In today’s episode, Amy is chatting with Melissa Farage. Melissa started her own marketing agency just one year ago, but hit the ground running with former clients hiring her immediately. She’s discussing her history in paid search, and how and why she’s made the addition of paid social to her list of specialties.

 

 

Highlights & Takeaways:

On this episode, you’ll learn about:

• What you need to know about paid social if you’ve only ran paid search
• How to pitch your clients on new channels if you’ve never run them before
• What to keep in mind for paid social, including how content marketing just might fit into the mix

 

Show Notes:

Welcome to Paid Search Magic. You’re listening to episode 16, “From Paid Search to Paid Social” with Melissa Farage. I’m your host Amy Hebdon. 

A few housekeeping items:

First of all, we know that this podcast is coming out after Halloween, but as you may already be hearing by this point, my husband James who edits this podcast wanted to have a Halloween themed episode, so you’ll probably be hearing some obligatory Halloween sound effects here. 

Second, I want to let you know that coaching sessions are currently on offer at PaidSearchMagic.com/coaching. You can get a 5 pack of 1-on-1, totally customizable sessions with me personally helping you with your biggest paid search challenges –  for 33% off. Go check it out.

Now, diving in…This week we’re talking to Melissa Farage.

Melissa is a digital marketing strategist who specializes in paid search and social. She founded her own marketing company, Mountains to Sound Marketing, a year ago and specializes in working with startups.

Amy: We actually have Melissa Farage live in studio with us. Melissa, how is it going?

Melissa: Pretty good.

Amy: Awesome. We are so excited to have you here to talk to us about paid media and getting that paid social aspect. This is the first time we’ve really been talking about that on the podcast and it’s really big right now. I think it will be a really interesting episode for people. To kick things off, can you tell us what you’re doing now with paid media and how you got started with it?

Melissa: I’m currently a marketing consultant. I started my own marketing company last year in November. I got started. I was pretty lucky. I had a previous employer contact me and offered to give me a couple jobs to manage some paid social campaigns.

Amy: Just like on the side?

Melissa: Yeah.

Amy: Nice.

Melissa: It became my full time job. Then I got incorporated.

Amy: Very cool. Actually, that might be interesting to come back to. You actually filed all the paperwork to be an escort, I’m assuming?

Melissa: I’m a limited liability company.

Amy: Very cool. In terms of paid social … You started doing page search before you got into paid social, right?

Melissa: Yeah. I had about five years experience in paid search and was hired on to manage Facebook campaigns. As you can imagine, it was quite a shocker.

Amy: Yeah, they’re pretty different. They’re both large, but they both operate very differently. What other networks might be included in paid social?

Melissa: I usually count Instagram, Twitter and even sometimes Taboola and Outbrain as social because they’re not your conventional search platforms.

Amy: Sure. Yeah. When you talk about PPC for you, does that incorporate everything like including paid search and paid social or do you feel like PPC refers to one or the other?

Melissa: I think it refers to one or the other because the strategy is so different between conventional paid search and paid social.

Amy: Okay. I guess how did you transition? How did you get used to Facebook when you had never done it before?

Melissa: It was a bit challenging because coming from AdWords, I didn’t understand the concept of an ad set. I spent a lot of time just reading up on documentation. I found companies like AdEspresso had really good instructional articles. I did my research. I read through all the Facebook support articles and ended up setting up a couple example campaigns that were never launched just to understand the processes.

Amy: That’s smart. With what you know about Facebook, how do you feel like it does compare to AdWords?

Melissa: They’re quite different. Luckily, coming from an AdWords background, you’ve got the knowledge of the metrics that you’ll use to evaluate your Facebook performance. You can talk all day about reach and engagement, but it all comes down to your cost per results, so conversion or click or view.

Amy: Do you find that you can trust Facebook or other platform’s internal metrics or do you feel like there’s a discrepancy between that and other sources?

Melissa: That was actually the biggest difference between AdWords and Facebook is coming from an AdWords background. I always thought that the view-through conversion was a bit of an exaggeration. Now that I’ve been dealing with Facebook for a year, it’s definitely a metric that I like to use in my reporting. It’s typical that I find that the Facebook conversions are about 5% to 7% higher than the conversions you get with a UTM parameter. When you ask a customer how they heard about you, they will reference Facebook.

