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Facebook Messenger Marketing for B2B -- Special Guest, Larry Kim
66 Plays6 years ago
In this episode, we talk to the go-to source when it comes to Facebook Messenger Marketing: Larry Kim! YES -- that Larry Kim, founder of WordStream and CEO and founder of the best Facebook Messenger Marketing platform, MobileMonkey.
Larry talks to us about :
- How Facebook is changing in ways that make private messaging more important than ever
- Why Facebook isn't just a place for business-to-consumer; B2B marketers can find opportunities there, too
- How Facebook Messenger Marketing can help B2B marketers get the most out of their Facebook presence
- The open/click-through rate with Facebook Messenger Marketing and how it beats traditional email marketing, making it a great additional outreach option
- How early adopters will be rewarded by taking advantage of Facebook Messenger Marketing now while the adoption rate is only at 1% since it's so new
- Tips and best practices to make your Facebook Messenger bot engaging to help with your content distribution
- The way to reach Gen Z with Facebook Messenger Marketing (for both marketers and HR and recruiters)
Want to follow Larry online? You can catch him on Twitter @larrykim or follow him on LinkedIn.
Be sure to catch the Chatbot Master Class! https://mobilemonkey.com/chatbot-marketing-course
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About The B2B Mix Show
The B2B Mix Show with Alanna Jackson and Stacy Jackson is brought to you by Jackson Marketing. Need help with your B2B online presence? Let’s talk!
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Transcript
Introduction to the B2B Mix Show
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the B2B Mix Show with Elena and Stacey. Each week, we'll bring you ideas that you can implement in your own marketing strategy. We'll share what we know and advice from industry experts who will join us from time to time here on the show. Are you ready to mix it up? Let's get started.
00:00:18
Speaker
Hey everybody, I'm Stacey Jackson. And I'm Elena Jackson. We are the co-founders of Jackson Marketing. And in case you haven't heard, we are also sisters.
Guest Introduction: Larry Kim
00:00:28
Speaker
We're bringing you episode 20 of the B2B mix show. Stacey, what's today's topic about? Today's topic is for all you B2B marketers out there who are curious about Facebook Messenger Marketing.
00:00:40
Speaker
We wanted to bring you someone who really knows firsthand about this topic and we are very excited to bring you a unicorn among donkeys, Larry Kim. Alaina, for those who don't know who Larry is, why don't you give them a low background?
00:00:56
Speaker
Larry Kim is the CEO of MobileMonkey, the world's best Facebook Messenger marketing platform and free chatbot builder. He's also the founder of Wordstream, the leading provider of Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and keyword tools used by over a million marketers worldwide. Larry is ranked among the top 10 most popular authors on Medium. He's a contributor to CNBC and Inc. magazine,
00:01:22
Speaker
His interests include chatbot marketing, Google ads, Facebook ads, entrepreneurship, and startups. Larry has also received marketer of the year awards for search engine land, US search awards, and PPC hero. Larry, we are very excited to have you today and welcome to the B2B mix show. Oh, great. Thank you very much for that intro and it's great to be here.
Facebook's Shift to Private Messaging
00:01:44
Speaker
Larry, before we dig into any questions, and we do have some specific ones about Mobile Monkey, is there any background you'd like to share before we get into the conversation about Facebook Messenger marketing? Sure. At a high level, Facebook is in a bit of trouble with their newsfeed. They're getting all sorts of criticism whenever the newsfeed has these live streams of murderous rampages.
00:02:07
Speaker
And also getting in trouble whenever they try to censor certain people from the newsfeed. And so overall, it's kind of a mess. They don't want to be in the business of trying to figure out what content is correct and what content should be on the newsfeed and not. And earlier this year, they announced that the future of
00:02:31
Speaker
of Facebook isn't the Facebook they have for today. It's more about private messaging and groups. And so that makes a lot of sense because the news feed is causing all sorts of terrible things. But I think the main question is just how do marketers adapt? Because you're probably used to marketing on the social platform that you know today. But
00:02:53
Speaker
what are marketers supposed to do like in the future? And so that's kind of, you know, what was hoping to talk a little bit about like in terms of messaging and how to do marketing on this new channel. Yeah. And that kind of leads into one of our first major questions as our podcast is primarily focused on B2B marketing and sales topics.
