Practical Tips and Insights from the NINJA on What it REALLY takes to Win in the Game of Social Media.
Hey, everybody!
Welcome again to another important blog article, which is full of information and tips that I hope you will find valuable. It is always my intention to share as much practical & valuable data as possible, to help you to accomplish the greatness for your business that I KNOW that you are capable of.
Before I get right into it, I’m excited and I’ve got to share with you that it’s absolutely INCREDIBLE what’s going on here at the AGM (Attention Grabbing Media) Agency.
The speed at which we’re growing right now is something that I know our ancestors and forefathers never could have even DREAMED about. It wasn’t even remotely fathomable to them because it simply was not possible, and NOW, today, in PRESENT TIME, it IS not only possible, it is REALITY, because we have this incredible tsunami of communication in front of us and all around us that the majority of people — including BUSINESS people, still take for granted. Now SOME of us entrepreneurs AREN’T taking it for granted because we are among the few who recognize the tremendous opportunities that have been made available to us, and so we are the ones on the leading edge who are learning about it, implementing what we are learning and are creating success with it…And even so, if the truth must be told, even YOU who are reading this, at some point you probably also used to take it for granted because I know that I did to a certain degree.
Current Tsunami Conditions for Communication and Marketing: There’s Still Time to Ride the Wave!
People ask me all the time “Manuel, How much content should I create? How heavy should I go, how much money should I invest?” Well, my answer to that is basically as much as you possibly can, because there is so much opportunity right now in front of us; there’s so much that we can actually take control of and gain mastery of. There’s so much “land grabbing” going on in this “Digital Real Estate” arena, and YOU HAVE TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET THE MOST for yourself, for your business, for your family, because this opportunity is not going to be around forever.
Now, when I say the opportunity is not going to be around forever, I am not talking about Social Media going away. Definitely not THAT. Social Media is THE preferred communication medium on our planet today. We already KNOW this to be true. What I mean is: Ten years from today, the Social Media marketing and advertising world is going to be a very common thing. By then, pretty much everyone is going to be investing money in advertising on social media, whether it is Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube, Periscope, Pinterest, etc. Whatever it is, everybody is finally going to be jumping on the bandwagon and investing in placing their marketing messages on these platforms because these are the newest communication platforms of the planet. It’s where people’s attention is fixated, and they look at these platforms multiple times throughout the day…EVERY DAY. The fact is, since these platforms are where everyone’s attention is, and they only keep growing and growing and growing, every business and brand that plans on staying relevant and even SURVIVING in the business world, will HAVE TO get into these platforms and establish awareness of their brand on these platforms. After all, this is how we talk with one another, it’s how we spread the word about things. This is how we actually communicate about things that we like and we don’t like. This is how we complain. In fact, I find it pretty incredible that people are complaining about Facebook, and do you know WHERE they complain about Facebook? 🤔That’s right. They complain ABOUT Facebook on Facebook. Yes you guys, this is what’s going on right now. The reality is that Social Media truly is the way that we talk to other humans today. It has been said that we are supposedly “less social” because we talk to each other less (We go to restaurants and we don’t talk to each other; we go to parties, everybody is on their phones, engulfed in Social Media). However, in actuality, we are talking to each other even more than ever. We’re just talking through another channel, another mode of communication, and the medium that we’re using is the social media channel.
There was a recent study that was done at an Ivy League university (I don’t recall if it was Cambridge or Yale University). The University conducted some research on how social we are today. And, it was focused on the younger demographic, particularly kids ages 17 years old and younger. What they found was that today, every single child surveyed considers themselves to have at least 15 friends or so. I find that very interesting because if you were to compare that data with the research back in the year 1990, you will find that it showed that kids back then would usually say that they have two or three friends. That’s a pretty significant difference, right?
Recent research showed kids aged 17 and younger consider themselves to have at least 15 friends… 5 times MORE than reported in 1990.
So, even though social media “looks” like it has taken away our life and our ability to communicate, the numbers actually show something quite different. It shows that we are actually doing more and accomplishing more through various different communication platforms. So, it’s a matter of just simply being able to observe what’s going on on these social platforms, and being able to communicate to people correctly on them. That’s what captures the attention and brings business into your world, okay?
Many of you already know this (and I did briefly mention it earlier in the article): I have an agency called AGM (Attention Getting Media) Marketing, and we help some really big clients. Generally the majority of our clients are doing several million dollars in revenue a year already. If there’s a prospective client that is doing $100,000 or $500,000 or even a million dollars per year in business, they usually cannot afford our services because we’re not necessarily cheap. We have a really good agency which produces a lot of successful results. Just like there are good doctors and good, reputable, highly recommended surgeons who can actually save your life, there are also surgeons that can kill you. By the same principle, there are good, effective marketers and there are bad marketers. Not going to “sugar coat” it. That’s a reality. Not all marketing is the same. Not even if it’s Facebook advertising. Most people are doing a horrible job of it. We happen to be really good at what we do, and we pride ourselves on that, and are constantly seeking to improve daily, and staying up-to-date with the ongoing updates and changes across the platforms, which are always changing periodically, all in the name of improving the platforms and making its users’ experience better and better along the way.
