MD25: High Converting Facebook Video Ads With @RickMulready

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Facebook video ads are hot right now, I particularly like them for doing re-targeting and inviting my most valuable and elite subscribers to join my private mastermind on Facebook.

Rick Mulready is one of my favorite go-to experts on Facebook ads, and since I have seen him doing and talking about video advertising on Facebook, I wanted to bring him on board for an interview so that you can see if this strategy makes sense to your audience and your business or website.

You may also be interested in these three related episodes:

• How to Create Amazing Marketing Videos With @AnthonyTranMAP
• Facebook Ads Retargeting With Mario Brown
• How to do Great Facebook Ads With Valerie Shoopman

What You Will Learn on Facebook Video Ads

– How to Craft a High Converting Video

– What Type of ‘Goal’ You Should Choose When Creating Your Video

– How Long Should You Make Your Video

– How And When Should You do Re-targeting With a Video

– And more…

Resources Mentioned

RickMulready.com

Transcript

Hey, what is up guys? Welcome back to another episode. I am super pumped today for two main reasons. Number one is because I have been planning a strategy about what you’re going to learn today which is Facebook video ads. And number two is because the day this episode goes live which is August the 5th I am doing a live training webinar about how to find, how to come up with mind-blowing and life changing business ideas and most importantly how to validate these ideas before you invest any time, money and energy in creating your project. I’m going to talk about 3 specific ways that you can use to validate your ideas and make sure that it is going to work. And one of those ways involves literally getting paid before you do anything to create this idea. Yes, getting paid before you create your business idea which would allow you to be 100% sure of course that it’s going to work. The webinar is 100% free and is happening at 1 PM Eastern time. You can heading over to rebelgrowth.com/webinar to join right there and reserve your spot. Now, I also want to let you know that today we’re running another contest where you can participate between a WordPress theme with website personalization features to display different versions of your website to your different type of visitors and increase your conversion rates. You can head on over to rickmulready.com/borja and read the guidelines for participating in the contest right there. And now, ladies and gentleman let’s jump into our conversation with Rick Mulready which is a very very good one.

So Rick, welcome to the show, man. Thank you for coming, I really appreciate it.

Rick Mulready: Yeah. Thanks for having me on. I’m honored to be here.

Borja: Yeah. So okay, what – I want to ask you, I want to take our listeners through the process of starting to use Facebook video ads which are becoming really hot in paid traffic. But first, why don’t you tell us a little about how it is that you got to become an expert in paid traffic and Facebook advertisement?

Rick Mulready: Sure. So I’ve been doing Facebook ads since 2010. That’s really when I kind of dove into the Facebook ads world, if you will, and I up until that point I’ve been doing online advertising since the year 2000. So I’ve been in the online ad space now for about 15 years. Started off at AOL back on the East Coast. I’m on the West Coast right now at AOL’s headquarters, spent almost 5 years there working behind the scenes, running some teams there that – we ran the online campaigns of the sales teams were selling. So I got to see that side of the online ads world. And then I came out here to the West Coast after that, spent a couple of years at Yahoo where I started to manage campaigns and also sell online advertising campaigns at some of the biggest brands in the world. I guess I spent 2 years there and I went from there to a company called Vibrant Media which is a contextual advertising platform where I ran the Southern-California office for them again selling to some of the biggest brands in the world. And then I went from there to Funny or Die which is Will Ferrel’s online company and then I actually went back to Vibrant Media after that. So basically the reason I say all that is I’ve had exposure and I’ve been working with all types of online advertising for about 15 years now. But in 2010 I was seeing what was happening with Facebook. And I was seeing that the small business out there wasn’t able to build these communities and be able to really take advantage of – even at that time Facebook was doing a pretty good job from their targeting perspectives being able to allow small businesses to advertise on there and reach a very targeted audience. While at the corporate companies that I was working at, small businesses they had these – the companies I was working at had minimum advertising spends that businesses needed to hit in order to advertise with them. And the reason for that is because there’s a lot of resources and time and manpower, if you will, that goes into running these campaigns, these ad campaigns. And that minimum is generally, it sort of out-prices the small businesses, they just can’t afford to do that. And so I totally understand why the big brands have those minimums. But you know, what I was seeing was the small businesses weren’t having the same opportunities that the larger brands were having. Yet they were having that same opportunity on Facebook. And so that’s really what was my first sort of interest, it picked my interest, if you will, back in 2010 and so I really kind of dove into Facebook advertising. And I did go with the advertising side simply because I was interested in the advertising side simply because that was my background. My background was online advertising, so I naturally gravitated towards the advertising side of Facebook. And I just I dove in and taught myself as much as I possibly could and I started running campaigns for some local businesses and some online entrepreneur friends that I had and it just kind of took off from there. And so I’ve been just infatuated, if you will, with Facebook ad for the past 5 years or so because they are so effective and efficient at quickly scaling a business. I mean you can jump in and have a success very very quickly with your Facebook ad, so kind of a long winded answer for how I got into Facebook ads.

