How to Rethink Facebook and Instagram Ad Strategy

- A best in class approach for a Facebook ads campaign,
again, regardless of vertikal, there might be some nuances,
is you wanna separate your prospecting efforts
so people who aren't familiar with your business,
have never seen an ad from you, you wanna separate that,
separate from your retargeting campaigns.
Within your prospecting,
you wanna separate interest targeting
from your lookalike targeting.
(light airy music)
(birds chirping)
- Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Zaryn Sidhu.
If you don't know who he is,
he's a Paid social expert and VP of Paid Social Activation
for North America at Brainlabs.
His YouTube channel is called Market & Hustle
and his Facebook ads course is called Hyper Growth Ads.
Zaryn, welcome to the show.
How are you doing today?
- I'm doing great.
Thank you for having me, Michael.
- I'm super excited that you're here.
Today, Zaryn and I are gonna explore Facebook
and Instagram ad strategy.
But before we go there,
I wanna hear a little bit of your backstory.
How the heck did you get into social advertising?
Start wherever you wanna start.
- Yeah, sure.
Well, that's a funny story
because my path never came from digital marketing.
I never wanted to be a digital marketer.
In fact, what I wanted to do when I was in college
was be a professional break dancer,
which is something that was doing for fun, you know,
through high school.
And at some point when I was in college,
I realized that I can get paid for this.
And at this time, I was studying to be an accountant.
I worked at a bank.
Like, I had this very clear cut of vision for my future.
And I was just doing this on the side.
And once I realized I could make a buck of break dancing
doing these shows and that these corporations were willing
to pay a lot of money,
I then decided it was in my best interest
to pivot my accounting trajectory into marketing.
And that's when my college path went from black and white
to color, and everything started to become more interesting,
because I could learn these concepts and apply them.
Lucky for me at the time, this is around-
- Wait, we gotta tok about the break dance and stuff,
'cause you showed me...
Tell a little bit of that backstory
because you were involved with some pretty big stuff
when you were break dancing
and you were like really talented.
So share a little bit about that journey.
I think, people would find that fascinating.
- Yeah, it's something I started doing in high school.
And I'm gonna be honest.
I started doing it
'cause I realized I can get attention from girls.
I wasn't a nerdy kid in high school,
but I wasn't a cool kid either,
and I feel like that kinda helped me
sort of find my identity, which I feel like a lot of people
in high school were trying to figure that out.
When I went to college, we first started doing these,
like, I don't know,
just like random kinda like birthday parties
and private events.
But then it escalated to corporate companies
wanting to use us to do these performances at their events,
especially like these three day conferences,
where they're trying to get everybody excited.
And at the beginning of the conference,
they always wanna have some kind of form of entertainment
to like wake people up
because it's like early in the morning.
So yeah, once we realized, oh, wow,
there's like a demand for this,
we were like, how can we play in the space?
This is around 2009, 2010.
So one of the things that was very favorable
was ranking online wasn't that difficult for this category.
Today, maybe it's a little bit different.
So being visible online started to actually generate,
help us generate leads for the business.
And we had this like very terrible website
that a buddy of mine had created.
I think I paid him like $300 or something like that
at the time.
And we were just shocked,
by following just some basic SEO guidelines from Google,
that this website was actually able to get us business.
So it was following, I think, the journey into me
getting into digital advertising
was following this process of like, oh, wow,
simple things can be very, very effective online.
And if you build upon that,
you can drive more demand for your business.
- That's a really cool story.
So tell us a little bit
about when did you start your own business
and kinda bring us a little bit more to the present,
like when did you start focusing on Instagram and Facebook?
Tell us a little bit more about that.
- Yeah.
I think, the first stage that, you know, like I was at
when I first started that production company, I mean,
it wasn't even a production company at first,
it was just like a dance crew,
was, you know, how can we be visible on Google.
But from there, there's only so much demand you can capture
through search activity, so it was like, well,
what else can we do to get people looking
for what we're doing
even if they're not actively looking for it?
And that's where Instagram and Facebook played a huge role,
especially back in 2010, 2011,
because their organic engagement rates were so great.
And because of the nature of what we were doing, you know,
spinning on our heads, flipping around,
the video content on the feeds just did so well.
