Larry Kim's Top 5 Favorite Facebook Marketing Hacks for 2020 and Beyond

And our first speaker today is Larry Kim. If you guys aren't familiar with Larry, he's one of the best marketers out there. He created a company called WordStream. WordStream got acquired by Gantt. And then from there, he created a company called MobileMonkey. But he's a super smart tactical marketer. He tests more than most people I've ever seen. And he figures out the best ways to get traffic from any single channel out there. Yeah, I mean, he's a machine. Every time I've seen him speak, I'm just like, I can't take notes fast enough. So get ready, it's gonna be a lot of information, probably a lot of information overload. So to Neil's point, just try to take one thing away and it should be really good for you. So without further ado, we're gonna let Larry up and enjoy.

Good morning. Thank you very much for coming in this morning on a Saturday. It's kind of a commitment. First of all, I wanna just thank Eric and Neil for, you know, Paying for the event and organizing everything. That's really great. So thank you guys. The topic of today's discussion is my top 5 favorite Facebook ad marketing hacks for 2020 and beyond. My name is Larry Kim and I will be your speaker today. Before getting into all the detailed hacks and tips and tricks, I thought I would—

Hi, Larry.

Briefly introduce myself. I'm from Canada, from a kind of a place called Winnipeg, which is super famous for being colder than Mars half of the year. If you've read my content, I'm really obsessed with unicorns. I know you might be thinking, oh my God, unicorns, they've jumped the shark, like they're on freaking Starbucks coffee and everything. But I was way ahead of this trend for like 12 years ago, even before My Little Pony and stuff like that. I'm famous for starting a company called WordStream. I started this in my 20s in 2008 out of a bakery because it had free Diet Coke refills and free Wi-Fi. It was kind of like WeWork, but before WeWork. Today it's over 300 people managing about over $1 billion of ad spend for tens of thousands of customers worldwide. And that was my first venture. It was really fun growing the— That's a lot of free Diet Coke. The venture from literally nothing to about $55 million in revenues last year, $16 million in earnings. And I sold that business actually just one year ago today to Gannett for $150 million. And sometimes people ask me, what's that like to do that? Honestly, it's kind of a relief because like a lot of marketers, I spent a lot of time blogging about how to make money and how to grow your business. And it would have been totally embarrassing if that didn't work out. And we're back in business again working on a new company called MobileMonkey. It's basically in the chat marketing space and I hope to talk a little bit about that today. All right, enough about me. We're talking about our story, we're talking about my top 5 favorite Facebook marketing hacks for 2019, 2020 and beyond. Basically, Here's the thing. Facebook knows that the newsfeed isn't the future of Facebook. At F8, that was abundantly clear. Every single session at F8 was talking about how the newsfeed is sort of like not the next thing. And the reason is because on one hand, Facebook is getting in so much trouble for livestreaming these murderous terrorist activities, and on the other hand, they're getting— Censorship. Crucified for censoring all this questionable material. Basically, they don't want to be caught in the middle. It's like a huge existential risk to their business model. They've declared that we need to get out of this business of trying to figure out policing the content because there's just too much. The future of Facebook is actually in private groups, smaller private groups and messaging. All right, so hopefully that's pretty obvious. I think it brings up a question though, which is marketers, we're familiar with how to market in a newsfeed environment. It's like you put ads and organic content in the newsfeed and people see it. It was pretty straightforward. The question becomes, if groups and messaging is the future of Facebook, how on earth do we do marketing in a private messaging future. And so that's kind of the topic for today, like forward-looking in terms of what are the ways we can tackle this. If you're new to messaging, just a show of hands here, how many of you have done a lot of messaging marketing? Oh, you guys are the vanguard here. Usually it's like crickets, it's usually like 3, 4, 5 of you. But basically it's kind of like a combination of email marketing because you can do push notifications, but it's also like a landing page optimization because unlike email, the content is interactive so that people can engage and respond to the content just as you would engage with a form on a website. So registrations, surveys, appointment reminders, segmentation and drip campaigns, all this is possible In messaging. So in my opinion, I think this is like a core growth marketing area to be focusing on for the next 5 to 10 years. Just like how, I don't know, infographics were the thing to focus on in 2012, 2013, etc. Like these growth channels, they have sort of a life cycle. So how does it work? So basically in terms of messaging, how it used to work was people would message your business. By clicking that button, send message, and those messages would then get stuck in a dumping ground known as the page inbox. And you can see there, there's a lot of unanswered messages. And, you know, maybe if your social media manager was very vigilant, they would go into there and kind of respond to those inquiries. That was not a very great approach. So what happened about 2 years ago is, you know, so this is This is describing how an operator could go into the Facebook inbox