Get the Facebook video campaign strategy playbooks the experts use in their businesses to acquire new leads, scale campaigns, and increase conversions. Listen as they detail two video ad game plans you can quickly start using in your business.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
- The video campaign strategy that provides value first and successfully reaches cold audiences (« Hint: This is especially effective for expensive products).
- The four elements to include in your video to create effective video ads that convert.
- What video ad strategy you can use if you have a novelty product or are just getting started.
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Episode 67: The Proven 3-Step Formula to Transform Your Business with Video Ads [Part 1]
Episode 68: 3 Elements of High-Converting Video Ads [Part 2]
Episode 86: UPSYD: The 5-Step Framework to Generate More Customers
Episode 99: Marketing & Traffic Advice from Facebook’s 30th Employee: Noah Kagan
3-Step Facebook Video Ad Formula
Molly’s Slides for the Facebook Video Ad Playbook
UPSYD Image:
Episode 101 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):
| Keith Krance: | Hello and welcome to Episode Number 101 of Perpetual Traffic. We’ve got the gang all back in town today, Ralph, Molly, myself, Keith, on with you today to talk about some traffic game plans. Have you ever been sitting there ready to start a new campaign or execute on a new Facebook ad campaign, and your wheels are spinning, you’re frustrated, you’re wondering, “What the heck should I use for a campaign objective? Should this target cold audiences? Warm audiences? What should my bidding be? What should my optimization be? Where should my placements be?” If that’s ever been you and you’re looking for more of a playbook, that’s what today is going to be about. Molly’s created these really cool traffic playbooks for a recent course they did, and we’re going to get into two of them today. Super excited to get into this stuff. Once again, this is episode 101. How are you guys doing? |
| Molly Pittman: | Doing awesome. |
| Ralph Burns: | Awesome. |
| Molly Pittman: | Excited for today. |
| Ralph Burns: | This is going to be killer. |
| Molly Pittman: | Perpetually excited. |
| Ralph Burns: | We’re overselling it already. Look at that. |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah. |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah. |
| Molly Pittman: | These traffic plays came from a recent workshop that we launched here at DigitalMarketer. What I did inside of this workshop, was actually created traffic plays. There are acquisition plays and monetization plays, and each play is basically a different strategy that you can use to achieve a specific desired end result. Obviously, on Facebook, there are lots of options. In marketing, there are a lot of ways to do the same thing. I think these plays really reflect that, so there’s a visual representation of the campaign that you will run, the assets you need, what objective you should choose, what metrics you should track, how you should bid, optimize what placements you should use, all of the questions that come up when you’re setting up a Facebook campaign. I think what these represent, like I said, is there’s more than one way to do something. We’re going to go through two plays today, that you can execute in your business and talk about the best use cases for each play and how they function, and give you some awesome examples. |
| Ralph Burns: | I think what’s so cool about these, first off, is these are some of the coolest things I think you’ve ever done because I look at everything from my perspective, which is from an agency perspective, and how can I take stuff from Molly that’s brilliant, and utilize it in what we’re doing? It’s a great way to sort of think about things differently, as sort of separate strategies. I think all of these, that are in all these traffic plays, are sort of in all of our heads collectively, here on this podcast, at least the three hosts here. It’s like, to actually see them out in name, in a cool name, and then to actually see them as how they travel through, and I’m not going to say the word, sales funnel, but the sales machine, it’s usually you’ll see, “Here’s an example of a landing page, then a thank you page, then a core offer page, and that kind of thing.” This actually gives you the traffic strategy that’s ahead of it, and how it goes through that machine. It’s really, really cool. I think we talk so much about video here on this show, these two are, I think, the most important ones out of all the ones I’ve seen. I’m super excited to talk about it today. |
| Keith Krance: | I know you might be listening right now and just be thinking, “Okay. I just want to know exactly what I should do. What’s my campaign objective? What exactly should I use for each situation.” If you think about, go watch an NFL football game or any other sport for that matter, and the best teams don’t run the same two to three plays all game long. They run a variety of plays because there’s so many different scenarios, situations, types of players on the field at that time. |
