E29: Franklin Baeza

Richard Hill:
Hi and welcome to another episode of eCom@One and today's guest is Frankie Baeza who's the founder at the ROAS system with a focus on paid social and also one of the lead trainers at the Blueprint, Facebook's Blueprint training, part of the business program. How are you doing Frankie?
Franklin Baeza:
I'm very well thank you. Thank you for having me on the show.
Richard Hill:
On a tax day... So, you're in Bournemouth today? I think that's right, isn't it?
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah, that's right. I love the coast, so I can't get away.
Richard Hill:
I don't blame you. I don't blame you. We're about 45 minutes away, unfortunately, from the coast. So, counting down the days for a little bit of day trip. So, I think, I'm looking forward to this one big time. It's a topic that's very close to my heart, very close to our agency. So, social ads... So, how did you get into social ads in the first place?
Franklin Baeza:
Well, I was going to say, would you like the long story or the short story? The summarized one?
Richard Hill:
I'll leave it with you.
Franklin Baeza:
You'll leave it with me. Okay, cool. I will try and skip through this as... Get to the point as quick as I can. I'll start with uni. I went to Bournemouth Uni, studied marketing, went to Uni with a business idea, which was hats... Snapback hats for... I used to sell on a market in Woking and I used to sell an American Football snapbacks. I had some regulars which were grannies asking me for UK Football clubs and at that moment I was like, "Oh wow. This is definitely a gap in the market." So, I went to Bournemouth Uni with the idea. I moved quite fast, so with my housemate, that happened to be a graphic designer, we just pumped all... Well, pretty much all my student loan into making three hats, used Alibaba. The hats arrived by October and we were ready to go live by Christmas... And that was my first experience of using social media to amplify a brand, get in touch with celebrities. I thought I came to it a bit too early, if it's possible because didn't have any idea about paid social just yet but that was my first experience on the social media element and the influence element.
Franklin Baeza:
So fast forwards, that came to an end in 2015, so we had an issue with some premier league lawyers and some patent issues and we were very young and naïve and it's just one of those things that came to an end... And then in the summer, that was my first experience at an ad agency. I went to work for the Brooklyn Brothers in Soho. I was one of the planning interns. I was put into creatives workshops. I was asked to get some audience insights and that's when I started playing with the Facebook audience platform... Started to understand how it works but still very, very early stages. I then also-
Richard Hill:
When was this then roughly? When are we talking?
Franklin Baeza:
This is in 2013.
Richard Hill:
'13, yeah. Wow, yeah.
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah, this was a while ago but then through that summer, I spent a bit more time with... I helped around at quite a few internships. I had a great experience with a guy called Battman. He was a consultant and is now one of the leads at Monster Energy, but his strategy formulation and the way he came up with things, really helped me because I was very keen to start my own thing and I actually went back to uni again with another idea. It was a drink... A recreation drink, which again, it's all naivety, right?
Richard Hill:
It's part of the fucking process, isn't it?
Franklin Baeza:
It's part of the process, yeah. Scaling a drinks company is something that requires a lot of funding and a lot of thought process, distribution, bottling, packaging... It just didn't come across my mind but he was very helpful in making me realize that it's probably not the best thing to pursue just yet. So, I went back to uni, finished uni and then in 2014, I had my first job at a start-up, which was my introduction to the tech world. It was called Droplet and it was a financial services company... It was essentially a mobile wallet. They were, again, too early to the game... This was pre-Apple Pay... 2014 and also pre-Monzo and so it was a really interesting experience there. I was made unofficially a growth hacker which was quite hard to explain to my mom. She was like, "You're getting paid to hack?" I was like, "No mum, no. It's a real job title in San Francisco. I promise you." I had to explain that to her...
Franklin Baeza:
And that gave me a real excitement about user acquisition and where I wanted to pursue my career, especially in tech. I actually got made redundant along with all my colleagues a year into the job basically, which was also another eye opener, is that tech is very like... Things can go wrong very easily, if funding doesn't continue, but luckily I managed to pursue another job in tech, which was with a company called Icon Zone and they were doing a market place for footballers to commercialize their social followings.
Richard Hill:
Yep.