Amy: How interesting. In terms of maybe the differences between AdWords and Facebook, what would you say is your biggest struggle? Someone who’s maybe done AdWords and paid search before and that are looking at Facebook for the first time and freaking out, what do they need to know in order to make that transition or to understand about how Facebook is going to work for them?

Melissa: One of the biggest differences is images coming to the mix; images, media. If you’re doing paid search, typically you just write a couple snazzy headlines and ad copy, and you’re done. When you’re doing Facebook or paid social, you have to keep into account how images will affect your click-through rate and conversion rate. There’s a lot more that goes into creating an ad.

Amy: Would you say that, that’s true for responsive ads and display ads within AdWords? Does it compare? Could you use the same images in both and expect to see similar results?

Melissa: I’ve actually tried that. I found that because the demographics are so different and the placements are so different, a lot more thought has to go into selecting your Facebook images.

Amy: Okay. One thing that I have found in trying … I’m fairly new to Facebook. You’ve actually helped me trying to get some Facebook things set up and that’s just been bewildering to me. I feel like within AdWords, you can really dig in to see … There’s a lot of observations you can make. You can say where did it serve and you can get a list of placements and targeting and everything like that.

Whereas Facebook, at first, I couldn’t understand, “Well, why would you create all these small little segments and small little ad sets and duplicate it?” It seems like it’s because that’s it, you don’t get to dig in more and see which interest did they have that led them to see. You have to do it that front-end work because you can’t get on the backend.

Melissa: Yeah. That’s why when you’re setting up your ad sets, it’s really, really important to highly segment your audiences just to see what’s performing. Luckily, Facebook has added some new features, split tests, which allows you to compare small variations in audiences just to see what’s working and what isn’t. Part of that, there really wasn’t that much insight into seeing like what interest or demographic or behavior resulted in your target audience.

Amy: Do you create a lot of different ad sets then ora lot of different campaigns just to be able to better control that data and see what’s working?

Melissa: Yeah. I usually create 5 to 10 ad sets per campaign just so that I can segment my audiences to see what’s working, what isn’t. Depending on your budget, you might roll out a couple tests a week, a couple tests a month.

Amy: It seems like there’s a lot more to keep up with going forward for Facebook. I don’t want to say ad words has set it and forget it, because it’s not, right? In terms of once you launch something, you’re not always having to re-go back to that and say, “Oh, the copy is not fresh anymore. The ad has expired.” Whereas it seems like a lot of times with social, that will be the case. If it’s not fresh, it’s counting against it.

Melissa: Yeah. All of that is just the difference in the audience. Search, there’s intent. You typically have an audience that’s knowledgeable about your subject, your company. You’re able to target them with the very clear and concise set of keywords. With Facebook, it’s more discovery. You’re trying to capture customer’s attention who didn’t even know they were a customer. A lot more goes into trying to experiment to see what’s going to work, what isn’t going to work and constantly making sure you’ve got fresh copy, just so someone won’t get tired of your ad.

Amy: That’s really interesting. You talked about intend and that someone doesn’t even know they’re a customer. They’re not specifically looking for your offer necessarily, right? One thing I’ve noticed a lot on Facebook and how people …. I’m sure people who are in paid search are going to see a lot of Facebook marketing and how to do Facebook, but right now it’s all about funnels.

People talk about funnels. You have to own the offer and own the landing page and every single stuff that someone is taking from the initial interaction with your ad all the way down to making that decision. I see that all the time constantly on Facebook. I feel like that’s something within AdWords or a paid search that doesn’t really come up very much.

You’ve got the people who are managing the ads or the AdWords account and the people who are creating the landing pages. They could be in different companies. There’s really not a lot of overlap there. I don’t know. I think that’s maybe changing. I think maybe people doing paid search will get more involved in their conversion rate process and doing more in terms of landing pages. What’s your experience with that, with how Facebook functions that way compared to AdWords or where that overlap is?