B2B Marketing Opportunities on Facebook
00:03:14
Speaker
And one of the things we've noticed over the last few years is that B2B marketers just don't find Facebook at all attractive and they don't spend
00:03:21
Speaker
a lot of their effort there. But Stacey and I have actually seen firsthand for managing some of our B2B client accounts that people are actually visiting their pages and going there for information. So what is it that you think B2B marketers are missing when they ignore Facebook? Most people have a Facebook account, so you're just missing out on Reach.
00:03:44
Speaker
So if you have all the customers you need and all the leads that you have, then there's no need to ever market on Facebook. But generally, that's not the case. Usually, businesses are looking for more leads and more sales. And if people are spending so much time on Facebook, and if they're the same people that you're trying to sell, generally, it's the same.
00:04:12
Speaker
the same people who visit your B2B website are the same people who use Instagram and Facebook and other Facebook products. You're just missing out on reach and the opportunity to
00:04:25
Speaker
have your brand to kind of be in all the places where your customers spend a lot of time. Additionally, there's a lot of unique targeting parameters for Facebook that are uniquely valuable for B2B marketing. So a couple of them come to mind like custom audiences. So that's where if you take the phone numbers and emails of your
00:04:50
Speaker
have your best customer prospects and upload those to facebook you can get a fifty percent match rate on facebook and that's the highest match rate of any platform in terms of being able to match.
00:05:02
Speaker
the leads that you have in your system to logged in users of a platform. Beyond that, they've got remarkable ad targeting options for B2B specifically, like job titles, companies, like you can go after specific name to companies, size of company, location, behaviors, purchasing histories, interests, demographics. These are one use components
00:05:30
Speaker
In combination, I think it's actually substantially better than, I don't know, LinkedIn ads targeting. It's probably just a bias. When people say, Facebook isn't great for B2B, I certainly haven't seen that to be the case.
00:05:47
Speaker
Do you think some of that comes about from when organic reach kind of went down with some changes that happened in Facebook? Do you think that that's why a lot of B2B marketers at least kind of moved away from that? Well, that was a kind of a transition that's kind of been happening over, you know, five, seven years now. So, you know, I just think that it's possible that you might be
00:06:15
Speaker
you might be connecting with these customers outside of work hours, possibly, and then perhaps they value it less, although I think, you know, if you can get them to engage with your content, that's valuable regardless of the platform. So I don't know what the root of that bias is. I don't necessarily share those views.
00:06:37
Speaker
So as far as the B2B marketers who do want to do more on Facebook, looking at a chatbot marketing or Facebook messenger marketing opportunity, how could that really help them get the most out
Benefits of Messenger Marketing for B2B
00:06:50
Speaker
of Facebook? The issue here is chat is not very scalable, right? So like, you know, people message your Facebook page all the time, but usually those inquiries go unanswered. Okay. Like, like it's, they just end up in your Facebook page inbox and then, you know, maybe someone will answer them, maybe not.
00:07:08
Speaker
And so what Messenger has done is they've, in partnership with companies like Mobile Monkey, we've developed technology that allows businesses to kind of engage with customers in a more conversational way, like by sending messages, as opposed to just showing up in their newsfeed, like so you can show up in their messaging space. And so, you know, like most B2B marketers are doing, you know, content marketing, you know, like podcasts or videos or blog posts. And so like, you know,
00:07:37
Speaker
I presume that the reason why these businesses are creating this content is for it to be consumed by their audience. And so you could look at messaging as just sort of a 2020 equivalent of email marketing from 20 years ago. It's just another distribution channel for content and for engagement.
00:08:02
Speaker
I think that I'm sure we can agree that having more people produce all of these white papers and B2B content that we're producing, like having it consumed by more people who are of the right demographics would be valuable. And so that's sort of the value proposition as I see it for B2B marketers.
