Thanks to our event sponsor Page One Power – The link builders you’ve been looking for.
It’s always a pleasure to learn more about Larry Kim, founder of WordStream. His insights on PPC and advertising are usually ahead of everyone else, so when he mentions his favorite new tips or hacks, I make sure to listen.
WordStream has been extremely successful in handling PPC for their customers, and Larry recently told me that one cent of EVERY dollar spent on AdWords goes through WordStream. Can you believe it? We are honored to have Larry join us for our LA SEO and marketing conference, happening in just a few weeks! The title of Larry’s presentation is 7 Ridiculously Smart Facebook and Twitter Advertising Hacks.
In our interview below, we discuss how social media advertising can bring in big revenue and traffic. If you’d like to learn more from Larry and our other great speakers at SEJ Summit Santa Monica, you can purchase your tickets today.
You’ll be talking about smart Facebook and Twitter advertising hacks on April 13 at SEJ Summit Santa Monica. What do you think is the most common mistake businesses make when it comes to social media advertising?
Hands down, the biggest mistake marketers are making in social is paying to promote junk content. You can’t just take your social ads budget and cut it 30 ways to promote 30 pieces of content — it’s a total waste of the majority of your budget. Facebook and Twitter are each using their own version of an ad Quality Score (Facebook Relevance Score and Twitter Quality Adjusted Bids), and like Google AdWords, you get fewer impressions and pay more for clicks on less engaging, lower quality ads.
The key is to do a ton of testing with organic content before choosing which posts to put your ad budget behind. You can increase your social ads ROI 10-100 times simply by refusing to promote crap content!
What advice can you give businesses when it comes to building an effective social media advertising campaign?
Find the tools to automate repetitive processes so you can focus on creativity. If you’re just getting started and want to build your social advertising knowledge, the Social Ads 101 module in PPC University is a great place to start. You can then access the tools you need to implement effective campaigns, plus guidance and workflows that make sense for your unique business goals, within WordStream Advisor.
How do you decide whether to build a campaign on Twitter or Facebook? Or, when does doing both work best?
You can get crazy awesome results even with tiny budgets like $50, as long as you’re promoting the right content, to the right people, on the right channel. I talked about this just a couple of months ago with Loren Baker in an SEJ ThinkTank webinar — that I love testing content out on Twitter, then promoting it on Facebook. By doing it that way, you can make sure you’re promoting only the best content on Facebook, which keeps your engagement insanely high, driving costs down and getting you crazy impressions.
I noticed that you’re into “finding the unicorn” lately (which you know I think is awesome). Who or what gave you the idea to use unicorns as a metaphor in ads?
It just seemed obvious to me, especially when you look at the top ads on any given Google SERPs page, or even on Facebook now. Ninety-nine percent of advertisers are using the same old tactics and messaging, so even if the creative is a bit different, the ads all end up looking the same to audience members.
If you want to stand out, your ads have to be totally different, stand out, rare…only the top 1 to 2% of your content has the potential to attain unicorn status. But if you’re wasting your budget on crappy content and not allotting more to potential unicorns, they’ll stay lame and never reach their potential.
What do you think is the easiest way find “unicorn” attributes to build ads around?
You have to identify what’s going to make what you’re offering truly different from anything else your target audience is considering. I’m not talking about more clever catchphrases or anything like that…those are just surface level changes that amount to putting lipstick on a pig if your underlying offer and messaging are no good. I’m actually going to be talking about this at SEJ Summit, so stay tuned!
Bonus Question: What was the last great book you read?
Zero to One, by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters. Just an incredible read, not only for entrepreneurs but I’d say for every manager, director, and c-level exec out there. It’s a fascinating deep dive into how Silicon Valley operates, but throughout, you can see how the concepts apply in all areas of business, and in all regions. It was a super smart book and I’ll probably read it again next year.
Thanks so much Larry! I’ve been meaning to read Zero to One. I’ll add it to my Amazon list.
Don’t forget, you can buy your ticket for our SEJ Summit Santa Monica conference, taking place on April 13th at Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel.
SEJ Summit image via Paulo Bobita. Other images via Shutterstock.