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah, footballers now, I'm sure you're aware of this, but footballers now have more followers than the clubs themselves and what these people wanted to do is commercialize the names of the footballers into licensed products. So, there was a lot of analysis on teams and the most influential players in the teams and trying to capture the right players and the right clubs to get those deals and that was, again, it was a great experience in the social space but not yet paid social... And then if I fast forward that to 2015, I started a... Have you heard of Product Hunt?
Richard Hill:
Yes, where you... Yeah, I have, yeah. It's like a group buy type thing.
Franklin Baeza:
So, Product Hunt is like an aggregator or like a forum for tech products and it's updated every day.
Richard Hill:
Software also yeah?
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah, software, apps, it could be hardware... Anything techy... Primarily techy stuff and it was started by a guy called Ryan Hoover and I love the Product Hunt. I used to use it every day and I decided to use that model and try to do it in fashion. So, for a start=up... because I still love the clothing industry. I didn't think I'd go back into it but I wanted to amplify the small clothing industries in the UK. Again, it was one of those things that the commercialization of it, was too difficult. I didn't have any funding; I was self-funded but that very luckily gave me the opportunity to interact with someone called Dan Murray. So, I tweeted him about what I was doing and about what he was doing, which was, he was the founder of a company called Gravel. Gravel would do fashion but in a Tinder style. So, they would suggest clothing to you and you could say yes or no and you could swipe left or right-
Richard Hill:
Yeah I did.
Franklin Baeza:
And when you would swipe yes, if it went on discount, you'd get notified and it was a clever app, very beautifully designed and I actually got brought in there to run the paid social ads. So, that's when my career in paid social started and that was in 2016. I had a short stint there. It was very much a speed learning curve. So, I just got thrown in the deep end, it was like, "Here's a thousand pound a day. Start getting these downloads in and reduce the price of the acquisition cost." I was very lucky because the guy teaching me was... His name's Jack and he was very experienced in the dating sector, which is obviously a massive spender on social ads and he was able to teach me all his techniques, the structure of campaigns, how to monitor performance but I feel very lucky that I was... Please excuse the seagulls-
Franklin Baeza:
I was very lucky that I got put into the deep end straight away because it forced me to learn the product very fast and I got comfortable with Power Editor pretty quickly, which really easier to do mass edits and stuff like that and it was good. We generated over 120,000 app downloads in four months. So, that was a really good stint for me. It wasn't feasible to stay on for reasons that became clear a year after...
Franklin Baeza:
They closed down after a year and a half but they actually forwarded me onto work for Born Social, they introduced me to Born Social, which was one of the UKs... I wouldn't say it's the first but probably one of the first agency's to primarily focus on social, especially in London and they brought me in as their first advertising manager. So, they didn't have any paid specialists at the time, which was an eye opener. It was an eye opener. I was like, "Oh my goodness. There's a lot to do here." And that, I think, was the real learning curve for me in terms of... I was brand side of Gravel and now I'm going to the agency side and I'm seeing how many industries, how many different types of businesses, different types of objectives that they all have, there's different auditors they all have-
Richard Hill:
With your agency side, or in that environment. You're not siloed into, one section aims, one industry, one maybe object type, et cetera. You're getting to see the whole world out there then what's possible and then obviously from that, you are where you are today. So-
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah, it was a great experience. The variety of compliance is what probably made me realize that the power of Facebook products, from B2C, from services, financial services... It was just so broad. It was amazing to see that and it was a really fun experience there. It was a nice, small team. I think they've grown now quite significantly and only gone to get bigger and bigger accounts... But yeah, it was a great experience. That was my first experience.
Richard Hill:
And so obviously a lot of different types of client you've been working with and different companies you've worked for et cetera. Obviously you've worked directly for Facebook et cetera and you've got a lot of experience in all different account types. So, what would you say are the main objectives that you focus on when you're working on social ads?
Franklin Baeza:
I would say I've worked across pretty much all objectives. My now primary focuses are lead gen, app acquisition, app downloads and conversions. They tend to be more high level performance based and drive the real business results, but there is still, I believe, a lot of value in the brand side objectives such as reach, video views because they do deliver fantastic value for money in terms of CPMs and obviously you can build a very, very engaged audience via video, which is a really interesting way to... If you don't have an audience, let's build one, and that's the quickest way to do it. So, if TV could say... If TV ads... If it was possible to understand the attention on an ad and then if someone was fully focused on ads, you could send them an email straight away, that would be pretty powerful, right?
