How to Research and Plan Your Blog Content for a Year

Do you use a blog to connect with customers and prospects?

Wondering how to plan and publish strategic content on a consistent schedule?

In this article, you’ll discover how to set your blog’s editorial calendar for an entire year.

#1: Set Goals for Your Blog

Before opening a spreadsheet and jotting down ideas for your calendar, you need to consider your goals.

Start by looking at your overall business goals. Think about what you want to achieve this year to help grow your brand. More brand awareness? More engagement from fans? Building trust and loyalty? Generating more leads, conversions, and customers?

Your blogging goals should help you achieve these business goals. To establish quality blogging goals, use the SMART goal-setting template.

For example:

• Boost your email list by 20% in 60 days by increasing targeted gated content on your blog.
• Increase your website traffic by 10% in 45 days by providing more targeted content.

After you set goals, you can focus on creating and publishing the exact type of content that will help you achieve them.

#2: Create Audience Personas

To get the most out of your blog content, you need to know who your target audience is, and what their interests and needs are. This information allows you to create better-targeted content that drives results (clicks and traffic, downloads, conversions, shares, etc.).

Consider the different people you’re targeting and put together audience personas for each. While everyone is different, there are similarities among groups of readers. By putting together audience personas, you’re giving yourself a clear picture of the person to target with your content. This helps you create content for your audiences’ needs and interests.

To illustrate, suppose one of your personas is Mary, 22, who studies software development and business management, and is interested in building her own business. What does she want to read about? Giving your persona a name and a face helps you better understand more of what your readers want/need from your blog.

#3: Create the Calendar

You’ve got your goals and know whom you’re targeting. Now you’re ready to create your calendar. First open a blank spreadsheet template in Google Sheets or Excel. Use the first sheet (or tab) for the overall planning of your editorial calendar, starting with the content mix.

Outline Your Content Mix

To keep things interesting for your audience, it’s a good strategy to mix up the types of content you create, not just in terms of the topics but also in the content format. Here are the main types of content that blogs produce:

• How-to guides
• Opinion articles
• Listicles
• Product reviews
• Case studies
• Infographics
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Interviews
• Interactive content: quizzes, polls, interactive maps, personality tests, and so on
• Studies and research papers

Depending on your niche, you may want to add other forms of content as well.

On the first tab of your spreadsheet, jot down a list of the different types of content you plan to publish and color-code them to make it easier to navigate your calendar.

Add Sheets for Each Month

Now add 12 new sheets for the different months of the year to make the content easier to organize. You’ll end up with 13 sheets total. If you don’t plan to post more than a few times a week, though, you can just add two sheets to keep things tidy (six months on one sheet, and the other six months on the other).

To add a new sheet, click the + button at the bottom of the screen.

On the new sheet, add your preferred columns to row 1.

As shown above, add the following columns to the sheet:

• To-be-published date
• Deadline for the first draft
• Headline of the blog post
• Author of the blog post
• Content type (opinion article, how-to guide, infographic, etc.)
• Keywords you’re targeting with that post
• Call to action for the post
• If the images for it are ready (featured image, screenshots, and any other visuals needed)
• A space to jot down notes about the article or questions from your team

Fill the first row with a color of your choosing so it stands out on the sheet. Then simply copy and paste this row to the other monthly sheets.

Add Relevant Events and Holidays

You’ll want to keep in mind some important dates when planning your editorial calendar, including:

• Important holidays
• Industry events
• Important business dates, such as new product releases or events
• Relevant novelty holidays

Make a note of the dates of these holidays and events in your calendar. This will be your cue not to publish content on those days or to create specific content themed for the occasion. Depending on your business, these dates might bring an opportunity for themed content so it’s a good idea to prepare.

If you sell cupcakes, you’ll want to be prepared for any holidays where people might want holiday-themed cupcakes. Or if you’re a B2B, you’re likely interested in industry events that your target audience attends. You could write a blog post about an event and your experience while attending.