So it was kind of a very natural progression of, well,
we're doing this cool stuff, let's just post it online.
And that traction that started to get
helped us generate more clients and more leads,
so it just felt like, all right, well,
how can we amplify this further?
And by that point, Facebook advertising was already a tool
that was available to most advertisers in the US and abroad.
So then that's when we started to experiment with that
and see how much further that could amplify the demand
for our business.
- So tell us a little bit about what you're doing today
with the company that you're working for.
- Yeah, well, at some point,
my dreams of becoming a professional break dancer
and raising a family and having a certain lifestyle,
I realized that the salary
probably wasn't gonna get me there,
also, it doesn't help that if you sprain an ankle,
you know, you can't work, you can't make money.
So I decided to pivot at some point,
and I had built a network of professionals
in the entertainment industry that I realized
that they didn't really understand how to leverage
their social channels and really use it
to build an online presence.
They had built a business that was quite successful
on referrals, sort of maybe like an affiliate tactiks.
So I turned to them and I said, hey, I can do this for you.
Or, at least, I thought I did at the time.
And for about a year after I got out of college,
I was just freelancing for these other businesses
and helping them better define their social presence.
And then at some point, I realized, okay,
I'm better than these business owners at doing this,
but I felt like I still had a lot to learn.
And that's where I turned to the agency world
as a source of kind of leveling up my skillset
and also taking all the knowledge
that these agencies had built in terms of processes
and frameworks that they were now applying
to the digital world.
So around 2015,
I went to work at Zimmerman Advertising in South Florida,
which is part of Omnicom Group.
And at that point,
paid social media managers didn't even exist.
A social media manager would do everything.
You were doing organic, you were doing influencer programs
and then you were doing a little bit of paid advertising.
And I remember while I was there,
they had put a role up for a paid social media manager.
So then that's when I realized, oh, wow,
this thing is growing, you know.
There was more money piling in,
clients were seeing more results,
and the systems, the platforms
were starting to get more complicated.
So that's kinda what kicked me off in that direction.
And I realized, you know what?
There's a lot of young people walking in at the agency
and some of them have like 5,000, 10,000 followers
on their Instagram.
And I realized the barrier to entry
like from the perspective of how do I grow my career
and what direction should I move on,
I was like, paid social is getting more complex,
more money's coming in, that means people
are gonna need more sophistikated digital marketers
to really manage these budgets
and help these businesses grow.
- So today, that's what you're helping.
That's what you're doing, you're basically helping.
Do you have a team or is it just you doing it?
- So in the current role that I'm in today,
I oversee the paid social practike for Brainlabs
in North America.
I work very closely
to some of our more of the enterprise clients,
but the agency does have a pretty sizable team
that is hands-on keyboard buying media.
I think, we have at least 150 team members globally.
And then we have a team of what we call social champions,
which are subject matter experts
that we really dedicate a lot of resources to training
and up-leveling them so that they can really service
their clients to the best possible degree.
- And the reason I found you
is because of your YouTube channel
and you're putting out content
on a pretty regular basis about paid acquisition.
Is that the primary focus of the channel?
- It is. Yeah.
And the channel started back in 2018,
about four years ago now,
because I realized that I kept having the same conversations
with friends and industry colleagues,
where someone would ask me a question about something
and I'm very passionate about paid media
and advertising at large,
so I'm willing to tok to them
for like 30 minutes or an hour.
But I just realized I kept having the same conversations
over and over, and I was just like,
why don't I just record a video of this and just send it
and then just have it, so when people ask me,
I'm just gonna point them to the video.
So that's kinda how the channel started.
And then you do enough of these videos in YouTube,
people are searching for them, the algorithm picks it up,
and I realize, okay, maybe there's something here.
Maybe people really do wanna understand some of this
more complex paid social digital advertising stuff,
but through a lens of practikality of like,
well, how do you do it?
- That's awesome.
Well, and that's how we discovered you.
So there's plenty of marketers listening right now
that are all in on Facebook and Instagram,
but I would say that the biggest chunk of them
are probably doing organic activities on the platform.
And they're wondering whether or not they should focus more
on paid advertising, paid acquisition.
What do you wanna say to those that are not sure
about whether or not they should put some money
behind their activities on Facebook and Instagram?
