing ads because it looks more natural.
Amy: I totally agree with that. Let’s back up a little bit. When you were talking about YouTube ads were you talking about the ads that appear right before I try to play a video or are these ads in the right sidebar?
Rick: Good question. I am talking about the in-stream ads. These are the pre-roll ads where you go to watch a video and then you have a video right there. The cool thing is they are called true view videos. When you play the video after a few seconds someone can skip the video then and there with a link that says “skip to video”.
Amy: That reminds me. Have you seen the GEICO commercial about skipping the video? Oh my gosh, I’ll put it in my show notes. It is the funniest thing. I saw this on TV yesterday. It was actually on the news where GEICO just made a video.
Let’s say you were going to see a GEICO ad right before you watched a video on YouTube. It was basically a family sitting at a kitchen table and right when the video starts they say something like, “Right now you probably want to skip this video. Well guess what, it’s already over.” Then it just says GEICO.
You can’t skip it. But, when the video pauses and the dog jumps on the table the people are frozen but the dog jumps on the table, this is where you can skip the video, but you can watch the dog eat everybody’s food on the kitchen table. It’s ridiculously funny. There is no point to it whatsoever but it was brilliant because they know everyone skips the video.
With the fact that most people will skip the video right away, we are just conditioned to waiting until the skip option pops up and then skipping the video. Let’s talk about what makes a compelling YouTube ad video so people don’t want to skip it.
Rick: I think the importance of that, it kind of brings it back to the priming the pump instead of racking the shot.
Amy: I don’t do the shotgun thing.
Rick: So, priming the pump, if people choose to watch your video they are sort of qualifying themselves by doing that. If they click to skip the video you don’t pay for that at all.
Amy: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Rick: If they choose not to watch the video you only pay for your ad, again this is YouTube ads here, you only pay for the ad if they view the video for more than 30 seconds. So that is the beauty of it. The idea is to get people to click on your video ad prior to that 30-second mark. That’s why there is sort of, like we have been talking here, an anatomy of a highly-converting YouTube ad.
Let’s go through the timeframes within that first 30 seconds.
Amy: Real quick, guys. Everything Rick is going to say here will be put into a free giveaway so if you go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/50download you can actually download the steps he will talk about of a highly-converting YouTube ad. But you want to listen to it because it is so nice just to kind of hear him say it in real life.
Rick: Step one would be to create a video that is about 45 to 60 seconds long. Step two, within that 45 to 60-second video give your best content within the first 25 seconds. We will break that down in just a second.
Then, around the 25-second mark (don’t worry, again this will be in your cheat sheet so don’t drive off the road to take notes) you want to go quiet around the 25-second mark. We will explain more about that in a second. Then, between the 25 and 30- second mark you want to point people to your call to action button that is on the video.
Remember, you want to entice viewers to click on your action button before the 30- second mark. After that 30-second mark you pay for it. But if you can get them to click before your video hits 30 seconds and they click that is a free click for you.
Amy: Awesome.
Rick: Then after the 30 seconds, if you did a 60-second video, you are paying for your ad at that point so that is your time to really sell. If someone has made it to that point just get into the selling of why you want people to click again.
Let’s break that down even more. Within the first five seconds you want to grab someone’s attention. Between 0 and 5 seconds your job is to grab their attention. This is where you want to start to filter people out. Can you tell at all that I am excited about this?
Amy: I can. I can hear it in your voice.
Rick: My voice speeds up. One of the suggestions that Tom Breeze, one of my guests on The Art of Paid Traffic Episode 6, gave is that he likes to start the video with, “Hey, did you know…” So it would be whatever it is for your specific niche.
Amy: Asking a question, grabbing their attention, just like a Facebook ad. I love it.
Rick: Then, from the 5 to 10-second mark you want to draw people in. If you notice here, we were Facebook ads people but it’s the same sort of structure that is a Facebook ad but you are just saying it in a video. So from 0 to 5 seconds you grab people’s attention. From 5 to 10 seconds you want to draw people in some more.
From the 10 to 15-second mark give people the main benefit of the solution you are offering. Remember, we are always focusing on benefits rather than features. This is your chance to do it. So from the 10 to 15-second mark you are focusing on the main benefit of what you are offering.
From the 15 to 20-second mark that is where you are talking about some sort of psychological trigger whether you are sharing authority, whether it’s a testimonial, maybe scarcity of your offer, some sort of social proof that you can trigger in them in that 15 to 20-second mark.
Then in the 20 to 25-second mark, that is your call to action. You have gone through and gotten their attention. You have drawn them in. You have given your main benefit. You have given social proof or a testimonial or scarcity. Then you want to tell them exactly what to do. Tell them to “click here” and then from the 25 to 30-second mark play no music. Just go quiet and the only movement at that point is directing people to your call to action button.
Amy: Weird. Okay.
Rick: Again, if you get beyond that 30-second mark, you are paying for it at that point, then you can continue to sell and just get right into selling.
Amy: What’s the point of going silent?
Rick: You don’t want to distract them from doing that call to action and clicking on that call to action button.
Amy: Okay. Cool.
Rick: There is a lot to it but it is rather simplistic in that the video is broken up into very specific increments so you know what you should be doing during certain points of the video. Again, this doesn’t have to put you in front of the camera. This can be a slide strip you are going through and speaking over whether it is Keynote or PowerPoint slides.
Amy: I like the step by step because anything I am doing brand new I really value someone just telling me exactly what I need to do. I can make it better after I get the first one out. But this is really good.
So what would be really cool, Rick, is if we could actually show people a YouTube ad that is done really well. It might not follow step by step exactly what you said but it will actually show some of these elements. Do you think we can post one in the show notes?
Rick: For sure. I think that would be really cool to include in show notes.
Amy: Cool. We have been talking a lot about the show notes. You can find them at http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/50 in honor of our 50th anniversary of the episodes. That is where you will find the show notes. But this is really good. This is so valuable.
Here’s the deal, we have covered a lot. We talked about Facebook advertising. We talked about the retargeting and the pixels and, most importantly, native advertising. Of course, we have walked through YouTube advertising and how powerful it can be and actually how to set one up in terms of what the video should look like.
Tell me this, Rick, what is your overall view in terms of what is happening right now with paid advertising. Do you feel like more and more people are getting on board? What is the vibe you are feeling out there?
Rick: I do think more and more people are getting on board. I think the key here though is to really find the platform that most aligns with your objective and your business. We are obviously skewed to Facebook ads because we have been doing it for a long time and we have seen such great success with it.
I say this all the time, let’s face it, there are almost 1.4 billion people on Facebook right now and ¾ are on every single day. Your target audience is on there. It is just a matter of targeting your ads appropriately and that sort of thing.
But, if video aligns better with the type of business that you are in maybe it’s time to start learning about YouTube ads. And, we didn’t talk about it today, but there are Twitter ads and there are LinkedIn ads if you are in the B-to-B space. If you are more of a visual platform type of business then Instagram is just now (literally within the past few days) starting to open more Instagram opportunities for the lay person, not just big corporations.
Amy: Nice.
Rick: So there are a lot of opportunities out there and I recommend that if you are interested in getting involved with one of these platforms and starting to test things out you should just educate yourself. Whether that is through content out there or a paid program of some sort, whatever it may be, educate yourself so that you are dangerous enough to get to testing it and get the necessary help you need to sort of take things to the next level.
I think you mentioned this at the very beginning, Amy, the beauty of all of this stuff is you don’t need to be spending a lot of money to test things out and see if it works.
There is a huge trend toward more people coming on to testing these paid traffic platforms out and, again, it is more towards what we talked about with native advertising, really providing great content for people and leveraging it with all the technology we have out there like pixel retargeting.
We aren’t going to go down that road right now but you could do a whole other thing with pixel retargeting with your YouTube ads as well.
Amy: Oh my gosh. Don’t even get me started. I can’t handle it, my head’s going to explode.
Rick: Head exploding right now.
Amy: I was like, what is that noise there? But that’s a whole different ballgame and whole different show. But what we’ve covered here is so valuable. And if I could give you any suggestions whatsoever it would be to just start with a blog post that you know is directly aligned with what you want to sell. At least get the retargeting pixel on your blog post.
If this whole retargeting and pixel thing has your head exploding, as we mentioned, Rick is actually going to do a quick video to walk you through how to locate it inside the ads manager.
Wow, these are the best show notes I have ever created. If you go to http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/50 you can watch a video from Rick that just helps you understand it a little bit more so that you know where to locate it. Rick, thanks so much for doing that.
Rick: Absolutely. I am happy to.
Amy: One more thing, you actually have a Facebook ads program. So in the Profit Lab, my program, I teach how to build a funnel and I teach one Facebook ad strategy. But you have the whole shebang. Talk to me about that.
Rick: This is where we really dive deep into Facebook ads. I get into step by step on everything from your goal and objective and what that strategy looks like to how to implement that strategy with Facebook ads. We dive into Power Editor and go through it step by step.
We really dive deeply into targeting all of the different targeting opportunities we just touched on a little bit today in this episode. But we break down every single targeting opportunity that Facebook has.
One of the questions I get all of the time is, “My ads are running, now what do I do?” What numbers am I looking at, at what point do I make a decision on when to change things or whatever. We dive really deeply into that as well. We break things down step by step and take a deep dive into it.
We also do group coaching for Facebook ads where people join me on a group call and they throw rapid fire questions at me. I love it. We have a really vibrant Facebook group as well where people ask each other questions about their Facebook ads and get support from each other and it’s a lot of fun. It’s a great course.
Amy: It’s really hands on. Really, truly, if you want to take a deep dive into Facebook ads and understand exactly how it works inside the Power Editor, which is where you should be running your ads, and this whole targeting, and I know you get into the pixels and all of that good stuff. If you want to check out the program all you need to do is go to http://www.thefbadvantage.com/amy and you can get all of the details. I’ll make sure to put it in the show notes as well.
Rick, or Regis, whatever you want me to call you, thank you so much for being on the show today. I love cohosting with you.
Rick: Thanks for having me on. I am really honored to spend #50 here with you.
Amy: Yes, exciting times. So, if you want to check out that really cool PDF giveaway that Rick and I created together, The Anatomy of a Highly-Converting Facebook Ad and Highly-Converting YouTube Ad all you need to do is go to http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/50download and grab your copy.
Thank you so much for being with me and if you’ve been with me since the beginning, Episode #1, I am honored that you came on this journey with me. There are only more great things to come. Thank you so much for being here and again, thanks Rick, I love to have you on the show. I can’t wait until you come back again.
Have a great day everybody. Take care.