The best tool for marketing your content: Facebook Live.
I’m a huge proponent of content marketing, especially since it’s helped me grow my Shopify store from $4 million to over $20 million this year alone.
And generally, my content marketing strategy goes like this: First, I create content that is relevant and engaging to a group of people; then, I try to build a community of these engaged people around shared ideas; and once this community exists, I make them offers.
For example: BOOM! by Cindy Joseph is my 8-figure skincare store built around the idea that it’s the first pro-age beauty brand for women. (This is an especially divisive idea when you consider how many billions of dollars bigger companies pour into making women believe their value only comes from looking young.)
So every piece of content we market for this brand incorporates this message—whether it’s a blog post, an article, or a video. We recently used Facebook Live as a way to reach our fans, and the organic engagement went through the roof. Check out these stats:
Facebook rewards you for using Facebook Live.
We did a simple face-to-camera video of our spokeswoman doing a Q&A from her business page (which has 100k+ fans) in the hopes of educating new users on our products and pro-age message.
And without any paid advertising it has accumulated 35k views, 1.5k likes, 575 comments & 130 shares! Facebook’s algorithm must absolutely love its new Live feature, because this simple video has performed better than any other we’ve ever done and it didn’t cost us 1¢.
And here’s the kicker: You can still amplify these posts later with ads AND embed them into emails and landing pages just like you would with YouTube and Wistia videos.
The huge benefit of this is that the videos continue to accumulate valuable customer data (like what percent of the video they watched) along with growing likes and shares.
This makes embedding Facebook Live videos the best for providing social proof and tracking viewer engagement!
Give your audience the content that is most relevant to them.
But the best thing of all is that you can create Facebook advertising audiences from people who engaged with embedded videos.
Facebook Live allows you to construct audiences based on whether they’ve watched your entire video or bounced from it after 3 seconds. This gives you a better chance than ever before of delivering content when the prospect needs it the most.
Because the more data Facebook Live videos give you on your prospect’s engagement with your brand, the better you can deliver content that is the most relevant to them as individuals, and that’s the whole foundation of content marketing.
We have to be as relevant to our users as possible, because the more relevant you can be to a group of people, the stronger the community you will build and the larger your business will grow.
(Do you want to see an animated video that is working well to engage with Smart Marketer’s online community? Then check out the end of the video that goes along with this blog post.)
Video Highlights
0:58 Inspiration for Facebook Live
1:41 All you have to do is commit
2:48 Generating Awareness
3:21 The Prospect to Customer Journey
4:43 The real secret to a business
6:35 Facebook is pushing live content
7:06 Boom! by Cindy Joseph
8:29 Experimenting with Facebook live
10:03 Blog post content
10:56 Facebook Live Audiences
12:05 Data Collection
12:47 Digital Consumption has fundamentally changed
13:30 Conversion occurs over multiple touch-points
14:47 OneClickUpsell
17:40 Animated Videos
18:00 Zipify.com
Click Here For Video Transcript
And there’s a couple of things I wanna talk about. I also wanna talk about this new type of content, which is live streaming content. So let’s just load the fan page here. This is my Facebook fan page. You’ll be able to see this camera feed. Eventually you’ll be able to see a second and a third camera feed, and my laptop. This way, I can talk to you. I can show you what’s on my laptop. And we can kind of have more of an interactive conversation live on Facebook, which is pretty sweet.
And now, it looks like… Here I am. I’m actually live. It’s working. Check that out. I got my ukuleles behind me. I might even play one of those for you, if you’re lucky.
So, what inspired this Facebook Live was a couple of things but the first was commitment. I talk to so many entrepreneurs. If you found me, if you’re watching this show, you probably found me because you’re interested in growing your business in some capacity. Or maybe you dig the stuff that I do with my wife, Carrie, on relationship and communication and that type of content. Hopefully you like that stuff, that’s good stuff. But it’s more likely that you found me because you’re interested in having more wealth in your life. Having your eCommerce business do better.
And there’s one thing that you need in order to succeed in business and in really any endeavor in your life. And we’re gonna go to the computer in just a second, but that one thing is commitment. All you have to do is commit. And I see so many people start stuff up and start stuff up. And then try it for a couple of months and then say, “Ah it didn’t work and quit.”
What’s interesting and you see it and the stock market. You see it any like sort of practice or endeavor that you go into in your life such as a musical instrument, or a martial arts practice, or a relationship, which we’ll get to in a second. If you’re willing to commit, that’s where the dividends pay off after a year, after two years. After time and energy investment, you start to see this huge payoff.
