Facebook and Instagram Power

In this episode, I’m going to talk about the importance of including Instagram into your marketing efforts. It is a platform that is growing by leaps and bounds and Facebook has given it the same power that it gave to itself. From 300 million active users to 900 million active users today in less than two years.Let me give you some tips. If you have any questions or comments click on this link to send me a message www.m.me/theninjamarketer 

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Podcast File

Three Types of Audiences on Facebook

Podcast Transcription

 

Hello again. This is Manuel Suarez and this is episode #10. Today is Monday. A lot of great things going on in this Christmas holiday season. I wanted to chat with you guys today about two particular platforms that are taking over a good portion of the attention on this planet. And those 2 platforms are Facebook and Instagram. Most of you guys know, I’m assuming pretty much all of you guys know that several years ago Instagram was bought out by Facebook for a billion dollars in what is considered as day and age like a seal of the century especially when you have other platforms like Whatsapp that was sold for $16 billion a year or two later. And, some other outrageous numbers that are going out with other companies. So when you look at a platform like Instagram which right now has close to 1 billion unique users then you can even understand that Facebook got away with it.

 

But people forget to really see the point that Instagram was a baby when Facebook got it. So obviously, who knows what would have happened if it would have stayed by itself? It was an amazing platform and Facebook saw its potential and they actually bought them out before they got bigger. But, who knows, with the wrong management what would have happened? We have seen it before many times happened that management can actually determine the direction of a company it survives or it’s a con, so whatever the future holds for it really depends on what management does with it.

 

Facebook has shown to be an incredibly smart company that knows what it’s doing and they’ve had failures along the way, they’ve had products, a company that they bought out, that didn’t work out. Like for example, they have this other virtual reality company called Oculus. It hasn’t worked out for them and they’ve lost money every single year on it. But this one particularly, this one and the bunch of other ones that they’ve taken over like WhatsApp are massively successful and they have made it massively successful. Like in the last year and a half, if I’m not mistaken, the company took Instagram from 300 million unique users to 900 million unique users in a matter of a year and a half. That’s like a little bit less than half the size of Facebook. So, it’s incredible because as far as I know, there hasn’t been a faster growing social media platform in history. No other platform has grown this fast. So it’s a fact that you can’t really ignore especially when in order to advertise on it you have to learn to use only 1 platform. They actually help each other out dramatically. Facebook and Instagram give you the same power, give you the same targeting potential, the same retargeting potential. They give you the same strategy. You can do lead generations. You can send them to your website. You can do promotions of videos and promote carousel – meaning several pictures. There are so many different things that you can do with both of them. They have actually made the Instagram platform like an entirely separate monster by itself to use as the same power that Facebook does. So if you have familiarity with Business Manager which is something that you find in business.facebook.com, I’m sure a lot of you guys use that tool already, especially if you’re listening to this podcast. You know that one of the placements that you can select at the Ad Set level is what we see as Instagram, the news feed and there’s another one that is called the stories. If you are also familiar with the specifics of those particular placements, stories is only 15 seconds. So if you have a 15-second video that is recorded vertically, then you can use it. If not, then you cannot use it as a story. And also, if you want to use a video on Instagram, also, you got to make sure there’s only 1 minute long. Because at this point, the maximum length of a video on Instagram is 1 minute. Those placement options are there together with a bunch of other options like now, when you look at your Ad Set, your placements, you’ll see a bunch of different options in there. There’s a particular placement that Facebook is testing now and they’re actually going all out with it which is the In-stream Display. Meaning that when you are watching a video that you’re enjoying, they’re actually putting videos, ads, in the middle of something else that you’re consuming. So this is something else that they’re testing out.

 

And then they do also something they call the Audience Network which is getting better and better. When I started doing marketing on Facebook several years ago, it was something like, as marketers, you would actually be like absolutely don’t even get close to audience network. Audience network is a family of apps that Facebook has partnered with in order to distribute ads in their apps and be able to send them to websites or back to Facebook or to Messenger, or to wherever you want them to send them to. So that is something that also has grown in effectiveness because again, there’s only a certain amount of real estate that Facebook does have when it talks about their news feed. They have no option but to figure out other ways to distribute their ads because again, Facebook’s ad revenue is what keeps them going. Companies, brands, like us that have messages to disseminate, we are the ones that keep Facebook growing because we get results, we put our money on Facebook, we keep on growing and then Facebook gets more money. That’s how we have this spiral that keeps on growing up and up.

 

I want to talk about what I’m seeing recently with the Instagram apps and one thing that I’ve been testing out recently is running Instagram placement only. I have seen incredible results with these. Again, you can see that the rules and laws that dominate cost that determines that something is valuable or less valuable also known as supply and demand are 100% in effect in digital marketing. So for example, Facebook has become a little bit more expensive because it’s a little more crowded even though it still seem to be the most valuable opportunity in this era but Instagram has become very affordable to market end. So it doesn’t matter what brand or service you have. Guess what? The demographic is flooding in on Instagram. They are getting all their people. There’s a community of 55 year old women coming in like crazy. A lot of men are starting to use it. There’s all kinds of people using the platform. So now, the particular Instagram platform is something that you can market to independently. You can create a 1 minute video ad. You can send messages to these people through images about your product or your services, you can generate leads of these guys to drive them to your product or to your service. There’s basically so many different things you can do just using Instagram. So, I think that’s something for you guys to give a test. One of the things that you can always do is try to get a little bit of something that I talked about and just implement it and put into action and see if you can see it for yourself as something that actually works and that it’s true. And if it’s true, you can scale it and get more results. And if it’s not, you bring it down and give it another try.

