Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Paul Ramondo, who helps small business owners and entrepreneurs generate highly-qualified leads and sales using Facebook ads and digital marketing funnels.
Ramondo divulges how to use the tools that are available both intra-Facebook and extra-Facebook to find your audience, refine them, build an audience avatar, build an ad set for targeting so you can then run ads and test to see what resonates and what doesn't resonate with your target audience.
“It’s important to define what the internal emotions are in which your product or service solves or activates for your audience, and how that relates to the avatar that you're targeting,” said Ramondo.
Ramondo recommends spending $5 on targeting a cold audience in a cold audience campaign and $5 a day targeting a warm audience, which are based off your retargeting audiences and include retargeting people who have visited your website, retargeting your email list, retargeting people who have engaged with your Instagram or Facebook profile, etc. and then run ads variable to the audience that you're speaking to.
“Customize to the audience that you're speaking to because the way that you speak to a cold audience is going to be different from the way you speak to someone that's already brand aware,” said Ramondo. “A warm audience already knows who you are, whereas, a cold audience needs to learn about who you are. You need to build trust, you need to build rapport with them before you can actually get them to take out their wallet and buy from you.”
Paul Ramondo can be found at paulramondo.com and social media channels including: Instagram, YouTube and Facebook.
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Transcript:
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Crystal (01:10):
But I literally do have dreams of being a ninja. I don't know why. I think it's because I basically bust in any room at any time and everyone hears me coming, but my dream would-
Paul Ramondo (01:20):
That sounds like the opposite of a ninja my girl.
Crystal (01:23):
I know that's my point. I think that's what I really have dreams of being so quiet and literally in an all black get up sneaking around, sneaking up on people, and it just won't ever happen.
Scott (01:34):
Are these actual dreams or are you talking figuratively?
Crystal (01:38):
Maybe they're like dreams, aspiration dreams.
Scott (01:42):
Because Paul, you may not know this about Crystal but she's also a hip hop dancer.
Crystal (01:45):
I am.
Paul Ramondo (01:45):
I love that.
Scott (01:47):
So the problem is I imagine you creeping into a room that's got great music thumping. It all goes to pot because you can't...
Crystal (01:54):
I can't. I'm probably going to need on eight beats-
Scott (01:56):
Like, "What is that?"
Crystal (01:58):
Exactly. It's just me hip hopping into a room trying to be a ninja. But I guess we all have aspirations. You guys chose to be entrepreneurs. And here I am trying to be a hip hop dancer at 38-
Paul Ramondo (02:11):
A hip hop ninja.
Crystal (02:12):
Yeah hip hop ninja.
Scott (02:12):
I can't think of a better segue into this amazing episode that we're going to have. Welcome everybody. This is Small Biz Buzz. And today we're going to have an... I mean, you don't have a great episode... You can't not have a great episode when it starts out with ninja hip hop dancing. So welcome.
Crystal (02:27):
I mean I'm pretty sure. And I have to say, Paul, you were like... I'm not going to tell you the truth. I've been doing social media marketing for 10 years. So one, I'm really excited to have someone on here to talk social today. And two, I almost didn't go to your session because I thought, I don't know, it's hard to like really after 10 years to learn too much more about ads unless you're not really staying in touch with what's new. So I was like, "I don't know." Then I thought, you know what? I don't see another session I really will want to check out.
Crystal (02:58):
So I went to your session at Social Media Marketing World and I was sitting there thinking, "This guy is the Facebook ninja." You had secrets that were new to me and I was really impressed. I mean, I'm an organic lover of heart at all social things, but we still boost posts and it's so important to know about ads. But you took two of my loves and merged them.
Paul Ramondo (03:21):
Oh, thank you Crystal.
Crystal (03:21):
You took research, which I am a nerd. I heard you say you were a nerd too, so very nerdy. I love research. Scott, I know Scott loves research as well. But you took research and you combined it with Facebook ads and I... My mind was blown. You were looking at things I've looked at for years and looking at it in a different way that gave me hope to go back and check things out.
Crystal (03:46):
So I'm so grateful that you wanted to join us today and wanted to chat about some of the secrets. I'll call them secrets because they just were a totally new way of looking at something. But I was so excited to see if you would come on the show and I'm really excited to have you on to help other small business owners look at their ads a little bit differently and hopefully get them what they need to really shine in their ads.
Paul Ramondo (04:07):
Oh, thank you Crystal. What an introduction. Hello, everyone. I'm super pumped to be here. And yeah, thank you for such a lovely introduction Crystal and thank you for coming to my session at Social Media Marketing World. It was lots of fun. Lots and lots of fun.
Crystal (04:18):
It was great.
Paul Ramondo (04:18):
I'm hoping we can bring as much value today as what it sounds like I brought to you at Social Media Marketing World. So I'm excited.
Crystal (04:26):
For sure. I think you will.
Scott (04:26):
Paul, for all of our listeners who weren't out partying at Social Media Marketing World, which is basically just a party as we all know-
Paul Ramondo (04:33):
Hey, look, there was a lot of lessons that we learned there and that was in between all the drinking, you know?
Scott (04:38):
That's right.
