Facebook ads are cheap. You can segment your audience to the Nth degree.But all that doesn't matter if you don’t take one more step, says Bud Torcom, CEO and co-founder of digital marketing agency Mazama Media.Bud sees a lot of companies going about their social media marketing strategy all wrong. The solution: a blend of tried-and-true marketing principles and taking advantage of the innovation available on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.If you think Facebook doesn’t work… Bud tells you what you may be doing wrong, as well as…
- The role of creative with segmented audiences
- The best way for a new company to capitalize on social media
- Why branding still matters
- Facebook and Instagram’s next sweet spot
- And more
Listen now...
Mentioned in This Episode: mazamamedia.com
'Social Media Marketing Strategy' Episode Transcript:
Steffen Horst: Welcome to the Performance Delivered, Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success podcast where we talk with marketing and agency executives and learn how they build successful businesses and their personal brand. I'm your host Steffen Horst.
Today I'm happy to have as our guest Bud Torcom, Bud is the CEO and founder of Mazama Media, a creative marketing company aimed at offering high quality, affordable priced, social media solutions for businesses. Before founding Mazama, he ran his own bike shop and used social media to sell thousands of bikes. Bud, great to have you on the show.
Bud Torcom: Thanks, it's great to be here.
Steffen Horst: Bud as I just said, before you founded Mazama you had your own bike shop where you used social media to sell bikes. Is that the first time you came in touch with marketing?
Bud Torcom: Actually well the first time I would say I think I was seven or eight and I bought a bunch of Beanie Babies for $5 and they started going crazy in price selling around 70, $80 for some of these Beanie Baby bears and other ones as well. And my first lesson in marketing is actually when I was looking to sell them at a fair and I just had them thrown all over the kitchen table. Not the kitchen table, a picnic table that they have just thinking whatever, people will buy them.
And my dad was just like, "No, you need to be able to set them up right and be proud of your product and have them all nice and set, marketed and pointed correctly so that people can really see what it is that you're trying to sell." And that was my first lesson in marketing there. The bike shop was actually a bit of guerilla marketing, that was back in college in 2010, 2011.
And so I was pushing the biz up on Facebook, I was making some sales but I was also printing flyers, had a lot of activity on Craigslist and started to see a bit of activity on Facebook. But it actually wasn't until I got involved in another company called cQpon that I was an owner in, where we ended up getting funded and this is after college and I was living in Bend.
And we got funded from the startup, not a ton of money, it was $100,000 but it was enough for the town of Bend for me to basically market the app that we built in every conceivable way. We bought newspaper, radio, television, Facebook ads, Twitter, Google AdWords, basically you name it.
Besides the Yellow Pages we did it and by far the highest ROI was from Facebook followed by Google and then Twitter and then TV and radio and print. They didn't even really make the same graph actually, as far as comparison to that app being downloaded.
Steffen Horst: Did you back then, look at how the more upper funnel channels like TV, radio impacted the more mid and lower funnel channels?
Bud Torcom: In a way, I had a hard time putting it all together. I'm not like a digitalist so I'm not one to just be like, "Oh TV's dead, radio is dead." I just think that they're overpriced right now, I think they are asking too much money for the amount of ears of people they're getting in front of. Where Facebook and Instagram are very underpriced, and you can get in front of way more people and actually have an exact audience for a lot cheaper than TV and radio. And also you can measure things like did they go to my site, did they purchase stuff, all sorts of stuff you can do there.
With TV it's just, "They did a Nielsen Rating and it sounds like people saw it." and radio was just like, "Yeah we're pretty sure." It's much, much more wishy-washy as far as what's going on with your content when it's being distributed on those platforms. But that's not to say that they aren't being distributed and people are not seeing and hearing it because they are. It's just it's a more difficult game to play when it comes to is this upper channel stuff working.
Steffen Horst: Yeah, that makes sense so I guess doing Facebook advertising at 10, 11, 12, that must have been almost like the gold rush time. It reminds me a little bit of Google back in early 2000s when you could buy clicks for 5 cents and even less and you would have a huge return on advertising, return on investment.
