TJ58 – Social Media Engagement Strategy: How To Captivate An Audience Of Influencers With Alex Houg and Dennis Yu

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In this day and age, everybody is on social media, particularly on Facebook. A lunch doesn’t get eaten, a gym weight lifted or an aeroplane flight taken, without news of it being posted to Facebook.

Real-life conversations are happening around the content that gets posted to the internet, your success online hinges on your ability to shape those conversations.

Alex Houg and Dennis Yu have uncovered a social media engagement strategy that shapes word-of-mouth online. It ensures the right people are the saying the right things.

They use frameworks to zero in on the right message, then use ad targeting to get that message in front of the right people. Its an innovative approach to old fashioned word of mouth and you can learn all about it in this episode.

FREE BONUS: Download over 40 pages of frameworks to help you become a thought leader and dominate your market using content and social media.

OUR GUESTS:

Alex Houg is the founder and CEO of BlitzMetrics. BlitzMetrics is an internet marketing firm that is based in Minneapolis and employs 21 people worldwide. At 20 years old, Alex has become an international speaker and writer. He has spoken at different events including Social Media Marketing World and ICON14.

Alex started as an entrepreneur at the very young age of 14 where he developed, then sold a gaming accessory website.

BlitzMetrics, his current company, works with clients such as Adidas, The Golden State Warriors, Fuddruckers, and Jack Daniels. They help connect businesses with interns, or unterns as they call them.

Dennis Yu, the Chief Architect and CTO of BlitzMetrics used to hold leadership positions with Yahoo! and American Airlines. He is now best known for Facebook marketing and advertising, expertise that has seen him featured on Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Fox News, and CBS Evening News.

He is a contributor to InsideFacebook and AllFacebook.

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A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 58 of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

• What’s BlitzMetrics?
• Triangles: Why They Work.
• The $1/Day Facebook Targeting Strategy.
• Engaging Facebook Influencers.
• Facebook Marketing Success: Case Study.
• The Right Content To Put Out.
• Facebook Campaign Strategies.
• Social Media Funnels.

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

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You can also get Dennis’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

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Welcome listener! You’re tuned in to another episode of Traffic Jam and of course that means you’re about to learn more strategies that will help you build and grow a consistently profitable audience online.

I am kind of excited of today’s interview because we’ve been working on setting this one up for some time and because it’s the first where we’re joined by two guests under one show. Before I introduce those two guests, I want to point you over to the episode page for Traffic Jam#58 and the URL for that is trafficjamcast.com/58 and you want to head there because there is a wealth of bonus training awaiting you and today’s guests have been very, very generous and donated a whole catalog of bonus stuff that will help you get much better results online so before you forget, head on over there now, it’s trafficjamcast.com/58 and download those bonuses.

So allow me to introduce my two guests from www.blitzmetrics.com. Alex Houg, he’s the 20 year old CEO of BlitzMetrics, an internet marketing firm with the difference from Minneapolis. Alex is a writer and speaker and has presented at Social Media Marketing World, iCon14, PubCon, and many others and he’s a regular contributor to Inside Facebook and Social Fresh.

Dennis Yu, he’s the CTO of BlitzMetrics and he’s a recognized lecturer in Facebook marketing, having been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, TechCrunch and many others. He’s also an author at Inside Facebook and All Facebook as well.

I am going to allow them to explain exactly what they are up to in BlitzMetrics in the interview so without any further ado, let’s hand over to Alex Houg and Dennis Yu from BlitzMetrics.

James: So hey there listeners! Welcome back to the interview section of Traffic Jam episode#58 and we’ve got a first today – an interview double header so joining me we’ve got Alex Houg and Dennis Yu. Guys, how are you doing?

Alex: We’re doing very well, thank you so much for having us James.

James: Well, it’s going to be a blast. Let’s open up by talking a little bit about www.blitzmetrics.com, that’s the company that you’re both involved with which is some pretty interesting stuff for agencies and interns so I guess as a way of introduction for both of you, tell us a little bit about www.blitzmetrics.com and what each of you get up to there.