Richard Hill:
So, we're saying, for the guys that are listening, we're saying that using video ads to promote the brand using CPM. Is that what we're saying?
Franklin Baeza:
So, no, reach would be optimizing on CPM, video views would be optimizing on a cost per play or through play but those sort of metrics are on the brand side... Those are the one's you'd be optimizing for on that end and what I'm saying essentially is the costs of that are very effective, used on a whole top to bottom strategy. So-
Richard Hill:
Use that top end to then filter them down to then more direct style of campaigns where we can target ROAS potentially.
Franklin Baeza:
Exactly.
Richard Hill:
Versions.
Franklin Baeza:
Exactly, yeah.
Richard Hill:
Okay. So, we've got a lot of different people on the podcast listening in that are ranging from... We talk a lot about ad words and we've got a lot of people on the AdWords side of things but I think social ads definitely less so and I think people are definitely more open to Facebook ads than they were six months ago, 12 months ago and so on, but for those guys that are wanting to start out on Facebook ads and social ads, where would you say is a good starting point and what sort of advice would you give to those people?
Franklin Baeza:
I would say, the starting point... And this seems obvious but start on the presentation of your social organically. Start on your page, making sure you fill out all the sections that you can, the functionalities that you can. Use the organic features. There is a lot of them. You can have an about section, you can have your cover photo, which could be a video as well. There's loads of different types of formats and posts that you can post from events to polls to galleries and photo's. So, I'd say get comfortable with that first because obviously it's one thing having a personal Facebook profile; it's another thing having a business profile and what I find is, there are a lot of businesses out there that will invest no time at all into their organic and go straight into ads and expect results, when that does have an effect on your overall performance.
Richard Hill:
Thank you. The guys that are listening, you just got to think that you're about to press the button, go live on ads and then the reality is you're not familiar with the platform but then those people that are then going to maybe go to your page, which is inevitable that someone's going to take that literally, which means, you're not even just take somebody seriously, and you've not posted for three weeks or your photo's, in the way it's built out without any... it's quite amusing where I think I saw an ad the other week or I think I saw an ad promoting a dodgy ad, if you like, that sets there's a guy saying he'll teach you how to get a million followers on Facebook and he's had this ad that been alive for two months and it had like three likes, "I mean, okay..." It didn't work out too well, I don't think.
Richard Hill:
So, making sure that your profiles are kept up to date, making sure that they are professional, consistent, which is shared quite often. We get that same challenge where people from sources say "Right, we start ads." Well, we can start ads but the conversions are not... The data is not necessarily going to be very good and so we do this piece of work organically. So, would you typically help them with the organic or would you more educate them and get them to get the clients?
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah. I'd be honest, I wouldn't touch the organic but I would educate them to say, "Look, I'm not going to be able to work with you until you have this set up and until you understand the functionality on the page, it's not even worth talking about the ads yet." It's a great thing for enablement and engagement, right? If someone actually, actively follows your page, that's essentially them subscribing to your content. I want to engage with the company or this company interests me, or this organization interests me. So, it can be a tough one because obviously you can't directly prove return on ad spend or return on investment through social organic. It's very difficult to do that but essentially, it is such a vital part of the performance of the overall ads and also just how, like you said, the perspective. If I click on a page and the last post is 2018, but the ads are like fully... There's loads of very silly ads and stuff. You realize that the company is only focused on one thing, which is revenue and generating profit, which is fine. It's completely fine but it's very obvious... Yeah.
Richard Hill:
Yeah, you're just less likely to purchase aren't you as a consumer. If you do go and look at the page, it's like, "Okay, a lot people still will, because you want it to be, I don't think..." Okay, so you've worked on a lot of different campaigns. What tips would you give our listeners specifically? A specific tip, right now, that are working well for you or have worked well for you and still continue to work well for you? What sort of tips would you give to the listeners?
Franklin Baeza:
So, I would say, really dive down into your business objectives, really, really focus and understand what they are and try to align that with the ad objectives that you have available to you on Facebook. You have to remember what you're optimizing for as well... And also, think about the whole experience. Don't just think, "My website's done; I'm going to send traffic to the website and it should all work fine." The checkout experience needs to be fantastic, page speed is important... All these things are, I'm sure are very valid and important and SEO are also important for Facebook.
