3.4 Episode Transcript (Social Media Workshop - Paid Ads for Beginners and Professionals)
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Without further ado, here’s the transcription to 3.4: Social Media Workshop - Paid Ads for Beginners and Professionals.
Elijah 0:30
Welcome to Victory or Death!, the podcast for content creators. My name is Elijah and these are my co-hosts.
Josh 0:35
Hey, what's up? My name is Josh. I'm a freelance tabletop game designer and a variety streamer on Twitch. And I'm also the Assistant Director of Ambassadors at Jasper's Game Day, a nonprofit that uses gaming for their purposes of suicide prevention.
Keon 0:50
What up, it's your big at Biggity Biggity Boy Keon here from the Frame Forge YouTube channel. You can find us @FrameForgeMedia on all the social medias, and we started our twitch channel live streaming, it's so much fun. Y'all got to come hang out. So yeah, that's where we are.
Marco 1:06
I'm Marco, a tea consultant and writer also blogging over at STEAPD.COM and Instagram.
Elijah 1:12
So all this month if you've been listening, and if you haven't, we've been talking about social media. This has been our social media workshop, where we started off with Social Media 101 going through mindset and how to approach social and all of its different aspects. The second episode was all about Twitter, with Josh leading the charge there breaking down data, how you can use the tools at your disposal on Twitter, to start building an audience. Last week, we talked about Instagram, and how to make a visual medium work for your content. And while also building a community and making it more accessible. Today, we are talking about paid media, which is more my wheelhouse. I do this professionally, every single week for almost the past year. Now, quick disclaimer though. If you are a content creator, you're probably not going to be utilizing paid media, this is more for creative professionals or if you are starting a business, or you are just trying to sell something straight up. So we're going to get into the nitty gritty about how to utilize Facebook and Google ads, the work that goes into making that happen and discussing about how to make those ads land.
Keon 2:28
Do not worry, I will show you guys cheap free alternatives that you will be able to do to get your information and content out there on the social media as it is. We've teased it a couple of episodes back. But yeah, this is all coming from really great sources in the game design community.
Elijah 2:46
So paid media is weird. Because Facebook...
Keon 2:49
What's the deal with paid media?
Elijah 2:52
Yeah, where's my where's my Jerry Seinfeld schtick? So okay, so paid media. How did I get into this professionally? Well, let me tell you, it started with writing podcast copy for a 200 million download podcast.
Keon 3:08
Ooh,
Elijah 3:09
They were like one of the top 100 on Apple podcasts. And I was reading their newsletters. So every week, I would write two long form newsletters for them, that would be sent out via their enormous mailing list. And then somewhere along the way, I started writing some of their sales emails for their mastermind courses and this other thing that you could buy into where they would do like private interviews with business people, and kind of serve up content that way. So I got into this, like writing sales emails pretty quickly, and sales content. And then at work, we hired a new client who needed a lot more Google ads, and Facebook ads done. And so I got to dip my toes into what it was like to actually build out successful Facebook ads. Now what's tricky about them is it's not just like slapping a picture, and some copy on and being like, hey, buy my thing. There's a whole lot of strategy that goes into it. There is a lot of thought that goes into which pictures are being chosen, the purpose of the copy, what kind of adventure or journey you're taking them on in order to make it land. And so the thing about paid media is that when you have a small, like when you're small, and you don't have a big following, it doesn't really land you need to have a decent budget to put behind it.
Keon 4:34
Don't do it. I am a living example. Don't do it.
Elijah 4:42
Unless you are a business. paid media is very dangerous because as soon as you boost a post on Facebook, or pay for ads, it will tank everything else because Facebook primarily is an advertising platform. And so when you go from being a free user where they can, you know, sell your data tracker data, sell your data as ads to other people, you become their customer when you pay. And then if you stop paying, you kind of get bonked by the algorithm. Keon, why don't you discuss that a little bit.