Alex: BlitzMetrics is created and founded to solve two fundamental problems. One, businesses and brands moving from traditional marketing in to digital and then on the second part, for young students and young adults to be able to get jobs and opportunities and work in their passion area. It is called Portege because it is like going from one body of water to another; it’s a transition phase and that’s both true for businesses and for students and we do this by connecting them and create something that’s economically viable for the businesses and then allow students to get a hands on experience as long as they’re qualified through their education program.

Dennis: So it’s about connecting the students and the universities we’re partners or the agencies with different businesses and when you connect these guys together, you need a process and that’s something that doesn’t happen in the school system so folks listening to the Traffic Jam podcast, imagine there are a lot of folks who are super pro at PC and email and generating traffic looking at conversion rates. But how do you scale that further right? You’ve got to develop in-house staff and buy only so much software so my role as the CTO is building the software that helps connect these pieces, but we are not an agency, we are not to take away clients, we’re actually here to produce clients and produce staff for agencies and these other folks, we are trying to help them so working with guys like you James is great because we get to put our education out there.

James: Nice! What type of agencies and businesses are you working with, with this platform?

Alex: We work with some big brands all the way to small businesses with small packages. Some of our bigger clients are like Brown Foreman, they’re a company of Jack Daniels, Golden State Warriors, and big brands like that.

Dennis: So it’s not necessarily that verticals because what we do is a horizontal play of traffic optimization. Some people might call it Yield Management and if you’re in an agency that is very concerned about having clear goals for cost per conversion, cost per lead and content management, not just social media nonsense or PR, there is nothing wrong with that but that’s just something different because you focus on numeric based optimization and you see where we get in to so we’ll talk later about the kinds of techniques that are working on Facebook with Google remarketing and combining other sort of things together in what we call plumbing but the overall theme is you’ve got to combine these ingredients in such a way that it drives more yield out of leads, phone calls, sales, ROIs, shopping cart behavior – this kind of thing and it is amazing how easy it is not to do it with native tools that are coming out of Facebook and Google so I think to a lot of the folks, listen in and see that the things that were very difficult a year ago when you handle natively, you’re going to get out of DSPs and 3^rd party remarketing platforms and you’re going to integrate everything down across various tools, there’s a lot of the technology but you’re going to find that the manual ad creation and a lot of the things were a real headache targeting is now being handled by the platforms.

James: Neat! Well I think this is an appropriate point to get stuck in to the meaty stuff of the interview and I know you guys have been working on something very interesting stuff recently, one of those things you mentioned to me Dennis was something you code named Triangles, so I am all ears when it comes to new and innovative stuff so perhaps you’d like to sort of lift the lid on what you’ve got going on there and sort of explain what this new concept is all about so here’s the floor, what’s triangle all about?