So, now, I want to share with you all about some of the things that we are discovering. One of my key roles in my agency, aside from being the CEO and the one running the show, I am also the Strategist. I’m the one who builds the strategies for these companies to be able to continue to expand. One of my overall goals is to figure out for each client, how to get the most at the lowest cost. So, I have figured out something really cool, which I’m going to share with you now. One of the things that I have seen on the social media side of things (Not only on the Facebook side of things)… I’m talking about Facebook advertising, Instagram advertising, Messenger, YouTube channels, et cetera. I’ve found out one of the single most important factors that determines whether you win or not in this game and build a business that withstands time. That most important factor is one word and that word is PATIENCE.
I say this a lot, and I will say it until eternity because it is an absolute and immutable TRUTH: If you don’t have the patience to play the social media game, you (meaning your business and/or brand) are not going to be able to survive in the social media game. The social media game requires hard work and patience. And, you’re going to have to be willing to test and test things out consistently and actively until you find those things that you can scale because if you don’t find those successful and winning things to scale, then, nothing happens. But, if you also invest on things such as strategies, audiences and ads that don’t produce results, then, you end up going down and losing all your money, and you’d still have to shut down, so this part is really important and I want you to pay attention, okay?
What I’m about to do is now is give you an analogy to the social media game, and, this is 100% true and I have personally been testing it out myself and it happens to be almost exactly the right formula…
Think about Facebook advertising in the same way that you think of a baseball player and their batting average/at-bat percentage. Now, what does that mean and what am I talking about?
Well, stay with me here, and I’ll tell you and make it all crystal-clear to you, ok?
In the social media game, there are campaigns, there are audiences, there are ads, etc. So let’s say that you pick out 20 audiences. You find 20 different interests, 20 different demographics, 20 different areas to target, income levels, etc. Now, I can GUARANTEE you that out of those 20, at least 16 to 18 of those (campaigns, audiences, or ads that you created) are going to fail. (That’s a given in this game, but that is no cause for despair or discouragement, because it’s par for the course.) What this means to you as a marketer is that in order to survive in the social media arena, you have to understand that as an advertiser and marketer, you are kind of like a baseball player. And this is what I mean by that: A baseball player gets up to the plate and he’s at bat. He’s going to try to hit the ball and try to get on base safely. Now, I don’t know if you guys know about baseball rules, but… Do you know that if a baseball player only succeeds three (3) times out of 10, they are eventually a Hall of Famer??!! Now Let THAT sink in. This means that if they fail 7 out of 10 times throughout their entire lifetime career, IF THEY FAIL 70% of the entire time, they are an absolute rockstar!
And believe me when I tell you that this is VERY similar when it comes to Facebook and Social Media advertising. If you get good results and find something that works well only 3 times out of every 10 attempts, you can then scale that, and when you continue to get results overall with that particular audience, with that particular ad in that campaign, you’re WINNING. I know, it’s pretty crazy to think that Facebook advertising works exactly the same way as baseball batting averages, but from several years of experience, I can assure you that I know this to be true, and along the way, I’ve found that most Facebook advertisers fail because They get impatient and forget to actually implement a strategy that allows them to test, test, test, test, test, test, test because there is so much data to gather and to learn from. (I actually speak about this particular point in my most recent article titled “7 Reasons Why Your Facebook Ads are Failing”. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, you can access it here.)
Remember, in the United States only, there are 220 million people actively using the Facebook platform actively. Worldwide, there are 2 BILLION people actively using the platform. You’ve GOT to be aware that Most of these people using the platform are never going to be interested in what you have to offer in your product or service. So, you need to know that in order for you to find the actual people who are going to be interested in what you have to offer, you will have to test out many different things. Your ideas about what works and what doesn’t work cannot go into the equation. Meaning that you cannot think like, “Oh, this video is fantastic. I bet you this is going to convert. Oh, this image is beautiful. I bet this is going to do great. Oh, this carousel image, this collection, this website…” None of that really matters, because sometimes, when you look into the accounts, you’re going to be shocked that some things are successful and some things are not successful, and often it’s going to be the ones you least expect. It’s very, very important for you to understand that, and accept it for what it is. In order to find success is in this, keep the above mentioned percentages (3 out of 10) and this “baseball” analogy in mind. Going forward, I want you to think with this so you are ready and prepared to deal with adversity, and deal with the fact that you’re going to fail more often than you’re going to succeed in the Facebook advertising game….BUT CONSISTENCY, PATIENCE, TESTING, TESTING, TESTING, AND TENACITY WILL GUARANTEE YOUR SUCCESS (Did I say “testing”?) …My point is, Don’t give up. Stay the course!