Establish a Posting Schedule

To be a successful blogger, ideally you should create a consistent publishing schedule and stick to it. Whether it’s one new post per week or several posts per day, keeping a clear schedule will help you build your readership.

As for when to publish, use your social media analytics to find out the best days to post, or rather to promote. Blog posts aren’t like social media updates. They aren’t necessarily read the second they’re published, so it’s more about when and how you promote your blog posts.

Because so many people are active on social media, your analytics can help you determine when people are most active online and therefore what days to publish and promote your posts.

On Facebook, go to Insights for your page and click Posts on the left. Here you can see what days your fans are online, as well as the times of day when they’re most active.

On Twitter, go to your Twitter Analytics and click the Tweets tab. Hover over a day in the bar graph to see how many impressions you received that day. Taking a look at my analytics, then, I can see that my audience is very active on weekdays (particularly Mondays and Tuesdays) and quiet on weekends.

Once you have a good idea of when to publish/promote your content, establish how often and which days you’ll publish each week. Then enter those dates in your spreadsheet for each month of the year.

#4: Generate Blog Post Ideas

Now that you have the framework for your calendar, you need to brainstorm blog post ideas. Coming up with dozens of engaging topics and other types of content in one go will take time and effort, but you’ll save a lot of time in the long run.

Make sure to keep your goals and audience personas in mind. Each piece of content you create should be strategic. It should help you reach your goals by feeding a need or interest of your target audience.

Here’s how to come up with a year’s worth of blog post ideas.

Research Popular Content Shared by Your Niche

Take a deeper look at your niche to understand what type of content is being shared and what content gets the best results. You can also use this research to get inspiration from your competitors and other relevant bloggers.

Start by using tools like Feedly and Flipboard to keep track of the latest content in your niche. You can subscribe to the top publications in your niche and to relevant topics in your industry.

Additionally, use a tool like BuzzSumo to discover the most searched-for content based on your keywords. BuzzSumo lets you filter your results by date, as well as content type, word count, and other filters. You can also order them by the number of total social media shares or total shares by your preferred social network.

This information helps you understand what types of content generate shares on social media (which usually also translates to more value to the reader and more traffic to your website).

When examining the top-performing content in your niche, make sure to look at:

• What subjects your niche is covering (what needs they’re meeting and what value they’re providing to the reader)
• What types of headlines they’re using
• The word counts of articles and how they’re structured

Research Keywords

Keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner can help you come up with blog post ideas. These tools can help you understand how people search online and what keywords they use so you can improve your headlines and your blog’s overall SEO.

To begin your keyword research, you want to search for keywords you normally use. Make a list of 10-20 keywords and longtail keywords (groups of 2+ keywords) to research. To illustrate, a search for “content marketing” generates the following results in Ubersuggest.

Ubersuggest lets you sort the results by search volume to see the most-searched for keywords first. You can also search for keywords within your results or remove any results that contain specific keywords.

The results below are sorted by search volume. The first few dozen results are too general (social media marketing, digital marketing, content, etc.), so scroll down a bit to see better-targeted keywords like social media marketing strategy, content creator, and content marketing example.

Now use the keywords you’ve identified as inspiration for your blog posts. Here are a few ideas based on the example analysis:

• “How to Build a Social Media Strategy for Your Business”
• “Why Your Business Needs a Social Media Strategy”
• “How to Find Quality Content Creators for Your Business”

Cover Popular Topics From a New Angle

When coming up with new blog post ideas, it’s not just about coming up with any idea, but rather ideas that will work and get you results. Take a look at Google Analytics for your blog to find your best-performing content. Identify which posts have generated the most traffic and then think about how to use that information to create new posts.

For example, looking at the data below, you can see that an older post on Facebook tools is still one of the top performers. Now think about new ways to cover the same subject; say, “Best Facebook Tools for Measuring Your Results”, or “Best Facebook Tools for Managing Your Page More Efficiently.”

In some cases, you might discover that a top-performing post is a bit dated, so you can write a new post on the same subject with updated information.