00:08:20
Speaker
And as far as using a solution like MobileMonkey versus Facebook Messenger platform itself, what is it that marketers should look for and why would they want to use a MobileMonkey solution versus the general Messenger in Facebook? Sure. That's a really good point. One thing that people don't really realize is that
00:08:41
Speaker
There is no messenger tools in Facebook Business Manager. So like if you go into Facebook Business Manager, you have tools for managing your Facebook page and tools for managing your group and tools for managing your ads. But there are no tools for managing messenger automation. So like the ability to do blasting to like
00:09:01
Speaker
Uh, you know, all your subscribers or the ability to do drip campaigns, like, you know, like automated responses to, to, to people based on, you know, certain activities, like the, the, the messenger product is actually like for, for businesses is actually very new there. They have a.
00:09:19
Speaker
an API for solution providers like MobileMonkey to build custom solutions. However, there is no messenger tools in Facebook Business Manager. So it's kind of the only game in town is to find a messenger solution provider such as MobileMonkey and use those tools if you're interested in exploring the channel. Hey folks, let's take a break to hear about today's sponsor.
00:09:50
Speaker
And we are back!
00:09:53
Speaker
From the things I've read on the Mobile Monkey site, it sounds like your click-through rate or your open rate would
Email vs. Messenger Marketing
00:10:00
Speaker
definitely beat, assuming you're not totally boring in the way you do it, would beat email marketing. Yeah, like I was saying earlier, the messaging is a lot like email in that you can initiate a conversation. So I can do a push notification to all my subscribers, just like how you can send emails to all your email lists, correct?
00:10:22
Speaker
So the issue is that with email, because the spam is such a big problem, deliverability on newsletters and stuff like this, even if you've opted into them, it's still 5% to 10%
00:10:37
Speaker
open rates and zero to one percent click through rates. So messaging, it doesn't have the spam problems because it has a very rigid permissions model. So if you're just trying to do email marketing, you can go to Zoom info and buy a list of, I don't know, B2B businesses or something like that. You can just buy a list of names.
00:10:58
Speaker
and then you can just start blasting them and there's no issues there. Nothing's stopping companies from just spamming people, but in messaging, you can only send messages to people who've explicitly granted your company permissions to message them on Messenger. So as a result, you tend to have smaller lists, but those lists have
00:11:20
Speaker
astronomical engagement rates, like 80% open rates and 20% click-through rates, which is pretty typical. And I don't think it's just tricking people by triggering the push notifications, because if that was true, why would there be a 20% click-through rate? You see what I'm saying? So people would just ignore it and block the bot if they were so mad. But actually, 20% of people are clicking on these things, which is much higher than the 1% typically you see in email.
00:11:49
Speaker
It's like a really exciting new emerging channel for distribution and just for keeping in touch with your customers. I don't think that you should do it instead of email, but people overwhelmingly use messaging in general as their communications platform. I think it's generally a good idea to embed yourself into those places where your customers hang out.
00:12:17
Speaker
And you're not inundated like you are with email. Like you get tons of emails from all over every day. And it's probably less that they're getting through Messenger. And that's probably one of the reasons why some of those open rates are higher than email. Yeah. Yeah. That's another thing. And so in marketing, it's all about first-mover advantage. Like, you know, you were talking about the decline of Facebook page reach, but like if you were doing this, you know, Facebook organic marketing, you know, 12 years ago, then you would have been having a great
00:12:47
Speaker
return on investment. All these marketing channels, they dramatically, disproportionately reward the early adopters of the technology and it's never going to be easier to get messenger subscribers as it is today because it's just so new and only about 1% of businesses are actually using it.
00:13:09
Speaker
Oh, really? There's only there's only about 400,000 messenger chatbots in the world, but there's about 180 million businesses. So it's less than less than 1%. Oh, wow. Are there GDPR concerns that people would have to be aware of? Or does Mobile Monkey or even Facebook help people not get in trouble?
00:13:31
Speaker
Yeah, so MobileMonkey is just using the Facebook Messenger API. So when you start a conversation for the first time with a business over Messenger, it serves you this kind of Facebook terms and conditions kind of thing like, you know, by starting this conversation, you're agreeing to blah, blah, blah. It's like one of those click through licenses. And
00:13:55
Speaker
Nobody ever reads it, but that's basically to check all the boxes for these GDPR consent requirements to inform the customer how the data is being used, et cetera, et cetera. So basically, the Facebook lawyers have figured this out, and all we're doing is we're just using their technology to send messages. Well, that's convenient.
