DAVE GRANFIELD:
Hey guys, Dave from BidPixel.
We’re doing another episode of marketing AI-based goods and I’m pretty pumped to have you along for this one.
As you know, we’ve been running a bit of a campaign over the last couple of months and it’s been, ask your toughest marketing and advertising questions. And holy crap, there’s been some tough ones.
It’s time to dig a little bit deeper and time to answer some of these questions that people have been sending through. I’m by myself today, so I’m just going to get straight into this one. Magda has asked the question, how do you engage with an audience when it doesn’t come naturally?
Now, her question is a bit two-part.
How do you engage an audience when it doesn’t come naturally? Do you write long-form captions in your advertising or do you use videos?
Magda, good question. I think there are two parts to what you’ve asked and you’re right in both areas.
One of the books that I’ve been reading front to back over the last couple of weeks is Dan Kennedy, The Ultimate Sales Letter.
Dan Kennedy comes from one of those eras of putting a sales letter in your letterbox and someone then cutting out a coupon and sending it back to get more information, right?
That’s where this got started and that’s where he originated. Now, Dan is still alive for those that you’re questioning. He reportedly had died, but he’s actually still alive and he’s recovering from some serious illnesses at the moment.
But Dan used to talk about long-form captions.
There’s been a lot of debate recently about long-form captions and if they work or if they don’t work. We’ve kind of subscribed to the fact that they do work if you’re targeting the right audience. What do I mean by that?
If you’re targeting the right audience and you’re using a copywriting framework, which is kind of sequentially taking people through the pain points, promising the hidden land, all that sort of stuff.
So if you’re actually giving them value and trying to help them by going through some of their objections and giving them the right answer or the right information that they need to make a decision.
I guess in the way that we say it if you’re educating and motivating them in long-form copy, that long-form copy actually serves a purpose and it’s helping you qualify your potential customers.
Now, different people read things differently and some people want to skim, so your long-form copy still needs to have headlines or needs to have headings or snippets and you might have a too long didn’t read a section at the top in dot point.
But really if someone invests the time to read your long-form copy and you can engage with them, there’s probably a higher probability that you’re actually going to close them or get them as a customer, right? Someone who skips over stuff and he’s not interested in genuinely not interested. Someone who takes the time to read long-form copy can be highly interested.
Now, the same goes and Dan talks about this with video sales letters or videos.
That if you can engage someone for a longer period of time, so if you can get longer through play, which is a viewing metric on Facebook, or if you can get people engaged in your YouTube videos for longer.
They genuinely have higher interest to engage with your content and naturally, you would assume that they are more likely to engage with you or maybe buy your service or your product or whatever it is that you’ve got.
So Magda, how do you engage with an audience when it doesn’t come naturally? long-form captions are really good. long-form copywriting on your advertising that educates and motivates your prospects. Now, you might make them problem aware, but once they’re problem aware, they’re going to start looking elsewhere as well. You are probably only one of many people that can help solve that problem. You’ve just got to make sure if you make them problem aware that you’re also educating and motivating them to come back to you.
And the same goes for videos. People will consume a lot longer video if they’re naturally interested in it. So if you’re finding that your videos aren’t getting viewed very long, you’re either not engaging them or you’re not finding the right audience to put those videos in front of. So Magna, I really hope that one hopes. Good luck with it. And once we’ve got this live, we’ll send you a DM to let you know where this video is on YouTube and where the podcast episode is.
Scott K. You’re the next question mate. You got two questions so let’s head to the first one.
What do you do with cold people who you haven’t spoken to in a year? Good question man. There are a few ways that we would engage a cold audience that hasn’t talked to or seen anything from you for a little while.
A really good way of engaging a cold audience for a short period of time is putting them in a Facebook audience or an Instagram audience.
You can take a database of people. If you’ve got their name and contact details, you can chuck them into a Facebook audience or a Google audience and start showing them ads about the top of funnel brand awareness, who you are.