Keon 5:15
You know, when you go to like Vegas or a casino, and they're just like, oh, here's a free drink, here's all this stuff. That's what's happening. They're just like, Oh, we know you're going to pay money. So we're going to give you these cool perks, when in reality, and that can be pretty good if you're trying to get certain analytics that you might not get other ways. But the problem and the problem that we had when it comes to YouTube, is they treat you very similarly, where if you have a video, so YouTube and a lot of these different platforms, they want your content to be shown to a bunch of people, because they want people to stay on your platform. So what do you think like AOL and Yahoo have started instead of just doing email, or like, "Hey, we're also a search engine. And you can see the news. And you can do this and this and that," because they just want boomers to stay on there all day. Like, that's legitimately why they do it. And it's, it works out for them.
Keon 6:06
But the problem is that, if you are a, if you're a YouTuber, and you're trying to make content, they would love to share your content, because they want people that you're bringing in from your community to stay there and watch more of your content. But if you're running it as an ad, they view you completely differently. Because they don't think that you're just trying to do it for the heck of it and try to bring in people from a community, they think that you're trying to tap into the community inside of YouTube. So you are paying for their access, instead of being a partner with them to get more people onto the platform. Or at least that's how I've kind of defined it in my head. Because the problem that happens is that once you start doing that, and you start to use their tools to get more viewership, the problem is they stop treating you like a partner. So let's say that you have a video that you've been using the, like the ads, or whatever, within YouTube or within Google to try to get out there.
Keon 7:03
The problem is that once that ad's done, they're going to be like, cool, you guys did your ad campaign. Right? Okay, bye. They won't treat you as if that video is meant to organically be shared around YouTube. And that people should view them more. They might eventually after you've kind of done whatever you're going to do. But the main thing is that in that ad campaign, you're running, you're setting what your audience is, you're saying, I want to reach these people for these reasons. And hopefully, that's right. If it's not right, then you might not reach any of those people and a lot of the money that you put in is going to go unseen or unused. Because the problem is that those people you put it in front of aren't engaging with their content. Now, once that's all over YouTube is then going to potentially, like pick that up and be like, "Okay, cool. So I guess we might share this around." But now like the wrong audience has already kind of seen it and not really given too much attention. So now you're starting on a very poor foot. So that's what we've seen is that even though we've gotten a lot of really good feedback, and really good usage of certain ads on our channel, the problem is that once you're, once you're done with those, those videos that might be the best on your channel might not really get as shared as some of your other videos.
Keon 8:14
Case in point, we have some videos we really love. And that made a lot of really good circulation. But one of our first videos has been performing better and better. And we didn't run that campaign on it. For I can't think of why it's doing so well. It's about "Gemini Man," which was a movie next to nobody saw. It was in 4K, 3D 120 frames per second. And all these randos that apparently give a crap about "Gemini Man" will come and like bully us about how it was actually a good movie. I don't know how they see our videos like that. I've seen kind of where they're coming from. But the thing is, YouTube was like, "Oh, there's like a very small niche that likes Gemini man, we're going to push you to there," versus some of the videos that we've done ad campaigns on that are about stuff people care about, but YouTube's not going to share them anymore from what I've seen. This is all asterisk, asterisk, asterisk, but they're not going to share them because they've already thought, "Oh, you're done with your ad campaign. Right? You've gotten what you wanted, right?" So they treat you completely differently from what I've seen.
Elijah 9:17
Right? Which is where we need to draw a line in the sand in terms of what kind of content do you make for an ad campaign where it is appropriate to put money behind it and where you don't, because it's better to keep it organic. So if you're just like, like, for example, if you were going to take a podcast episode here, or like I wanted to drive people to the newsletter for the show, right? It would not necessarily be appropriate for me to put money behind it. Because what is essentially happening is I'm saying, "Oh, my entire show, this entire podcast is monetized. I want to, you know, drive people to it using money." That's not what Organic viewership. And so when you do that, it's creating the situation where the algorithm is thinking that all of your content should have money behind it, that would be all fine and good if I had something to sell, but since I don't have something to sell, basically turning all of my content into a paid click funnel is gonna run me out of money and is going to basically kill the content that I'm creating. So don't be tempted to buy clicks, or buy engagement or buy impressions with, you know, boosting a post on Facebook, because you're telling Facebook that you want your content to be paid, and it's going to completely destroy any reach that you might have had otherwise.