Franklin Baeza:
When you actually have an objective, which is to send traffic out of Facebook, Facebook doesn't necessarily want people to leave Facebook. So, if there's any issues with page speed, if there's any kind of horrible pop-ups that come up on the page, that will be penalized. So, it's worth thinking about the whole experience; the flow of the journey and consider that highly when you're making your campaigns. Another thing I'd say is really experiment with formats. A lot of people try to use a horizontal image, which I wouldn't touch anymore. The only types of creative I use is 1 x 1 squares and 9 x 16 vertical or 4 x 5 vertical. They're the ratio's that you need to focus on, which are obviously a bit unusual because they don't actually appear on... I don't think they appear on many other ad platforms. So, It can throw off companies, "How do you make a square image?" There are loads of tools out there, which obviously we'll talk about but that's what I'd recommend... And also motion. Motion is very important. The creative is so important and you often get into loads of different types of creative. So, the way to stand out is obviously movement. It is so simple and it doesn't have to be a one minute Guinness ad or three minute Guinness ad. It just needs to tell someone something within just half a second. You don't have a lot of time.
Richard Hill:
Quick, that split, 90 say seconds, you just got to interrupt that scroll. Oh, yeah.
Franklin Baeza:
Exactly that.
Richard Hill:
Further on yeah. So, making sure that experience, when you go to the site, that's the first thing, making sure that... That goes across any marketing channel, whether you're doing Google Ads or whether you're trying to focus on SEO or conversion, at the end of the day, if you haven't got a good experience on the site, it doesn't matter what you do, that's quite often the first port of call for any type of marketing strategy I would recommend as well.
Richard Hill:
So many people are so geared up on, "We need to double the traffic. We need to double the traffic," obviously conversions and sales but ultimately, it's quite often not that that will attract because a lot of SEO cases, for example, it's about doing that CRO piece at the front end, making sure that the site absolutely converts. The experience over different mobile devices, the check out... I know we've mentioned this in a lot of podcasts over the last six months but, just listen in, go and buy something from your site, from your mobile phone and see if it's successful because I would imagine, 50% of you listening, there's a problem and so, if you've got chat programs, quite often... I see it all the time, the chat program is still showing and, in the checkout, and then there might be some instances you're wanting to but sometimes you can't actually to get to the check-out button. You can't click-
Franklin Baeza:
Blocks is overlaying the-
Richard Hill:
Overlays and then you're trying to click the cross to get rid of the chat and then you can't and then you half, "But you know what? Bugger it, I'll buy it somewhere else," sort of thing. It sounds like that's not going to happen but we see it. We see it literally every other week, we see that a very specific thing, getting lost in the checkout, not being able to get it back. So, that checkout-
Franklin Baeza:
I've had that a lot with outbound checkouts. So, when you go to have a website, you're happy the website, happy the product, click add to cart, everything's looking great. You click purchase and then suddenly it's taking you somewhere else and you like, "Where am I going? I don't want to go somewhere else. I want to buy it here."
Richard Hill:
You've properly set up then at Sage Pay or whatever it may be and they're going off to the third party checkout and then you're like, "Whoa, I'm not putting my credit card in there." Basically, you need to spend half a day with your dev and get that fixed. It's that simple. So, obviously we got a lot of guys that probably will be running ads as well, that are listening. So, they're looking at their ad campaigns, looking at the different campaigns they're running. Now if they're all looking at ad campaign that isn't performing, what sort of things do you look at specifically and what more so on the e-commerce side specifically? What sort of things would you look at that can help improve their returns and ROAS and conversions.
Franklin Baeza:
So, first of all be looking at delivery of the ads. Is there any issues? Is the ad set in learning mode? And if it is, there's definitely a problem and that needs to be fixed. Look at impressions. For me, the reason why I say this is if it hasn't hit a thousand impressions or more, it's not really worth making decision just yet. Unless, obviously, you've had it on for a week and it just isn't spending your budget but in that case... That's sort of my decision point; 8000 plus, is this actually a winner or a loser? Be critical about your actual creative. Think about where you are and who you're selling to and the language you're using. With e-comm, it can be very product focused, very price focused, very offer focused but it doesn't necessarily need to be so direct responsive at the start. It can be a brand ad.
