Podcast appearances and mentions of ali parmelee

The Inbound Success Podcast launched on August 28, 2017 and today marks the 100th episode, and 100 straight weeks of publishing interviews with high performing marketers. On this week's Inbound Success Podcast, I'm taking a break from interviewing guests to share with you 13 trends that I've observed from the 99 interviews I did throughout the last two years. Listen to the podcast to learn more about the 13 things that the world's top-performing inbound marketers are doing, and get links to the specific episodes where you can dive deeper into each topic. Transcript Welcome back to the Inbound Success podcast. My name's Kathleen Booth. I'm your host, and this is the 100th episode of the podcast. I thought this was a great opportunity for me to take a break from the usual routine of interviewing some of the incredible marketers that I get to speak to every week and look back on the last 99 episodes and try and digest some lessons learned. I've had the incredible good fortune of speaking to some really amazing marketers in the last two years as I've done this podcast. It's given me an opportunity to meet people I otherwise never would have met, to learn some things that have really kind of made a difference for me in the way I think about marketing, and have prompted me to take a second look and reevaluate the way I've been doing some things. So, thought it was a great opportunity to share some of those lessons learned with all of you. How The Inbound Success Podcast Got Started But first, I wanted to just take a moment and tell a story about why I started the podcast. It was about two and a half years ago that I had my own marketing agency, Quintain Marketing. I had had the agency for 11 years. I'd gone to a lot of marketing conferences and listened to tons of podcasts, and watched webinars, always looking to make myself a better marketer. I had a lot of clients that I wanted to help. I also wanted to market my own agency and do better every day. I always would listen to these folks talk about the marketing work they were doing and the incredible results they were getting, and so infrequently felt that there was anything really tangible that I could take away from it and immediately use to improve my own marketing. This podcast was really an attempt to solve for that. It was me trying to scratch my own itch, and in doing so hopefully helping some of you. The interesting thing about this has been that it has certainly done that for me, and it has also done so much more. I already mentioned that it's enabled me to meet so many people I otherwise would never have met. There are a lot of people in the marketing world that I really admire and respect. And having the excuse of saying, "Hey, would you like to come on a podcast?" is a great way to meet someone new and to meet and to form that relationship, so that's been great. I've also met some really incredible people that I didn't know about through my guests when I ask them who else is doing a really great job with inbound marketing. And those relationships have been amazing. One of the most amazing and incredible things about this is that it changed the entire course of my career. One of first people I interviewed when I started the podcast was Bob Ruffolo, who is the founder and CEO of IMPACT. Now, I work at IMPACT. The reason is that before we started to hit the record button for the podcast interview, we were just talking about how things were going. I was telling him that I thought I might be ready to make a change, and that led to me selling part of my company to IMPACT and joining the team. That's been a really major shift in my life and a great one. I've learned so much. I get to work with some really smart people every day and do very, very interesting work. All this has come out of this little podcast. And most importantly, I've learned a lot about marketing. As I said, that was my original goal. 13 Lessons From Interviewing 99 High Performing Marketers So without further ado, I looked back through the 99 episodes I've done before today and really saw 13 themes emerge. That's what I'm going to share with you today. 1. There Is No "Secret Sauce" The first one ... And some of these, by the way, are going to seem like no-brainers, but they're important because it's important to remind ourselves of the things that we kind of already know. First one is, in most cases there really is no secret sauce to being an amazing marketer. The folks that I interviewed who were the most successful have a few things in common. Number one, they are voracious learners. They're always trying to improve their knowledge. They're always hungry for more. And they're consistent. That's huge, the consistency. A great example of that is Goldie Chan. I interviewed her. She's often referred to as the green-haired Oprah of LinkedIn. She has the longest running daily channel on LinkedIn. She's posted a new LinkedIn video every day for I think it's about two years. It's incredible. It doesn't matter where she is, what's happening, whether she's feeling well, whether she's traveling, what her access to Wifi is, she finds a way to do it because consistency is so important for her. And it's really paid off. They also do a few things and do them really well. A great example of that is Rev Ciancio who I talked with about Instagram marketing. Rev has an incredible Instagram presence. Which by the way, do not look at it when you're hungry because his pictures are all of mouthwatering hamburgers, french fries, pizzas, chicken wings, nachos, essentially everything that's bad for you, but that tastes so good. But, Rev has a fascinating strategy for how he approaches Instagram and has built an entire business around it. He does one thing, and he does it really well. Alex Nerney talked about Pinterest similarly, just a platform a lot of inbound marketers overlook, but he's really figured out a way to make it sing for him. The hungry learners who are consistent and who pick a few things and do them really well, that's really the secret sauce, which essentially isn't so secret. That's number one. 2. Listen To Your Customers And Prospects And Use What You Learn in Your Marketing Number two is they really listen to customers and prospects and use that in their marketing. Again, sounds like a no-brainer. We always talk about the need to do persona research and to build buyer personas, but I think what happens is we get very often so caught up in building the actual persona that we forget the big picture, that it's not about having this fictional profile of a person. It's really about understanding the way our audience thinks, what their real pain points and needs are, and the language they use to talk about that. A couple of the interviews I did were great examples of this. Barron Caster at rev.com who uses their own transcription product to transcribe all of the conversations they have with customers and then pull actual words that customers have used out and feed that into the copy on their website and landing pages, and that's gotten them amazing results. Val Geisler and Joel Klettke, two of the most accomplished conversion copywriters out there, both also talked about this type of research and understanding deeply, deeply the needs of customers and prospects. Paul Blamire at Atomic Reach, who is head of customer success and makes it a point to speak to new customers shortly after they've onboarded and really understand what brought them to the company and how the product is solving their needs. And he feeds that back in not only to marketing but to product development, to every aspect of the business to deliver a better customer experience from first touch in the marketing process all the way through the experience of using the company's product. 3. You Don't Need Fancy Tools Or A Big Budget Number three, you don't necessarily need fancy tools or a big budget to get incredible results. There are some really great examples of this. Oli Billson who I recently interviewed about the small events he's doing that are delivering tremendous amounts of revenue to his business. Chris Handy who talked about marketing for a Pre-K school, really small campaigns, but they just really ... They understood their audience, and they used the available tools that they had and got terrific results for the school. Adam Sand, who's using direct mail in conjunction with inbound marketing, super old school, but very effective for him. And Harry Campbell, who's The Rideshare Guy, and he's probably the top content creator in the ridesharing space. So think Uber, Lyft, Lime, Bird. He just started blogging and has created some great content and a big following. You really don't need fancy tools or a big budget. You can do it on your own with what you've got, if I go back to the first thing, if you're consistent, if you pick a few things and do them really well, and if you're a hungry learner who is willing to roll your sleeves up and apply what you're learning. 