and manually respond to those messages. But because that was so unscalable, especially if you do any significant amount of Facebook marketing, they've released an API for Messenger about just over 2 years ago allowing third-party developers like MobileMonkey to create solutions to manage this at scale. So the problem is this technology, it's actually not in Business Manager, so if you're looking for where Where's all the messaging tools in Business Manager? It hasn't been released yet. It's all third-party integrations through their API. So typically what marketers do is they'll use a chatbot, like a Messenger chatbot company like MobileMonkey, to— we then use the Messenger API to pull in all their contacts, your contact list of everyone who's ever messaged your page in the past, and then it looks a lot like MailChimp where you can do, you know, chat blasting broadcasts to your subscriber lists. And I can kind of describe to you how this works. It's a lot like MailChimp where you compose the message that you're trying to send. So that's like text or an image. I call this chat blasting. And basically you then specify a recipient list of all the fans who you wanna send the messages to. And then boom, you just fire away, schedule the message or Or blast the message, you know, as you will. So this is an example of a webinar registration, so like event notification is a pretty cool use case for messaging. You know, anything that you do email marketing for, you could probably do with messaging, except that this is way more engaging than anything you can do in email because that button there, it doesn't just go to a website, it's actually going to You know, a dialogue that kind of qualifies you within the messaging application. Now, another use case for messaging is blog blasting. So since this is Neil's event, I just wanted to show here that whenever I do a blog post, I blast it out to my subscribers. Neil Patel is one of my subscribers. I don't know how he ended up on my list, but I know that he reads my messages periodically. Periodically because I can see his little avatar kind of advancing as I create the content. Thank you, Neil. So the question becomes, is this spam? It kind of feels a little spammy, or does it? And I just want to give you some data on kind of comparing the click-through rates and open rates for messaging versus email. So as I was mentioning, I do blog blasting both by email and chat every time I produce a new piece of content. So this is for the same campaigns, for the same dates, and basically what you can see is the open rates from the messaging channel are about 3 times higher. Instead of 20%, it's more like 60%, and the open rates are almost 10 times higher. Instead of like 2%, it's closer to 20%. So the click rates and open rates are so high, that leads me to believe that this isn't spammy, right? Sure, maybe I could trick you into reading a message by triggering the push notification, but then why would you click on the thing? You know what I mean? Like, why would you be 10 times more likely to click on it? And so this is— I think this is very significant because like where do you find channels that have 10x improvements? You know, like those are rare. Basically messaging in my view, it's fundamentally less spammy than anything email ever was. Email I can just Go to ZoomInfo and buy a list of CMOs and just fire up Woodpecker and start off some kind of like a drip campaign. You can't do that in messaging. There's a rigid permission model and you can't message people who haven't messaged you first. So I can only respond to messages. And the content's more interactive and people, can just type stop and then you're forbidden from messaging them unless they reengage with you. So that's kind of the overview of how to do messaging marketing, but I wanted to give you a little quick tutorial on how to structure these campaigns because there's sort of an art and strategies here. So what you're looking at here is a chatbot conversation. A user interacting with a chatbot, not a human being. So it's kind of like someone's filling out a form. And the question that people have is like, how the heck do you make these things? Because does it require a lot of coding? And it's actually— they're actually pretty simple. As I was saying before, typically you just use a chatbot builder like MobileMonkey. And there's 2 types of content that you can send to a user. There's dynamic and static content. Static content, that's sort of your vanilla text. And images. And you can get more exotic by, you know, sending just stuff like this. And when you fire that to the user, it gets rendered in their messaging application as such. Pretty straightforward. And there's a couple other kind of ways of jazzing that up a bit by embedding PDF files like gift cards or videos or attachments. You might as well just— instead of sending a link to a website, you can just send the content. In fact, if you look at the slide deck, it's kind of hard to see, but it's, you know, the slide decks, that URL will fire the slide deck to you as an attachment. So it's bit.ly/marketing-school-2019. So then what about these dynamic interactive forms? These are super easy, all you need to do is kind of fill out a form where you specify like what are the questions you want to ask and what are the different multiple choice answers or freeform answers that you want to take in. And basically when you send this form or these questions to the user, they get rendered as a dialogue, you know, that awaits for user input. And it's basically like, you know, a web form but conversational through chat. Chat and you're asking users questions and saving the responses. So this is really key, guys, because this is something that's very difficult to do in email marketing. The segmentation