Franklin Baeza:
So, there is some seriously advanced tools in terms of e-comm on Facebook. So, you have the catalogues, which I'm sure you're aware of and if they're implemented right, they can be implemented across industries. So, e-comm, automobiles, property and flights... Obviously flights taken a hit but in terms of those industries they're very much product focused, skew, loads of skews and the interesting part of that is the dynamic deliverability.
Franklin Baeza:
So, if I'm looking at three-bed houses or if I'm looking at a particular shoe size, I can set up the audiences in a way that will only deliver those products that are available to that person. So, if a product goes out of stock, it just automatically takes it out of the ad. If it's re-back in stock, it will go back into the ad. Those ads tend to be like dynamic carousels but there are other ways of using the catalog products. You can add them to instant experiences and you can add them to canvases. So, there isn't just one format of ad on e-comm. So, I specifically say, "Try and experiment with the other formats before cutting the ad spend or even cutting the campaign."
Franklin Baeza:
Another thing is, if you're using video, try and focus on shortening the length of the video. 15 Seconds is optimal and you can do up to three videos, 15 seconds long in a story, back-to-back. So, you can do a 15 second intro, 15 second products, 15 second availability. So, try and adapt your creative to the platform... Use that.
Franklin Baeza:
Another thing I see is dynamic, creative optimization, which is probably not used by everyone. It may seem like you're losing control a bit or you're giving Facebook more power, but in my opinion, it's a fantastic way to use Facebook's platform to it's full potential. In terms of liquidity in terms of placement optimization. It's a really, really clever way to be everywhere at the same time.
Franklin Baeza:
So, what that would do is essentially, you'd use a 9 x 16 and then obviously this would be your main focus area, the 1 x 1... You can have some stuff at the top, some stuff at the bottom but that would be your main creative but then it will be reformatted per placement and the ad will be delivered across all placements, which more recently has expanded quite significantly. So, I'm now seeing placements available in Facebook search. I'm now seeing placements available in the market place. There's now placements available in groups. There's placements in Instagram explore. So there's some serious expansion in the way these ads are appearing and obviously to be in those places, you need to have the right format.
Richard Hill:
So, I think guys, listen to that last two minutes there. I would stop the podcast right now and rewind because there's some real nuggets in there. The newer placements and I think this is where... I personally think that... Hopefully you agree that Facebook is developing that ability of a product, to be the DPA, what we refer to as Dynamic Product Ads, to be able to use those catalogs to create catalogs with products, subsets of products, different types, whether it's all your products and then when somebody's gone to your store and looked at that size seven T-shirt... Whatever it may be, size seven Nike pair of shoes then they didn't buy it, that catalog and the way you've set up your ads is enabling you to then show that size seven Nike to the person that put it in the basket, person that looked at it and obviously bidded a bit differently based on that level of intent...
Richard Hill:
All the different placements. I think, I see a lot more of the placements. Obviously we manage a lot of accounts, all those but I'm seeing more and more, especially in that market place and groups. If you think about some of the targeting you can do there. When there's these passionate groups around the products that you sell and you can place ads on the Marketplace in groups, it's amazing.
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah. Marketplace, I think, is a very interesting product in its own right. I've seen the listings there now expanding into these exact things we discussed on DPA and catalogues, which are houses, cars... Big purchases. Obviously there are competitors out there, Zoopla, Auto Trader. They must be quaking because it is a serious product in terms of the information availability, the ease of searching, the-
Richard Hill:
A lot of variables you can use, isn't there? Well literally just before lockdown, so about seven months ago now nearly, we were about to start a term of a project with a villa company, low and behold, exactly the same holidays at the end of the day, booking, 5-person, an 8-person, a 10-person in a country. All the different variables that you have with an e-commerce SKU, you have with holidays, you have with cars. So there, Facebook Marketplace offering there, is very much solely unique. So, the ability then to show that family of four, that holiday that they looked at three weeks ago and similar holidays and reviews for that same prompt they looked at and the availability and the pricing and the fact that there's only two left of them in August for the family holiday, it's like wow, it's some good stuff yeah.