Once again, going back to Magda’s question, you can educate them and motivate them and make sure that they are starting to form an informed decision on your brand or product or service and sequentially you can then start getting those cold people a little bit more interested in you so that when you do start interacting with them a little bit further down the funnel further, they are genuinely wanting to engage with your brand.
Now, that sounds all romantic, but it doesn’t always work and it can take a long time to reengage people.
The next way is you can reengage them.
If you’ve got a proper CRM, like an email nurturing platform or an email database, MailChimp is included in that. If you’ve got something like MailChimp, you can send everyone in your database an email.
But the chances are, you’re going to have a massive unsubscribe rate and you’re going to have a massive bounce rate and you might even get flagged as being spammy through Google and Microsoft and that would really mess up how you send your emails in the future.
So, if you’re going to engage cold people, you have to give them the option to opt-out fairly quickly.
We recently did this with a big audience and we actually gave them the option to unsubscribe straight away. A way clearer on how they could do it and we let them do it and we didn’t try and hold them to receiving another email from us.
But what we did in that email was provide a ton of value upfront.
We knew they were our ideal customers. We have talked to them in the past, we’d met them at trade shows, we’d interacted with them, or they’d downloaded something from us in the past. We knew they were kind of ideal but we just needed to make sure that they were aware of who we are again.
So we literally sent out an email saying, “Hey, we’ve been really bad and we haven’t sent any emails forever, I think it was 18 months, but we’ve got this valuable thing that we’d love to share with you today.” And then downloading or them engaging with that is a sign that they are actually interested or engaged in what you’re doing.
You can bring these cold people back into your influence or your sphere by offering something that’s valuable, right? Marketing is a give and take. You’ve got to give something valuable to be able to take the opportunity to email them back again or to promote things to them again.
Now I feel like the deep dot grice stuff that you can do, what do you do with cold people who you haven’t spoken to in a year?
Well, you can also get tricky. Say we’ve got salesletter.com.au is our domain name and I send emails from [email protected]. Now, if you spam too many people with that email address as I said before, servers will flag you and you’ll never get an email into anyone’s inbox again.
If you wanted to be someone unethical but you wanted to get a high rate to either get people unsubscribing faster or if you wanted to get the message out to more people, what you could do is use a platform like MailShake, is a mass sending email platform and you can actually… What we’d recommend doing.
Now, this is only for the use of good, right? This is only if you’re trying to really unsubscribe as many people as you can before you start plugging them into your normal CRM and nurturing them back up.
What we would do in MailShake is, say if I had salesletter.com.au and I use [email protected], I would go and get salesletter.com. Completely separate URL, completely separate domain name. And then I’ll put [email protected].
Now, what I can do is plug all that database into a platform like MailShake and send out some emails. Now, always provide value first, and you are ultimately trying to call the list of anyone who’s not interested in you.
But when you send with MailShake and when you send something with the .com instead of the .com.au, even if you do get a high bounce rate or a high unsubscribe rate or a high spam rate, you’re not damaging your main domain name and you’re not damaging your email address for future use.
So, Scott, I hope that clears that up. There’s a good way of doing it. There’s a not so good way of doing it. All I encourage you is to be ethical in how you do it because no one likes spam email coming into their inbox.
All right, Scott, your next question was, do you close the sale with the prospect so that they know that maybe it’s actually a no?
I’m going to interpret this one by how I think.
When closing a sale, so when talking to someone and try and do business with them, do you try and let them down slowly if you don’t want to work with them? That’s what I think you’re trying to say here.
So that they know that a maybe is actually a no. Does that mean if you’re saying, “Maybe we could work with you,” but really in the back of the head you’re going, “No, why the hell would I work with you?”
If that’s the instance, why would not you tell them no?
Like they’re wasting your time on the phone. They’re wasting valuable resources that you’ve got. They might be a contact in a database that you’re paying good money for. So, if that’s what you mean mate by trying to ease them out of it slowly by saying maybe when you really don’t want to work with them, why not be truthful?
I’m not sure if that’s what you meant by that question, but comment below Scott if you watch this or listen to this and let me know and maybe we can come back and refine that.
