Oct 9, 2018
I’m talking with Paul Fairbrother and Francesco Colicci with AdEspresso, and they are going to share how you can make an impact with your holiday marketing via social media. Today we are going to be talking about how you can really compete in this upcoming holiday season and particularly in the Black Friday, Cyber Monday rush, which is the biggest advertising time of the year. We will also be talking about how to utilize Q4 data so that you can make a big impact in Q1.
Key Takeaways
[4:48] What businesses need to be aware of for Q4
[6:54] How to create compelling ads for the holiday season
[9:59] 5 tips for successful video advertising
[15:00] The different ways you can engage with your audience(s)
[19:30] How small business or start-up advertising can compete with enterprise advertising
[23:10] What a lookalike audience is and how to utilize it to your benefit
[27:23] Affiliate marketing best practices
[31:10] How to up your Q1 marketing game utilizing Q4 data
AdEspresso Information
AdEspresso Facebook Ad Examples
Email: paul@adespresso.com
Twitter: @AdEspresso
Kyle Gray:
Hello everybody, welcome to The Story Engine Podcast. Today, we have a very special episode. We have two brilliant minds from the AdEspresso team, Francesco Colicci, and Paul Fairbrother. It's also special because we are coming to you simultaneously from around the world. Francesco is in the Philippines, Paul is in London, I'm here in Salt Lake City, Utah. So, this is a lot of fun. I haven't had multiple people on the show before, and it's really exciting to see people just coming in from all over the world. So, thanks guys for joining me. Why don't you two introduce yourselves, some of your background, and what you do with AdEspresso.? Paul, why don't you go first?
Paul Fairbrother:
Hi Kyle. I just want to congratulate you on the new podcast. Listened to a few so far, it's really good. So, yeah, I'm Paul. I'm head of education at AdEspresso. What we try to do is make sure that AdEspresso isn't just a software platform. We want it to really educate and inform our users so they can get the most out of their Facebook advertising.
I run software webinars, and we have some guests on there, like Murray Smith, Dennis Yee. We also go and do experiments. We actually put some budget behind some real Facebook campaigns to find out what's working and what's not. So it's based on actual reality not just those myths that are put around out there by advertising. We also go and do broad base so anybody can get those. And we do video training courses, so I'm basically the training and education or I'm working with Facebook ads. I'm one of those proper Facebook ads geeks that love talking about pixels and optimizations and lookalikes and all these weird things that most people just glaze over when we talk about.
Kyle Gray:
I'm excited to dig into that.
Francesco Colicci:
Hi Kyle and really happy to be here with you guys today. I'm Francesco, the team leader of the marketing services here at AdEspresso and what we do is, we are offering managed services. Basically, we are doing three kinds of stuff. We do campaign reviews where people, advertisers from all over the world, can ask us to review their campaigns. We do coaching as well, so one-hour session coaching to really advise on how to optimize and try to take the best out of the advertising. And we do the concierge as well. That is, I would say, the deepest service that we are providing at the moment where basically we are managing campaigns for clients from all over the world.
We are quite a big team and we are trying to do the best that we can for our clients. And I'm managing this awesome team from people from all over the world.
Kyle Gray:
That is incredible. So lots of talent here and it's just in time because today we are gonna be talking about how you can really compete in this upcoming holiday season and particularly in the Black Friday, Cyber Monday rush that just has all kinds of business owners, entrepreneurs, marketers just chomping at the bit to get in on some of this action.
But it can be a risky thing, it can be really competitive, and it's very difficult to succeed. At least as far as I've seen. But if you can find your way in there are huge opportunities so I would love to hear coming into this Q4, last quarter of the year, and some of the big holiday rushes and Black Friday, Cyber Monday, maybe a little bit from each of you. How does the landscape change near the end of this year, and what do businesses really need to be cognizant of coming into this right now?
Paul Fairbrother:
Cool, so one thing I would say is, if we look at the trends in the process the first thing to remember is that Facebook runs out of ad space, there's only so many ads they can serve on the platform before it's gonna start annoying people. So their ad load is at maximum capacity which means if they run out of ad space and every ad that's served is in an auction, then ad prices can only go one way which is gonna be up.