Elijah 10:45
Now, where you might want to get into using paid media, is if you have a click funnel that you want to set up, or a content flow, you want to set up that ends in a paid product. This is really effective if you are actually wanting to like take on clients, or if you're wanting to sell a course or program. One of the best ways that I've seen this done, one of our clients at work has a like free PDF, to try to drive people into his paid mastermind program. And it actually performs really well because people click this paid ad for this free item, which then loads them into a sub mailing list, which then lets him contact them to try to sell them on his paid program. But they still get something out of it. So like, the key there ultimately is that he's offering something of value, which is then leading them down a funnel to deeper value in basically paid coaching from him.
Elijah 11:46
But if you're only a content creator, if you're doing a podcast, you don't necessarily want to put money behind the podcast until you have sponsors or you have really big guests on the show. Like back when we're working with that 200 million download podcast, Kevin Hart came on. And so they put a lot of money into well, a lot of money, not for them, a lot of money for us, an ad budget on Facebook to promote that Kevin Hart was going to be on the show. So like there's a time and a place to do all this stuff. But I think the really important mindset to understand is that you cannot cheat the content system by putting money and buying views and clicks. I seen this repeatedly on Instagram, especially, you buy clicks on Instagram, and you'll get a post that has like 300 likes, then the rest of your posts have like 10. Now is savvy and know what's up, they're gonna say, "Oh, this person's buying, you know, buying their engagement." And they'll probably click off because it sends a message basically, that you're not genuine in what you're doing. And so that gets back to the like, mindset piece about social media is are you there to drive value? Are you there to build a community? Are you there to try to make money off people? And that's the balance you kind of have to take with everything.
Keon 13:15
So anybody that I know, that uses advertisement effectively is selling a product and I you cannot like everybody, I want to say this twice, and you will remember it. You can't cheat the system. You can't cheat the system. These sons of guns know when you're doing it, you know, it's it's a little bit more obvious than when you think it might be. And the way to get around it Elijah already and by get around it, I don't mean cheat the system. I mean, to actually do something that's worth your time is Elijah hit the nail on the head when he mentioned it, and it might have gotten like to really see the concrete example of it. You might need to think about the fact that the people that were on that mailing list were emails, these were being sent via email and it was a newsletter to their emails.
Keon 14:08
I will now cite a couple of GDC talks you really should go look at because GDC, the game design convention, is incredible. They talk about a lot of really specific things that people use in game design, but it is very useful for you when it comes to your social media. Because when you have someone's email and I'll bring up I'm going to cite the exact talk. It's called "What to write so people buy: selling your game without feeling sleazy," very important because the people that you're reaching out to want to actually engage with you. They want to be a part of your community and they like what you do. Don't feel like you're the guy that's going out there or gal that's going out there and saying like "Hey, I know like, you have a lot going on your feed but if you could check out my stuff," no they're ready to see your stuff. Don't be wishy-washy about it. Say "Hey new thing about this," be excited and engaged about what you're doing, so that your community feels confident in what you're doing and that you have the energy to bring them in, and they want to see what you're doing. But when you have an email list, this is big. Your email list will have far more engagement than if you are on Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, any of those things, because those feeds have algorithms to them.