Crystal (04:38):
Yes.
Scott (04:39):
Give them a rundown of who you are and what you're about in the world.
Paul Ramondo (04:43):
For sure, for sure. Hey, guys, my name is Paul Ramondo. I'm a massive nerd for all things digital marketing and tech. And I guess the nutshell version of what I do is help small business owners and entrepreneurs generate highly-qualified leads and sales using Facebook ads and digital marketing funnels.
Scott (05:02):
Great.
Crystal (05:02):
So I just want to dive right in, because we have a lot to unpack in a short show here. And I'm going to try to give them as much as they can. But one of the things I was most interested in is one, how you use research further than I've really ever looked at it in terms of the areas you're looking at and how you expand that from what you can get on Facebook natively and into just like a Google search. And then specifically, the thing that keeps coming back to my mind was the example you gave about the music festival. So I'm wondering if you can share a little bit about both of those things?
Paul Ramondo (05:36):
Yeah. For sure, for sure. When it comes to research... I mean, there's so many different types of research you can do on Facebook, and what I was speaking specifically about at Social Media Marketing World was cold audience research. So how do you find your perfect audience avatar? Where are they living on Facebook? Where are they? And how do you define that avatar and then go out and use the tools that are available both intra-Facebook and then extra-Facebook to find that audience, refine them, and then build an audience avatar, build an ad set for targeting, so you can then run ads and test to see what resonates and what doesn't resonate with your target audience.
Paul Ramondo (06:18):
I guess, taking from the top, I think one of the most important things that you can do before you run any Facebook ad especially to a cold audience is working out what that definition of that avatar is. So who is that person? Where do they live? What do they do for fun? What aspirational values and attitudes do they have that motivate them or scare them when you're talking about the path to purchase? So what are the internal emotions in which your product or service solves or activates for your audience, and how does that relate to the avatar that you're targeting? And then on top of-
Crystal (06:55):
Which I have to say is actually one of the most difficult parts of Facebook marketing because it's great they have all these options of all these ways to find people. But what happens is if you work with a team, you have your marketing team tell you, "Well, this is the type of demographics that everyone has. These are the people we're looking for." But not every demographic can be found in Facebook targeting. So that, what you're describing is one of the most complicated things. But I think the way you went about it just really enlightened me and gave it a more simple approach really.
Paul Ramondo (07:29):
Yeah, for sure. Demographics are super, super important. The age, the gender, the location, all the basic kind of roots, top level attributes about your audience avatar, those demographic attributes, they are very important. And when I sit down and I'd build out an avatar, for either a product centric or a customer centric business, which I can get into more in a second, I dive deep. So you've got the demographics, but then you also want to look at the sociographics, right?
Paul Ramondo (07:59):
So let's say you've got a definition of... Let's say... Let's do a live workshop. Give me a business example. Give me something to sell and who I'm trying to sell it to.
Crystal (08:13):
Let's do... Scott, should we go gym owner? What are you feeling today, Scott?
Scott (08:19):
Yeah, let's do it. Let's do gym owner.
Crystal (08:21):
Okay. Let's do like a gym owner.
Paul Ramondo (08:22):
Gym owner, cool. Now, caveat for everyone listening, this is a gym owner in a post-COVID world, when everything is back to normal. Okay?
Crystal (08:31):
Okay. Sounds good.
Paul Ramondo (08:32):
All right. Because the avatar, and interestingly on that, the avatar and the challenges and the aspirations along the path to purchase for the target audience of a gym owner during what's happening right now with COVID, and depending on what they're selling is going to be very different to what they're usually selling post-COVID right. So let's just do post-COVID, right?
Crystal (08:53):
Yep.
Scott (08:53):
Great.
Paul Ramondo (08:55):
Cool. So a gym owner, they let's say... Depends on what kind of gym. Firstly, what kind of gym they're running, right? So they could be running a women's only gym, they could be running a gym with multiple locations, like a chain, a gym chain, they could be running like an F45 type gym, they could be running a bought traditional bodybuilder gym and I'm going to speak to what I know. So I speak that massive gym rat back in the day and used to back... When I was younger, I used to spend a lot of time in the gym with bodybuilding champions and dudes that I learned a lot off in terms of training.
Paul Ramondo (09:30):
Now, the gym that I used to work out, I used to spend six to seven days a week there. It was very much an old school Arnold Schwarzenegger really-
Scott (09:40):
The real deal.
Paul Ramondo (09:40):
Old school equipment. Yeah. And it was part of its vibe. It was part of its lure. Now, in describing that you can already kind of see that there is a specific avatar for that gym because your... Sally, the 23-year-old that wants to get beach ready in time for summer, that may want to drop a few kilos or a few pounds, depending on whereabouts and what system you use to measure, she's not going to enjoy the vibe and the ambience and the atmosphere of a traditional bodybuilding gym. She might be looking for something completely different in terms of a gym experience. So automatically, we know that Sally is not going to be in our target audience. And our target audience stereotypically speaking for this hypothetical bodybuilding gym is going to be say, men between the ages of... And some women, but primarily men between the ages of say 18 and 25 years old, or maybe 18 and 35 years old.