Bud Torcom: Yeah, the cost, well when I started Mazama that was 13 and that was just a little after starting with Mazama was from cQpon and seeing the ROI that we got from Facebook. I was like, we could do this for other businesses and that's what that blew up from. And the cost then for CPM because it's done differently in Google AdWords it's not like, you could pay per click but you definitely want it to be optimized per CPM, meaning cost per 1,000 impressions.
But shoot I mean it was 70 cents or something, now it's $4 or $5 but that's still right now it's still a gold rush because it will one day probably in the next couple years it will be 30 or 40, which if you think about it if you're just wishy washy on Facebook right now, you should be on because one day you're going to be like, "It costs $45 now and people aren't paying as much attention. I should have bought it when I was 4 of $5." I'm more thinking there's a gold rush being right now for those that are willing to recognize that it's happening.
Steffen Horst: You still think that inventory is so massively unpriced?
Bud Torcom: Absolutely yeah, absolutely. Same with Instagram, Facebook owns Instagram so it's around the same price and then stories are still incredibly underpriced as well, 2, $3 CPMs is pretty insane. You think of it like a cost per 1,000 impressions and being like you're paying for a Facebook newsfeed 4 bucks on average in this country being US. To get in front of 1,000 specific people that you want to get in front of not like, "Hey this is 1,000 people that live in Portland."
No, this 1,000 people that live in Portland who are also vegan who also drive Priuses, that specific and that for $4 is pretty insane and if you're able to take the creative, the content, the thing that that Prius vegan driving Portlander is going to resonate with and take time on that, you're going to win big time and you're going to be doing it for 4 bucks for 1,000 times. They see it, I mean wrapping your head around that is pretty fricking insane, that much going to coverage, that specific audience for that low amount of money.
Segmented Audiences
Steffen Horst: I guess a lot has to do with audience and the selection of who you're going to target. It's a little bit like paid search, if you have a keyword on broad match and you blast it out without any focus, you will spend a lot and you won't get a lot of results, positive results. I assume the same is with Facebook, if you don't break down your audience segments and I assume create creatives that fit for that audience segment, you probably have the same issue as with a broad match keyword approach on Google.
Bud Torcom: Yeah, but a lot of people also get and sometimes my team gets caught up in this as well and I bring this back. I'll get caught up in it, a lot of people do when it comes to Facebook and it's been marketing. It's just this idea that if you meet the right audience then they're going to buy. We got it down to those vegan Prius driving Portlandiers. They are totally going to love our vegan Prius only air freshener.
That would make sense but if your creative sucks and if you're not saying, "Hey Portland, preservationists and look how cool this is and you need to take time and you need to stop." Because my audience is right, they're going to buy what I have to show them but there's no time on the art then you're going to fail as well.
The secret that people, it's just that it takes time and people don't want to do it so you're able to break down. I mean your product you probably can sell it more than just people that live in Portland who are vegan and drive Priuses. You could probably also do it to people who are in Seattle, you could probably also to people around LA and Chicago. That's a whole other different things and those people talk different ways, those people like different things.
I mean just saying, "Hey Chicago." and then not talking about the vegan thing but they end up seeing that because it's some sort of vegan product. And then you say I have that same ad saying, "Hey Portland." and then the same one saying, "Hey Seattle." and the same one saying, "Hey LA." and then you get even more specific, "Hey Thousand Oaks." "Hey Santa Monica." "Hey Santa Barbara."
Instead of just, "Hey LA area." and you make those videos over and over and over again. Then people are going to stop because you've been relevant to them, but people just don't want to take the time to do that. They think that if I just get the right audiences and throw it out there they'll buy and when they don't they're like, "Oh Facebook doesn't work." No you didn't take the time to stand out from the crowd to make it work.
Internally we're doing for our own marketing we're going to be hitting ecommerce, people in ecommerce that live in Oregon and Washington to start and I'm in front of a green screen saying, "Hey Husky fans, hey Beaver fans, hey Duck fans, hey Timbers fans, hey Blazers fans." And a few others and I'll be in front of those stadiums and making comparisons about, "Hey Beaver fans." which Oregon State Beavers. That's my alma mater, we won last year's College World Series.
Our football team is horrible, so you want your marketing to be our football team or our baseball team on being relevant to them. And I'm going to target to ecommerce players who are Oregon State fans and everyone's going to stop and they're going to appreciate that as you can imagine you would because I'm taking the time to make something for the viewer.