- Yeah, I think, it's great to have an organic presence.
I think, that's very important.
I think having an organic presence on Facebook and Instagram
and some of the other social channels,
if they're relevant to the audiences
that these businesses are serving, I think, it's great,
because at this point, it's table states, right?
It's become so easy nowadays to make a website
or a digital presence.
A 15 year old kid can build a website through Shopify.
And you just don't know what is an actual real business
and what is not.
And having organic content is something
that can lend a lot of credibility
because you can showcase the business, the people,
the service.
But the reality is that if we go back 10 years ago,
the amount of organic reach that we were getting back then
compared to now, it's like dismal.
So if the end outcome is you're gonna use this channel
to drive an audience that you can engage,
that you can then eventually sell a product or a service,
it's in the best interest of any advertiser
to maximize their reach.
And back, I would say, maybe 10 years ago,
the way that organic and paid social was working
was that many brands would build up this organic presence
and they would use paid ads to get followers.
So it was very cheap to run campaigns to get followers.
And then you would organically just post four or five,
10 times a day to maximize your reach
against these audiences.
What we're seeing now is that that's not the way
that you wanna be using paid social,
but at a minimum, you do need to be using paid social
because there's gonna be a large percentage of the market
that your organic content
will not be able to reach the full users out there.
So even if you are large, even you have a million followers
or 2 million followers, again,
your average post is getting under 2% reach at best,
so paid social does play a role,
not only to make sure that you're maximizing your reach
against your existing audience,
but that you can go to tok to new prospects out there
in the market who might not know who you are,
who might be in market for your product or service.
They just haven't heard about you.
And paid amplification is a great tool to get you there.
- What do you wanna say to the people that are like, well,
Apple, I forget what they call their privacy thing,
but Apple seems to have really made it very difficult for us
to do remarketing, retargeting,
and all this other privacy stuff that's going on
at the browser level.
It seems like advertising on Facebook and Instagram
isn't going to be as effective as maybe it was before.
What do you wanna say to those guys?
- I think, I mean, it's a valid concern.
For very long time, the industry has benefited
from very low level of regulation or awareness
of how some of these platforms have been using data.
And the amount of data that Facebook and Instagram has,
that can power advertising campaigns
is to the benefit of advertisers.
So losing any percentage of that is gonna hurt us,
but still their tools are very effective.
And there's still many, many advertisers
that are running campaigns at scale
across different vertikals from D2C brands, to B2B,
to B2C players that are seeing tremendous results.
And there's a reason why a lot of these brands
still carve out a good chunk of their budgets
to advertise on these platforms.
So it still works.
Does it work to the level that it was before?
You know, it's probably not as effective.
However, the platforms have invested a ton of resources
to try to usher in this new era of how they can be effective
for small businesses and large businesses
despite some of the challenges that Apple has put across.
So I think it still makes sense for advertisers
to use the platform
even if it's not as powerful as it once was.
- You pay very close attention with your YouTube channel
and the work that you do for your career too,
the things that Facebook has been signaling to advertisers,
and I would love to hear from your perspective,
like what is Facebook telling marketers?
What do we need to be paying attention to from these signals
that are coming from Facebook?
- Yeah, so one thing that comes to mind is that in,
I would say, in the last like 12 months,
there's been a shift in narrative
with how advertisers are running campaigns.
The legacy approach
was that you're gonna create as many audiences as possible,
and you're gonna use a tiknique called horizontal scaling.
So you'll build one audience, you'll see how it performs.
And once that's doing well,
you continue to run that audience.
Then you think about the next audience, you build the next.
And then what ends up happening is you might have a campaign
that might have like 15, 20 different audiences
all running at once.
Some of them overlapping with each other.
And one of the things that Facebook has been saying is like,
hey, you need to limit this level of fragmentation
and you need to build broader.
And again, that makes sense
because what's the purpose of having two audiences
that have a 40% or 50% overlap.
You're bidding against yourself.
You're paying more money.
Your audiences might be seeing the ads more times
than they need to convert.
So there is some merit
in not over complicating your campaigns.
However, on the other side,
if you oversimplify the way you're building campaigns
and you have just, let's just say for sake of argument,
just one big broad audience,
then the true benefit of being able to use these tools,
you kinda lose which is the ability to test and learn.