4. Connect With Your Audience On An Emotional Level Number four, the best marketers connect with their audiences on an emotional level, another thing that might seem obvious but that I think a lot of marketers get wrong. We tend to put our marketing hats on and make our marketing all about ourselves or we fall back into that comfortable place of corporate jargon, and kind of robotic speech, and use words like leverage and synergy. Nobody talks like that in real life, or not at least the people that you want to hang out with. The people who talked about this were Kieran Flanigan of HubSpot who shared their hearts and minds strategy for creating content with two types of content, content that solves a person's problems and tells them how to do something, that's really that mind's content, and then the heart's content, which taps into a pain and emotional need that the audience has. Then, Katie Stavely from Mautic. This is ironic that these are the two examples I'm giving for this one because HubSpot and Mautic could be considered two different sides of the same coin, HubSpot being a paid marketing automation, CRM, customer service platform, and Mautic being a completely free open source alternative to it. Katie talked about how important it was to be authentic in your marketing, especially with their audience, which it's all about community. It's opensource software, so your community is helping you develop your product. But regardless, the idea is to really make that emotional connection. 5. Sometimes The Biggest Wins Come From Content That Is Not Related To Your Products Or Services Number five, with content marketing, sometimes the biggest wins happen when you don't create content about your products or services. We as marketers, as inbound marketers, think a lot about top-, middle-, and bottom-of-the funnel strategies. We're always brainstorming what are the questions that our audience is asking as relates to our product or service. That often leads us to create content that is very much about us and not so much about our audience. But, I had two interviews that I thought really highlighted how successful you can be if you flip that script and talk nothing about yourself. What I mean by that is ... I'll start with Stephanie Baiocchi, who was actually Stephanie Casstevens at the time I interviewed her. She hadn't been married yet. And funny enough, she was not working at IMPACT. That's another great outcome of the podcast. Now she is. But, she talked about a campaign that she was running for a client that sold solutions for medical waste from physicians' practices. Originally, they were creating a ton of content around medical waste, and it just wasn't working. The reason is that their audience, which is really the office managers for physicians' practices, already has a medical waste solution. You can't be in business if you don't, so they weren't out there searching for any information about medical waste. They didn't even realize they needed to switch providers or that they had a problem. It was when she kind of took a step back and thought, "What are the biggest problems that office managers have? It doesn't need to have anything to do with medical waste," and she realized it was patient no-shows. They created a patient no-show policy template that office managers could use. That was a total home run. What it did was it opened up the conversation with their audience so that eventually they could begin talking about medical waste. But at that top-of-the-funnel level, they needed first to really open that conversation, and product- and service-related content wasn't going to cut it. Another person who did that really well was Ryan Bonnici, who is now the CMO of G2 Crowd, but at the time was working at HubSpot. HubSpot's a company that has a huge audience. Of course, trying to broaden the top of the funnel at a company like HubSpot is challenging. All the low-hanging fruit is gone, and so you really have to get creative. He was trying to target a small business audience. He really asked himself, "What are the problems that small businesses have?" And, again, doesn't have to have anything to do with HubSpot. He realized when you're starting your business or when you come to work at a small business, one of the first things you have to do is come up with an email signature. You're usually either copying one that somebody else in the company has created or you have to create it from scratch, and it's kind of a pain. He built an email signature generator, an online tool where you could type in some information about yourself and it would spit out a really nice-looking email signature. That tool generated a ton of traffic, leads, and revenues for HubSpot, and it cost them only $6,000 to build it, but the impact was enormous. So, great lesson learned about getting out of the habit of creating only product- and service-related content and thinking bigger. 6. Paid Ads Are An Essential Part Of Any Inbound Marketing Strategy Number six, the old myth that paid ads are not inboundy is dead, or it should be dead. This one was woven throughout almost every interview I did. It's funny because when I first started working with inbound marketing, it was back with my old agency. I had discovered HubSpot. We were following their original methodology of attract, convert, close, delights, for those of you who've been in the HubSpot world for a long time and all. I remember many times going to INBOUND and seeing Brian Halligan stand on stage and talk about how the old way, the old interruptive way of marketing was paid ads, and people didn't like being interrupted. I think we all read that as, well, paid ads are not acceptable if you're an inbound marketer. That myth started dying, I think, several years ago, but it's worth repeating that paid ads are, I would say, not even just inboundy, they're essential to an inbound strategy in this day and age. I'll just list off a bunch of names of my guests who've talked about it. This isn't even a complete list, but Mark Rogers, who at the time was with Carney and grew The Daily Carnage newsletter using Facebook ads; Sterling Snow from Divvy who's used ads to drive leads for their platform; Moby Siddique who has his own inbound agency and does some incredible Facebook ads work with Messenger bots; AJ Wilcox, who is a LinkedIn ads expert; Ali Parmelee, who's one of my coworkers here at IMPACT who does incredible things with Facebook ads; Anthony Sarandrea; Rick Kranz. The list goes on and on. All of them attribute the success that they're getting and the incredible results to some form of paid ads. Let that be the final nail in the coffin of that old myth. Let's really embrace ads, and not just checking the box with ads and promoting our posts, but really taking a full funnel approach to advertising. Because that's the other thing that these folks talked about is it's not about boosting something on Facebook. This is about really digging in and getting good at ads and thinking how ads can be used at every stage of the funnel. 7. Content Distribution Is Critical Number seven, it's not enough to create and publish your content on your website. You've got to promote it and distribute it. This is one that I've heard time and time again. A lot of the best marketers I've spoken to say you should spend twice as much time promoting and distributing your content as you do creating it. I think for a lot of us that equation is backwards. One person who talked about that was Kipp Bodnar who is the CMO of HubSpot, probably one of the companies that is the best at inbound marketing. He talked about what a game changer it was in the last year when HubSpot really threw some muscle behind content distribution and how that impacted their traffic. This is a company that already had amazing traffic, by the way. Then, Phil Singleton. I loved my interview with Phil who is an SEO expert and an author. Phil talked about this great strategy he uses for clients where he's creating e-books, just like lots of inbound marketing agencies do. But then he takes the e-books that he makes for clients, or he takes a collection of blogs, for example, and compiles them into any book, and he publishes them as Kindle e-books on amazon.com, and also in some cases as hard copy books through Amazon direct publishing. It is so simple, and straightforward, and inexpensive. It blows my mind that more marketers are not doing this. It was a cool episode, so definitely check that out. But yeah, the lesson is don't just like write those blogs, create those e-books. Think about what are you going to do with them once they're published. How are you going to get them out in front of the world? 8. Original Research Can Drive Tremendous Results Number eight, original research can have amazing results. I had several interviews where people touched on what has come of original research. One of the people I think that that is most famous in the marketing world for doing this is Andy Crestodina. He has been doing a blogging survey for several years and really credits that with bringing a lot of attention to his agency, Orbit Media, out of Chicago, giving him a ton of backlinks and press. It's a pretty simple survey. He does put quite a bit of effort into promoting the survey itself so he can get a lot of responses, and then once he gets those responses into packaging that content so that he can turn it into things like infographics and articles, et cetera. But, it's not just Andy. Michele Aymold from Parker Dewey uses original research and data to boost her marketing results. Clare Carr from Parse.ly, they actually don't even have to do that much research because simply by the nature of the product that they sell they have access to a lot of proprietary data. She's really productized that and used it to get a tremendous amount of press. In fact, she was able to dramatically cut back the amount of content she was creating while getting better results because the data itself was so attractive to their audience, and it also helped her reduce their PR spend. Then, Rebecca Corliss at Owl Labs. They produced the state of remote work, and that's gotten them quite a bit of traction. 