The panelists talk to Daniel Kremsa about Facebook campaigns and marketing.

Transcript

CHUCK:  You wanna say nice things, Eric? ERIC: Nice things, Eric. [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at BlueBox.net.]  [You're fantastic at coding, but do you have an action plan to take it to the next level? The upcoming book, Next Level Freelance will help you optimize your freelance business for happiness. The book is packed with actionable steps to make more money, case studies, tips to find more clients and exercises for you to establish your desired lifestyle. Extras include nine interviews of freelancers who make great money while enjoying great work-life balance, videos on strategies to find quality subcontractors, and videos on making more free time by outsourcing your daily tasks. Check it out today, nextlevelfreelance.com.] [This episode is sponsored by Planscope. Planscope is a project management and collaboration app built for freelancers and the way they work with clients. It makes it easy to price up new estimates, and once you're underway, helps answer the question, “Will this get done on time and under budget?” I've been using Planscope to do my estimates and manage my projects, and I really, really like it. It makes it really easy to keep things in order and understand when things will get done. You can go check it out at planscope.io. ] CHUCK: Hey everybody, and welcome to episode 101 of the Freelancers Show. This week on our panel we have Eric Davis. ERIC: Hello. CHUCK: Reuven Lerner. REUVEN: Hey, everyone! CHUCK: I'm Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv, and this week we have a special guest and that’s Dan Kremsa. DANIEL: It’s Daniel Kremsa, yes. CHUCK: Daniel Kremsa. DANIEL: Hi. CHUCK: So, do you wanna introduce yourself really quickly? DANIEL: Sure. I run a digital agency called Kremsa Digital. The website is kremsa.com. We build custom solutions and mainly focus on [inaudible] programs and loyalty campaigns. Our clients are mainly CPG and entertainment brands between $10 million and $100 million a year. We are in Los Angeles, so that makes it convenient. Some of the examples of our clients are LiveNation, Ticket Master, Amoeba, but we also work with other agents. We used to get clients like Microsoft and Discover Card. We’ve been around for 13 years, have about 20 people in the organization. We have two offices, three offices in two countries – two in the US and one in Europe, Slovakia. CHUCK: Awesome. So we brought you on this week to talk about Facebook campaigns and using Facebook to get the word out about your product or service. I'm assuming you’ve done some fairly large campaigns – what is it that makes a campaign particularly successful? DANIEL: A successful campaign – that’s a good question. I think it’s a unique campaign that attracts the person’s attention enough to a point where they’ll share it with their friends. Technically speaking, I would say a successful campaign is something that brings in at least, that every person that you draw in through ads will bring in at least one additional person through social channels. That is a successful campaign. Very rarely this is achieved. I was able to be part of one – it wasn’t a campaign, it was a program. It’s called Opinion Poll where we were able to achieve 1.1 virality, which means that every person that came to the poll application brought another 1.1 people with them. And as you can imagine, this creates a viral effect and ultimately the application grows. The application has been going on for, I wanna say five years now. We have about 15 million authenticated users. The growth has stopped due to the number of changes on Facebook, but it still produced a strong application. CHUCK: I never thought of it in terms of how viral it was, but that makes some sense. In our market, it seems like we’re a little bit more niche-focused – usually we’re focused on one area or another. For us, it’s Rails development, or if we’re writing an ebook, it’s going to be for programmers or freelancers or what have you. In those cases, can you still get that level of virality? I guess that’s the word you used. DANIEL: The market has been changing a lot in the past few years. Facebook celebrating its 10-year anniversary has gone through a variety of changes. Back in the day, that’s like five years ago, it was impossible to create viral apps for everybody. Everybody who just had a good idea kept things simple and focused on bringing or leveraging the social element, social factor, they were able to do so. At this point, you hear a lot of people talking about “pay to play” and unfortunately, that is true more and more. There are exceptions, but I myself have been trying to recreate the success that we previously had and am still trying. REUVEN: Just so I understand, so you're trying to say that basically, you could’ve done a viral campaign, marketing campaign, just through say, Facebook postings and strategic blogging and so forth – traditional source of marketing stuff – but not paying for advertisin,g and now your finding you have to also advertise? DANIEL: Correct. The reasons why is that number one, there's a lot of competition. I mean, you have the [inaudible] of the world playing in the same playground as you are. Number two, Facebook itself is a competitor – they have apps to sell, they have money to make, and then you have all the friends and family that are interacting with the brand or with the platform. So you have all these competitors that you have to compete against, and it’s tough, and the way to get forward is by ads. CHUCK: Let’s set up a hypothetical here. I really like getting into the nuts and bolts of some of this stuff. Let’s say that I have this friend that’s written a couple of ebooks and he wants to get the word out about his ebooks, and he has some specific markets – freelancers, or developers, or whatever.  