Why Snapchat ads? Endless competition, higher costs, and a revolving door of policy updates constantly make it more difficult for marketers to rely on Facebook for the majority of their traffic.
So what happens when we look to strategy rather than ad tactics? What happens when we begin running Facebook ads to influencers’ audiences, create virality with Messenger bots, or look to other mediums such as Snapchat ads?
In this speech, we’ll be exploring the strategies outside of Facebook ads that will allow you to geometrically skyrocket your sales beyond your imagination – from someone who has used these very strategies to drive over $100,000 in sales in a single day through his own companies, and for his clients.
Speech by Dimitri Nikolakakis | CMO, Ape Athletics
Dimitri Nikolakakis Speech Transcript
So, turns out Snapchat isn’t just for sending d*ck pics, right?
Alright guys, before we get into who I am and why I’m here to speak to you, I want to talk to you about the current state of internet marketing.
Because we’re in this really weird, sort of stage at the moment, where our success as internet marketers and what we do, it’s all based on driving traffic directly from an ad to an offer.
The Current State of IM
And we’re just kind of going through this weird transitional period, where people are starting to do much more multi-level, sorry, multi-touchpoint marketing.
Where we send people to from one video to another, and we create custom audiences based on engagement and all that sort of stuff.
But until now, our campaign success has very much been based on optimisation and media buying skills and tactics. It’s essentially been a race to zero.
Where, as the ad costs go up, because the Facebook ad real estate is consistent, and more advertisers come into the market, it becomes a lot more difficult to compete, right?
So on top of that, artificial intelligence also coming into the game and that’s playing a massive factor. It’s a huge element in what’s going on.
We’re getting to the point where we can literally, or business owners are just going to be able to tell Facebook or Google or whatever it is, how much they think a conversion is worth to them.
Punch that in, how much they’re going to make from a customer. And then put in their creative and Facebook’s going to go and do all the targeting and everything by itself.
And this isn’t progressing at a linear rate. If you look at technology from the last one to ten years, compared to the last two years or so, we’re seeing massive increases in this technology.
It’s completely changing the landscape of internet marketing.
So if you are relying on played and old media buying tactics, your business is doomed. It sounds pretty dull.
We’ll get onto it in just a sec, why I think this and what direction internet marketing is going in.
Dim Niko
But first, I’m Dim Niko. As the lovely introducer said, founder of Epoch Agency. We specialise in paid traffic for private label ecom brands.
The team spent over $10 million on ads. And I also create a bunch of content around all this stuff, which is why I’m speaking to you today.
So I can come and help you out with a couple of strategies and all that sort of stuff.
So, as it says, I get a ride out of growth hacking and using unorthodox strategies to geometrically grow our clients’ companies and our own companies.
Because at the end of the day, we’re internet marketers. We’re here to make a lot of money, we’re not here to slowly scale companies. And if we want to do that, we can go back into like the corporate space and get a job or something like that.
We want to find ways to really growth hack and scale very very quickly.
So on top of that, I’m the co-owner and CMO of Ape Athletics, a fitness apparel company. As you can see, they’re kind of like Gym Shark. We sell fitness clothing.
And that means that everything I’m going to talk to you about today, we’ve either tried through our own company or through our client’s company.
So, I very much practice what I preach. I’m not just another agency owner that’s coming up and talking about what we’re doing for our clients.
We’re actually doing this with our own ad spend for our own business.
Where IM is Going
So, yeah. So back to what we were talking about before. Where’s internet marketing going?
It’s no longer gonna be a game of media buying and direct to offer ads.
I think that artificial intelligence is essentially going to make media buyers, or what we think media buyers are today, quite redundant.
It’s gonna be the final nail on the coffin.
So as we do get closer to that break-even return on ad spend, we’re going to see a transition into all of this more strategically driven marketing, which is exactly what I’m going to talk to you about in a sec.
So the bottom line is we need to be creative with our strategy. We need to think outside the box.
And I’m going to give you three strategies that we can actually use or implement.
Tomorrow when you go home, swipe this stuff straight into your business and start giving it a crack. B ecause there are some massive opportunities that you guys don’t wanna miss out on.
We Will Cover
Firstly, Snapchat advertising and Instagram Stories. They go hand in hand for a couple of reasons, which we’ll talk about in just a sec.
Exploiting the undiscovered gold mine that is allowing us to achieve CPMs of as low as a $1.78. I think, actually in the stats when we go through them, it’s even lower than that.
So with Facebook advertising, where it costs 20, 30 40, whatever it might be, depending on what vertical your advertising in, we’ve seen particularly coming out of Black Friday now, extremely high CPMs.
Imagine if instead of it costing $50 or $30 to show your ad to a thousand people, the power behind showing our ads to a thousand people for as little as a $1.78.
After that, we’re going to go through Messenger bots. A little bit unconventional. We’re not going to talk about it in the same way that everyone else is talking about it.
Actually, a couple of months ago, this was at the start of the year, we used a growth hacking kind of strategy.
Where we generated just under 24 grand sales in a single day, using this weird sort of giveaway strategy coupled with influencers. We’ll talk about that.
We’re still using that today. We did it about two weeks ago. Don’t have the stats on that one yet, but I think we did about 30 grand of sales in the first hour of one of those product launches.
Very much still works today.
Then, Facebook ad influencers, which sounds kind of funny, no one is doing this. So I suggest you listen up to this one.
It’s essentially coupling Facebook ads with our Instagram influences to get insane returns on ad spend. We’ll go through that in a sec.
#1 Story Ads
Story ads, why are story ads so incredible?
Firstly, a couple of things. The CPMs are ridiculously cheap, particularly with Snapchat because it is such a primitive platform.
I mean, there was no Snapchat pixel until a couple of months ago. And that means we can build our top of funnel audiences for super cheap.
So while people may not actually purchase straight out of Snapchat, it means we can drive a bunch of traffic that we can later retarget and you know, do all that fancy mumbo jumbo.
Why it’s so cheap? The extremely primitive platform, which I’ll show you in just a sec.
The targeting is still super, super basic. And you need custom data. You need to have your own customer list or some kind of pixel data or something like that.
Because the targeting, like I said, is really basic. It works off Datalogic’s third-party. Don’t quote me on that.
Also, 9×16, which means that business owners or marketers need to create purpose-made content around Snapchat and Instagram ads, which just means there are fewer advertisers in the market.
And these Instagram Story ads are a CPM of about $10. So still a great opportunity.
With Snapchat, there’s a minimum ad set budget. If we run an ad on Snapchat, we have to set the ad set budget to at least 50 bucks.
The result of that is, if you want to run 10 different ad sets to test, you’re gonna be spending 500 bucks a day, right?
A considerable amount of money for a business owner that you’re just trying to get into the market or whatever.
So that barrier to entry, that sort of resistance is why it’s such a great opportunity.
Stats
As you can see here, the stats. This is just a couple tests we ran a little while ago. But, a total of $1.38 CPM, we were getting like $0.30 swipe-ups with some of this stuff.
So super epic. And again, as I said, you can use this for your top of funnel stuff.
You can create conversion-based campaigns now because there is a Snapchat pixel now. But it’s very – it’s still very new and primitive.
As I was describing the targeting before, we can’t actually, like, the targeting is super basic.
I mean, if you type entrepreneurship into Facebook advertising, you’re gonna get like a million options pop up. And from there if you choose one of those, you get like a million suggestions.
Nothing comes up with Snapchat.
Custom Audiences
So, we have to have our own custom audiences. Again, another reason why it makes it a lot more difficult for any random marketer to just come into space and start playing with it.
Which means that it is a great opportunity and it’s super cheap.
So hot tip, when you do start playing around with Snapchat ads, I’ve got two examples here.
HiSmile, a teeth whitening company in Australia. They’re absolutely crushing it.
You can see that with the Snapchat advertising, we always want our ad content to look native, whether it’s on Facebook or Snapchat or whatever it might be.
And natively, the Snapchat content is very low-quality I suppose. You’ve got your friends taking, not d*ck pics, but taking all selfies and quite low-quality.
You can see that the company here.
When we actually put their ads side by side, they downscaled their content or the quality of their content rather. So that it seamlessly integrates into the content that is on the Snapchat platform.
And you’ll get much, much better results if you do this. Funnily enough.
So that’s a quick tip.
#2 ManyChat
Now, ManyChat. Alright, this is an interesting one. We’ve all heard about ManyChat, and we’re almost sick to death of it.
ManyChat is, essentially, just another audience building tool. And it’s all good and well for me to tell you that we use this strategy to generate 24 grand in sales.
But in the process, the more important part is we created an audience. Much like we’ve got our custom audiences and our followings on Instagram or our influencers’ audiences.
We’ve created an audience that we can constantly broadcast to. We can create multiple touch points, we can send them to follow-up offers.
So, that $24,000 in sales is not the end of it. We’ve put multiple 6-figures through our ManyChat lists.
And it’s all about creating the marketing assets. So just keep that in mind when we do go through this, and like I said, we’re still using this strategy.
Most recently, November 18th, where again, I crushed it so, sweet.
Why ManyChat Is So Great
So, why is ManyChat so great?
I’ll only briefly go into some of this stuff because like I said, it’s been done to death but insanely high open rates. Insanely high click-through rates.
Yeah, not too much to go through.
So there are the results of the campaign, which I’m gonna take you through in just a sec. Like I said, $23,987 that day.
And here’s what we did.
Step 1: Create Growth Tool – RefURL
We created a growth tool. I’m not sure how familiar you guys are with ManyChat. Essentially, it’s a Messenger bot tool.
Did we create a growth tool that was a RefURL, right?
And what that means is it’s a link that when a prospect clicks on it, or when a website visitor clicks on it, or someone from an influencer’s following clicks on it, the following message pops up.
And it says, “Hey Dimitri, to enter the giveaway, just hit the button below!”
Sweet. They hit the button, they’ve entered the giveaway. It’s super, super simple.
Because in the past, when we run Instagram giveaways and stuff like that, it’s always like, “Hey, tag 3 friends below, and go and follow us, and comment your favorite thing about this.”
And it just gets super complicated.
So all we did is we got our influencers to put the RefURL into their Instagram stories. They literally just created a quick 5-second video that says, “Hey, if you want to enter the giveaway, we’re giving away $500 worth of stuff. Just swipe up.”
And then when the customer or the prospect or the website visitor swipes up, they go straight into ManyChat and they see this, okay.
Then what happens is, once they enter, they get a message that says, “Hey, come over and follow us.”
And that’s because we want them to follow us on Instagram, that’s another audience that we can retarget with our Facebook ads.
Create Audiences Based On Instagram Engagement
Because with Facebook, we all know now that, I think for the past 3 to 6 months, we’ve been able to create audiences based on Instagram engagement.
May have been a fair bit longer than that, actually. So we get them onto our Instagram, then they’re pixeled.
We can run Facebook ads directly to them, we can broadcast to them. We’re creating all these epic audiences.
And then after that, we tell them to go back and tag their friends. We tell them that every extra friend they tag, they get an extra entry.
The reason why we do that is that we really want to promote virality. And by doing that, we can put very, very little ad spend behind it or we can have very few influencers promote it.
The snowball effect happens, and heaps and heaps of people end up entering the giveaway and getting onto our list.
Step 2: Drive Traffic And Sign Ups
So as I described, our traffic source was influencers. We do a lot of stuff with influencers, which I’ll talk about in a sec.
And you can also do it with Facebook ads.
So you can use the JSON tool, which essentially is you just click on an Ad and the message will open up. Or you can use the common growth tool.
This was a really huge thing. You guys would have seen in your newsfeeds, people were doing it. And they were saying “Comment “win” below to enter the giveaway.”
Then a ManyChat bot would reach out. Doesn’t actually work anymore.
What you have to do, because Facebook hates drawn engagement like that, if you run a Facebook ad and you say “Hey comment XYZ below, so that you can win”
Then Facebook is gonna neg the reach. And it’s not going to be seen by that many people.
So how I would recommend doing it now is having a more longer-form response or eliciting a long-form response from the customers.
Instead of saying, “Comment “win” below”, say something along the lines of, “Comment in 25 words or less, why you love Ape Athletics or why you love our fitness apparel”
And, when you do get the longer-form responses, Facebook sees that and they think, “Hey, really awesome content from this page. These guys are actually providing value in the Facebook sphere. So we’re going to give them a little bit more reach as well.”
So the CPMs drop.
The whole goal with this guys is to aim for virality. You want people coming back and tagging their friends as we saw in the screenshot before. And then the snowball effect happens.
Step 3: Announce Winner
That leads us to the winner.
Up until this point, we may have spent a bunch of money on Facebook ads or influencers and we’ve built this massive list, now it’s actually time to make some money.
So what we did was we offered a runner up prize to actually drive conversions from this list.
We said to everyone on the list, of course, there was the one winner that won the $500 or a $1,000 prize or whatever it was, the big prize.
And then, after that everyone won a runner-up prize.
Worked for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was extremely personalised.
As you can see here, “Congratulations to full name.” People think that this broadcast is going out to everyone and it was calling out that specific person.
So we were getting responses that were like, “Oh my god. I’m so excited! Thanks so much, thanks for choosing me!”
And then we gave them $15 spending money. Instead of doing, a lot of people like to do discount codes. Just 15% off.
If we give them a tangible amount and we say, “Hey you’ve got a $15 voucher to use on our store.” If they don’t use it, they feel like they’re losing something.
Discount Codes
It’s not the same with discount codes. And that’s why that worked well.
Then, of course, we gave them a “unique code”, which wasn’t actually a unique code. We can’t dynamically send out messages so that everyone gets a different message in ManyChat.
So we gave them a “unique code”, again, making them feel as though that had one. Making them feel really special.
And of course, saying that they can only use this for orders over $75 and it worked great. We got 254 orders.
And like I said, just under 24 grand that day in sales.
#3 Influencer Marketing
So that brings me to the third and final strategy or point, Influencer Marketing. This has been a hot topic because everyone says that influencer marketing is overpriced.
And it doesn’t work anymore and they’ve tried buying shout-outs.
See the way it was 2 or 3 years ago, you’d literally just be able to DM pages. You’d send them a message, you say how much for me to post and it would cost you 50 bucks.
They’ll chuck up a post, they might have 200,000 or 300,000 followers. And then you’ll get like a $1,000 worth of sales come through.
People were building whole businesses off this. It was insane.
They were just scaling this up, they were reaching out to as many influencers as they could. And then slowly, influencers caught on.
They started putting their prices up. At the same time, the market sophistication increased. So the people in the market weren’t as responsive to seeing influencers’ ads.
I mean, we’ve all seen those stupid bracelets now on Instagram that everyone was selling back then through influencers.
And so, it doesn’t work as well anymore. Or that’s what people think.
I still think it’s massively, massively untapped, right? And that’s because it’s not about just buying shout-outs and having a single touch point anymore.
We have sponsored athletes. All the guys that work with us, they work with us for an extended duration. And their audiences see us over and over and over again.
Build An Audience
They’ve built a really, really loyal following with their audience. And when the customer or the prospect does see our product, they’ll see it for months leading up to a launch.
One of our recent launches, we did 80 grand in the first hour. 110 grand that day. All built on influencer marketing, and it didn’t cost us anywhere near that much for the influencers.
So how do we actually find these influencers?
It’s a lot about building relationships and branding and positioning, okay.
You don’t want to just reach out to an influencer and say, “Hey I want to pay you this much or how much do you cost to put up a post?”
Because they’ll just give you” an absurd number.
What you want to do is you want to create an ongoing relationship. So that you’re paying them, say, a monthly wage or something like that.
And again, that way their customers or their followers rather, see your product on an ongoing basis. Then you get the conversion on the 7th or 8th touch point. Not the first touch point.
Two Types Of Influencers
So two types of influencers.
Macro influencers, of course. We pay a wage plus commission. And the reason we do that, as you’ll see in a second when we start talking about the Facebook ad influencers.
If we give them a wage and we sign them on with the contract. They’ve got a little bit more or we’ve got a little bit more control over them.
And we can really get them doing some cool stuff when it comes to the ads manager and sharing their audiences and all that, which we’ll talk about in a sec.
Of course, the commission to incentivise them. Okay. It really helps them get personally invested and drive sales and stuff like that.
Then the micro influencers. They’re typically 50,000 or less. Sorry, the macro is over a 100,000.
These micro influencers, we just pay a commission only.
And that’s a really, really great way at the brand building because you just reach out at mass. If you’ve built a solid brand and you know how to sell that vision, everyone will want to get on board.
It’s a little bit easier for us now with Ape Athletics, so we’ve got a bit of a name in the industry.
But essentially, what you want to do is you want to create and have a very clear mission statement, a very clear direction that the company is going or the brand is going.
That way people want to be a part of it. And then you’ll have no trouble with this sort of stuff.
Why Influencers Are Undervalued
So why are influencers actually undervalued?
The first one is, they’re an instant source of hot traffic.
Okay, the influencer has already done all the heavy lifting for you. They’ve already built up an awesome relationship with the customer or with the prospect.
And they already have the whole know, like, and trust. That means when they post their product, they’ll drive sales, essentially straightaway.
Now, they are still simply underpriced. If you can build up these relationships and you can reach out and you’ve got good brand positioning, you will get an insane return on investment over time from these influences.
And finally, they also have audiences.
Sounds like a no-brainer. What do I actually mean by that? They have, we’ll get to that in a sec, actually.
So, the bottom line is, all about building relationships. It’s a long-term game, it’s not just buying shout-outs and then blasting your audiences and stuff like that.
Facebook Ad Influencers
Yeah, let’s get into Facebook ad influencers. And this is a really interesting one. As I said, no one is doing this yet.
I came across one guy who was a client for a bit. And if I told you who he was and what his companies were, you’d know exactly who he is. He’s doing this stuff as well.
So back onto my point, where influences have audiences, right?
As you can see here, we can share these audiences, or these influencers can share these audiences with your ad account or your business manager.
Two ways of doing it. You can, and this is why again like I said, it’s really important to get the influencers on a wage where it’s possible.
Two Ways Of Doing It
Two ways of doing it. We can make ourselves an admin or get them to make us an admin in their business manager or ad account.
And they all have ad accounts because remember, these Instagram pages, if they’ve got 200,000 followers.
It’s a business Instagram page. So it’s a targetable audience with our Facebook advertising.
Or we can get them to create the audience in their ads manager. And then directly share that audience with us, okay.
What does this actually look like?
As you can see here, we’ve got this guy, Maxx. He was one of our influences. Epic dude. Really cool guy.
And what we did was, we created ads directly targeted to his Instagram following and his email list and people that are engaged with his Facebook, his website visitors, all that sort of stuff.
Stuff that we can only do because we have him on a wage. And we’ve got a bit more push-pull. We can say, “Hey, do you mind if we do this?”
Build Long-term relationship
And we’re building that long-term relationship.
So what we did was we put up a post targeted to all those audiences. All of his audiences.
And then, we set them up from our brand. It said, as you can see, as worn by Max Tuning.
So when someone’s strolling through their newsfeed, instead of seeing Ape Athletics and just seeing some random model in the photo and not really associating with the brand. It’s just a completely random brand because the fitness industry is so saturated now, anyone can go and like, start selling fitness apparel.
Instead of it just being another brand they scroll past, instantly, if they follow Max and they watch his vlogs every day and they really engage with his content, they’re just going to stop scrolling.
And out of curiosity think, you know, “What’s going on here? Who is this brand? I need to know more.”
Pixel Them And Start Retargeting
They’ll click through. We’ll pixel them, we’ll start retargeting. And we’ll follow them up with more content, all that sort of stuff, right?
So that’s essentially what Facebook ad influencers are. We can run our ads to the influencers and then to the influencers’ audiences.
And then the next step up from that is we can actually set up ads from the influencers pages. This is where you’re going to get astronomical returns.
So we’re only just starting to test that sort of stuff. I don’t know if anyone really doing that yet, at all.
What essentially we’re doing there, again, it’s super important to have the wage going on so that we can actually post from their pages.
And you might say, “Man, why would these influencers ever let us post from their pages and do all this stuff?”
Like I said, it’s about building a relationship. And you can actually create a really great pitch around it. You can tell these guys, “Hey, we know how hard the organic reach has been.”
Because that’s been a massive problem for them right.
Organic Social Media Marketing
Organic keeps going down. We all know organic social media marketing and all that sort of stuff is kind of a dying breed now and we need to be in the paid game.
So we tell them that, Hey, we’re gonna float your ad spend. We’re gonna start creating posts and boosting them directly to your audiences.
Sure, it might link you out to our products, but that’s fine. And you’re gonna start seeing a stronger connection develop with your followers again.
As it was back in the golden days when they could just grow their Instagram accounts like crazy and organic was the thing, right?
And on top of that, when we’re marketing to colder audiences and lookalikes from their pages.
Because people, we are testing this like I said, but I’m thinking people are going to be a lot more likely or a lot more responsive to a post that comes from an athlete.
Even if they haven’t heard from him, then a brand, if they haven’t heard from the brand.
So yeah, we’re doing that. And when we told them that, “Hey we’re gonna be marketing to new audiences. Your following is going to grow. We’re all going to benefit. It’s gonna keep everyone happy.”
So that’s what we did.
Here’s one of the ad sets that we ran. It got a 6.34x return. That’s just to his email list. And that was pretty epic.
On that day, we had a launch and using all these influencers and all these strategies, we did just under $111,000 in sales on that day.
So worked incredibly well guys and yeah.
There’s No End To This
The truth is, that was just three. Really, there’s no end to this, okay.
So I challenge you all. When you are doing your marketing, start getting really creative with the strategy.
Instead of just going direct to an offer, start thinking about how you can start adding a bunch of touch points between the initial ad that you run and actually asking for the sale.
See what you can do with that so that you can really build a relationship and start building a brand with your customer. Because that is the direction that internet marketing is going in.
And if you’re continuing to just go direct to offer and try and optimise and race to the ground, it’s only gonna end one way. We discussed that earlier.
So, guys, that’s me, Dimitri Nikolakakis.
Shoot me a friend request if you like. Any questions you’ve got, just ask away.
And I believe we’re gonna have a Q&A now? Is that what’s going on? Beautiful. Thanks, guys.
Q&A
- Eric:
- Let’s give it up for Dimitri Nikolakakis.
- Dimitri:
- Thanks man.
- Eric:
- No problem. Your joke at the beginning there about Snapchat d*ck pics. My name is Eric Dyck. So all my all my pics are d*ck pics.
- Dimitri:
- Beautiful.
- Eric:
- That’s my best joke that I’ve ever made up. So, Slido.com AWA18 to ask some questions. We have some good ones here. If there’s any that sound good here. To start with the top one there from Xavier, what platforms do you suggest for influencers? Do they all include micro influencers too or do you have other suggestions for platforms?
What Do You Suggest For Influencers
- Dimitri:
- Okay. We don’t actually go to these platforms at all. We find that when we are going into the platforms, you’re comparing basically, it’s a very different dynamic. If we’re reaching out directly to the influencer from our brand page and saying, “Hey, we’ve got this massive opportunity for you. We’re not sure if you’re the right fit. We’d love to have a discussion and kind of see.” Versus talking to an influencer on a platform that’s there purely to make money, they’re just hopped onto the platform so that they can monetise, that’s the only interest that they really have in mind. We find that we get much better results, we get better deals. And we find better influencers that are really into and that really get around the brand by directly reaching out and actually building a relationship. So yeah, we tend to stick away from the platforms.
- Eric:
- This is just one that I have that I’m interested in. With influencers, like engagement is such a big thing. There’s a lot of people that have a big following but they’re garbage. They don’t have any engagement. How do you, is it literally an eye test that you go through and look at someone’s following and see how much people are actually engaged? Do you have metrics?
How We Scout The Influencers
- Dimitri:
- Yeah, there are some metrics. One of the other guys in the business handles specifically how we scout the influencers and the metrics and stuff. But when we are looking at it, there are two sides to it. There’s the metrics and there’s also the engagement, but not the engagement from a metric perspective where you’re saying, “Hey, we got 100,000 influencers, 100,000 followers. 5% of the audience is liking. 1% is commenting.” We actually go through their comments and see what they’re saying about the influencer. You’ll see, you’ll quickly be able to tell the difference between the really fanatic followings that are super loyal. Particularly, when you start comparing, you might have a look at the influencers Instagram audience and then head over to YouTube and look at their audience there, and if the same people are commenting on both, you know that they’re building up a really awesome tribe that’s following that influencer all around the internet.
Is Facebook Against ManyChat
- Eric:
- Cool. The top question on here, is Facebook against ManyChat? Do you know anything about this? Are they planning to ban them so that you just used their platform natively?
- Dimitri:
- Not that I know of. Not planning to ban them. There are a lot of rules that Facebook’s put in place to avoid ManyChat and Messenger just becoming like email marketing. You can’t send promotional messages if you haven’t had an interaction with the person at least in the last 24 hours and stuff like that. But there are ways you can go around it. That’s a whole other topic about like broadcasting types and stuff like that.
- Eric:
- Cool. You mentioned ManyChat. Have you tested other messenger bot tools? What are the pros and cons to ManyChat? I’ve heard Chatfuel is good too.
ManyChat: Pros And Cons
- Dimitri:
- Yeah, great. I’ve only used ManyChat. But yeah there are tools, Chatfuel, Octane. I think the major shortfall in ManyChat and where it becomes a challenge in e-commerce is that there’s no revenue tracking, right? So if you create a broadcast and you drive traffic to an offer, you don’t know unless you’d like to start playing with UTMs and stuff like that. But natively, ManyChat doesn’t have revenue tracking in the same way that like email marketing software does like Klaviyo, you know. Yeah.
- Eric:
- Do you use UTMs on top of whatever you do?
- Dimitri:
- Yes, yeah. UTMs, affiliate links for the affiliates. We can track that sort of stuff. Really important to know what’s going on and tracking all the success, yeah.
- Eric:
- Nice. How long in minutes and seconds should the Snapchat or Instagram ads be? 15 is the max. 15 seconds is the max.
Snapchat and Instagram Ads Duration
- Dimitri:
- Yes. So Snapchat ads are 10 seconds, I believe. And Instagram ads are 15 seconds. But having said that, with Instagram ads the story ads, you can set up carousels. You can have three 15-second story ads within the one ad. That way when the person’s like clicking through their stories, like rapidly through all their friends’ stories, and they come to yours, they have to click 3 times before it goes away. If that makes sense. That’s a cool little trick. Yeah, I’d recommend doing that.
- Eric:
- That’s great. Just one from before, not how much is your revenue from Messenger ads. But what percentage of your revenue would you say, that you bring in, is from Messenger?
- Dimitri:
- It’s hard to say. I mean, we could, I guess that’s really an attribution question. Because we have so many touch points and we’re building up a brand, I could say that say 10, 20, 30% is from ManyChat. But they may have come from an influencer before that or they may have clicked on a Facebook ad after coming through ManyChat. So because we are focusing solely on like building up a brand and having that really awesome tribe of followers, it isn’t so much so that we’re directly generating revenue from ManyChat. More so that it is just a culmination of all these different efforts.
- Eric:
- A piece of the tapestry.
- Dimitri:
- Yeah, absolutely.
Average Pay To Do Consistent Posting
- Eric:
- That’s really cool. So, what do we have here? How much do you pay on average for them to do a consistent posting? Because you mentioned you have the two-pronged effect. You have sort of the retainer that you have with your good guys. Then there’s, per post fee as well. Like what does that fee look like?
- Dimitri:
- Cool. Like the number one question, I get all the time. It really comes down to the relationship that you have with the influencer, right? We have some incredible, incredible influencers that have hundreds of thousands of followers that might pay like a couple hundred dollars a month for. Plus commission of course. And then there are some that, when it’s like a completely cold outreach and it’s someone that we really want to work with that has a big name, they might cost 3, 4, 5 grand a month. So, it’s not astronomical. It’s definitely achievable. But yeah, that’s to give you an idea.
- Eric:
- Okay, cool. Have you dabbled with YouTube influencers at all?
YouTube Influencers
- Dimitri:
- Yes. So, all these guys, all these influencers that we have, or most of them, are YouTube and Instagram side-by-side. Most of the reach out happens on Instagram and through our networks and stuff like that. If we have a really great influencer, they’ll have a bunch of influencer friends. And these guys, particularly in the fitness industry, have YouTube followings as well as Instagram. YouTube is awesome. 100,000 engaged subscribers on YouTube is gonna be so much more valuable than a 100,000 on Instagram. Because some of these guys put out like daily vlogs and their audiences watch them day in, day out.
- Eric:
- For hours, sometimes.
- Dimitri:
- They give hours of their day just to these influencers, you know. So when you’re playing with that sort of stuff, you get insane returns as well.
How Many Promotional Messages Are Enough
- Eric:
- Very cool. How many promotional messages in Messenger are enough? This is a question, I’m always interested like, there’s another question here about email versus Messenger. And do you sort of segment the kinds of messages you send in Messenger? Do you have a specific kind? Like in Messenger, you kind of have to give content or you have to give a little bit more?
- Dimitri:
- Yeah, I mean. Sorry?
- Eric:
- Yeah that’s pretty much it. How do you not come across a spammy?
- Dimitri:
- We are really careful with it. We don’t broadcast anywhere near as much as we do with email. The email we might have a weekend where we send like if we’ve got a product launch, we might send 8 or 9 emails that one weekend to our customer list. And the equivalent on the ManyChat side will literally be like maybe, one, when we launch and go live. And then one when the scarcity is coming up, and it’s we’re gonna have like a price increase or a deadline or whatever it might be.
- Eric:
- So like 4 to 1 ratio.
- Dimitri:
- Yeah, yeah. Definitely gotta be careful with it. You don’t wanna get your page banned or blocked from the Messenger bot as well.
Average Price Of A Product To Be Successful
- Eric:
- Nice, what products, so this is an interesting one, what products and niche to start with? What sort of like, what’s an average price of a product that you found to be really successful in this space?
- Dimitri:
- In this space particularly, there are a lot of brands coming out now actually that are going for a higher ticket, like super premium fitness apparel brands. And that means that you’ve got a lot more play, a lot more margin so that you can start running your Facebook ads and maintain profitability and from there, scale, right. I think, essentially, at the end of the day, price isn’t really a major factor, particularly, with something like this, where we’re building brands. People are buying because they associate with the brand, not just because they want to buy the cheapest t-shirt or whatever, right? So the higher the price, the better. It makes it a lot easier when it comes to your Facebook advertising or whatever advertising that might be. Yeah.
Sample Email To An Influencer
- Eric:
- Nice. One last question here. Just give us through like what an email to an influencer might look like. Like, just read it out.
- Dimitri:
- Sure. So it would go along the lines of, “Hey, mister influencer. My name is Dimitri, I’m the CMO of a fitness apparel company called Ape Athletics. You can check it out here.” And we linked them out to it. “Our mission is to build one of the greatest fitness apparel companies in the next 12-18 months and we’re looking at building a massive team of absolutely incredible influencers to be a part of that journey. So looking at doing expos, doing all this cool stuff, like I said, selling the dream. And from there, we’d like to see if you’re a fit. We’d like to have a chat just to see if the opportunity is right for you. And when are you available to get on a call.” That’s the kind of message.
- Eric:
- Pretty simple. Straightforward.
- Dimitri:
- Yeah. Pretty simple.
- Eric:
- But having a quality product is super key in that equation.
- Dimitri:
- Yes that’s right. Yeah, absolutely.
- Eric:
- And making sure your brand is aligned with theirs.
- Dimitri:
- Absolutely. That’s right.
- Eric:
- Very cool. Yeah. Well let’s give Dimitri one more round of applause. Thank you so much.
- Dimitri:
- Thanks man.