9. Community Is A Powerful Tool To Fuel Growth Number nine, community is such a powerful tool for marketing. This is an interesting one because here at IMPACT we've been working really hard over the course of the last two years to build our own community called IMPACT Elite, which is on Facebook. We've learned a lot about community in the course of doing that. I would say it has been a game changer for our business, certainly. We now have over 5,000 people in that community. It's a delicate balance how you run it. You can't make it all about yourself. It has to truly be about helping the members of the community and getting them to the point where they're almost running it, if you will. I spoke to several other people who have built communities and had similar experiences in terms of the community being a fundamental tool in the growth of their business. One was Bill Faeth who is a marketer who specializes in the limousine and transport business. He has Limo University, and he has a big community around that of limousine companies. Frank Gruber, who started Tech Cocktail in the beginning and turn it into Tech.co, which was then acquired, he now has a company called Established. But, he began this grassroots community all over the country of startups and people interested in the startup ecosystem and wound up building a tremendous media business from that. Nikki Nixon who at the time I interviewed her was running the FlipMyFunnel community for Terminus. Ameer Rosic who has a community focused on blockchain called Blockgeeks. And Mark Graham, who is an old friend of mine doing amazing things, he's up in Canada and has a software platform called Commonsku and has built a great community around that. All of these folks doing incredible things with communities in very different niches, I should say. For Bill, it was limo companies. For Frank, it was startups. For Nikki, it's people who are ABM practitioners. For Ameer, it's folks in the blockchain community. And for Mark Graham, it's people in the promotional products world. All of these different niches need communities and people are hungry to connect with others who have similar interests as they do. 10. The Quality Of Your Content REALLY Matters Content quality. I had a couple of great interviews on this. This is one that I'd love to talk with more people who are focused on this. In this day and age, you can't just be creating content and checking the box. You have to really create great content that is better than anything else out there if you really want to get amazing results. One person who talked a lot about this was Oli Gardner and how he is putting a lot of effort into really making the content that they create be the best that's available on the Internet. Emily Maxie from Very talked about this, too, really digging deep and creating unbelievable resources for your audience. Both of these folks are getting great results in terms of traffic, and that traffic ultimately turning into leads, because they took the time to create in-depth pieces that really added value for their audience. Seems like it should be obvious, it's another one of these, but it's really not too a lot of us. I mean, you might think your content's really good, but is it the best? When you Google that topic that you created content about, is your piece the best thing that you can find in the search results? If not, go back and spend the time and make it better. I think one of the lessons I've learned is it's better to make less content that's better content than it is to create a high volume. 11. Creating A Podcast - Or Being A Guest On One - Is A Good Way To Build Your Brand Another theme that came out was podcasting. It's sort of ironic because we're on a podcast talking about podcasting. But a lot of my interviews, as I went back and reviewed, had to do with podcasting, beginning with George B Thomas, who I've had the privilege to work with over the years here at IMPACT. He's now at Impulse Creative. George is a prolific podcaster, and he's ... It might seem easy when you listen to him. It just seems like, "Oh, there's a guy that just has a great rapport with his audience," but he puts a ton of thought into how he does these podcasts, how he structured them so that they not only deliver value for the audience, but that they have naturally built-in incentives for people to share them and to grow his audience. That's really worth listening to if you're somebody who wants to start a podcast. Andrew Dymski is another person who's been podcasting for a long time and who I've been a guest on his podcast. He's been a guest on mine. He's got some great insights. Ryan Hawke, who has The Learning Leader podcast, Ryan blew my mind just with how prepared he comes to everything. He talked about this, too, how before he does an interview the amount of preparation he does, the amount of preparation he does when he even just invites somebody to come on his podcast. This guy is serious business, and that's why he's so successful. He really has put the thought into it and turned his podcast into a business. Dan Moyle came on the show and talked about podcast guest interviews. So not necessarily starting a podcast, but if you want to get the word out, going on other podcasts as a guest. At the time, he was with a company called Interview Valet. What's been really cool for me is seeing the other side of that. I get pitched a lot by companies like Interview Valet, and there are certainly other ones as well. They'll send me an email and say, "Listened to your show. Thought it was great. Here's a guest that I think would be really good for you." That's how I've gotten a lot of my more interesting guests. There's something to that podcast guesting strategy that really I think can help you get traction and raise your profile if you're trying to build a personal brand or trying to get the word out about a product or a service. There are plenty of companies like Interview Valet that, for a fee, will take care of that for you. It's kind of like having a talent agent. I also talked to Jay Acunzo about podcasting. He is actually a consultant to other companies and helps them create, produce, and get the best results out of their podcasts. One of his clients is Drift, which comes up a lot on my show. People love Drift, always cited as one of the best examples of a company doing inbound marketing really well, and they have a couple of podcasts. Then, Jeff Large of Come Alive Creative. Lots of folks talking about podcasting. It really stuck out to me that it's not just about, hey, everybody should have a podcast, and I don't think everyone should. It's not right for everybody. But, podcasting can play a role in almost everybody's marketing strategy for sure. 12. Video, Video, Video Number 12, video. Can't have a list of trends and things that are important in marketing without talking about video these days. Some of the guests that I've had that have spoken about this are some of the more impressive people that have been on this podcast. In 2019, I opted to kick the year off with an interview with Marcus Sheridan, who is an amazing man that is a big role model for me. I currently get to work with him at IMPACT. But, he's somebody that I followed for years and I have so much respect for because he sees things about marketing and about customer behavior that a lot of other people don't, even though they're staring us in the face. One of the things that he has really seen and committed to is that when it comes to marketing and selling, we can't just tell people something. We have to show it to them, too, and we show it to them using video. He talked about how important video was going to be in 2019. I know that he's out speaking at conferences and talking about video all over the world. Also, Eric Siu. I kicked off 2018 with Eric Siu doing predictions for last year. He talked about video as well and was like, "Video's going to be huge in 2018." So in both of my kind of yearly prediction episodes, the guests that I've had have cited video as one of the biggest things we should be paying attention to. And then, of course, I already mentioned her, but Goldie Chan, who is a LinkedIn influencer and creates a new LinkedIn video every single day, has made a career around those videos. She's amazing. She travels all over the world and is sought after as a speaker because of the LinkedIn video she creates. And Dennis Yu who has turned video into a formula for building people's personal brands. It's really impressive what he does. They're these short little videos that he films. Using that medium has helped countless people create brands for themselves. 