Paul Ramondo (10:34):
Now, if there's only one location for that gym, then that gym is going to be in what's known as a customer centric business. That's because it's a local business. And you'll find that most local businesses are customer-centric businesses. So that gym, you're basically going to be targeting your target avatar within a certain geographic radius around the location of that gym.
Paul Ramondo (10:54):
Now let's say that that gym is also part of a chain. There's a chain of these bodybuilding gyms. So if that's the case, you'd then be targeting the geographic location around each address of all of the local or each individual location on the gym, right? Now, let's say that we want to find who that avatar is on Facebook beyond the geographical location of the gym. And let's say that the reason we're wanting to do that is because we are also selling... This gym is now also one that sells its own proprietary blends of protein and pre-workouts and thermogenics, so it's got a massive product line in which it sells digitally, which extends beyond the physical service in which it offers in terms of lifting weights and getting shredded in the physical location.
Paul Ramondo (11:45):
So we want to now generate ecommerce sales for that gym with our target audience, but now our target audience isn't locally centered, it is within the entire geographic region in which we're operating in. So let's say that that gym is also a supplement store, and it operates and sells locally within Australia. Cool.
Paul Ramondo (12:06):
Now, what I've done is I've defined two examples of what a... An example of what a customer-centric business is, the customer centric business being the geographic location of that local gym, right? That's a customer centric business because it's a local business. And then on top of that, it's now a product-centric business as well, because as an ecommerce aspect to it, which sells to our target audience, which lives all over Australia.
Paul Ramondo (12:30):
Now, we go back and we define that avatar, let's say and going back to the same example, the avatar is the same as the people that go and lift weights in the gym, 18 to 35-year-old men, except now, they're located all over Australia. So we need to go and find who is our perfect avatar that would be most likely, most likely to respond positively to ads that we're running in their feed to purchase our product and the product in this situation is the ecommerce aspect of the protein or the weightlifting supplements, thermogenics, pre-workout, whatever.
Paul Ramondo (13:06):
So you have to now start your information search and one of the best ways you can start an information search for this is by using the Audience Insights tool.
Crystal (13:15):
This is my favorite part.
Paul Ramondo (13:16):
Yes. I'm just jumping all over the place because my mind is just active in real time. We also need to work out in terms of defining that avatar, we need to work out the demographic profile like I touched on earlier, we need to work out the sociographic profile. So I think sociographic profile being things like what platforms and channels does this Jack's 25-year-old weight lifter dude consume? What websites does he go on? Does he go on bodybuilding.com, does he go on sixpackshortcuts.com or sixpacksecrets.com? What blogs and content does he consume? What magazines does he consume? What fitness idols and icons does he look up to? Does he look up to someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger or does he follow an influencer like Zach Parnell?
Paul Ramondo (14:03):
Who are the people and the idols and the influencers and the thought leaders that this target audience member follows and consumes on a regular basis, right? Now on top of that, what kind of platforms and software do they use during their workouts or around their fitness life? So do they use Strava, do they use MyFitnessPal to track their calories and macronutrients and micronutrients, do they use Nike Run Club, do they use any Apple Health Kit? Just think really laterally about what platforms and tools and apps this specific avatar is using. And of course, this is going to be different for every single avatar in which you build.
Scott (14:40):
Paul, earlier, you talked about trying to get to understand the attitudes and sort of the internal emotions of your target. Are these what you've just gone through, these sociographic factors, is this sort of the proxy that you use to understand the emotional and sort of attitudinal characteristics of the audience?
Paul Ramondo (15:02):
That's a great question. So basically, you've got your demographics, which we discussed earlier. Then we got your sociographics, examples, which I just provided then. And then in terms of what you're referring to, which is the third layer of the cake, we've got the psychographic profile.
Paul Ramondo (15:16):
So the psychographic profile being, okay, I'm a 25-year-old dude, I've started lifting weights and I want to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I don't look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. So what do I have to do in order for me to transform my physique to become the next Arnold Schwarzenegger or become jacked and shredded? So psychologically, that would be an aspirational lever in which we can pull on within our marketing creative with our marketing messaging, and also allows us to further refine the targeting that we're doing because we know that this subset of our audience, this avatar, specifically aspirationally wants to get huge, which means if you want to transform your physique, to say you want to add 20 or 10-15 kilos of muscle mass onto your physique and your say 70 kilos, and I apologize I'm using the metric system for around listing that's based in America-
Crystal (16:10):
I know. A kilo in America is much different than a kilo that you're talking about. I'm watching too much Narcos.
Paul Ramondo (16:19):
Oh, vibes. Vibes. I mean, yes, a kilo in America, but then by definition would be a good way to lose weight, if you know what I mean. So, basically, in order to transform your physique, and for that audience to transform their physique, and you know that's psychologically something that they're aspiring to, that gives you an insight into, okay, what does our service that we're offering at this gym or what does our service that we're offering through our weightlifting supplements, how can that help our audience achieve that goal?