Dennis: So a triangle is the strongest geometric structure. It’s the foundation of bridges, you see this in nature, and executives like to use this kind of thing too and you can even go further and say, depending on how religious you are, but think of this, things change so much in a minute in marketing and we feel like we’re breathless running from fad to fad, this technique, that technique, especially those in affiliate marketing, there are some underlying, everlasting concepts that will always be true no matter what is going on, example, iAds just launched and we know that Tumblr just launched app install and there are some new things with Twitter in the way you can tie together your applications and platforms and logins and different mobile marketing frameworks, all of these things appear to be very confusing as potential users of traffic to optimize against which you are already doing with Facebook, Google, Email, SEO and all that kinds of stuff, so when you have, I am going to go through five or six of the first triangle formats and I’ll go through quickly, but you’ll see that these principles help you scale everything else that you already have taking what’s working and making it better, taking what sucks and cutting it. The basic principle of optimization. The first one is audience engagement conversion. That’s a three-part funnel. Top, middle, bottom funnel, separate your goals in to these different areas. Second one is goals content targeting. You choose what the goals are, cost per conversion, ROIs, content, you have the content to support that for each of those areas targeting. You have the audiences, remarketing audiences website and customizing email, targets based on workplace targeting, targets you drive traffic from, keywords that rank in Google. When you combine goals, content and targeting, you have a triangle. When you combine metrics, analysis, action, which is the process of iteration, looking what’s going on, why did it change, therefore what action I am going to take, right? Metrics, analysis, action. You have another three parts. To the students, we have learn, do and teach. First you have to learn how to do it, you then have to practice it, then you have to be so good you can teach other people how – this is where the school system breaks down because you learn in A levels if you’re in Europe or in the United States you get an A like you’ve mastered it because you’ve been able to answer a multiple choice test, but can you really do it? Right? Going from learning to doing and then doing to teaching means you have to manage a staff, so if you are a small business owner, or if you are managing an agency, probably your biggest headache is consistency from other people who are not doing the level of work that you have because your expertise, because you care and they’re just an employee they’re not doing the level of work that you have, because of all these different reasons, how do you tie all these things together? And there’s a series of these frameworks that we’re putting out there and all the content actually flows back in to those frameworks, all the way down to how do you optimize Google display network for remarketing. That falls in to these frameworks. So it is not just an idea. Each of the ideas breaks down in to subsets and goes all the way down so you can troubleshoot what is going on with your campaigns. If your margins are down, your profits are down, then is it because your revenue is down or your cost is up? Can you figure out where it is coming from? Is it because your cost per click is up or your conversion rate is down? Is it because it is coming from Google? Is it because of seasonality? Is it because if you trace it down to cost per click, is it because your quality score changed? Is that because of your landing page? Maybe you changed your bids too often? Maybe a competitor came in. so if you are looking at your traffic at an overall framework you can go all the way down this logic tree to figure out where something has changed and this knowledge is independent of how well you know power editor on Facebook, or using adwords editor in Google or all sorts of little techniques that – we’ve heard all kinds of techniques, these frameworks we believe are timeless and this is what people need to be thinking more about and less about the next thing they need to jump on because if they miss this one thing they are going to miss the opportunity that is that we have spent millions of dollars even in the last few weeks, we have one client that is spending almost $400,000 a day on Facebook ads and we are applying the same techniques. Even though we are seeing stuff from Facebook we have daily calls with Facebook and Google. A lot of people can’t even get a note or whatever and we are telling you, even though there is a bunch of stuff we have not seen before in the ways that both of those guys are moving in to mobile and things that we can talk about here, it still is more important to focus on these frameworks. I don’t care if you are a small business owner, I don’t care if you are spending a million bucks a day on Google, and you still need to get this basics.

James: Yeah, it’s all about the fundamentals, right? As business owners, as marketers, we’re quite ready to jump on the new and latest thing but it really comes back down to the basics. I can see Dennis right away that you’re very much a systems and frameworks guy, seems to be a very analytical brain that you’ve got going on there, would that be right?

Dennis: I ran analytics for Yahoo back in the day. I’m Asian and usually Chinese people are better in Math, but I would not put it past Alex either because he’s the founder and he’s the one driving the vision here, I’m just the techie.

James: Yeah, so have you been influential in the development of these frameworks Alex?

Alex: In many ways because my vision going back to what we had explained earlier is I believe education should be free and we want this to be available to young people, young adults, young students so that they can then apply this and learn this and overall this then translate to business results for the brands that work with us so yes, of course my hand is definitely in all of these little frameworks that we’ve created.

Dennis: You might see James on inside Facebook or it could even be larger outlets like USA Today or Times or places like that. We are putting out these examples, not just consulting things, this is first hand data with our step by step, here’s how we did it for the Golden State Warriors, here’s how Jack Daniels did this to increase sales, here’s how we’re selling more tickets or here’s how we’re getting more conversions with the screenshots. You know how those affiliates who breaths this stuff and they say oh, I have five or six secrets and now you have to register and give us all this money. We’re putting that stuff out there because we practice what we preach in this respect and this is why we’re sharing it. We want to talk about specific techniques, there’s no BS to sell people in to a product, right? We’re all tired of that!