Borja: And now you have your own business…

Rick Mulready: I do.

Borja: Right?

Rick Mulready: Yeah, I left the corporate world at the end of 2012 to focus full time on this Facebook ads business. And it’s – I also talk about other forms of paid traffic as well. I have a podcast called the Art of Paid Traffic. So it’s not a 100% Facebook ads but primarily it is. And so yes, when I left the corporate world in 2012 to focus full time on my business here and having a blast.

Borja: And what are your thoughts on Facebook video ads? And they better be good, man, because otherwise this whole interview is not going to make any sense.

Rick Mulready: Facebook video ads are one thing where it’s at right now, on Facebook. I mean plane and simple there’s over 4 billion views, video views happening every single day on Facebook right now. And Facebook is really trying to figure out I think what the true value of having video on the platform is. And they’ve done a really good job in ramping that up very quickly in the first half year of 2015 and they have – the videos have a higher emphasis from what we can see in the News Feeds, so the algorithm that runs in the background that dictates what content is put into to the News Feed, videos are getting higher priority there. And from an advertising perspective, videos are working extremely well. And it’s working – let me offer a couple of reasons. Number one is it sort of breaks up the news feed so as you’re scrolling though, especially in the mobile device and that’s where video ads are doing the best, on mobile devices. And the reason for that is people are just scrolling through the news feed, you know, they’re standing online at Starbucks or at a store or on a bus or the subway or whatever it is and they’re scrolling through the news feed and the video is in auto-play. So when it comes into the news feed, it comes on to your screen, the video starts playing automatically. Now it’s muted, you actually have to touch the screen, tap the screen in order to listen to the video. But it sort of catches people’s attention far more easily than a, you know, just a standard type of image. So that presents some challenges for people who are using video ads which I’m sure we can talk about in and of itself but they’re just catching some great attention for people in the news feed. It also allows you to – as an advertiser it allows you to start to build a relationship with your ideal target customer through video. You know, so they can connect with you on a different level than just like a picture would. And so they can kind of hear – they can get to see your personality a little bit. They can hear from you, they can get to see you. And it allows you to interact with your target costumer on a whole different level than on the – just like a standard type of image.

Borja: Well, from what you’re saying in regards to video ad being very powerful in mobile what it sounds like is that they’re very good for creating a brand because how can you close a lead from mobile from someone standing in a Starbucks line or…

Rick Mulready: Yes. Yes. For sure. So video is definitely very good for a branding and awareness of your business. And so that’s a great place to start to build a relationship with people. Because you have to remember the mindset of people that are on Facebook. They’re not necessarily on there to shop. They’re there to share with their friends and family images, updates, videos and so forth. So you have to catch their attention in front of your exact target customer and you have to catch their attention and offer them something of value. You have to entertain them enough so that they’re interested in clicking on your ad or your video like you’re talking about. I mean that’s a great point like how are you, if they’re in the line at Starbucks, how do you get them to opt in to your e-mail list? Well, one strategy could be, you’re running a video ad and you have a call to action during the video or at the end of the video, wherever you want to put that, that drives them to a landing page for them to opt-in to whatever it might be. Maybe you are super entertaining and super – you’re adding some great value in the short video and someone is like “Man, I’ve got to click on this and get whatever this person – whatever they’re offering here.” So that’s one way. Another way to do it is strictly use the video as that awareness play and that branding play. So you’re just getting in front of them, you’re getting them – you’re introducing yourself to your target customer if it’s a cold lead. And then, what Facebook will do and what they’re doing now is they’re creating custom audiences for you automatically of people who are watching your video. So they’ll break it up and they’ll say and I forget what the exact terminology that they’re using is but they’ll build an audience for you of a video that you’re running of people who have watched your partial portion of your video or people who have watched the full video for your ad. And then you can turn around and use those custom audiences to sort of move your target customer further down your sales funnel. And so then you can turn around use those custom audiences to target people with a different kind of ad. Maybe it’s another video ad, maybe it’s a more standard type of image ad at that point. But you can get to use the video to kind of set up that relationship with them. Then you can re-target people who watched your video and sort of moving them down your sales funnel. I mean it’s a really really – and I think Facebook is just now really starting to get, you know, start to perfect this technology that they’re doing with the re-targeting. I think it’s only going to get better but it’s a really really cool option they’ve put in there for us.