In the relationship side of things, oftentimes, people end up having their children be the greatest love affairs of their lives. Like not in a romantic capacity but just like the most love they experience in their life is in their relationship to their kids. Because their kids are the only people they are actually willing to commit to. Commitment is where it’s at.
And when it comes to buying advertising online, which is something I love to talk about, how to generate visibility, how to get people to know you exist. And we’re gonna talk about the three stages of the customer journey in just a second. But I love talking about how to generate awareness for ideas, for fundraisers, for products, for whatever. But how to generate awareness for things. And I like to do that by purchasing advertising. And when it comes to doing that, you gotta commit. You gotta just commit to doing it. Commit to getting better.
It looks like we already got a bunch of folks watching us live, which is really cool. And this is where it’s gonna get a little weird because there I am live streaming on Facebook, super wild.
So, let’s talk about this customer journey. We’re going to cut to the laptop here. And when it comes to getting someone’s attention and having them actually do the thing you want them to do, which is purchase your product, do business with you. There’s really three phases that someone has to go through to become a customer and then a repeat customer.
The first is sort of before, before, they know about you, before they’re a customer of yours, before they’re even a prospect. So at the top level, you have to get their attention. You have to create awareness for whatever it is you have to offer. That could be a physical product. That could be a service. It could be a charity. It could be an idea. It could be something like that, right? So, there’s the before phase where you’re getting their attention. It usually starts with an advertisement.
Then there’s the during phase. So there’s the phase where they’re going from prospect to customer. They’ve seen your ad. They’ve clicked over to your website. They’ve engaged with some piece of content that you have.
And then there is after, right? So now, they’re actually a customer and a lot of people just kind of focus on what? The lingo terms in our community is traffic and conversion. That’s what people call it traffic and conversion, before and during, right? Getting someone… Using traffic to get awareness or have them find out about you and then using conversion tactics during the prospect to customer, you know, journey to get them to become a customer.
The real secret to a business and this goes back to our commitment thing is after. Most of the money in your business will come from people who’ve done business with you before. So you’ve got to create a good post-purchase sequence. You gotta have additional offers. You gotta offer upsells, which is something we’ll be talking about in just a minute.
So, let me show you this Facebook Live thing. So when I talk about before, right, this is before for some people. Some of you watching this have never done business with me. You’ve seen my content, you’ve liked my fan page. You’ve checked out my blog but we’ve never actually… You never purchased a course. You’ve never been through one of my training programs, never used one of my software tools. You never come to an event, right? You’ve not yet done business with me.
My strategy, in all of my businesses, they all do the same thing, I create content that is relevant and engaging to a group of people. And I share that with them and then if they like it, they subscribe to me in some form or fashion. So my eCommerce business, BOOM! By Cindy Joseph, we create content. It’s relevant to a topic or conversation that a group of people are having. They like it, they become a fan, they become an email subscriber, or whatever. And once we have these groups of people, who we’ve engaged in a conversation, we then make them offers.
Now why am I telling you this? What does this have to do with anything? Well, it has to do with Facebook Live, right? So here I am. I’m live on Facebook and I’ve got some camera, I’m able to show you my computer screen. And the reason why I’m live on Facebook, instead of doing the traditional style of content marketing that we do for our businesses. Which is, you know, shoot a video, produce it, make it nice, and then upload it to Facebook, upload it to YouTube, upload it to Twitter, and Pinterest, and everywhere else, kind of share it around. Is because right now, Facebook is favoring this type of content. And for the next year or so, they will be.
They’re really pushing this “product” they have. I just did double air quotes. I’ve been waiting to do that. I haven’t been able to figure out a way to do double air quotes. That’s my first time actually double air quoting something. It feels pretty good. I might figure out a way to do it again in this broadcast.
So, they’re really pushing this Facebook Live “product” of theirs. Ah, there it was, I just did it again. They’re pushing this Facebook Live product of theirs. So what I noticed and I’ve been kind of experimenting with one of my businesses and I’m gonna show you. Give me just a second while I pull up my screen here.
So here we go. So this is the fan page for one of my brands, BOOM! By Cindy Joseph. And we’ve been creating… Well, our big strategy for this brand is to create content. We’re curating a conversation that is not happening anywhere else on the internet. Everyone is telling women that their lives are over after 35. That it’s just sort of all downhill from there. That it’s anti-age, anti-wrinkle. You must stop this thing from happening, you know?