| Ralph Burns: | You’re not going to win the Super Bowl with just one play. As great as my close, personal friend Tom Brady is, in my mind he’s my friend by the way, just so you guys know, but he’s not going to win Super Bowl 51 with one or two or three plays. I mean their playbook for the Patriots is like the equivalent of the Chinese phone book. It’s very thick. You don’t need that many plays, but I think you need more than one. I think today’s episode is going to be a great example of two video plays because we talk about video so much. You’re probably wondering from past episodes, which play do I do? We’ll talk about that today. Again, the question is really based upon your offer, based upon the formation on the field so to speak, but then also your product … |
| Molly Pittman: | The players. |
| Ralph Burns: | The players, the assets you have, the players on your team, your personnel groupings, all that sort of stuff, so we’ll get into that today. |
| Keith Krance: | All right Molly, let’s get into traffic play number one for today. |
| Molly Pittman: | Let’s do it. Like Keith said, feel free to go to digitalmarketer.com/podcast, to actually look at these plays that we’re talking about. The first one’s called the Video Boomerang Play. Now, this one is a bit more complicated than the play that we’ll cover next. This is a really, really powerful play. It actually consists of two different Facebook campaigns. The first campaign is a video of use campaign, and you’re going to be targeting cold traffic, people who haven’t heard of you before, with this first video of your campaign. What the first video will do is actually educated the audience. The goal of this first campaign is to simply get people to watch the video so that you can populate a custom audience, that you can then retarget with a second campaign. |
| The goal of that first campaign is simply to get people to watch your video, for you to educate them, for you to establish yourself as an authority, for you to introduce your brand to this person, and then you’re going to retarget with a second Facebook campaign, that’s optimized for conversions. That’s where you’re actually going to ask them to do something. Maybe opt-in for a Lead Magnet, purchase a product, sign up for a trial, come to your store, whatever the next step in the Customer Journey would be for you, that’s going to happen in the second campaign, that’s only going to show to the people that watched the video in the first campaign. | |
| At DigitalMarketer, we ran a video of use Facebook campaign, and it was a short, quick little video, only like 25 seconds. It covered five ways to use Facebook to grow your local business. That was all the video was about. It just gave them five quick ways to grow their local business using Facebook. The reason I did this, was because we had an offer, a Facebook ad templates Lead Magnet, that I really wanted to use to generate leads of people that own local businesses because I wanted to sell them our DigitalMarketer Lab product, but when I ran traffic directly to the Lead Magnet, when I was targeting these local business owners, trying to get them to opt-in to the Lead Magnet, it just wasn’t working.
(NOTE: Not a member of DM Lab? Try it for just a $1!) |
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| I think the reason it wasn’t working is because it was too early in the Customer Journey and they were not even solution aware yet. They weren’t even aware of the benefits of Facebook ads for their business, before I was going to ask them to opt-in for a Facebook ad template. We needed to sandwich in a little bit of value, a little bit of education first, so that we could pixel them and then retarget them with the offer. Again, we ran this ad, it was five ways to grow your local business with Facebook. We pixeled people in that video, and then we retargeted people who watched that video, and asked them to opt-in for the Facebook ad templates. Once we did that, it worked like a charm. We were getting sub $5.00 leads, while counting the cost of that first campaign. | |
| Really, this play is best used when you have a really strong cold video asset that provides a lot of value to your market. Maybe you’re teaching someone something, you’re solving a problem for them, you’re putting something in their Newsfeed that is really valuable. I saw a video ad from West Elm the other day, and it basically showed you how to arrange items on your coffee table, so that it looked visually appealing. It was just a little five step process, and it showed from a birds-eye view looking down at the coffee table, and they showed you five things you could put on the coffee table to make it look good. I watched the video because I have a coffee table and it was interesting. Then they started retargeting me with the items that were on the coffee table. That’s a great example of a strong cold video asset that you could lead with. | |