So we've analyzed the CPM, which is the cost of 1000 impressions, and it can go up about three times the baseline in Q4. So say you would normally pay, depends where you are in the world and what type of advertising, say you were paying ten dollars per 1000 impressions, that could be thirty dollars. So much much higher prices, but on the flip side, people are looking to buy. So for a lot of retailers, it's actually worth paying that higher prices because you'll sell more in Q4 and certainly around the holiday season than you will at any other time of the year. So that's the kind of landscape that we're seeing there.
Francesco Colicci:
Yeah, exactly. I just wanted to add that in general all the CPA's are going really high in general, and especially in Q4, so the competition is really, really strong so we need to be kind of unique with how we're advertising. So that's why we have here a couple of tips that we would like to share with you guys.
Kyle Gray:
Definitely. So when it comes to some of the things we need to consider for our ads, as far as visuals or videos, what do we wanna do, if we're spending a lot of money to get these ads noticed, what do we need to do to really make sure that the ads are compelling? What about visuals, does our copyrighting change around these times, and do you guys have any good ideas? And I wanna hand it over to Francesco first because I maybe wanna hear in particular since you are seeing and coaching so many different people through improving their ads, some of the trends that you're seeing or some of the common mistakes and how to really create a killer ad for this season?
Francesco Colicci:
Yeah. Well you know that an ad is, I would say we have different factors there. So the creatives we are talking about the ad format, the copyrighting, the content itself, and in general I would say that of course we really need to go for the split testing first. Because we don't have your, and this is something we usually say to our clients, so there's not actually one ad format or one kind of copyright that is working better than others.
So, basically, based on the business that you are running we really need to go for the split testing. And for the Q4, the best thing that we can do is to work and to start doing stuff in advance. So trying to split test before, and try to be prepared to get to the Q4 and having in mind the right format, the right copyright that works best for our type of business and product.
And regarding the split testing, I would say that course carousel ad, if we are talking about eCommerce, is something that is working really good. But we can say that we are seeing that as well as you know guys, the video content is something that is something that is working really good as well. And based on the video ad we can, and this is something that we strongly recommend, we can create custom audiences that are keys, especially in Q4. Where basically, to target broad audiences and cold audiences is kind of risky because the competition is huge, and so we need to be very, very precise on targeting.
So the best approach is trying to work with the best audiences that we have, audiences from videos, and do a strong retargeting. So talking about creative, I would say that for eCommerce, for retail, the best option is to go for a video ad, carousel ad, maybe try to avoid single image ad. That is something that is really, really common, and really used worldwide. And so try to go deep talking about audiences, try to go deep and create the best custom audiences and the retargeted audiences that in Q4 are really key.
For eCommerce and retailers, the best option is to go for a video or a carousel ad and avoid single image ads because they are too common
Paul Fairbrother:
Yeah, what I'm finding at the moment is that just about every blog post that Facebook's putting out is reinforcing the importance of video. That is definitely what's really resonating, certainly on top of the funnel. So I've got about five quick tips for video because what I see is that people know that they need to use video but don't format it correctly.
So the first tip is that it needs to be short. We're now seeing fifteen-second video work really well, probably thirty seconds is as long as you need at top of the funnel. Facebook is even getting good results with six seconds, so shorter the better. It's kind of blurring the lines between images, and GIFs, and videos. Its kind of like everything is playing towards this six to fifteen seconds.
The second thing is you've gotta be using square video. So people, especially old school content creators, are creating nice landscape videos with their SLRs. But if you use a square video it takes up more vertical space on a mobile, but it still has the same horizontal space. So square just works well on mobile. Works really well on Instagram as well, I've seen Instagrams designed for square. So make sure that you go and crop your video canvas to square.
The third thing is to make sure that the videos are captioned. At least 85% of video views are with the sound down. Sometimes I see even 90%, so nobody is listening to your nice voiceover. You've got to be having it captioned there. And make sure they're quite nice captions as well, not just what's called the SRT files, the old school little captions. You want something really nice, like big overlays on there.
The fourth thing is thumbnail images are really important for video as well and you can AB test these just like you would the video. Quite a few people now have autoplay turned off, I certainly do that I don't want every single video auto-play. So sometimes people just see your video as a standalone image. So what happens with some advertisers is they choose a random frame from the video, probably not the best one, just make sure that you customize it instead.
Last thing as well, is to make sure the video is really punchy from the start. So people scroll through their feed, they probably see one post every second, sometimes two posts every second. You've gotta really hit them with everything you've got from the beginning. Traditional advertisers are used to YouTube, or maybe even things like TV where you start with a slow build and slowly work into the ad and then have a punchline at the end.
On Facebook, you need to reverse it. You need to give the offer upfront because people are just scrolling through their feed. Like I said they haven't intentionally clicked on it like YouTube, so give them all that content up front there.
Kyle Gray:
Wow, that is some incredible stuff. Some of the big takeaways that I'm just gleaning from you is that the carousel ads, which for anybody out there who's kinda new to Facebook ads, that's multiple images that you can scroll sideways through. And those are really fun because it's a great way to display a lot of different products, but also you can kind of tell a story, it almost like what you were saying Paul, has a kind of dynamic format to it where you can show different slides of somebody progressing through something.
Kyle Gray:
Different slides of somebody progressing through something or learning something or becoming better and telling a little bit of a story, showing how that works, and it keeps people engaged, it keeps people moving through and I also really love the video ads. I love the idea of creating something really, really punchy that gets their attention right away, because yeah if you imagine somebody just kind of on their phone, you know, you're just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling; and you maybe have like you said, probably less than half a second to get their attention.
So, with both with the words with great captions and with amazing visuals. Yeah, you need to capture their, their attention. And it's almost, it's almost, its almost that single image ad has become the thumbnail, you know.
That's, that's really where the best place for, or what you want to think of your, your single image ads is, is just an ad to actually entice people to watch the video maybe. And then moving forward.
But, but that's one of the things I love about storytelling or copywriting and all these things, is just breaking it down to little micro commitments where you just get people to, with, with the thumbnail you're just really thinking about you don't want people to decide to make a purchase you just want people to click through.
And maybe even on some of these ads, although the buying intent's very high, and people are ready to go, and you guys feel free to disagree with me on this or not, but really what the goal is with a good ad is just to get people to click through to our site, to the store page, and that's going to get people, that's going to give 'em more information where we can really get them to make the purchase and there, and they're ready to go.
But we've just got to get 'em out of the kind of feeding frenzy of ads that's happening on Facebook, not to mention all the holiday pictures, and all the other stuff that's happening in their lives.
Paul Fairbrother:
Yeah, absolutely. That's what we need, is to capture that attention as Francesco said. Being able to do some of the retargeting as well, even with people on Facebook can be so useful, to love that story, even if you don't get the clicks so that's where beginners can begin and can be good so that you can then retarget video views.
Some of the other engagement audiences that can be useful, you can build an audience of people that engage with you on Facebook and then you can and hit them with an ad on mobile. Mobile you speak, you tend to find is still better for purchasing. Instagram people are more there just to scroll through some pictures. So there's a kind of one-two that you can do there by just using those engagement audiences between Instagram and mobile.
There are other things you can do as well, there may be somebody that's attended an event, you can create an event custom audience to kind of retarget people. Lots and lots of different things that really urge people to pick through and engaged audiences that you see within the business manager because it's not just about getting people to click things on your website. Definitely, the key thing that we want to do but if we don't get them at first, just look at some of the other options that we can do. And something I do quite often is to run a giveaway. So, really simple competition, get people to like the post to enter and then you can build an audience of people that have engaged with you on your Facebook page and then you can retarget them going hey, you didn't win the giveaway but click through and you should go and purchase, here's a coupon code. That sort of thing there, so Facebook is really getting more advanced than just getting the click of the mouse in. You can do so much stuff with all the different audiences now.