Franklin Baeza:
It's mad to think there was a time where that was all done manually. This was all done manually by lists... Lists being updated every day, there's exclusion lists and it gets messy. It gets really messy, really time consuming and quite boring and this is why the product's evolvement has been so interesting to see because in such a short space of time, it's now completely, almost completely automated. So, very interested in those new placements and making sure that you're using the right formats for those placements.
Richard Hill:
Lots to look at there. So, obviously you've worked a whole lot of ad campaigns over the years and continue to do so. What's some of the best ad campaigns you've worked on and why have they been so good?
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah... I think in terms of the impact it's had on my career, and also just for the client and for the agency, I'd start with Born Social... There's three that come to mind. I'll start with Born Social and say Backyard Cinema. So, in 2016 they came along in October to talk about their Christmas Show and this is the first time I was given budget at Born Social and also some time to think about how to do this rather than, "Let's do some posts and..." which was the standard thing at the time. So, this is the first real, "Let's think about this strategy," and we came up with a really interesting...
Franklin Baeza:
This is why I say using the brand side objectives and the direct response side objectives are so powerful because we started off with reach campaigns across London, with video's and instant experiences, just to show people what was available, what were the films available, when it was launching et cetera and that was on the start of the campaign. Even through that already, we were generating revenue. So, it was a good sign that this is a product that would be easy to shift and then we re-targeted those video views with web traffic campaigns, which again was driving revenue and driving return on ad spend but then obviously with that traffic, we can now re-target the traffic, create look a likes off the back of the traffic and do conversion ads and we actually managed to sell our tickets with less than 70% of the budget and we actually made... It's a ridiculous return on ad spend. It's like 825 or something like that.
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah and that actually to me was the first time I used the ROAS measurement.
Richard Hill:
Yeah.
Franklin Baeza:
And that's actually the first time I was like, "This is the number." This is the number that everyone's going to be talking about and that actually did.
Richard Hill:
ROAS use these minds.
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah and that's what actually made me realize that I wanted to start my own... Well, when I was to start my own, I would be calling it ROAS Systems and that's what I'd be focusing on.
Franklin Baeza:
That was awarded, Best Paid Social Media Campaign by Social Media Communication Awards and it also won Best Paid Media Campaign by the Drum Dadi Awards. Yeah, so it was really awesome to be part of that. I wasn't actually at the agency when they picked up that. It is what it is. What happens when you hop around too much.
Franklin Baeza:
Another campaign that sticks out is... I was working for an agency called Ality and we had a client called Anchor and they're like they hold anchor jobs,] firm and they were looking to hire across the UK, so what we did is similar style in terms of three pronged approach of driving the reach at the start, re-targeting reach with conversions over the line, but we were actually using the Facebook Messenger to pre-qualify the candidates, which then made the interviews a lot smoother and a lot more effective, so they had a 23% conversion rate on job applicants and a 68% lower cost per applicant, so yeah it was a really good project to work on. The actual bot, I didn't have anything to do with, it was another guy at the company, an absolute wizard, because it required some serious, well, code and some really clever ways of... One of the questions was, "Where are you based? Please enter your post code." You put your post code in, it would run a search, alongside your radius, whether or not there was jobs in your area and then obviously you could be given straight away the jobs that are available for you to apply for.
Franklin Baeza:
So really clever products, really clever campaign and I think it made some waves in the recruitment industry.
Richard Hill:
Different APIs and using automations, scripting, so actually the Facebook Developer API, hook it in with the recruitment data in, yeah, amazing.
Franklin Baeza:
And last one was last year. Well, it took me a long time, so I started talking to them at the start of 2018 and they weren't interested at the start, at all. They were very much on an organic model which is fair enough because they built a really good community, but this was Free trade. So Free trade is a Challenger Stockbroker and they came into the market via crowd funding, so they had a really good user base to start with and I remember talking to them very start, "Oh we need to get you on social ads, we need to get you on social ads." They weren't having it. They weren't very convinced it would work for them at the start.
Franklin Baeza:
I think I sent proposals over the course of a year and luckily no-one else was pursuing them because they came back to me and we worked on a project for three months and the good thing here was my end goal was to prove the channel as a acquisition channel which we did. We did in three months. We generated 10,000 downloads or so, registered downloads, because we were tracking each part of the journey and now they have a team on this. So they've inhoused it and they're up against, I think they're about to hit 250,000 downloads now. They're in a serious growth stage and yeah it was fantastic to be of that. It opened a lot of doors for myself.