13. Lead With Brand Which brings me to my 13th and last lesson learned from 99 interviews with incredible marketers, and that is that all of these strategies, and tactics, and approaches are powerful. But at the end of the day, the most important thing in marketing is brand. Brand is paramount. Without it, you can have some quick wins but you'll never have a true success that will last over the long term. I'm only going to cite one example here because it's the one that comes up the most. And if you listen to this podcast with any degree of regularity, you know that at the end I always, always ask my guests, "Company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now?" There is one company/individual, the company and the marketer who's spearheading it for them, that by far comes up more than anybody else, and that is Drift and Dave Gerhardt, who I was very fortunate to have as a guest early on. I can't tell you the number of times people have mentioned Drift, and it's not just people from the marketing world. It's folks that have come onto this podcast from all different industries, and they all cite Dave Gerhart and his work building a brand at Drift as the one succeeding the most with inbound marketing. It's not for me to say what that brand is or to really try to encapsulate what Dave has done, but I think it's fair to say that they've built a brand that's incredibly authentic. There's no artifice. There's no fancy tricks about it. They, of everybody, really reflect everything I've said about the past, you know, this list of 12 to 13 trends I just spoke about today. When I look back through this list, they are doing a few things and doing them really well. They really listen to their customers. It's not about fancy tools or a big budget. The things that make them successful don't have anything to do with that. It's about connecting on emotional level. It's about creating content that sometimes doesn't have anything to do with your products or services. They do paid ads. And it's not enough to create and publish your content, you've got to promote it. They are so good at that. They've got a tremendous community, really high-quality content, a bunch of podcasts. They use video better than almost anybody else, especially on LinkedIn. Checkout Dave Gerhart's LinkedIn presence. And they just have a really strong brand. So my hat is off to Dave Gerhart and the team at Drift for ... If I had to give out an award for top inbound marketers, I think it would go to them. Thank YOU For Listening But really, everybody that I've interviewed over the course of the last two years has been so impressive. It is just my absolute privilege to get to do this every single week. I also wanted to say thank you to you for listening. Podcasting is a funny exercise. As I record this, it's Sunday morning, and I'm sitting in my home office, which is a tiny little room that actually had to be permitted as a closet because it's so small. There's chaos happening around me in my house. I'm by myself talking into a microphone. I'll go away, and I'll turn this into an episode. It'll go live tomorrow. You'll be hearing this Monday, if you get the episode right when it comes out or sometime after, and you're out there listening. But when I create these things, it's just me in a room. To know that there are people who choose to listen to this every week is just an unbelievable honor and a privilege to me. So, thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening to this content. I hope so much that you've learned something from it and that, even if it's in a small way, it's helped you get better results from your marketing and feel like a smarter marketer. If that has happened, then I feel like I've succeeded. With that, I will say I would love to hear from you. It's been a hundred episodes. If you are a regular listener, please take a moment and contact me. I always say at the end you can tweet me @workmommywork, which is my Twitter handle, but you can also message me on LinkedIn. You can email me at kbooth@impactbnd.com. You can send a carrier pigeon. However you want to do it, I would love it if you would get in touch and let me know what you like about the podcast and what's something that I can improve because I'd love to make the next hundred episodes even better. With that, I won't belabor it. Thank you again for listening, and I'll see you next week. Or not see you, I'll be talking to you next week for episode 101.  

What does a full-time Facebook Ads expert do to get great results for her clients? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, IMPACT's Lead Facebook Ads Strategist Ali Parmelee shares the exact process she uses to develop Facebook ad campaigns and track and measure the performance of ads.  This isn't Facebook ads 101. Ali is sharing advanced tips, in detail, for marketers that understand the basics of Facebook advertising but want to up their game and improve their return on ad spend (ROAS). Listen to the podcast for step-by-step instructions on building Facebook ad campaigns like the pros do. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. My name's Kathleen Booth and I'm your host and this week my guest is Ali Parmelee who is the Lead Facebook Ads strategist for IMPACT. Welcome Ali. Ali Parmelee (Guest): Thank you very much. Glad to be here. Ali and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: Yeah I'm excited to have you here. It's not often that I get to interview my own colleagues for this podcast so this is kind of a special treat. Why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and about your background? Ali: Sure. So I am newer to the Impact team. I used to be a co-owner of Think Creative group out of Connecticut and we merged into Impact over the summer. So I've been with Impact for about five-ish months and trying to bring all of our Facebook and Inbound methodologies over with us. So my team came over with us and I am focusing on driving Facebook and Instagram ads for Impact now. Kathleen: Yeah the first time that I saw you, met you, heard of you was at a HubSpot Partner day event a few years ago when you were actually up on stage with someone from HubSpot talking about how to do Facebook ads right. I was really impressed by everything you were doing and how deep you were going specifically into Facebook ads. So we were really excited to have you guys be a part of the team because it's given us some capabilities we didn't have before. Ali: Thank you. Thank you. That was fun. That was two years ago. I spoke with Daria and my previous co-founder of Think and it was a great time. I love talking there. Kathleen: Yeah. Well we're gonna pick your brain on Facebook ads here today. So you know you are very specialized in terms of what you work on. And while you, I think you have in the past, you have done broader marketing strategy, you've worked with clients across the range of their different marketing needs but you've gone really deep specifically with Facebook ads. And what I find interesting about that and one of the reasons I really wanted to have you on is that it seems to me like everybody's either doing Facebook ads or talking about doing them these days. It's become kind of ubiquitous which is funny to me because when I first got into Inbound marketing I remember actually HubSpot used to say, "Inbound marketing is about attracting buyers and not spending them with ads," and they were very kind of anti-advertising and that's really changed. It seems like they recognize that ads have an important place in the inbound marketing methodology. But I'd love to hear your take on that. Ali: No, absolutely. I definitely have a varied past were over the years I won't say my age but I've been doing this for quite awhile and I've done everything from writing copy, doing PR, to running full inbound campaigns. My previous company we were HubSpot patterns as well so I used to run social media campaigns and everything. And one of the things that I think has ended itself to me having the successes that I have with Facebook ads is I really think you have to be a strong utility player to do Facebook ads right. Because there's so many different elements with it. Ali: A lot of people think that Facebook ads is boosting of that you're simply just taking an idea and doing a pretty general ad but you have to think about the strategy behind it. It's just as strategic as everything else that you do with inbound marketing. Ali: And that's why why I talk about Facebook ads and doing it the inbound way it is ... to go back to your question here it is something that totally works together with inbound marketing because you don't wanna feel like you are spamming people but you're helping to get it in front of them. Because at this point people's feeds are so over-saturated and flooded you have to make sure that they have the opportunity to see it which they don't get to with how low the normal reach is now anyway. Kathleen: I will say done well they for sure work because I mean I'm a marketer, I know what's happening when I go into Facebook. But there have definitely been times when I have purchased things because I'm like, "Okay I have seen this ad so many times I need to click through and see what it's all about." A great example is I think I'm a devotee now of Aptiv which is an exercise app and it literally was just that it showed up enough in my feed. And I was like, "Alright, darn you Aptiv I'm gonna check it out." Ali: That's funny. Kathleen: It does work, for sure if it's done well. Ali: Absolutely. Absolutely. Kathleen: But it sounds like if I'm hearing you correctly what you're saying, at least in my mind the way I'm seeing this, is it's almost like there's the iceberg and the little bit of the iceberg that you see above the surface is the things people see that is, "Hey do you wanna boost your post?" But that there's this giant iceberg under the water of additional knowledge and expertise and methodology that you can take advantage of to do it really well. Ali: Absolutely. Kathleen: I'd love to have you talk about that a little bit more. So when you work with a client, and somebody comes to you and says, "I wanna do Facebook ads," walk me through what that initial conversation is like from the 50,000 foot kind of strategic view. Ali: Yeah, absolutely. And if I keep talking too much just yell at me because I can talk forever about this, I get so excited. So it's honestly very similar to onboarding and talking to people about inbound marketing. You have to understand the goals. Like I was starting to say before it's not just about saying, "I have this lead generation tool that I want to put out there," or, "I wanna get more sales." We need to understand what the KPI, the key performance indicators, are that we're going after. Are you trying to increase your overall brand awareness? Do you need more unique site visitors? Are you trying to get leads and more email addresses? Are you trying to get sales? Do you have old inventory that you're trying to move? We have to understand what the overall goals are. And then we come up with strategies. Ali: So it's very similar to an inbound method strategy that way. So once we start understanding what your goals are we can start to put together a blueprint of what that means. So we have some clients who in the past have wanted to start blogging. As we all know blogging is fantastic but it's not a silver bullet that happens overnight, we have to get more people coming to the blog. So we have clients where they had been running, they had been posting blogs now weekly multiple times a week for six months, they were not seeing really any traction with it. Through our strategy of not boosting but we call it amplifying because we do it through Facebook ads manager and I'd written a blog that's on Impact's site, we can- Kathleen: We'll link to that in the show notes. Ali: Yeah. So there's a big difference between that because this is where you're making sure that you're using the pixels, you're creating segmented audiences that you're going after for this. And instantly from the first week where we went from not having any amplification going to actually having amplification going for it they went from maybe 50 views to over 800 views for the blog. And that was with a very minimal spend. Ali: That was about $15 a day. So again when we get started we wanna know what the goals are. We want to talk about budgets and timelines for how quickly we want to reach those goals because they all play a factor with each other. Kathleen: So you're having that conversation big picture about goals and timelines and budgets. Is there ever a situation where you say Facebook ads are not right for this? Ali: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. If it is ... so a couple of those scenarios would be I particularly love e-commerce and I focus on e-commerce. If a product their average order value is under $50 you are going to have to have a big budget and do a big volume to make your money back on it. So doesn't mean you can't do it but what I've done in scenarios like that is we look at how can we group or bundle products so it can get the average order value up instead of just saying, "Nope, sorry it won't work for you." So I've talked with say coffee drop shippers where it's $20 for the average order value but if we sell subscriptions for them instead now that makes that a guaranteed three months $60 and it makes more sense for them to do it. So there's ways around that. Ali: So we look at average order value. We also look at are their goals realistic with their budgets. Because I have audited accounts where people say, "It's just not working." I'll go in, I'll look at their targeting and they're targeting four million people at a dollar a day and it's going to take them two years to see any results. So it's also setting realistic expectations with people too. And also for people to know that this is not just ... while you get very quick results it is not a silver bullet, you have to continue to work at it and it's not something that you start and stop. They have to be willing to understanding that this is part of your overall marketing strategy, your digital marketing strategy because you have to stick with it for a minimum of three months to make sure that it's working properly for you because it's a lot of split testing. A lot of theorizing and then going back and tweaking to get it running smoothly. Kathleen: What about on the B to B side? Are there situations when it's not a good fit on that side as well? Ali: You know it can be harder on B to B but not necessarily. There are so many tips and hacks that you can do. If you have a good size email list part of what we'll do is we'll start to audit first and see, "Can we find enough of these people in here," or, "Can we find enough look alikes, is it at least a 200 person seed audience that we can work off of to start trying to build look alike audiences?" You know one of my mentors actually sold an MRI machine through Facebook ads. So you can sell anything. It's a matter of can you get the targeting right which is super critical and can you build a campaign structure the right way to make sure that your messaging gets across. Kathleen: So let's take it a layer deeper and let's talk about targeting. I think it would be really interesting because these things change so quickly. Can you break down what are all the different targeting options and the ways that you can come at this? Ali: Absolutely. So this is something that seems like such a very simple straightforward methodology but it's something that when we go into audit accounts we don't see people who aren't working with tried and true Facebook advertisers that have a similar setup are doing. A lot of times we'll go in and we'll see people think of a campaign because of the naming conventions with Facebook. It's campaign ad set ads. So they think of a campaign as, "Oh I want to promote this one idea, this one concept." But that's not how we approach it. We look at the campaign as the objective that you're able to select from Facebook. So they give you about 10 to 12 objectives you can pick from: brand awareness, traffic, conversions, video views, product catalog sales. And so we will always build our campaign structure by objective. And then where you would normally ... when you go into ad sets that's where we do our targeting. Ali: So for example when you go and look and audit any of the accounts that we're running we really never have more than 10-ish campaigns at once ever going, and that's a lot. It depends on what the ad buys have. There are some campaigns I'm running where I only have three active campaign objectives running right now but we're still spending $40,000 a month. It's just how we structure it. So for ad sets when we get in there ... now this is where you start looking at the different target audiences that you're going after. Ali: So think of this like the buyer's journey where you've got the top of funnel, you've got the middle of funnel, you've got the bottom of funnel. Top of funnel you are only ever going to target lookalike audiences, ice cold people, people who have never heard of your brand, never been touched by your brand, they just know a little bit about the concept and that's how we're targeting them. What we typically will do in there is this is where all lookalike audiences go and this is where interest and behaviors go. Ali: Now a sort of micro-tip on that is we start out by breaking those all down separately, we don't go and take a 100 different behaviors and put them all in, we'll clump similar ones. So for example one beauty client that we have we'll do retail stores, so Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Sephora, places like that will all be in there. But I'm not gonna put those with other interest categories because I wanna see what's working, what's resonating. So we'll make sure that we split those out. Same thing with even the look alike audiences. I may do a look alike audience of the top five percent of time spent on site and that is one ad set. Then I do another ad set which is Facebook engagement for the last 180 days or 90 days and I build that custom audience to make a look alike and that's it, that's who I'm going after. And then I do the same for Instagram. Ali: So we have a set list that we kind of start off with as the lowest hanging fruit and that's always gonna be look alike for top of funnel. Then middle of funnel we take those same custom audiences that we built the look alikes off of and that's who goes in middle of funnel. So now it's not the look alike but it's the actual top five percent of time spent on site, it's the Facebook engagers for 90 days, it's the Instagram engagers for 90 days. It's people who have viewed content but not added to cart. That's all middle of funnel. Ali: And then bottom of funnel that's where we're going back and trying to get people across the finish line. So maybe it's e-commerce and you've added to cart but you haven't purchased. We're gonna keep following you around. Maybe it's an annual timeline download and you've landed on the landing page but you haven't downloaded it. I'm gonna remind you it's still there for you to download. Kathleen: So talk to me more about why at the top of the funnel you're only using look alike audiences? Ali: So top of the funnel typically you're going to use objectives that are cheaper. And so with that we want to make sure that when we're casting the widest net we're not spending the most amount of money. You're gonna pay more for clicks and conversions when you start doing conversion objectives for middle and bottom of funnel. Top of funnel you might be doing video views, you might be doing traffic, brand awareness. You may even still be doing conversions but you're going to have enough things going that you're casting the widest net, we want to make sure that it is truly a cold audience that then you're trying to help refine and build into a more interested audience for you. Kathleen: So you want a cold audience or is there any reason ... you know you talked about it being look alike, is there any reason you wouldn't try to develop a cold audience