#150 Mail-Right Show We Interview Michael A Giannulis About The Power of Combining Video With Facebook

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Michael currently owns an almost 8 figure business specializing in online direct sales. I have a strong background in Marketing, Operations, Human Resources, Sales, Coaching, and Motivation.

Michael is an entrepreneur, coach, and marketing consultant. He coaches business owners to achieve greater levels of success. My top 5 strengths (Strenght Finder 2.0 test) are Achiever, Ideation, Positivity, Learner, and Input.

Michael loves coming up with creative solutions to problems and then implementing those solutions quickly. Michael keeps a positive attitude at all times and do my best to inspire those that work with him to pursue their dreams and plan their goals.

 

Here’s A Full Transcription of Our Interview With Michael A Giannulis

Jonathan: Welcome back folks to the Mail-Right Show. It’s episode 150. I’ve got my co-host back with me. He’s still traveling folks and we’ve got a fantastic guest, Michael.

Michael: Michael G.

Jonathan: Michael G. I’m going to just say that. I’m going to let Michael introduce himself. Michael, can you introduce yourself quickly to the audience?

Michael: Hi. My name is Michael Giannulis, kind of how it sounds or how it looks but it gets to be a little bit weird for some people. I’m excited to be here and share what I can.

Jonathan: That’s great. And Robert, would you like to quickly introduce yourself?

Robert: Reintroduce myself. All right. So, I’m Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound Real Estate Marketing and if you want to learn more about me, you can go to my website which is how most of you know me anyway.

Jonathan: That’s great. And I’m the founder of Mail-Right. We’re a marketing platform, a SaaS product that helps you get quality leads for your Real Estate business. Now, Michael, you’ve got a really interesting personal story but you’ve got a lot of knowledge about Digital Marketing and in general. As we were saying in the pre-show chat, our audience are mostly Real Estate professionals. Can you give us a quick overview of how you’ve, if you were that market, how you would look at utilizing Digital Marketing to help your business?

Michael: Yeah, sure. As I said to you, we won’t focus on that side as much but for the last year, I’ve been doing some work as a Real Estate Investor and as part of that, I got more involved in generating leads of people that want to sell their homes or multiple family, all kinds of options. The cool part was a lot of the experience that I had in doing ads kind of carried over. It was very much the same. It was just almost changing what the ask was. And basically what I found and what I would suggest to people here is right now, probably the best way that I’ve seen to generate good leads has been with Facebook ads. Facebooks ads are really doing well. Direct mail has also done about the same. So both those options have done quite well for us. Like I was saying, on Direct mail side we’re spending about $5,000 a month and then on the side of Facebook, we’re spending about $2,000 to $3,000. Some of that’s also with AdWords. What we’re finding with Google is it’s really expensive. So generating like one lead with the AdWords is costing us around $250 to $300. Whereas on the Facebook side, on our average, we’re generating a lead for about $30 to 40 bucks each.

Robert: With no difference in quality? Are you figuring out a way to take a look at the quality of the lead?
Michael: Yeah. So, we’re seeing that the AdWords quality is a little better but the volume’s so low that we’re not seeing anything out of it yet. So, I actually paused AdWords just because after about a $2,000 spend, we hadn’t really seen anything yet. This a part of the ad side, but I’m also dialing in the sales team, so I have two people so I have to kind of keep an eye on them and see how they’re doing. So, it’s a little bit tough when you’re in the early stages on what are you judging? Are you judging the ad? Are you judging the lead quality? Are you judging the salesperson? There’s all these different people. There’s all these different aspects. So sometimes early on when you’re in like a startup stage, which this particular company is, it’s tough. So we’re kind of just throwing out a lot of things and kind of seeing what sticks and then also trying to go backwards and see like, where did the actual deal come from? Mainly the deals would come from direct mail.

Robert: Okay.

Michael: And I think the reason for that, now this just particular to me, is because with the direct mail side, I’m able to target people that have maybe paid off their house or they own three or four homes and they live out of state.

Robert: Okay.

Michael: On Facebook, it’s a lot tougher to target that. For us, we’re always targeting people that have equity in their home that live out of state that can own more, you can own two or three homes. So that way we know they’ve that the equity in the house to sell it and we go for the fast sale. We try to close within about 1 to 2 weeks. So that has helped out for us quite a bit. On the Facebook side, one issue we have bumped into is, and again, this all real-time stuff, so it’s kind of like, as right now as it can. We’re seeming like we’re getting a lot more mobile homes from the Facebook ads. A lot of people see the ad and they’re like, “Hey. Do you buy mobile homes?” And really don’t. I’m trying to look for someone that might but that’s been kind of interesting and I don’t know if that’s a demographical thing, so we’re also trying to tweak that. The other thing that, I haven’t tested this yet but I’ve read about it, I’ve had a lot of people that do this kind of strategy. And what it’s called, it’s called the Carpet Bomb strategy and that just comes from the kind the terminology just to kind of hit a big area all at once and it’s just for Facebook. What you do is you create a video, maybe about 30 seconds long, this is not something that I came up with but you create this video about 30 seconds and in that video, you’re really honing in on who is your target audience. So, if you’re trying to sell luxury homes or you want to get a listing for those type of homes, you would open up with kind of like a very interesting, exciting picture that will catch the eye of those types of people. And then, you would kind of have text going.

