Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the e-commerce marketing podcast today’s guest is Andrew Foxwell Andrew is the co-founder of Foxwell digital a social media advisory firm based in Madison. He cobbled he collaborates and consult with. Bring company Fortune 500 companies e-commerce entrepreneurs and local startups, and he advises them on Facebook Instagram advertising online fundraising and digital marketing strategies.

He has been advertising since the start on Facebook, and he has spent over 100 million dollars through the platform welcome to the Pakistan Drew. Hey, thanks so much for having me is that correct over 100 million dollars in Advertiser since it’s not an exaggeration. Shanna a lot of the spend came when I worked at an agency and then since then I have started my own agency, so yeah, it’s a it’s kind of nuts and I have been really with it since the beginning so OK and the agency started Foxwell digital arm.

What’s the website for that incase listeners want to visit the website check you out sure our website is Foxwell digital com and you can check it out and check out the story. Wife and I own the business together, and we it’s just us. We have a one part-time employee, and yeah, we do Facebook and Instagram advertising and we help people figure it out and help navigate that landscape for a lot of people so you can check it out check out our testimonials that fox will digital com backslash cred as well.

OK, so let’s jump into it today. We are going to be talking about Facebook and Instagram advertising and we’re going to be talking about how to build it the right way the proper Foundation. Done and what are the required ingredients to have successful advertising campaign in Facebook and Instagram, so let’s jump into it, and you can just take over and let us know how should businesses be strategizing on capitalizing when they Market on Facebook and Instagram sure well.

I think you know the first thing is thinking about all of the fundamentals of what you need in order to really have an impactful campaign on Instagram. And on Facebook. I think one of the biggest ones that I see people miss right away is creative so creative and what you’re going to say and what the images of your products look like so are they good you have product shots that are of you know of that product that makes sense.

And if not if you’re selling information if you’re selling people the sign up for webinar is that offer compelling do people actually want to sign up or does it feel like spam, or are you trying to get their email, and you know maybe that landing page is not something that Facebook would like so that’s a big fundamental right there the creative in the ad whether it’s a video whether it’s a photo or whether it’s a combination of things is that something that is really impactful another foundational aspect of it is.

Do you have the Facebook pixel properly installed on your website in order to really have impactful Facebook and Instagram marketing campaigns that are through paid strategies you absolutely have to have the Facebook pixel installed and the Facebook pixel so great because it’s got so many features to it that you can do once.

It’s in there. Not only. Can you course create free marketing pools, but you can do things with some new features like page engagement custom audiences or like website custom audiences. Says that her based on events that happen with the pixel so maybe somebody’s gone to that site more than once and they’ve gone twice and they’ve it fired the event that’s the add to cart event so they’ve added something to cart twice in the last 90 days.

You can send an add to those people so having that Facebook pixel in there allows you to not only create great audiences, but also have your attribution and your Roi much clearer and much easier for you to translate. Hopefully continue to grow okay. Before we move along as far as the creatives at this elements that people should be paying attention to and what are some like good examples of brands that listeners can look at to try and get inspiration and see what’s actually really working.

Yeah, I mean I think the general concept with creative framework that I like to go off of now is what is thumb stopping? What is somebody going to be going through their newsfeed on their phone and seeing because that’s where obviously the majority of the impressions are being shown where somebody going to be going through and I’m going to see it be like whoa interesting.

What is that and how can you go about that? There are a lot of brands that that do this really? Well, you know I mean I saw an example of really creative piece of creative together. Day that I wanted to talk about from Mandalay Bay, which is really interesting. They actually created like a fake news feed, and it looks like sand is filling your your news your screen.

Just pretty pretty crazy, but you know there’s a brand name bombus an e-commerce brand, and they have really really mastered. You know the creative. What is it using video using their products in a creative and interesting way and creating visuals that are really really like something. That’s captivating.

See, but generally the rule of thumb that I follow and there’s definitely exceptions to this rule, but if you’re an e-commerce company that it has a product that you’re trying to sell lifestyle photos are just not what they used to be I think a lot of people and a lot of social advisers used to say hey you should put on lifestyle photos at people wearing your product walking down the street, or you know the classic one that we saw a ton of which was the product sitting next to an iPhone with a shot down looking at a desk.