Steffen Horst: What you're basically saying, what I hear is it's great when you break out audiences and that's not all. What you really have to have is a creative so an ad unit that really communicates with that audience that you basically build out, is that correct?
Bud Torcom: Yeah, exactly. You can direct the audience and that's great but if you don't take time on the art of it then you're going to lose.
Steffen Horst: Is there anything specific about creative because you can spend as you said, very little time on a creative and you probably will not be successful or you can spend a lot of time. What is it from a creative perspective, maybe the top five things that people should adhere to in order to do develop a creative that helps them to be successful?
Bud Torcom: Well first thing is you need to have a brand strategy and you need to have a brand. What I've learned over the five years of running Mazama, the companies that we have failed, they were newer companies and they would come in without a brand. And they would just expect because they made this thing first, this market that it would sell and as I was learning myself over the years I'm like, "Yeah well that makes sense."
And so we'd be working and we want to add much success, well now we realize that no, you need to have a brand and a brand strategy put into place and that needs to be followed. If you're making a bunch of Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google or display ads and TV commercials, whatever it is that you're doing you need to be having brand guidelines. You need to be having different colors and stuff like that, that's going to communicate to people saying, "That's that brand, I remember that brand."
The frequency of and they remember you, then once they trust your brand because you've been pushing your brand and not selling, then they'll start to buy. On the creative side whatever is your branding guidelines, whatever you decide to go with, stick with it. Get creative within those boundaries but that needs to be your boundaries. Second is video is king, if you don't have a bunch of video you can use, then start making movement from the pictures using apps like Legend which you can do on your phone.
You can take a picture of your product and then have words fly across the screen in as little as five seconds from your phone. Movement is big and then understanding that vertical video is the key to story success and understanding that stories is what's taking over Instagram and Facebook. Not only should that mean that your content should be done both horizontally and vertically so that people can interact with it on both of those platforms.
And tell stories completely wins which I think would be my personal opinion after talking with Facebook and what they've been telling that it seems like two years from now that newsfeed will end up being pretty irrelevant.
Steffen Horst: Okay. You just obviously said a few of the things that are really, really important. One thing you said is that, "You need to have a brand." Are you saying that if you're a new brand, a new product, you don't have that brand value there is no recognition.
Probably going in and saying, "Hey you know what, I want to achieve a five to one return on investment, return on advertising spend." is probably a little bit unrealistic. Because you first need to actually start building your brand and build familiarity with your audience before you then can basically go ahead and start selling your product today.
Bud Torcom: Yeah, exactly. Brand is everything, it's absolutely everything, that's why people buy everything that you're wearing right now. You look down at the clothes you're wearing right now and see what you're wearing, odds are it's not because a cookie followed you around and that's why you bought those jeans. And that's why you bought whatever shoes that you have on or whatever that is. Just because we ended identifying with the brand over time and you decide that you ended up trusting it.
When it comes to sunglasses, I mean there's plenty of people that makes up that looks like Ray-Ban stuff but people want the Ray-Ban stuff and it's just the name. Okay well if that's the case why? Well they put the time in to build the brand, so you got to understand. Can't you make conversions during that time while you're building that brand?
Absolutely, absolutely you can but this whole idea like okay I just started a company, now I'm going to start selling like hotcakes on Facebook overnight. Well if it is that easy everyone would be doing it, we'd all be trillionaires it would be great. But no, you have to develop that brand first, you have to figure out the most inexpensive way of doing it and you got to keep on giving value to your potential consumer.
And then ask them for a sale later on instead of demanding it in the beginning because that's the same as kissing somebody on a first date. That typically doesn't work out too well. Actually it's more like asking somebody to marry you on a first date, that really doesn't work out too well and that's what a lot of startups and companies are doing. That's what a lot of established brands end up then doing on different social platforms with not a lot of success.
Because it's just like hey yeah, I know of you but you're new to me here on this, this being Instagram, this being Facebook, whatever. Develop what is your language on this platform before we start saying, "Buy, buy, buy, buy."
Steffen Horst: Obviously you have several solutions within Facebook, you can do prospecting, were you still targeted but you do more brand awareness approach. And then obviously you can do retargeting on Facebook where you re-engage with people that went to your site and found out about the company, the products, the services. From your experience those two tactics, obviously in the beginning you don't have much retargeting because you need to build that retargeting full.