James: Yeah, absolutely! Well I’m going to make sure that we’ve got some links to resource in the show notes because these are certainly interesting concepts that I know our listeners would want to go and find out a little bit about so we’ll share that offline after we finish speaking, we’ll make sure we plug those in to the show notes section for this podcast. I want to continue straight along the jugular for a question around another little secret that you both sort of hinted out before we started recording and that’s the strategy you’re using to connect with influencers using only a $1 a day in Facebook ads, what’s that all about?

Alex: Our technique for reaching media influencers as you’ve seen where we’ve been featured in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, we target media influencers by our favorite technique which is workplace and job title targets. And for a $1 a day you can hit this core influencer of the inside of the media or inside of your industry, you can then target these people for a dollar a day and hit a few hundred people

Dennis: So for example, you may have seen the article on USA Today where they reached out to Alex and say, hey, it looks like the Ice bucket challenge and all these crazy videos and stuff where people are tagging each other is way more popular in Facebook than Ferguson with all the riding going on, now why is that and what is the data behind it? Anecdotally, different people are seeing different things. African Americans may be seeing more Ferguson and different sets of people may be seeing more about Ice Bucket. So we gave them research about that. Now the way they got that was that they saw something that we were quoted in the LA Times. How did they see that? Well, we did workplace targeting. So anytime you have something good and you’re going to have to wrap your head around this one because everyone else falls down on this, you are promoting everyone else’s content. But why pay $1 a day to promote someone else’s content? I want to drive them in to my blog, right? No! You want to drive them to the highest authority thing which is usually not yours. So we will drive people who work for the Wall Street Journal, who’ll work for the LA Times, who will work for The Chronicle, or MPR or whatever, we will drive them to an article where the LA Times is using our research. And when this USA Today thing goes out, guess what? We recycle that back in to the network and then we keep loading it on, and this cycle builds power. You see? Because when you see that, we’re all internet marketers here, let’s pretend that you’re a journalist for a moment because you might over assume the knowledge level of the people that you are working with, right? And they see this article from USA Today, they click through it, they see all that stuff and guess who they think puts it out there? So for me it’s PR really. And a lot of internet marketers as well, they can’t write the content necessary to generate this. They are so focused on the immediate conversion that they forget that this is actually the most powerful concept in internet marketing is word of mouth marketing where a lot of people talk about you. It is the ultimate medium that has nothing to do with changing the bullets of your landing page copy or making the button green and bigger – that has nothing to do with that. Before there was the internet it was word of mouth and this is how you stimulated that way and that has been our favorite technique for years. You never fail!

James: Yeah this is nice and it is self-perpetuating. I’m sure as soon as these journalists pick up this piece of content then you get those media mentions which then in turn drives organic links back to your site which then drives search results which then increases traffic and this thing can just roll on and roll on, hey?

Dennis: Email sign ups and leads and word of mouth when people are talking about you and ways they’re not even track-able. Remember we talked about frameworks? The first one, goals, content, marketing? The first one, goals – I want to be known for being the best in Facebook optimization for example. I want to be known as the guy who knows how to generate leads for car dealerships. Whatever the goal is, is you define it with metrics. Content, am I producing the content that supports that? You can call it SEO, you can call it content marketing, you can call it social marketing, PR, it’s all the same thing. You have the content that supports that goal. Targeting – do you have that audience? Is it your own list? Is it someone else’s list? Is it using workplace targeting like Alex taught us? You see that as an application of one of the frameworks goal-content-targeting.

James: Yeah, absolutely! And I think I read Alex somewhere, perhaps on an inside Facebook post that you’ve written that actually who you engage with on Facebook influences who you can target with your ads and I think the example was a workplace placement ad that you’d set up in this regard, is that still the case?