Here are some tips to help you come up with variations on topics you’ve already covered:

• Common mistakes
• How-to posts
• Case studies
• Real-life examples
• Best tools/apps listicle
• Best tips and tricks listicle
• Research others’ content

Also look at your best-performing content on social media. Use your social media networks’ built-in analytics or a social media management tool like Agorapulse to see which blog posts received the most engagement and clicks when shared. Likewise, use these top-performing posts as inspiration for new ideas.

Review Blog Comments

Often, you’ll find a wealth of valuable information hidden in blog comments. Start with your own blog and check the comments. Look for questions your readers have and find out what they want to learn more about.

If you can’t find enough relevant comments or simply want to find more, look at similar blogs that cover the same subjects and target the same audience as your blog.

Survey Your Audience

Another way to get inspiration from your audience is to ask them directly using a survey. Use a tool like SurveyMonkey to start building your survey.

Make sure your questions are direct and easy to understand, and that the survey isn’t too long. Send the survey to your email list and post it on your blog and website, as well as other sources.

Tip: To get more people to sign up and take the survey, consider giving them an incentive such as a resource they can download (a how-to guide, checklist, coupon, etc.).

Set Up Interviews

A good interview can attract a lot of traffic and engagement. And if you interview the right person, it can help boost your own influence by association.

Make a list of top influencers and experts in your niche, as well as clients and people you’ve worked with over the years. Then reach out to them to ask if they’d be interested in an interview. The interview can take many forms such as a video or podcast, or even a written article.

#5: Add Your Content Ideas to the Calendar

With the previous tips and methods, you should be able to generate dozens of blog post ideas, perhaps enough for an entire year. Now add them to your calendar. As you can see, under the Topic/Type column, I copied and pasted the article type from the first sheet to make it clear what type of post it is.

At this point, you can also determine the deadline for the draft and who will write it so they know ahead of time what they need to do and by when.

When entering these headlines into your calendar, be strategic:

• Create a mix of different types of content to diversify (if, of course, you’re creating different types of content). If you have a food blog, you might create a weekly content mix with recipes on Mondays and Wednesdays, a restaurant review on Tuesdays, a how-to post on Thursdays, and so on.
• Post your best blog posts on the optimal days. How-to posts, for instance, tend to generate more traffic and engagement, so publish (or rather, promote) them on the days of the week when your audience is most active. Do likewise with any other content that provides a lot of value to your audience.

Tip: After you’ve added all of your headlines to the calendar, don’t leave it just yet. Take a look again at all of the content you’ve planned and answer these questions:

• How does this benefit my target audience?
• What value does it bring?
• How will this help me achieve my goals?

Conclusion

Maintaining an editorial calendar for your blog helps you stay focused on your goals and improve productivity. Think of it this way: How many times have you had to come up with a blog post idea at the last second? How many blog posts have you written and published just for the sake of posting something?

This can happen to anyone, but if you create an editorial calendar, you can avoid these issues, publish consistently, and focus on the content that gets you results. Planning your content in advance helps you ensure each piece of content you publish will help you reach your marketing goals.

What do you think? Do you have a content calendar for your blog? How far in advance do you plan your blog content? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Chat and Messenger Bots: New Research for Marketers

Wondering why chatbots are gaining popularity?

Interested in how savvy businesses are using bots to improve communications with their customers?

In this article, you’ll discover insights from research that show how bots are evolving and affecting customer service experiences across many industries.

#1: Bot Technology Is Changing How Businesses Communicate

Many companies in a variety of industries are learning firsthand how bot technology can change the way they provide customer service. This technology is being used to assist with personal online banking, booking travel accommodations, managing insurance claims, offering internal support, answering customer service requests, and even providing better mental health access.

Bots are artificial intelligence systems that interact with users via messaging, text, or speech. They’re being used on websites, as well as on platforms like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack, WeChat, and more. They allow businesses to move communication with their customers or potential customers forward without human participation.

Your brand can essentially be present 24/7. That said, a bot is only as good as its programming and user input allow it to be. Additionally, bots require training.