Keon 15:23
Your email list does not! Google isn't sitting there like "Hmm, I wonder what Keon wants to see today? His bills or something from Reddit?" I need to see my bills AND I need to see the Reddit stuff I already subscribed to. Like all of that kind of stuff I already have in my email list because it is curated BY ME. Case in point in this GDC talk I mentioned, which is "What to write so people buy," he mentioned the fact that if you in my mind, I had this perfect, you know, dream on a hill of having a viral video a video go viral, and then I would get a million subscribers. If you have something go viral, the click through rate for people to come back to let's say you're on Reddit and you have something go viral. The click through rate for someone to come through and view your YouTube channel, Instagram, or anything else is less than 10%. And it's drastically less than 10%. When you send something through email, people will probably click on it above 50%. And that's consistently. So if you have a free thing to give the world and you're ready to give it to them like a free audiobook, or a free seminar, webinar, any of that kind of stuff. And you get people's emails through that, then you can I mean, make it easy for them to unsubscribe, that's big. But if you send them maybe a newsletter for us, we have a YouTube channel, if you send a newsletter at the end of the month saying, "Hey, here's what you missed on our YouTube channel. And here's all the really cool stuff we've been posting on Instagram that can help you as a filmmaker," then they might be like, oh, cool, yeah, I can look through this really quickly. And I can engage with your content that I might not have seen. And that is 50% engagement, versus being at the behest of whatever algorithm you're a part of, on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, any of those things. That's huge.
Elijah 17:10
Exactly. And the trick is obviously getting people off social media and onto that mailing list. However, I just I really want to illustrate the power of a good mailing list. So our brick and mortar clients, they have a mailing list. We did a mailing campaign, to email with some Facebook ads. Facebook ads drove about, like 2% of what we made that day. So we made like $3,000 off Facebook ads, we made $30,000 from email in one day. Like that is the power of having a mailing list. Even if you're just doing free stuff, man, like the mailing list is the way to get people engaged, dialed in. And that is ultimately the your best bet to pair with paid media when you start to actually have things that you are selling. Because you can hit people on social media, let the algorithm do its thing. But then you can also hit people direct in their mailbox. And that like everything with content is all about having direct communication with people. Heck, get them on a text messaging list, I don't care. If you want to really push your content hard, get your hardcore fans, and get them into a direct contact situation. Because that's how you're going to build the ultimate brand loyalty. It's not buying clicks, and it's not buying views that doesn't do anything. It's all about how you're talking to them and how you reach out to them. Now, before I continue, we are running out of time. Do you guys have questions, comments that you want to throw in?
Josh 18:44
I think I'll just add that I think Patreon is another great way to do something like that, where you've got folks who maybe are willing to give you $1 or two a month. And that gets them on an email list. Anytime you post something, they'll see it. That's that's a huge way that I've been successful in terms of like driving people to the stuff that I'm actually like selling, in terms of content that I'm making and selling, is I'll post about on Patreon. Sometimes I'll like throw in a discount link, or I'll just give it away for free to my to my patrons there. And also, anytime I post something, I get consistently 50% or higher engagement. Whereas if I tweet something, like I've got 1000s of followers, I never get 1000s of likes, not like consistently on everyday tweets, you have to go in with the expectation that certain levels of commitment are involved in order to like see more stuff from you. And I think Patreon email lists those things are so much more reliable in terms of getting your content in front of someone if you're trying to sell as a small creator.
Keon 19:52
Yeah, and the one other thing that I wanted to mention is that this is all free. Like for you to have your Patreon and drive people to it. If you're doing that through an email list, or if you just are constructing an email list, you don't need to advertise for that you are actually having your email list that is something that people want to engage with. And more people will engage with. And that the other thing you can do, and I know that it's gonna sound like a lot of work, but it is very important, is make sure that you're keeping track of what's going on. I had mentioned this GDC talk before, it's been a month. And if you haven't listened to this GDC talk, I don't know what you're doing. It's amazing. It's called "No time, no budget, no problems: Finishing the first tree." There's also one that's very similar called "Crafting a tiny open world." That's about the game, a short hike. It's a portion of post mortem.