We’ve all. In that photo 100 times right and so that stuff doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work as it used to and it doesn’t really Drive sales so the question is how can you have an interesting and Visually creative and captivating shot that is of your product. You know that that that something’s going to catch people’s eye and its products Centric without you know kind of shoving it in their face too much, so that’s really the the type of thing that I would do its a lot of colors that people don’t explore.

So you know what are bold colors that you could put your product against that it would stand out and would stand out of the news feed and think about visually what you stop on as well. There are some of the kind of components that I like to follow. Okay, so so far as far as having a successful Facebook and Instagram campaign.

You’ve mentioned the creatives, and I did the Facebook pixel to the website. What are the other ingredients that make make up this success formula. Facebook and Instagram advertising yeah the other components that I really believe are you know the audiences that you have available to you so if you’re going to start from scratch, it’s a very difficult proposition to do that if you don’t have an email list or you don’t have a previous customer list because you can certain you can definitely start with with Facebook or Instagram paid from scratch, but it is harder, and so if you have audiences of email opens or your email list or your customer.

Store even maybe you have a best customer list or a multiple purchase or customer list that is going to make that work a lot easier for you on e-commerce and and so having those lists as a foundational piece is really really great and important to having success because you can create lookalike audiences from those and those look like audiences are modeled by Facebook to be exactly like the people on those core lists based on 2000 factors of similarity which.

Super cool, so that’s really what you’re going to want and it’s going to that’s going to be a foundational piece to really seeing the success that you want to do so those look like audiences and having lists is another one and then the final ingredient is really what we started to touch on earlier, which is your website right so if your website is converting at less than 1%.

It is going to be really tough to get people in there to buy something from Facebook that are cold traffic there never been there. They don’t know. You and if your website isn’t converting at 1% at a minimum. It’s going to be tough, and so you know you’re not going to be really seeing the success you need so question is how can you design your website?

How can you redesign some landing pages to make people aware of what you’re doing quickly so that they path for them to purchase is as easy as possible especially on mobile. I heard a six months ago that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t even look at products anymore that people bring to him that Facebook’s trying to roll out.

Desktop he doesn’t even look at it everything that gets brought to him and the experience it gets brought to him has to be on mobile and so that’s the type of mentality that I think we really need to have and I know I have it clients that we work with habit. Not everybody does, but I would encourage you to start thinking that way of looking at it purely on a mobile device and saying.

If I didn’t know this and I wasn’t familiar with this. What would I learn about it? What would it be like yes, that’s it’s definitely something that a lot of people have been preaching you have to get your mobile right you have to get your mobile right but slowly businesses are just picking up and get it get it to that realization and study to optimize their websites for that, but it is taken a lot of time, but unfortunately a lot of.

The internet and a lot of users mainly access everything through mobile so yeah, it’s definitely something that businesses need to be working on you’ve mentioned that for ingredients you need for Success at this some mistakes people should be avoided. When they are running campaigns on Facebook and Instagram that you know?

I think the there’s a couple mistakes that people make that there’s a lot of mistakes that are common all mentioned some of the top ones one of the first mistakes that I say would say is very common is when people launched a Facebook or Instagram ad for the first time and they let Facebook choose the placements and they don’t deselect the Facebook Audience Network.

They don’t deselect the Facebook right hand column, and they don’t diesel actually things like the. Instant articles on Facebook there. It’s not that those placements can’t deform an audience Network really can’t at this stage. It’s not mature enough as a placement for Facebook, and we could talk more about what that is and the instant article certainly can perform in certain cases the right hand column on Facebook desktop can certainly perform in some cases, but if you don’t deselect those things Facebook will spend some of your money there, and you potentially can be wasting money, so that’s one thing that I would say is a common mistake that I’ll see another.

Common mistake that will see is people using the wrong ad units or the wrong objective so they’re saying hey, I really want to try to sell this to people and I’m going to boost a post at them. Well. That’s fine and boosting a post will get you engagement and gets you likes comments and shares, which is okay, but it doesn’t necessarily Drive sales and one of the main value propositions of Facebook is that you can say to them.

I am looking to make a sale off of this ad. I want to launch an ad for conversions, and what that does is help stick that you launch it, and it finds people within your target audience that are the most likely to convert, and so that’s just really awesome right. That’s a perfect perfect way to do and so no there’s no reason to waste your money.