 

A lot of the things that we are going to do on the digital world, on marketing, are going to fail. That’s just the way it is. There’s something that I’m going to be massively successful with, maybe you will not be massively successful and vice versa. It’s all about what you can find that works. And also, working on honing your skill, working on improving your ability. It’s something that people sometimes underestimate. They start blaming the platform, they start blaming the world, and they start saying like, “Well, the thing is that digital marketing or Facebook has already gotten crowded, it’s already overpriced. It just doesn’t work, it’s so expensive and I can’t afford it. It’s just impossible to be a businessman in this era.” Well, this is the reality guys. It’s just like any other skill, you have to work on improving it. Just like 4 years ago when I started doing a lot of typing in my computer, I was very slow, and right now, I’m faster than a secretary that has been doing it for 20 years. I just worked on my skill day in and day out just like riding a bicycle. You know when you start riding a bicycle? At first, you’re going to fall several times and you’re going to be using your training wheels and as you get better, you improve the ability and then you get rid of the training wheels and then you start doing better.

 

The same thing applies to marketing on digital platforms. There are different aspects to any marketing strategy that you put into play and you have to work at dominating them. It’s a long term play. You’re trying to build a business not to be successful in 2018. You’re trying to build a business so you can live the life that you’ve been wanting to live your whole life and that means for the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. So again, this is like a long term play and this is something that we’ve seen as an obvious fact – the more that you work on a particular skill, the better that you get at it. It’s something that’s so true. You don’t necessarily always have to say like “I suck”, let me not do that, but you can actually work on improving that particular skill and actually making yourself big credit while least decent at it. So, for example when you are building an ad, there’s so many different components. You’re going to choose the correct objective. Do you want to have Facebook show your video to people that are going to watch the video? Or do you want to get a lot of visitors, or do you want to generate leads, do you want to generate sales? What do you want to accomplish? And then, you’re going to select your audience. Like in the United States, there’s over 200 million unique adult users on Facebook every single month of the year. That’s a lot of people active on Facebook, using it. So, I can guarantee you that most of those people are not your customer. For whatever it is, they’re simply not your customers. Like I get promoted something that I’m not interested in like for example men’s underwears or some dresses, or things like that that I have zero attention on, and they’re going to waste all their money. So the same thing applies to Facebook Advertising, Instagram Advertising, Messenger Marketing and all these platforms they were using so much today. You have to know how to put your message in front of the right person.

 

So that’s why, for example, right now, something that I would give you as an actionable tip. A lot of you guys already have this on your account. When you select the Campaign Objective – video views, lead generation, conversions, traffic, etc., whatever you want to select – there’s a little checkbox right below at the bottom of the screen that says create a split test. This is something that you guys should test out. Create a split test of your audience. Create a split test of the creative, create a split test of the placement. Guys, you’ve got to throw things out there and find out what sticks and eliminate what doesn’t work. In that way you can grow whatever is working and get rid of those things that’s actually wasting money for you.

 

What I would recommend that you do is, number 1, create a content, a 1-minute video or a set of images that you can run on Instagram and also test out your audiences. Run a test of 5 different audiences. So check that little button and test 5 different audiences, different age ranges and also with different interests – one interest on each one – and you can do other things like you can test out iPhone users or android users, or you can test out income levels, somebody that makes $40,000 or more, $60,000 dollars or more. Guys, it’s pretty much like, unlimited amount of things that you can do – variations off – so you can test out the winners and then once you’ve figured that out, you also have to work on your creative. Meaning, you can test out what is your best headline, what is your best description, what is your best title, what are your best bullets point that you are going to put to describe your service, product, or your message? What is the best video, what is the best image – all those things you can also test out and you can test out a combination of those things.

 

There’s something that Facebook has recently launched which a lot of you guys can already see on your account which is called Dynamic Ad Creative. Using the Dynamic Ad Creative, you can do a combination of all these things and Facebook will run all of them. I’m talking about 10 different texts, 5 calls to action, 5 descriptions, 5 this and that. And they will mix and match all of them. And at the end, you’re going to find out what is the winning combination and be able to push on that particular creative using the Facebook’s incredibly intelligent robots.