So, you would have images, you would have text, like some kind of song in the background, just to get people to watch it. And what you’re doing is you’re hitting it. Let’s say you go out and you restrict it on Facebook maybe only by zip code and maybe income level or you own your own house. That’s it. You keep it very very vague. You don’t go trying to target in like wants to sell their house, trying to do this, talk to an agent, all these little things because Facebook’s data is kind of like, it’s okay but you don’t ever really, you aren’t sure. So you just go for as broad as you possibly can and when you do that, you put the video out and you make it your goal from Facebook because that’s the big thing you have to do is decide what’s the outcome. Your goal isn’t to do anything but to get video views.
Robert: Okay.

Michael: That’s important because Facebook, they make that very cheap because right now, Facebook is in this kind of deathmatch with YouTube fighting over ad spend. Are you going to spend your ads on YouTube or you’re going to spend it on Facebook? So, Facebook is discounting their video cost tremendously. Now, you’re going to say, “Well, why do you want videos? If they watch it, that’s not going to do anything?” Well, there’s two things. One, you will have a call to action at the end. So you would say like, “If you want to sell your house or you’re looking to buy a house like the ones you’ve seen, call me or email me, go to my site,” whatever your call to action is. And then, you have your little button on the side saying, “Make me an offer,” you can choose. So that’s kind of one part and you’ll get trickle from that. But what you’re really trying to do, which is so cool, is you’re creating a list of people that watched that video, that then you go back and you show your Facebook ads to those people and you can do it with Facebook based on how long they watched the video for. So, if someone watched 75 percent of that video or more, it seems likely that those people are more interested. So this is a way to let Facebook and let user behavior create your audience for you.

Robert: Okay.

Michael: So you’re not out there trying to guess at it and go, “What is this?” I’m going to guess people that own a home in this zip code who like shopping for home goods. You know what I mean? You’re trying to guess at who we should target. So, instead, you let the people choose themselves by how long they watch it.

Robert: Okay.

Michael: And then you go back with your more traditional ads and if you do it right and you do your branding right, they’re going to be like, “Hey. I’ve seen this before somewhere.” They may not know where but it’s going to look like, “I think I’ve seen this.” So you’ve got that. Then, you let that traditional ad drive them to your site and this is a big key. This is where I think a lot of people in pretty much every single space just don’t do this and I don’t know why. You just want to always make sure that where you’re driving people, that there’s a clear call to action and there’s a way for the person to give you their information for a follow-up. If you’re not generating leads, it’s just a big time waster. And if I was an agent, I would have both sides. Do you want to sell a house? Do you want to buy a house? And I would say, “Get on my email list. Every week I send out all my homes that are coming for sale. Every week I,” whatever. You find out whatever the benefit is and what people want and you make sure you give them that in your email. If I was doing it, I would even say, “Hey. If you’re thinking about selling your home, get on this email list because each week I update you on market trends, predictions of what’s about to come, average home values,” all the things that if you’re thinking about selling a house, what people would want. I would probably build out a report on like the 10 things you must do before you even think about selling your house and I’d come up with stuff that people probably already think of this stuff but some people might not. It would be like, “Make sure you’ve done this. Make sure you’ve cleaned this. Make sure your yard’s picked up.” I just read an article that’s talking about like cleaning up the yard and putting out and stuff can increase the home value by like 4, 5 percent. It’s just nuts. There’s all these things that can be done. So I would look at just adding value there.

And then, when it comes to the Facebook side, what’s cool, you’ve got the is audience of people who watched, let’s say, the whole thing, people that watched the whole video, once you’ve run this ad for a week, 2 or 3, you’re going to have a lot of people in there which is cool. But what’s awesome is, and you’re going to show ads back to that audience so now you’re going to get them to move from watching about you to going to your site. If they click over to your site, then you’re going to want to have follow-up ads going to them if they didn’t opt-in on that form. If you want to be more friendly and less aggressive, you could start sharing blog posts to those people. So, here’s a post I wrote about the upcoming trends for 2018 or 2019 trends. Here’s a post about, like I said, the 10 things that you must do before you ever think about selling your house. The 3 things every realtor must tell you before they offer your home, whatever, all these content pieces.

Robert: Sure.

Michael: And I will be following up, following up, following up. And then, that would basically implement in their minds, they’re thinking, “Okay. Well, this dude’s or girl’s everywhere. They’re doing some awesome stuff.” And that just gives them a repeat time to make contact with you. In the Real Estate game, at any given time, this applies to most any industry, there’s only about maybe 3 percent of people that are ready to take action now. So it’s like very very few people are actually going to right now to take the action that you want them to take whether that’s buying your product, selling their house, trying to buy a house. But probably 50 percent of the people are thinking about it. They’re in that unsure stage, “I might do it, I might not.” And the rest of the people might not even be thinking about it but they just thought it was neat so they were checking it out. But they’re still at least in that web. You kind of want to get them in your sphere of influence so you can continue to follow-up with them via email, via the Facebook ads, all those things. Now, where it takes a really big jump and can get extremely good on the Facebook side is let’s say you do this for 3 months and after 3 months, you look back and you have 5,000 people who watch 75 percent or more of your video. And say, you’ve got 1,000 people who signed up on the buyer side and I’m just making things up for math and 1,000 who signed up on the, they want to sell their house side. Facebook will then allow you to take those audiences. So we have 5,000 that watched it. We have 1,000 that want to sell their house, 1,000 that want to buy it. You can then tell Facebook, “Go out there Facebook and find me people that look like these people.” And in Facebook, it’s called a Lookalike Audience. It’s shortened to LAL. And what it does is Facebook has reams and reams and reams of data. I mean they get into trouble for it all the time because they have so much data.

They basically will make sort of like profile of the people that did the action that you’re asking for and they’re going to say, “Okay. What is the commonality amongst these people?” And remember the exact data points they have but let’s just say it’s 200. It could be gender or age, demographic, homeowner status, zip code. There’s all these different things. And they compile and then they go out and they create a list for you, a new audience of people that look like those people. And then, you can turn around and you can show those people the video. You can show those people the follow-up ads. You can show those people the blog posts and the more people that are opting in, the more people that complete that action, guess what? Facebook’s getting smarter and smarter and smarter with finding out who that person is that you’re going after. Where most people fail on the ad spend side is they jump in, they spend money, it’s very very expensive and then they stop. I’m even doing this myself right now with AdWords. I spend a few thousand. I was like, “Hey. That’s too expensive.” I turned it off. But what you really need to think about is that when you’re starting an ad campaign, you’re not starting an ad campaign to see instant results. You’re starting an ad campaign to buy data. So all you’re trying to do is you’re spreading out your cash. You’re testing out different ads. You’re testing out different audiences. You’re testing out different times of day. You’re buying data on all these things because maybe only 1 out of 20 is going to work. It’s almost like a jackpot. You’ve got to keep spinning it until you get the 7s across the whole way. I’ll give you an example that’ll make a little bit more sense because it’s something that we more understand. Because when you talk about Facebook and get into like audiences and video and lookalike, copy and all this weird stuff, it gets to be odd. But we just have been doing for a different company a radio ad campaign and we spent about 60,000 bucks and it was costing us around, I think I want to say like $2,000, a little bit under 2,000 bucks to generate one sale and the sale was only a $37 product. So you would just think, “Man, what a fail?” On the Internet side, we can produce those buyers for under 100 bucks, so we’re talking like a 20x more money.

But when you dig into the data, we started to look and we were running these ads on all these different stations, channels, which is funny because that’s what you call it, different channels, when you run ads. Well, on the radio side, we had different times of day that we did it. We had different ads that we ran And then, we had completely different stations. Not only did we have different stations, we had XM going on one side and we had AM, FM going on the other side. So we were spreading out everything but because we were tracking and we looked back, so we let the ads run for 1 month then we paused it. And I said, “Okay. Let’s see what happened.” Now, I don’t have yet the exact figures but when we looked at it, I think we had produced, it was around 34 sales or so. Well, I think 29 of those 34 sales came from XM radio and we didn’t even spend but maybe a third of the ad budget on that one piece, that one XM. And then, we looked. We had tested like five or six different ads. Well, guess what? I think almost all the sales came from these two ads. So, if we hadn’t dug in and looked at it, we would have just said, “Oh, radio doesn’t work. It sucks. Turn it off. What a big waste?” But now we know, “Okay. If we run just on XM,” and we also saw that pretty much all of our sales came during the popular times like the 7 to 10 and then like the 3 to 6, the drive to work and the drives home. And so, now we know, okay, our next time we go in, oh and we found out even within XM, it was certain channels on the XM station that were generating those sales. So it’s like, “Okay great. What do we do now?” So, now we go back and we say, “Okay. Well, we want to run only, these two ads, we want to only run them on XM, only on these particular stations and only at these particular times.” So, we spent 60,000 bucks to buy that information, that knowledge.

Robert: Let me ask you a quick here. I’ve got to jump in because I just want to make sure I’m understanding the math. So, you spent 60 grand. XM delivered 29 sales at $39. So your net yield was $800? Am I understanding that correctly?

Michael: Yeah. But that’s just the starting point for us. That’s the opening of a funnel.

