Facebook Advertising Changes. Have You Been Effected?

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

- G'day world, Chris Hogan and Andrew Groat coming to you live from the MeMedia studio here at Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast. How ya goin', Andrew?

- Yeah, good.

- Awesome.

- How're you?

- Yeah, I'm good. I hear you had a double strength real coffee.

- Yeah, I'm shaking a little bit right now.

- Good, let's get started. Today we're talking about multichannel strategy and what people are really doing in their short-term, long-term strategies, and we've just had something huge dumped on us in the last week in terms of changes in the marketplace. So do you wanna share what's happened?

- Yeah, so Facebook advertising recently went, underwent some pretty big changes, and it's not all set in stone just yet, but it's caused huge problems for a lot of people. I was talking to a friend of mine recently who, she runs an e-commerce business, really successful, and these Facebook changes has like dropped her organic reach of that 1%, and if you think like, what's the point of even having a following if you're only reaching 1% of them? Sales dropped by 30%, ad costs have doubled. It's, yeah, it's crazy. You add all that together, that's a big problem. Luckily, she's one step ahead with that, and was already building up an AdWords channel, but I mean, that's not like for like. The viral strength of Facebook can't be replaced by AdWords. AdWords is like a regular stream of ROI, but, yeah, the product releases you do on Facebook would just explode and get a lot of business in, so, yeah, it's a big issue and there's a lot more hustle and ad-spend to have to make up for that.

- So just on that. Basically this huge change has happened on Facebook. People don't know what's going on. I think you mentioned that their help section on the help forum--

- Yeah, yeah. 'Cause it's not just that, like, all sorts of ad formats have changed, and settings have changed, and things just don't work quite so well anymore, and I was researching something, 'cause we had this change in ad formatting happened, and I went to find out why, and their entire help system had gone down, like the knowledge base and the support website, so, yeah, it's crazy, and the lesson in all this is don't put all your eggs in one basket really.

- Yeah, exactly. So essentially, this massive change has happened, people's businesses and their sales are being affected massively because they've been using Facebook as a source of traffic, which is obviously equated to sales for them, and yeah, like you just said, if Facebook was your only strategy, even though as much as we love Facebook for its power or virility and its targeting capabilities, when they implement a change like this with no explanation, which they can do, they don't have to explain to anybody--

- They don't answer to anyone, it's their platform, so if they just change stuff and people don't like it--

- Yeah, and so then we're left sitting here potentially with no sales coming through the door, or a fraction of the sales coming through the door, and because we relied on one single channel to bring those in, we have to diversify, we have to move very quickly and jump onto a different channel. And just like you said, putting all your eggs in one basket, potentially isn't the right strategy. It's not a good strategy.

- Even if it's going quite well.

- [Chris] Exactly, and--

- Well, almost especially if it's going quite well, 'cause guaranteed something's coming. Always seems to be like that, like ad policy changes, feature changes, reach, audience, just without warning can change, especially with Facebook, they're quite reactive. If someone complains, they're just like all right, that feature's gone.

- So putting all your eggs in one channel, or source of revenue or traffic, is a bad idea, and we have spoken about before that one reason why it's a super bad idea is because people out there, you guys don't own this channel. You've got no say in what happens on this channel, so whether it's Facebook, whether it's YouTube, whether it's Google advertising, whether it's Instagram, LinkedIn, you're renting space.

- Yeah, you may think it's yours, especially if you're building a following, you may think it's yours, but reach changes, and you realise, okay, this isn't mine at all.

- Yeah.

- You know?

- And the only thing that we've said that people own is their own website. Okay, I'll say this, but it still doesn't apply. The only thing we really do own is the organic traffic to our website, and obviously yeah, we can't dictate what's happening in Google land either. Search engine results and pages can change, and algorithms can change on Google, and your SEO ranking could tank, yeah, but, if you've got a very strong Google organic source of traffic, and versus having a strong paid traffic, then your business is gonna be far more secure, just using those two examples.

- I would say you need both.

- Of course.

- And sort of beyond that, not just one pay channel. I'd probably look at having Facebook and Google. I'm not so sure about any of the other paid channels, but you wanna have both of those just in case. You should be working on the organic just in case. Protect yourself even further from there, build up a mailing list with everyone that's coming in, collect details, maybe an MMS list or something like that as well.

- MMS messaging is massive, yeah.

- Yeah, always keep on top of SEO. There's a lot more to it that you need to do.

- So you build up a database, own as much of that, those people's details as possible, and don't just rely, like you just said, don't just rely on email, have MMS and SMS as a backup, and if comes down to it, maybe we need to go back to snail mail. There's always that, yeah.

- There's always that.

- Another one, remarketing should be in there as well. You should have remarketing cookies. That's one people often overlook. 'Cause that gives you more control over your paid channels, if you are building up like an audience as well. Building up your own audience, rather than just using targeting.

- Yeah, so, and then just today, it's been announced here in Australia, so we're actually filming on a Thursday, you'll see this Monday, but, today Amazon Australia goes live, and I believe it's for a select few people, it's gonna happen in a couple hours, I believe, and there you go, there's another channel that people could be tapped into, products, selling your products on Amazon, and, whoa, have I got some predictions around what Amazon's gonna do to retail here in this country.

- Yeah, get ready. They're scared, like if you've seen, what's the guy from Harvey Norman, the guy that owns it? It's not Harvey Norman, but anyway, he's terrified of Amazon because it's all these sorts of old retail companies, they're just not gonna be able to cope with it.

- Gerry Harvey, yeah.

- Yeah, that's him.