based off of demographic targeting? Ali: Yes. So we could absolutely do that too. We have some clients who specifically even have states that they target because they're best performing states. So we might say this is our ... Ali: States, so we might say this is our women who are 35 to 65 in Texas, California, wherever. The one thing that I usually will say though is we start with a narrower top of funnel in these different micro niches because Facebook honestly is very good at helping to figure out who the audiences are for you to target. You ... it also takes the emotion out of it because you have your own theories of who you think is right, but let's let Facebook actually build the data for us and then see how can we then hone that down even more. So, for example, we have a newer client right now where we've started with all of the lookalikes and then we went back and added in as a second phase some of the behaviors and interests and more of the demographics because we were able to see, okay, this, these age groups are the core age groups who are engaging. Ali: So let's trim this back to these age groups and now let's add in a layer of these behaviors, and this is a new ad set that we test. Kathleen: And you're, are you learning that from seeing the results of the lookalike audience? Ali: Yes. Kathleen: Okay. Ali: Exactly. Data analysis is a huge part of Facebook ads. You have to understand what you're seeing and reading and then how to react to it. It's not just building these ads and a lot of times you'll see with Facebook, there's a lot of churn because people are great at getting things going, but they're not necessarily great at the longer haul of keeping it going. So the better you are at data analysis, the better ... and you're going to have a, you're ... the better you're going to be able to create results and the longer relationships you're gonna have. Kathleen: Now you begin with the KPIs and the targeting, and then really at some point you need to make decisions about budget. Kathleen: Can you talk me through how you think about budget? You know, because having been in agencies for a long time, I know that the big question everyone says how much did I spend? And usually there's some sort of an it depends answer in there. And then there are people who come and say this is what I'm prepared to spend and it's completely arbitrary and has nothing to do with any kind of logical reasons. So I'm curious how you approach that conversation. Ali: Yeah, absolutely. So as we're going through KPIs, I get a good sense of approximately how much testing we're going to have to do. And so this is something that's really big and important for people to understand. Facebook ads is truly all about testing and so the more budget that you have to be able to test, because the way, as I was saying, I might only have a handful of objectives at the top level, but then when we get to ad sets, each of those ad sets need their own budget. Ali: So say for example, I have a top of funnel conversion. So actually this is a good example, right now for one of our e-commerce clients, we're prepping for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, we're doing a lot of testing in there. And so we have eight ad sets in each of three top of funnel campaigns right now. So that's 24 different ad sets I have to put budget to. And it has to be equal budget so that I can see what's actually performing well with the different audiences and then be able to make proper decisions for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So I have some clients where I can tell from the KPIs that they're more of sort of a dipping the toe in the water starter level of what they're looking to do. The base level that I tell people is you need to feel comfortable spending at least $3,000 a month just on the ad spend, not the implementation or the management or setup, but just on the ad spend alone. Because that gives you enough latitude to be able to scale up, scale down and get faster results. Ali: Certainly, I've had clients who have said, well, I don't know, I'd rather start with 1500. That's fine, but you have to understand that everything is relative. So I'm going to need, if you want to cut the initial budget down to 1500, then where it would normally take me six to eight weeks to establish benchmarks for you, it's now going to take 12 to 16 weeks to do that because we're just prolonging everything. And the budget, the metrics might be slightly different depending on the time of year. Like I would not advise anyone just starting instantly right now because the cost per click is double what it normally is going to be right now. So ... Kathleen: Because of the kind of ... Ali: Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Yep. Kathleen: Yeah, that's interesting. Now, okay. We covered KPIs, we covered targeting, we covered budget. One of the things that I'm hearing you say is that there's a lot of testing you ... there's a lot of data analysis, there's a lot of like watching results. I'd love to learn more about, you know, how much time are you spending in a given week just looking at this stuff? How frequently are you looking at it? Is it daily, is it hourly, is it weekly, what does that cadence look like? And is it dependent upon spend? Ali: It's dependent upon spend and goals. So, I'm in there every single day for all of my clients. And then depending on the budgets and how many, how much testing we're doing. So that example where we have the 24 live top of funnel ad sets right now I'm in there hourly checking to see what's going on and do we need to make changes because we're even testing the same exact copy, same exact image, but square versus vertical. To see because again, from reading the data we are seeing that, this is a crazy statistic, but 90 percent of their purchases are coming from mobile through Facebook and Instagram. Ali: So with that being said, right now we're testing a hack to be able to do a vertical image. It's not something that you can typically just do straight up in Facebook ads. You actually have to create it as a, what we call a dark post. So it looks like it would if it was an organic post on your actual page, but it never hits your page. We just create it and then take it and run it as an ad. But the theory, what this is, the vertical images takes up more space on a phone. So I want to take up as much space as I can and right now those are converting really well for this client. Kathleen: That's interesting. For anyone who doesn't know, can you explain more about the dark post thing? How do you create it? What is it? Ali: Yeah. So basically in ads manager, when you go to create an ad, and I haven't actually even gotten to this part of it. I've explained a little bit of how I set up the campaign structure and then the ad set structure. Ali: But, so the idea is with this, sorry about that. The idea is with this, that what happens is you take the same creative. What we do is we build a master ad set, a master campaign, and then master ad set. So we will never ever turn these ads on in the set. And then we take that one ad and then we drop it into each of the different ad sets. So in those 24 different ad sets that I've been talking about, I'm running the same exact ad in every single one.  Okay. So for creating a dark post, this is something that is never going to actually live on the page itself. It will just be an unpublished post. Which then we turn into an ad. Now we make the master ad campaign that is never turned on, but this is this one ad. So within the master ad campaign we will create this ad that then we take this singular ad and drop it in any ad set that we want. Ali: So the difference with this is is I'm not going, in this example where I said we have 24 different active ad sets top of funnel. I'm not creating 24 ads over and over and over again. I'm taking this one ad that we created once and then I'm dropping it in each of the different ad sets. And here's why this is so important. Have you ever seen those posts or Those ads where it's got thousands of comments and likes and you think to yourself, oh my gosh, this is amazing? These people clearly have a lot of interactions, you're getting ... you might have some negative sentiment, you have positive sentiment. But that all happens because you're taking one post ID, you're creating this ad and you're dropping it over and over. So all of those likes and comments and shares follow it around and are cumulative and instead of having to optimize it 24 separate times. Kathleen: So you're taking the one post, but you say you're putting it in different ad sets. Kathleen: Does that mean that the ad itself across all those ad sets appears identically, but you're targeting is different in each of those cases? Ali: Exactly. So this way I'm able to test does a testimonial ad perform better versus maybe an explanatory ad? Or does a video format versus a single image versus a slide show work better with the same copy? And I take that and the interesting thing is is I have examples where top of funnel I've split and tested single image versus slideshow where it's the same exact copy and it's a draw. It's a 50/50 for one of my clients. However, that same client, middle of funnel, I've tested slideshow versus single image and I now know I would never waste my time or money on a slideshow again because it does not convert middle funnel, only a single image does. But this allows me to be able to see that. Kathleen: Really then it sounds very similar to how we approach AB testing with other things. You know, the rule with any good AB