Tips and Tools for Digital Marketing Agencies: Interview with Connectio

And now, here's Charles's interview with Wilco. Enjoy...

Charles: Hey, hey, hey, this is Charles. Hope you're doing great today. Now, if you're listening to this podcast in the morning or in the evening, go cut off the phone, take the phone off the hook, and lock the doors. You're going to have an amazing time. We're gonna be talking with the legend himself, Wilco from Connectio. How are you doing today?

Wilco: I'm doing great, man, but I wouldn't call myself a legend, though.

Charles: Dude, I've used every Facebook product you can think of. First of all, you don't really have a product, you've got like a suite. I mean, it's kind of like having Microsoft Office versus a chisel and some stone tablets. Connectio is really ... Man, that thing rocks.

Wilco: Thanks man, I appreciate that. Appreciate that a lot.

Charles: First of all, tell us a little bit. What exactly is Connectio, and how did you come up with the idea for it?

Wilco: So yeah, sure thing. Connectio is, as you said, a suite of various tools for Facebook advertisers. And the way it got started was actually a couple years back, it's almost two years ago, when we created the very first product, which is when Facebook released Facebook Lead Ads. At that time there was no way to grab the leads from Facebook Lead Ads into your autoresponder. I was like, "Why is there no easy solution for this?" So I pinged my team, we already had a team of developers, and we started building, we started working, because I needed it for myself.

So this was two years ago, and we then released that as ConnectLeads, and that was actually the first product. Then after a while, because I love Facebook Ads, I'm a bit of a Facebook Ads nerd, I would say, so as you dive into Facebook Ads, you'll start to realize there's some limitations in the platform, or some things that you know will work better if you improve it. Over time, I saw all these gaps, and for every one of those gaps we actually created the tool to overcome that gap. For example, we got a tool that allows you to do behavioral retargeting, so instead of just retargeting everyone who's on your side, you can now, for example, retarget those who maybe just scroll to a certain part of your site. If they scroll through at least 50% of your page, or if they spend at least a minute browsing your site, or anything like that. And that just immediately boosts your ROI of your return ads.

So it's all different kind of tools, but all targeted specifically to Facebook advertisers. I think that's the best way to describe.

Charles: Oh dude, I’m gonna tell you this. The first time I actually got into the tool suite and I realized, "Wait a second, I could target somebody in combination. Have they scrolled to the bottom of the page? Is this the third visit? How long did they spend on the page?"

When I was looking at those tools, I was just totally blown away. And one tool that I absolutely love is, when you go into Facebook, Facebook is gonna give you just some random, or what they believe is an interest that you may be targeting. If you were to enter in person A, they give you person B. With your tools, you actually have the ability to ... How deep you guys go with that. Cause I mean, the first time I used it I ended up with probably 50 targets I never even thought about.

Wilco: Yeah. Obviously, though, you don't want to make the mistake of going too complex. You want to pick what's relevant for you. To give you an example, one of our… What we do, is we initially target to a cold audience. We target various blog posts, content on our blog, and then we actually retarget based on how far they scrolled, if they scrolled more than 50%. Because we know that it's not even just about how much time they spent, but we know that if they go through that article they will scroll down because they will read that page. And if they haven't then they weren't as interested, but if they have then they're going to follow up with various ads. So obviously it depends on what's relevant for that campaign.

Another thing that you can do, and you're gonna be familiar with this, is when you're tracking things using the UTM tags, which is being used by a lot of tracking tools, mainly by ... It's invented by Google Analytics, obviously. So a lot of people there, they're running ads from different kinds of sources, and they add this UTM tag into it. And what you can do with ConnectRetarget is you can then retarget everyone specifically for that campaign. So let's say you're retargeting people from a certain email promotion or a certain Google AdWords campaign, or whatever. You can then retarget only those from that specific campaign. And this is where you can once again just dial in your retargeting even further than you could do without it.

Charles: Dude, this is super exciting. And guys, let me just try to explain that in a Charles metaphor. Basically you're only spending money with people who look like they're going to be the perfect buyer, the perfect audience, the perfect everything.

Wilco: Exactly.

Charles: And I think that most people who looked at, and I know people will go, "Well, remarketing in such a small percentage of the budget", but the reality of it is, I would guess 56% of every remarketing dollar is really wasted 'cause if you're not careful you end up remarketing, retargeting people that were on the site for all of two and a half seconds, for somebody who lands on a page who really got to the page and within a second realized it wasn't for them. They weren't even interested enough to read. And when you look at that you could easily take that money, apply it back into your other campaigns or even just increase your existing remarketing efforts.

That is the lowest hanging fruit in any business, any campaign, is remarketing. And yet so many people spend all of their time, money, energy, and effort going, "Charles, once I can get a campaign going, I will remarket to them." And I'm like, "No, no, no. You should be setting up remarketing first." That's like, I think, trying to do Facebook in this environment, as competitive as it is, I think if you start without already thinking through and already implementing your remarketing, you're almost setting yourself up to fail, because I don't know about you, but have y'all noticed a huge spike in prices over the last couple years?

Wilco: Yep. Yeah, yeah, just like you said, return for us it's like the low hanging fruit. And actually, I figured to actually maybe share what our highest converting returning ad is, because a lot of people, they think that you need to be creative to create all kinds of ads, but it's funny, because our highest converting returning ad is actually the one that is the simplest to create and it applies to every single business. You can apply it for every single business, because if people go to your site you obviously want to communicate multiple things. You want to communicate the benefits, social proof and whatnot. And I've noticed that in your retargeting, for me personally, social proof seems to work the best.