So you have to find some kind of middle ground
where you're not over complicating campaigns,
where you're working against the platform, the tiknology,
where you make it hard for the algorithm
to exit the learning phase,
to be able to get those 50 conversions per week.
But to the other side,
that you're not building so simplistik
that you might be getting results,
but you're not really taking advantage of opportunities
to understand what is and what isn't working
to then feed it back into your strategy.
So that's one thing that I would say.
And the other piece of that too
is that I believe one of the reasons
that they've also been leaning
into this build broad narrative
is because costs have increased, you know.
Especially we saw a massive increase in 2020
as a result of a lot of businesses going online
and on Facebook ads for the first time.
And that sort of continued into 2021.
And to the point that I think quarter over quarter,
like, I might get the year wrong,
it was either 2020 versus 2021,
we saw like a 60% increase in CPM costs, which was crazy.
- That's crazy.
- You know, that alone is crazy.
You know, you're paying significantly more
because there's more competitors in the auction,
but at the same time, that this is happening,
we have Apple's iOS 14 come in.
And what that did is it removed a ton of data signals.
So before iOS 14, about 80% of the US iOS device users,
they opted into tracking.
They allowed Apple through their advertiser ID
to share back information Facebook,
and so it really helped us drive performance.
Once they made it in model where someone has to,
when they download the app, they have to say,
will I share access?
That number went down, I think, under 40%.
So we lost about half, like 40 to 50 million data points
that we were getting.
On the regular, we lost that.
So you have now CPMs going up, measurement going down.
And then what that ends up doing is your ROA is cut in half
and/or your cost per action is doubled.
Even though that's not really the case,
it's just what might be visible to the advertisers.
So those factors have definitely been top of mind
for advertisers in the last year.
However, some good news for Meta's recent earnings report,
they actually told us that their CPM rates
that were decreased 14% in this past quarter.
And actually, we were doing an analysis recently
at Brainlabs, and we saw that 2022 versus 2021,
CPM rates are down.
So it is very possible
that now that we're exiting the pandemic,
that a lot of these advertisers
might have started moving money back to other channels,
maybe offline, TV, you know,
things that they might have been investing in the past,
and that's reducing the cost of media.
So there might be now an opportunity for advertisers
that might have been priced out at some moment to say,
hey, maybe this is really the time to ramp back up,
or test Facebook or Instagram ads for the first time.
- I love this.
This is awesome.
Now I would love to ask about your strategy.
So given all this information that we've been toking about,
the CPMs ROAs, and now they're starting to drop a little bit
and all the other things that we toked about
about what Facebook is signaling to us that,
hey, we ought to not go super narrow,
but not go super broad either.
In light of all of this, what is the strategy
that you recommend to everyone listening
when it comes to their Facebook and Instagram ads?
- So, I think, true success on Facebook,
regardless of the vertikal or market or geographic area,
it boils down to two many things.
Number one is data signals.
The reason that this platform has become so powerful
and effective is it's ability to harness information
that users are giving to the platform,
and then allow advertisers
to then leverage that information.
Now, in order to do that well, you need to understand
their pixel tiknology in that mechanism
and how it's able to extract that data
from your website, and then use that information.
And one thing that we've recently seen
at Brainlabs in partikular,
so Meta rolled out their conversions API solution,
which allows you to be able to get signals from browsers
that might not be, let's say, someone's using an ad blocker,
for example,
a pixel won't be able to get that conversion data.
And if you don't have that conversion data,
well, then now, you don't get credit for the sale
and then the algorithm loses an opportunity
to further optimize.
- Yeah, and just to clarify,
that allows publishers to have first party data,
so it's not blocked, right?
Isn't that how it works?
I mean like, so for example,
we're a publisher or our website or whatever,
we can add this in, it's a first party cookie
or something like that instead of a third party, right?
And therefore, it's not blocked.
Is that generally how it works?
- Yeah, that's one of the upgrades that Facebook
was quick to make was have the option for their pixel
to be a first party pixel,
so that most browsers wouldn't remove it.
However, there's still a lot of ad blocking tiknology
that will remove the Facebook pixel.