Francesco Colicci:
I was just thinking about, yeah I agree with Paul, the very first ad on top of funnel is just to catch the attention as in the best way that we can, using unique creatives and in Q4 we really need to be unique, and try to be very innovative as well because at the end of the day we are competing with thousands of people especially in Q4 that are doing the same. So try to be very unique and as well trying to be as well simple and try to not spam because most of the people when we recommend to use video they are like oh wow we need to but we need to do with the designers with the video maker but at the end of the day with the mobile sometimes you can see the perfect ad with the very simple video and you know video from a mobile is fifteen seconds that is working really well because at the end of the day the very first step is to catch the attention of the people.
But then where the conversions are is on the retargeting. So basically we have nowadays several ways to retarget people as Paul was saying and what we strongly recommend is to we go for them and try to A/B test them, all of the video views Facebook page engagement, website visitors, because what most of the people and advertisers don't understand sometimes is that they are they just wanna see conversion from the day zero, right? And this is a big mistake because this is something that we need to build. We need to build up and the very first step is to catch their attention and then the retargeting is where you really go for it and go straight to the point. Like, okay, now you checked our video you check our website now just go for the conversion, right?
Expecting conversions from day one is a mistake because you need to build up to that and the very first step is to catch their attention
Kyle Gray:
Definitely and I love that it doesn't just start with black Friday. It starts with kind of the value ad suggestions you've had where maybe instead of creating a video that's interesting that adds value that's engaging and really promoting that in the months leading up with Black Friday building up that audience I love that idea of a giveaway Paul, just creating, creating the following so that you can really capitalize on it as much as you can and I think that that is it leads into my next question where, how can small businesses compete? and I think building up these audiences that way so that you can focus on retargeting instead of targeting cold traffic is a great way to do it, but you know when you are a small business or a start-up going into this space trying to go up against some of the biggest names out there with huge advertising budgets, with huge creative budgets how can small businesses and startups really get an edge during this season and capture some of the huge amount of spending that we see happening?
Paul Fairbrother:
I think sometimes where you want to be is don't worry too much about the production quality but remember this is Facebook so people are on there to look at pictures of their friends or parties like we said looking at funny cat videos that's certainly what I'm doing on Facebook they're taking huge pictures they're probably a little bit blurry, so you do wanna put represent your brand well but you don't need to spend thousands on images its much better to get it all where you can be split testing whether you're doing that through ads manager or like we do through AdEspersso is that you could be A/B testing several different assets that you create very quickly.
Also think about how you can get ahead of some of the big brands so we'll take enterprise brands and they work very very slowly but its what you could do as a small brand and some of my clients do this is they do Facebook lives so Facebook lives can them up when they're live I think that is probably coming down the line but its not available yet. That doesn't matter what you can do is reach them after the fact. And people love Facebook Live because they can see the people behind the brand they can see that its legitimate that this isn't just some kind of shopper site that somebody's made in ten minutes they can see that there are actually real-life humans there behind this brand so think differently think what enterprises are going to be very very good at and then do something different.
People love Facebook Live because they can see that the people behind the brand are actually real-life humans.
So can you do Facebook Live can you do just you know video recorded on your mobile rather than a kind of full-on Stephen Spielberg production there, just go for something a bit more natural. So that's what I'm doing definitely rapidly test where you can and just one final thing is always to keep in mind with the basics. So the key to success in Q4 is to be using your Facebook pixel which basically means its a little tracking code on your website that can really track how many purchases you're getting and or how many leads and you can really benchmark your campaigns and we still see a lot of clients that aren't using pixel, the pixel is completely free it can be set up in five minutes so before you do anything as a small business make sure you've got the basic plumbing there, basically could give you exactly the same tools as a small business as a million dollar a month enterprise brand.
So there's no technical reason why you need to be left behind. Just make the most of those resources that Facebook gives you in Business Manager and then you should still see success.