Alex: Yeah, definitely!

Dennis: And you’ll definitely be able to do that going back to the core of hitting the media influencers but if you fail on any of those parts, you’re not clear on the goal – oh, I want to be known as an internet marketer – sorry, not good enough, not niche enough. Content, your content sucks because you’re self-promoting and because you don’t have any media examples of samples of expertise, sorry you fail. Targeting – I want to target everyone digital because I’ve got my get rich quick thing, sorry you fail. You must have all three.

James: Well, I think last time we had scheduled to have this interview I think Alex you had just been presenting at Pub Con in Las Vegas where I believe you were sharing a case study of a photography business that went pretty much from ground zero to six figures likely at least within this year, sounds like a pretty inspiring story, certainly one that resonates with me because I took had some pretty good success growing a small photography business. What’s that story and what can we learn from it?

Alex: So that was on one of the panels that I was on but there are many examples that I could share with you for growing small businesses. Here is the thing, when you are a small business and I know a lot of us are self-made entrepreneurs who kind of make stuff happen. We don’t have the money that the NBA or Rosetta stone or those guys have. We look at small businesses who are doing it and then how it scales out. So for example, Infusion Soft serves fifty thousand small businesses. Now we have helped them with their lead gen so we’re a little biased but we’ve taken a number of their customers. For example, one of them is Paul Sohal and he sells a little video service where you can send video emails. Well guess what? If he knows that his audience are people who are already using Infusion Soft and Mail Chimp, and Hub Spot and guys like that, and this is something that already works well with that service, then it’s a matter of simply marketing and spending a couple of bucks a day and so we present that at Pub Con as well as the Infusion Soft. Kelly Householder he has a shop where he sells digital I think D-I-Y welding is the name of his little side business and you pay $10 and you download one of these welding plans, and guess what, he is targeting all of these people who are commercial welders, all the people who like to weld in their garage during weekends and you can build a little dune buggy, you can build a table, you can build whatever or a tricycle for your kid and it’s simply having that content, making sure that it ties with the thing that you stand for and narrowing it down, just like we talked about choosing a niche. You do that with any kind of marketing and then targeting. And targeting has been probably the thing that people had been most amused and excited about in terms of what you get out of social data but it is actually the easiest part. The most difficult part is always going back to choosing the right thing and that piece of content against it. And so a lot of folks come to us all the time thinking that they’ve seen things that we’ve done for very small businesses and we cannot work magic, we cannot make chicken salad out of chicken shitake because you must start with legitimate credible expertise in a particular area you are passionate about because you want to make money but you really want to make things happen.

Dennis: Gary Leeland, he loves softballs and he goes and records videos of softballs and he targets the parents of softball players. He targets adult softball players and amplify to these people so they can start engaging to this content which goes back to his goals; I want to be able to get more people to watch his podcast or I want more people coming in to get his training programs. Okay. Now is he creating content? Absolutely! He goes and he records videos, he interviews people in the softball arena of sports and then he just amplifies to the people that would really enjoy that and that’s going back to what I was saying just a few moments ago each amplifies to the people that would really enjoy that and that’s going back to what I was saying a few moments ago like the parents of softball players, the adult softball players, people that are in college playing softball and just sharing that across the coaches, the college scouts, he amplifies to those people and it goes back to the core of what we’re saying. It doesn’t even cost that much to do it for a few dollars a day and it. And he has a lot of reach and he would look at other guys like Jacob Spatchnik, he is a San Diego immigration attorney, he’s the number 1 attorney in Facebook. #1 in terms of Fanbase and #1 in terms of interactions, and guess what it drives business. It drives people to him when they’ve got a problem with their visa or whatever because whenever something dumb happens, when Obama says something that pisses people on the immigration law, he’s the first to come out and say something like that. He’ll put a video together, interview other people, and if you have a relative in India and you are trying to come over on an H1B Visa, this is the guy, you’ve seen his content, everyone’s talking about it, they’re forwarding articles from this guy and not even selling his services. But he uses ads in such a way that he gets good media pick up so he’s quoted in the major newspapers as an authority on immigration rules, I think he probably is one but this is the whole behind the scenes thing. The same thing with like Marie Smith, right? We did a class with her last year, the Facebook marketing success thing to tell you the same principle and it goes back amplified because you know of Marie Smith and her audience we’re thinking on the small business side and just sharing her content goes back to these frameworks which you are actually included in that program as well in the Facebook marketing success system.