Richard Hill:
Brilliant. Brilliant. So I think a lot people with Facebook, it's this creative piece that people get stuck on. You get into the interface and say I'll figure out how to manoeuvre it, if it is a style point, podcast] doing their own thing. It's quite daunting AdWords in a way, probably less daunting than adverts I think, but then I think when it comes down to it, you've got this creative element. What sort of things, tools, tips, you can give the guys, maybe tools definitely? Creative side of Facebook.
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah of course. Yeah, so I think if you're really early stages on this and you're just starting off and for example you want to get started on story ads. I would say, use Instagram itself, so use the Instagram camera, get on the camera, play with the effects, play with the stickers, play with the polls, GIFs, just get used to it and actually that content can be used in ads, because you can download what you've made and then you can send to an email or Google Drive and then you can use that as an ad itself.
Franklin Baeza:
That's obviously not... Wouldn't be the most scalable way to produce content, because obviously it's-
Richard Hill:
A good starting point…
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah, definitely a good starting point, but if you then want to expand the creative, make it look less organic, because using camera will just look like organic content which is one of the benefits of it, it looks native, it looks like it's not an ad, but then obviously if you want to do an obvious ad, which sometimes you need to do, the other products out there, I think I would start with Spark. So Adobe Spark is their new web based client. There's no software, I mean you can get the app on your phone. It's essentially a progressive web app, so you can get it on your phone, you can get it on the web and it's really a clever tool because it has loads of templates, it has... You can upload your brand guidelines on there as well. So if you have any colours, if you have any fonts, if you have logos, you can load all of that into separate brands and then whenever you make a product or an ad you can drop them in the right place, you don't have to worry about what's the hex code or what's the font-
Richard Hill:
Not collaborating with teams and agencies as well, yeah.
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah, exactly. So that's my favourite. Then obviously there's Canva, which is a fantastic product, obviously some people love, hate, because of... designers are probably hating it.
Richard Hill:
Yeah, I'm mad at two designers on the podcast. Yeah, I don't mention it. I thought we use it.
Franklin Baeza:
I don't have any sympathy because it's just how it is. Products evolve and I think if for example, I've had designers I've worked with and they're saying, "I don't know how to animate." I'm like, "I know how to animate, so you need to know how to animate." I not a designer and so there's an element of maybe not liking the fact that it's not a purist approach, but it's a great product and if you're a good designer you can make some great ads on there so... I would say from the bottom of my heart, if you are a designer, you don't have experience in motion, get on Canva, that's a great start.
Franklin Baeza:
And then obviously Adode Illustrator's for some really good graphics if you're into more nitty gritty and they say if you want to plan for example a large campaign with maybe five different personas and you want to have a story ad and then some carousel ads and then an instant experience for each persona, you can make the art boards and map it out, a lot visual, which takes longer, but it can be worth it if you're doing a big campaign like that. And then finally, there's a product called Creative Hub, which isn't used that much, I don't think, it's relatively new. It's on the Facebook ads platform and it allows you to see your ad before you get it into Ads Manager, across all placements like every single placement there is.
Franklin Baeza:
So if I find the designers are probably designing it as a single image and not thinking about the copy above, the copy below, the call to action, the environment it's in.
Richard Hill:
Rather than its ad wilderness.
Franklin Baeza:
Exactly, and I think that disconnect can cause sometimes a bit of... The creative could be better, so I think if you are designing and you want to see what it looks like on the actual ad, get on Creative Hub and check out how it looks on all placements and then-
Richard Hill:
Yeah, I would say that is an area that Facebook are going to develop even more and more as well, that's my thoughts on it.
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah.
Richard Hill:
Got their own tool, they are talking about it more and more and more, they're going to develop that because obviously you're staying in their platform which has got obviously all the... A lot of it's about. So, no one's about that the creative is the challenging piece. So that's great, so I've seen a lot of different ideas there of tools to use, so let's touch on, so obviously you are a lead trainer at the Blueprint, so when we first... The Blueprint for those that are listening, it's Facebook's own training. It's training on the different elements of paid ads. There's all different areas, whether that's the technical side, the numbers side, the creative side, the planning side, the strategy side and in all the different areas. A lot of different questions and Frankie teaches and leads on a lot of that for Facebook.
