You’ve always wanted to get started on Facebook advertising but, you thought you didn’t have the equipment, it would take too long, or it cost too much money to create and promote.
In this episode, Dennis Yu & Kieran O’Brien will tell us how to get started with Facebook ads fast and easy. You will hear how, with only your phone, you can create the beginning of a Facebook ad campaign, in as little as one minute. Just when you thought that was too good to be true, you hear how you can start to promote that campaign for as little as $1 dollar.
Show Notes:
- How to create your topic wheel. What type of videos you’ll want to create. Why, how, and what videos.
- How most businesses fail with their content by trying to create the exact logic.
- Why don’t you see 99% of what your contacts on Facebook are posting?
- What is the Facebook algorithm looking for?
- Bonus for the podcast listeners: get The Dollar A Day Strategy by Dennis Yu for free.
Transcript:
Jesse: Happy Friday, Richard. How are you?
Richard: How’s that day again? You know, I mean, even though people could be listening to this on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, it all feels like the same day these days right now.
Jesse: You’re telling me? Yeah, I guess it’s Friday, but, yeah, it’s every day is the same day. Even the weekend is kind of the same day, really. But here we are, it’s Friday podcast, we take a little bit of a lull here, too. So for people that are catching up, we’re going to start doubling up on these. You’re going to get flooded with podcasts, and, hopefully, you can keep up with us. I think you can. But, Richard, what are we talking about today?
Richard: I’m super excited about today. We’ve had a lot of really good guests. But this is one I’ve been looking forward to for a while. We’ve known this guest for a long time. There’s a lot of people out there right now using Ecwid that are just getting started. And they’re learning Facebook. They’re learning ads, they’re learning how to drive business. Some of them are doing a side hustle. Some of them are jumping full in. And this is also going to apply for merchants that have been on Ecwid for a while. So this could cover the gamut. And this person is straight up, in my opinion,
For those people who’ve either thought ads were too hard or took too long to do, our guests today are going to basically help us understand how to make videos in a minute or less and how to promote those videos for basically about a dollar a day. So today on the show, we’re going to have Dennis Yu, the CEO of Blitz Metrics. Not only is he doing amazing things for businesses, but I just really love his model in general. He is at a digital marketing agency that’s partnered up with a bunch of schools, and they’re teaching a lot of the people that are graduating new skill sets in and how to help businesses. And they’re doing it with some big ones. I mean, they’re running campaigns for Golden State Warriors, Nike, Rosetta Stone.
The list of accolades that I could talk about with Dennis, just real quick, I’m going to bring up just a couple because why not? Let’s see here. I got to stop off quickly because I could go forever. He spoke over seven hundred thirty times in 17 countries, five continents. He’s basically been at conferences, Conversion Conferences, Social Media Marketing World. He’s been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, NPR, TechCrunch, Fox News. I mean, it just goes on and on. So instead of hearing me talk about him, let’s let’s bring him on and actually get to learn from Dennis. Really appreciate having you on the show.
Dennis: Thank you, Richard and Jesse. And we want to learn from Kieran O’Brien, who’s teaching me stuff all day long about how to scale. We were just doing a show earlier, and I said, do you remember those days when you had the
Richard: Super excited and thanks for joining him, Kieran, this is really cool. We’re getting a bonus here. Really good to have you. So, hey, someone just getting started. Let’s say, again, we’re hoping to get to do maybe version two or something else with you in the future. So if you listen to this podcast and at the end you really enjoyed it, please give a shout out and we’ll go deeper with Dennis and possibly Kieran, too, at another time. But right now, let’s go from the standpoint. Someone has just signed on to Ecwid, and they’re just getting going. Why should they be doing videos on Facebook? And is it really true that you can do that? Can you promote them for as little as a dollar a day? How can we get people started doing that?
Dennis: Absolutely. So clearly, you’re setting up your shopping cart and everything related to that with Ecwid because you want to sell stuff online. And as you make money, all kinds of good things happen where you can reinvest; you can hire people, you can fulfill your life dreams. But what people don’t realize is that the shopping cart by itself is the last stage of the process. For someone to enter their credit card and to give you money requires that they have to first know you, like you and trust you. And people will think that Facebook ads or YouTube or these other channels are for people who are spending a lot of money.
For example, you guys know, Purple the mattresses. So we spent one hundred million dollars on Facebook ads promoting their mattresses. And there’s some high powered content; you guys remember the Goldilocks videos that we made, those cost several million dollars. And then we spent, of course, a lot of money promoting that and other videos. They might think that that’s out of reach. They might think they need a professional videographer. They might need a whole team. They might think, well, it’s just me and my mom and pop. I’m just getting going. None of those tools are available to me because I have to hire an agency and any video cameras. All this and nothing could be further from the truth.
Because what you need, you need this. (showing a smartphone) If you have this and you have one minute, and you have one dollar a day, you can get going. And it’s not because you want to be Gary Vaynerchuk and have your face everywhere. I’m an introvert. Every once in a while, I can be like Kieran and you guys, and then I crawl back into my introvert cave. But when you’re able to share your story and share who you are, like with Purple, we’re sharing funny moments. We’re also sharing why that particular mattress won’t compress when you drop an egg on it. So we made a video called the Egg Drop Test. Or let’s say that I want to sell Trident gum, and all the other gums are about the same. But I can talk about how it’s part of my daily routine or how I’m the founder. And what I’m doing in my daily life has nothing to do with gum because people are trying to, if they build a bond with you, and you do it through Facebook in the way that we’re going to tell you about. With Dollar Day and
So it could be you’re making cookies in the kitchen, and maybe you’re selling kitchen appliances, you’re selling something completely different. It doesn’t matter, they’re learning who you are. They’re learning about your customers. That’s the first touch. Then there’s something called remarketing on Facebook where anyone who’s seen one piece of content from you, you then can show them. Facebook will then sequence the next piece of content. We’ll do that targeting for you automatically, show the next piece of content, which is how content, which is you’re sharing how you’re doing something. And then from the how, you’re moving people to the what, which is now they’re ready to buy. And if you start backward, you think about the product that you’re selling. What kinds of knowledge would you be expected to have around that product? So if you want to name a product and let’s figure out what those topics are and then from the topics will map it to the people.
Jesse: Well, I know he’ll be listening to this one, so we had Prairie Melody Birdseed, so he sells organic bird seeds and bird feeders, right?
Dennis: OK, so organic. So he’s selling the bird feeders and the birdseed. Yeah, primarily birdseed, though.
Richard: And before you get started. Dennis, I just want to say one quick thing, because this is a beautiful point that you put out there. And then we’ll go right into Prairie Birdseed. You could get really fancy, but I just want to clarify for the people, when he said this, all he did was pull out his cellphone. So literally, when you get started, and you start explaining this, I just want to be a reminder for those that are only listening to this podcast and not seeing the video as well. Dennis was saying, yeah, you could get all the fancy gear, you can get big agencies and all this stuff. But he’s going to bring it back to people who are just getting started and basically saying with your cell phone and then having this why, how, and what structure. And they’re going to get in the topical and different things here. But it’s literally starting out with your cell phone. So sorry for interrupting, Dennis.
Dennis: It’s a great context. And if you’re listening, I have a face made for radio. Okay, so if you’re listening, I’m holding up my phone. And a lot of people are thinking about, they’re overthinking it, basically. Okay, so look, I’ve got an iPhone. Oops, the lights turned on. See, even I don’t know how to use this thing. And I’m going to the camera right here. And let’s say that, what’s the owner’s name, the founder of birdseed? I’ll be Dennis, okay, I’ll protect, and I’m doing selfie mode, and I’m pointing the camera at me. And I’ll say. This morning when I woke up, I saw a cardinal out on my front and my backyard, and it’s the first time I’ve seen this cardinal in three weeks, I thought he was never going to come back, he was beautiful. And I took a couple of pictures before he flew off. And thank goodness this is what one of my favorite moments that made my day.
There, I just made a
So in my garden this past weekend, this is a true story. I’m not making it up. I went to Home Depot, and I thought, you know, my garden is kind of barren. So I’m going to get some potted plants and some beautiful flowers and some azaleas. And I got a lemon tree, and I got two different heirloom tomato plants. And in fact, I was there, there are so many that I went back to Home Depot the next day and I got seven more tomato plants, and now if you go in my backyard, I’ve got eight tomato plants that are all in a row and I’ve gone crazy. And people like Dennis, you’ve gone crazy. What are you doing? I thought you were just going to get a cookie. I know. But, you know, sometimes you go to Home Depot, you go to Costco, and you want to buy this one thing. And then pretty soon you have to do that. Right. You end up with like 20 things. And so now my garden has got all these different things. And then, of course, if I’m doing that, then I went to Amazon, and I guess I can’t say that I bought a weed whacker, and I got a new lawnmower while I was at it. And then I hired a maid.
So I’m just talking about now I’m talking about gardening in my backyard and other stuff. Then I’m talking about maybe. You know what, I’m cooking, or I’m talking about things that I’m working on, and so I’m just getting people a sense of this outside, imagine there’s this onion in multiple layers. So on the outside, I’m making lots of little 15 second and one minute videos talking about the things that I care about that don’t have to deal with Prairie Birdseed, which is about who I am. It may be that, hey, I’m an entrepreneur, and for small businesses, it’s really hard. And I have a pizza joint that I used to go to all the time. But I think they’re going to go out of business because they have great pizza, but they don’t know how to market. And things are really hard right now. And you’re just telling stories about who you are. You’re interviewing customers, asking them about what they’re doing, and what do you see in your yard. So that’s the outside. That’s the who, that’s building relationships. You know, when you meet somebody I know, it’s kind of like hard nowadays to meet somebody. But when you meet somebody, what would happen, Rich? When you meet somebody, what do you say?
Richard: I’m loving this because you’re just to your point, you’re trying to get to know somebody like, hey, what are you into?
Dennis: Don’t you know how to do this? I’m not teaching you anything you don’t know how to do. You realize you’re building relationships online, but when you meet somebody, what’s the first thing you say to them? Meeting at a conference, you meet him at the coffee shop. What do you say?
Richard: Well. First, I say hi.
Dennis: You say hi, yeah, you don’t need to say buy this stuff, it’s on sale, and it’s 20 percent off coupon.
Richard: No, I love it. I want to reiterate, like, even as you’re saying this and Jesse and I do this, I get what you mean by this — going back to the know, like, and trust. It’s you’re getting to know somebody. And it just seems for someone who’s stuck in their business sometimes, are thinking so much about trying to sell something, it seems like wait, doesn’t that seem like a waste of time, does it? But to your point. You wouldn’t just go up: Hi, I’m Dennis, you want to buy my horse? Hi, I’m Dennis. You want to buy this car? That’s not even saying hi.
Dennis: Do you ever want to be that guy?
Kieran: And you see so many
Jesse: Yeah. I think what I like about what you’re saying here is that you don’t have to put, this doesn’t have to be the perfect video. It’s almost like you say, make ten videos that are probably not that good, but you’re just getting them out there. You’re just going to tell a little story. And I don’t mean not good. I mean, like, don’t overthink it. Just get 15 seconds. 30 seconds. This is who I am. This is my business. Put it on Facebook, put it on Instagram, and then we’re moving on to the next stage later.
Richard: Yeah. And one quick caveat here too. As we’re going through this, it really strikes me is why this probably works well, too, is this isn’t search. People are in their feed, seeing what’s going on with friends and family. It’s not like they have this buyer intent right then. So it really plays into this even more because they’re seeing you potentially for the first time. You’re just letting them know a little bit more about you. I like that guy. And then, as you know, and we’ll get into here when you start to see that next time, remarket. Now, you know a little bit more about it. Now maybe I’m assuming. How do you take those videos now, so they’re going out and basically in version one of the videos, they can talk about whatever they like, whatever they’re up to, whatever they’re doing. Is that correct? What do you have to think about this next layer of videos, or am I already overthinking it?
Dennis: Well, even you, Rich, are potentially making it more complicated than it needs to be. Think about dating, right? So when you meet your wife. When you meet a girl the first time, you don’t ask: Hey, would you marry me? And get on your knees no matter how good your pickup line is. Right. You have to get to know them. You have to go on a date with them. Then your first kiss and all the way on down the line until you propose. And that’s what’s going to happen to your customer. Now, it doesn’t mean you’re posting random Gary Vaynerchuk kind of stuff out there. If you know who you and your customers practice Inception. You know that movie, Inception, the dream, inside the dream, inside the dream, you’re still targeting just the people who would be interested in buying your birdseed. So you’re targeting the fans of other birdseed brands, you’re targeting people who have gardens, people who like the National Audubon Society, people who are planting gardens, are all the things that are related. That’s called literal lateral. And what’s the third one? Explicit targeting. So we still have all of our targetings. But what we’re talking about is making a video that’s going to move in three sequences, three steps. The first one is all lightweight moments, just giving people a taste of what you care about.
And you’re not going
And then I say, Kieran show me, how is this car generating so much power? Open the hood and show me the engine and talk about why this car is better than that car. Can you beat a Lamborghini? Are you heavier? Like what makes a car fast, and how does this work? And, you know this, and he’s got access to all these fancy sports cars. But now I’m sharing knowledge because I’ve earned attention from by giving people a little teaser into that topic. Now I can go deeper. Here’s the thing that businesses get wrong, whether they’re big or small businesses, they think that they have to build the exact logic. Like when you set up an email autoresponder sequence, or maybe that’s a little bit fancy, you can set up these rules on exactly what messages people get. And like this fancy flowchart kind of way. The beauty of Facebook is if you put out that initial why content, those little 15 second snippets, and then you put out stuff later, it doesn’t even have to be connected. It can be just random. The other timeline, it is content that was on Facebook or YouTube or someone else from years ago.
But you put out knowledge; Facebook will make that linkage for you. That is so key. Facebook, they sent me a note. You ever see that thing where it’s Facebook.com/memories used to be called on this day. And they’ll say, hey, did you know three years ago you did this one thing, you’re hiking this one place? Are you with this friend? You had dinner. So they showed me something yesterday with my friend Austin Wilcox, and he and I were having a chat. He posted something like, I could use a margarita right now or five. He’s being cynical because he was having a hard day because his boss was in a hole. Right. So he’s talking about that. And he said he needed a drink. And I said, what you really need is some Jack Daniels or this particular flavor, because
Richard: This is a great, great point, too. And I’m going to kind of take some out of what you said, we’re not going to outthink the Internet, we’re not going to outthink AI. So the creative is the variable. This is part of how this works. You’re going out, and Facebook is going to find. It’s part of probably why you say start with a dollar. They want to provide value to you. So if you start with a dollar, they’re going to find someone that’s tested in that. I’m loving this, this is great.
Dennis: Let the system do the work. I’ve been under lockdown for two months, and I haven’t really left the house except to get packages and tomatoes and tomatoes and Home Depot. And I bought a breadmaker, you know, the bread makers, those are cheap. You basically put the stuff in there, you press the button, and that’s it. Isn’t that nice? So have you ever made bread before? Need the dough. Now your hands are all tired and like, oh, my goodness, is it even worth it when the bread comes out of the oven? It’s like cinnamon bread with you putting butter on it and it’s such good carbs.
But imagine going from manually having to mix all the dough up and do everything and measure everything and all that versus you just open the packet, you dump it in, you press the button, and that’s it. Right. That’s how you want to think about Facebook. If you have the ingredients, the goals, content, and targeting, but primarily your little 15 second and one minute videos and you put it inside the machine, and you press the button, it does everything for you. And we can go into all the reasons why it is like some people want to complain about targeting a custom audience and how big you mean make them invested audiences and how lookalikes work and how you do the whole thing and all this fancy stuff. And we can argue about that.
But just know this. If you follow this recipe, even if you don’t understand exactly why the recipe calls for yeast or whatever in that particular way if you put these videos in the system and press the button and don’t worry exactly about what happens inside the machine, the cost of your traffic is going to be less irrelevant to quality. Scores are going to be higher, your engagement rate is going to be higher, your cost per engagement lower, and your ROIs, return on ad spend, and your CPA, your cost per acquisition, will be lower overall. Why? Because I’ll show you one thing and not go too deep, but I’ll just tell you just one thing, and hopefully that’s enough to convince you that this is true. What happens, Kieran, if you have low engagement on a Facebook post that you have, organic, an ad on your page, and a profile. What happens when you have a low engagement? What does Facebook’s machine think about that?
Kieran: Thinks that people don’t like it.
Dennis: And then what happens if you’re boosting a post? What do they do? The cost of your traffic?
Kieran: Goes up.
Dennis: Why?
Kieran: Because Facebook’s algorithm thinks that people don’t like your content, your page, or product, whatever it is.
Dennis: So you ever hear people complaining about, oh, well, I don’t get any reach anymore in the news feed because Facebook kind of forced me to pay. That’s not true. We have some pages that are getting millions of interactions per post, something really big, not that you need to get millions, but you know why? It’s because there’s so much competition in the news feed. There’s so much content that most people are seeing less than one percent of the content that could be available to them. But Facebook’s engine filtering mechanism is so smart that you feel like you’re still getting a pretty good view. But do you realize that 99 percent of what you see on Facebook or 99 percent of what you could see on Facebook from your friends? I don’t mean like random stuff on the Internet. I’m talking about what you’re what you’ve signed up to see. You’re friends with someone, or you follow a page, or you’re in a group means you are eligible to see that content. Do you realize that 99 percent of it you’re not seeing? So then if you’re Facebook from them because if you really want to understand how to win at Facebook, you kind of has to look at it from their point of view. Just for a moment, how are they deciding on all the content that they could show you? How are they deciding what’s going to make it into the one percent? What do you think that is?
Kieran: Things that keep people on Facebook and that they like and that they interact with.
Dennis: So when you post something, I think you and I both like the five thousand friends that I’ve been at that limit for like ten years. You know, that’s why people that keep friends requesting me and I can’t accept them because I’m at the five thousand have to delete people. But what Facebook will do, and this is true for a page or profile, when you post something, do they just show it to everybody in your friends’ list?
Kieran: No.
Dennis: They share it with what’s called initial reach, which is usually about one percent of who could see it. So if you have five thousand friends, maybe 50 people will see it. And if those 50 people are liking, commenting, and sharing, then what’s Facebook going to do?
Kieran: Continue to push it to a higher percentage of your audience.
Dennis: And more and more until at which point the engagement rate has fallen so low that you fall off the news feed, which is called edge rank decay for the math people. You can go Google it and see I’m not making this up. These words are not made up. There’s the math behind social networking. It’s actually called graph theory for those people who want to look at it. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t make it up. Graph theory existed 60 years ago. So what the algorithm is looking for is high engagement and a high signal. If you feed them that good signal and you get more engagement, it’s not because you’re trying to be viral. It’s because you’re trying to show that there’s a linkage between your product, that you’re selling the knowledge necessary, because anyone who wants to buy a product, that means they’re knowledgeable about certain things they’re really passionate about.
So if I have a car that means I’m knowledgeable about certain things, about racing, about the engine, about various things. Right. I watch Fast and Furious, whatever it might be, and that knowledge will tie to certain kinds of people. So if I can bridge the who to the what. I’m sorry, even I get it wrong. To the why to the what. And I put all those items inside my breadmaker, and Facebook will do all the mixing, Facebook does all the targeting, Facebook will do all this other kind of stuff. And that way they’re going to reward you. Now the beauty is this is another thing that people miss. I could have content from 10 years ago on Facebook that is producing sales for me today. Why? Because I might have boosted it back then, and I put a dollar a day against it, and it was good.
So then initially we put a dollar a day for seven days, seven dollars. Easy now. And if it’s still doing well because Facebook is telling me it’s doing well, then I’m gonna put thirty dollars for another 30 days for another dollar day, and then I’ll put another hundred dollars for another 30 days, and then I’ll put a thousand dollars for another three days and then I’ll put fifty thousand dollars on it or what have you. Like we did this test for Infusionsoft, which is now called Keap and we made one hundred
We just put a dollar against each of them when we spent, whatever, a thousand dollars. Like American Idol or these, like singing and dancing competitions where eventually it gets narrowed down to like four people, then two people. And then there’s like the one singer who wins at the very end, you ever watch those shows?
Jesse: Unfortunately, yes.
Richard: I know what you’re talking about.
Dennis: So I’ve never said this before. Facebook is Simon Cowell. Because he’s going to make fun of you or whatever, but if you find a winner and he likes it, and that’s a winner, you’re going to go
I have to put the 15 seconds and
So maybe you make a what video, and you’re talking about the birdseed and how it’s made and how you’re a small business owner and how you’re not some giant factory and how the quality’s higher and how you really care for your customers and your service is better. Like, great. And then you make a video about how it’s raining outside and how the birds don’t come. Or now you’re making a video about how now you have a bird feeder, and you have whatever it is you have. Whatever content you’re making, you’re going to put it into one of these three buckets. Your why, which is around your mission and just little tidbits, little behind the scenes moments, so it doesn’t look like an ad. How content, where you’re sharing, little bits of knowledge.
It could be a minute long, could be three minutes long. Don’t worry about it being exactly like a minute long, but share one piece of content. Don’t go into the whole webinar for a whole hour. One minute, you’re talking about individual ingredients. You’re trying to make individual ingredients. And so you have this library or cupboard, or what have you of individual things. Now you make videos about what? So talk about the price. Talk about your service. Talk about your product features and benefits. Talk about each individual, one product at a time. For example, I bought this $10 billion bill. This is a real piece of currency, $10 billion from the reserve bank of Zimbabwe. And I can talk about how hyperinflation happened here. And they had to print money to fund their military, kind of like what’s happening in the United States.
And you know, the $5 trillion stimuli, you know where that’s coming from, right? It’s not coming from taxes. I’ll tell you that it’s coming from the government printing money. But so I’m just telling the story about one little thing, right? I’m sharing it. I have an economics degree. I went to the London School of Economics. I can talk about what’s going on when you print money creates inflation, right? Like this. Now you have a $10 billion bill. And so I’m just sharing pieces of knowledge. If I have why, how, and what, and I have 50 or a hundred little tidbits. And remember they’re all separate little tidbits. I’m not going to mix them. Rich, what’s your favorite drink?
Richard: I’ll stick with tequila too.
Dennis: Tequila. So what’s the favorite thing you like to drink?
Kieran: Lemonade.
Dennis: Lemonade. Okay.
Richard: Well, my favorite drink overall, I was just going with your… (laughing)
Dennis: Jess, what’s something that you’d like to drink?
Jesse: I’m going to go with old fashioned.
Dennis: Not necessarily alcoholic drink, but just like, you know, some kind of
Jesse: Yeah, still old fashioned. (laughing)
Richard: Oh, it’s got water. (laughing)
Jesse: Yeah. Water for me.
Dennis: Well done, I was hoping for, but if you said like tomato juice or milk and I’d say, well, what if I put milk in your old fashioned? What if I put tomato juice inside your lemonade? Would you drink that? No, that’d be kind of nasty, huh? Yeah. But let’s say you actually do like. The number one ordered drink on airplanes is tomato juice. A lot of people order tomato juice when they fly. You never order tomato juice when you’re at home. You know, but let’s say, for example, that you wanted to mix tomato juice and your margarita or something like that. It’d be kinda nasty, but let’s say those, those are two things you actually would drink, but separately.
So this is what people are doing on Facebook. They’re taking all kinds of random stuff and packaging it in one video, putting it there, and then blaming Facebook for it. What you need to do is you need to separate out the salt and the pepper and the tomato and the lemons and the beef and the chicken and the, all the vegetables, like all the separate out those different ingredients. Put them in the machine, press the button, and let the machine do whatever. Now, if you put all the ingredients in the machine and you tell the machine that you want chicken masala, then the machine is going to grab all the different components and make chicken masala for you. You tell the machine, what’s something you like to eat, Jesse?
Jesse: Lasagna.
Dennis: So what does this lasagna have? You’ve got the pasta, and maybe you have some ricotta cheese and some sausage, you see, I’m using food analogies cause I’m hungry. And so all you do is you press the button or the picture of lasagna, right? And then, then, the Facebook machine will go and grab all these other things for you. Cook it for you. If it was me, I’d burned the thing, right? Cause I walk away, and I don’t pay attention or something, but this is what we literally have to do. Put the ingredients in the machine; the ingredients are primarily your little bits of video. Then the mechanics of setting up the ads are really easy because you’re just doing boosting posts and native remarketing.
If you have enough traffic, you can do web remarketing and all sorts of fancy things and custom audiences and lookalike audiences. But really for what we’re talking about here, if you have content that introduces things you care about, goes
Richard: Yeah. I mean, I know Jesse has a couple of things he wants to talk about here, but to kind of sum all that down in quick. What you’re saying is Facebook’s bread maker, right? It’s the bread machine, and the beauty sticking with the cooking analogies here is it’s a lot more actually like cooking than like baking. Because baking, you really do have to think out the order of things, and it can really mess it up. You can’t come back and correct it. But cooking, you can add a little salt later. You put it in the beginning, but it’s not quite there. You can put some later. Facebook is the machine that’s going to help figure out that order for you.
In your world, you figure out what was the three, the lateral, the literal. Can’t remember the third one. But you basically think about those, and you just make how, what, why videos or who, what, why videos. And the machine’s going to figure it out. Focus on just maybe answering questions that are frequently asked, incorporating them into your videos. Not necessarily like they’ve asked the question, but just talk about it like a regular video. Does that sound kind of summed up?
Dennis: I want to blow your mind, which is a tall order. And you guys tell me if you’re listening or watching, if this thing causes an aha matrix moment, like a red pill moment for you. Okay. So I built the analytics at Yahoo 20 years ago. So I’m a search engine engineer. I understand the algorithms. All right. Now, do you guys have a guilty pleasure, Netflix or HBO? Some kind of show you like?
Jesse: I’ve actually been watching White Lines lately, and it’s, it’s kind of bad, but I’m into it now. I can’t stop.
Dennis: Okay. So now you’re watching it, and so Netflix is your drug dealer. And so when you go in, and you log in, and it’ll say, well, Jesse, you like White Lines, but you might also like, and what are they recommending?
Jesse: Oh boy. Yeah. Others are kind of weird.
Dennis: And they’re pretty good. Aren’t they? They’re pretty good at making those recommendations. Kieran, you’re on iTunes, and you’re listening to some songs. You have a certain artist that you like, what’s an artist?
Kieran: Drake.
Dennis: Okay. So, you’re in there. My buddy Lee Way Wong has three PhDs in statistics. And he’s the one who built Apple’s algorithm recommendations inside iTunes. His English is horrible, but the guy is amazing to hang out with. That’s like a six, four Asian dude. He’s like, yo man, but he’s got three PhDs in statistics. He’s the one that wrote the algorithm that makes song recommendations. Are they pretty accurate?
Kieran: Yeah.
Dennis: You should tell Lee Way thank you. Right. And the same algorithm, if you do a search for whatever on Google or Yahoo, is usually pretty good at giving you what you want. And if you go to Amazon and like me, I’ve been crazy. I’ve been buying all kinds of stuff. I bought this stamp, this thing that you stamp, and it puts, I put people’s names on these actually. Right. It makes recommendations. Right. If you bought this, you might also like to buy these other things. You guys follow me. Yep. So did you know here’s the
Kieran: The algorithm shall not be named, it’s Voldemort.
Dennis: No, what’s the name of the algorithm?
Richard: The algorithm. That’s all we ever hear; it’s called the algorithm.
Dennis: Facebook actually got mad at me cause I spoke on stage a couple of times, and I wrote some articles about it. Now Facebook’s created one that just for them, that’s called Edric. But the class of algorithm that they’re using is called a collaborative filter, which is basically saying people who like this also might like that. Right. And you understand the idea of people who buy this might like that. If you go to a dating site, if you like this woman, you might like this kind of woman to this woman. Right. I want to look at her profile too. Right. And when you’re on Facebook, if you are constantly clicking like on Donald Trump’s stuff, what kinds of stuff are you going to see in the feed? More, probably more Donald Trump stuff. Yeah. Okay. So if anyone’s mad about Facebook, about what they’re seeing in the feed whose fault is it?
Kieran: Their own?
Dennis: Yeah. And so if you’re running ads on Facebook and it’s not driving sales whose fault is it? Because you’re misunderstanding what the algorithm does, like getting mad at the Facebook ad system. It’s like stepping on a scale and getting mad at the number it shows when you get on the scale. Well, whose fault is that? I love buffets. It’s my fault. The scale told me I gained three pounds. How many pounds did you gain during the last two months? You know, Corona, you know, how many times do you go and look in the refrigerator even though five minutes ago. It’s still the same thing. Like there’s nothing new in the refrigerator. How many times have you liked reopened the refrigerator? Whose fault is that?
Richard: Yeah. Well, this would be one of the reasons why we say keep creating a bunch of new content, right? Don’t get mad at what happens, but learn from what happened.
Dennis: If you put, why, how, and what content in there. And you have customers who are already happy. Facebook will see that if you do the custom audiences and do something, we call digital plumbing, which has all the tracking. And you feed this stuff back to the Matrix. You take your tinfoil hat off the system. We’ll find more customers for you. It just will happen. Why? Because Facebook is a word of mouth engine, meaning that if they know who your top 50 customers are. If you upload a list of your top 50 birdseed customers who have bought. Or maybe you upload the whole list, but then you upload another list of the ones who are like the really good long time loyal customers. And those ones, which you can interview and get testimonials from. And all that Facebook will go out and do the heavy lifting, and they will do the sequencing and bidding and ad optimization for you.
Do not have to hire someone to do this for you. I mean, once you get over, say like $10,000 a day, you might hire someone like Kieran or me to come in and tune it. But really the algorithm is going to do 99% of it because of the thing that we call a collaborative filter, where you’re trying to feed it, your good customers. And by feeding the content in the structure of why, how, and what the system will figure out the journey. As some people like maybe Rich, he’s impulsive, and he sees something, and he just buys it. Right? So Facebook knows that. Cause guess what? Facebook saw all the things that Rich has bought, and Facebook will then show, Hey, rich, you need to buy this birdseed right now, and Rich will buy it. And maybe Jesse’s a tire kicker. Jesse like, Oh, you know, I kinda like to do a lot of research and figure out what’s going on. And so, Facebook knows that. Not just because of his behavior with being outdoors and birds. They just know that he just likes to shop around before he buys. And they’ll drip him a different flow of content. They’ll show him a different mix of content. Do you believe that Facebook understands who you are and will, therefore, customize the ads so that they can give you something that people will like tuned to you individually?
Jesse: I believe in it in a very scary way. Yeah. I have no doubt.
Dennis: I mean the microphones listening, except that, that’s true. Don’t worry about, Oh, well, one day the NSA, no, that day was 20 years ago. So when I ran analytics at Yahoo, we would have government requests where we’d have to pull the emails of these people that were suspected terrorists or criminals or whatever. And we had to do it. If my team didn’t do it, we’d have to go to jail. And you can think about the kind of data that we could pull on people. Let me tell you; it was very good. And even 20 years ago now, imagine what today. I don’t work at the searches anymore. Now just imagine what they’re able to do. We were collecting 13 terabytes of data per day. I wonder how much data Facebook collects per day.
Kieran:
Oh wow. Yeah.
Dennis: Server capacity. The servers that we were working with back then versus now, holy moly. So why wouldn’t you let Facebook do the work for you? If you believe the algorithm is smart enough to do this heavy lifting for you, then you’re going to use this
Kieran: They’re called campaign budget optimization. And so they’re a short form of CBOs. And CBO is perhaps the most obvious and widely used version of Facebook’s algorithm and in advertising because we all know that the algorithms there, we all know that it’s helping us optimize our ads. But I think when the CBOs came out about a year and a half, two years ago, that was the first time that it was really obvious and right in front of your face, on the backend ads platform, that there was an algorithm because you could see one, one ad set was being pushed more budget than another. And the other ads that were getting better results than another. But you’re spending only one budget across those three. So I think CBO has really shown people the power of the Facebook algorithm for the first time upfront. And it’s extremely powerful. We use it in my agency a lot for our
Dennis: It’s like automatic versus manual transmission. One to let the system do it for you. And by the way, if you have never heard of CBO, don’t worry about it. It’s just another TLA,
Kieran: I actually don’t know.
Dennis: That’s called awareness, consideration, and conversion, the exact same. There we go. Now, what happens if you go into LinkedIn’s ad system and you’re choosing which campaign you have, and there’s three buckets of campaigns, what are those levels?
Kieran: I got this one awareness, consideration, conversion.
Dennis: Holy moly. How do you know that? Let’s say you go into Quora, and you want to build ads in Quora. And they happen to have a
Kieran: Awareness, consideration, and conversion.
Dennis: Wow. You get an A, now let’s say you go to Twitter. Do you want to build some campaigns? And they make you choose between these three categories. What do they call?
Kieran: Rich got this one.
Dennis: Do you know? It’s true, it’s tough. Now, is this a conspiracy? When you go to each of these ad platforms, now, some people say it’s a conspiracy because like the people who worked with me at Yahoo and we built the analytics system, there was no Google Analytics back then if you guys remember for any of you guys who were old enough, back in my day, we used to manually do our searches. We should go to a travel agent, get off my lawn. Those people who worked on my team and built the analytics. Do you think Google built their own analytics? They stole the people on my team. And then they bought this other company called Urchin. Yep. You know, UTM parameters and Google. You know, U, it’s from Urchin, it’s from that company they bought, they didn’t even buy. Oh, Google search engine, the whole PPC thing on how they make money, they stole all that from Google. We have a $6 billion lawsuit that we won. We were waiting until they went public. And then we sued them. They stole that whole thing from us. So the engineers that built the stuff at Google, who do you think built Facebook’s analytics, same people. Who do you think? You know, Sheryl Sandberg, who runs Facebook? She’s their COO, what do you think her previous job was? Google. She ran sales at Google and the head chef at Facebook. Where do you think he worked before?
Jesse: I’m guessing Google.
Dennis: Yeah, maybe he did.
Richard: So you’re going back to this talent borrows, genius steals thing.
Dennis: Yeah. So if we can get this thing to work on Facebook, we can get it to work everywhere, but let’s get it to work on Facebook because we need to have the key ingredients. And so it’s basically a Facebook, Google, or Coke and Pepsi world. That really is what it is. Let’s get this right. Get the content going. And you’re going to find that when you sequence people through these three levels, remember there are these three levels, and you’re going to make little videos. You’re not going to try to get people all the way through in one 20 minute video, break them into little segments that are 15 seconds or a minute on why, how, and what, which is the same thing as awareness, consideration, and conversion.
If you get that you’re ahead of everybody else, then dollar day boosting, then all this stuff Kieran’s talking about, like with CBO and your campaign structures, like all that stuff will naturally fall into place. But what we like to say is that you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shiitake. No amount of adding seasoning with chicken shiitake, it’s not going to work. Okay. So with the right ingredients, the breadmaker, the automatic transmission, like whatever analogy you want to use for the machine, Skynet, you know, whatever, whatever you want to use for that, that system will do the work for you. Okay. But the first thing is you have to trust; you have to take the red pill.
Jesse: Now, guys, I believe the algorithm works. I don’t doubt it in any way. And I’ve actually built some of these complicated things that you’re mentioning, and now I’m like upset that I could have just taken a little bit more of an easier route because some of the stuff you said is complicated.
If I can do like a, a one minute, how to we’re not going to do the video here, we’re not going to do a screen share. But like, let’s say somebody is like, all right, they’ve already paused. And they made 15 videos, Facebook business managers, and they created a campaign. And then, and they’re going to put all these 15 videos. The why, how, and what in one campaign, or are they going to do three separate campaigns for the, how the awareness?
Kieran: So you’re saying we have 15 pieces of content.
Jesse: And there’s five in each, in each category.
Kieran: Okay. And we’re at the top of the funnel. This is the get to know me type videos that Dennis was talking about.
Jesse: They have five of those. They have five why’s, five how’s, five what’s. Should they just throw them all in there and put them at a bucket day, or should they do three different campaigns?
Kieran: In that case, yeah, you would want three different campaigns because you would want to be serving three different types of audiences. Because at the awareness level, those are usually cold audiences. People who have never heard of you or your brand before, that’s where you want to get people to know like, and trust you. Okay. Then in the middle consideration, that’s where maybe you start talking about the product a little bit more. You start to talk about what it is. You’re not trying to sell it yet, but you start talking about what it is, the features and benefits. Maybe it’s, you know, some videos of some happy customers talking about their bird feeder. Nothing crazy. Maybe there’s a link to your website. Maybe they end up on your website, but nothing, nothing super salesy. They’re just a little bit of information about the product.
