CMO strategy guide: The Facebook master class for marketers

Despite suffering the worst stock selloff in history and trouble with the U.S. Congress, Facebook remains a crucial part of the Chief Marketing Officer's (CMO) arsenal.

For this reason, I invited two distinguished Facebook marketing experts to be guests on episode 288 of the CXOTalk series of conversations with the world's top innovators.

Dennis Yu and Logan Young are among the most knowledgeable Facebook advertising experts in the world. They are co-founders of BlitzMetrics, a data and analytics company that serves enterprise clients.

Also: Twitter shares fall 17 percent on disappointing user numbers | Now LinkedIn will let you leave voicemail messages (just not for me, please) | Facebook Q2 misses revenue estimates as user growth stalls | CNET: Facebook's bad year just got worse

The video embedded above is a genuine master class in how to use Facebook effectively for marketing. If you care about this topic, watch the video and read the complete transcript.

Edited summary comments are below, but the video and transcript go into far greater depth, especially on detailed topics such as how to use video through the entire marketing funnel.

Why does Facebook remain so important for marketers?

Dennis Yu: Facebook has scale. And, because of the amount of data they have, you can see a Cambridge Analytica happen. You can see various fears that occur when people could do something with their ad targeting platform.

You know the same kind of ad targeting that Facebook has gotten in trouble for, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Google have provided the same kind of targeting, but they don't get in trouble because they don't expose that same level of [detail].

What has been the impact of scandals such as Cambridge Analytica?

Logan Young: A lot of people just aren't aware how much data Facebook collects and how they make it accessible to others. As that's come to light, it's freaked a lot of people out.

In response, Facebook is trying to be proactive right now, saying, "Yes, we have the data, but we're going to be more responsible in the way that we use it.

Dennis Yu: As long as the general population is relying upon the newsfeed for their news, they're going to fall for fake news. They're going to sign up for things that they never really wanted.

Facebook has to be more transparent. They have to educate the public. They have to educate business folks like us on what is possible.

How can marketers harness the power of Facebook?

Dennis Yu: Facebook has gotten into this situation because consumers use Facebook as their address book; like a best friend, like the phone to talk to everybody. The very thing that's made it powerful from the consumer standpoint is the very thing that has been hurting them from the regulation standpoint.

It's also the very thing that's amazing for us as marketers. While it's free for consumers, all that data becomes amazing because we can target and drive more sales.

Logan Young: Ads are powerful when they're relevant.

Some time ago, Proctor & Gamble came out, and they said, "You know what? We've tried this whole online advertising, and we just found that traditional works better." Well, if you approach Facebook with a traditional mindset where you have just one creative that you blast out there to everyone, it's not going to work great for you.

The power of Facebook is that you can sequence messages. The average consumer needs seven touches with a brand before they're going to convert.

Let me give you some quick examples of how this will work on Facebook.

If I have a video that I run there as an add, I could take people that watch 50% of it and show them something else, or I could take people that only watch 3 seconds or less and say, "You know what? They didn't watch that video. Let me try again with these folks."

If I have an event, for example, we worked with TiVo a while ago; they had this big event. It as a ten-year anniversary thing. I put the event out there. Some people would say, "Yes, I can go," some people would say, "No," and a lot of people would say, "I'm interested, but I don't know." Well, I could then retarget and say, "All the people that said they were interested but didn't make it to the event, they might be interested in something else," so I can target those people with another ad.

On Facebook, you can become relevant with your messaging in a way that you can't with billboards, TV, radio, any kind of traditional. It's just not possible.

That's the power on Facebook. Most advertisers don't do that, sadly.

Why is the funnel concept so important on Facebook?

Dennis Yu: In a traditional funnel, you have top, middle, and bottom. You have awareness, engagement, conversion, which is how Facebook organizes their funnel. Technically, they call it awareness, consideration, conversion. We call it awareness, engagement, conversion.

Marketers are usually in two camps. One is, they're brand marketers where they're trying to drive awareness for selling consumer packaged goods. Then you have direct marketers trying to drive leads, sales, and e-commerce, that kind of thing. Then, in the middle, you have this no man's land of engagement.

Facebook is trying to bridge those audiences. They have built, for example, a new tool called Advanced Measurement, now called Attribution, which shows how Facebook can drive people going into the store, an in-store visit, and buying at the point of sale.

They tie back your loyalty programs, POS systems, email; remarketing between these different systems.

It's not just a Facebook funnel. It's not that people are engaging on Facebook and then buying on Facebook. Instead, Facebook is influencing the consumer to buy, maybe bypass the website and landing page completely.

Likes, comments, and shares are vanity metrics. A lot of those have zero correlation with the actual purchase when you do split tests, lift tests, to determine if there is an impact.

Most social media marketers are trying to drive likes, shares, and comments with cat photos or whatever, without changing the underlying behavior.

What should marketers do?

Logan Young: Marketers need to recognize that it's not always a one-touch conversion, and you need to sequence this out. Find a funnel that works for you, to send all your traffic down. You want to test having multiple touches, but you want to go from the first touch all the way down to conversion and recognize that, again, it's going to take multiple touches.

Advertising video is so cheap on Facebook where you can get a view for a penny or less, often we've seen, when we worked with the Warriors, we were getting views for just fractions and fractions of a penny, so it's okay to have multiple touches.

Use video. That's the best way because you'll get the lowest CPMs. Your cost per view is just ridiculous. Test videos to find one that gets you a cost per view of one penny or less, and that's kind of a good indication that it might be working. Then you want to sequence a few different videos together. Again, lead from a first touch all the way down to they're going to the website and then converting, purchasing your product.

Dennis Yu: Video is key. If you're not doing one-minute videos and 15-second videos on Facebook, you're not even in the game when it comes to Facebook because you can't remarket into Instagram or run things like Instagram stories 15 seconds or less or take those same videos and run in Snapchat 10 seconds or less.

CXOTalk offers in-depth conversations with the world's top innovators. Be sure to watch our many episodes! Thumbnail image Creative Commons from Unsplash.