test is you only change one variable. So that's kinda what it sounds like we're talking about here. Ali: Exactly, exactly. Kathleen: Yeah. Interesting. Once you have all of this setup, you then need to proceed with putting together the creative. Ali: Yes. Kathleen: Any takeaways or advice on how to approach that creative so that it's gonna perform well? Ali: Yes. So especially for top of funnel, people don't want to feel like you're spamming them. They don't want to feel like, how did they figure out how to find me? This is an ad. I don't want this. If they start to hide your ads, that counts as negative sentiment. People may not realize this, but the more negative sentiment you get, the worse your optimization is. So it's gonna cost you more. Ali: Facebook will ding you for it. If you continue to get lots of complaints, they'll even shut down your account on you. So you have to be really careful. We call ... we practice what we call ad camouflage. So what this means is, this is how ... you may have heard me talk about doing Facebook ads that are inboundy. You wanna be helpful, you don't want to sound like you are selling, you want it to seem conversational. So this is where we, first of all, Facebook does not allow you to put too much text on your images. We try to actually not put text on our images at all because we want it to feel organic. We'll use hashtags in our body copy because we want it to look like an organic post. We will specifically not select the call to action button that you have the option to pick for Facebook ads, unless we're forced to, it will force you to on videos and slideshows. Ali: But otherwise we will not because we want it to feel as organic as possible. Kathleen: Hm. And with images, I heard you earlier mention normally they need to be horizontal instead of vertical. Ali: Yeah. So for single image ads you're going to do, that's a very horizontal format. Vertical you do in sort of the super duper hack of doing the page post itself. And so that's where you can't even pick a headline, you can't pick a CTA, this, it looks and acts and breathes like a post that you would do normally. It just is dark, it's unpublished. Kathleen: And that's really for mobile. Ali: And that's, yeah, that's what we're finding is working well for mobile where you have a lot of mobile conversions. And then there's also square. So I have some clients where when I start auditing their assets that they're giving me, they may have fantastic artwork that I can pick from but they're all vertical. Ali: So now that we've had this, this one option, if it works for them, that's great, but sometimes it doesn't. So what we do there is we'll crop them down to squares, which then we can use those four slideshows and they're also great for Instagram. Kathleen: Okay. And same for video I would assume? That there are certain times when you want certain formats. Ali: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So, video and Instagram stories is a whole other beast that we haven't even gotten into. But you're gonna look for more vertical with some of those. Again, it's testing because you might just have your own theory on it and that's what I'm doing right now. I am testing vertical against horizontal for that same client, the beauty client. Kathleen: Why do you think vertical works so well? Is it again the mobile? Ali: Yup. Yeah, I mean and that's why data analysis is so important. You know, not only am I in the accounts every single day, but I am running comprehensive reports every Monday. And then I'm meeting with my clients depending on how engaged we are, anywhere from multiple times a week to every other week to review the analytics together and hear what they have coming up and then make plans together about what makes sense moving forward. Kathleen: Just out of curiosity, would you think that the guidance on vertical versus horizontal video would change if you were targeting a B to B customer? Like are they more likely to be looking at this on a computer, on a laptop or a desktop and therefore would horizontal make more sense for that kind of an audience? Ali: You know what, you would think so, but there's no rhyme or reason with it. So many people use their phones nowadays, even if they're at their desktop. I know I have my phone right next to me and I have it open and I'm scrolling through things. Multitasking, you know, I'm a little different because I'm trying to be targeted by ads so I can see what everyone else is doing. Kathleen: You're the only person who's like, please send me more ads. Ali: Oh Kathleen, I'm not kidding. I have a Chrome plugin that allows me to strip out any organic posts from facebook so I can only see ads. Kathleen: Oh my God, that's just the opposite of everyone else's reality. I love it. Ali: So, you know, but mobile, I mean, it really is for me, even with some of the things that I'm targeted, think about it. Like I have two young kids and you know, as I'm putting them to sleep and I'm sitting there next to them in bed, I'm scrolling through while I'm just waiting for them to fall asleep. And that's why there's, it's so important for all these best practices. You do want to test out vertical. You wanna make sure if you're doing videos for that reason right there alone, that you have captions go like all, all in your video for you. So ... Kathleen: What's the best way to do captions? Ali: So, there are a couple of different services actually that I'm gonna start testing out. Facebook has an automatic translation for captions. It can almost be like a fun drinking game to see how bad they are when they come back. For the most part, it's close enough that it makes it not that bad a job. However, if there's any lengthier ... If there's any lengthier videos, that's when I would absolutely go through a transcription process. If it's three minutes or under, it'll take 15 to 30 minutes to do it. So, it's not that bad. Kathleen: Any particular transcription services that you've used? Ali: Actually I haven't tested it yet. The one that everybody in my community keeps talking about is called Rev.com. Kathleen: That's what I use to transcribe my show. Ali: Oh. Kathleen: It's great. It's quick, and it's very reasonably priced. And it's pretty accurate. Ali: Good to know. That's good to know. Kathleen: Two thumbs up on Rev for me. Ali: Good to know. Thank you. Kathleen: Yeah. Great. So, the other thing that you do that's very interesting, and you kind of talked about it already. But, I wanna just circle back to it, is do you have a very particular way that you organize everything on the back end? Ali: Yes. Kathleen: Can you address that a little bit? Ali: So, in terms of that, so I started to talk about how we will do top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel. And, we, again it sounds very basic. But, keep ... so one tip I can say is keep your naming conventions the same. So, that it's really easy to scan through. Because as you keep managing clients for a long time or managing your own campaigns, you need to be able to quickly go and see what is what and where it is. So ... Kathleen: Especially if there's multiple people jumping into your account. Ali: Exactly. So, we'll always do a naming convention of what phase of the funnel it is. And, then we'll say what objective it is. So, it'll be like TOF-Conversions, TOF-Traffic, TOF-Videos. Kathleen: TOF meaning, top of funnel. Ali: Top of funnel. Exactly. And, so we keep a very, very streamlined way of doing that. And, then we follow the same naming conventions as you keep going down to access. So, it'll be LLA-Look Like Audience. And it will be FB-90. So for us that means Lookalikes of Facebook engagers for 90 days. And, so come up with your own system that is going to make sense and try to stick with it as much as possible. Kathleen: Great. This is so interesting. So, I'm curious to know. Do you have any good tales of like using all these systems that you have? What kind of an impact has that had for the accounts that you do Facebook ads for? What are the terms that people expect to see? Ali: So, again, everybody is different. And, that's part of the goal setting too, is understanding what your profit margin is, what your cost should be, what your normal threshold is. Here's actually another tip that I would say, is also look at those goals for the different levels of the funnel as well. Because while you might have a blended cost per sale across for acquisition, you're going to pay more top of funnel. Or, you need to look and see what that actually is. Is it because now you're retargeting. You're able to spend less, because you're targeting such a micro niche of who you're going after. So, when I'm setting up all my weekly reports, I actually have it so that I'm looking at what my sales are, my cost for acquisition, the average order value for top, and then for middle, and then for bottom. So, that I know am I on target? Or, am I not on target with this? Kathleen: Yeah. Ali: So, that's really important.  