Paul Ramondo (16:50):
So you would then build... Say that would give you an idea for content so you can give them advice in terms of supplements for weight gainers, you can give them best ways do a clean bulk or best ways do a dirty bulk, you could teach them about macronutrient tracking, you could teach them about the best scientifically proven exercises for you to do in terms of lifting heavy versus their volumes of reps, that kind of educational base top of the funnel content, which you could then start running to that target audience that wants to add on that 15 to 20 kilos, so they can become Arnold Schwarzenegger, Greek god looking and worthy. Do you know what I mean?
Crystal (17:31):
I mean, who wouldn't want to?
Scott (17:32):
And worthy.
Crystal (17:33):
I mean Paul, when you're looking... For a lot of small business owners, they don't necessarily... They don't happen to Audience Insights. They don't necessarily get all the way around. So can you tell them some of the things you have been able to find in an Audience Insights research and how you've taken that to expand your audience that you're targeting, or narrow down depending on what you're attempting to do? Because there might be times you would want to do either of those?
Paul Ramondo (17:59):
Yeah. For sure, for sure. So it goes back to... Everything stems from the top. If you're doing kind of like a step-by-step look at all of this, and I appreciate that I'm jumping all over the place, step one is you really need to find your avatar. You want to know your avatar better than you know yourself. So avatar, you want to know their demographics, give them a name as well. So we've got Sam, who's 25 years old, who lives in, say, Perth, Western Australia and he wants to become like Arnold Schwarzenegger. And sociographically, you know of his interests and his attributes and platforms that he uses, like MyFitnessPal and Strava.
Paul Ramondo (18:38):
And on top of that, psychologically, in terms of his profile, you know that he wants to become jacked. That's our avatar. Now from that avatar, you use that as the foundation for your interest targeting and your interest research. So what you want to do is take that avatar, and then you want to say open up a Google Sheet or open up a Word doc, and basically narrow it down any potential interests that this specific avatar that you've defined for your business might be interested in.
Paul Ramondo (19:05):
And then, you want to take that and you want to go over to Audience Insights and then you want to start playing around with Audience Insights. So the first thing you want to do is put in the demographic information. So now, we're looking for people in Australia between the ages of 18 and 35, based on the avatar we defined earlier and then we want to go down and start adding in interests. And those interests are going to come from our audience avatar worksheet, which we've basically worked out. So you might type in interested in MyFitnessPal and see if that works, see if that comes up as an interest for you to target.
Paul Ramondo (19:39):
Now, let's say we just put that one interest in Audience Insights, My Fitness Pal, which is the app that allows you to track your macronutrients and a bunch of other stuff, excuse me, and then on Audience Insights, you want to navigate... So when you're looking at Audience Insights, you want to navigate basically toward the middle of the page and you'll find a section called page likes, and you want to click on the page likes tab. And what that's going to do is it's going to show you all of the pages related to the interest that you've just put in MyFitnessPal and it's also underneath that going to show you the affinity of other pages in which are suggested based on the interests that you are now searching for inside of Audience Insights.
Paul Ramondo (20:23):
Let's say we've done the demographics, we add in say audience... So we add in My Fitness Pal, and you're like, "Cool. Another app that this person might be interested in is Strava." Right? So you type in Strava. And that comes up as an interest. Cool. Now what that's going to do is it's going to change the affinity, it's going to change the suggestions of page likes in that tab that we've just opened inside of the same tool, inside of Audience Insights and you're going to see the affinity and affinity is a measure of how likely the audience that you're building off the interest that you're targeting, how likely that audience is to respond positively to your ads and your content that you run on Facebook compared to everyone else on Facebook, right?
Paul Ramondo (21:08):
So it's a measure of as you add more interest in, the affinity score is a really good way to work out, okay, if the affinity score is increasing, and if it's not dropping too dramatically, then we know that we're kind of on the right track, because we want to find audiences which have the highest level of affinity compared to other people on Facebook from the interest that we're targeting. Does that make sense?
Scott (21:36):
Two days ago, I think we did our webinar talking about lifecycle automaion. Lifecycle automation is the proven framework that we created over a decade ago, that helps businesses to design the perfect customer journey that will lead them to consistent growth. And right at the beginning, under the system of collecting leads, which is one of the first three systems, we have this whole concept of targeting and the reason is because we recognize how clear it is for you as a business owner to understand, I like the way that you said it Paul, you've got to understand your ideal target customer even better than yourself. Is that really possible? Oh, I guess we don't really look at ourselves, do we?
Paul Ramondo (22:15):
Well, look, yeah, you want to you want to basically... Yeah, I say you want to know them better than yourself, you want to know them better than your best friend or your partner or your mom and the reason that I say that is because one of the biggest mistakes that I see when people sit down to do targeting, specifically, audience research and avatar targeting is that they mistakenly assume that they are the target audience. And sometimes that's correct. You could be your target audience, but that's probably 1% of the time that you are literally the person that you're selling to. And even in that 1%, you're still not your target audience because you have a cognitive bias against what you're selling because you're romantic about what it is that you're selling. You're romantic about your business.
Paul Ramondo (22:57):
So you really need to psychologically disconnect and emotionally disconnect yourself from the targeting and the research process and think, "Okay, I'm not talking to myself, I need to talk to the people that I'm selling to."