So he decides that he wants to try and get the word out on Facebook. What kinds of things should he be doing in order to kind of build that following on Facebook? DANIEL: First of all, the product has to be good – that’s not different than any other marketing that you do anywhere else. It’s just a different channel, but the base, the fundamentals, are still the same no matter what. You have to have a solid product. Now you have to tailor that product to an audience that’s ACD, or ADC – Attention Deficit Disorder. ADD. They consume, they scroll through a page very quickly and you have to capture them somehow, so you gotta pick probably the best thing that you got in this book, or several best things, and in a very easy way present them to the user, and do so probably multiple times. The more relevant you are, the better chances you have in succeeding. CHUCK: So how do you get that in front of the right audience? DANIEL: You gotta start with friends; you gotta start with your network. If you have pages, you put it on your own pages. If you don’t, then you have to leverage Facebook ads. CHUCK: Can you build a Facebook page while you're working on a book or a product? DANIEL: Absolutely. A Facebook page is very simple to build; Facebook has nice tutorials and information about it. It’s very simple. CHUCK: What should you put on it in order to get people to like it? DANIEL: You gotta show some value with the page. You gotta pick something that your target audience needs. I'm sure you’ve talked about avatars, and all the stuff that you're going to find out who your audience is, and then they’ll [inaudible] audience. It can be different for different people. Giving away stuff also helps; that is also the reason why we focus and build things that allow us to reward people for taking action and also reward influence or sort of bringing people to take action. CHUCK: Oh, interesting. So what kinds of things are you doing there? I think we understand giving something away, but how do you reward influencers for bringing people in, especially to something like a Facebook page where there isn’t any money-exchanging [inaudible] yet? DANIEL: What we do is we have a platform that we’ve worked on, that we built for the last three years, that allows us to measure where people come from as other systems do like Google [inaudible] and other ones. But also it lets us measure who owns the link that you used to come from. So for example, you, Charles, if you came across a site and that rewarded influencer was using our system, you would get this short code that can be, a short code that can be a VIP.me/Charles. Then that short code would take anybody to, for example, the book on Amazon, and if somebody came through the book and came through your link and bought the book, if we were to integrate to Amazon’s API to get the information who bought the books, we would be able to reward you for all the people that came through your link to buy the books. Does that make sense? CHUCK: Yeah, it sounds like an affiliate program. DANIEL: Very likely an affiliate program, yes. CHUCK: So can you do the same thing with the Facebook page to see who’s referred somebody to it? DANIEL: Yes, on the Facebook page it can pretty much do the same thing. Facebook is a little bit more secretive about the places where people come from, or how Facebook is growing – but yes, you can do the same thing. The one thing to mention though is Facebook page is a third party page – you do not own any information that’s on the page. Facebook can shut you down if they choose to at any point, and you will not have any information about your users. The best thing is to leverage a Facebook page just as a marketing channel, as any other social pages. You have Instagrams, the Twitter pages – they all work the same way. You don’t own them; you just build up an audience. That’s an audience that can potentially convert to sales, but the sales and everything are happening on your site, which, if this is not something that you guys have talked about before –100%, I think, you should have your own property, a property that you control and that you can do more things about and also collect emails. Unless you have users’ actual contact information to use and can reach out to them on their personal time, you're going to have a hard time in the future trying to sell them something because Facebook pages at this point have only about 10% reach. So if I put something on a Facebook page, not all or 100% of my fans will get it, only about 10% or less if you have pages that have more than 500,000 likes. We have some pages that have 1.5 to 2 million fans [inaudible] manage, and they get even less percentage on the smaller pages. REUVEN: I'm curious Daniel, if I'm interested in marketing something, whether it’s an ebook or an online course that I'm doing, something like that, is Facebook the right place to advertise? What would be the