00:14:24
Speaker
With all the noise out there, like millions of new blog posts published every day and you were talking about trying to get content in front of the right people, Mobile Monkey could help people do that. And I love the way that you guys do it because it's very engaging and entertaining when I get those little messages from Mobile Monkey.
00:14:43
Speaker
So what are your tips and best practices for a B2B business? Obviously, don't be boring, but what are some good ideas of how they could actually make it more engaging and interactive so people want to go download that white paper?
00:14:57
Speaker
Sure. So we don't just take our email marketing emails and paste them into the chat and then send them out. It's a different medium, so there's different best practices. One of the things we do is we
00:15:17
Speaker
So chat there's an expectation of it being an interactive medium so like if you think of your own chat discussions with your husband or your friends it's usually like back and forth like you know ten times or something like that you know me.
00:15:31
Speaker
And so the idea here is to take the message that you want to send and break it up into short sentences. You'll never guess what happened. And that's your opening message. And then you provide some buttons. It's like, no, no, tell me what happened. You just have all these providing the user the ability to respond and interact with the content that you're providing.
00:15:59
Speaker
So each message should be very short. It should be very informal. We actually don't even use capital letters. It's all lowercase. We use emojis and gifs.
00:16:11
Speaker
and spelling abbreviations because that's very customary for chat communications. It's very informal. And basically, that's some of the obvious stuff. Some of the more advanced stuff include asking the user questions instead of declaring something. So I think a lot of blog posts are more of the declarative style where you say you
00:16:34
Speaker
you make it some kind of a bold claim. Like, you know, like if you think of blog posts, you could say like, you know, five ways to do email marketing or something like this. Like, that would be a blog post that you would send. But like, in chat, you might want to frame it a little differently. You might, as your opener, be like, hey, are you struggling with low email open rates, you know? And then
00:16:57
Speaker
kind of engage the user in that way. Eventually, you can just send them the link to your blog post, but you kind of just got to that location, got to that outcome in a more kind of conversational way. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, more relaxed. And you guys do a great job of that. I always click through.
00:17:19
Speaker
So I want to switch gears just a little and talk about the coming Gen Z people that are now coming into the workforce.
Reaching Gen Z through Messenger Marketing
00:17:26
Speaker
I think they're top of that demographic. They're now in their 20s. They don't really use Facebook to the degree that they use Instagram and other platforms that are kind of more private or limited group type situations. So
00:17:40
Speaker
With Facebook unifying messaging for Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, does messenger marketing or something like MobileMonkey present a better way for companies to reach this demographic? Yes. You still need to get people to opt into your messages because you can't just randomly send messages to people.
00:18:01
Speaker
So, there's an ad format called click to messenger ad for Instagram, okay? So, what I would be doing is I would be running like, you know, some really cool hip video, you know, ad on Instagram because that's where those kind of Gen Z people hang out. And I'd be offering them something like if they click the button, like offer them like, I don't know, a gift card or something, you know, just like,
00:18:30
Speaker
Just trying to get people to subscribe with a click to messenger ad. As soon as the user clicks on the ad, they've opted into receiving messages from your business. You see what I'm saying? So it's kind of like a, I don't know if you remember this, but like, you know, 15 years ago, there was like a Facebook like ad.
00:18:48
Speaker
Like where, where you'd run an ad and if they, they click the button, they would become a fan of your page, you know? So, you know, now it's 2020. So it's kind of, they've kind of changed the game a little bit where you, the goal is not to get page fans, it's to get messaging subscribers. So they have a new ad format called click to messenger ads, which if the user clicks on them, they become a messenger subscribers so that, so that you can send them, you can send them like a.