Borja: Let’s get into the shoes of someone who wants to start their first video campaign. What is the very first thing that they have to do?

Rick Mulready: Well, they have to create a video. They’ve got to have a video but you don’t have to like – this is not a case where you have to like hire a big value production company or anything like that. I mean you can record on your smart phone. I mean most iPhones or Android devices have really good video cameras these days. I would encourage you to get a decent microphone though. And you can get them on Amazon for 20 or 30 bucks right now. I mean they’re good and yet they’re very inexpensive as well. So make sure your sound is good because there’s nothing worse than having a decent video but no one can really make out what you’re saying or those crappy audios. So yeah, just record a video and really just try to get your personality across. Again, as I was mentioning before, really try to entertain your target costumer, really try to add value to them in a short amount of time. I get the question a lot of, how long should a video be. And really, there’s really no right or wrong answer on that. Now with that said, you have to remember again, how people are using Facebook. So the quicker, generally that you can get to your message and get through the video, the better. But make the video as long as it needs to be to get your point across and to deliver whatever you want to be delivering in that video. So once you have the video you want to upload it directly as you’re setting up your Facebook ads. There’s a couple of different options that you can do. You can choose the objective video views, so if your goal is to get people, if you just want to get people to watch your video within your target audience, you can choose video views. But if you want to do like website conversions for example, if your objective is to get people to opt-in on your e-mail, on your landing page, then you can choose website conversions and select the video option for the ad type. So you can do it couple different ways but then this is just a matter of uploading the video directly to Facebook and then setting up your ad from there but it’s pretty straightforward as Facebook walks you through in the ad setup.

Borja: Okay. So yeah. I figured that Facebook would one people to upload the videos straight through their platform. So it wouldn’t make any sense – what are you seeing from people trying to paste a video from somewhere else? What’s going on with those people?

Rick Mulready: That’s not performing as well and Facebook – so a couple different things there, Facebook does not give it the type of priority in the news feed even if you’re doing it just on your Facebook page. Just organically Facebook isn’t giving it the type of priority it would as opposed to if you directly upload the video to Facebook. And then if you don’t directly upload it as an ad, you’re not able to use, what I was talking about before, where Facebook builds those audiences for you of people who are watching your video. They wouldn’t be able to do that. So I do not recommend that you just link out to – if you have a video like on YouTube or Vimeo or something – just linking out to those places. Definitely upload the video directly to Facebook.

Borja: Right. And in terms of a call to action what are some best practices for including your call to action?