Keon 20:47
But both of these talk about the fact that these people spent a good portion of their development time and the time that they took to create their content to go online and share stuff consistently. And showing that after they shared enough stuff over a long period of time, they could if they wanted to, they didn't say that they did, but you can track that movement on a graph. Like put all of the analytics like impressions, all that stuff into a Excel spreadsheet, you can see what stuff was the best, like work the best and didn't work the best. And the way that these people used it for their video games were that they took their best working like GIFs that they put on social media, and put them into their trailers. So that the trailer immediately immediately got people's attention, because it had what the audience really liked. Case in point, the guy that made a short hike, so that people really liked this flight mechanic that's within the first like 10 seconds of the trailer, and actually got me to buy the game before I even watched this GDC talk.
Keon 21:45
So, the more that you can kind of feel what's going well, and what's not going well in your social media, and making sure that you are kind of tweaking to that can help you do even better. Out of that if you have something good to give, and you want to make sure that your audience is getting a lot of really cool value, having them on a mailing list and sending them a newsletter that will actually add value to their life and make them want to come back and enjoy your content, is incredibly helpful and way easier to engage with them than being at the behest of some algorithm.
Elijah 22:16
in the spirit of keeping things neat and tidy for this episode because paid media needs to be neat and tidy: That is all the time we have. Where can people find you?
Josh 22:28
Well, hey, I can be found across pretty much every social media platform @JoshuaMSimon's and on Twitch @JoshuaSimons. I've been saying this all month, someone took the "M" and I can't find it. If you do see it, tweet at me. Tell me tell me that you found it. That'd be great. And yeah, I talk about tabletop gaming and just you know boosting people, tell them how great they are.
Keon 22:53
It's your boy Keon, you can find me at the Frame Forge YouTube channel. And on all social medias @FrameForgeMedia, come hang out with us. The big thing we've been doing is Twitch, we love hanging out with everybody on Twitch, it's incredible. I didn't know about it until a couple weeks ago. So please come hang out with us on there. And we'll have a grand old time @FrameForgeMedia.
Marco 23:11
And I'm Marco, you can find me on Instagram or Facebook @steap_d, or STEAPD.com as well as clubhouse under my name, Marco Namowicz.
Elijah 23:22
And if you want to find all things Victory or Death!, be sure to check out https://victoryordeath.substack.com for our newsletter, and for our episodes if you want to get them from the source. Or you can look us up on Apple podcasts. Make sure there's an exclamation point when you're searching. That's the big thing. But I need you to do two things right now: I don't bug you guys enough for this. But can you please leave a rating on Apple podcasts or whatever platform you're on? An honest rating please, if you think that we are two-star garbage but you listen to us anyway, because it's useful, let us know. And we'll we'll fix that right up for you.
Keon 24:03
You found my review. Yeah!
Elijah 24:05
But I cannot stress this enough ratings help visibility, whether it's a Google review on a business, or a podcast review on Apple podcasts. Those help us get discovered. And I need you to also sign up for the newsletter if you'd like long form content. Or if you just want to see what we're up to. It's absolutely free. You will get a newsletter every single week and a roundup newsletter every month that delivers content to you debriefing episodes that we've had in the past or current episodes. So with all that said, thank you so much for listening to the social media workshop for the month of February. Next month we are bringing in some brand new co-hosts and to talk about professional writing.
Elijah 24:51
This is going to be a workshop for creative professionals, could be helpful for content creators if you need help with with writing, I cannot wait to bring you this workshop. I'm super excited. This is like my bread and butter. So tune in in March for that. Thank you so much for listening, be sure to leave us a review and to sign up for the newsletter. I will see you guys on the next one.
Josh 25:10
As we say smash that like button, hit that subscribe button and follow across all social media platforms.
Keon 25:16
Listen here, listen here. listener This is just you and me now you and you and Keon. If I found out, you haven't listened to a GDC talk by the end of this month. I swear to God, I'm going to find you. And I'm going to give you a big hug because we all got stuff going on in our lives. But please just take a second to watch the GC talk.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai