Gary Leland Show Episode 13
This week I interview Mason Pelt of MasonPelt.com – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com
We talk about Facebook marketing. http://rocksdigital.com/roi-social-media-marketing/
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Gary: Mason, welcome to the show, thanks for joining me. Before we start talking about Facebook, please go into your background with Facebook advertising and your qualifications.
Mason: My background has been all over the place in marketing. I started out wanting to do video production but that didn’t work out and now really love podcasting. My backgrounds in Facebook marketing relates to working with large brands and small business owners on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google ads. I do a lot of stuff around organic content marketing and paid media buys. For example I consider a promoted ad on Facebook ad to be a paid buy. Most of my work is direct marketing.
Gary: I know that next week you are speaking at Podcast Dallas and you are talking about marketing podcasts.
Mason: Yes, I will be talking about how to grow your podcast organically and how to grow your audience using online advertising and marketing automation which are often times under looked items. I have a blog post coming out on Rocksdigital.com in which I talk about how people mess up on social media by not being willing to spend money or posting the wrong content. I think the biggest mistake is not tracking properly though.
Gary: In regard to spending money on Facebook, you don’t have to spend a lot to get decent results.
Mason: You really don’t. Actually one of the things I have been having great success with is a content company who makes a digital publication. What we have been doing are small custom audiences. It is an audience of 50-60 hand-selected people that we have assembled are they are the most passionate fans. If they see us post something, then they will like it. The test is spending $4 with a bid for CPM, meaning cost per thousand impressions to reach an audience of 50 people. $4 CPM and reaching 50 people is a lot of impressions. Usually what happens is we get a ton of organic pick up off of just that little bit of seed money. Think about it, $4 every time you make a blog post or something, to be able to get that type of engagement on social does greatly improve your organic reach.
Gary: So when you are saying 50 people, you are talking about the reach the 50 people give you by liking and sharing your post?
Mason: Exactly because these are hand selected influencers. They are people who like everything we do. They like it, comment on it, an engage. It has improved traffic and our overall visibility on Facebook. What happens when I like something and one of my friends sees it? Well first of all they have seen it, which is one of the beautiful things about Facebook. We run ads also for friend-to-fan targeting which is an ad that says that one of your friends likes this or commented on this.
Gary: Before we get into that, I want to go into the basic uploading of an email list. For instance I have an email list of people who want to subscribe to my blog because they like it. What can we do with that email list, how do we do it, and how do I benefit from it.
Mason: What you are talking about are Facebook custom audiences. There are a few ways to do this. If you go to facebook.com/ads/manage on the left hand side you have the option for audiences on your account. If you click there you have the ability to import several types of files and now Facebook has added the ability to copy and paste and email list in because it was a little complex to change file types. When you upload the list you can target your most passionate fans.
Gary: So when I upload my list I can say that I want these people to see my stuff, it’s not up to Facebook?
Mason: Exactly and you can do some great stuff with this like targeting journalists. I will give you an example of what we have been doing with a company I am working with called Little Black Pants. WE have been doing custom audiences of their existing buyers. So people went to their e-commerce store, purchased a product, gave their email when they purchased the product, and we uploaded it to Facebook as a custom audience. The issue is that they just bought the product and we don’t have a lot of other products to sell them right now, so how do we get them to buy something. The truth is, those people won’t buy, but Facebook allows us to create a look-a-like audience. It’s one click to create. Under the audience tab you have an option to create a look a like audience.
Gary: Is that an audience that basically has all the same demographics as the person you just uploaded?
Mason: Same demographics, but more than just demographics, it’s more complex than that. It looks at the Facebook pages they like, their age, and even off line data like their credit card spending, income, and online spending habits. Facebook has partnerships with several large companies that allow them to find out off line purchase data. It is a little creepy, but your email address is linked to a credit card number somewhere and that data is not given to Facebook but they can mine some of it. I as an advertiser can create a look a like audience of people who have similar characteristics in every way. We are targeting people in several deeper ways than just liking one page. The other best-kept secret with Facebook is remarketing. I can run an ad for people who went to my website and for people who have been to the website, added and item to the cart, and not completed the order. With at least two of my clients right now we have ads running for people who have not completed orders in the shopping cart and we know who they are because of a tracking pixel in the website, not because of an email address because clearly they did not use one of those yet. It’s a Facebook website custom audience, which you can get to through the audience tab. You will get a little piece of java script code similar to Google analytics. You can install that onto your website and assign different behaviors to that, so we can say that people who tried to check out but didn’t can have an ad run to them reminding them that they have an incomplete order. Sending people back to that site can result in extra sales.
Gary: It sounds to me that the strongest one is the look a like audience.
Mason: Look a like audience is the one that will get you the most volume in that I can generate an audience.
Gary: So the bigger the email list the more powerful the look a like?
Mason: Not necessarily. With some companies I segment the list into what types of products they buy because it will let me get more specific with the person who buys that type of product. For example if I were selling hockey equipment, it wouldn’t be a great list for people who buy baseball equipment. Merging the two lists together would confuse it, so I would make two separate lists for one who buys hockey equipment and one who buys baseball equipment and go from there.
Gary: These ads we are talking about now, are they the side ads or the ones in the feed? Or is it both? Is one better than the other in regard to how much it costs for what you get?
Mason: In the feed is a little more expensive but it results in more clicks while the sidebar will result in more impressions. What I tend to do, and Facebook will let you do this automatically, is that you can make one ad and it will go both places. In the last year Facebook made the sidebar wider so it has more real estate there. I actually like to run ads in both. They split pretty evenly between the sidebar and the news feed in regard to effectiveness.
Gary: Let’s say I am going to spend $5 a day, so not big money, I don’t think it matters where I put my ad at $5 per day I am probably going to sell out of my whole $5. Would I be better off to put in the sidebar where I will get 20,000 views plus $5 worth of clicks versus putting it in the feed where I will get 10,000 views and the $5 worth of clicks?
Mason: My honest suggestion would be to test because it depends on what product you are selling and who your audience is. Probably what I would recommend is to do both newsfeed and sidebar. Mobile is kind of tricky because you have to have a mobile ready site and people have to be willing to buy your product off of their mobile device. Even if you put the ad in the sidebar and it doesn’t get as many clicks, it doesn’t have the impression on people that it is the only ad they have seen all day and they are tired of looking at it. People also do respond to impression. Let’s say I am impressioned by your ad in the sidebar for 3 weeks. I have seen your ad in my newsfeed a few times and in my sidebar a lot, now I am getting comfortable with you. I prefer you because I have seen you. It’s basically brain recognition. That being said, I definitely recommend you run your ad in both places because one isn’t better than the other, it’s just different.
Gary: How about boosting a post? That’s the easiest thing for someone to do if they are not Facebook smart, I think.
Mason: It is and it actually works now. It used to be terrible, I would tell people not to waste their money on them, and I think every Facebook marketing person would say not to buy them. Over the last 6 months they have improved the targeting options you have to where it’s not bad. There are still problems, but it is much better than it used to be. There are a couple of things you can do with boost post that are easy and work really well such as targeting your fans, so you can boost it only to people who already like your page. The other way is to boost post to custom audiences, so for people who are not necessarily a fan of your Facebook page.
Gary: So as an advertising agency, what is your starting point for a client? There are a lot of people who don’t have the time and need someone to do these ads for them. Is this the kind of thing that small businesses could use or are medium to large businesses more benefited by it?
Mason: I actually have been catering to quite a few small businesses lately. I have what is called a launch package, which I offer internally, but if someone wants to get a proposal from me they can go to MasonPelt.com to get in touch with me. I almost exclusively work with companies that have a direct sellable product because otherwise it’s too much stuff and it’s difficult to prove that I am making money. At the end of each month, I want to be able to send you a report that says that you spent $2,000 on me, you spent $4,000 on Facebook, and I made you $10,000. For me, if a client has a product that can be sold directly, is a good product, and if they can survive on the product they are selling and shipping. They have to be willing to put a minimum of $1,000 in advertising on Facebook otherwise it is really difficult to shine out there.
Gary: Where can people find you if they have questions about your services?
Mason: You can find me on MasonPelt.com, you can email me directly at Mason@masonpelt.com, and you can Google my name to find me on any social network except for Pinterest.
If you have a question send it to me at GaryLeland@gmail.com
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