And then, at the bottom of the funnel, you have the conversion stage right now, that campaign objective is usually going to be a purchase objective and Facebook’s algorithm. The machine’s going to go and find people out there in the world of Facebook that are target people that might want to buy bird food. Okay. And at each of these levels, that audience is getting smaller and smaller. Because, let’s say you hit 10 million people with that ad at the top, with your awareness ad, people just getting to know you and your business. Ten million people, maybe only 1 million of them care enough to watch more than 15 seconds of the video.
You set up a remarketing audience for your consideration stage, where you talk about the product out of those 1 million people, maybe only a hundred, 200,000 of them care enough to watch that video or go to your website or whatever, whatever action that is, that they end up taking. And then out of all those people at the third stage, the conversion stage, then you serve them in an ad with some sort of offer. Maybe at this point, it’s a discount. If that’s how your business operates. Maybe at this point, it’s a really great video of the product and the problem that it solves, whatever it is, then you’re working with a much smaller audience of people. So guess what happens when you’re working with a smaller audience of people who already know your brand, your conversion, sorry, your CPA goes down your cost per acquisition.
So you’re not spending as much money. Try running an offer to a cold traffic audience. That’s the quickest way for your CPA to be way too high. So at the bottom, at the conversion stage, now you have an ad for people who have already seen those first two ads, they know, like, and trust you. They like the product they’re considering. They’ve been to your website, they’ve watched your videos, whatever it is now you can get them to go and purchase. And so, yes, to answer your question, three different campaigns on there. Each of them has a different objective. Usually, the top, one’s probably going to be video views or engagement or something like that. The middle ones often, you know, link clicks, landing, page views, something like that. And then the bottom one is usually, add to cart view, content, or purchase.
Jesse: Yep. Okay, perfect. I wanted a little blueprint of the Facebook breadmaker, and that’s a nice little, that’s a nice back of the napkin blueprint there. Obviously, we could go way, way more
Dennis: I got all kinds of pro tricks, but let’s get these ones in place first.
Jesse: I’m with you. I didn’t want to scare people. I just wanted to make sure that they had, if they were ready to go, they could rewind and get back to that part of the video. Awesome. Richie, any, any questions here? We don’t want to keep these guys all day here. I know I could keep taking notes.
Richard: To your point, I literally feel like I could talk to him for days and keep learning the whole entire conversation, but we’ll try to have you back for round two and, or put together a webinar or something. So that’s one thing I would say for the, for the people who are listening, reach out on social, reach out in the comments at the ecwid.com/blog/podcast. Just let us know if you want to hear more, and we’ll, we’ll try to get Dennis back on and take it to the next level. And for those that don’t want to wait for that, Dennis, where would people learn more about you and what you guys are too and how they can support you?
Kieran: Well, Dennis always responds to my Instagram stories. I know he’s very active on Instagram. Is it @dennis.yu ?
Dennis: That’s right. That’s right. I don’t have as many followers. I don’t get like 5,000 people liking my posts, but I’m on LinkedIn, or you can Google me, and you’ll see, there’s a ton of stuff out there. The main thing is I want to see you guys actually put this into action. Don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis and explore all these cool tips, but ended up not implementing. I’ll leave you with this one question. What is the best video? You just started your store with Ecwid. You’re excited about starting
Richard: I’d probably say the first one.
Dennis: It’s the one you actually make. Don’t tell me about the video you’re gonna make tomorrow, make your videos now, because if let’s say, I’m your weight loss coach, and I give you this great plan that it works. And I got a great gym and all this equipment, but you never use the gym, and you never follow the plan. So we gave you, Kieran and I, we just gave you the plan. Just do something. Do you want to run a marathon? Just run a mile today, just do something. That’s the biggest thing. We’ve talked.
So many people that have started their stores, big dreams that buy all the software that does all this stuff, but they don’t make any video. Any videos. They buy all that. They want to run a marathon. They buy all the running shoes and whatever, but they need to go jogging for a mile. Freaking make your videos. And maybe they’re terrible. They will be terrible but put the first ones out. In fact, if they’re terrible, they often do better. Watch boost it for a dollar, remove your ego, let the data, tell you you’re going to find the ones that suck. Actually, people will identify with your
Karen and I want to know how you’re doing. Even if you’re watching this way down on the replay months later, I want, I really want to see you succeed. We’re not being paid to do this. We were here because we want to see you kick some butt.
Jesse: Even on the
Dennis: What we talked about today is called The Dollar A Day Strategy. Okay. And of course, it’s a whole book, and we’re not kidding. There literally is a whole thing behind it. So in order, because Rich and Jesse and our friends at Ecwid, we all want to help people out because now’s the best time for entrepreneurship. If you send an email to operations@blitzmetrics.com with the subject line We love Ecwid. And you tell us what you want. The Dollar A Day Strategy. We will give it to you free. This is a course that we’ve sold for $189. We’ve made millions of dollars selling courses. So it’s legit. In fact, you could Google it, and you could see how many people left reviews about it. We will give it to you. No strings, no upsell, no credit card, we’re just going to give it to you. Because we want you to make a one minute video. We want you to start boosting it. We want you to start getting going here.
Jesse: Awesome. I love it. I hope people are listening there, writing that down, and rewinding and sending you guys this email because I want to see our customers have success. I want to see merchant’s put these things into action. Awesome. Thanks, Dennis.
Dennis: Thank you, guys.
Jesse: Alright. Richie, any last thoughts here?
Richard: Nope, that’s it. Even though we weren’t thinking about this, it inspired me to start making videos.