Robert: Sure. I just want to make sure that I got the math right. Go ahead. Continue on.
Michael: Yeah. And again, I’m still not even saying that this is for sure going to be what we end up with. It might not ever pan out like I hope but at least now we know. And then, the other thing we found out is we were doing a, our particular campaign and this makes me look so stupid, I hate to even share it but it’s just one of those things you don’t think about when you’re going into a whole different area. We had it so when people would call us, it had like a voice prompt, “Hey. Thanks for calling. If you’d like us to text you the link, go ahead and press 1. If you prefer to leave a voicemail, press 2.” It was kind of like that. And most people hung up. It was like maybe only 2 out of 10 would do anything. And I kept thinking, “Why is this? Why? Why? Why?” Finally, I talked to the radio guy that helped us put it all up and he’s like, “Well, man. These people are driving home in their car.” So, most of them are by themselves in their car and they’re not going to be sitting there on their phone like, “Oh, I’m driving to drive,” press 1, you know. So, most people, it turns out on the radio side, will either just call real fast and then stop it. So the phone number’s in there. And they’re not going to sit there when they’re driving and try to hear someone talking on a voice prompt and then press 1 and then press all this. So, it was just not thinking through the customer experience. The prospect’s experience is they’re sitting in a car driving. It might be driving 80 miles an hour down the Interstate. It’s not very safe to be trying to be pressing 1 and 2 and all this stuff.

Jonathan: Yeah. I think that’s great Michael. I think we’re going to go for our break folks and when we come back, we’re going be discussing some more with Michael and we’ll be back in a few moments.

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Jonathan: We’re coming back. We’ve had a feast about Internet Marketing. I’ve been fascinated with the conversation. So, Michael, I think just to recap, I think what you’re trying to say is that a lot of people, obviously, the example you were using was quite a large budget with quite a large client but the principle is the same. Sometimes you’ve got to accept a little bit of loss to get the data that will enable you to focus your Digital Marketing so you do get success. Would you say that’s the overriding principle you were saying?

Michael: Yeah. That’s what it took me 20 minutes to say so you did great there.

Jonathan: Right. What particular areas online that you, I think what, also from what you were saying is the two hot areas that get you going at the present moment which are combined is Facebook with video. Is that correct?

Michael: Yeah. Video on Facebook is great. Even if you keep your ad exactly the same but you add a video of like a picture that runs for 20 seconds, Facebook will usually decrease the cost of that ad just because they love video because it keeps people on the site longer. People love video so therefore Facebook does too. So I’ve even seen people that make a video that doesn’t even make any sense. It’s just there just because it’s driving the cost.
Jonathan: Yeah. And I also think what you were trying to point out in the first half of the show is that some of these people, because they watch a certain length of the video, they’re giving a strong signal which then you can retarget them and retargeting normally is a lot cheaper than trying to get people that are totally cold to you, your product, your service and then get them to do something. Is that what it is?

Michael: Yes. That’s a big piece to it as well. Yeah. When you do retargeting, it’s basically like you’re providing the data. Then, Facebook is going to make that cheaper for you. And when you do the retargeting too, like I had said, there’s an added benefit that even if they’re not conscious of it they’re going to at least sort of recognize you. A big thing, especially for agents to do, is making sure that their Facebook page picture is a picture of them. It’s their face. Don’t do the whole like corporatey thing because Facebook is a social platform. It’s about people. So you want to make sure that you’re kind of branding your face.

Same thing. If you’re doing a video, if you want to do one like a quick one featuring you, if you’re on screen and this is probably a little controversial. I’ve not done this so I don’t know, in the Real Estate space. But in the other spaces, we often see that more like real videos get a lot more traction. So a video shot on an iPhone may get more shares, more talking, more communication than a studio video with like a professional sound stage, you know, all that stuff because a lot of people just see that as an ad. But they see a guy walking on the beach or something talking as like a real video that you made that day and that’s what Facebook is. If you scroll around on Facebook, all your friends and family, they’re posting pictures of their cat and their dog and what they ate and what they did, all those things are what people like. So the more you fit in with the look and feel of the platform, the more you’re going to kind of get traffic.

Jonathan: I think that’s a great point. We’re going wrap it up for the podcast part of the show folks. We like to keep it around 30 minutes but hopefully, Michael’s going to agree to stay on for a little while and we’re going to see what Robert thinks of all this. And then, maybe delve in a little bit of Michael’s fantastic personal story as well. So, Michael, how can people get a hold of you and find out more about you?

Michael: Yeah. So, if anyone wants to find anything about me, they can just go to onlyonemike.com. That’s O – N – L – Y – O – N – E – M – I – K – E.com. And if they go to onlyonemike.com/mailright, I’ve got a free book there that they can opt-in for to get the book and it’s called How To Obliterate The Blank Page and it’s strategies that I use when I have to write an ad or write sales copy, especially when you’re starting from scratch because most people sit there and stare at the blank page and think, “What in the world do I do?” So, this kind of gives you 7 or 8 strategies to get started, some questions to ask yourself, so you never have to deal with a blank page again.

Jonathan: That’s great. And my foreign correspondent here, Robert. Robert, how can people get a hold of you?