capabilities of chat is substantially better than other channels by asking users questions like, are you an in-house advertiser or are you an agency? This allows us to do deep segmentation. And I can send, depending on how users answer the question, I can customize the conversation and send users down different Messenger funnels. And so just take a minute here to think about how this is different from conventional advertising and conventional landing page optimization strategy. In landing page optimization strategy or online advertising, we have an audience, okay? Maybe it's like a Facebook audience or maybe it's like a list of emails. And we make assumptions. We say, I think that this audience is gonna be interested in this offer. But you don't really know. It's just a Facebook audience that says these are mommies with babies at home or something like this. You don't know that they're gonna be interested in this thing. You're assuming. Using chat, this is the first time in marketing where you can really easily let the user provide their self-description. Describe their interests and their needs and then immediately respond and reflect those pain points into kind of a more optimized solution. So using this power of segmentation where you ask users questions, what you do is you create different audiences or lists of people depending on how they answer different questions. So like in this case, the question was, are you an agency or an in-house marketer? I can create a list called everyone who's an agency marketer. And there's the list, and using that list I can then use it for chat blasting saying like, hey, I'm holding an agency growth summit just for agencies like you. And when you combine the power of messaging with the power of segmentation, you end up getting these really ridiculous outcomes like an 85% open rate and 30, 40, 50% click rates. So I think that's pretty exciting. Another thing that you can do is, You can prefill all the form fields because they're already logged in with Facebook. So they already have your location, your phone number, email, et cetera. And all they have to do is release that information to you. That helps with eliminating some bogus emails. In terms of how do people navigate these experiences, there's 2 ways to do this. There's button-based navigation or there's natural language processing. 99% of these experiences all use buttons. So, a button is just like a phone tree where you, you know, call like a Home Depot or something. It says press 1 for sales, press 2 for service, press 3 for hours and directions, et cetera. This is typically how you manage these types of things. I like buttons because it gives users a clearer idea of what they can expect in terms of the level of services. If you're feeling more ambitious, you can leverage natural language processing. For your navigation of these chat experiences. That's where you ask an open-ended question. There's no menu. Kind of like Google Home or Siri or Alexa. You know, they don't have button menus. It's just asking like, how can I help you today? And you might be wondering, how the heck do you program this kind of stuff? It's actually super easy. All you do is as you're creating those dialogues, you know, the chat dialogues, the content that you're creating. Tag the content with keywords. Like we were working on a webinar registration page here, so we're going to just tag that with words like register for the webinar or webinar registration. And then what happens is when someone asks your company for something where we infer the intent to be related to some of the triggers that you've previously defined, we'll properly make that match using natural language processing. Processing and serve the content that you've previously created. This is very similar to Google AdWords. In Google AdWords, you select keywords and you create ads and Google matches the keywords and ads that you've created to the user queries that are being entered into a search engine. Same idea. There's kind of a conversational equivalent of a search query report. So this is where you can kind of monitor, like, what are all the things that your bot is being asked? That you didn't have an answer for. And the reason why this is important is because in order to improve the experiences, you would wanna create content that's related to what people are actually asking. And typically there's like an 80/20% rule. It's always like, what time do you close? What's your refund policy? Et cetera, et cetera. You just create that content. It's not totally automated. You can jump into these conversations at any time. That's called a live operator take. And when that happens, it's just like reverting to the old system when it was fully manual. You just talk to the user through messaging. And while you're doing that, the bots typically shut themselves up so that they're only talking to one person and not like a robot and a person. Okay, so that's kind of the bot basics. I wanted to give you a couple tips on how to chat blast like a master blaster. By the way, these images take forever to create, so I can't believe no one's loving them. So the worst thing you can ever do is just take your email blasts and dump them into a message and fire away because it's a different channel and there's different best practices. And I want to give you a couple tips on how to be a master blaster like me. And basically the key is to employ conversational language. conversational tactics that are employed by salespeople. Like as if you walked into a store and you're talking to a customer service agent. And so one of them is this notion of the principle of consistency. So like say I'm like a, I don't know, a fundraising person. I'm trying to raise money for some cause. And I say like, hey Eric, how are you doing today?