As a guy in society, I get power and value for production. So the more money I make, the more I produce. The more society sort of says I’m good and, you know, and I appreciate. Women, on the other hand are told and this is not actually a true reflection of a person’s value. But women are told that their value comes from youth and beauty. And that that value starts to go away over time. It’s really sort of… You know, to be a woman in this society, it’s confronting to be told that after 35, you’re shot and you gotta get Botox, and you gotta do all this stuff.
And so, we don’t, you know, subscribe to that viewpoint. This brand, that I’m showing you now that you can see on my computer screen here, is a cosmetics brand where all the products are sheer. They’re about celebrating you as you are now. We believe that life just gets better and that every stage of life is its own kind of beautiful. So anyways, we do content and we’ve been experimenting with Facebook Live.
Now, check this video out, okay? Behind the scenes, right, we did this little video. Thirty-five thousand views, 1500 likes, 575 comments, 130 shares. None of that was amplified with advertising. We didn’t pay for any advertising here because… And granted, we have a very big community of fans. Facebook really likes this fan page.
But even with Smart Marketer, I have much… On the Ezra Firestone fan page that you’re watching right now, I’ve got much less fans, right? I’ve got like, you know, 15,000 fans compared to 200,000 fans. But even still, when I produce content with Facebook Live, it’s getting much more reach, much more engagement. Facebook is pushing it out in front of everyone. And then that same content, we do the same thing that we would do for all of our other content, which I’ll show you in a just a moment. Which is we share it in our blog and we email our subscribers and things like that.
And what I want to do is I wanna share this post real quick on to my wall. And just make sure that works. So what I just did was I shared a post from my fan page on to my personal wall because my personal profile, I have like 5000 friends. I don’t know most of them personally. It’s a business page. There we go. So I did share it, it worked.
Although if you’re my friend on Facebook, I’m super happy about that. Thank you for being my friend. I like to be friends but I don’t actually know all 5000 of them. So some people follow me on my personal profile for business as well. So that’s why I did that.
But lemme show you over here what we’ve done on our blog. So here, this is a blog post on our blog and you’ll notice that the video embed here is Facebook. So it’s a Facebook video embed. So when you go to my blog and you watch this, you know, this post on the blog and you can see that we transcribe it. What we like to do is put video highlights and then we put a transcription so you could read it so you don’t have to just watch it. And then we’ve got, you know, our comments. And obviously, we’re responding to every comment because we really appreciate when someone engages with us.
So anyways, the point is that you’ll notice that this video embed is not YouTube. It is not Wistia. It’s Facebook. Why is it Facebook? Well, the reason it’s Facebook is because Facebook allows… So if someone is logged into Facebook and they come to my blog and they watch that video. Then what I can do is inside of Facebook in my ads interface, I can click on create an audience, custom audience, engagement on video and video. And then I can say, you know, someone who watched 25% of my video. And then I can select the actual video here. So I can build a group and it might be a little too small for you to see on the screen. I’ll zoom in a little bit. But I can actually build a group of people who’ve engaged with that video and then communicate with them with a message.
I can put an ad in front of them. I can say, “Thanks for watching my video.” And so, they may have watched that video off of Facebook. They’re watching it on my website. But I’m still able to send that data back to Facebook and leverage it to communicate with those people, you know, in the way that makes sense.
And so basically, we can go back to face the camera now. This new type of content, which actually is the same type of content we’ve been doing, right? It’s a video, we’re showing slides, you know, stuff like that. But it’s being broadcast live through Facebook, therefore, data is then becoming an actual video that we can then put on our website and things like that. Data is being collected.
So what you all see in the future is likely that all of the videos on our websites, on our store, you know, where people are buying products, on our blog, will all be hosted by Facebook. Because that allows Facebook to then collect data on those viewers and allow us to communicate with people who’ve engaged with our content.
And the interesting thing about being a business owner today is that people are on these devices. They’re carrying them around with them. They’re using them on the toilet. You know that people are just like on these things all day long. And the way that people are consuming the digital medium, the way that the internet gets consumed has fundamentally changed.
It used to be that people sat down at their computers for a couple of hours here and there, at a desktop, and that was it. And then, we got these laptops that you could carry around with you but you still had to sit at them. Now, the digital medium is carried with you all day long and you’re engaging with it via touch. So touch-based engagement of the internet, touch-based engagement of the digital medium has eclipsed traditional laptop, you know, keyboard engagement.
And so, since people are consuming the internet all day long in short little stints, instead of, you know, one little block at a time, like it used to be, the process of getting someone to know about you and then getting them to actually do business with you and become a customer happens over multiple touch points now. So they see a piece of content and then you know that they saw that content. So you follow up with them with an ad that says, “Thanks for seeing, you know, thanks for engaging with this content, check out my product.” So there’s multiple touch-points as opposed to the old traditional, they type in something on Google and they go to like a product, they buy it. Like now, the average life cycle of someone discovering something and engaging with it is happening across multiple touch-points, which is pretty cool.
Now, the other thing that I want to show you is that this video that Smart Marketer, my videos, are sponsored by a company called Zipify. I happen to own Zipify, so it’s sponsored by me. I sponsor my own stuff, which I think you should do too. You know if you’ve got things that are valuable to your community, you should offer it to them.
So, I would like to show you a video. I also wanna show you these animation videos that we’ve been working on. I’m gonna talk to you a little bit in the next video that we do about why we think graphically-animated videos are performing well when it comes to engaging people in a conversation. So, I’m going to show you a video from our sponsor about a product that we have that’s kind of cool. And then I’m gonna talk to you about it. So here we go.
Narrator: What if I told you that you can increase your average order value overnight and your overall revenue just by adding one-click post-purchase upsells? You might say, “Great, what’s an upsell?”
An upsell is when you offer your customer a product that is complementary to what they’ve already shown interest in. It’s when you order a hamburger and someone asks, “Would you like fries with that?” Or you go the apple store, you buy a computer, and they offer you Apple Care. Offering upsells is the easiest thing you can do right now to start growing your business. Because by increasing your average order value or the average amount of money you make per order, you’re getting more value out of the customers that you already have.
Unfortunately, upselling does pose a big problem. Making more offers to your customers adds friction and slows down the buying process. And in a world of short attention spans and abandoned carts, this is a huge concern. The last thing that you wanna do is scare off customers and end up losing sales.
What you need is a way to offer upsells but without any of the risk. And that’s why we created OneClickUpsell. With OneClickUpsell, you can offer one-click upsell post purchase. Due to new updates to the Shopify platform, we can now give you the ability to make targeted, upsell offers to your customers, after they’ve purchased and after you’ve secured the sale.
So once the order is complete, instead of going to a thank you page, your customers are directed to a post-purchase OneClickUpsell offer page where you can offer complementary products and special deals. Without adding any friction to the buying process and without the risk of losing your initial sale. None of the risks and all of the reward. It’s called having your cake and eating it too.
And with our page editor, it’s easy to make professional upsell offer pages and customize them to match your store. We have a tagging system that lets you customize which upsells you offer, depending on what your customer has purchased in the initial order. And an in-app analytic suite tells you which upsells are most effective so that you can optimize for higher conversions. Your revenue can skyrocket overnight.
And, there’s a bonus. OneClickUpsell comes with a bonus, post-purchase email sequence. This is a series of emails that will allow you to keep your customers engaged after they make a purchase. Which will decrease refunds while increasing reviews, customer loyalty, and most importantly, repeat purchases. It’s another great way to make more revenue from the customers that you already have.
So let’s review. With OneClickUpsell, you’re now offering one-click, post-purchase upsells that make you more money from every order. And you’re sending automated post-purchase emails that generate more sales from every customer. Sounds like things are on the up and up. So don’t wait, try OneClickUpsell. Shopify’s only one-click, post-purchase upsell tool.
Ezra: And we’re back. There you go. So, those animated videos are working extremely well as a way of creating engagement. Now, on the next show that we do, I’ll talk about how we’re using and why we’re using them.
If you’re interested in OneClickUpsell, if you have a Shopify store, go ahead and cut through computer. What you can do is you can go to zipify.com, Z-I-P-I-F-Yeah, and you can check out OneClickUpsell which is this application here. Which will, if you have a Shopify store, give you the ability to create more engagement and revenue from every order that you get. You can read about it. It’s a very cool tool and it will add value to your customers and to your business. So now, we can go back to face the camera.
So Ezra here, the first time that we’ve gone live on the fan page. Thanks for joining me. Be willing to commit to something because when you commit to something, that’s when the magic happens. If you have started a new venture and you haven’t given it 18 months of actual, like legitimate attention… Because in your life, what you put your attention on grows. What you ignore goes away. So if you haven’t given it 18 months, I don’t wanna talk about it. Don’t come asking me for stuff and advice and whatever if you haven’t put in 18 months of energy towards that or at least if you don’t intend to, right? If you’re just getting started, and you want help, hey, I’ll help you out. But you’ve got to be willing to commit.
So, Ezra here from Smart Marketer. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next one.