Do you see the return on investment more on the retargeting, remarketing side and not so much on the more prospecting awareness side? Or over time when you've built the brand within your audience, do you also then see the return on the prospecting approach where you hit people depending on your frequency, several times?
Bud Torcom: Well yeah, we look at it as a funnel so they're not two different things. They are two different things but the one hand feeds the other, so the prospecting and putting out that net to those vegan Prius drivers, you have first start getting them to your site, they you can retarget them on the Facebook pixel. But you want to be giving them content, you want to be giving them value, lots of different videos on the air freshener thing you're trying to sell them.
And they can start really seeing it more and then when they've been on the site a few times and you can see that they're pretty interested. And they haven't, maybe they've put the air freshener into their cart but it's time for them to convert, well if you have your Facebook pixel set up correctly then you can retarget them with like, "Hey you forgot to convert this, you forgot to buy this out of your shopping cart."
Right now we're having amazing success with one of our clients called World Weather and they're pretty established medium-sized company out of Eugene. They have locations across the US, New York, Venice Beach, all over the place, Denver. And basically we are getting a huge ROI off of the retargeting area to spend right now but we know that that retargeting audience will be exhausted so we are putting more money into the prospecting because retargeting doesn't work forever.
They're going to buy or not or they already do buy and then there will be opportunity for up sell and cross sell but if you just get caught up in this whole, well this is great, just put more money in the retargeting side, it's going to dry up.
Steffen Horst: You need to feed the pool.
Bud Torcom: Pretty much.
Steffen Horst: That makes sense. I'm sure you had your share of companies that come to you and say, "You know what, we heard you're great. Can you deliver us great ROI from Facebook marketing because that's a channel we haven't figured out." And obviously many of those companies, they have this expectation as we talked about a second ago, that the dollars come in immediately.
How do you deal with them, how do you talk to them and explain to them that it's not like this magic machine that you just turn on and all of a sudden, the dollar bills come out and you can just rake them together and bring them to the bank?
Bud Torcom: Well depending on the company by if what you're describing, if they're new and they have this product and the brand's definitely not established I'm going, "Okay it's time for us to give a lot of value on Facebook and on Instagram. We got to be talking about if we were doing, for me personally when I'm putting other content on LinkedIn I'm not talking about, "Hi, here's what you do with a pixel and if you want to know the rest give us a call and well give you a free social media consultation."
Or, "This month only we'll give you, your first month will be half off." No, just talk and give value, this is what you need to do, this is how you should be setting up. I'd be talking about philosophy, I'd be talking about books that I read and stuff like that and not expecting anything in return.
What's the most value I can give to the world and without expecting anything and people end up coming and they end up buying from you. Just because you put them in that situation of learning as opposed to oh you have to buy all the time. When clients come and they're like, "I want to sell these sunglasses, we've just made them more awesome." and this other company is selling the same sunglasses and there should be no reason, we're not getting their kind of numbers and blah, blah, blah, which is an exact experience I've had.
And I'd be like, "Listen slow down, if we don't build your brand and give value nobody's going to care. And this company that you're comparing it to that you think that we could just turn you into overnight, they've been established for over five years. You just opened literally this month, so let's get building the brand, let's get people used to seeing you. Let's have you be a normal thing that people like to watch is people."
Companies need to stop thinking of themselves as commercials on Facebook and Instagram, they need to be thinking about themselves as the publishers. They need to be thinking of themselves as a TV show and not the commercial. They need to start showing the behind the scenes type stuff, what inspired them to make these sunglasses that float in water?
What did this, what did that, how has this journey been going? What are some of the fun things behind the scenes on the photo shoots that they've been doing? I mean what is going to be interesting without saying, "Buy these sunglasses today because they're 50% off." And you build that loyalty brand through it and that's going to take time.
I actually tell a lot of them, "Just start blogging everything, just start documenting everything about building your company and give it to us, so then we can use that as micro content." And a lot of them I advise them to make podcasts as well just because it will give us so much content. You make a friggin' podcast, if you can make one for me Mr. Client, at least one a month. Not a lot of them are doing this, but when they do, oh my God.