Melissa: Yeah, I find specifically because the audience might not be knowledgeable about your product, it’s a lot more important to have control over your landing page. I honestly love it when a client will let me set up landing pages and conduct AB tests just to see what will convert and what won’t. Something as simple as a background image could turn away a potential customer or sell a new customer.

Amy: Do you think that, that’s not true with paid search or people that’s more committed that they’re looking for it?

Melissa: I think so. I found definitely with paid search you can get away with getting a lot more information or selling a lot more without as much effort.

Amy: When you create landing pages, how do you do that? Are you using the client’s site, you’re just creating a page for them. You’re using a tool like Unbounce. Or how do you build that out?

Melissa: Typically, I like to pitch Unbounce because it’s a pay per traffic platform. It’s also really easy to learn. I honestly like having the control over making some pretty small changes without having to call on an engineering team. I’ve proven to clients that I’m able to increase the conversion rate in with about an hour’s work as opposed to something that might take an engineering team a month.

Amy: Sure. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Do you feel like it’s important for someone who does paid media to do both paid search and paid social now or do you think that it’s okay to specialize in one or the other?

Melissa: I’d recommend specializing in both because I see paid social as a way to warm up potential leads. Paid search is a way convert them when they’re more ready to make a sale or sign-up. I honestly like to have control over the messaging across all channels, because the worst thing you can do is have an inconsistent offer and consistent value prop.

Amy: Sometimes, clients or maybe a little bit less educated or less familiar with how this works, they expect people to have one paid interaction, that’s it. You click on an ad and you either convert them or you find them organically or you go directly back to the site. The idea of paying for awareness or attention through Facebook and then paying for it again through them searching for a paid ad on Google and then doing again on their brand or something.

They are really reluctant to kind of agree that, that’s how the search landscape is or that’s how people interact with brands. In your experience, do people search that way? Where they going to one or the other or can you make it so that they just convert? Have the one interaction and that it’s it.

Melissa: You can get someone who’ve done customers, but one thing I always pitch to tests with clients who don’t think that conversion is two-step process is adding a how did you hear about us question on your landing page. A lot of times, they’ll see maybe they’ve heard everything on Google but they say they heard about you on search or Twitter or Instagram.

Amy: Do you find that, that ends up being pretty accurate? Is there any way to know?

Melissa: Not really. What it shows is it shows that you can’t always just trust your UTM parameters. People will see you on multiple sources and one will stick out in their mind.

Amy: That’s interesting. When you are pitching or working with clients, how do you decide which channels to use in your marketing mix?

Melissa: I’ve got a full stack of channels that I offer. Usually, I like to sit down with the customer. Kind of identify what they want to sell and what their target demographic is. Then I’ll usually select three to four different channels to focus on. I always like to have a paid search channel in the mix, but a lot of customers I find are moving more towards the social.

Amy: Do you have any idea or theory about why that is that people are moving to social?

Melissa: I think it’s new, it’s popular and also CPCs are rising significantly for Google where I’m actually able to get cheaper leads on social sources.

Amy: Interesting. When you ask your clients who their target is, do you feel like they usually have a pretty good understanding of who they should be reaching or marketing to?

Melissa: Most of the time they do, but I also like to do my own testing, which you can do with Facebook or Google or the source of your choice. Just to kind of refine like age, gender, location. I like to start there before diving deep into the interests demographics and behaviors.

Amy: How would you do your own testing like? What would that look like for someone who doesn’t that?

Melissa: I just start with doing like a low-budget engagement campaign just to see who is actually engaging with a post or an article, or an ad. That will give you a lot of insight as to who your likely customers are going to be.

Amy: If someone wanted to do this on Facebook and they hadn’t used Facebook before, how would they set that up so that they’re able to track that? If they set their parameters of 18 through 65, are they going to be able to then go through and segment and figuring out who their audience is or they have to set up groups right at the beginning or different ad sets.

Melissa: Facebook, they’ve improve their reporting significantly. You can easily drill down into different age groups, genders and locations just by adding a breakdown to Power Editor or just building a report in the reporting dashboard.

Amy: Okay. Can you walk us through what the difference is between Power Editor and some of the other ways that people might access Facebook?

