YOUTUBE ADVERTISING OR FACEBOOK ADVERTISING?

ISAR MEITIS: Hi everyone. Today’s interview is a part of the E-Tribe Podcast Series. We interview entrepreneurs from around the world. We discuss their business, challenges, solutions, lessons learned, tools that they like to use, etc. It’s also available to stream and listen on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, and Google Podcasts.

Today I am meeting with Benjamin Kepner. Benjamin is the founder and CEO of  “Global Social Media Marketing”, which is a vibrant marketing and education technology company out of Denver CO. Benjamin is the ultimate millennial – He taught English and Spain, which gave him the opportunity to travel all over Europe. He worked in an IT integration team for a large travel corporation working with companies all over LATAM. He was the global sales manager for an international food science company, and as mentioned earlier he founded his own social media marketing agency. He also coordinates and hosts events, and has over 10K followers on Instagram. 

Hi Benjamin, and thank you for joining us. Would you mind giving us a brief summary of what was the path that got you to where you are today?

BENJAMIN KEPNER: Thank you, Isar. And of course… I have a UGA BBA Marketing, International Business, a decade of experience growing millions in global sales with technology, partnership marketing, digital marketing, social media, and Spanish for 70 brands and 70 events in 30 industries. As a multilingual marketer in English, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish, I started my career as a social media manager which became a new job after the recession of 2008 in my hometown of Georgia. During this time, I taught myself how to use a DSLR camera and Final Cut Pro to make YouTube videos before he ever started running Facebook ads or working with influencers. After dealing with burnout and no full-time work, I became an English Teacher with the Ministry of Education in Spain and worked with socialmediaonlineclasses.com, an e-learning company for how to use social media, to escape Atlanta traffic. Shortly thereafter I returned to the United States with fluency in Spanish and joined Tourico Holidays, a billion-dollar travel company, where I met Isar and Uri to follow my intrapreneurial talents across Latin America, United States, and Europe before creating a social media department from scratch for Last Minute Travel. I eventually left Orlando and began working with all the sports leagues in partnership marketing to create social media content such as the NBA, NFL, NHL, Super Bowl, NCAA, FIFA, and many other sporting events. However, I would eventually travel to Red Rocks to see his favorite band STS9 after years of research on Denver as a great place for millennials and move there to go back into sales as a Global Sales Manager for Applied Food Sciences. After AFS,  I was accepted as one of 4,000 Google for Education Certified Trainers worldwide to transform education globally. Since moving to Denver, I have become the Communications Chair for Mile High Young Professional, one of only 100 Global Hootsuite Ambassadors, Event Manager for Network After Work, and an Instagram influencer to inspire Denver community engagement. It was during this struggle to find full-time work and meeting with his tax accountant that I was inspired to create GSMM and the rest is history!

IM: What is the company’s business? 

BK: Global Social Media Marketing (GSMM) is an award-winning multilingual marketing and education technology training company headquartered in Denver, Colorado that holds 30 digital marketing certifications, works with over 30 industries globally and has one of only 4,000 Google for Education Certified Trainers in the world. 

IM: What are the key services you provide?

BK: Our services include Google for Education Certified Trainer Teacher Training, Professional Development, Technology Conference Speaking Engagements, Educator to Educator Connections Services, G Suite Training Workshops, Google Educator Credentialing, Social Media Marketing, International Business Expansion, Social Media Marketing Courses, Instagram Influencer Marketing, Facebook Advertising, Google Ads, Google Marketing, and YouTube Training Videos.

IM: To what kind of clients?

BK: I have experience in 30 industries that include small business, medium, and enterprise clients. The primary industries we work in include Education, Environmental Services, Food & Beverages, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Non-profit, Music, Law, Insurance, Retail, Virtual Reality, Health & Wellness, Travel, Mobile Apps, and SaaS Software industries.

IM: Let’s talk about opportunities and challenges. The goal is for other people in similar situations to benefit from your lessons learned. This is where we dive into marketing. I would like to learn the biggest challenges your clients have and what are the best solutions you offer them. Can you categorize the biggest marketing challenges companies have today? What are the lowest hanging fruits as far as solutions today?