Complete automation or AI replacement for customer service isn’t feasible at this time. However, we’ve made leaps and bounds in just a very short time.

The technology is now becoming advanced enough that bots can be used in a meaningful way, and this is expected to continue to grow. An early adopter that makes use of chatbot technology is 1-800-Flowers, which was one of the first to use Facebook Messenger bots. Customers can get help with flower selections and receive instant updates on delivery timing.

Sephora has found a unique way to reach their target audience through chatbot technology. Their Color Match bot for Messenger helps customers find an exact match in lipstick shade by using a photo they’ve uploaded. The company also has the Sephora Virtual Artist app that allows you to upload a photo of yourself and then try on different makeup to see how it will look on you.

In the insurance sector, Allstate has an AI virtual assistant called Allstate Business Insurance expert (or ABIe) that helps answer questions from customers directly.

Then there’s the popular Woebot app, used primarily through Facebook Messenger, which brings therapy right to the palm of your hand. This AI robot is trained in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and helps track the user’s mood, find patterns in mood swings, and talks about health and wellness in daily chats. It even checks in on the user daily.

Takeaway

Businesses are using bot technology to change how they communicate with their customers. Oracle reports that 80% of businesses want chatbots by 2020, and many of those respondents were already using them. The survey included responses from 800 business decision-makers, including chief marketing officers, chief strategy officers, senior marketers, and senior sales executives from France, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the UK.

To stay ahead of the curve, it’s a good idea to get comfortable with bot technology now.

#2: Bots Signal a Boon for Messaging Apps

Mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are huge business. People want to be able to log in from wherever they are and chat with friends, family, and even brands they do business with.

Mobile messaging apps are about more than just sending messages. The industry has evolved and with falling data prices, improved features, and cheaper prices for mobile devices, the apps are available to a larger base of users than ever before.

Tech-savvy brands are building on the popularity of messaging apps and bot technology by focusing on growth now, and then in the next phase on building servicesand monetizing. While the stats show that marketers and media companies are still focusing on and putting more resources into social networks than messaging apps, this is expected to change between now and 2020.

Takeaway

We could see a big shift in the online marketing world as media companies and marketing experts move from social networks to messaging apps and bot technology instead. As technology changes and brands fight to “go where the customer is,” we’ll see more of this.

Messaging platforms will continue to grow and we’ll see more brands taking advantage of bots to connect with their target market using these apps.

#3: Bot Tech Will Develop Rapidly in 2018

What’s next for chatbots? Technology around the chatbot industry is growing at a rapid rate. Bots are learning to do more things; spot patterns better; and trigger accurate responses based on keywords, phrases, or other stimuli.

According to a recent report by Grand View Research, the global chatbot market is expected to reach $1.23 billion by 2025. Trends that we’ll likely see in 2018 and beyond include more advances in AI development. Smarter AI means more accurate chatbot experiences.

Voice interfaces like Amazon’s Alexa are gaining traction with users, and Google is working to make voice interfaces interactive with wearable devices and smartphones. We’re also seeing advances in conversational interfaces; companies like Drift and iAdvize are leading the pack in this area.

Have you landed on a website and seen a chatbox pop up (usually in the lower right) asking you questions? Expect to see more of this.

Many businesses are already using bot technology for things like marketing, sales, and customer service.

Takeaway

As we can see from the stats, the chatbot industry is only going to continue to grow, and 2018 is likely a launchpad year for the future of the bot industry.

We will eventually see chatbots completely replace native apps and that transition will make some huge leaps in 2018. No longer will users have to go from a site to an application and back again. The flow will be seamless, based on the user’s needs and preferences.

Conclusion

The stats show us that bots are here to stay, at least in the foreseeable future. The technology is growing at a rapid rate, bots are becoming cheaper and easier to use, and more businesses and brands are hopping on board.

Juniper Research tells us the average time saved per chatbot in the banking and healthcare sectors, when compared to traditional call centers, is 4+ minutes. Think of the money businesses will save from this! The average cost saved per chatbot interaction in banking is $0.70.