James: Yeah, and we’ve gotten in a really exciting time for a small business for content marketers because it’s so easy if we put to mind to produce content now that the platforms are available like Facebook we can really precisely hit our exact target audience and as you said it doesn’t have to cost very much at all, right?

Dennis: Yeah, what makes it even more exciting is having your users and your true core fans actually create the content for you because they are already using your product, they are already using your services, why not leverage what they’re already saying and then just amplify it to the people that are like-minded to the people who are sharing definitely.

James: Absolutely! Good. Let’s stick with Facebook for just a moment, what are your suggestions or strategies for setting up a campaign, what types of campaign should a business potentially have in play?

Alex: Again, our framework’s social media engagement strategy ties directly to our goals, content and targeting so one, you have to start at the very top understanding the business, what are you trying to drive to? Are you trying to directly sell or are you trying to get people to your email list or are you trying to get people to your videos? What’s the goal? Then, are you creating content that supports it and are you targeting the right people which will then amplify that to it and showing to your campaigns in a way where you’re building a funnel, you’re building up your audience, you’re building your mass up the top which then starts to trickle down from audience in to engagement. Okay, you’ve got this people in on your website, you’ve got these people in on Google and you’ve cookied them, they’ve joined your email list, what are you then doing to move them down the funnel in to engagement? Start amplifying your content to them and then as you’re engaging in the middle of the funnel and continue to trickle down in to the bottom of the funnel which is conversion and that is driving, going back in tandem of what your business goal is and then driving those people to it so that’s how we organize our campaigns, it’s audience engagement, conversion and you divide them out based on what your objective is, if you are trying to build an audience then you would load it to the top of the funnel or if you are trying to drive conversions and you have adequate amount of engagement and mass at the top then you can put more in to the bottom of the funnel so it’s based on the business goals and based on where you are coordinating with your other marketing efforts to.

Dennis: Let me tell you something that has significantly shifted our thinking that I think is going to really throw a curveball to people that are marketing on Facebook, if you asked us a year ago, how do you build campaigns? We would have given you a step by step process on how you do it and how you optimize and how you tweak these things and how you bid the right way and what placements are working and if you should build a mobile app and all of those kinds of technical maneuvers but if you ask us today, we’ll tell you that stuff almost doesn’t matter because the network themselves, Facebook in particular, they are doing the optimization for you so when you come in and you create a Facebook ad, guess what, there are 13 possible business objectives which 10 you can see and there’s a few that we can see but other people can’t see that relate to website clicks, video views, conversions, registrations, RSVP, all of these kinds of things and you choose that goal. You don’t even have to target anymore and I never thought I would ever say this, we’ve done this and tested this across dozens of clients. We used to pride ourselves in being able to upload lots and lots of custom combinations of all sorts of targeting. Think about all the crazy kinds of targeting that you do, we used to pride ourselves on that. We found that just by – like some of these guys literally targeting the United States, 18+, median of the market is 25+, people who are high income whatever, we find that over time, the algorithm beats us. So you don’t have to spend time tweaking your ads and moving stuff around and all that and so the time that you used to spend diddling around on that kind of stuff and learning all the power editor stuff, okay fine, there’s a few things that you can do in the power editor that you can’t do in the accounts manager, some weenies and we can argue over that but let’s not forget the most important thing. Because Facebook is doing the optimization that squeezes out all the tools out of the way by the way, then that gives you time to focus on what really matters which is the content. So if an ad is not performing it’s not because of the bid, it’s not the time of the day, there’s day parting, the delivery which we notice a lot of things like that, what matters is your content probably sucks. And the networks can’t do that part for you unfortunately so 2015 is about doing less ad tweaking and more analytics and framework based stuff on your content. Is it aligned with your audiences? Are you segmenting to create a journey for each of the different customer types and along the way delivering them content so that they get an automation through email? It’s the same as marketing animation through social and search, it’s all the same thing. Now the networks have made themselves generic delivery channels so you can focus on the framework items. And that is really to screw over people that consider themselves adwords experts or Facebook ads experts or whatever kind of tool specific dinosaurs, single player, you’re about to die kind of expert.