Rick Mulready: Well, you’re going to have to kind of test different things on this. So here is what I mean by that. You know, you can – so the – I would have a call to action right away in the video because as I mentioned before the video is auto-play, so it’s kind of coming in to somebody’s news feed automatically playing but it’s going to be muted and so you don’t want to be giving away your best stuff or talking about your best stuff within the first three seconds or so. You’ve got to give somebody an opportunity to tap on the video and then so they can hear you. Okay, so you have to get their attention and get them to click on the video in a visual manner and that might be some sort of a call to action on the screen itself like calling out who your target costumer is. Maybe your target costumer is, I don’t know, coaches or a consultants or whatever, whoever they might be, call them out. Just put that in some sort of call to action text on the video. Or maybe you want to have like a tap the video to listen or something like that. And then in addition, the other call to action, the more traditional type of call to action, trying to get them to a landing page is just going to be testing. So you’re obviously going to want to verbally say, you want to tell people what you want them to do but it’s also a good idea to put the URL in as long as it’s a very simple URL. Just link that, just have it, not link it but show the video or show the URL, I’m sorry, at the bottom of the video. And maybe you’re pointing to it or maybe you’re telling people,”hey, click the link in this post.” So maybe you’re not saying, maybe you’re not showing the URL in the video, maybe you have the video or you maybe have the URL in the post itself where – and you’re just telling people to click on that link. Now, what I said before as far as testing goes, once you’re running your video Facebook has done a really good job within their reporting to tell you how long somebody is watching your videos. So when you – if you’re running an ad right now, let’s just say, and the ad is let’s just say 2 minutes long and your call to action comes in at 90 seconds, well you want to make sure that people are watching your video long enough to even hit that call to action part in the video. So the way that you would do that is make sure you click on the reports tab or the reports link I should say in the left hand column and then you can customize the columns of your reports. And then within that there’s a videos section. And then you can there’s all different types of options to click. I like to make sure I’m seeing the average duration that somebody is watching the video. So again, if you have a 2 minute video you can select that option and then in your report it’ll tell you how long people – the average duration of people watching the video. So if you put your call to action again at 90 seconds but people are only watching 22 seconds of your video, probably an issue with your video or the target audience that you’re targeting with that video.

Borja: And what about re-targeting and videos?

Rick Mulready: Yeah, I mean this is what we talked about before, so there’s a couple different ways to kind of take this. So you can re-target people who are watching your video and you can re-target people who have partially watched it or watched the video fully. You can use those as custom audiences and you can turn around and re-target people who have watched your video. Or you can have an audience, excuse me, a set up a re-targeting audience, a setup of people who have come to your website or of your landing page from previous ads and or just general traffic coming to your website and then you can re-target those people and use a video ad to re-target to them.

Borja: Yeah. I like that.

Rick Mulready: Yeah, yeah, it’s super effective. What’s great is if you’re setting – let’s just say you’re setting people to, I don’t know, an opt-in page or maybe it’s a sales page and you’ve creating an audience of people who have landed on your sales page but didn’t buy from you. Well, what might be a cool strategy there is to re-target those people with a video ad where you’re talking about your program again, reintroducing yourself again and then maybe you’re cutting in some video testimonials of people who have – of your target customers that have previously gone through your program. And so you are, you’re giving them those testimonials in a, from a re-targeted video ad. I mean, that’s really really powerful stuff.

Borja: You also mention, you just mentioned about following up with another video. How would it be different from the first video?

Rick Mulready: Well, you want to think about it again. So if somebody has – if you know that somebody has seen your video previously, then you want to again sort of move them further along your sales funnel. And that’s going to look differently from whatever niche that you’re in and whatever you’re doing in your business. But you want to sort of give them a different type of message. Maybe it’s you’re adding, I don’t know, additional value in some way. Maybe you’re teaching something new or maybe you want to just give them a heads-up about something new. Or maybe you want to give a – if you want to offer testimonial from some of your clients that way and you want to – you know, video ads are so good for that, you know, cutting in testimonial clips of your students where you don’t have to do it from a re-targeting perspective of hey, people visited my page before but didn’t opt-in or didn’t buy. You can do that just sort of with a second part of your – the second video in your sort of ad campaign here where now you’ve given them the value and you’ve giving them some entertainment in that first video, now in the second video maybe you’re giving some additional value and then maybe some testimonials from your students who, you know people can watch those videos and say “oh, that person is just like me, maybe this can help me as well.”

Borja: Powerful. Yeah. I can see how powerful that can be of course. So now that we’re talking about audiences and challenges that people might have perhaps. What are some obstacles that you see people having?

Rick Mulready: I think the biggest thing – and I’ve gone trhough this myself is just getting over that hump about creating the video. And you know, don’t let that be an obstacle of you doing and trying video ads out. Because people automatically think oh I have to be – and you don’t even have to be in front of the camera necessarily either you can do some sort of a, just like a slide video with Power Point or KeyNote or something. You do have to keep in mind that you do still have the 20% rule that Facebook has for its images. So the first part of your video can’t be made up by more than 20% text, meaning the area of your video can’t contain more than 20% text. So Facebook is just making sure that, they’re trying to protect the user experience in the news feed and make sure that just it’s not a billboard. So you don’t have to be in front of the camera. I think it’s better to be in front of the camera simply because if your goal is to generate awareness or build some – if you introduce yourself to your audience, you in front of the camera is going to be a much more powerful strategy. But again, you try not to let that be an obstacle or a challenge in order to get that ad going. Again, grab your smart phone, get in front of your smart phone, just make sure you have a good mic, you know a little pal mic for 25 bucks and away you go. But that is a big obstacle that generally stands in the way for people that they just have this mental road blocker or mindset block that they need to shift through in order to just kind of get these videos going. Or even just sitting in front of your – if you have a webcam on your computer, just do it with that. I mean just get it out there.

Borja: Yeah, you can even do – I mean depending on the type of audience that you’re trying to reach, you can even do like a selfie type of videos like Jay Baer does with his show, Jay Today. Where you’re handing – you’re just grabbing the phone with your hand and recording a video like supernatural. I mean, again, it depends on the type of people that you’re trying to reach but it would make you look like very natural, very friendly. But yeah, there’s a lot of things that people can play with in terms of the video, I believe, doing perhaps… How do you call them…? Explainer videos.

Rick Mulready: Yes. Absolutely.

Borja: …and animated videos and all that. There are great for audiences.

Rick Mulready: Yeah. Lot of different ways you can do it. And it’s just have fun with it. Again, it’s remembering what the mindset of people who are on Facebook, you know, entertain them while adding value to them. And there’s a lot of different ways you can do that with video.

Borja: Yeah, yeah. What I can see as a takeaway from all this is knowing your audience, knowing the mindset of people, of people that’s in Facebook and knowing what goal – what is it that you want to achieve from the whole system and the whole campaign.

Rick Mulready: That’s number one.

Borja: Yeah, of course, yeah that’s a number one definitely.

Rick Mulready: Yeah. You’ve got to know why you’re doing things in the first place or else you’re just going to be wasting money.

Borja: Yeah. And you’ll end up with a campaign campaign that says “What is it man, that I was trying to do?”

Rick Mulready: Right. You’d be surprised or maybe not surprised about how many people do that.

Borja: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So now we’re talking about targeting. Who is your ideal customer? And how do you serve this person?

Rick Mulready: Yeah. My ideal customer is generally someone who has an online business. And they’ve been doing business for a little while, they have some sort of product or service that they have started, they’ve gotten some sales and now they’re looking to automate leads and sales for their business. They’re really looking to put those leads and sales on autopilot, so they can worry about other aspects of their business, where they don’t have to worry about where that next lead or sales is going to come from. And Facebook ads and other forms of paid traffic are phenomenal ways to do that. I mean and that is really why I focus so much on Facebook ads because they’re so efficient and cost effective in order to automate things for your business. So that person like I mentioned is generally an online entrepreneur they have a product or a service already and they’re looking for ways to automate things. Now, I do have people who – I enjoy working with who maybe they don’t want to go down that route but they are looking for – to create their own business helping other businesses that might be in the form of managing Facebook advertising, and so they’re looking at it like “How do I do this? How do I set this sort of business up? How do I learn Facebook ads so that I can help other businesses and create a good lifestyle for myself through this sort of business?” So yeah, that’s my ideal target audience.

Borja: Perfect. That was perfect. And for anyone listening before we go, I really really want to encourage them to subscribe to Rick’s podcast, the “Art of Paid Traffic”. If you want to learn more about paid advertisements and doing video ads, it’s an awesome resource for paid advertisements and traffic. So Rick, thanks a lot for everything. If people want to stay in touch with you or learn more about what is it that you do, where can people go?

Rick Mulready: Best place is my – is the podcast, the “Art of Paid Traffic” like you mentioned. Thanks for the kind words about that. And also my website rickmulready.com, hop on the e-mail list there and you’ll get all kinds of great content, that’s the best way for us to get to know each other.

Borja: Terrific. Thanks man. I really appreciate you coming on the show and I hope to have you again in the future.

Rick Mulready: Sounds good, man. Thanks so much.

Borja: Alright guys, that is it for today’s episode. I really hope you enjoyed it and did a lot of notes. Remember, only implement the marketing strategies that make sense to your audience. Now, if you’re listening to this episode on August the 5th head on over to rebelgrowth.com/webinar to join my live training on how to find and validate a business idea. Once again guys, thank you so much for listening. Go out and create videos and keep diving.

Thanks for listening and let me know what you think of this episode.