You’ve heard me say this before: Facebook Live video is a crucial marketing tool for your business. And if you’re not already, you should be going live once a week – regardless of whether you’re just getting started with your marketing or you’ve been running ads for years! In this episode, you’ll learn why you should regularly go live on Facebook (regardless of the number of live viewers!), why this only works on your business page (and not your personal or group pages), and the KEY to tracking video engagement inside the ads manager (do 3 second video views really matter?). If you’ve been avoiding going live (or if you’re not promoting your live content), because you’re wondering if it’s worth it – I break down all your Facebook Live FAQs in this episode!
Key Points:
1:24 One of the simplest and best things you can do to get started with your Facebook ads and marketing – even if you don’t have your funnel together
2:11 What if you don’t have a large following on your business page? Does it still master?
2:50 How 1 Facebook live weekly can drastically improve your lead generation and your webinars (if you’re not a data whiz, this is for you!)
4:22 How much money should you really be spending on Facebook Lives?
5:06 Keys for targeting audiences so you successfully promote your Facebook Lives and season your Facebook pixel
7:45 Do 3 second video views that are reported in your Ads Manager for your Facebook Lives really matter? And if not what metric should you be looking at instead?
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:30]
In today’s episode, we’re gonna talk about how to use Facebook Lives in your marketing. I love Facebook Lives and video for leveraging and getting better results in your marketing. So, one of the things we encourage a lot of our clients to do is regular Facebook Lives. I definitely get some pushback on that from our clients, but it is one of the best things you can do. People ask me, “When should I start Facebook Ads,” or, “What can I do just to get started with my marketing in Facebook Ads? I don’t have my funnel all together.”
[00:01:00]
I get asked that question all of the time, and I always say, “Just start doing Facebook Lives.” Just get on Facebook Live, and then what you do is, you can promote it. So, getting on Facebook Live … before I dive into that, one thing I want to mention is that getting on Facebook Live and getting on video like that will help you when it comes time for you to do a webinar or to make other videos for your marketing. It’s just a really good habit to be in, because it makes you show up and do something that makes most of us uncomfortable. And continue to do it – just show up and do it. It can only do good things.
[00:01:30]
One of the other things people say is, “Well, I don’t have a lot of following on my business page, so if I do a Facebook Live, then nobody’s gonna watch it.” That’s where promoting it and actually putting ad spend in it comes into play. So, here’s the strategy that we use and how we use Facebook Live strategically in marketing for our clients. (And I even do this for myself. If you go to my Facebook page, you will see that there are quite a lot of Facebook Lives, and we do this same exact strategy, because it works.)
[00:02:00]
My recommendation is that you do one Facebook Live a week. I think it’s just a good habit to get into, to start putting your content out there; but here’s the other thing … You can use those Facebook Lives very strategically to test topics in different ways. You are putting your content out there to your audience to see what gets the best response. And then you can take that information, and you can use it for your webinar. Let’s say you do a Facebook Live and it just blows up, and you put some ad spend behind it. But then it starts getting all of this engagement in the comments, and you’re like, “Wow, I struck a chord here. I should use this strategically in the future.” So one time a week, and then you’re gonna use 5-10% of your marketing budget.
[00:03:00]
This is why I don’t give you a minimum number, because sometimes we have our clients spend like $200 or $500 on a Facebook Live promotion, and [then we have] some who spend $25 or $50. I don’t wanna give you an exact number of how much you should spend, because it more is a matter of how much are you spending a month and how much needs to go to Facebook Live promotion. So, 5-10% of your marketing budget should go to promoting your content. Remember, this is Step 2 in The Hirsh Process: Visibility. This is where you take just value content and you put it out there to people. So, reminding you that these Facebook Lives … they don’t even need a pitch in them. They don’t even have to have a call-to-action. They’re you showing up, giving value, sharing your message, branding yourself, getting on video in front of people in the newsfeed, and just putting that out there.