Robert: As always they can come to my website and they can say hello to me at inboundrem.com. They can schedule an appointment if they want to talk to me but mostly, they can check out all of my great content on Real Estate marketing and I would be extremely and they would be extremely happy.
Jonathan: They would be. Robert’s very approachable. And if you want to check a hold of me, it’s really easy. Go to the Mail-Right website or get a hold of us on the Facebook page. I’m very accessible myself. I’m always there to help and have a chat with an agent that wants some advice about Online Marketing and specifically Facebook. So, we’ll see you next week when we’re going to have an expert like Michael and we hope to give you some insights, some ideas, to move your business to the next level. We’ll see you next week folks. Bye.

Jonathan: Welcome back folks to the Mail-Right Show. It’s episode 150. I’ve got my co-host back with me. He’s still traveling folks and we’ve got a fantastic guest, Michael.

Michael: Michael G.

Jonathan: Michael G. I’m going to just say that. I’m going to let Michael introduce himself. Michael, can you introduce yourself quickly to the audience?

Michael: Hi. My name is Michael Giannulis, kind of how it sounds or how it looks but it gets to be a little bit weird for some people. I’m excited to be here and share what I can.

Jonathan: That’s great. And Robert, would you like to quickly introduce yourself?

Robert: Reintroduce myself. All right. So, I’m Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound Real Estate Marketing and if you want to learn more about me, you can go to my website which is how most of you know me anyway.

Jonathan: That’s great. And I’m the founder of Mail-Right. We’re a marketing platform, a SaaS product that helps you get quality leads for your Real Estate business. Now, Michael, you’ve got a really interesting personal story but you’ve got a lot of knowledge about Digital Marketing and in general. As we were saying in the ore-show chat, our audience are mostly Real Estate professionals. Can you give us a quick overview of how you’ve, if you were that market, how you would look at utilizing Digital Marketing to help your business?

Michael: Yeah, sure. As I said to you, we won’t focus on that side as much but for the last year, I’ve been doing some work as a Real Estate Investor and as part of that, I got more involved in generating leads of people that want to sell their homes or multiple family, all kinds of options. The cool part was a lot of the experience that I had in doing ads kind of carried over. It was very much the same. It was just almost changing what the ask was. And basically what I found and what I would suggest to people here is right now, probably the best way that I’ve seen to generate good leads has been with Facebook ads. Facebooks ads are really doing well. Direct mail has also done about the same. So both those options have done quite well for us. Like I was saying, on Direct mail side we’re spending about $5,000 a month and then on the side of Facebook, we’re spending about $2,000 to $3,000. Some of that’s also with AdWords. What we’re finding with Google is it’s really expensive. So generating like one lead with the AdWords is costing us around $250 to $300. Whereas on the Facebook side, on our average, we’re generating a lead for about $30 to 40 bucks each.

Robert: With no difference in quality? Are you figuring out a way to take a look at the quality of the lead?
Michael: Yeah. So, we’re seeing that the AdWords quality is a little better but the volume’s so low that we’re not seeing anything out of it yet. So, I actually paused AdWords just because after about a $2,000 spend, we hadn’t really seen anything yet. This a part of the ad side, but I’m also dialing in the sales team, so I have two people so I have to kind of keep an eye on them and see how they’re doing. So, it’s a little bit tough when you’re in the early stages on what are you judging? Are you judging the ad? Are you judging the lead quality? Are you judging the salesperson? There’s all these different people. There’s all these different aspects. So sometimes early on when you’re in like a startup stage, which this particular company is, it’s tough. So we’re kind of just throwing out a lot of things and kind of seeing what sticks and then also trying to go backwards and see like, where did the actual deal come from? Mainly the deals would come from direct mail.

Robert: Okay.

Michael: And I think the reason for that, now this just particular to me, is because with the direct mail side, I’m able to target people that have maybe paid off their house or they own three or four homes and they live out of state.

Robert: Okay.

Michael: On Facebook, it’s a lot tougher to target that. For us, we’re always targeting people that have equity in their home that live out of state that can own more, you can own two or three homes. So that way we know they’ve that the equity in the house to sell it and we go for the fast sale. We try to close within about 1 to 2 weeks. So that has helped out for us quite a bit. On the Facebook side, one issue we have bumped into is, and again, this all real-time stuff, so it’s kind of like, as right now as it can.

We’re seeming like we’re getting a lot more mobile homes from the Facebook ads. A lot of people see the ad and they’re like, “Hey. Do you buy mobile homes?” And really don’t. I’m trying to look for someone that might but that’s been kind of interesting and I don’t know if that’s a demographical thing, so we’re also trying to tweak that. The other thing that, I haven’t tested this yet but I’ve read about it, I’ve had a lot of people that do this kind of strategy. And what it’s called, it’s called the Carpet Bomb strategy and that just comes from the kind the terminology just to kind of hit a big area all at once and it’s just for Facebook.