James: Yeah, well, I am just a little bit worried now what I am going to line up for guests in forthcoming shows, there might not be anyone left, right?

Dennis: Bring the folks in the networks themselves because really, you’re asking us about Facebook ads, don’t you think that some of the folks at Facebook would be better qualified or perceived to be better qualified than anyone else?

James: Yeah, absolutely! But it certainly loops back to what you were saying about really understanding your market, getting your messaging right and standing for something that is actually going to make a difference and stand you out from the pack. It really isn’t about the difference between cost per click prices and slight click through rate difference from one ad to another. That stuff doesn’t really matter it’s the bigger picture stuff we’ve got to get focused on.

Alex: And this is from the technical optimizers telling you that the technical optimization’s being handled by the networks. Unfortunately there’s going to be fewer e-books to be sold around this and the vendors in this place and many of them will die. That’s unfortunate but that’s exactly in the vision of what BlitzMetrics is about, it’s putting that education out there because if you look James at the end front of this game, eventually the vendors will have to put the education out there. That is network specific. Do you think anybody is going to make better education google adwords than google themselves? Facebook tried to do this in the last two or three years by partnering with these agencies who have done a terrible job of educating clients and then they turn around blaming Facebook when things don’t work. Well, Facebook had to take that back and that’s pissed off a lot of people but it’s in their financial interest to produce the education. The only one who can keep up with Facebook’s changes are Facebook people themselves and the same with Google. (28:45) and that is a fact. People like to argue with it about that because their livelihood is dependent on selling e-books on that sort of thing and continuing to sell weight loss, the new weight loss diet, that’s what these internet marketer crowd of people like to do. But they are going to go away in the same way that they are going to go away. We’re all legitimate content marketers who have to actually know something about that for the client, all that stuff is going to go in house so if you are listening to the Traffic Jam podcast and you are a struggling small business owner, you have expertise in a certain area and if you hire a vendor or buy a piece of software and those people aren’t die-hard fans or customers of what you do, you’re going to fail.

James: Yeah interesting stuff. Well, let’s get close to rounding out gentlemen, we’ve talked a lot about Facebook and I don’t want to just leave it at Facebook itself, what are the channels that you guys are playing around and finding really great results with for those people that you’re working with?

Alex: Going beyond just Facebook because of course James you know us for working on Facebook ads but we work across all channels, whether that’s Google, whether that’s Twitter, whether that’s Facebook and it’s tying all of the content and all of the sequences together because at the core it’s about marketing automation so if you have a user in a particular step along the way in the funnel, they should be having consistent messaging in email, on Facebook, in Google and you can do that based on a cookie, based on a user ID, based on an email address and hitting them so they’re moving along the funnel, they joined your email list, are you then hitting them inside of Facebook? Are they seeing your stuff in Google? So now they’ve made a purchase, what are you doing to cross sell or upsell? What are you doing based on where they are in the funnel and at the core comes back to marketing automation across all channels.