Scott (23:08):
Yes. And you have to constantly remind yourself that. And so what we talked about... What we talk about is the need for people to climb inside the head of their prospects. And so, listeners, as you're listening to what Paul's talking about, he's giving fantastic and concrete examples for ways that you can basically use Facebook, you can think of Facebook as sort of this... I don't want to make this political at all, but whether you like it or not, Facebook is in the heads of a lot of people because they're able to watch the behaviors of a lot of people.
Scott (23:40):
And so what we're talking about here is the ability you have to go in and use the Audience Insights tool to learn things about your audience that may not otherwise be obvious. And so I just think it's super powerful because the value of this is number one, it's going to impact the way that you might be able to leverage a tool like Facebook to find more people like that. But even more than that, it's going to allow you to adapt the message and the conversation to really meet the needs of those people. And again, some of those needs are not completely evident.
Scott (24:11):
And so, the concept of going in and adding these characteristics, and then understanding from Facebook that look, a lot of people that have that characteristic also have these page likes. And not only that, you can say, now with your affinity score, you are understanding what the likelihood is of that person actually responding. It's unheard of that you can have that amount of worth just sitting there at your computer. It's amazing.
Crystal (24:36):
And I'll tell you, who knows me better than myself, is Facebook. If you know your avatar, you can get to the people you're trying to sell to or trying to serve, if you're using Facebook and the tools they have correctly. I mean, I just think being able to go into Audience Insights, everyone first of all, all small businesses out there should be looking at Audience Insights. It's something I do just to understand a little bit better, but what I really enjoyed about your presentation Paul was seeing about how you take that and use it to really... That affinity score thing is taking it next step, and then being able to translate that to your ad targeting is really next level.
Crystal (25:20):
But if you're not even in Audience Insights, get in there. It's important to understand who's already... If you already have some kind of audience on your Facebook page, who's already engaging with you? Who's already liking your page. And that is important.
Scott (25:35):
I'm assuming there are some people listening today that don't have a clue what Audience Insights really is. So let's start with the very... Let's pretend I know absolutely nothing. And so what is Audience Insights? Is it some paid tool I have to use? How do I get access to it? Is it really something I could go leverage? Do I need to hire someone to do that? Let's start with the basics.
Paul Ramondo (25:55):
For sure. So, great news fam. Totally free. Love that. Love a free tool. Built into the back end of Facebook.
Crystal (26:02):
Me too.
Paul Ramondo (26:02):
So let's go super elementary, how to access the Audience Insights tool. You want to go into Facebook's Ads Manager, and then in the top left hand corner of Facebook Ad Manager, you're going to click on the little drawer in the top left hand corner, and then that drawer is going to drop down and then you're going to see a bunch of columns. And in those columns, you're going to see Audience Insights. And you just want to click on Audience Insights or depending on which version of Facebook using, it might be called audience research. And if you can't find it, just simple like most things, you're a simple Google search away, how do I find the Audience Insights tool on Facebook, and then you're going to click on that. And then once you find it, you're going to click on that, and then you're going to be able to start doing all of the stuff that we was talking about earlier before the break.
Scott (26:43):
Great. And then to kind of just get back caught up to speed with what you've been talking about. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to take our own experiential learnings that let us know, oh, we know that our audiences have these types of interests and we're going to go start plugging those in to find out if the things that we know our customers have interest in to find out if those are actually something that's registered on the Facebook network basically, right?
Paul Ramondo (27:06):
Correct.
Scott (27:07):
Because not everything I have interest in is necessarily something that's targetable on Facebook, right?
Crystal (27:13):
Correct.
Paul Ramondo (27:13):
You took the words straight out of my mouth and that's something really, really important for everyone to know. So just because they don't know everything, but they don't know everything. Just because... Back in the day, pre-Cambridge Analytica, a little fun fact for everyone, pre-Cambridge Analytica scandal, you could do so much more-
Crystal (27:30):
You could do so much more.
Paul Ramondo (27:33):
Oh my gosh, honey.
Crystal (27:34):
The Wild West.
Paul Ramondo (27:36):
Oh, it was... I'll tell you what, it was the Wild West. It's scary in terms of data but as a marketer, it's like, "Give me that data. Let's use it because I can do some cool stuff with this." Now, you can still do really powerful stuff with the data at your disposal. It's just not as easy. And a great point that I want to draw back on is interest that you can target through Audience Insights, and through the Ad Set Targeting layers of Facebook don't equal page likes. So just because you can target say, gym, just the broad category of interests of gym inside of Audience Insights and the ad set manager doesn't mean that that is targeting the page on Facebook called gym.
Paul Ramondo (28:21):
Let's say that you... And a really great way to spot test this is to literally go if we're using a really broad, broad keyword like gym, we type in gym into basically normal Facebook, and we see the Facebook page for gym sharp, I don't know if there's a page, just hypothetically speaking. Now, let's say that hypothetically, that gym page shows up and there's 6 million people that liked this page. Cool. So gym has 6 million people that like that page, but then you go into Audience Insights, you type in gym and it has 10 or 12 million people that are interested in gym.