Maybe I’ll even get you on the show and we can have a chat with you and refine that one. So, guys, that’s it for this episode. Short and sweet. Two questions. I’m going to go back to back in producing other episodes straight away. But Josh out there has asked me just to talk quickly about our 36 point checklist.
We developed a 36 point checklist, which is for Facebook advertising.
Now, we built this because it’s super, super valuable to know how much knowledge you have on the Facebook advertising platform. Now, it might be because you’re running the ads yourself and you want to just have a quick refresher.
This 36 point checklist has been designed by our team who are on the platform every day. It’s kind of what we see in our larger order that we get people to pay us for. These 36 points are the main things that we see that people do go wrong the most.
It’s super valuable for your own knowledge and testing yourself out. We send it to a ton of people as a lead magnet just to get them on the straight and narrow the workout if their knowledge of Facebook advertising is up to scratch. But what Josh wanted me to talk to you about is this thing is extremely valuable if you’ve got someone else running your ads.
So, if you’re currently paying a freelancer or if you’ve got an agency running your advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
Or even if you’ve got an internal staff member that runs your ads and maybe you think they’re not quite up to scratch and if you think that your agency doesn’t quite know what they’re doing.
Or if you think that you’ve got a freelancer who’s really testing and measuring on your ad spend in your account and you’re calling it and teaching them as you go, this test would be really good for you to go through because it’s going to give you a bit of a click-through and understanding of what’s actually happening on your account.
It goes through things like looking at third-party and first-party cookies to make sure that’s set up correctly. It’s going to go look at audiences and how you’ve created some audiences.
Are you using things like lookalike audiences on your account? It’s just a really high level 10 minute process just to see if you’re doing the most with your account that you can be. And if you’re not, it’s got some hints and tips in there on what you can do to make your results a little bit better.
Go ahead. There’s going to be a link right here, right? Let’s put a link to the 36 point checklist that you can go and download and get some information. We’ll put a link in the description as well.
But that checklist is really basically a litmus test which takes 10 minutes to find out if your ad account is healthy or not. Now, if it’s completely unhealthy, reach out to us because we’d love to explain that checklist a little bit more. We’d love to give you a little bit of a hand.
Cool guys, that’s it. That’s three questions. Ask Magda and Scott K., thanks very much guys.
We appreciate the time that you took to ask those questions of us and I loved answering them for you. Scott just asked quickly. He did ask what this thing is. Everyone that asks us a question or any guests that we have on, we actually tell them that they can ask anything about one of the products up on the wall. A lot of these products are actually from customers of ours that send them in because they want it to be there and they want it to be seen.
This is a little bit special though, this is a Pullman tamp for coffee making. It’s a Barista tamp and it’s designed that you tamp down the coffee grounds before you put an espresso machine. This is my tamp.
For those of you that don’t know, over 10 years ago I owned a cafe and ran a coffee roastery. This was my first professional tamp that I made and literally this thing was doing three to 10 kilos of coffee a day.
So 300 to 1000 coffees a day, seven days a week. These things had some use and that’s a bit of a memory for me. That was the first business that I ever owned as a 25-year-old. I’m now on 37 this year. So 12 years ago.
Yeah, that’s a coffee tamp, mate. That’s where that comes from and that’s the history around that.
Awesome guys. We’ve got a couple of weeks left of the world’s toughest marketing question competition. Now, I want you to ask us a question, so ask in the comments below on YouTube or Instagram.
If you’re listening on a podcast, hunt us down and ask and comment on YouTube or Instagram because you can go in the draw to win $50,000 in ad spend.
We are going to give someone the chance to spin the wheel and win $50,000 cash, which can be used on Facebook advertising or Google advertising. I’d love it to be you. So drop a comment below.
Scott, I’ll give you another entry if you ask that question with a bit more clarity. All right, cool guys. Love your work.
It’s Dave from BidPixel. Ask questions. By the way, if you’re on YouTube, can you subscribe, like, and hit that little notification because we’d love to reach out to you and let you know when we’ve got more of these questions coming up. All right, thanks guys.
Have a good afternoon.