| I think this is also best used in broader markets, where your people might not be as solution aware as they are in other scenarios, so if you do need to lead with that value first, it’s very important in your business, I think this is absolutely for you. It’s also for you, if whatever you want them to do is a huge ask. If you’re asking them to buy a more expensive product or you’re asking them to do something that may not immediately solve their problem, this is a good little sandwich, an asset to use to give that value first. | |
| Again, you would start with a video of use campaign. Your campaign objective would be video views. You would be building that website custom audience, of people that watched your video, and then you would set up a campaign that’s optimized for conversions. That campaign would retarget people who watched your video, and it would optimize for whatever conversion you’re asking for on that page, whether it’s an opt-in for a Lead Magnet, webinar, trial, for them to purchase a low dollar product, that’s the function of that second campaign. | |
| Again, if you look at the visual, you look at the play, you can see the success metrics that you would track. For the first campaign, you would be tracking video views. The second would be cost per lead or cost per acquisition, whichever makes sense for your business. For the first campaign your bidding would be automatic, same for the second campaign. The first you would optimize for video views, the second you would optimize for conversions. For both campaigns, I would recommend your placements to be Facebook feeds, right hand column, and Instagram feeds. All of that can be found on the actual play, but I highly recommend this for anyone who really wants to lead with value first, or if you want to scale out an offer. If you need to scale out to another market, this is a great way to become relevant to them. | |
| Ralph Burns: | I think an important part to this is these are flexible as well. The way that Molly is approaching this is different than how we approach it, just because we found that whenever we start a video campaign, we tend to start with video views, but we also test website conversions. Website conversions, in our case, worked better as an objective. I don’t think these are hard and fast necessarily, but I think these are good guides. Just let the data tell you. We said, “If we’re going to show them a video, we might as well have some sort of call to action.” Some of these people actually did do that. The majority of them didn’t, but we still got very, very high-quality video viewers, even though we were using two different objectives. We were using video views objective on one and website conversions objective on another, we found website conversions was doing a little bit better, so we kept that one running. |
| I think we actually ran both for a considerable period of time, but how we used this, we used it slightly different than how Molly did it. We looked at, for this particular customer, what audience buys their stuff, begin with the end in mind, is what we always start with. Who is buying your stuff? Well, we found that people who engaged in video, who were a website custom audience, somebody who engaged with a blog post, those people were the people that bought like 3X more than any other audience, to this particular offer. | |
| What we wanted to do was create website custom audiences by creating blog posts, which we did. We also created a video, two different video campaigns, one website conversions, one video views objective and we combined those together and we created more warm audiences that we then retargeted for a next step, in our case, was a webinar. Register for a webinar, where they were sold a product that was just under $500, thereabouts. The campaign did extremely well. It ROI’d at about 3:1 at scale. These things are flexible, but I encourage all you guys for anything that we ever teach here, think through, “Does this make sense for my product? For my offer? My way of doing things?” For us, even though Molly, me, and Keith, see eye to eye on a lot of stuff on Facebook, we test different things and we have different ideas. I’d encourage you to do the same thing, but definitely use this as a framework. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Especially the optimization and the bidding. These are just what we’ve found through all of our tests, but the strategy remains the same. The visual element of this play remains the same because it’s human psychology. It’s back to the relational stuff we always talk about. Some people need to get a little bit of value first before you ask them to do something, and this play is perfect for that. |
| Keith Krance: | Exactly. 100% agree with both of you here. It really depends on what you’re trying to do and what your situation is. The example that Molly’s using here, and we’ll put that in the Show Notes as well, is the five ways to use Facebook to grow your local business. It’s a great short video, but the goal of that video is to move people from unaware, really of the solution, to aware of the solution. In this case, if you go back and listen to Episode 86, where we went over the UPSYD framework, and really what she’s doing with this video, is taking people from step two to step three on the ladder, and we’ll put an image here.