What do you think? Do you enjoy interacting with chatbots? Would you use one yourself for your business? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.






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How to Combine Facebook Ads and Content for Better Results

Want to optimize the content in your Facebook ads?

Wondering how to build connections that improve conversions?

To explore strategic ways to combine content and Facebook ads, I interview Keith Krance.

More About This Show

In this episode, I interview Keith Krance, a Facebook ads expert. He’s host of the Perpetual Traffic podcast, founder of Dominate Web Media, and coauthor of The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising.

Keith explains how to create content and calibrate your budget for each phase of the customer journey.

You’ll also learn how to apply Keith’s Facebook ads formula to lower your ad spend.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.

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Here are some of the things you’ll discover in this show:

Facebook Ad Content

Keith’s Story

Keith became a Facebook ads consultant in a roundabout way. He grew up in a small town thinking you had to be a doctor or lawyer to be successful. However, he didn’t want to go to school for the years it took to enter those professions. Instead, he went to the University of North Dakota to become an airline pilot and, four years later, was flying for a regional airline.

However, as a young pilot, Keith realized he didn’t have the seniority to be home for Christmas or Thanksgiving. After a friend gave him the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Keith started his entrepreneurial journey, which he feels is a true reflection of his personality. In 2003, while he was still flying, he started investing in real estate.

After doing well with real estate, he began investing in local franchise businesses. By 2005, he was out of the real estate game and became a franchisee of two different businesses. He had a couple of different partners and five different locations.

Over the next five years, Keith focused on his franchise businesses and became interested in Facebook ads around 2010. He was already learning about the digital marketing world when his girlfriend told him about Facebook. He was amazed by what he could do with Facebook ads compared to billboards, for which he paid $10,000 per month to advertise in a mediocre location.

From that point, Keith went all-in on Facebook and quickly learned how to run successful ads. Due to changes in the franchise business, Keith eventually transitioned completely out of that industry and decided to focus entirely on helping other people learn how to advertise on Facebook.

Keith began building his consultancy by networking and getting results for local clients. At a consulting event for Perry Marshall, Keith connected with a client who hired him because he had self-published a book. About 5 months later, word had spread that Keith had cut a client’s lead cost by 68%, and Perry Marshall’s team reached out to Keith about working together.

After Keith had worked with Perry for a while, Perry asked him to coauthor The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising, which is now in its third edition. Keith also started the Perpetual Traffic podcast with Digital Marketer and was working on growing his agency. Since then, Keith found a partner to run the agency so he could focus on the education and consulting certification side of the business.

Listen to the show to hear more details about Keith’s transition from piloting airplanes to running an agency.

The Big Mistake in Facebook Advertising

In Facebook advertising, the big mistake people often make is focusing on the wrong stuff. They don’t take time to truly understand human psychology or the Facebook and Instagram platforms.

To help people focus on the right things in their ads, Keith suggests thinking of Facebook and Instagram as online versions of a party or a business networking group. Pretend you’re a brand ambassador for your business, and your job is to build relationships and educate people in your local community.

For example, maybe you sell green home-cleaning products. You want to educate people on how to keep their houses free from toxins or how to make homemade laundry detergent. By educating people, you start to build relationships. Only after you educate people and build these relationships do you begin talking about your own products and the needs they meet in the market.

If you sell services, like digital marketing consulting, and are getting your business started, maybe you’re attending a local networking group. You learn quickly not to expect to get a brand-new client the day you shake somebody’s hand or to try pitching your services 30 seconds after you meet someone. That’s not how building relationships works in the real world.

At a business networking event, if all the attendees are business owners, only 5% to 10% of those people might be actively searching for a new digital marketing consultant. However, although the vast majority of people might not be actively searching for a new consultant, they might not yet realize they could be doing things better.

Also, the people at the networking group have different personality types or make buying decisions in different ways. Some are impulse buyers. Others are competitive and want the best. Some are logic-based and make decisions quickly. Then you have the slow decision-makers, process-driven people, or humanistic people who listen to their hearts.