What you do is you create a video, maybe about 30 seconds long, this is not something that I came up with but you create this video about 30 seconds and in that video, you’re really honing in on who is your target audience. So, if you’re trying to sell luxury homes or you want to get a listing for those type of homes, you would open up with kind of like a very interesting, exciting picture that will catch the eye of those types of people. And then, you would kind of have text going. So, you would have images, you would have text, like some kind of song in the background, just to get people to watch it. And what you’re doing is you’re hitting it. Let’s say you go out and you restrict it on Facebook maybe only by zip code and maybe income level or you own your own house. That’s it. You keep it very very vague. You don’t go trying to target in like wants to sell their house, trying to do this, talk to an agent, all these little things because Facebook’s data is kind of like, it’s okay but you don’t ever really, you aren’t sure. So you just go for as broad as you possibly can and when you do that, you put the video out and you make it your goal from Facebook because that’s the big thing you have to do is decide what’s the outcome. Your goal isn’t to do anything but to get video views.
Robert: Okay.

Michael: That’s important because Facebook, they make that very cheap because right now, Facebook is in this kind of deathmatch with YouTube fighting over ad spend. Are you going to spend your ads on YouTube or you’re going to spend it on Facebook? So, Facebook is discounting their video cost tremendously. Now, you’re going to say, “Well, why do you want videos? If they watch it, that’s not going to do anything?” Well, there’s two things. One, you will have a call to action at the end. So you would say like, “If you want to sell your house or you’re looking to buy a house like the ones you’ve seen, call me or email me, go to my site,” whatever your call to action is. And then, you have your little button on the side saying, “Make me an offer,” you can choose. So that’s kind of one part and you’ll get trickle from that. But what you’re really trying to do, which is so cool, is you’re creating a list of people that watched that video, that then you go back and you show your Facebook ads to those people and you can do it with Facebook based on how long they watched the video for. So, if someone watched 75 percent of that video or more, it seems likely that those people are more interested. So this is a way to let Facebook and let user behavior create your audience for you.

Robert: Okay.

Michael: So you’re not out there trying to guess at it and go, “What is this?” I’m going to guess people that own a home in this zip code who like shopping for home goods. You know what I mean? You’re trying to guess at who we should target. So, instead, you let the people choose themselves by how long they watch it.

Robert: Okay.

Michael: And then you go back with your more traditional ads and if you do it right and you do your branding right, they’re going to be like, “Hey. I’ve seen this before somewhere.” They may not know where but it’s going to look like, “I think I’ve seen this.” So you’ve got that. Then, you let that traditional ad drive them to your site and this is a big key. This is where I think a lot of people in pretty much every single space just don’t do this and I don’t know why. You just want to always make sure that where you’re driving people, that there’s a clear call to action and there’s a way for the person to give you their information for a follow-up. If you’re not generating leads, it’s just a big time waster. And if I was an agent, I would have both sides. Do you want to sell a house? Do you want to buy a house? And I would say, “Get on my email list. Every week I send out all my homes that are coming for sale. Every week I,” whatever. You find out whatever the benefit is and what people want and you make sure you give them that in your email.

If I was doing it, I would even say, “Hey. If you’re thinking about selling your home, get on this email list because each week I update you on market trends, predictions of what’s about to come, average home values,” all the things that if you’re thinking about selling a house, what people would want. I would probably build out a report on like the 10 things you must do before you even think about selling your house and I’d come up with stuff that people probably already think of this stuff but some people might not. It would be like, “Make sure you’ve done this. Make sure you’ve cleaned this. Make sure your yard’s picked up.” I just read an article that’s talking about like cleaning up the yard and putting out and stuff can increase the home value by like 4, 5 percent. It’s just nuts. There’s all these things that can be done. So I would look at just adding value there.

And then, when it comes to the Facebook side, what’s cool, you’ve got the is audience of people who watched, let’s say, the whole thing, people that watched the whole video, once you’ve run this ad for a week, 2 or 3, you’re going to have a lot of people in there which is cool. But what’s awesome is, and you’re going to show ads back to that audience so now you’re going to get them to move from watching about you to going to your site. If they click over to your site, then you’re going to want to have follow-up ads going to them if they didn’t opt-in on that form. If you want to be more friendly and less aggressive, you could start sharing blog posts to those people. So, here’s a post I wrote about the upcoming trends for 2018 or 2019 trends. Here’s a post about, like I said, the 10 things that you must do before you ever think about selling your house. The 3 things every realtor must tell you before they offer your home, whatever, all these content pieces.

Robert: Sure.

Michael: And I will be following up, following up, following up. And then, that would basically implement in their minds, they’re thinking, “Okay. Well, this dude’s or girl’s everywhere. They’re doing some awesome stuff.” And that just gives them a repeat time to make contact with you. In the Real Estate game, at any given time, this applies to most any industry, there’s only about maybe 3 percent of people that are ready to take action now. So it’s like very very few people are actually going to right now to take the action that you want them to take whether that’s buying your product, selling their house, trying to buy a house. But probably 50 percent of the people are thinking about it. They’re in that unsure stage, “I might do it, I might not.”