Most cases, you’re taking people who are, they’re aware of the problem, they want more customers, these local business, but they’re not aware really that Facebook is a great solution for this. This video view, what that’s doing, it’s turning a lot of people and making them aware of solution of Facebook, so now she can follow them up with a more direct response type of ad, to promote their Lead Magnet. |
| Molly Pittman: | Absolutely. |
| Keith Krance: | Now, question on that. For the direct response play following that, does it have to be a video in this case, or could it be a non-video? |
| Molly Pittman: | The Direct Response Video Play would have to be a video because it’s explaining why someone should take action on this. |
| Keith Krance: | Perfect, perfect. Okay got you. Love that. Basically, you’ve got your kind of branding, making them aware of the problem, making them aware of the solution video, and then that’s being followed up with a more direct response type of video that’s related more to your offer. That’s going to be targeting your warm audiences, and of course you’re building your warm audiences fast with that initial video view campaign. Now, as Ralph kind of mentioned there, with our Three-Step Video Ad Formula Strategy, what we do sometimes is we’ll combine those two together into one video. Now, that’s not super easy to do, but sometimes what you can do is you can combine those, where you’re giving them that value, and then you’re transitioning to a call-to-action, so you’re kind of doing both in one. Typically, it’s a little bit longer type of video. It’s just one more game plan, is all it is. |
| Ralph Burns: | Totally. It’s a little bit more complicated to do. I think 67 and 68 go through that in a great amount of detail, where we’re always looking for the shortcut like, “How can we do this in one step instead of two?” In many cases, you need two steps. I think every traffic play has its place, and it really depends on how it works and you got to test it. I think of the things that Molly mentioned when she first started introducing this one, is she tried something going right to this audience with the Lead Magnet, and it didn’t work. It’s like, it’s okay for it not to work, but figure out why. Think about it statistically or think about it logically, why doesn’t it work? Well, they need more warming up. They’re not ready for this thing yet because it’s foreign to them. They’re not aware that this type of solution actually exists, so you have to educate them first. Tough to do in one video, but you can definitely do it in two, like this play does. |
| Molly Pittman: | I think that kind of leads to the second play, right? |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah. |
| Molly Pittman: | The second play is the Direct Response Video Play. This would just be one campaign and one video. If you’re looking at it visually, it looks a lot simpler. This can target cold traffic, and basically this campaign optimizes for conversions. It has a video element as the creative and it’s going to cold traffic, and it’s asking people to take action, even though you’ve never met them before. The reason that this can work, is because of the video element. You can really take the principles from the last traffic campaign and almost combine them, to deploy this particular play. Again, it would be a conversion campaign with the video as the creative, going right to a landing page asking someone to opt-in or sign up. This one is best used when you have more of a novelty product or offer. You have something that either solves an absolute, immediate need for the end user, or it’s just something that’s really freaking cool. |
| Let me give you two examples. The first, at Survival Life, we have this lighter and it’s waterproof. They have a video of this lighter with the flame lit and there’s water coming down, but the flame doesn’t go out. You can use that video and run a website conversion campaign, as we’re doing right now, that goes right to the sales page and asks people to buy that lighter. The reason it works, is because it’s such a novelty item. That market wants to be the cool guy that whips out a lighter in front of his friends in the rain, and it doesn’t go out. It’s just really, really cool. | |
| Another example is from one of Ralph’s clients, thedogtrainingsecret.com, and in a video ad, it says, “Does your dog get way too excited and out of control when he sees something he wants in his environment? Watch this video to discover one clever trick for how to finally start teaching your dog to calm down on command. Then click here to learn more.” It’s a video where he’s solving a huge problem. Anyone with a dog knows how annoying it is to not be able to control when your dog gets excited or tries to eat your food. He’s solving a big, big problem, but he’s also giving them a trick. Even if they don’t click over to his $27 product, he’s also giving value in this video. He very easily could have deployed the Video Boomerang Campaign and shot a video that gave two or three tricks for how to calm down your dog, and then retarget them with the $27 product. Here, because he is solving such an immediate need, it’s okay for him to go ahead and optimize for that $27 purchase. He’s able to give value first, and then he’s also able to make a call to action to go buy a product to learn more. | |