Just trying to get likes comments and shares when you can actually launched an ad for conversions, and then the ad units a lot of people say yeah, this great photo of my product, and they’ll upload it as a photo post and put a link in it well. That also doesn’t really work it can occasionally, but what happens when you click on a photo in your news feed it enlarges the photo which is like doesn’t take you anywhere so in many cases switching over to either a link post ad which is one that drives you right to the site or something like a carousel ad can be a really great way to show off multiple parts of that product or multiple value propositions of that product, so those are some of the those are I would say the top two.

I would say the. Third one is kind of common that will see it is a challenge around attribution, so they have pressed play or launched a Facebook ad without setting sort of an expectation with it and making sure that all of your tracking and attribution is correct. So making sure that your pixel is firing making sure that you have a way to track it to some degree off of Facebook with Google analytics and making sure that you know you’re able to to just see what some numbers are and how they align to one another and that’s a that’s another really big one, and there’s so much of others like naming conventions and other things that I think people don’t plan their bill before they actually get in build a Facebook ad is another common one, but those are what I would say at the top.

Common things that we see in terms of mistakes people make okay again, we talkin with Andrew Fox well from Foxwell digital. Do you have any resources that you can share that people can check out when they’re trying to come up and optimize their Facebook and Instagram advertising and ultimately what are some cool tools that people can use sure yeah, I mean so there, are you know the best resources you can find if you’re looking to get more.

Advanced with some of the tactics and tools that you are using is to check out Jon Loomer is website Jon Loomer Jon Loomer digital. He is I’m on his podcast every month in John’s a good friend of mine, and he is he’s really the advanced Facebook guy and you can. Also, book time to talk to me through his site if you want to and so he’s got a ton of resources on there.

I’ve all the newest things and all the newest kind of tricks and tips and gadgets that you can use which is really great one of my personal favorite resources is Addis presso. They have an incredible amount of content on their website about things that you can try and there a software that you launch ads through, but that’s really a big one.

That’s that’s really really helpful. Is is to kind of look at espressos content. See what they’ve got. One on and then you know really tools there isn’t anything fancy that I use I actually don’t use any tools to manage our campaign’s Facebook even has automated rules, and I don’t use those actually because I’m kind of a control freak, so I can’t necessarily say that they’re big ones for reporting or anything that I use because I my belief on this and my friend Antonio that espresso loves to make fun of me when I talk about this, but you know my big thing is the platform.

To sell much that Tim me as a Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising expert and consultant. I have to be I have to be as close as possible to that platform. I’ve got to know if a button changes. I’ve got to know if a if something is broken. And a day-by-day basis because if I don’t that’s that’s my I lose my value to my clients my customers, so so I don’t really use a lot of the tools for anything, but there are things that I’ve seen people starting to use like you know people will do animated photos Cinema graphs, and they will you know use flick?

Cyl for kind of animating those images and things like that so if there’s things like that that people have been using more, but but I have still kind of stuck to the platform itself, but the big one. I mean if you’re not using the power editor. To launch an optimize your campaigns on Facebook that is an absolute necessity if you are going to go to step 2, and if you’re really going to start to take advantage of the Dollar’s take advantage of how you’re spending and take really control of your Facebook campaigns you have to know how to use the power editor in the right way, okay, and thanks for being on the podcast if people wanted to reach you how can they reach you?

Thanks for having me yeah, my mails Andrew. At Foxwell digital com you can reach me at on Twitter at Andrew Fox well and look forward to hearing from you and let me know if you listen to this and where you located. I was love to to get emails from all over the world and some of the podcasts that I’m able to be on a need final thought.

I tell you the biggest thing right now that I would say if you are not doing is checking out that engagement pageview custom audience piece that I mentioned earlier on Facebook that is just doing so so great so make sure that you. Check that out of saying you know hey if people then this URL multiple times that they’ve gone to this URL, and then they’ve done this and creating those conditional website custom audiences is really going to have impact on your campaigns right away, okay again.

Thanks under for being on the podcast. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the e-commerce monthly importers during the e-commerce marketing Partners Facebook group to learn connect collaborate and grow with other e-commerce marketers at get of si.com /f be subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for e-commerce marketing partners and please leave a rating and review.

See you next time.