And the rest of the people might not even be thinking about it but they just thought it was neat so they were checking it out. But they’re still at least in that web. You kind of want to get them in your sphere of influence so you can continue to follow-up with them via email, via the Facebook ads, all those things. Now, where it takes a really big jump and can get extremely good on the Facebook side is let’s say you do this for 3 months and after 3 months, you look back and you have 5,000 people who watch 75 percent or more of your video. And say, you’ve got 1,000 people who signed up on the buyer side and I’m just making things up for math and 1,000 who signed up on the, they want to sell their house side. Facebook will then allow you to take those audiences. So we have 5,000 that watched it. We have 1,000 that want to sell their house, 1,000 that want to buy it. You can then tell Facebook, “Go out there Facebook and find me people that look like these people.” And in Facebook, it’s called a Lookalike Audience. It’s shortened to LAL. And what it does is Facebook has reams and reams and reams of data. I mean they get into trouble for it all the time because they have so much data.

They basically will make sort of like profile of the people that did the action that you’re asking for and they’re going to say, “Okay. What is the commonality amongst these people?” And remember the exact data points they have but let’s just say it’s 200. It could be gender or age, demographic, homeowner status, zip code. There’s all these different things. And they compile and then they go out and they create a list for you, a new audience of people that look like those people. And then, you can turn around and you can show those people the video. You can show those people the follow-up ads. You can show those people the blog posts and the more people that are opting in, the more people that complete that action, guess what? Facebook’s getting smarter and smarter and smarter with finding out who that person is that you’re going after. Where most people fail on the ad spend side is they jump in, they spend money, it’s very very expensive and then they stop. I’m even doing this myself right now with AdWords. I spend a few thousand. I was like, “Hey. That’s too expensive.” I turned it off. But what you really need to think about is that when you’re starting an ad campaign, you’re not starting an ad campaign to see instant results.

You’re starting an ad campaign to buy data. So all you’re trying to do is you’re spreading out your cash. You’re testing out different ads. You’re testing out different audiences. You’re testing out different times of day. You’re buying data on all these things because maybe only 1 out of 20 is going to work. It’s almost like a jackpot. You’ve got to keep spinning it until you get the 7s across the whole way. I’ll give you an example that’ll make a little bit more sense because it’s something that we more understand. Because when you talk about Facebook and get into like audiences and video and lookalike, copy and all this weird stuff, it gets to be odd. But we just have been doing for a different company a radio ad campaign and we spent about 60,000 bucks and it was costing us around, I think I want to say like $2,000, a little bit under 2,000 bucks to generate one sale and the sale was only a $37 product. So you would just think, “Man, what a fail?” On the Internet side, we can produce those buyers for under 100 bucks, so we’re talking like a 20x more money.

But when you dig into the data, we started to look and we were running these ads on all these different stations, channels, which is funny because that’s what you call it, different channels, when you run ads. Well, on the radio side, we had different times of day that we did it. We had different ads that we ran And then, we had completely different stations. Not only did we have different stations, we had XM going on one side and we had AM, FM going on the other side. So we were spreading out everything but because we were tracking and we looked back, so we let the ads run for 1 month then we paused it. And I said, “Okay. Let’s see what happened.” Now, I don’t have yet the exact figures but when we looked at it, I think we had produced, it was around 34 sales or so. Well, I think 29 of those 34 sales came from XM radio and we didn’t even spend but maybe a third of the ad budget on that one piece, that one XM. And then, we looked. We had tested like five or six different ads. Well, guess what? I think almost all the sales came from these two ads. So, if we hadn’t dug in and looked at it, we would have just said, “Oh, radio doesn’t work. It sucks. Turn it off.

What a big waste?” But now we know, “Okay. If we run just on XM,” and we also saw that pretty much all of our sales came during the popular times like the 7 to 10 and then like the 3 to 6, the drive to work and the drives home. And so, now we know, okay, our next time we go in, oh and we found out even within XM, it was certain channels on the XM station that were generating those sales. So it’s like, “Okay great. What do we do now?” So, now we go back and we say, “Okay. Well, we want to run only, these two ads, we want to only run them on XM, only on these particular stations and only at these particular times.” So, we spent 60,000 bucks to buy that information, that knowledge.

Robert: Let me ask you a quick here. I’ve got to jump in because I just want to make sure I’m understanding the math. So, you spent 60 grand. XM delivered 29 sales at $39. So your net yield was $800? Am I understanding that correctly?

Michael: Yeah. But that’s just the starting point for us. That’s the opening of a funnel.

Robert: Sure. I just want to make sure that I got the math right. Go ahead. Continue on.
Michael: Yeah. And again, I’m still not even saying that this is for sure going to be what we end up with. It might not ever pan out like I hope but at least now we know. And then, the other thing we found out is we were doing a, our particular campaign and this makes me look so stupid, I hate to even share it but it’s just one of those things you don’t think about when you’re going into a whole different area. We had it so when people would call us, it had like a voice prompt, “Hey. Thanks for calling. If you’d like us to text you the link, go ahead and press 1. If you prefer to leave a voicemail, press 2.” It was kind of like that. And most people hung up. It was like maybe only 2 out of 10 would do anything. And I kept thinking, “Why is this? Why? Why? Why?” Finally, I talked to the radio guy that helped us put it all up and he’s like, “Well, man. These people are driving home in their car.” So, most of them are by themselves in their car and they’re not going to be sitting there on their phone like, “Oh, I’m driving to drive,” press 1, you know.