reasons to go to Facebook, what would be the reasons not to use Facebook for that sort of advertisement, as an advertising channel? DANIEL: Good question. Keep in mind that Facebook is an affinity platform or affiliate platform. That basically means, what I'm trying to say is that it’s a platform were people indicate who they like and who they don’t like. They don’t necessarily intend to make a purchase; they go to Google when they intend to make a purchase or other search engines, or other platforms that are meant to get and transact something. So usually, Facebook is a place where you go gather the audience, the right audience, to then re-target and sell the book, but Google makes more sense for things like selling a book, because that’s where people go to find information and to act on that information. So the difference between Facebook and Google or other ones is Facebook is affinity, while Google is intent. ERIC: Another way to kinda look at it is with Google, most people are going to Google or a search engine when they have a problem and they're looking for a solution. And that’s where those kinds of ads work best versus Facebook or if you're familiar with Google’s display network where those are the ads that show on a third party site, those are the kind of the ads where someone’s off reading a site or they're browsing their Facebook feed and they kind of see, “Oh, here’s something interesting.” Like, “here’s an ad that’s interesting to me because it’s a topic I care about.” From what I understand, Facebook and those interest-type ads are best for giving away something free, like to get someone onto a mailing list or kind of the more soft touch of sales and marketing versus Google, which is more the commercialized type. DANIEL: Exactly. REUVEN: So if I have a product that I want to sell for money, then it sounds like what you guys were saying, “Yeah, I can use Facebook, but not directly. First I should advertise on Facebook to people who are potentially interested in the subject, and then I give them something for free whether it’s an email course or sample or something, and then based on that maybe I can get them to convert to the actual purchase.” ERIC: Yeah. DANIEL: Exactly, yes. ERIC: And there's another; I haven't done it, but I've heard of people doing it so I don’t know it exactly, but they're retargeting where someone comes to your site once, and they leave without purchasing or signing up or doing the action you want, you end up advertising to that specific person on other sites. Say they come to my blog, and then they leave, well then I can have a system that on Facebook I advertise to them to get them to come back to my blog – that’s basically retargeting. That seems to work good on Facebook on something like that because they [inaudible] forgot and they might have completely forgotten about you, and maybe they have the intention of coming back, and they're just, like I said, I believe, browsing Facebook and they see your retargeting ad and says, “Hey, come back to my blog” and they’ll be like, “Oh shoot, I forgot to go back!” I've heard that’s been going pretty good, I guess over the past few months. I don’t have any personal experience with it yet though. DANIEL: I do have some experience with that; I've been running it for a few clients of ours and I can confirm that it does work better and it also makes sense. If I like something, I’ll go to the page and then [inaudible] a person going to forget about it. If I'm not ever reminded, I will most likely not make a purchase. But if I'm reminded, I will go back and I’ll probably make a purchase, so this works well on Google as well as Facebook. REUVEN: Can you guys describe how this works? I sort of think I understand, but I'm not as sure I understood how the mechanics work. ERIC: Basically, on your site, you put a JavaScript [inaudible] that does the cookie, and so itdrops the cookie and tells Facebook’s advertising [inaudible], “Hey, this visitor has come to my blog.” And then so on Facebook, they kinda read that cookie and they know that this person came on your blog, it’s linked in their database and they know that that person was there thirteen days ago, they saw this page ad this page, and then based on your advertising settings, you have it set up to show them an ad, let’s say, once a day, and basically do that until that cookie gets removed, where you have a conversion. That’s basically the technical side of it; it’s pretty simple, it’s just kind of connecting different things. REUVEN: And Facebook has a clearly-defined API for JavaScript or even a library that does this? ERIC: I haven't set it up; I'm pretty sure I looked at Google’s, because Google has a [inaudible], there's third parties also. It’s just like Google Analytics where its JavaScript [inaudible] drop us on a page and you set it up in the advertising to say, “Here’s the ad to run when someone’s doing this.” DANIEL: It’s basically the same thing on Facebook. REUVEN: Wow, that’s pretty nifty! CHUCK: So just to clarify then, this creates an affinity between your website and the user, or some kind of connection anyway, in Facebook so that when they're browsing through Facebook, it shows them another ad or it shows them your Facebook ad? DANIEL: Correct. CHUCK: Okay. ERIC: One example [inaudible] I guess two years ago, the [inaudible], he basically was trying to – he’s in an advertising consultant – and I think it was Google and he cranked it up all the way, and he said he was able to, in a browser, go to a site, and then just browse the internet normally, and his ad actually had his face, and he said his face was plastered all over the internet because he had it at such a high –. It’s basically, he said he turned on stalker mode, and so you can kinda think that’s the high end of – it can follow you around and until you can actually click and convert, it will keep doing that. It burns through the advertising budget and all that, but this was a test. So you can think if you can scale it down to very little and just kind of that standard sales thing, talk to someone seven times and eventually they might buy your product or leave, that’s basically how you can use it. REUVEN: Wow. Now my question is also that, and I haven't done anything with this, but my question is that on Facebook you can target not just –. In Google ad words you can target words, but on Facebook you can target people’s interests based on their likes or geography or other things. Can you guys describe it a little bit more? Or tell me I'm totally wrong? DANIEL: True, you're absolutely right. Facebook tracks users and tries to collect as much information about them as possible, so Facebook knows your history, how old you are, where you come from, what schools you went to, what friends you have, what your friends do, how close they are with you, which ones are closer than others, as well as additional information outside of Facebook like what applications or pages you go to and so they have a pretty clear idea of who you are and can target ads to you as best as they manage to do that. ERIC: That’s kind of what I was about the difference, whereas Google, you're mostly targeting the search, what term they're using, you can use other stuff like where the search came from geographically or whatnot, but it’s mostly around the term – that’s the whole keyword analytics and all that. With Facebook, you're targeting who is doing that search, not what are they searching for, but who. DANIEL: Exactly. REUVEN: That’s a great distinction. Well, I guess you’ve said this before, but you found also that Facebook ads actually convert; they can turn people into customers. Because quite frankly, when I go to Facebook, I don’t really see very many ads, so I don’t think I've seen very many ads, so I often wonder how often are they really being posted. DANIEL: On the right side you usually see ads that’s owned by Facebook, and also if you're in mobile you see a lot of ads inside the feed itself. They're called – if you look for a wall post, or on a wall post, you will see there's a text called ‘sponsored,’ right? If it’s sponsored, then it’s paid. I get them all the time, so I'm sure you do as well, but they're masked within the wall, within the feed, to make them seem like they're authentic wall posts. REUVEN: Yeah, I just realized I forgot to turn off my ad blocker, that’s why I don’t see the ones on the right, so I definitely have seen those inside the wall and they just seem kind of sneaky to me. DANIEL: Right. There was a time back where Facebook said that they will never advertise on the wall, unfortunately that was gone. Now they're advertising mainly on the wall. From an advertising standpoint, I don’t think it’s a bad move; those ads do work. Facebook went through a lot of work to make them authentic and relevant, so to me, as a user, I find them relevant and I click into it and I'm looking at them as I'm scrolling through the walls. I'm not ignoring them; they're right on the side. They're right within the wall that I have, that I'm looking at. And to answer your previous question, Facebook ads do work, from my experience. It truly depends on what you're doing, what you're trying to do. If your intent is to sell people something, you probably have a better chance on Google or Bing. If your intent is to draw an audience and build an affinity network, if you will, if I'm saying it correctly, then your better place is on Facebook. Facebook has a very distinct place in the marketing ecosystem. CHUCK: Interesting. So when you're talking about building an affinity network then, that’s where you're talking about multiple people that like a certain thing or are interested in a certain topic? DANIEL: Exactly. CHUCK: And so, when you're building that network, do you want to build it around a particular topic or do you want to try and build it around a brand or a product? DANIEL: It depends on your brand or your product or your message. For example, if you're Apple, you're fine just advertising Apple – everybody loves Apple. I'm a fan of Apple, right? And I’ll be a fan of Apple’s fan page because I like Apple. But if you're someothercoffeeshop.com, right, I don’t think you can build a lot of affinity around that. So in that case, when your brand is not known or popular or liked, you work with what you’ve got and what you’ve got is usually information. So you build things about information – you can build things about healthy coffee, or recipes that involve coffee. I don’t know if there are any, but you build around the idea that will attract the people who will then make your purchase. CHUCK: That makes sense. So if your message is about better freelancing or increasing your rate or whatever, then you build a group around that as opposed to going in and building it around your product, because