Great.

Well, Eric, I'm glad you're doing great, but the problem is a lot of people aren't doing great today. In Syria, there's a refugee crisis, and there's a lot of suffering here. Do you want to help them have a great day too? So what I just did here is I've used a principle called consistency, and that is by making Eric affirm that he's, you know, doing great today, he's actually more likely to want to make other people feel great. Conversely, had he said, I'm having a terrible day. The breakfast was awful and there was all these AV problems. Then he's gonna say, he's gonna be less likely to wanna help. If he's suffering, why the heck should anyone else not be suffering? You see what I'm saying? So it's a very simple principle, but what you do is you just get users to affirm certain truths so that you can take them along a journey, a conversation. And so here I'm just trying to sell some chat marketing videos. You know what, it doesn't even matter what you say, I'm gonna still try to sell you those chat marketing videos. But the question I'm asking is, when it comes to chat marketing, are you a beginner, intermediate, or advanced? And depending on how you choose, I will reflect my conversation to kind of be consistent and to be parallel to what you've— This is a good question. Self-described as. So like, oh, I'm a novice. Well, great news, I have a course for you. It's built specifically for novices and step-by-step path, blah, blah, blah. And then these little tips and tricks actually have an enormous kind of compounded impact on chat conversion rates. A second conversational principle, and there's dozens of these, I just wanted to highlight how this is different from email marketing, how it's conversational. A second tactic has to do with this principle of reciprocity or reciprocal concessions. And that simply means like if the customer perceives that you are trying to be more reasonable, they in turn will reciprocate that feeling of reasonableness by trying to do you a solid as well. So the classic example of this is If you have a kid and the kid asks like, hey dad, can I have an Xbox? And you're like, no. Can I have a ping pong table? And you're like, no way. And then he's like, can I have a cookie? And then you're like, oh, okay, fine, you can have a cookie. So that's like, I'm kind of being guilt-tripped into giving him a cookie because I feel like he's being more reasonable. And this is kind of a conversion trick that you can apply. It's where you anchor on a high price point like, hey, here's a chat training course. For marketers, it's $199. What do you think of the price? And they're like, 99% of people will say it's too expensive. But that's okay because you then walk it back. You say, you know what? You're totally right. That's way overpriced. Would you like a 94% discount code to get this for $9? And now you're anchored on this $199 price tag. You think you just got this deal and you're gonna be more likely to buy this thing. And so the power of conversational commerce is that this allows us to engage in tried and true salesmanship strategies employed by regular salespeople that we were never really able to employ in our ads, emails, or landing pages because there was never any expectation of interact— back and forth interaction. So I wanted to give you a couple tips on how to grow your contact list because just like email marketing, this is a lot more fun if you have hundreds of thousands of subscribers versus like 10 subscribers. So the good news is it's never been easier to grow your subscriber list today. In the olden days of marketing when I was getting started, we had these squeeze pages that we would drive traffic to and try to get people to cough up their email address so that we could email market them, drip campaigns and newsletters and stuff like this forever in perpetuity. The problem with that is email, it's like 5% open rates and the cost of driving traffic to these landing pages are very, very high. So today the goalposts have shifted a little bit if you ask me. A better strategy would be to try to get people to message your business. business so that you could obtain the necessary business messaging permissions so that you could reengage and engage in conversation with these customers. So what we're not gonna do is just wait for people to message your page because that's like, that'll take forever. You'll end up with like 45 leads a month or something like that. Kind of lead magnets for growing your contact list. And basically they're strategies to bait users into messaging your company, basically. So one of them is called a Comment Guard. And so what this is, it's a really cool tool where if someone posts a comment on one of your posts, you then privately respond to that user through Messenger and they become a— if they respond to that. Engage with that private response, they become a contact. So this is a lot— like I've been experimenting with different types of content. Instead of just posting like, hey guys, here's my blog post, I've made it more conversational. So like I— here's a crazy example. It's like the battle of the English and the math. One rabbit saw 6 elephants holding 2 parrots going to the river, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How many animals are going to the river?

6.

It's a quiz question and I'm just saying like post your guess and I'll send you the answer and an explanation privately through Messenger if you comment. And so this thing, it generated 57 commenters. And so one of the cool things about this is that because of how the machine learning works for exposure on the Facebook newsfeed algorithm, this actually gets a lot of organic exposure because it's looking for content that has interactions. And then of course if something's doing really well you can boost these posts to generate even more contacts. Here's another example of engaging your audience instead of just saying like, I'm the greatest, blah blah blah. This is a realtor example, the realtor is asking a question. This house was listed by Unicorn Realty for $100,000, can you guess what it sold for? Type in your answer in the comments and we'll send you the actual price as well as a market assessment for this neighborhood. And so that's where you would create— if someone then responds, we would send them the correct answer as well as a PDF file with the market assessment guide for that neighborhood. So that's totally more valuable and more engaging than just just planting static content to your newsfeed which is never going to get the engagement to be visible in the first place. But this will generate the comments which will make it visible and around and around we go. So, how do you set up these Comment Guards? It's pretty simple. You just choose the post that you want to apply the Comment Guard to. You specify a frequency cap and that's important because you don't want to keep sending the same thing over and over if they respond twice in the same day or whatever. And then you just choose, is this applying to every comment on your page or to specific posts? And that's how that works. There's a couple other growth tools. One of them is landing pages. So you can set up landing pages that instead of having these long form fields, you can just have those single-click buttons where if they just press one button, you receive receive all their contact information like first name, last name, gender, location, time zone, language, you know, location. And of course messaging permissions. So that's kind of the most important thing. And those do very well as well. They do particularly well on mobile. And that's what those look like. And another one that's very popular is just website chat. So just, you know, the problem with website chat is that it's usually anonymous. Like people will chat with you, you have no freaking clue who they are or how to reconnect with them. With like a Facebook chat, you immediately convert that visitor into a lead because you get all their personal information as well as messaging permissions to talk to them. So those are some of the key ways to grow your list. They're not rocket science. There is another one called Facebook Messenger ads that I want to just talk to you briefly about. It's a pretty fantastic new ad format that's been around for just over a year now. So for me personally, I was a big cheerleader of Facebook ads, but the prices have gone up a lot. So audiences that were No one likes these slides. Audiences that I used to pay like $1 or $2 per 1,000 impressions are today $100 or $150. And the problem is that the prices are going up 20%, 30% a quarter. And that's problematic because every 1% increase in cost per click is a 1% decrease in return on investment for you or your customers. And so I've changed the way that I do Facebook ads. I've eliminated these donkeys and I use this new ad format called Send to Messenger ads. And basically it's very similar to Facebook ads except that when you click on that ad, instead of going to a landing page on your website, it sends them directly into my Messenger funnels, into my Messenger dialogues. So, the interesting thing about this is that when they click the button, I get all the information and messaging permissions, okay? So, that's fundamentally different from sending them to a webpage and hoping that 3, 4, 5% of people will actually convert on that page. So you can think of these as kind of like magical 100% conversion ads because I get everyone's information for everyone who clicks on this stuff and that's eliminating the most leaky stage of the funnel by just eliminating it. So again, the cool thing about this is you can really use these Messenger ads as kind of like redirectors. So redirectors meaning like you ask a couple qualifying questions of the user and then depending on how they answer, you then send them to the appropriate offer. So that's reducing assumptions, you're actually trying to find out for sure and basically just how to set these these up, you just go into Business Manager, you choose the Messenger ad format, you create