And so one of the things
that we're seeing a lot of success with
is advertisers who are setting up the conversion API,
which basically instead of passing the information
through the browser, can send it directly from one server
to Facebook, from the advertiser server to Facebook.
And I'll be honest, it's not the simplest thing to set up
if you're new to Facebook ads.
However, if you're using like a Shopify or a WooCommerce,
there's partner integrations where the platform
will literally walk you step by step of what to do,
and you're just clicking next, yes or no.
So it can be pretty simple if you're working
with one of those major e-com platforms,
but the benefit of it
is that because we have more data signals,
those advertisers are seeing CPLs as low as 40%,
43 to 47% more efficient because you're capturing more data.
So not only can you measure it,
but now you're feeding it back to the algorithm,
and the algorithm now can better go find those audiences.
So data signals is one key part of it
in understanding how that pixel tiknology works
and where there might be opportunity
for you to use something more advanced.
The other piece of that is really building in service
for the algorithm.
Kinda going back to this idea
of are you over fragmenting your campaigns,
or are you oversimplifying things?
You wanna have a campaign structure
that works in service of the algorithm.
And the reason that why that's important
is because you cannot control Facebook's algorithm.
However, your campaign structure is a mechanism
for you to have some sense of control.
And to give you an example, a best in class approach
for a Facebook ads campaign,
again, regardless of vertikal,
there might be some nuances,
is you wanna separate your prospecting efforts.
So people who aren't familiar with your business,
have never seen an ad from you, you wanna separate that,
separate from your retargeting campaigns.
Within your prospecting,
you wanna separate interest targeting
from your lookalike targeting.
A few reasons why
is because from an organizational perspective,
when you get into your ads manager,
you wanna be easily able to understand what is inside
of each campaign so that you can look at your metrics
on a day-to-day and move quickly.
But another reason that's important
is because sometimes the audience sizes are so distinct
that when you're running these campaigns
and you're using CBO, campaign budget optimization,
which lets you dynamically move money around,
you might have an audience,
an interest campaign that's 10 million, 20 million,
very sizable.
And what the algorithm will do
is sometimes in those situations
is move money in that direction,
even though that might not give you the best performance.
So it's good to separate interests and lookalike campaigns,
because there's different levels of intent
in the same way where retargeting
is gonna have a completely different level of intent.
So at a minimum, using your campaign structure
to really separate those types of intent
now gives you some levers to control your bids,
your budgets, and also your creative,
which is gonna drive a really key part of the performance
with any Facebook campaign.
- I got a couple clarifying questions
on the conversions API.
The name sounds like it's sending conversion data
and that's all it's sending.
Is that a fair assessment?
Like, for example, I got a sale,
let Facebook know that this person turned into a customer,
so that maybe I can target people
that are more like this customer.
Or is it actually tracking
all sorts of different kind of data points,
not just like a e-commerce conversion?
Do you understand what I'm asking on that?
- Yeah, so if I understand correctly-
- Like, it can attract a page view versus a form fill
versus the different kinds of actions
that maybe the regular Facebook pixel might have tracked.
- Yeah. That's a great question.
So when thinking about the Meta's pixel
and the conversion API, it's not an and/or,
it's not an or, it's an and.
So the pixel's gonna provide every website you wanna tag it
with a pixel.
The conversion API, it's kind of like something you put
on top to capture anything that the pixel can't capture.
And the great thing too
is that it can automatikally de-duplicate events,
so that if somebody goes through your website and they buy,
and they were using a browser where they were sharing,
they weren't using an ad blocker or any kind of tiknology,
they weren't clearing cookies.
The pixel's gonna get that event ID,
and also the conversion APIs gonna get that event ID.
And if they match, it's gonna say, okay,
this is one single version.
So there is some level of customization
with the conversion API that you can control.
So for example, when someone goes to buy from you,
they share their name, their email, their phone number,
country, whatever, you can actually say, hey,
I'm willing to share the customer's first name
and their email.
And that's what Facebook can use to match.
Of course, if you give Facebook more information,
their ability to match is gonna increase,
but there's definitely some businesses or vertikals
that might be more protective
if you're dealing with something in banking or maybe pharma.
You might not be comfortable giving a phone number,
but maybe you're comfortable giving an email.