00:19:14
Speaker
some content and start a dialogue with them on Instagram chat or on Messenger. You see what I'm saying? I think that'd be a fun way for recruiters who if these people aren't on LinkedIn to maybe put a job at and click a message to reach us about this application. I just think that'd be neat. Yeah, because Instagram and Facebook have amazing targeting options, you could
00:19:37
Speaker
Be very selective you could you know narrow it down to recent grads with like i don't know engineering degrees you know just and then you could you could talk you could talk to them about their you know possible career opportunities like you know in in their space like doing it through messaging rather than sending people to you directly to your
00:19:59
Speaker
your website. It's just kind of a differentiated, more interactive way of doing that. Here's the thing with ads or marketing in general, you're making a lot of assumptions. So in marketing, if I post something to my wall or if I post an ad to an audience, I'm assuming that this content that I'm creating is relevant to the users who will consume that content.
00:20:27
Speaker
And these assumptions are usually wrong. In messaging, you don't have to make those assumptions. You can just conversationally ask the person, are you looking for a job? Yes or no? Based on the answer of that question, you can very decisively understand what their interests are, as opposed to just guessing based on, oh, I think my email list will be interested in this, or I think this ad audience will be interested in this.
00:20:54
Speaker
And then messaging based on the feedback you're getting from the user, you can change the next question. So you don't just continue down this funnel asking them irrelevant questions. You have to kind of adapt to the answers that are being provided by the user and just sending them down.
00:21:18
Speaker
different pathways. If they say, I'm looking for a software testing job in the South Boston area, now that you've collected that information, you should then send them to the right page on your website, as opposed to just sending them to all the tech jobs. You see what I'm saying?
00:21:38
Speaker
You can kind of pre-qualify and figure out where to send them and then send them, you know, you can still send links on Messenger, but what you can do is you can find out more about what offer will be relevant to that user, you know? Yeah. Okay, Larry, we don't want to take up too much more of your time, but we do have one more just for fun questions that we like to wrap up our conversations with.
Larry Kim's Alternate Career Interests
00:22:00
Speaker
And we came up with this one specifically for you.
00:22:02
Speaker
If you weren't creating software for marketers, what other industry or niche would you find interesting to tackle next and why? I think I'm very happy building software for marketers. But if, you know, for whatever reason, I wasn't doing this, you know, maybe just doing like math, math teaching or computer science professors, something related to education. That'd be great. So I hope I hope you like kids, if that's one thing that you would be doing.
00:22:31
Speaker
Yeah, I have two boys, one's zero and one is four and they are a handful. Oh, wow. I was going to say that those those two ages are probably a handful.
00:22:42
Speaker
Yeah. All right. So marketers, there you have it. Reasons why B2B marketers should consider Facebook messenger marketing straight from Larry
Connecting with Larry Kim
00:22:51
Speaker
Kim. Larry, if our audience would like to follow you online or get in touch with you, what are the best ways to do that? I'm on Twitter. So that's Larry Kim on Twitter. I check that every day. Also LinkedIn or Mobile Monkey has a Facebook group called Mobile Monkey Island. And that's, that's just available on Facebook.
00:23:07
Speaker
All right. Also listeners, I saw on a Facebook live today on Larry's page about Facebook messenger chat bot masterclass offered by mobile monkey. It's on their website. We'll include a link with that along with Larry's contact info in the show notes. And I've already signed up for it and nobody paid me to say that. I think it'll be great. I already took a peek at the content. Larry, thank you for joining us. We really do appreciate your time and taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to us. Yeah, we really appreciate it. Thank you. And, uh,
00:23:36
Speaker
Well, thanks for reaching out. Have a good day. Okay, people. That's a wrap. If you want to get in touch with me or Stacey, you can hit us up on social. On Twitter, you can find Stacey at Stacey underscore Jax. That's S-T-A-C-Y underscore J-A-X. And you can find me at Elena underscore Jax. That's A-L-A-N-N-A underscore J-A-X. And hey, maybe you're not a Twitter fan. Looks up on LinkedIn. Stacey Jackson, Orlena Jackson. We will respond to you with any questions you might have if you reach out to us.
00:24:04
Speaker
Finally, don't forget you can also leave us a voicemail on the Anchor mobile app. Yeah. All right, people. Thanks for joining us. Have a great week. Bye. The B2B Mix Show is hosted by Stacy Jackson and Elena Jackson of, you guessed it, Jackson Marketing. If you need help with your B2B inbound marketing efforts, visit us at JacksonMarketingServices.com.