Okay so one example, like I was saying is a college advisor that we have worked with now for many years. And, she is fantastic. She shares so much good information. She is the epitome of what an inbound marketer should be because of all the great information she shares. So, she has this one piece of content that she gives away for free. It's the annual timeline calendar. So, this is something that tells you for each month of the year, here are all the things that you need to have on your radar for everything from standardized tests to essays to getting any recommendations and referrals and visiting colleges. Kathleen: I could've used that. I have three kids who've now gone through that process, and it would've been nice to have that. Ali: She is amazing. Well, clearly I didn't target you. But ... so, anyway, what this is, is she does a full process with this. So, this is actually a great kind of multi-channel example too. Because we do the inbound marketing for her. My team does that. So, we do everything from having a landing page where they can go to get to get this. So, we've built that out for them. We do emails that go out to the database. Because this is refreshed information, she refreshes it every six months, it's something that people want to re-download and re-engage with. So, she already has a great following for that. Ali: Then, we do an organic social presence for her with it. And, then with the ads, now I'm amplifying everything that we're doing. So, this is something where just looking back at August and the metrics. So, we launched it August 1st, and all of a sudden we jumped up for them because of doing ads and doing very, very strong presence, I can tell you looking at this we had ... 3,821 people who downloaded it in August. Kathleen: Wow. Ali: Of those, 2,486 of them came from paid social. Kathleen: Hm. Ali: This is because we did not just say this is a campaign. This is a gated piece of content that we wanna put out there. We used our strategy where we did top of funnel. And, so we shared information about blogs that were relevant to not knowing what you need to be doing. And, then we also took ... she does Facebook Lives every single month. And, so we took her Facebook Lives and we turned those into ads. And, so then we retarget anyone who's watched at least 25% of the video to then be hit with the middle of funnel ad. And, that middle of funnel ad is the offer to download this annual timeline. Ali: Then, if you've hit the page to download the annual timeline, but you didn't actually download it, we hit you to remind you there's still time to download it. So, that's at bottom of funnel to try to convert and get them across the line. Kathleen: Got it. Now, when you look at the ad efficacy and ROI, in terms of metrics, what are looking most closely at? Is is cost per click? Is it cost per acquisition? Is there some other metric? What are the KPIs that are most important there for you? Ali: So, it depends on the different stages of the funnel, and again back to what the KPIs are that we set. But, I'm always going to be looking at a few different key areas. So, again, if it's legion versus eCommerce, for eCommerce I'm looking at returns on ad spend. The purchase conversion value, the budget. How much of the budget is being spent that we've set? How many purchases? I'm also looking at link clicks. It's really important to look at outbound link clicks and the CTR. So, the click through rate, CTR, is something that you always want to be a bare minimum of 1%. If it's under 1%, this is where we have a CRO problem. And, you have to start working backwards to say I'm getting a lot of activity on the ad. But, I'm not getting enough people who are clicking through. Or, they're bouncing. They're not happy. They're not staying there. Ali: And so you have to start then becoming a sleuth in terms of what's going on, on the site as well. So, I'm looking at those, as I mentioned, link clicks. And, relevance is also another one. So, relevance, you can get up to a 10 score. So, this client, the college advisor. She ... we do the blog amplification for her. She has such a very strong presence through her ads campaign and her inbound marketing that I don't have a single ad that's running for her that's under an eight relevance. She's just phenomenal. Because we've honed the targeting so much. If you start to see that your relevance is three, four, something's wrong. You have to either tweak that ad set or kill it. Kathleen: And, relevance is a score that Facebook gives to you? Ali: Yes. So, this is ... that's determined ... there's a couple of different things that go into it. But, I like to look at how many link clicks are you getting? Are you getting shares? Are you getting comments? Is it positive sentiment? Negative sentiment? All of that goes into the relevance. Kathleen: Wow. It's fascinating how much goes into this, because you know, going back to what we first talked about in the beginning. It's so easy to just think, oh yeah. I'm gonna boost my post for $50.00 and just see what happens. Sure, I'm sure you can get some results there, but it really is such a science. Ali: Absolutely. Kathleen: No wonder people hire Facebook ads experts, because it's a lot. Ali: It really is. It is. And, that's why even sometimes people say, well don't you wanna learn other channels? And, yes. I'm interested in learning other channels. But, this changes all the time. There's so much that you need to stay on top of that I have all I can to just keep working on clients and keep myself learning as well. Kathleen: You are plenty busy. Ali: Yes. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Now there's two questions I always ask my guests. And I'm gonna do a twist on one of them with you. I always ask, the first question is, company or individual. Who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? But, you're so deep in the Facebook ad space, I'm gonna amend that to be, company or individual. Who do you think is killing it with Facebook ads right now? Ali: So, I am very privileged to have a great community. It's a very similar community to the inbound community as well where we all support each other. We have our own Facebook groups that we participate in. We share the hacks and tips and tricks. So, there are a handful. I particularly love a few people. Scott Seward and Dee, they are Right Hook, and they're out of Australia. And, they are just wonderful. They're great with eCommerce. I love my mentors. I've learned from Kat Howell, who I would not know anything if it weren't for Kat Howell. Ali: And, then honestly, a lot of just my peers in the group. They're wonderful. I work with them often, and we all have little bits of golden nuggets, I call them, that we share with each other, that helps. Because, like I said, some things do change. And, so we are constantly posting. But, there's a really strong community out there. Kat Howell by far, has changed the way I approach Facebook ads. Kathleen: Oh great. Now I think I know the answer to this, because I think you just said it. But, I'm gonna just double check anyway. With things changing so quickly, how do you stay up to date? Is it primarily through this group of ... community of practice if you will? Ali: Absolutely. So, there's a couple of great groups out there. The Facebook ad hacks. So, Kat Howell has a couple of different varieties. I'm part of her mastermind group, and I could not imagine not being part of it. You can go through, she even has really great simple programs, Facebook ads that convert. I've gone through a lot of the different programs, but now I have this community. There's other good communities out there too. So, actually, Scott and Dee, they started their own eCommerce heavyweights Facebook group. That's another great one to be a part of. Ali: Oh God. There's some other really strong podcasts that are out there too. I can even help ... I'll grab a couple and give them to you if you wanna post them. Kathleen: That would be great. I'm always on the hunt for more podcasts to listen to. I'm a total podcast junkie, which is probably why I have a podcast. Fantastic. Well, I'll definitely include links to all of that in the show notes. But, if somebody is interested in learning more about this wants to ask you a question, wants to reach out to you, what is the best way for them to find you online? Ali: They can find me on Facebook. I pretty much will become friends with everybody, because that's what I do. I'm on LinkedIn as well. They can go through, I have some articles that are posted on the impact blog as well on Facebook ads. So, read through those as well. And, you can email me too. Kathleen: Great. All right. Well, thank you so much, Ali. This has been super interesting. I mean, I still feel like my head spins every time we get to this level of depth of Facebook ads. But, every time I talk to you, I learn so much more. And, I'm sure that everybody listening feels the same. It's really interesting. Ali: Well, thank you for having me. I know I can go on and on. So, apologies if I rambled too much. Kathleen: No. Don't apologize. It was great. Ali: Wonderful. Kathleen: And, if you're listening, and you liked what you heard, I would very much appreciate it if you would give the podcast a review. I know I say this every week, but it really does make a difference. So, if you go onto Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on and leave a review that would be much appreciated. And, if you know somebody doing kick ass inbound marketing work, Tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. Kathleen: That's it for this week. Thank you again for listening.

Welcome to #Inbound17 Pop up episode 1 - Today we feature Angela Defranco who talks about the future of relationship between SEO, Content and Lead Attribution. Also we recap the Facebook Ads masterclass session by Daria Marmer from HubSpot, Ali Parmelee & Dawn Barson. PLUS! Brene Brown's keynote!

Ali Parmelee is the co-owner and creative director of Think Creative Group, a brand building and brand management firm. She speaks about leveraging social media to grow a business. Yale Entrepreneurial Institute Summer Fellowship Speaker Series: Ali Parmelee.