Richard Hill:
So as a teacher, you must get asked a lot of the same questions, a lot of similar questions. So what are some of the most co, sort of commons things that maybe people ask you and what are the solutions really?
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah, gosh, so I would say, because it's such a large platform and because there's so many... It can be overwhelming right. You get on ads platform and there's so many buttons, there's so many places to start, so I think the main questions that come through is, the creative like, "Well, what creative should I use? Why should I use it?" Audiences like how in depth, how granular they'll go into my targeting and then finally budget. And what's interesting is, these three things are completely unique to your business every time.
Franklin Baeza:
There is no blanket response to any of those questions. The creative can be, if you're selling a hot product that everyone wants, there's no need to do brand ads, so you can focus on direct response. If no one's heard of you and you do direct response straight away, you're not going to get any results, so it's very difficult to give like... This is why it's really interesting to talk to people one to one or in group sessions or... And actually understand their business, but that's actually one of the reasons why I found agency life so tough, because you actually have to understand the person's business and when you are working across, I don't know, forty, fifty, even more accounts, how can I, a third party, understand your business better than you do? I don't think it's possible. As much as I can try, I don't think that's truly possible.
Richard Hill:
Yeah, there's definitely a challenge there on the agency side, I think if you got forty clients then forget it.
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah, exactly, but essentially, it's really coming to terms with your business objectives and understanding how to the Facebook Ads Platform to achieve those goals, because I've had clients where I've gone in and they're straight away starting on conversion ads and their pixel isn't even live and I'm like, "How did you do that? How is that even possible?" Unfortunately it's not very clear as to where to start and I think that's, I would say personally, we discussed this, start on your page, start on understanding that and then maybe start some engagement posts on your first... If you really want to understand the product, the engagement ad, although it doesn't have direct sales correlated or anything like that, it's very cheap. It allows you to test your creative quicker than any other objective.
Franklin Baeza:
So if you have 10 different posts, different types of messaging, different types of language, some with emojis, some without and especially when you're a start-up and you don't know how your messaging is necessarily going to look like.
Richard Hill:
You get it back, when you do that market research with an engagement post cheaply for your people.
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah, and that's what I tend to say is, "Look, if you haven't got any experience with this, start walking. Start on the cheaper stuff. Try to understand what performance means in that objective and then obviously you can transfer that further down the funnel." That's the main thing really is those three factors that, very different to answer on a blanket basis.
Richard Hill:
Yeah, no that's great. Okay well, I think fantastic episode. Lots of great takeaways. That's why I'm going to listen back to it for sure. We always like to ask a book recommendation from all our podcast.
Franklin Baeza:
Oh, cool. Yeah, this is great.
Richard Hill:
What book do you recommend?
Franklin Baeza:
It's a book called Total Rethink: Why Entrepreneurs Should Act Like Revolutionaries and it's by a guy called David McCourt. He's Irish-American and he is in charge of the broad brand rollout in Ireland at the moment, which is a massive expansion across rural Ireland but his story is truly inspiring. He's achieved a lot at a very fast pace and his approach to people, his approach to candidness, his approach to... Even immigration, his views on immigration are very inspiring to me from my own sort of story in terms of my mum, my dad, they're not native to this country and it touched some nerves there. It was a really great, great book.
Richard Hill:
Really resonated, yeah. Fantastic, well we'll make sure that marked up in the show notes. Well thank you so much for being on the podcast. If the guys that are listening in want to find out more about you Frankie, what's the best place to reach out to you.
Franklin Baeza:
Yeah of course. I'm on social. Frankie Baeza. I have a website called thisisanadvert.com which you can check out and also if you are actually active on Paid Social, head over to paidsociallists.com, it's double L and that will take you to a group on Facebook with about 500 other Paid Social Specialists, so it's a big community. It's growing organically and there's a lot of chat there if you have any questions, technical questions, jobs, things like that, it's always... We will welcome anyone to the group.
Richard Hill:
Well thank you so much for being on the podcast Frankie, I'll speak to you again soon.
Franklin Baeza:
No worries, thank you very much.
Richard Hill:
Thank you.