And now we have one podcast every month and we just got an hour, sometimes an hour and a half of all this content. My team maybe goes through minute two to minute three was fire content and at 15 minute, 17 was so firing, cut that up and I put that together and throw it the public. Back to the filler content which we prefer to be on video as well so we can have that video element to it. We'll make graphics, we like the audio things are bumping up and down.
Basically, when I'm talking to clients that I'm really excited to be working with I say, "Buckle up your seat belt and we're going to be doing this for at least a year together. And it's not going to be, you're not going to get crazy conversions within the first three or four months, it's just how it is. And also by the way I need you to do a lot of work." And they're like, "Well that's what I have you for."
"No, I need you to do a lot of work, I need original content from you guys. I'm not you guys, I know how to distribute it, we know how to do AB testing, we know how to get conversions, but I also know that the original content from you is how we're going to do it, so I need you to do the work." And they go, "Okay." "Sorry oh also are you on Instagram?" "No, I'm not on Instagram, that's for kids it's kind of silly." It's just like, "Yeah download it now."
I'm not going to be that guy anymore that just goes, "It's okay. You don't have to be on Instagram or Facebook because that's what you hired me for." And I get like, "No, you need to go on Instagram and download it right now, so you understand where this underpriced attention is, where all this attention is and what they're doing on it."
When you start understanding how people are engaging on Instagram, what this story thing I'm talking about is. What the news feed is doing, the fact that you can have a minute long video and that's it. How long a story is the reason why it's vertical, different friggin' geotags you can put in, different gifts, all this stuff. You really won't start understanding it until you get into it yourself.
That way Mr. Client, you and I could have a conversation about, "Hey I saw this thing in stories with this swipe up, what is that?" I'm like, "Oh that's a story ad and yeah, we actually are running." "Okay great, I was thinking about doing it this way." Now we're thinking the same language instead of me just telling you some numbers and you be like, "Okay yeah, that sounds good.
Because for people that might be listening to this will be like, "Yeah I just don't have the time for that." You do have time to watch TV in the 90s, you did have time to listen to the radio when it was the thing. And a lot of times when you ran a business and if you ran radio and TV ads, you specifically listen to one, boost your ego to hear your own radio and TV ad but two, was also doing market research.
You were listening and you were watching TV and let's say you were a car dealership. You were watching TV and you have a TV ad and you're watching the Bears game and all of a sudden your competitor pops up in the second quarter and go, "Huh that's interesting the spot, that decision to be in the second quarter like that and it's also right when it ended. I wonder if we should add one right when it ended?"
"It was interesting also that they had it at half time, I wonder if that was cheaper? Also it's a minute long instead of 30 seconds or 45 seconds. Also that was a really cool video they made, why isn't ours look like that? I think ours should be like that." You're doing market research because that's where the attention is including your own, so don't be an old dinosaur and be like, "No, that's just not for me." because you will lose.
You need to be having that same conversation you had when you were watching the Bears game on TV, that you'd be having when you were on Instagram. And going in between stories of what your kids are doing and seeing what other businesses are doing and starting to get ideas as why to where your company should go on these platforms. I'm just done with being like, "No, it's okay I'll do it for you."
Steffen Horst: It sounds like you make sure that the expectation is set in the beginning of what you're delivering and what you expect of your client to do to make this successful because at the end of the day I think it was a good point in there. It will be hard to convince them that what you're doing is good and it's the right road to success, if they don't understand what you are doing and how it can actually work.
Bud Torcom: Yeah, exactly.
Steffen Horst: Makes total sense. But we talked about audiences, we talked about creative. Actually, there was one point you said earlier, "Video is king." From your perspective is video the new thing that makes you stand out or makes the clients stand out from the static images that are pretty much all looking the same when you go on Facebook and Instagram?
Bud Torcom: Yeah, I mean just your eyesight moves more with a video than with a static image, so as your thumb is scrolling down your news feed and you see something that just automatically starts moving, you can't help yourself that you give it a little bit more attention. I forgot what the science breakdown numbers is on from but it is down to studies of movement causing the eye to engage more than just a still image.
When you're flying through with your thumb on the thing and a bunch of still images and you see a video, you still might go past it but you are going a little bit slower even if you don't recognize it, it just captures more.
Steffen Horst: And just to be clear, I don't think you need to have a minute long or even a 30 second long video. I mean this could be like a 10, 15 second video and it serves the purpose I would assume.