Francesco Colicci:
Yeah, agreed. I agree with you Paul, and I think that myself and Paul we can say that and we see every day like big businesses and small businesses and sometimes we have really surprised about the fact that the small businesses are smarter and are running better ads than the big ones. So at the end of the day to be really smart and maybe regarding the audience and you can the small businesses to start and from your customers is a, is key as well. So instead of going for you know the big broad audience, just starting with the top customers that you already have and most of the time and you can create the lookalike audience lookalike audience is something that Facebook is providing us where we can find new people similar to our top customers. So if you have a list of email, for instance, you can use that list to find new customers similar to your customers right so at the end of the day as Paul is saying there's no technical reason why a big business can do better than a small to medium one.
Kyle Gray:
That's encouraging and I like the idea of using lookalike audiences and just to piggyback off that and make sure that all the listeners are clear so a lookalike audience is a collects if you collect a lot of data on your own website if people are watching a video facebook can kind of piece together similar pieces of information and say okay well this looks like, this is your audience and they like this kind of thing and all these people haven't as yet seen your website but they like all the same things so they'll probably like it.
So this is probably the best form, best possible version of cold traffic which again just to make sure everybody is on the same page that's traffic that doesn't know anything about you. They haven't visited your website they haven't yet seen your videos this is essentially your first contact with hem. But if we use lookalike audiences we can at least be confident that they fit a similar profile to people who are engaging with us and are enjoying what we're doing. I want to kind of continuing in this conversation around smaller businesses or different businesses we've talked a lot about product-based businesses, eCommerce brands, which are really common and really that's usually what you think of when you are imagining what's going on on a black Friday shopping spree. But is it possible for the service businesses, software business, personal brands or maybe coaches to sell products and really profit during this time?
Paul Fairbrother:
I'd say from what we see with that experience with AdSpsresso having a sale maybe twice a year can be very effective. The key thing though is that you have to be doing a big discount if you do it there. I think you're better off saving up your discount and doing one big discount rather than lots and lots of little ones like during Black Friday five percent off isn't going to cut it. Its gotta be its gotta be the big guns coming out, there to compete. If you can't do that then that's understandable, then it's probably not the best time to be spending too much money.
So that's the sort of thing to see what you've got to offer there. If it's a discount then great people are buying whether its B to B or business to consumer but otherwise think about well, is it worth paying a higher price and its certainly not going to be for cold traffic prospecting that's when you might as well let the big guys and all the small brands as well that are doing eCommerce let them have their time on Facebook. Don't disappear in Q1, the ad prices are so much cheaper in Q1 and that's where you can get double the reach for the same kind of ad span there so just work out have you got a really good offer, if not then go take some time off and enjoy Christmas with your family. Come back really strong in the new.
Kyle Gray:
And time off, go and enjoy Christmas with your family. Come back really strong in the New Year there.
Paul Fairbrother:
Okay. And then bringing this back around, and I think that's actually a good point. You know, you don't just want to jump in there, and I think it's really important to consider pricing. Not only are you giving yourself a deep, deep discount on your services, which ... or your products, which for smaller businesses or services that, you know, just may not be sustainable, especially when considering how much more you're spending on your ads, so your cutting away at your margins in two different ways.
And so, yeah, I think that's smart. There are most likely ways that you can do it, but there's no other reason why you wouldn't want to do a big discount or a big launch at another time when there's a little less competition and noise. So, my next question, going away maybe a little bit form ads themselves but, is there room for referral marketing and affiliate marketing to help people sell more products. Can you get people advocating for you, trying to get referral coupons? Is this a good time to be doing that? So, it's not necessarily using ... spending your money to spend on ads, but you're giving away maybe some of your margins to influencers, or some of your customers who just want to evangelize your brand.
Kyle Gray:
Yeah. I would say that this is something that most of the people are doing at the moment. I mean, most of the smarter advertisers are doing at the moment. I would say that instead of going for, you know, big influencers, especially if you are talking about small to medium businesses, you can look for some advocates. That is something that is really working worldwide. So, instead of going for, you know, big names, especially if our budget is not so big, we can decide to build a strategy based on advocates, so you know, with really small prices and try to have a network of the right advocates in a specific area ... on specific areas as well, to do that.