Paul Ramondo (29:01):
Now, the reason that there's a disconnect between the interest that you're targeting or researching and the actual page like is because page likes don't equal interests. The way in which Facebook's back end categorizes interests is not the same in which it categorizes page likes. That's something really important to keep in mind. Because if you're targeting gym and you think you're targeting the Facebook page related to gym, most of the time, it's not the same. That's something really important to keep in mind.
Scott (29:28):
But you are... Because of their evaluation of the way people interact, they're saying, "We're going to put you in... We're going to target people who are most likely to be interested in gym." Right?
Paul Ramondo (29:41):
That is correct. That is correct.
Scott (29:42):
Great.
Paul Ramondo (29:42):
And then it comes down to what we were saying before about defining we're working out and optimizing your affinity score because if you put an interest into your targeting, which is gym, and you might think that it's a great interest to target... For example, let's say that we're using the same example as before, we put MyFitnessPal, and we put in Strava as to the interest, I think that's what I said before that we're targeting in a hypothetical example. And then the affinity score let's say there's 75,000 people in this audience at this point, and then you put in gym and the affinity score before for the top suggestions of page likes we see sitting at 363 and then you put in gym, and the audience size grows from 75,000 to say, 10,075,000 and then you say the affinity score for the suggestions of the top pages now drop from 363 down to say 52.
Paul Ramondo (30:40):
And what you've then done is you've added in and you've built a way larger audience, but the likelihood of this audience now responding positively to what you're going to be sending to them compared to other people on Facebook, because the affinity score has dropped is a lot lower. So they're a lot less likely to respond to the creative and respond to the ads that you're running because you've made it so much broader.
Scott (31:02):
So that means somebody who's going to go advertise on Facebook, they could start by just going into an ad and adding a bunch of targeting criteria, this tool... And then basically, if you do it that way, you're having to... By just investing the money, you're basically having to spend your money to figure out if that was a good approach?
Paul Ramondo (31:21):
Correct.
Scott (31:21):
And what Audience Insights is doing is basically saving you money from having to spend that, you're doing some preliminary research that gives you some indication about whether people are likely. And Paul, how does Facebook... I realized this is part of their algorithm, but are they using some historical activity in your own Facebook account to dictate whether there's an affinity with you? What's the general concept there?
Paul Ramondo (31:47):
Yes, that's a great question. I'm going to speak to my understanding and just with every advice and just as a blanket rule, and I say this all the time, just because I've got lots of experience and I do well with Facebook Ads doesn't mean that what I'm saying is gospel, I always recommend that I've run tests and iterates and then a lot of stuff in terms of as it relates to the algorithm side of things, a lot of it is... It's kind of all kept a bit hush hush. So my understanding, based on what I've read and from my own research testing, is that the way in which Facebook calculates the affinity score is based off a plethora of data points. It's based off your interaction history, how often you're logging in, the cumulative number of pages that you've liked that fit with inside a parent category, or umbrella category of what you've liked already.
Paul Ramondo (32:39):
And interestingly enough, if you are curious as to why you're seeing the certain ads that are targeted to you, so if you want to flip the script, and see, okay, I'm seeing all these ads rock up in my newsfeed, why am I seeing these ads rock up in my newsfeed? So for example, for my newsfeed personally, I see ads for software platforms like AgoraPulse. I see ads from Social Media Examiner, I see ads related to Facebook and Instagram marketing, I see ads related to building six figure businesses online.
Paul Ramondo (33:09):
Now, I know why I'm seeing those ads because I know what I interact with on Facebook, I know which pages I like. But what you can now do is on the personal side of Facebook, you can go into the settings and I can't remember exactly where it lies, but there's an area in your personal settings.
Crystal (33:25):
It's on the right.
Paul Ramondo (33:25):
Yeah. There's an area in your personal settings-
Crystal (33:27):
On the right little caret.
Paul Ramondo (33:29):
Yep. And you can see all of the pages in which you've liked and all of the pages over the history of your profile on Facebook. And then keep in mind that on top of that, it's also going to be based on the Instagram pages that you follow and the Instagram accounts you interact with. So Facebook takes all that data, all those interactions, all that user history, all those data points across Facebook and Instagram and they put you into these different silos of categories.
Paul Ramondo (33:54):
And then that's where you fall into or those the umbrellas in which it categorizes you. For example, I like a bunch of pages related to fitness on Facebook, therefore, I have expressed an interest in pages related to the gym, therefore, I'm in that gym interest targeting category [crosstalk 00:34:10] a million people.
Crystal (34:11):
One time, right after a breakup, I was on Facebook and I got this ad for how to deal with a breakup or something like that. And the social media marketer in me was dying to know why they targeted me. I'm still convinced they have the mic turned on and are using that but whatever. That's-
Paul Ramondo (34:29):
Sorry. What they might have done is... Here's a little fun example. I love this stuff so much. You can do so many cool things with not only interest targeting, but behavioral targeting. And then you can like... And you get super nerdy, you can lay out all of this together.
Crystal (34:45):
Oh god, I love it.
Paul Ramondo (34:46):
So let's say that I'm working for an online ecommerce company that sells diamonds, specifically diamond rings. Now, everyone on Facebook shares so many aspects about their lives to the point where Facebook knows how long you've been in a relationship for, Facebook knows if you're engaged, Facebook knows that you were recently engaged, Facebook knows if you're about to get married, Facebook knows if you've just become divorced, Facebook knows if you've just gone from being in a relationship to single.
Paul Ramondo (35:18):
Why do they know that? Because through your personal profile attributes, you're telling Facebook what's going on in your life. So you change. Let's say you're in a relationship, taking your example and Crystal, you're in a relationship, and you had you're in a relationship on Facebook, and then you've changed your relationship status to single. What does that tell Facebook? All right, well, that tells Facebook that you are no longer in a relationship. So then in terms of the interest, not interest targeting, but behavioral targeting that you can do at that ad set level, you can target people that are recently single, I believe you still can do that. But I definitely know that you can target people that have been in a relationship or recently engaged or been in a relationship for X amount of years.
Paul Ramondo (35:58):
So if I'm working for this fictional diamond company and I want to run ads to promote these diamonds, then I'm going to be targeting people that have been a relationship for X amount of years and I'm going to split test that against people who've been just in a relationship versus people who've been in relationship for a few years and I'll split test that against people that have just gotten engaged. And then I'm going to run aspirational based content around these beautiful diamond rings and I'm going to split test that to both men and both women because you think that okay, well, the target audience realistically speaking hypothetically, should really be men because men are the ones that are typically going to be buying a diamond ring.
Paul Ramondo (36:38):
However, you also want to be targeting the women and you want to be split testing the women because the women are the ones who'd be like, "Hey, babe. I just saw this really cute ring. It's so cute. Don't you think it's cute?" And then like the... Again, all hypothetical, but you see where I'm going with this? And then the man's like, "Oh, yeah. It does look really cute. Which one do you like more? Interesting." And then he-
Scott (37:01):
And the split testing continues, yes.
Paul Ramondo (37:04):
Exactly.
Crystal (37:05):
I like when you do the split test of the actual scenario in two different voices. That's probably my favorite part of this call so far.
Paul Ramondo (37:10):
I appreciate that. Trying to make the learning easy for everyone.
Crystal (37:15):
I love it.
Paul Ramondo (37:15):
So then, the man then goes on to that same website, which is... There's two parts, there's two entry points for this funnel at this point and time. You've got the split test of the man and the woman and then you've got the woman telling the man, "Hey, this is a really cute ring. I think you should have a look at it." And the man's like, "Oh, this is the one that she wants. I'm going to make my wife to be real happy. Let's go." And then he goes... So he might not have been caught by the targeting that we did for men, he's been communicated IRL with the wife-to-be, so then he goes-
Crystal (37:46):
"In real life" for all of you out there.
Paul Ramondo (37:47):
Exactly. And then he goes on to the website, that specific website, diamond website that I'm now in hypothetically working for and then we Facebook Pixel them, we Facebook Pixel the man and then we can run retargeting ads to them at the bottom of the funnel. So we've basically just sidestepped the interest targeting for that man, because we've caught the woman that's then recommended that he check out that ring and then he loves her so he's like, "I'm going to go do some online shopping and see if I can afford this and all the rest of it." And then we pixel them and then we can retarget them based on website interactions and website activity if you set up your Facebook Pixel correctly for up to 180 days.
Crystal (38:23):
Okay, so mind blown out there for everyone. But what Paul just did, you might want to play it on slow or on repeat, he gave you a lot of free consulting advice here. He took you all the way from research to pixels and how to retarget. So I just want to say that is a lot and there's a reason experts like yourself have a very hefty client base because it is something that if you don't have all day every day to nerd out about social media, that you may want to look at hiring someone for.
Crystal (38:54):
However, what I will say is before you do that, I always think the best approach is to test things out yourself. So for small businesses, Paul, what would you say if they haven't really dabbled in it yet and they know now's the time for their business, how would you tell them to get started with Facebook ads are a main takeaway for kind of that first initial test?
Paul Ramondo (39:15):
100%. So many things to say, I'll start by addressing the timing nature of this episode and what's going on in the world. Facebook has a supply issue and there's a supply issue in two ways. One, is the supply issue in terms of Facebook has a limited amount of resources known as placements, in which it can run ads on at any given point in time. So placements being things like Instagram stories, Instagram feed, in stream video ads, right side newsfeed ads, mobile newsfeed ads, etc, etc. And they've also got a supply problem in terms of eyeballs. So at any given point in time, there is a limited amount so there's a capped amount of eyeballs that can consume ad content on that limited amount of supply of real estate in which you can run ads.
Paul Ramondo (40:02):
Now, when you think about and this is basic economics supply and demand, when you think about how Facebook ads and the cost of Facebook ads work, it's an auction. So at any given point in time, you are going up against other advertisers to get in front of your audience for the ads that you're running. Now, the price of that auction in terms of who wins, in terms of who's ads gets placed are a variable of the supply the eyeballs and the placements available, as well as the demand. Now, demand keeps... Up until this point in time, supply of eyeballs and the supply of placements has been limited and it's basically decreasing. So as supply decreases, the cost goes up and demand has also been increasing and as demand increases, basic economics price also goes up because you've got more people competing to get in front of your audience for a limited supply.