Melissa: They’re actually working to integrate ads manager with Power Editor. They’ve become more similar within the last year. Power Editor is your go-to resource for doing bulk edits, changes and uploads. The biggest difference is you can actually make edits and you don’t have to publish them instantaneously. Say you’re making a bulk edits to 100 ads, you make a mistake. You can review them before they’re pushed live.

Amy: Let’s talk about that for a minute. The review process of having … Is this a fairly recent change where everything has to be reviewed before it goes live. Any change that I made now is like, “Did you mean to do that?”

Melissa: Potentially.

Amy: No, it’s not.

Melissa: I never pay attention to those.

Amy: Okay. I guess going back to what we’re talking about before with it can be beneficial to know both paid search and paid social because clients want to be doing both. What do you think is the advantages of having one person do both instead of having a paid search person and a paid social person?

Melissa: I think the biggest advantages is you’ve got the same strategy, the same messaging and you’re also using kind of similar imagery and techniques across all channels. The worst thing you can do is have different value propositions, different taglines.

Amy: Basically keeping everything consistent?

Melissa: Consistent.

Amy: That makes sense. We’ve talked about some networks. You mentioned some content management with Taboola and Outbrain. How did those work? We talked about Facebook a lot bit. How would someone go about using Taboola? Would they have a landing page similar to what they would be using on Facebook or AdWords or does it needs to go an article or is it something completely different? What’s the function there?

Melissa: For the concept marketing platforms, you do need to have an article, which I typically recommend being separate from your traditional blog post because you want to optimize it specifically for conversions. I’ve actually built articles on Unbounce, so I can AB test different calls to action, different colors, different buttons and different content.

Amy: How would that differ? How does a landing page differ from an article?

Melissa: An article, you actually want it to relate to the catchy headline that you have with the content marketing. You do wanted to educate. I typically like to have it be brand-focused rather than just getting someone to immediately convert.

Amy: What would be an example of a conversion that you’d have on an article that you’re working on?

Melissa: Maybe you’re pitching a new product. The customer to actually be knowledgeable about what they’re signing up for rather than just having a really quick and easy lead gen.

Amy: Conventional lead gen and landing pages is … The conventional wisdom is basically you don’t give anyone any opportunity to do anything else other than convert. Like removing any navigation or outbound links. Is that the same or is that just turned on its head when you’re working on articles?

Melissa: Yeah, it gets turned on its head. A lot of the companies do have strict requirements where if you try and submit a landing page, they will disapprove the article. They are trying to keep the quality of.

Amy: Okay. I just want to push on this a little bit more because I think it’s really interesting. For someone who’s never done this before, how would you recommend learning? What should an article look like? What’s the best practices for article writing? Especially if you’re used to just writing really short ads, article writing is maybe a completely different skillset. What do you do to get good at that?

Melissa: What I always recommend doing is just sourcing what your competitors are doing. Usually, you can start by any local or mainstream news channel. Look for other articles that are on the web. It’s usually at the bottom of the pages. It will say either sponsored by Taboola, sponsored by Outbrain. Click about 10 of them and look for patterns and see how the articles are formatted and what the call to actions look like. Typically, people adhere to shorter character limit and it’s very, very sales driven. Typically, all the images are hyperlinked and there are a couple, very strong call to action buttons in the article itself.

Amy: If you had a client and they’re like, “All right, we’re doing search. We’re doing display. We’re doing social and now we’re doing content marketing.” Are you helping them with all these different landing page and thus really building a suite where a different … Basically, customer experiences depending on which ads or channels they use to get there.

Melissa: Yeah, I prefer to have control of the entire marketing strategy.

Amy: How do you pitch that without getting too deep into how do you charge. I think that would be an entirely different episode. They’re just getting their feet wet and they wanted to get started with paid social. How would they convince someone? “Take a chance on me. I can build out. I can build out these pages if they’ve never done it before. I can use these different channels. I’ve never used Pinterest but I’m going to pitch someone on Pinterest because I think that, that’s going to fit with their demographic.” How can someone get started in that and really know what their next steps would be to start taking chances?