So there's a lot of customization options
in what you can share,
but the pixel is basically what you should be using
to capture any of that like page view data
and any of those other media metrics that aren't the sales,
the end sale conversion.
- I know you already kinda mentioned this,
and I don't know if you fully exhausted your answer
to this question,
but when it comes to prospecting ads versus retargeting ads,
is there any other little nuances that we need to tok about
maybe that people need to be thinking differently
about when it comes to setting up their ads
on Facebook and Instagram?
- Yeah, I think, with prospecting,
there's this saying my Facebook reps would say before,
they'd say one intent is low, creativity needs to be high.
And the thinking here is that if someone's been
to your website and you know there's some level of interest,
at that point, it might just be messages
around like reminding them that they left something in cart.
Like the messages can be generally more simple,
but when you're prospecting,
and you don't know if this person actually
is looking for what you're trying to sell them,
you need the threshold to not just get their attention,
but to like hook them in and get them to lean in
is a lot higher.
So if I was a business
and I was thinking about like my budgets around creative
and sort of my social plan in general,
I would put a lot more effort and intention
into any prospecting creative that I was developing,
because I know the threshold's gonna be a lot harder
to get their attention.
- So just so we're clear,
when you were toking about the card abandonment,
that's more retargeting, not prospecting, right?
So to get people in the very, very door in the first place
on the prospecting side of things...
I mean like, I'll be honest, like right now, you know,
we're running ads for one of our events
and we don't have the target audience amongst our media
because we have a very small audience that is interested
in X and a very large audience that's interested in Y,
but we're trying to sell the X, right?
So one of the things that we've decided to do
is run Facebook and Instagram and Google ads
to try to attract that X audience to us.
But, I think, the challenge that we face
is we're selling a product,
we're not providing a free piece of media.
We're not providing a free service, right?
So I would imagine the bar is really high with advertising
for prospects when you're going directly to a sales page.
And that's not easy.
(chuckles) 'Cause we're not actually looking for prospects,
we're looking for customers.
You know what I mean?
So I don't even know if we call that prospecting,
but, I guess, arguably it is.
- Yeah, absolutely.
A buddy of mine, David, always has this analogy.
It's like, you don't ask someone to marry you
on the first date, you kinda build up to it over time.
Now, if you say that to a direct response marketer,
they're like, challenge accepted.
And, I think, that's the role
where creative complete a strong role,
but also the messaging that creative has in the synergy
that it has with the landing page,
it's also very, very important.
Whenever I'm thinking about something like products
or services that might be more expensive
or somebody has to really think about this,
one of the things that's good to understand
is like sources of influence,
and thinking about how you can incorporate that
within the creative itself.
And a lot of times, that might look something as simple
as featuring other industry experts within the creative,
because they're trusted.
So it's like, oh,
Scott Galloway is somebody I follow religiously.
And I remember there was a big conference,
ad world conference that they had been promoting for years,
and I was just like, ah, I just don't think it's for me.
And then I remember seeing an ad with Scott Galloway,
and I was like, oh, Scott's gonna be there.
I was just like, sign me up.
So I think whenever you're prospecting,
the challenge is the more expensive it is,
people need to think more, they need more time,
it needs a little bit more nurturing.
So understanding those sources of influences,
and if you can bring it into the creative early on,
it just increases their trust
and they're more likely to take that action earlier
than later.
- I love that.
Let's transition into toking a little bit
about creating ads, creative for ads.
Obviously, Mark Zuckerberg has really put a lot of emphasis
on video.
We're seeing Instagram recently getting a lot of pushback,
but clearly moving to a feed
that is very reels focused, right?
And we're starting to see the same thing on Facebook.
So tok to me about creative and what your thoughts are
and what your experiences are based on the work
that you've done with your clients.
What do we need to be thinking about
when it comes to creating great ads?
- Creative is very important.
I think, long term,
that's the most important optimization lever that you have.
Once you figure out who your audience is
and you've kind of done some of the housekeeping,
creative is the one lever, again,
you can continue to learn from
and you can continue to optimize long-term.
So out of the gate, it's just very important.
Something I often find that whenever I do audits for clients
that we're pitching is that I'll see some campaigns
that they'll have like 17 ads,
and then they'll have one audience that has like one ad.