However, a lot of people running Facebook or Instagram ads target only those fast decision-makers who have intent to buy right now. They’re focused on those 5 or 10 people who are actively searching for green home-cleaning products or a consultant. In doing so, the people running these ads miss audiences that would potentially buy their products or services in the future.

The reasons advertisers miss these potential customers vary. They’re trying to sell too quickly. Sometimes, they give up before they start or they’re focused too heavily on the targeting, optimization, number of ads they should run, and the ideal size of their audiences.

Keith emphasizes that people can be a lot more successful if they don’t give up too quickly on their social marketing. They think it doesn’t work for their business because they don’t take the time to develop the right message. Also, people who focus only on direct-response, hardcore conversions burn out their audiences.

Instead, Keith suggests focusing 90% of your energy on what kind of offer you should send to people, and how you can build trust and deliver value. Think about how an ad can show somebody that you can help them. Even if someone doesn’t click your ad that offers help, you’re still subconsciously building a relationship with them.

Ads that build trust and offer value help you build custom audiences, too. If your ad is a video, you’re building a warm custom audience, probably pretty cheaply. If you have an ad that’s not video, you can still build custom audiences of people who click your ad.

As you run ads that deliver value, you’ll hear statistics and figures meant to help you calibrate ad content. However, don’t let these figures cloud the importance of talking to your audience as you would in a face-to-face conversation.

For instance, a Facebook partner manager or rep might tell you to use short videos because attention span is short and average video engagement time might be 15 seconds. Although this data is accurate, focusing on it can cause you to miss the audience you want to reach.

Say you have a Facebook video ad based on a blog post. Whether that video is 8 minutes or 1 minute long, you’ll lose about 95% of people after the first 15 seconds, no matter what. But the 5% who keep watching will watch to the end, and those are the people you want to attract.

Listen to the show to hear my thoughts on the customer journey.

Keith’s Formula for Scaling Your Business

Keith’s scaling method is based on his BSC Triangle, which is upside down like a sales funnel and divided into three sections. The top section is for branding, goodwill, and awareness. Keith recommends spending about 20% to 30% of your advertising budget on this category of ads, which build warm audiences that you can later target in conversion-focused campaigns.

Initially, you need to be careful putting money into these ads because you might not get a return on investment (ROI) right away. However, in the long-term, these ads will be game-changers for you.

The second section is conversions. These ads generate conversions with content and a call-to-action strategy. You spend 50% to 70% of your budget on generating conversions with ads that reach cold, as well as warm, audiences.

At the bottom of the triangle, you focus on generating sales using smart retargeting. These ads might show the second step in your sales funnel or bring people straight to an order form. If you sell physical products online, you might show dynamic ads. Spend 10% to 20% of your budget, or as much as you can, on this section because these audiences generate the biggest ROI.

With this formula, you build up the smart retargeting audience by having a strategy in those top two layers.

Branding Ads: A branding ad might feature a blog post, YouTube video, or Facebook Live that delivers value to people. You’re basically spending a little money to promote content that you would share on social media. For these ads, Keith recommends choosing two or three pillar pieces of content that provide an overview and set up your products in the best way. Find something you’ve published if you can.

If you’re a numbers person, the key performance indicators (KPIs) for these ads are cost per impression or cost per video view. You want to know how many people you’re reaching. You’ll also find that cost per video view is a lot lower than the KPI for a conversion campaign.

Conversion Ads: A good conversion campaign that builds goodwill and educates is a game-changer. Keith has at least seven or eight clients who have been running a conversion ad for more than 2 years. That ad has taken these clients from $230,000 per year to $4 million per year, or from $500,000 to $20 million in ecommerce sales. These clients include coaching and agency clients.

For a conversion ad, video offers a long-term benefit. It will build subconscious connection with people, as well as generate video views. A long story-based ad can work, too. Whatever the format, the ad must educate, demonstrate, inform, and/or entertain. To help remember these qualities, Keith uses the acronym EDIE.