then you can have the conversations with people and kind of tailor things to what they're interested in? DANIEL: Absolutely. And if they're interested, they're going to share. And when they're sharing, that means that there are friends who are also interested in that same topic who will like and share again, or comment. CHUCK: Yup. ERIC: I haven't heard much about this before, but what do you think about the idea of someone building an app to kind of draw people to like their page or be part of your community versus getting advertising or just doing content marketing? DANIEL: If you have the finances, I think it’s definitely worth it, because what you're getting with an app, that’s like the next level. With pages, you only get basic information, basic actions like share, comment, you don’t even know who those people are. I mean, you can look through your feed and you find out, but you don’t have their emails or anything; you can’t reach back to them. While if you have an app, what you do is you ask people to authenticate into the app and then once they do, you'll get all of their information including the email, which means that you can reach back to them. In addition, you have the people do other things than just like, share and comment. You can have them engage with your app, going back to the poll application that you’ve built. Poll application was to create polls and vote on polls – it’s very simple, but just this very little next step makes the application very successful and very unique. So I think it makes total sense, and now you're shifting the game, you have total control of when people are coming in and what you're showing to those people. You can put in your ads in the application. You can put in your links to your books and other things inside the application and people can share the application with their friends as well. So that’s like another level. Did I make sense? CHUCK: Mm-hm. DANIEL: A lot of people do – I mean, what you see nowadays is a lot of people are building applications and actually not even taking people to Facebook anymore. They build applications that let people authenticate with Facebook, but they keep them on their site. For example, Hulu. I'm sure you know, has Facebook off, right? They have a fan page, but they make money on Hulu because they stream videos. Those videos have ads and it makes total sense to have people authenticate with Facebook on Hulu because if they like something, it’s much easier for them to share it with their friends and now the friends are most likely people who also like the same videos would go back to Hulu and play the videos and hopefully sign up. ERIC: I also suspect that by authenticating through Facebook who is getting access to the demographic data so that they could see, ‘Okay, who are our actual customers? Oh, it’s males aged 34-36 or whatever’ and they could do some analytics on that [inaudible] into other marketing campaigns. DANIEL: Absolutely, and on top of that, you can ask for likes. They know what pages those users have actually liked and passed. So if I, as a user, come to Hulu – I never had to use Hulu at all, and simply by authenticating, Hulu would be able to determine what are the best shows to present to me, because I may like Simpsons. I never liked Simpsons on Hulu, but since I liked Simpsons on Facebook, and now I'm authenticated on Hulu, Hulu will serve Simpsons to me, because they know I like them. So there's power in that. Just to elaborate more on it – because I authenticate with Facebook, Hulu also has access to my friends, and if some of my friends are on Hulu, then they can look at their pattern and what they’ve been watching. And even if I didn’t like anything, just the fact that I had friends who liked stuff will also allow them to determine what movies to present to me. All of this goes back to personalization, high-relevancy, and ultimately converts to more views which ultimately converts to more sales through ads. REUVEN: Facebook is obviously the 900-pound or maybe the 90,000-pound girl when it comes to these sorts of social networks and advertising, and it sounds like they got a very sophisticated platform for it. I know that I've been reading and hearing increasingly, over the last few weeks even, all these dire predictions for Facebook – that it’s going away, that it’s not popular anymore. Younger people – I know that my kids, my 13-year old for instance, she was on Facebook all the time and yes, I'm a terrible father for letting my daughter be on Facebook at that age – we’ll talk about that another time. But basically, she and her friends are no longer using Facebook; they're using other things like WhatsApp. Do you see decline in the usefulness of Facebook? DANIEL: Facebook is changing; it’s always been changing. This is just another phase. I think what they’ve done that nobody else has done properly is build the user profile data. You remember there had been a number of similar sites, social sites, before Facebook came around like MySpace and Hi5 and you name it, right? Where they failed is where Facebook succeeded, and that is to create authentic connections amongst real people. They still have thousands and millions of cheaters and there's a lot of [inaudible] but it’s still a fraction compared to whatever anyone else had. I, on Facebook, am Daniel Kremsa, and anybody can find me under Daniel Kremsa. I'm not some