| This is definitely more of a direct response approach, and it’s great when you have something that’s really cool, that people really want, or if you’re solving an immediate need. It’s also a good place to start because with this type of campaign, you’re going to find that you can only scale it so far, without adding in an extra piece of content, like we did in the Video Boomerang Traffic Play. Just to give you a little bit more specifics, you would choose the conversion objective for this campaign. You’re going to be measuring cost per lead or cost per acquisition, whatever you’re optimizing for. Bidding, we recommend using automatic bidding. Optimization, we recommend conversions. Conversion window, we recommend one day, but Ralph’s also finding that seven day works really well, so definitely test that. Then good placements for this type of thing is Facebook feed, right hand column, Instagram feed, again, those are all just suggestions guys, from what we found definitely worth testing. This is a great play if you want quick results, and keep in mind that you can retarget these people too. Just because you’re going for the kill, right in this first campaign, doesn’t mean that you can’t retarget people that watch the video with your offer. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Yeah, totally good. This goes back to Episode 67 and 68 again, definitely ones you want to listen to, with Keith’s EDIE formula, I used to say Edie, now I say Eddie. I think Eddie Van Halen because it’s badass. In your first one, in the small business one, you’re sort of informing and education more than anything, but in the other video for dog training, you are informing, entertaining, and educating all at once. Out of those four, educate, demonstrate, inform, and entertain, if you could get more of them or all four of them would be great, most people can’t. I know I can’t. If you could get a couple of them in there, that makes the video even more effective. |
| Molly Pittman: | Another example of this is, again, back to this novelty idea and solving a huge problem, I saw an ad in my Newsfeed from Xerox. The ad copy said, “Tired of tracking down receipts? Now you get your phone to do the work.” The video was just a quick 10 second video, and it had a stack of receipts and the stack of receipts disappeared, and then turned into a cellphone. They were able to visually represent in the video, not only the problem, but also the solution. The receipts went away, the phone laid there on the table, and you could watch that video in 10 seconds without reading the ad copy, and realize, “Cool. This looks like an app or some piece of software that’s going to keep me from having to sift through all of these receipts in my business.” You click on the ad and it goes over to a 30-day free trial of their software. Again, if you’re really solving a big problem, and you’re showing a novelty offer, this is a great type of campaign to use. |
| Keith Krance: | When we talk about our EDIE formula, educate, demonstrate, entertain, a lot of times the demonstrate examples are perfect for novelty tech, cool gadgets, items, or like a software, like that example, or we’ve given the other example of Designer, of a client of ours, it’s a 15 second video, digital video showing a blog post going through a conveyor belt, turning into a pdf, and that’s all it is. It doesn’t matter if they’re warm or cold, they’ve got a problem, this solves it. Another one that we show in our three-step ad formula guide, that we’ll give you free access too as well, in the Show Notes, is a video produced by Karen X. Chang, but the company is LaForge, and its high-tech glasses. It actually does some other things that Ryan’s talked about, that kind of portal effect. It shows you what it looks like looking through those glasses, and it’s a pretty cool video that really does a lot of those things. |
| The key thing to understand here, is with this traffic plan that Molly’s talking about, this is the Direct Response Traffic Plan, this is going to be great for retargeting people because now you’re focused on your product, or your service, or your offer. That’s what it’s really doing, you’re focusing on your product, or service, or offer, you’re not really focusing on delivering value in this case, so you’re either going to be targeting warm audiences, if you have a product that does need that warming up, or if you have like a cool tech thing or something you can just demonstrate, then boom, guess what? You can go cold, warm, and include everybody in that audience. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Again, what’s important to keep in mind with these plays, there’s more than one way to do something. While, although it’s cool that you have all those specifics, those are the questions that we get mostly, “How should I bid? What should I optimize for? What placement should I choose?” That is the cool aspect of these plays, in my opinion, what’s really cool is this is just a visual representation of how many different strategies there are out there to accomplish whatever you need in your business. If you need to go out there and reach a really cold market, the Video Boomerang Play is probably best for you. If you have more of a novelty offering or you’re just getting started and it’s really the first time you’ve targeted your market with Facebook ads, the Direct Response Video Play is probably the best place to start. I think what’s cool about this is just seeing how many ways there are to do something, and that’s why this podcast will probably be around forever. |