 

So, if you guys are already here, and you’re listening to this message, I’m assuming that you’re here on this podcast because you already have a business, you’re working on growing it to the next level, or you are really really ready to create your own business. So whatever it is the situation that you’re in, well obviously, I would really love to know if you can send me some feedback and let me know where you stand. I know I’m having some listeners already on this podcast that I’m putting some things into action, then you can send me a message. You can go to m.me/manuelsuarezdigital. Send me a message and let me know where you’re at and how have you been able to apply some of the things that I’ve been teaching and what are you looking forward to learn more about. But if you’re already here, you know that there’s an opportunity. Since I’m really good in this particular area, this is an area of skil, about recognizing this opportunity and putting it into play and helping you guys also recognizing it and put it into play and see results. I want you to understand that you have to test things out. You test things out, but not only that. Whatever income that you’re getting from anywhere else, for whatever it is that you’re putting into your company, you have to take a portion of that into investing towards your future. Meaning, your branding, company, understanding of the platform, you’re testing out the strategies, and all of those things because this is the future. If you only have an Amazon-based business, you have to understand that putting all your eggs in the Amazon basket is a serious liability. You are not building an empire that is going to last for ages to come. You are building short-term cash supply, short-term survival. When you recognize that and start putting some of the money into opening up channels, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Youtube, and putting yourself out there like crazy then you are really, really, in that case, planting your roots. And when you plant your roots, that’s when the reality of your business starts selling in in this world and now you know that you’re going to have something to hand over to your family one day and keep it for generations to come.

 

And Amazon business is not a business. It’s a launching pad. It’s something that helps you generate cash flow so you can build your business. So whatever you’re doing, you have to put the strategies into play, and there’s a lot of things that you can do. If you only have an Amazon brand and you don’t have content around that brand, then the good news is that, it’s easy this day and age to create a content around a brand. It’s easy around this age to create content for any service. It doesn’t matter what it is, it doesn’t matter where you’re at. You only have a few options. You have image that you can take with your phones, you have videos that you can also take with your phones. You have written words, articles about your products and your service. You have audio like we are doing today in a podcast that you guys are listening in, absorbing these contents I’m giving you consistently.

 

So there are many things that you can do to provide these information and you yourself, be your own public relations company. You and yourself become your own distributor of your message and not depending on the old school newspaper, 1 quarter of a page, ad or the television ad, or the radio ad, or none of that stuff. Right now, we are living through the greatest marketing era of all times in which we are all carrying a device that allows us to communicate to the world and let them know that we’ve got something special for them. So it’s an exciting time. So you have to have the attitude that you are going to keep on testing things and improving along the way. Every single day, I work on getting better at what I do. Every single day I see what can I apply to make my own life better. What ca I apply to make my own marketing strategies better? What can I apply to make these campaigns better to increase my brand to the next level? We are living through an era in which the person that has the most information is winning the game. If you know more than your competition and you are more passionate than them, then you win. If you don’t, then you don’t. As simple as that. So learning, and trying out, putting into play, and testing the results are the key. So, what can I tell you in this particular podcast? My advices are 2 things. Number 1, realize that there is a massive potential with the use of this new and powerful up and coming ad product which is Instagram. Meaning that they have recently started to getting really really good at giving us marketers all the data that we need in order to be successful using the platform for advertising. And concurrently, the platform has been exploding in attention – getting more and more users every single day, flooding in and using it consistently. So, we have an enormous potential in there. So, test out doing Instagram Marketing by itself. Test it out. And if not, test out using that as an additional placement for your ads because it is working wonders for generating leads, for building brand awareness, for creating video viewers, for generating amounts of people reach – it’s becoming more and more powerful. So test that out.

 

And number 2, guys, put this into play also. You’ve got to work on creating your ideal audience, your ideal person that is going to be actually consuming your content and your message and start planting your seeds by testing your audiences to see which one is the right one. And then, testing your message, testing your creatives, and today, we have these opportunities because Facebook algorithm has been given to us and now we can use it in our marketing strategies to be able to find out billion dollar robots, billion dollar algorithms that we have been given access to, to find out what is the correct audience, what is the correct creative, what is the best placement, who is the right person that needs to be listening to our message. All of these things we have access to.

 

So again, Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, right now is really an exciting time. It’s time for you guys to flood it and start learning about it and start learning how to use them. There’s a lot to learn. I mean, I can literally sit down with you guys for hours and hours and hours, for weeks and weeks and weeks, for months, and not be done. Not only that, it’s never done. That’s why I’m opening up a coaching program probably towards the end of February in which I’m going to be teaching advanced strategies for e-commerce and entrepreneurs to be able to get really good at Facebook Marketing, Instagram Marketing, and all these powerful platforms. I want to grab all of you guys and turn you into professionals like myself. I consider myself as a professional. I am a certified Facebook expert now. I did a test and it’s blue print test that they call the Advertising Core Competencies Test. So I have my certification which I learned along the way for a lot of trials and efforts and testing out what works and what didn’t work. I actually didn’t do any other course. I decided that I was ready to take the test and I did it, and it was very difficult but I passed it.

 

So, I want you guys to keep on improving, keep on learning and let me know if you have any questions, follow my page. I love teaching, so, I hope you guys are enjoying it and let me know if you guys have any feedback. Hearing from you is going to help me keep on going and keep on providing more and more value to all of you guys. Right now, it’s one of my number one mission, it’s to be able to help other people, other dreamers, other entrepreneurs to also be successful and to apply all these things that I have done successfully for my businesses and for other customers that I help. See you guys next time.