The thing is that I think in general, in Q4, we really need to go for whole different strategies, right? There's not one strategy that is working better than another one. So again, testing is key. Also, regarding the strategy and combining a good advertising strategy together with a good advocate strategy I think is really something that will pay off.
Combining a good advertising strategy together with a good advocate strategy will pay off
Paul Fairbrother:
Yeah, one thing I would say with, just on the affiliate side of this, first off be careful. Facebook is not really a big fan of affiliates, so using influencers instead could be the way to go, like Francesco was saying. And also, with affiliates, just pick them carefully. You want a small, selected bunch. So, I've seen this in the UK, and I'm sure it's the same for Carl in the US and Francesco, wherever he is in the world, is that some of these, I'll call them kind of like work from home cosmetics brands, opportunities, they sign up anybody and then all of these people think, "Hey, I can start at ten dollars or ten pounds. I can post them out into Facebook."
And I just see endless ones in my feed with very low-quality ads because these people don't really know what they're doing, and you know, when you actually see half a dozen of these or even a dozen over time, it actually devalues the brand, so I would say be very, very careful who you let go and promote your brand for you Make sure that they know what they're doing with ads because anybody can just jump on as an affiliate and just kind of ruin your brand really, on Facebook ads.
So, yes it's good that this is a really low barrier to entry, but it also means that they can just put complete garbage out there that ... Facebook has some pretty strict ad policies about what you can promote, but there are no policies about the quality of the ad really. So these people are putting garbage out there and it's just devaluing brands, so ... yeah, working with a small network or with the influencers is definitely a much better way to go.
Kyle Gray:
That makes a lot of sense, and we've covered a lot of ground and I think we've gotten some really good insights into how to have a really comprehensive and really successful time during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and by the time this post is published hopefully all of you will have enough time to start preparing and gathering up installing your pixels, building up a good following, building up your custom audiences. And, to kind of close this out, I'd like to know going through Q4, Paul, you hinted at this a little bit, going through Q4, which kind of mellows out near the end and then starting the New Year strong, how can we take our data that we've gleaned from Black Friday? Maybe we got some extra traffic, we grew our audiences. How do we start the New Year strong with what we've gained and what we've learned from our Q4?
Paul Fairbrother:
Well, I would actually say that some of my clients actually get better results in the beginning of Q1 than they do in Q4, just because people are still buying. Once you get into Q1, people have finished doing their Christmas shopping then they can spend the money on themselves. Yeah, and just the cheap rack prices, so I think there are some good results there, and what I would really do like Francesco was saying, think about using some lookalike audiences. They're getting more and more powerful.
So, what's happening with Facebook is they take away some of the targeting. Recently, third-party partner categories like Axiom and Experion were removed for privacy reasons, and generally due to discrimination reasons in some cases, or just with all the privacy that's being heaped on Facebook at the moment, they're reducing a lot of targeting. Now, Facebook's probably still got that data on people that Facebook knows exactly who clicks on what and who are purchasing, so the way to access that information is through lookalike audiences. So, though we can't explicitly say, "Hey, we want people that go and purchase, or data from Facebook ads," we can access that audience through lookalike audiences, so just think about using your best lists. That's going to be email audiences, purchase lists.
There's a fairly new option where you can create lifetime value audiences where you have played, this is where it's an email list, you have played the cart values from Facebook. So, yeah, just really think about the best audiences. Also a little kind of off topic here, but there's a great tool called Facebook analytics, which holds ... we could probably have a whole podcast from that, but there's a great tool called Facebook analytics. It's now free for everybody. It's great for small businesses. It used to be like a high-level enterprise tool, but what you can do from that is create what's called event source screen. This is where you can lump in your Facebook page, could be more than one, could be several ad accounts, same with mobile apps.
