[MUSIC] Many organizations want to add social advertising, especially Facebook-type advertising, into their marketing mix. Joining us is Steffi Decker of Chong and Koster. Steffi, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Tell us a little bit about yourself and about your company Chong and Koster. >> Sure. I'm a senior partner at Chong and Koster. We are a full service digital ad agency based in Washington D.C. We work primarily with responsible corporations, big national advocacy organizations, as well as electoral candidates and organizations. >> So, where does social fit into the marketing mix of a company? >> Well, I think the easiest way to think about it is there are three types of advertising that most companies, and most of our clients certainly, deal with. The first is direct response advertising. That is trying to get a user or a person to do something right now. Buy these shoes, sign this petition, whatever it is. >> So, you're taking them right to action that you can measure. >> Exactly. Then, the second is big brand advertising, or in politics we call it persuasion. And so these are trying to get new people into the funnel. Get new people exposed to your brand or your product. And then the third is a hybrid of the two really. We call it stunting or visibility, where it's a much more narrow audience that you're trying to talk to. Usually it's influencers or you're trying to get press or journalists to come across your content or your product. >> Okay, and we've studied the influencers so we're gonna be using them. So, where does Facebook-type advertising really fit into this funnel? >> Well, Facebook ads fits in across the whole funnel, but most places where people start with Facebook ads are in the middle of the funnel. So, if you think about your funnel from the bottom to the top, the bottom is where people are ready to take action. They are ready to buy your product or they're ready to volunteer or make a donation, whatever it is. The middle of the funnel are people who are exposed, and they know enough. They know this product exists, whether you're a candidate or you're a commercial, anybody selling sneakers or anything else. But they might not know your company or your specific product. And at the top of the funnel, this is where you need lots of budget, and you might need experts as well to run big brand campaigns. This is to bring your brand to market or bring it to a new market. It's a much more expensive and challenging proposition than sort of in the middle and the bottom of the funnel where you have people ready to act. >> So, in terms of starting off in social, would I be better off starting in the middle and bottom of it to pick off essentially the low hanging fruit, or should I go up to the top? It sounds like at the top there's a lot more steps down so its gonna take me longer to do that, but is that the right way to look at it? >> Absolutely, you wanna start at the bottom of the funnel and grab everything you can there. Capture 100% of that audience. Then, work your way up a little bit into the middle. That's where there's gonna be a good amount of scale for most people, people who are ready enough but you need to put the ads in front of them, and Facebook is great for that. >> Okay, so I'm sold. Let's go with response marketing. So, how do I do that? Are there steps you recommend we take to do it in a very efficient way? >> Yup, absolutely. There's a five step process that I think is the easiest way to think about it. The most important step in the process is step one. What is your goal? You gotta figure out what am I trying to do here. Am I trying to get people to buy a product? Or get them to click through to a website or spend time on the website. Maybe if you're marketing a blog you want them to spend time on your website. There's a term in marketing we use that's called KPI. Key Performance Indicator. So what is my KPI, that I'm trying to measure? That's the most important step is to identify that. >> So, that KPI could be a response rate, or I want to bring over so many people, but can it also be a cost or something that I want to use as my way of gauging success? >> Absolutely. So, it's a cost per action often. How much does it cost to get me to get someone to sign this petition or volunteer for this campaign? Whatever it is, you can often measure that in cost. >> Yeah, so how much I wanna pay to get somebody whose gonna buy my product. So, that's really the cost to the profit, if you will, over time? >> Absolutely. I mean the ads cost money. So how much do I need to spend out there to get someone to see the ad and click the ad, and then take the action that I want. >> Fantastic, so I got my goal set. Now, what's the next step? >> So, the next step is we throw everything against the wall and see what happens. What's great about digital is that it's so much cheaper to test in the digital universe, especially for direct response, than it is in other mediums like television or direct mail or phones, anything like that. >> So what does it mean, throwing it against the wall? Are we going to take a target market and then what are we gonna do to test that or do that? >> You should start with the things that you think will work. Maybe you have a little bit of data from your email list. >> Right. >> The people on your email list are responding well to this or I did a blog post and it went great on this topic. So, you start there. These are the things I think will work. Then, add in some other things that you don't know. >> Okay. So, if I think about Facebook. >> Mm-hm. >> As I understand it, I have a title line and I have some text. I also click through to somewhere and probably have a graphic. Are those things all we're gonna test? We're gonna test everything that way? >> Yup. Facebook is great because you can break the ad effectively into its component parts. Like you said, Facebook ads have images. They have different text areas. So, you wanna break those out and figure out what's working in each of them. So, for an environmental organization, for example. What kind of images motivate people to click on them and sign up? Is it images of pollution or is it images of happy children in a clean healthy field? We don't know, and that's why we throw them all against the wall and see what works best. >> Okay, so now we're done throwing them against the wall. The market essentially has voted as to what they like and what they don't like, now what do we do? >> So, the market determines that they like the pollution image. That's what gets them to take action the best. So, we take that and we iterate from there. So, the one we tested was a pollution, grey sky, cloudy image. So we see, are there different types of pollution images? Could we have a carbon power plant of some kind or a blue sky or a grey sky? And we iterate and test different types of pollution images and see if we can find one that works better than the original one. >> So, it sounds like you've done the broad scale testing, you find out what works, but then you're gonna do much more micro testing to really find what's gonna break through for your marketing program? >> Yup. Test, optimize, iterate, and then rinse and repeat. Test, optimize, iterate. >> So you're constantly doing that? >> You are. There is a limit though. Testing is the most expensive part of your campaign. So, the last step of this is always you must always scale out what you learned in the testing phase. If you use your entire budget in testing, you'll never get to this scale phase. >> Right. So, generally the rule we advise on is about 80/20. You should spend 20% of your budget on testing and about the remaining 80% on scaling it out because that will pay for all the failures of the testing. >> Oh, that makes perfect sense. Once I find out what works, if I don't have any money to go capitalize on it, I'm not gonna hit my marketing goal. >> Exactly. >> That's fantastic, I love that five step methodology. Thank you so much. [MUSIC]