Something that Facebook has told us time and time again
and I've seen in the performances,
you want a minimum of three to five ads running
at any given time, because that gives breathing room
for the delivery algorithm to figure out what works for who.
Another piece of that too is that mixing different formats
within one adset is beneficial,
because the tiknology could also understand
who are the audiences that are being reached
that tend to convert off of a carousel format
versus the ones that tend to convert from video.
So I think there's this theme of, again,
building in service of the algorithm
that also kind of steps into the creative aspect,
where it's like, there are some best practikes
that if you always take these into account,
you can work with the algorithm, not against it.
But more prescriptively, I think, video is a format
that we just continue to see shine,
because it goes back to this old saying,
like if a picture's worth a thousand words,
well, and what is a video worth?
There's so much more you can do with video.
And we know there's a really great report
in the Journal of Advertising, that what they found
was that the average frequency that you needed
to drive purchase intent for someone on social
was around 10 exposures.
So someone needs to see an ad 10 times over a period
of, you know, maybe a couple weeks over a period of time,
they weren't really specific on the time,
in order to get you to the point that you're like,
I would very likely buy that product.
And then what they found within this research
was that if your message was emotional based,
they can get you to have that same level of purchase intent
within two exposures.
- Really?
- So it just goes to show that the importance of not just...
I think, Facebook says creative is like 58% to 60%
of all campaign performance.
So just think about how effective video can be
because you can say so much,
you can overcome so many of the buying objections.
And then now if you have video
that has an emotional lead into it,
which, I think, this is something
that a lot of direct response advertisers
have finally like caught onto.
And I tend to see a lot more of these ads on my feed,
where they're toking through problems
from the lens of how can I get a visceral reaction
from someone.
And a lot of times,
that happens in the first two to three seconds,
when someone makes a bold claim
and says something that, you know, catches you off guard,
or they ask you a question question
that forces you to self-reflect.
And I remember when I was at Open Education,
which is a direct to consumer startup that I worked in
at Miami after I left Zimmerman, and we were doing like,
I dunno, we were spending maybe at least eight
to $10 million a year on Facebook ads.
And one of the things that we quickly learned,
because we did a lot of this testing nethering
was that there was a partikular type of ad
that would tend to get a lot of results.
And it was an ad that was just asking people a question
and it had a little emoji, and it was in Spanish
because basically what this company did
was they were kinda like a Rosetta Stone,
but they were teaching English in Latin America
as opposed to teaching, learning Spanish
in the United States.
And one of the insights that we had
was that a lot of people that learn English
in a third world country,
and if they don't learn it from a native English speaker
from like, let's say, America,
they might understand the language
and they might be able to speak it,
but their pronunciation is like a little off.
And because of that, they'll feel embarrassed.
So we had these ads, which will basically tug
at that insecurity of like,
know English but embarrassed to speak it.
And these ads would like fly through the shelf.
And I remember that we created some kind of structure
and internally, in meetings, we would call 'em like,
oh, these were self-reflection ads.
And then later on,
after more time working across other clients,
I started to realize, oh, wow, there's something here.
So it's great to see that there's research
in the Journal of Advertising that connects the dots
of like emotional messaging in creative
being very effective.
But also, what I've seen in my experience as well
is that, yeah, when you take that kind of messaging
in prospecting, it can be very, very effective.
And it's funny, 'cause a lot of people think, well,
if you're trying to sell somebody something,
especially if it's to another business owner,
well, business owners are very rational
and they're looking at costs
and they want to understand what the benefits are, you know,
which is true.
That's also important.
But initially, to hook them in,
if they might not even be considering the products
or service you're selling them,
emotional messaging could be really impactful,
because you could say things to somebody like,
hey, you know, are you worried
about making payroll this month?
Now you got their attention,
now you can tok to them about your payroll software.
So rational messaging where it really tends to shine
is in remarketing, because you could tell someone,
hey, you have an offer.
You can overcome buying objections
with those rational messaging, right.
I got 30 day return policy, as an example.
There's a lot of rational points
that can be addressed within remarketing.
That's also not to say that you can't include benefits
of your product or service within your video creative
when you're prospecting.
Absolutely.
You just don't wanna lead with it.
It could be a part of your messaging
and a part of your video,
but you always wanna lead your prospecting creative
from an emotional angle whenever possible.