BK: The biggest challenge our clients have is deciding what social media video ads are best for their business to generate leads and sales. We offer low-risk contracts at a fair price with our own in-house video production capabilities and partnerships with other video production companies. We have also created YouTube training videos for our process to educate our customers to empower them and provide transparency on our processes and systems for thought leadership to earn their trust. Most companies cannot correlate ROI to social media or understand how to create social media content that drives leads and sales.  The lowest hanging fruit to achieve these things based on the last decade of changes in the social media industry is utilizing Facebook and YouTube advertising.

IM: Can you give us examples of your biggest differences in audiences?

BM: Sure. Let’s start with your Facebook Audience. The placements your ads are shown on and how you can target your audience. It tends to be an older demographic. You can create detailed interest-based targeting, custom audiences, lookalike audiences, and retargeting social engagement or website visitors to specific landing pages. Facebook’s demographic settings allow you to reach deeper layers of audience segmentation, focusing only on those who are most interested in your brand. The ability to dedicate your ad dollars precisely to a quality audience is more likely to drive organic traffic, form submissions, and inquiries. Advertisers can upload customer information from their own databases to Facebook, which then applies to filter based on its own data and information provided by third-party data brokers to match users whose information the advertiser uploads. This creates the “lookalike” audience of users, allowing advertisers to effectively double the potential reach of their advertisements by targeting new customers who exhibit the same interests and consumer behavior as their existing customers.

Now for YouTube Audiences, they’re more likely to be consuming content with sound. Younger demographics. You can create keyword targeting, in-market audiences, offline customer data, affinity audiences, and retargeting YouTube video engagement or website visitors to specific landing pages. Ads are shown more that rank high in the YouTube algorithm equation of Relevance + User Experience = Quality Score. 

The biggest differences in capabilities (Targeting, marketing channels, tracking, automation, engagement, tools) goes like this: All Facebook video ads are auto-play and while you’re charged per ten-second view, two-second view or ThurPlays, any video that is played longer than three seconds is counted as a view. Facebook users may be in a public area or on a device with limited sound-reducing your video’s effectiveness. The simple solution to this is to provide text-overlay. YouTube offers in-stream, in-display, bumper, and discovery ads. In-stream plays before or during a video and allows the user the option to opt-out after the first five seconds. In-display ads are located outside of the video you are watching and are only played if the user clicks on them. Google offers advanced targeting, allowing you to reach affinity audiences who have demonstrated an interest in topics related to your industry, product, or brand, besides enabling targeting based on age, gender, parental status, and interests. You can specifically target in-market audiences who are actively looking for products similar or comparable to those you sell. Additionally, you have the opportunity to place your ads on popular videos relevant to your target audience. For Facebook video campaigns, you pay for video campaigns based on three-second, ten-second, and completed views. Nearly 50% of Facebook viewers continue watching an ad for at least 30 seconds.

IM: What would you say are the three biggest advantages and disadvantages when using YouTube?

BK: Advantages – YouTube is owned by Google who is Fielding more than 3.5 billion search queries every single day of users who are actively looking for goods and services. YouTube allows you to share video content on other social media sites, forums, blogs, and websites then YouTube allows you to aggregate your videos on any platform.YouTube has a partner program to allow you to monetize your videos with advertisers once you reach 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time.

Disadvantages – You have to capture your audience’s interest in five seconds or less, which is no easy feat. Generally more expensive than Facebook and more videos being uploaded for more competition. More of the younger audience spends more time on Instagram or Tik Tok right now to consume video content.

IM: Great, thanks. Now the same question, but for Facebook.

BK: Advantages – Facebook’s targeting options are much sharper to reach your audience than YouTube if you want to serve ads to a very niche audience. Most popular social media channel for the last decade that owns Instagram and developed stories with 2.4 billion users. Facebook is usually cheaper because people can scroll through multiple ads in one session and you can post the videos in Facebook groups.

Disadvantages – Facebook video ads cannot be shared outside Facebook and if a user doesn’t have a Facebook account they may not be able to see your video (unless it’s set to public), they cannot see your video ads without an account. 85% of videos on the platform are viewed without sound, making the addition of captions even more important! Harder to monetize videos through the use of Facebook ad breaks allow you to monetize your Facebook video content. Ad breaks are short ads (in the form of pre-roll, mid-roll, and image ads) inserted at natural breaks in your eligible video content.  