[00:03:30]
You get to strategically use them to retarget, so you don’t necessarily have to have a call-to-action. Because, just by getting viewers, you’re gathering data that is very valuable for your future marketing. So, you’re gonna spend 5-10% of your budget actually promoting that Facebook Live. That’s why I tell people, “Do your Facebook Live for the replay. Don’t do it to engage.” Yes, engage with people if they come on, and that’s great; but if you get on and there’s like one viewer or zero viewers, just do it. Just record the video, do the Facebook Live, make some mention of, “Hey, if you’re watching the replay, comment and let me know, blah, blah, blah. Drop a one for this,” whatever you wanna do. Just do it; don’t spend the first five minutes like, “Well, I’m waiting for people to get on…” You’re doing it for the replay, because you’re gonna promote it.
[00:04:30]
You have to keep that in mind, because if you spend the first three minutes doing nothing, your promotion is not gonna go very well, because people won’t watch the video when you go to promote it. Now, when we promote it, we spend most of the money going to cold traffic. Occasionally, we will make a combined audience of all of the warm traffic for the Facebook Live, if it’s a new one that a client did, because we want to stay top of mind for that warm traffic. But let’s say we’re going to spend $100. What I would do is have three audiences with a $25 lifetime budget and promote it for about five days, have all of those be cold traffic, and then one audience with a $25 lifetime budget be all of my warm traffic combined in an ad set (so, all of my video views, my web traffic, my email lists, my page engagement, my Instagram engagement … all of those warm buckets in one).
[00:05:30]
For a lot of the time, if you’re lacking budget – or, this is more of a strategy to just get new viewers so you can send them to the next step in your funnel – you can do 100% cold traffic targeting. This is gonna depend on the budget, how much cold traffic, but I’d suggest here … so, we do two things. We have one regular Facebook Live that we promote, but eventually I want you to find two or three Facebook Lives that did really well, got good engagement, [ones that] are obviously resonating with people with the topic. And I want you to promote those ongoing. You can get to a point where you don’t have to keep on doing new Facebook Lives, and for us we needed to figure this out, because our clients didn’t want to do regular Facebook Lives or they didn’t have time – but we still needed to do that Phase 2 of The Hirsh Process.
[00:06:30]
So, if you have a couple of Facebook Lives, you can regularly promote those to cold traffic, and if you do that, you should be excluding your warm traffic in those ad sets. What you don’t want is your warm traffic to keep on seeing that Facebook Live if you’re promoting it. Promoting it ongoing, exclude your warm traffic from the promotion and just keep on running it. Maybe it’s $5.00 a day or $10.00, and you’re promoting it – that means you’re continually getting views, and then you continually have an audience to retarget down your funnel. Also, in addition, you can promote any new Facebook Lives that you do to both warm and cold traffic, or just cold traffic depending on your budget. The key that you’re looking for here … one thing that people ask me a lot – because if you’ve ever promoted a video in Facebook, you see that it just reports video views, and they don’t really mean very much, because they’re 3-second video views and it’s like, “Great. I got this many 3-second video views. Who cares?” So, usually they’re one or two or three cents. That’s pretty normal.
[00:07:30]
It looks great, which is why Facebook reports it like that, but what you actually want to do is, in your ads manager if you click on “performance columns,” you can pull up a video engagement report. And it basically creates a bunch of tabs where you can see how many people watched 25%, 50%, 75%, 95% of my video views. What was my overall engagement? That’s how I judge the audiences. If I have four or five cold traffic audiences and I run a Facebook Live for four or five days, then for me to see what cold traffic audience responded the best, I’m looking at: What’s the average percentage of the video watch? How many people watched 50% or more of the video, or 25% or more of the video? Whatever one had more probably was your better audience. That’s the best way to tell. The next best way to tell is obviously take that audience of 25% video viewers, and retarget them to the next step in your funnel. And if they convert, they’re the right people. They’ve connected with you.