So, most people, it turns out on the radio side, will either just call real fast and then stop it. So the phone number’s in there. And they’re not going to sit there when they’re driving and try to hear someone talking on a voice prompt and then press 1 and then press all this. So, it was just not thinking through the customer experience. The prospect’s experience is they’re sitting in a car driving. It might be driving 80 miles an hour down the Interstate. It’s not very safe to be trying to be pressing 1 and 2 and all this stuff.

Jonathan: Yeah. I think that’s great Michael. I think we’re going to go for our break folks and when we come back, we’re going be discussing some more with Michael and we’ll be back in a few moments.

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Jonathan: We’re coming back. We’ve had a feast about Internet Marketing. I’ve been fascinated with the conversation. So, Michael, I think just to recap, I think what you’re trying to say is that a lot of people, obviously, the example you were using was quite a large budget with quite a large client but the principle is the same. Sometimes you’ve got to accept a little bit of loss to get the data that will enable you to focus your Digital Marketing so you do get success. Would you say that’s the overriding principle you were saying?

Michael: Yeah. That’s what it took me 20 minutes to say so you did great there.

Jonathan: Right. What particular areas online that you, I think what, also from what you were saying is the two hot areas that get you going at the present moment which are combined is Facebook with video. Is that correct?

Michael: Yeah. Video on Facebook is great. Even if you keep your ad exactly the same but you add a video of like a picture that runs for 20 seconds, Facebook will usually decrease the cost of that ad just because they love video because it keeps people on the site longer. People love video so therefore Facebook does too. So I’ve even seen people that make a video that doesn’t even make any sense. It’s just there just because it’s driving the cost.
Jonathan: Yeah. And I also think what you were trying to point out in the first half of the show is that some of these people, because they watch a certain length of the video, they’re giving a strong signal which then you can retarget them and retargeting normally is a lot cheaper than trying to get people that are totally cold to you, your product, your service and then get them to do something. Is that what it is?

Michael: Yes. That’s a big piece to it as well. Yeah. When you do retargeting, it’s basically like you’re providing the data. Then, Facebook is going to make that cheaper for you. And when you do the retargeting too, like I had said, there’s an added benefit that even if they’re not conscious of it they’re going to at least sort of recognize you. A big thing, especially for agents to do, is making sure that their Facebook page picture is a picture of them. It’s their face. Don’t do the whole like corporatey thing because Facebook is a social platform. It’s about people. So you want to make sure that you’re kind of branding your face. Same thing. If you’re doing a video, if you want to do one like a quick one featuring you, if you’re on screen and this is probably a little controversial. I’ve not done this so I don’t know, in the Real Estate space.

But in the other spaces, we often see that more like real videos get a lot more traction. So a video shot on an iPhone may get more shares, more talking, more communication than a studio video with like a professional sound stage, you know, all that stuff because a lot of people just see that as an ad. But they see a guy walking on the beach or something talking as like a real video that you made that day and that’s what Facebook is. If you scroll around on Facebook, all your friends and family, they’re posting pictures of their cat and their dog and what they ate and what they did, all those things are what people like. So the more you fit in with the look and feel of the platform, the more you’re going to kind of get traffic.

Jonathan: I think that’s a great point. We’re going wrap it up for the podcast part of the show folks. We like to keep it around 30 minutes but hopefully, Michael’s going to agree to stay on for a little while and we’re going to see what Robert thinks of all this. And then, maybe delve in a little bit of Michael’s fantastic personal story as well. So, Michael, how can people get a hold of you and find out more about you?

Michael: Yeah. So, if anyone wants to find anything about me, they can just go to onlyonemike.com. That’s O – N – L – Y – O – N – E – M – I – K – E.com. And if they go to onlyonemike.com/mailright, I’ve got a free book there that they can opt-in for to get the book and it’s called How To Obliterate The Blank Page and it’s strategies that I use when I have to write an ad or write sales copy, especially when you’re starting from scratch because most people sit there and stare at the blank page and think, “What in the world do I do?” So, this kind of gives you 7 or 8 strategies to get started, some questions to ask yourself, so you never have to deal with a blank page again.

Jonathan: That’s great. And my foreign correspondent here, Robert. Robert, how can people get a hold of you?

Robert: As always they can come to my website and they can say hello to me at inboundrem.com. They can schedule an appointment if they want to talk to me but mostly, they can check out all of my great content on Real Estate marketing and I would be extremely and they would be extremely happy.
Jonathan: They would be. Robert’s very approachable. And if you want to check a hold of me, it’s really easy. Go to the Mail-Right website or get a hold of us on the Facebook page. I’m very accessible myself. I’m always there to help and have a chat with an agent that wants some advice about Online Marketing and specifically Facebook. So, we’ll see you next week when we’re going to have an expert like Michael and we hope to give you some insights, some ideas, to move your business to the next level. We’ll see you next week folks. Bye.