IM: When should someone decide to use Facebook over other social media outlets?

BK: Facebook is a good solution for direct response marketers who want to leverage video ad units to generate acquisition. Boosted Posts to reach a large audience and promote event ticket sales or eCommerce products. Watch parties are also great for Facebook videos used in the past to post on Facebook page groups. Facebook live is growing faster this year than YouTube live due to more people practicing social distancing. Great for cross-promotion on Instagram. Facebook advertising costs have an average cost per click (CPC) of $1.86, but that can reach over $5.00, depending on factors ranging from ad quality to competition. Focus on mobile video. More than 95% of Facebook users access the platform on mobile devices. Facebook’s analysis finds that mobile-first ads have longer average view times and higher brand recall than traditional or mobile-adapted video ads. Also, there is a huge rise in messaging platforms and you can send Facebook videos directly to users via automated chatbots or messaging campaigns using a tool like Manychat. Facebook video ad like campaigns is also a great way to build your fanbase. We generated 11,000 likes for the GSMM page with only an $800 ad spend budget.

IM: And when someone should use Youtube over others?

BK: YouTube is the most popular video streaming service around. Good for live streams and higher quality video as well as long-form content. It’s great for training purposes, webinars, interviews, speaking engagements, music videos, documentaries, and podcasts. YouTube works in 80 different languages, reaching 85% of the internet, and just 15.8% of YouTube’s visitors are American. In 2018, 70% of millennial YouTubers watched a video on the website to learn ‘how to do something’. Since 2016, the number of small and medium-sized businesses advertising on YouTube has doubled. YouTube ads excel at both building brand awareness and providing customer support after a purchase. We took our best performing Google Hangouts video once a google trend spiked and spent another $800 on a YouTube discovery ad targeting keywords in the most populated countries to get 600 subscribers and 74,000 views to the video.

IM: And when should both be mixed and how would you mix them?

BK: You would use YouTube to drive traffic to landing pages to audiences who have higher intent based on keyword research and then retarget users that land on the Facebook page for cheaper cost per conversion of lead generation. It’s also a good idea to share all your YouTube videos URLs to Facebook to help improve the SEO of your YouTube videos and then repurpose them later as raw mp4 files uploaded to Facebook to allow for more engagement within the native platform. Starting with YouTube first is my suggestion as the content is normally higher quality and content and can be exported later for other use in other marketing channels. You can use both platforms together to build brand awareness, increase the spread of information, drive buyer behavior, provide reminders to curious buyers, use repetition to improve sales, and provide multiple purchase pathways or ways to generate leads.

IM: Could you recommend any great resources for our listeners to use? Which ones do you love using?

BK: These resources can be technological solutions/blogs/podcasts/people you follow/books/gadgets etc., which you believe can dramatically help people like you if they knew about it. Please be specific and include a URL/name of the app/search query that will help people find this resource. try to make these Facebook and YouTube specifically if there are specific tricks or tools you think not a lot of people know about and that helps you be more successful and more efficient. Tubebuddy and this training video on how to evaluate your YouTube Channel. CallRail and this training video on how to Integrate Google Ads with CallRail Phone Tracking. 4K Stogram and this training video on how to turn your Instagram Stories into YouTube videos using 4k Stogram.

IM: What are some great tips you could share that people could benefit from? Or some cool apps you are using, any processes or interesting things your company is doing, management styles and processes, etc.

BK: We are creating an internship program at the university I graduated from. It’s a win-win for students to get experience, class credit, and opportunities to be contractors at my company. This will help them utilize YouTube Discovery Ads and increase YouTube channel subscribers and views with powerful video storytelling use Google Hangouts Calls for video conferencing, team collaboration, remote work, virtual classrooms, and client meetings

IM: If people want to contact you and/or follow you, where and how can they find you (Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/blog/etc.)? 

BK: They can subscribe to our 📺YouTube channel and click here to learn more about our services, or visit our main website 🌏.

Contact us here or call (770) 365-5550.

They could also join the conversation with our community of 40,000 fans on social media: 
👍Facebook,  🐦Twitter,  📸Instagram, and ⛓Linkedin.