[00:08:00]
Also, if you’re getting comments and actual engagement on your video, it’s also the right audience. Those are how you tell it’s a little bit cloudy in the reporting. It’s not the same as, “Okay, I paid five dollars cost per lead,” or something. You know? It’s kind of lame that they report the 3-second video views, so that’s why I encourage you to pull up a more in-depth report, which you can do in ads manager, and then make this an ongoing strategy and use this to retarget. I want to mention here, (1) 5-10% of your marketing budget should always go to that Phase 2, Step 2 of The Hirsh Process (Visibility), which should be in the form of Facebook Lives, if you can. And then (2), use that data to both retarget and – this gets into Step 3 (Regeneration) – create lookalike audiences.
[00:09:30]
Some of our best audiences are lookalikes of your 25%, 50%, 75%, 95% percent video viewers, and retargeting that lookalike audience to the Phase 3 (Regeneration) in your funnel. So, whenever you do this, you’re paying to get video views, which means you’re paying to season your pixel and you’re paying to see who responds to your stuff, which means you’re teaching Facebook who you want to reach more of. And those lookalike audiences are really powerful. So use it for both retargeting and lookalike audiences. The final question people ask me is, “Do I have to do a Facebook Live, or can I pre-record videos, and is that the same thing?” Now, there’s no proof behind if Facebook favors one or the other. I like Facebook Lives better, because I think they show up and they come off as more authentic. They’re not scripted, you’re just live, you can tell it’s not scripted and the person shows up in a little bit more authentic and connecting way.
[00:10:30]
If there’s one thing that’s true right now about marketing, it’s that people are responding to that very authentic messaging. When we help with massive launches and they’re like, “Let’s compare our studio-recorded, really nice-looking video to a video shot on our cell phone,” the cell phone video is working better. That’s one reason I like Facebook Lives, and I also think it’s good practice for anybody who wants to do a webinar. I do think it is favored a little bit in the newsfeed when it says, “Emily Hirsh was live,” and then that’s showing up as a sponsored feed versus a video in the newsfeed, because it doesn’t have that organic [look]. The idea is to make it not look like an ad in the newsfeed. So, that’s kind of my theory. If it’s like, “I have to do pre-recorded, or I’m not gonna do any videos,” start with pre-recorded and eventually try to move to Facebook Lives. Remember, you’re doing them for the replay. Don’t worry about not getting a lot of people on them – you’re not gonna get a lot of people on them. Organic reach is basically nonexistent on Facebook.
[00:11:30]
You’re gonna pay for viewers, and you’re gonna target the exact audience you want to target so that you can build that visibility phase in your marketing and use the data and the retargeting to bring people through your funnel and build up your following. This is brand awareness, you guys. It’s so important. So, if you’re not using Facebook Live, if you’re not using video, I highly, highly suggest that you start doing that today in your marketing. Also, it’s just really good practice for you to show up. One other final thing to mention is that you have to do it on your business page. I wanna make sure I say that, because people, especially if you’re in a network marketing business… I always have people come to me and they’re like, “I did hundreds of Facebook Lives and they were all on my personal profile,” and I want to poke my eyes out! I’m like, “Do you realize all of the data that we can’t use?” I know you get more engagement on your personal profile, but Facebook, number one, does not want you promoting your business on your personal profile. Number two, you can’t use any of the data, nor can you turn it into an ad.
[00:12:30]
You also can’t go live streaming into your group, starting from in your group. You can go live from your page and share it to your profile or share it to your group, but you have to originate from your page for this strategy to work. So that’s really important if you don’t know that, and if you were doing Facebook Lives on your [personal] page, you’re way better off doing it on your business page. If you’re doing it on your [personal] profile, do it on your business page instead, and share it to your profile, because then all of those viewers you can retarget. You can’t do that on your personal profile, so make sure to do it on your [business] page. Now, if you guys want to join my Facebook group, I have a very exclusive Facebook group. It’s for people who are making over $100,000 in income. You have to apply to get in. There’s three questions to answer. If you go to HirshMarketingInsiders.com you can apply to join the Facebook group where I do a lot of bonus trainings – and this podcast episode was actually inspired from somebody who was asking about this in the Facebook group.
So, I do bonus trainings in there. It’s an awesome community. You do have to qualify to get in, but I encourage you to go to HirshMarketingInsiders.com and apply to join that Facebook group. Thanks so much for joining me today, you guys.