Your ad content doesn’t need to have all these qualities; see if you can apply even just one or two of them. People often focus on ads that entertain or go viral, like the ads from Dollar Shave Club or Dollar Beard Club. A viral video blew up the company. However, other qualities are just as important. In the book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Jonah Berger talks about six reasons why things go viral.

Two reasons that things go viral that are easy to forget are usefulness and making people feel knowledgeable. Sharing something that’s useful and practical makes people feel good. People also share things on social or tell their friends about something because it makes them feel like they know something that others don’t know.

When Keith creates an ad or helps a client, he often thinks about those two reasons because he wants to create a message that people will want to share. Sharing not only builds more trust, but also tells the algorithm that people like your ad. The algorithm then rewards you with more impressions; cheaper clicks, views, and cost per conversion; and higher ROI or ROAS (return on ad spend).

For a conversion campaign, the best ads are often content you’ve published because you created the content for YouTube or a blog post. To illustrate, Drew Canole from Organifi (a green smoothie) has a 6.5-minute video showing 11 superfoods and what they do for your body.

At the end is a pitch. Drew says Organifi tastes great and provides the same benefit as the superfoods for less money than shopping at Whole Foods. He drinks the smoothie right on camera. He also mentions that Organifi has hundreds of Amazon reviews. Clicking the ad takes people to a sales page where they can subscribe to the product for $57 per month.

If someone watches that video, even if they don’t watch to the end or click through, they learned about superfoods and might share the video. They may not even know a pitch appears at the end. This ad has been running for 2.5 years and has 30 million views among the different paid placements.

I ask if there’s a distinction between a branding ad and a conversion ad. Keith says the difference isn’t so much in the ad content. For example, a branding ad about superfoods might list only five foods and drop the pitch at the end. The important thing is how the branding ads and conversion ads work together to build your audiences.

Initially, focus all your energy and budget on getting one EDIE element right. When you do this, you’re actually branding, creating goodwill, and building awareness. You’re connecting with a range of people, from those who aren’t aware of their problem to those who intend to buy your product. After launching the first ad, you build another similar ad with a different objective, such as website conversions instead of video views.

With the conversion ad, you optimize based on purchases. When you do that, you win big. Facebook will really focus on people who are going to buy. They’ll do the heavy lifting for you. That’s why you focus all your energy on the messages and your offer.

Say you run the video about the 11 superfoods with a video view objective. That objective tells Facebook to reach people who like to watch videos. When you do that, your ROI from that video won’t be very high, and your cost per conversion will probably be twice as high. However, your cost per video view might be two to five times cheaper. So you’re getting five times more reach.

When a 6.5-minute video is building goodwill, you might run it as a website conversions campaign. What Keith recommends is, instead of spending 100% of your budget on conversions, you spend 80% on website conversions and 20% on video views. The video views ad will reach those slow decision-makers who probably aren’t going to buy the first time or even in the first 7 days.

Smart Retargeting Ads: You can do smart retargeting in a lot of different ways. Keith starts with a simple example. Say that you have a video or a long text ad that educates people about 11 superfoods and what they do for your body. Many people check out the ad, but they’re not buying. With smart retargeting, you might show another ad that’s shorter and more product-focused.

In the product-focused ad, you can still dig into challenges and frustrations but focus on why your product is different and how it will help your audience solve their particular problem. Then the ad might link directly to the checkout or sales page, depending on your sales setup.

Listen to the show to hear Keith discuss the long-term benefits of branding ads versus conversion ads.

Audience Targeting

For the smart retargeting ads, you make the targeting fairly narrow. Although the specifics depend on your ad, in the case of the product-focused superfoods video ad, you would target people who visited your sales or product page but didn’t buy.

For the branding and conversion ads, however, you make the targeting broader. Keith notes this point is super-important but is often misunderstood. People often think that for a branding campaign featuring a blog post or branding type of video, they need to target cold audiences. Then, for the conversion campaigns, they target people who visited their website or watched the video.