Dennis: In other words you have to think about sequences for the customer as opposed to channel specific level silos. Bigger companies struggle with this so if you’re fighting against a bigger company, you have the advantage because they are organized by channel unfortunately so what that means is you got a customer and they abandoned your shopping cart or they didn’t fill out the form or whatever it is then guess what, of course you would use Facebook for remarketing. You do it natively instead of FB ads but why wouldn’t you drop the Google pixel the same time like Alex says? Why wouldn’t you drop in the Twitter remarketing? Why wouldn’t you have all of your remarketing pixels working together at the same time? Why wouldn’t you use Google tag manager to drive all of those pixels at the same time? That’s an example of a web audience. But what about email audiences because email is another way to deliver a message. So is phone and direct mail. So if you tie together these sequences it really doesn’t matter what channel they come through because if they have a preference of clicking on email, send it in email. If they have a preference for in-app notification, send it to the app notification and cut off the email bit. If you are independent of channel, then you can design the customer experience as distribution independent of any channel specific thing. Channel specific marketing will die in the next couple of years.

James: Yeah. Well I would certainly vouch for that and I think that’s an awesome point to end on guys, I know you have some interesting material around these topics, you’ve got a checklist which I have seen on your site which I think would be an interesting read for our listeners so I will make sure that a direct link to that is included in the show notes and of course the main website itself but where else do our listeners connect with you each individually over the web?

Alex: You can email me at [e-mail] you can reach me on Facebook, Facebook.com/alexhoug or Twitter just @AlexHoug.

Dennis: Same with me, [e-mail], we’re on Facebook, LinkedIn, email, and all the typical places. Probably better to do just a google search for Alex Houg, that’s the best way.

James: Yeah, you both got pretty unique names so I am sure you’ll be popping right up the top of the search results. Anyway, awesome, we’ll include it in the show notes, the links to both of you and the website so that will be included for you the listener in the episode show notes which is TrafficJamCast.com/58 so thank you to both guys been an absolute pleasure having you on the show I am glad that we could put this together and also it is a first double header here on Traffic Jam so thank you to you both.

Alex: Yeah thank you so much for having us James, it’s been a blast.

Dennis: Two for one, thanks!

So there you have it that was Alex Houg and Dennis You from BlitzMetrics and that is almost another episode of Traffic Jam. Now remember that the kind guys at BlitzMetrics have provided a little bonus training as an add on to the information shared on this interview and you can download all of that for free by going to TrafficJamCast.com/58 and there is a whole lot of goodies here and I would recommend you go grab a lot.

Also as a reminder, you can quickly and easily subscribe to the show by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher and whilst you’re there please leave a review for the show it really is the best way that you can support the Traffic Jam podcast.

We end the show this week with a track chosen by Dennis and Alex at BlitzMetrics They’ve gone for Lords, The Royals but it’s the puddles, the clown version – yeah, Sad Clown with the Golden Voice version. I hope you enjoy the track and as always I look forward to seeing you back here real soon!

RESOURCES:

• Email Alex
• Email Dennis
• BlitzMetrics
• Find Alex in Facebook
• Find Dennis in Facebook
• Case Study: Golden State Warriors
• Case Study: Jack Daniels

MENTIONS:

• Gary Leland
• Kelly Householder
• Jacob Sapochnik

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

This week’s Traffic Jam track is a song called Royals. Dennis Yu and Alex Houg have chosen a version by the Sad Clown with a Golden Voice.

The track was originally recorded by singer Lorde for her debut album, The Love Club EP, which was released in August 2012. Puddles, a 7 foot clown with a sad face and a golden voice, along with the band Postmodern Jukebox recorded their cover version in 2013.

YOUR NEXT STEPS:

To help you market yourself even better online, the kind team at BlitzMetrics have put together some special bonus training, just for you.

This unique bonus bundle includes…

• How To Become A Thought Leader. A 27 page guide to personal branding, content marketing and the article writing process.
• The Framework of Social ROI. Sixteen pages packed full of diagrams and process maps you can easily follow to get the most out of social media.

Click to download and get instant access to this special bonus content.