- Do you find that, especially on Instagram,
since Instagram seems to be moving
towards discovering content
that's not from people you're following
with all these reels that are coming up,
and this is likely moving to Facebook as well,
do you think this is gonna benefit advertisers
as people begin to watch entertaining content
that is unfamiliar to them?
Is it possible that they're not even gonna realize
they're seeing an ad because they're just stuck
in like a flow state
when they're watching some of these videos.
Is this kind of what you believe Meta is trying
to accomplish here with some of these changes?
- I think.
- 'Cause a couple with good content, of course, right?
Assuming you have a really great ad.
- Yeah, you know, I think, that's a great point.
I think, one of the main benefits of reaching audiences
when they're on social media
is that they are in a discovery mindset.
As opposed to when someone uses like Google search,
they're in a different type of mindset.
They're in an intention mindset.
They're looking for something.
But when they come to social media,
they're open to seeing what comes across their feed.
And I do believe that as the content becomes more mixed
in someone's feed and more unpredictable,
that could lend to someone being more open
to discover a new business.
And that's actually something that on TikTok,
advertisers are seeing a lot of success in the platform.
You're seeing a lot of success
'cause you don't know what's gonna come up on your feed.
It's very unpredictable.
And yet people are coming to that platform
and they're leaving a lot of times discovering a new brand
or product or a place that they wanna travel,
and then later on buying.
And there's actually been some great stats about that.
So if Facebook and Instagram are taking some of those ideas
and feeding it into their tik as they have been testing,
I think, that could definitely be very favorable.
Now, the one caveat here
is would someone be more likely to engage
with an ad because of this change?
I think, that's dependent on the creative.
What we've seen traditionally is that advertisers
on Facebook and Instagram,
if you're like a large advertiser, traditionally,
they were just taking like their TV ads (chuckles)
and just bringing the 30 second TV ad
and putting it on Facebook and Instagram,
which is obviously not great,
because it's a different medium.
People don't engage with the content the same way.
So I think if advertisers are really building their creative
from a platform first perspective,
which is make your videos vertikal, you know,
eat up that real estate space,
so that people can be immersed in the video.
Design your video for sound off.
Traditionally, most people have consumed,
I think, over 60% have consumed video on Facebook
and Instagram with sound off.
Now, this is a stat from like five, six years ago,
so I don't know.
I think, that might be changing,
especially with the updates to the product.
But just assume someone's not gonna watch a video
with the sound off,
it's like, does the message still come across?
If not, use text, use visual aids
to kinda get the point across.
Also, making sure that the video is short
and like punchy and entertaining.
So you want quick cuts.
You don't wanna be using 45 second, one minute long videos.
There might be some product categories
where that could work, but for the most part,
I think, keeping it short and sweet,
like 10 to 15 seconds is an ideal time.
Showing your brand cues early on.
Don't wait for the last second of the video
to show your logo, because you might have paid
to entertain someone for 14 seconds,
and what you'll find is that they might not even remember
who you are if they didn't click on the ad.
So even if the intention
is to get someone to the website to buy,
we know that always doesn't happen on the first try.
You can benefit from someone remembering your brand.
So showcasing your brand logo
or your brand cues early on, super important.
And those are a few of the tips that I would say,
if you're gonna be using Facebook to drive sales or leads
for your business, and you're gonna lean into video,
there's a lot of ways that you can sort shape up
your creative to be as impactful as possible.
- Zaryn, this has been really insightful.
If people want to discover you,
do you have a favorite social platform
you wanna send them to, website you wanna send them to,
where would they go to find you?
- Yeah.
I would send them to my YouTube page,
youtube.com/markethustle.
Or you can just go on YouTube and type in Market & Hustle,
should come right up.
There's a ton of videos there.
I think, we have over 160 videos published.
We did a series this year on Facebook ads
and everything performance.
So there's a ton of great content there.
Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn,
send me an invite there.
You can find me just by looking up Zaryn Sidhu, Z-A-R-Y-N.
And yeah, looking forward to-
(Michael and Zaryn chattering)
- For those that are listening, S-I-D-H-U.
Zaryn, thank you so much for answering all my questions.
Really appreciate your insights today.
- Absolutely. Thank you for having me.