I keep emphasizing this because it’s something that I have learned the hard way myself. I have learned that most of the things that I create — even though I may think they are fantastic — reality is they’re not going to be successful. But, if you incorporate a system of monitoring your campaigns and monitoring your results, you’re going to be able to turn off the “losers” and scale the “winners”, and THAT’S the way you’re going to be able to grow your business.
So, what is my advice to you guys? Well, Number 1, you have to be ready to ride the wave. (If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I say this a lot, too). You have to be willing to run the marathon. You have to be willing to step in there and test things out actively until you find those winners that are going to be based on your metrics, because remember that in the marketing world, we all have what we call KPIs, which stands for “Key Performance Indicators”. Some people are going to have video views as their KPI. Some people’s KPIs are going to be based on sales/purchases, leads, conversions, etc. Whatever it is, you are going to have your own KPIs along the way that will help you monitor your results. So, what you are going to do is figure out what those KPIs are and turn off the “losers” so you don’t bleed out and scale the winners so you can grow your business. But, always, always, always keep in mind that every time that you submit a campaign with an audience and with an actual ad, there is a 70-90% chance of failure. Let that sink in for a second. 70-90% chance of failure. That’s a lot, but once you remember the analogy about the baseball players’ batting average, it makes better sense to you, and there’s no need for discouragement, right?
Ok, so once you find those winners, that 10%, 20%, 30% (of audiences in those ads that actually give you results), you can scale those so high that it makes up for all the other 70% of losers that you created along the way. Actually, we do this in the agency. What we’re doing agency-wise is: We’re grabbing a single campaign, let’s say that’s a branding campaign. And then we have another campaign called the purchase campaign. And then we have another campaign called a Messenger subscriber or lead generation campaign. And in that campaign, we are creating hundreds of audiences, duplicating, duplicating… AND duplicating audiences, and testing them out. Once they’re in there, we have combinations – people who have watched the video, people that visited the website, people who are page fans, people that like certain things, people with a certain income level, people who use certain devices like IOS or Android devices. Whatever it is, you can have hundreds of combinations. Let me tell you something that Facebook doesn’t have: They don’t have a lack of data. They have an enormous wealth of information that you can use to create audiences. I always tell my students when they’re creating an audience, try to stay within the 1 to 2 million audience size range, because other than that it gets too large and you can’t really communicate very effectively to a big crowd of 10 million people or so. But, if you have a targeted 1 to 2 million people in there, now you can communicate with them better, and be able to find out faster if this is going to be a winning audience that you can scale 👍, or a “losing” audience that you need to turn off 👎.
So remember, 1 campaign for branding, and/or 1 for purchases, 1 for leads, etc… and then eventually hundreds of audiences. You duplicate, duplicate, duplicate and then make as many of them as possible. Then, you can have a few ads…and eventually (ideally, if you have the manpower) test out hundreds of ads, catalog artworks, single images, single videos, carousel videos, carousel images, collections, presentations. Test out many different things – short copy, long copy, CTAs (Calls To Action) with one single word, CTAs with several words, with an entire line along the description, etc. You can test out a bunch of different things when you go into the Facebook Business Manager. The possibilities for combinations are virtually endless.
Once you get a little bit more advanced, you can then set up what is called “Automated Rules”. (In the Business Manager, Automated Rules is going to be found on the drop-down menu.) These are rules that you can use to actually turn off your losers and to increase the budget on your winners as you please. There are thousands of different combinations of these rules, but if you set up some basic ones, Facebook will actually help you and turn off all the losers whenever you start bleeding out because of a losing campaign. It’s also going to help you scale and increase the ad spend on the winners.
Guys, this is BEYOND COOL 😎. It’s a pretty AWESOME system that WORKS. We’re incorporating it and it works like magic. If you do this, and if you have decided to put the right type of patience in place, you will be able to grow your business. Absolutely NO DOUBT about that.