the copy as you would normally. The only difference is that instead of sending them to a landing page, you have to design one of those dialogues that I was showing you before, how we created a webinar registration using static content and dynamic content. So you create a dialogue to send them to and then You then link together the ad with the dialogue by copying the link, like the URL of the chat dialogue. I can give you an example of how this looks. It's basically— hang on a second. The animation is not playing, but basically It would have just gone through this chat flow pretty easily and it ends up sending people to a website anyways, but at that point I already have all their registration information even if they don't fill out the form. So after someone clicks, you get all their contact information, first, last name, location, profile photo, everything like that. Facebook provides that to you and they become a Messenger contact, which means you can set up a drip campaign with like, you know, after 20 minutes send them this message, after an hour send them like an invitation to join your Facebook group, you know, after 12 hours send them an upsell. And that's an email strategy that's used that also works for messaging. You can sync the data to your CRM. Using Zapier or something like that. You can do remarketing based on conversational criteria. So depending how users answered the various questions that you asked, you can package that up into an audience, dump that into Facebook ads and just do an Instagram remarketing campaign or something like that. And you can do chat blasts to those people based on their interests. And what we're seeing is we're able to get outcomes that I just haven't seen for 6 years. So typically, if you're doing lead gen in competitive US markets that are like $150 CPMs, it's gonna be like $200 or $300 a lead. But in Messenger ads, you can get them for $3 to $5 because you get the contact information for everyone who clicks on the ad basically. So it's just like using all these tactics. We can come up with leads that are more qualified, more engaged, and maybe 10 times cheaper than conventional Facebook ads. And the cool thing about this is that chat is kind of a personal space. So as your robot is kind of engaging with customers through messaging, you're actually building up kind of like— Relationships. Branding familiarity points with the users. And we know that people tend to favor buying from the brands and companies that they've heard of and interacted with in the past. So guys, we talked a lot about messaging. Why? Because obviously the future of Facebook isn't like the newsfeed stuff, so that's what we've been focusing on Facebook Messenger marketing. We talked a lot about basics of how to set up these bots, how to increase, how to do chat blasting, how to employ psychological hacks in your copy, Messenger ads, and so much more. Thank you for joining me on this epic journey from Donkeyland to Unicornland. I wanted to just wrap it up here in terms of kind of Giving you the big picture, what does this all mean? In general, there's more daily active users on messaging platforms today than there is on social media, yet less than 1% of companies have any ability of marketing directly to those users on those messaging platforms. Messenger has over 1.3 billion daily active users and the engagement rates are about About 100 times better than what you typically see on email marketing. And there's a profound generational shift in communication preferences well underway. People overwhelmingly prefer messaging over email as their way of communicating with people. And it was leaked earlier this year that Facebook is integrating Messenger with Instagram and WhatsApp. I get that there's an objection like, what if my company, my customers don't use Messenger? But a year from now these 3 things are gonna be integrated and what customer doesn't have either a WhatsApp app or an Instagram or a Messenger account? I mean, if they don't have them, are they really that valuable a customer? And basically, hopefully I was showing you today chatbots. I think a lot of people think of it as a customer service technology, but the way I view it is more as a top of the funnel technology for blasting out content, for qualifying leads, for doing online advertising, for doing lead routing and assignment and live chat. So it's more like a top and middle of funnel technology, which I think will be essential for marketers going forward. Thank you so much, Eric and Neil, for inviting me. for this conference and putting it on. Please go to bit.ly/marketing-school-2019 to get a free copy of the slides here. And the coolest thing is you'll get to see it sent to you via a messaging application. Thank you so much, everyone.

Thank you.