| Ralph Burns: | Because the playbook is so thick. |
| Molly Pittman: | Yes, because with marketing and Facebook ads, the limit really is your creativity. |
| Keith Krance: | Then we talked about this on Episode 99 as well, with Noah Kagan. We talked about how just because somebody’s in your target audience, doesn’t mean that one thing is going to resonate the same with everybody, so different types of creatives, messages, are going to resonate with different types of personalities, people that are more impulsive, people that are less impulsive. Just because one, maybe, of your videos does a little bit better, doesn’t mean the other one should be turned off. |
| Ralph Burns: | That’s so important. |
| Molly Pittman: | I think that’s a huge mindset shift for people. If you set a target success metric, whatever it is, “I’m willing to pay this for a video of you, or this for a lead, or this for a sale.” If you have that metric, when you’re testing, whether you’re testing images, or hooks, or copy, or different types of campaigns, one might generate better results, but it doesn’t mean that the other is bad. You shouldn’t turn off everything other than the winner. You should keep running anything that’s under your target success metric because different people are going to respond to different messages, different people are going to respond to different campaigns. The more the merrier, as long as they’re all producing results that meet expectation. |
| Ralph Burns: | Yeah, I think that’s so important, because everyone’s looking for one thing. There’s not one thing. |
| Molly Pittman: | What’s the winner? |
| Ralph Burns: | What’s the winner? What’s the one thing I should do? You should try all of them. You probably don’t have an unlimited budget, that’s fine, so test them methodically. You don’t, you’re not looking for one thing. Ideally, you’re looking for like three or four or five things that work, and from a scaling perspective, that’s how you scale. That’s the best way that we scale our ads out, is because we use multiple, different videos, like for the dog training secrets video, there’s dozens of videos we use because he’s got such great content. For all of our customers, we’re like, “We got one thing that works. Let’s get another. Let’s get another. Let’s get another.” |
| As long as we’re hitting our metric, and we call it our CPA/KPI, which is basically the metric that tells us if we’re making money or not. If we are, then we just want more of it because in every audience remember, there’s a million-person audience on Facebook. There’s people who will convert, there’s people who will view, there’s people who will like, there’s people who will engage, but inside the converting audience, which maybe inside a million-person audience, is like 250,000 people. Think about that, as like there’s maybe five or six different groups in there, that they will respond to different messages and different creatives. To get them all on your side, to become a customer, you got to continuously try new things and combining some of these strategies, using different plays, as well as different creatives, is the way to do it. | |
| Keith Krance: | This is why I’ve always said, “Do not just look at a video ad and test it, as far as a cost per conversion, against a non-video ad.” They are serving two different purposes. You might have a video ad that brings in a lead at $6.00, and you might have an image ad that brings in a lead at $4.50, but guess what? Maybe the video ad is making a better longer-term impact, so that person’s coming in to your funnel with their guard down instead of their guard up, so in the end, three days later, it actually might be a much more profitable lead because of the impact psychologically that you’re making with your audience. It’s very important, which is why, back to Molly’s point, maybe your ceiling is eight and everything below that, keep them running to connect with those different types of personalities. |
| Ralph Burns: | Don’t co-mingle your campaigns. Keep your video campaigns separate from your linked post campaigns. We do this, it’s hard to, but you got to keep it separate, because they really do have different values, because you may see more ROI for those video ads, and we’ve definitely seen that because there’s value that’s upfront right in the Newsfeed. They’re consuming content right in the Newsfeed, and then therefore they become better customers later on. It’s an added benefit to it, so definitely keep them separate. |
| Keith Krance: | All right. Good stuff guys. Let’s remember, this is one where you’re going to want to head to the Show Notes at digitalmarketer.com/podcast. This is Episode 101, and we’ll have the plays in there. We’ll also have any of the episodes we linked out to, a couple of other things we mentioned. We’ll have all the resources in the Show Notes, for you to check out, download, listen to, watch or whatever it is it may be for you to consume. |
| Ralph Burns: | Kablam! |
| Keith Krance: | Good times. Till next time. |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, thanks guys. Test them. |
| Ralph Burns: | Test them. |
| Keith Krance: | Bye, bye. |
| Ralph Burns: | See ya. |
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