So what I do is I actually create, and this applies for any kind of Facebook ads for retargeting, doesn't matter whether you're using ConnectRetarget already or not yet, but what you need to do is you need to create a carousel ad, so that's the type of ad that actually shows multiple carousel, and they can sort of scroll through as a slider. And instead of going all creative on what you should add there, is you should basically ask your current customers, "What do you think of the product? What do you think of our service?" In other words, gather some testimonials and then every one of those carousels, every one of those images, you just upload the face of that particular customer and right below, in the text, you add in their testimonial; something they said. It has to be very short because you only have limited text.

And what we do is we run an ad like, "Hey, I saw you're looking at UpViral, which is one of our business. Hey, I saw you're looking at UpViral, here's what our customers have to say." And that's it. Nothing salesy, nothing pushy, and then every one of those blocks in the carousel ad below is like an image of someone with their quote what they're saying like, "Oh yeah, I just got 3,000 leads using UpViral." "Oh, I just got 50,000 leads using UpViral." And they can just scroll through, and obviously every single one of them if they click on it, they'll go straight into your sales page. It's like the simplest ad to create, but it beats all of our other things where we're trying to be creative and where we're trying to be persuasive and whatnot. Just showing that social proof, it is super, super, super effective. And it's easy to create, so that's for all of you who are listening right now.

Charles: Guys, that takeaway, you need to go ahead and print that out, write it on the side of the wall, get a Sharpie and scribble it somewhere. That is a massive takeaway. I see people every day going, "Why do I remarket? How do I retarget? What do I say? What do they wanna hear?" And let's face it, at the end of the day, social proof is still, it's called social networks for a reason, and social proof is the ultimate trump card in a social network.

Now guys, let's go ahead and jump into the next question here. Wilco, let's just say that I own a marketing agency. I'm working for clients. Some are big, some are small. At what point do you think your suite of technologies come in to really be a big value? If you're spending a couple hundred dollars a month, is it valuable or is it really designed for somebody who's maybe ... You know, what level of marketer is the tool really designed for?

Wilco: Yeah, sure thing. So obviously, there's various tools with different rules, I would say, or different answers depending on what product it applies to. For example, we were just talking about ConnectRetarget. If your client, or if you're getting, for example, 30 visitors a day on your website, it doesn't make sense to split up your audiences. You need to have substantial traffic in order to make sure that it makes sense to split it up between retargeting everyone or just the highest potential of your visitors. That really depends on how many visitors you have.

We have another product called ConnectAudience, and what that does it actually synchronizes all your email autoresponder into a Facebook custom audience. In other words you can run ads to, for example, people who opened a recent email of yours but they did not click on the link, or those who are on a certain list, or those, if there are multiple lists, the overlapping segment, or if they did not open a certain email. Things like that. And that obviously depends on how big their email list is. If they have 100 people on their email list, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Everything has a certain purpose.

For example, ConnectLeads, that one you basically need right away if you're gonna use Facebook Lead Ads. Without ConnectLeads then you'll have to basically download a CSV file from Facebook, upload them into your autoresponder. So you'll need to have that right away. And for ConnectExplore, which is a product that will help you dive into your audiences so you can find a lot more audiences and go in-depth into interest-based targeting of your ads, that one is relevant right away when you're getting started, even if you haven't, maybe even especially if you haven't started off with Facebook ads yet.

So for every product, the answer would actually be different.

Charles: Does a lead ad, they connect, they get added to the CSV file. The longer it takes you to get them a welcome message, the more likely they are to have forgotten about you. And if you look at it from a sales standpoint, the highest, just from like ... If I was gonna make a sale to somebody, if you gave me a lead today, go, "Charles, call it today." There's a much higher chance I'm gonna close it versus 24 hours. And with the lead ads, you're literally getting people instantaneously added into your autoresponder, you're getting that welcome email out. That is an absolute must-have, especially if you were to combine that with site retargeting to a lead.

And I also wanna kind of jump on, you really ... Guys, I can't stress the power of being able to connect your CRM to Facebook. What you're saying is, if I come to your site, I opt-in ... I immediately get added to a custom audience. If I'm moving through your site, if I do a certain action or if I buy a, this is incredible, if I buy your product, let's say I buy your first product, but I don't buy your upsell, you can have your CRM push that data directly into Facebook and you can bring people right back to that upsell, where they left off in your funnel to finish buying. That is huge. That's the kind of stuff that has an ROI. It doesn't take too many upsell sales to cover the cost of a whole lot of tools, guys. I'm just gonna stress to you, you absolutely need to take advantage of that.

And if you're sitting here telling me, "Charles, I've run out of targets, I've run out of this, I've run out of that." There's a tool for that. The first time I used it I had no clue that it could dig so deep. We found a number of little gold nuggets I would have never expected to have found, and it just dug 'em up and I was like, "Well, I never thought about that. That makes sense." And we were able to custom-tailor these ads to it. Guys, this is a complete suite of tools you absolutely need to check it out. So, Wilco, where can I go ahead and find out about Connectio?

Wilco: You'll find that at Connectio.io.

Charles: Sweet, sweet, sweet. And before we go, guys, just head over there, grab the tools. I will tell you this, every product he's made, I mean he's got ... Your UpViral product rocks, by the way ... every product he makes is top-notch. When you grab it, you start pluggin' in, you've got simple short videos to help you figure out how to use it. A lot of stuff's pretty much self-explanatory, and it's really designed for one thing: helping you grow your business with Facebook.

If you're a Facebook marketer at any level, whether it's for an individual, whether you're an agency, or whether you're just selling trying to help other people out, Connectio is the type of tools you absolutely need to grow your business.

I've used them, I've actually paid for them. I can't stress to you enough how important they are, so guys, head over there, click the link in the description. Head over there, grab them, I think you'll be extremely happy with them. And this is Charles, and on behalf of Wilco, you guys have a good one.