No, it does not happen overnight. The social media game is a very different game than the Amazon game. In Amazon, you can launch a brand, start doing some promotions, some giveaways, go heavy with strategies, start optimizing doing PPC. You can start doing all those things and suddenly you can start getting traction in a month or two or maybe 3 months, If you have a good product and a good niche market. That’s the Amazon world. (Those of you who are Amazon sellers undoubtedly know what I’m talking about.) The social media game is a different game; it’s a LONGER game that requires a lot more testing. But let’s say you start also playing the Social Media game for your Amazon brand or for your e-commerce store(s), or for your local business, or your brick and mortar store, restaurant, your practice…WHATEVER type of business that you have. You will definitely have to start testing things out. This is the path to your eventual, SUSTAINED success. IT’S A LONG GAME WITH LONG-TERM REWARDS. That’s the thing about it. 😉
If you were to go back through my content over the years and months, to all my podcasts, to my videos, to previous blogs, etc., you’re going to actually go back and see a plethora of ideas that you can incorporate into your business that are designed and intended to help you scale your business today in the Social Media world. But, you WILL need to have a mental preparedness to deal with a testing and “learning curve” period of anywhere from 6 months to a year. If you do this consistently, you should be able to eventually create a MONSTER that you can scale, that will then start giving you $1 spent = $5 in return; $1 spent = $7 in return and the like. And once you have that (like MAJOR brands that I handle such as Dr. Berg, my dad Dr Frank Suarez, and other brands that I service and handle right now), NOW you’ll have a gold mine that is yours forever and ever. And even if Amazon were to shut you down 😬, or if you decide to change brands at some point down the road, or even if you were to go into an entirely different field of endeavor and do something else, you will then understand the essentials and principles of how to build an audience that you can keep on using actively. So, your social media game is everything. And THAT’S why You HAVE TO play it to WIN!
This is a necessary skill that pays big time. If you take the time, exercise the patience and commit to do this, it will do a world of good and pay off in SUCH a big way. It is one of (if not THE) most powerful things that you can ever do for your business, but you have to understand that it’s a long game that requires a lot of activity. There is no such thing as “set it and forget it” in the social media world. That is a false premise, and it’s a sure recipe for disaster. Overall, to stay alive in this Social Media game, you WILL have to work actively on the accounts, you have to create a lot of audiences, lots of ad sets. You have to test out different variations of copies, images, and videos. You have to test out different copies on your CTAs (Calls to Action). You have to be willing to move things around, turn things off and turn things on, and never get frustrated when you have losers because having losers is part and parcel of the actual social media game. (Remember again, the analogy of the baseball batting average… IF they fail 7 times out of 10, they’re in the HALL OF FAME!) There’s no such thing as a social media marketer, even me, that is going to have 80 percent winners! I wish. (and I’m considered to be one of the top gurus in the social media world). It just doesn’t happen like that. I wasted a lot of money on my Facebook ads because I had to consistently keep on working on finding my audience, finding my creative, finding my exact message that is going to get through to these people and help them come into my sales channels, okay? That’s how it works. The BEAUTY of me sharing all of this with you is the fact that YOU CAN LEARN not only from my Sucesses, But also from MY FAILURES, from MY MISTAKES. Stick with me, and I’ll show you how to “skip to the front of the line”.
So there you have it. The ONE MAIN THING needed to win the game of Social Media is patience. You’ve gotta be willing to have patience. Don’t give up. Understand that it takes time, but then again, anything that is really worth having for the long term is WORTH working for and being consistent and patient.
Like myself for example, I have been doing this for a few years already, actively creating and sharing social media content and doing non-stop seminars, while steadily testing, monitoring, tweaking, continuing my education & training, and implementing along the way. I already have a couple of million dollar courses with hundreds of people enrolled as a result of my content and my seminars. Although it has been a little over a year since the uber-successful initial launch of my first course, in reality I’m just getting started, and it has taken a lot of work and a lot of implementation to get there actively. Think about people like Dr. Berg, who’s a rockstar, a social media superstar, and my number 1 client , along with my dad. (They’re BOTH my number one clients…well, actually, there’s also Grant Cardone as of very recently, but that’s another story entirely 😄). This guy (Dr. Berg) created his social media channels, particularly YouTube, back in 2009. He spent nine years producing content actively and consistently on the social media platforms. When I took over his social media channels a couple of years ago, he pretty much didn’t have anything on Facebook. On Instagram, he had nothing. I brought those channels to life. The YouTube channel had 300,000 subscribers already when we came in. Today, it has 2.2 million subscribers. So it has gone viral in the last couple of years since we started helping him. But in reality, you’ve got to keep in mind that for the first eight years of his social media career, hardly anybody really paid that much attention. He was already surviving well. He was already generating millions of dollars in sales, but not NEARLY like he is today. Today, he is a social media monster. A Giant. Today, we are accomplishing incredible feats for his content. Today, he’s a REAL rockstar. He decides to do a convention, it gets packed. We offer new products for him, they get sold. We have an extension of a digital program, we sell it. Whatever it is that we do, we’re going to sell because he built himself there by way of consistency, patience, hard work, testing, dedication and by having a brilliant marketing mind behind the whole thing.
So, it’s what it takes, okay? It’s what it takes. It takes hard work, it takes dedication, it takes patience. If you’re not willing to have patience, then I suggest that you jump off the social media ship because there is no way around it. Patience is an absolute requirement if you want to win in this social media game, and there is NO EXCEPTION to that.
So there you have it. Now you know what it takes for your brand to win in the Social Media arena. I’ll see you in the next article.
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