Melissa: Yeah. We like to start people off with a mainstream source like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Depending on the demographic, I will pitch like, “Hey, let’s try Imager. Let’s try Pinterest.” Depending on the demographic. I’ll always be frank with my clients and say, “I’ve never tried this before, but I think it might work. It has a lot of potential.” Then typically, I’ll look into some sort of metrics like, “Hey, this is not competitive yet. It’s an emerging new place to market to our customer.” Then typically, I’ll come up with an advertising budget.

Amy: In your experience of managing different paid and social platforms for people, have you uncovered any strategies, like any verticals that work for one group of people that someone else might want to avoid or something that works really well that someone might want to try?

Melissa: Yeah. Right now, my go-to thing is experimenting with Twitter. I think it’s because so many paid marketers have been fed up with Twitter’s performance in the past that it’s not as competitive as you think. One thing I really like about Twitter as well is they’ve got a really good insight into what different interests and behaviors are working and down to even what Twitter handles. Your audience and your customers will follow. I really like using it as a way to collect more data about the demographic.

Amy: Melissa, what’s the biggest tip you have for someone who hasn’t launched the social campaign yet or is launching for a new client? How can they learn what they should do next?

Melissa: Usually, I start by looking at my client’s closest competitors. I like to go after 5 to 10 different competitors and like them on Facebook or navigate to their website. Typically, what I’ll do is within a day or two, at least, I’ll start seeing their ads, and I’ll take screenshots. I always make a doc for each client where I record screenshots of ads and document that landing pages.

One tip I have is decoding the UTM parameters because you can often learn a lot about your competitor’s marketing strategies and how they’re segmenting their campaigns. I’ve used this in the past to get ideas for new campaigns to try.

Amy: Interesting. I know a lot of times, clients, they’ll be really into competitors because I want to know what their spend is or what their keywords are. When you’re decoding to figure out what their campaigns have been, how does that help inform what you would do next? Would you just copy what they’ve done? Would you test what they’ve done? What are your next steps there?

Melissa: I won’t copy language or imagery, but I’ll look for themes like, “Hey, they’re trying to pitch a seasonal event or they’re trying to drive to a free info session or something.” Sometimes, when it comes down to audience segmentation, they’ll actually include the audience name in the UTM parameters. You can say, “Oh, look, this person is charting this group of individuals. Why don’t I try that for my own client?”

Amy: Did you find that works pretty well?

Melissa: It works pretty well.

Amy: Awesome. Another question is when someone gets to your landing page, when you’re working with lead gen, you’ve generated that lead. I know sometimes when marketing were like, “All right, that’s it. We’re done. There’s a lead.” There’s still a lot more that goes on before they actually become a customer, right? There’s a lot more of the conversion that happens that were not really involved in when we’re just looking at that initial lead. What other factors are there? Is there a good way to be involved in marketing like post lead to help someone convert all the way to becoming a customer?

Melissa: Yeah. A lot of times, clients just aren’t focused on the number of leads. They want to look at lead quality. As a marketer, to prove that a channel works, you need to ensure that these customers are ready to take the next step to conversion. A lot of times, I’ll help guide strategies for email drip campaigns and possibly set up a recurring newsletter to help warm up some cold leads to get them to convert.

Amy: What would you include in a drip campaign to get that started?

Melissa: Depending on the source, especially with social, I really want to focus on letting the customer know more about the company. Usually including a mission statement or a value proposition that’s relevant to the demographic.

Amy: Are you measuring open rates and everything that happens after that to be able to optimize?

Melissa: Yes. I’m always AB testing emails, content and headline.

Amy: When you’re AB testing, this would go for emails as well as ads, how do you decide what to AB test? I think a lot of times, you put in a lot of effort like, “Okay, it’s done. I had my ad. I don’t want to come up with a new variation. It’s perfect as it is.” How do you decide what you’re going to test it against?

Melissa: Usually, I like to start high level for each audience, what are some value propositions that can appeal to them. Then list them in create a cash of value propositions to test. A test like a discount versus a monetary value and kind of see what works. Then I’ll work on messaging from there. Let’s say I’ve come up with my two to three top value propositions. Then I will move on to imagery.