Paul Ramondo (40:55):
Now, what's happening at the moment, which is the first time that it's happened in years, especially since the IPO back in 2011, 2012, what's happening now is everyone is at home because of what's going on and everyone is now socializing and spending way more time on social media than what they were just compared to a month ago. So now, we have more of a high supply of eyeballs, which is now increasing the supply of people that we can advertise to which hypothetically, statistically would mean all other things ceteris paribus, so all things being equal, means that supplies increase which leads to a decrease in price.
Paul Ramondo (41:33):
Now, obviously, this is met by a lot more advertisers advertising in Facebook because of what's happening. But it also has been met by a decrease in demand because a lot of advertisers are cutting back on how much they're spending on ads because they're saving money because they're in very frugal, it's very tough economically, globally at the moment. So as a call to action, I've just explained to you how an auction on Facebook works. Now if you keep that in mind, I believe that right now it's one of the best times for you to get on board with Facebook, especially if you've never tried it before.
Paul Ramondo (42:01):
Because the ads are most likely going to be cheaper than what they would usually be even compared to say a month ago, because they've got so many more eyeballs to get in front of. Now, if you're starting out for the first time, I recommend using the steps that we've discussed already in terms of building a cold audience targeting. I also recommend playing around with retargeting and targeting your warmest audiences first, because... And also if you haven't set up the Facebook Pixel on your website, install the Facebook Pixel on your website yesterday, like it needs to be done. I can't stress that enough.
Crystal (42:30):
It's so easy.
Paul Ramondo (42:32):
It's so simple. In fact, the new tools on Facebook make it so simple and there's so many free YouTube videos that literally step by step, show you how to install it. And depending on what platform you're using, it could be as simple as creating the Pixel on Facebook, which takes like two clicks, and then copying your Pixel ID and then pasting it into the Pixel ID section of your platform supplier. If it's like Shopify, it's like a three- to four-click, five-minute install process. It's easy as pie, no coding, no developer needed.
Paul Ramondo (42:59):
And then in terms of starting out, start out with the amount of money that you would spend on a coffee every day. $5. Spend $5 targeting a cold audience in a cold audience campaign and $5 a day targeting a warm audience, which are based off your retargeting audiences and that could be retargeting people that have visited your website, it could be retargeting your email list, it could be retargeting people that have engaged with your Instagram or Facebook profile, and then run creative and run ads variable to the audience that you're speaking to.
Paul Ramondo (43:27):
So customize your creative and the language and the copy and the offer, and whether you're actually trying to sell something or whether you're just trying to provide value, customize that to the audience that you're speaking to because the way that you speak to a cold audience is going to be different to the way you speak to someone that's already brand aware. A warm audience already knows who you are, whereas, a cold audience needs to learn about who you are. You need to build trust, you need to build rapport with them before we can actually get them to take out their wallet and buy from you.
Crystal (43:53):
Oh my gosh. I could talk to you all day long Paul, but producers are already telling us we blew through all of our time. I can't even believe that. Well, I shouldn't say blew through it because that was a lot. It was like a whopper sized addition here. Right, Scott?
Paul Ramondo (44:07):
I love it.
Scott (44:07):
Ah yeah. It's so awesome. I think there may be some people out there that don't have a lot of experience and I think... I'm glad that you ended with there is a small way to start. There's a lot of anxiety about Facebook, and I've tried this and I haven't. So I love that we gave tools that allow people to go out and research in a way that can maybe set up the likelihood of success even more and also create insights about our audience. And I love that we gave them simple ways to start and super helpful stuff. I think finding more customers is something that I think almost every single business wants to do and there's obviously a lot of energy around Facebook.
Crystal (44:46):
100%. Paul, can you say where everyone can find you if they want to look up more or get some more information?
Paul Ramondo (44:52):
Absolutely, Crystal. My handle is Paul Ramondo on everything. That's P-A-U-L R-A-M-O-N-D-O. The best way to reach out to me is via Instagram, drop me a follow, send me a message. If you have any questions. I literally reply to every single message that I get. And yeah, from there, you can... It's basically Paul Ramondo on everything; paulramondo.com, Paul Ramondo Instagram, Paul Ramondo on YouTube, Facebook, etc, etc.
Scott (45:15):
Nice.
Crystal (45:16):
Oh my gosh. Well, thank you so much. That's actually guys for everyone out there, that's how I got a hold of him. So thank you Paul for responding to my DM.
Paul Ramondo (45:24):
Thank you for having me.
Crystal (45:24):
Thank you so much for all of your time today. It was so invaluable for everyone listening. Like I said, you taught this old dog some new tricks, so I appreciate it. And, man, we're going to have to have you on here again, talk about some Facebook stuff.
Paul Ramondo (45:37):
Would absolutely love to do that. Thank you so much Crystal and thank you so much, Scott. And thank you so much everyone listening.
Scott (45:45):
Yeah, you bet. All right. Thanks, Paul, everybody. We're going to call this a wrap for this episode of Small Biz Buzz.
Speaker 1 (45:59):
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