- Yeah, absolutely, and jeez he's changed his tune. He didn't believe in e-commerce at all several years back. Yeah, so Amazon is gonna make a huge difference, and if you don't understand the model of Amazon, so essentially what can happen is brands, manufacturers, can put their products there, retailers can put their products there, as a source to be a distribution agent for any sales that happen there on said product. Amazon can actually distribute, so they have a thing called fulfilment by Amazon, so they have warehouses that they've created throughout Australia, or sorry, creating throughout Australia, and so therefore, people can actually have their product shipped by Amazon, and so Amazon also have indicated that they will potentially go into bricks and mortar retail so people can actually walk into a store. Now, that hasn't happened yet. And when we start to talk stats and things like that, a lot of us are super scared in the retail space due to the fact that one in two online sales are happening on Amazon in the USA, but something to be very considerate of is that the USA is a massive country and the distribution networks are far better than what we have here in Australia, so we do need to probably liken ourselves more to what's happening in Canada when it comes down to Amazon. And so Amazon, I don't know the stats of what's happening out of Canada, but one of the difficulties they're having in Canada is the distribution networks. Everybody's almost just as spread out there as they are here in Australia. So, what does this really mean for, basically retail here in Australia? Well, I have a prediction that, basically, those big shopping centres that we love to visit here on the Gold Coast, they're gonna basically turn into distribution centres. They're gonna turn into maybe restaurants and cafes, more so than your shops, which we'll go in and try stuff on. Stuff is gonna be delivered by drone, it will happen, and I predict that in five years, we will be seeing that stuff happen throughout the world. Now, whether it happens here first or whether it happens somewhere else, Amazon said they wanna do it, and it's gonna happen.

- They've got too much money. No one's gonna be able to stop them from doing this stuff.

- Yeah, so, there's a whole other conversation we could have around Amazon, but I think, just to get back to our point, that a multichannel approach is best. Distribute your following, your audience, your sources of traffic, across multiple channels. While we love Facebook, putting all your eggs into Facebook, that Facebook basket, is not necessarily the best choice. Instagram, same deal. And so we do come back to what is the best thing that we can do as a short-term strategy and as a long-term strategy, and what is that?

- Content marketing, yeah.

- There you go, yeah.

- And then use all your pay channels and your following and all that sort of thing to buffer and strengthen that via promotion. Obviously, yeah, you wanna get some regular income from these as well, but, also keep a portion of that budget for growing your content marketing channel, because that's the only one you really own. Even then, you don't own it but that's the one you have the most control over, and that you find the most strength from long term.

- 'Cause push comes to shove and you've got a heap of content that you've created, it's taken you years to create that content, and you've got it all housed on YouTube or Vimeo, and they start to do something.

- Yeah, next minute algorithm change, yeah.

- You can pull it all down and upload it to your own website. All that content can still be available that you've created, but if you didn't have the content to start with, you're behind the eight ball, massively. And so then on your own channel, your website, is still the most reliable channel that you can put money into and invest in, and I think that everybody needs to really start now, start yesterday, doing that content creation, and it's good to have this kind of conversation, and look at it from a different angle, isn't it, because essentially, we talk about it all too often. If you go back through our history, you'll see that we talk about content marketing, produce content, do it all the time, distribute through social, all the time, but we're talking about from case studies, and this is another case study, and this is another angle to look at it from, isn't it? It's just a super compelling reason to do it. And that way, your short-term goals, your short-term marketing goals can be bursts of goals. Oh, look, Facebook's got this happening right now. Their algorithm's doing this right now. They've got fantastic ads right now. Great, let's use it.

- Yeah, how can we use it, but it might be a flash in the pan, it might not. Especially with Facebook. They release all these new ad formats, next week, they're gone again, 'cause it doesn't work, so, yeah.

- So Facebook have also started bringing out a Facebook creator app, encouraging--

- Oh, Creative Hub, yeah.

- Encouraging, well, yeah. I personally don't know much about Creative Hub, because it's not really fleshed out yet, right?

- No, it's far from fleshed out.

- Okay, so, but the creator app that appears on the App Store, basically encourages people to create more content for Facebook. Now, they've done it specifically for individuals. Last week we spoke about personal branding and how it's not really an awesome strategy, and that takeaway was make more your brand more personable. Well, Facebook's bringing out a Facebook creator app to basically get people to create more personal content, so you cannot use it for your brand pages, and the reason why it was brought out is so that those people that are doing Facebook Lives on their own profiles can get some analytics, can get some insights into what's happening on that content that they're sharing through their own personal Facebook timeline. What's the message there that I'm trying to get to is that content is king. Content, comes back to content again. Facebook are doing this, it comes back to content. Yeah, okay, they're not letting their brands to utilise that Facebook creator app. Brands don't need to. They already have their Facebook insights coming through many other sources, whether it be their own insights or third-party apps. So, yeah. It's just very clear to me and yourself, and when this happened just this week, this massive change, this blowup, in terms of Facebook algorithm changes and ads not working as they were the week before, it was just, we had to talk about it, even though we don't know what's going on. We're just like everybody else out there. We're actually sitting here going, um, so, Facebook ads stopped working and our sales plummeted. Would we sit around and wait?

- No, no.

- [Chris] For Facebook to come good again?

- No, well, it may not. They may not even release an announcement. I mean, they've done this before. So, yeah, could be one step ahead.

- Yeah, absolutely. I think that's all we've got time for. I did a lot of talking then, and you had the coffee. So thanks very much for watching Get Fact Up. As you know, we like to bring to you you know, what's happening right now, keeping ourselves on our toes, keeping you on your toes. Keep listening. All of our episodes are hosted on MeMedia.com.au, or we can just Google Get Fact Up, and they're also hosted on YouTube, so you can go through all of those there. We're using YouTube, yeah, not Facebook. We upload to Facebook as well.

- Yeah, it's everywhere.

- Yeah, it's everywhere. So thanks very much for watching, guys, and stay cool, appreciate your time.

- Thank you.