Keith says that’s the wrong way to think about targeting and this approach is more complex to set up. Instead, keep the targeting simple because you want to reach that large portion of your audience who don’t have intent to buy right now but might later on.

When you run a content-rich, great ad that really educates, tells a story, builds emotional connection, and generates conversions, you can put that ad in front of big, broad, cold audiences. But it’s also going to work well with your warm audiences. In other words, your conversion campaign needs to target cold and warm audiences, not just people who saw your branding ads.

When you set up the ad campaign in Facebook Ads Manager, you separate the audiences into different ad sets. So you create one campaign with one ad set for all your warm audiences and another ad set for, say, all your local cold audiences. Then you have another ad set for all your lookalike interest audiences and one for your fans.

Those four main ad sets will drive everything. Imagine you turned a blog post into a long copy ad that might have a soft call to action, or maybe not. This ad is building goodwill and your audiences. Those audiences are mostly cold but you can also show the ad to warm audiences because you want those people to read your article, too.

Keith calls the article or video you use in ads that target different audiences a pillar post. Some of his clients have only one, two, or three pillar posts. These posts are used in ads run on small budgets every day. If you put $20 per day behind a pillar post, the amount of reach that continues to rack up is amazing.

When you already have a big following on social media or get a lot of organic traffic, putting in a tiny bit of money grows your reach exponentially. For instance, Keith has helped content marketers build their entire brand by adding a small amount per day to their business, and everything tripled within a year.

Listen to the show to hear how Keith would apply his formula to Social Media Examiner content.

Keith’s Quilting Client Example

To clarify how a business might use Keith’s approach, he shares an example of a client who sells a digital product that teaches people how to make quilts.

This client promoted different pieces of content for branding, conversions, and smart retargeting. For branding, he had a Facebook Live that was about 45 minutes long and running as a video views campaign. He had another 2-minute video that was focused on selling and was also doing some retargeting.

After looking at this client’s Facebook Live, Keith recommended using it to create a new website conversions campaign while continuing to run the Facebook Live as a video views campaign. Although the 45-minute Facebook Live had some soft calls to action, it was mostly building more branding, goodwill, and trust. The budget for these ads was small.

With the two ads promoting the Facebook Live, Facebook targeted people who were going to watch videos and engage with the post, as well as people who would want to buy the client’s product, which cost $7.

The change eventually lowered the client’s ad costs while increasing his reach. The Facebook Live as a video views ad was costing him $19 per customer. After the change, his website conversion ad cost $8 per customer, or less than half the video views rate. But the video views campaign became four times cheaper. So the branding ad is now spending less money but reaching four times as many people.

Listen to the show to hear how this client was featured in a hot seat in Keith’s elite coaching group.

Discovery of the Week

With Toggl, you can easily track your time spent on different tasks.

Toggl is great for checking how much time you spend on tasks so you can be more efficient or for tracking time so you can bill clients accurately. After you log in to Toggl, you can start and stop on regular tasks. You can also add a new task by typing it into the app. If you forget to stop the timer on a task, you can correct it later.

Toggl is available as a mobile app for all platforms, as well as a Chrome or Firefox extension for your desktop browser.

You can use the free version of Toggl to track your own time. For features like exporting reports or tracking teams, you can purchase an advanced version.

Listen to the show to learn more and let us know how Toggl works for you.

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Key takeaways mentioned in this episode:

• Learn more about Keith, his courses, and Mastermind groups at Dominate Web Media.
• Listen to the Perpetual Traffic podcast.
• Sign up to get Keith’s book and free training for listeners of this episode.
• Read the current edition of The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising.
• Check out the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
• Learn more about Perry Marshall.
• Discover how Facebook dynamic ads display products.
• Read the book Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger.
• Watch Organifi’s informational video ad.
• Try tracking your time with Toggl.
• Watch our weekly Social Media Marketing Talk Show on Fridays at 10 AM Pacific on Crowdcast or tune in on Facebook Live.
• Download the 2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.

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What do you think? What are your thoughts on Facebook ad content? Please share your comments below.

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