Then what you can do is start working on funnels, so you can see if people comment on a post if they then go into a purchase. You can look at actions on the website like I noticed with one of my clients, a high degree of people that were searching were then purchasing, so they could then tweak their website and make the search bar a lot more prominent. So, investigate all of those things that are available in Business Manager there. You've got things like the audience insights tool. So, yeah, Q1 could be a very, very good time for a lot of my clients.
Francesco Colicci:
Yeah, I just wanted to add that Q4 at the end of the day is a big time to collect data, and based on that data, we can start Q1 in the best way possible to try to process that data that we just collected in Q4 to try to find new audiences. So, the budget that you are spending in Q4 is not only for the conversion we are accumulating in Q4 itself, but are basically something very useful to start the New Year. The data from where we can find new people interested and similar to the ones that just converted in Q4, right? So it's a big moment to generate conversions of course, but most of that is a big moment to collect a lot of data there that we can process in the New Year.
Q4 is a good time to collect data, and based on that collected data you can start a successful Q1 finding new audiences
Kyle Gray:
This is incredible. So that's a really high note, really encouraging note to end on, but there's just a huge amount of opportunity all over the place and I'm really grateful to have learned some strategies that I think are going to be very competitive in this Q4. So gentlemen, Francesco, Paul, thank you so much for joining me.
To close out, why don't you tell us a little bit about AdEspresso. You're both working with AdEspresso, and one of the biggest themes during this conversation was A/B testing. Testing, testing, testing, and that's something that AdEspresso does really well. So, if somebody really wants to succeed, take their ads to the next level and learn more about what you guys are doing, the free content, the webinars, what do we need to do?
Paul Fairbrother:
Okay, the best thing that anybody can do is go to AdEspresso dot com, and there's a section there, our academy, and they can look at a blog page, they're completely free, all our blogs. We've got some guides to download there as well, so we give away so much for free, which is something we love doing, so we've got there some e-books on Instagram, ad examples, Facebook ad examples. A complete beginner's guide to Facebook advertising, so if somebody is just starting out and thinking, "Okay, what is all these terms that we've just talked about today?" Go in there and have a look at those.
We do a monthly webinar. We've got some coming up with ... which will be going into more depths about the topics that we've covered today. We do those once a month. They're free again, and we also do a 14-day free trial as well for AdEspresso, if you want to test build the tools. But really what I say to everybody is that, you know, with using AdEspresso is to take Friday afternoons off, which sometimes shocks people but what we're trying to do in marketing is not actually spend more time on marketing, we're actually trying to reduce it so we can use our energy to do the more creative things like go and create the video, or the ad copy, or write some nice emails, and let software take care of all the technical things.
So, for example, we can use automated rules. We can use PDF reporting, which is really neat because you can set up a template and AdEspresso can email you every day or every week or every month with all your results and some nice charts. You can use data sync, so when we talked about those emails lists into custom audiences, we can let the software go and sync an algorithm, then the updates CSV files, and import ... you know, tell it to import lead-outs, you know, the data from there into your CRM, things like that, so ... there's a lot of automated tools that we have there to do the heavy lifting for you, so whether you use AdEspresso or any other platforms, just automate absolutely everything that you can to make your life easy there.
Francesco Colicci:
To save a lot of time, I would say.
Kyle Gray:
Definitely. Well yeah, these are powerful tools. Thank you so much for joining me gentlemen, and we have to have you guys and more of the team back on the show because there are so many great insights here, and yeah, I'm sure, like you were saying, there are so many more topics we can dive into.
So I'm grateful for you both and thanks again for joining me from all around the world. I'll talk to you guys again soon.
Francesco Colicci:
Thank you, Kyle.
Paul Fairbrother:
Thanks, Kyle.
Francesco Colicci:
Thank you.
Kyle Gray:
Thanks for listening to the Story Engine podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes and the resources mentioned in this episode, and every episode, at thestoryengine.co. If you want to tell better stories and grow your business with content marketing and copywriting, be sure to download the content strategy template at contentstrategytemplate.com. This template is an essential part of any business that wants to boost their traffic, leads, and sales with content marketing. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.