unknown, parenthesis, something else name, right? It’s me. And I have my friends in there and they're authentic, and that is really hard to beat. If you have – the size of it is gigantic. They're not going to go away, they're just going to morph, because they have this fundamental information that all the other people are sharing and reusing and they know that, and they're purchasing other sites. They bought - Instagram, did they buy it? CHUCK: Yeah, Instagram. DANIEL: Right. So Instagram is where the younger kids used to go. Now they're going to Snapchat and Snapchat’s probably going to sell, but there's going to be others and others and others, and it’s just a change. Facebook is so wide; I mean, they do have a lot of reach and a lot of money behind them, so they can morph as the behavior, user behavior morphs. So I don’t think they're going to go away. I know they're not going to go away; they're going to stay. REUVEN: I just have one more question that might be an answer for all.  I mean, you're talking, Daniel, about all this information that Facebook is collecting about us and how useful it is for us in marketing. Is there a chance though that just as Facebook has tainted to some degree about how much information they have about us and how they're collecting it, that we can get painted with that same brush if we do marketing through Facebook? Are they going to say, “Oh, this company, it’s kind of creepy how much they know about me.” So, would it backfire? DANIEL: Sure, it probably becomes a responsibility. If you have access to this information you gotta make sure that you put processes in place to not abuse it and use it correctly. If you go to the dark side, then people will not like you. But if you don’t abuse it, if you play fare, and if you're relevant and helpful, then it’s going to work fine. And there is tons of examples of both. REUVEN: Makes sense. CHUCK: Alright. Let’s go ahead and do the picks. Reuven, do you have some picks for us? REUVEN: Nothing new or exciting, but I've been using Thunderbird for a while for my email program and I actually kinda like it. I used to complain that it was sort of kinda good enough, but actually it’s a pretty nice, mature program. I don’t know how many people out there are looking for email programs anymore given that virtually every one probably already uses one, and I seem to be the only person I know who does not use and love Gmail – I neither use nor love it – but if you are looking for something else, then Thunderbird is certainly worth your while. And that’s it for me for this week. CHUCK: Alright. Eric, what are your picks? ERIC: Recently I read a book, it’s called Mini Habits – smaller habits, bigger results, and so if you listened to past episodes, you probably know I'm kind of a big habit freak or whatever you wanna call it. Mini Habits is interesting; it’s basically you set a really tiny habit, ones that would take a minute or two to do and the intention is like, you know those days when you just feel like you can’t do anything, at the very least you can get through these and you might actually do bonus work. One example is do one push up a day, and the intention is some days you're going to do one, some days you might do ten, some days you might do ten and then go run for six miles. It’s a good book; it kind of works the same as another pick I did in the past called Tiny Habits, but this one is neat because it goes into some of the science and kinda talks about motivation and willpower and kind of how a lot of the habits, methodologies, are kind of looking at it backwards. It’s an interesting read if you're looking at habits or you want to kinda make some changes. CHUCK: Alright. Well, the only pick I have this week is antibiotics. I got a sinus infection, and it’s not been fun. I'm starting to feel better now, so – antibiotics. Modern medicine. Daniel, do you have some picks? DANIEL: I don’t think I have any, but there's one thing that I like, but unfortunately I don’t recall the guy who’s presenting it. It’s more of an abstract concept, but one that’s going to be more mainstream more and more and that’s the user’s value when we’re doing our work, you wanna get paid for it right. The only way that we look at other people as the monetary value, how much money they can give us from what we know and that’s that. That’s the current state of the world – monetary value. But there's another value that a human has, and that’s the social value. That value’s not monetized, but I touched base on it with the rewards and rewarding people for bringing people, because social value, to me, is as big as monetary value. Charles, you may not have a dollar in your pocket, but if you have a following of 10,000 people, you're very valuable to me as a marketer, right? At this point, there is really no way I, as a marketer, can leverage this information. There are little hints that things are coming up; more and more people are thinking about it this way, but it’s still just early on. This guy whose name I'm forgetting had a very good presentation about this very concept, so I just want to put it out there. CHUCK: Alright, well, thanks for coming, Daniel. DANIEL: Sure. CHUCK: Really appreciate you taking the time. DANIEL: Thank you for inviting me. CHUCK: We’re going to go ahead and wrap the show. Thank all of our listeners for listening. Go leave us a review on iTunes, we’ll catch you all next week.