Amy: What would you test for imagery?

Melissa: I like to see whether faces work or maybe an infographic. Also, one thing to consider is colors, gray scale versus a red or a blue.

Amy: As you are creating these different audiences, do you find that there are some audiences that are going to respond to different messaging or imagery better and you’re going to have to speak to that audience differently or do you find that there’s usually one winner across the board no matter what audience it is?

Melissa: I typically find that the imagery in messaging varies depending on the audience segment. A lot of things to consider are your age groups and your target demographics. If you think about a millennial will respond differently to an ad than someone who’s Gen X.

Amy: After you’ve done enough testing, can you get to the point where there’s no … Faces is going to work better for this audience. Or is it something that you’re starting over with every time you launch a new piece of creative to see if that still holds true?

Melissa: I like to use my test findings to build a sketch of each demographic like this audience likes faces and they like percentage discount. That way, it can continue to test and refine messaging. I do like to throw in at least one ad per ad testing segment that tests something brand new.

Amy: One other question. As we move towards and pass the mobile moment where people are more likely to be using their mobile phones, do you find that you’re having to do a lot of device type as well for how you’re optimizing or do you just let things run? What’s been your experience with that?

Melissa: I’m always a mobile first marketer. If a website isn’t responsive, then I really push creating a mobile first landing page. I do like to segment by mobile versus desk type. One thing to consider is people on iOS will respond differently than people in Android phones. A lot of times, it’s because you’ve got people bidding up for certain device types. I always recommend segmenting by device just to check performance and look for optimizations.

Amy: Do you find that the conversion rate is different if someone is on iOS versus an Android or is it just that, that auction is going to affect your overall performance?

Melissa: I find mostly just the auction.

Amy: Basically, the user is going to be the same, just how much are paying for the access for the user is going to be different.

Melissa: Yeah.

Amy: Then in terms of you’re sending out emails, like your involvement with that, is that something where you’re also having to check device type and break everything out or is it more like just the audience is going to respond how they’re going to respond?

Melissa: Typically with emails, I don’t spend as much time segmenting and optimizing for device. It’s all mobile first.

Amy: Interesting. Is there anything else … If someone is listening to this and they’re like, “Paid social is where I need to be,” what resources would help them transitioning to get more involved in paid social?

Melissa: I would just say start by reading Facebook’s documentation and looking for free resources like AdEspresso that has really, really good blog and guidebooks.

Amy: I’m going to push back on this a little bit because I have found Facebook articles to be about as useful as Google’s AdWords articles, which is not very. There’s information in there, but it’s hard to use that as a learning resource or unless your brain works differently and you’re like, “Oh, AdWords help section is great.” I feel like it’s hard to learn something from that. Do you feel like it’s better and that there’s better resources there?

Melissa: I think it’s like hit or miss. Unfortunately, their documentation is so expansive right now that it’s hard to find the coherent articles. I usually start with free resource like AdEspresso. Then I use Facebook’s documentation to fill in any gaps and verify all the information that I’m seeing. Honestly, I find the most learning I’ve done is just by doing. Go ahead, create some campaigns that you’ll never set life just to go through the process. See the settings and then just build a couple audiences.

Amy: Great. If someone wanted to learn more from you or get in touch with you, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Melissa: They can send me an email at melissa@m2smarketing.com.

Amy: Okay. Awesome. I will link that in the show notes as well so that people can have access to it. All right. Thank you so much for being on the show. It was really great to have you.

Melissa: Thank you.

Summary:

Thanks so much for sticking around. Be sure to check out paidsearchmagic.com/16 for transcript and show notes, and paidsearchmagic.com/coaching for the deal we’ve got going on there.

Next week, we’re  back with another mini-episode. You may have noticed that our minis aren’t always mini, we’re still playing with the format.

Our topic will be: Blindsided by Black Friday: Holiday planning for non-retail and unsuspecting businesses.

This is a don’t-miss episode if you have any clients who aren’t planning on running promotions over the holidays. Or at least, not yet. Thanks again for listening. Until next week!

 

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