Bud Torcom: Yeah, or it could be a still image that has words coming in on it but just the movement really right, so you can't make any videos because I don't know because you come up with excuses for yourself because we have all these video cameras on all these phones. But then just have words coming on still images, have your still images turn into a slide show, have something move.
Steffen Horst: Yeah, that makes sense. What are the dos and don'ts of Facebook advertising, what are the things that you see when you win a client and they have done Facebook advertising before, what are the things where you want to rip out your hair.
You're like, "Again and again the same thing. Why don't they know that this is just bad practice?" What are those things and what are the ones where you say, "This is what you should do at least to be successful." I think we covered a few things already but yeah.
Bud Torcom: Well actually I can pick on Best Buy right here. I was surfing around on their site and they have a Facebook pixel installed on their home page, which means that they can retarget you if you go to BestBuy.com and then that's it. And it just blew my mind that a company that size was dropping the ball in that way. Having a Facebook pixel set up across your website is 101 under your efficient and doing effective ads.
And Best Buy also 'cause now that Facebook's more transparent you could go to their Facebook and see that they are running ads. It's not like they decided that that's not going to be what they're going to do. Somebody over there needs to be taught how to do this correctly because they don't have a pixel firing correctly and one of the main things is the shopping cart.
I was going through Best Buy and I put a $1,000 TV in my shopping cart and then I abandoned it and there was no pixel set up and so I was never reminded about that $1,000 TV. And that would have cost Best Buy if they set it up correctly to get that impression in front of me, less than a penny. And it's like, "What are you doing?"
Steffen Horst: It sounds like ... Sorry go ahead.
Bud Torcom: No, I'm flabbergasted so I guess the main do is having the pixel set up correctly, having the pixel firing on all pages especially the shopping cart page, no matter what you're selling, what you're doing on your site so that you can then give content to a person based on where they went on your site. Because just going to Best Buy isn't enough, they could be into fridges, they could be into TVs, they could be into frigging a new phone and then you're going to want to serve them an ad based on what they went to on your site specifically.
Not just, "Hey thanks for coming to Best Buy, we're doing fridges." I'm like, "I'm not interested in a fridge, I want a TV." "No we sell fridges." That doesn't make sense but that's how it's set up, that's how they have it set up right now. That's one of the do and don't, don't be running ads on Facebook without the pixel set up right and do make sure that that pixel's set up correctly.
The other is and I'll take over ad accounts and whatever they're doing internally or another agency is just running nothing but buy, buy, buy ads. Just like only this much, only this much and they're like, "Yeah it didn't work." I'm like, "Yeah, you didn't take any time to build our brand, you didn't take any time to build a rapport. You didn't give any value to them, you just had all these ads that were trying to convert left and right and you weren't getting conversions because people didn't know who you were and you were offending them."
And then also Facebook's now going to be charging you more to get in front of them because that's how their algorithm works. Because you got greedy not only did it not work but Facebook is charging you more to do it than your competitor who didn't ask for the business right away. And they were getting conversions and they were paying Facebook less money to do it, which is hilarious.
Steffen Horst: Yeah, thanks for those two points. How should a company, I mean we as agency owners we would always obviously love if companies come to us so we can advise them on what to do. But if a company says, "You know what, I want to start off myself." how do they start off right from your perspective? You said, "Make sure that everything is pixeled."
I would say probably have a strategy in place because the pixel issue you just outlined sounds to me like someone when they designed a strategy for this campaign dropped the ball to say, "Hey make sure all types and all pages are pixeled." Are there any other things that a small company can get started with Facebook without having to bring in an agency?
Bud Torcom: Yeah, I mean you need to take in the time to learn how to do it, so Google, how to run Facebook ads. I mean go into Facebook Blueprint and take all the classes and try to get certified yourself being a Facebook Blueprint certified person. Then you at that point will at least have a good understanding on how the tools of Facebook work and how you can use them.
And then you can build a brand, if you already have a brand that's been developed then you can deploy your brand outlines within those Facebook tools. Or I would recommend start doing a branding strategy while at night you're working on Facebook Blueprint to figure out yourself.
Steffen Horst: That makes sense. It looks like we're coming towards the end of the podcast. When we started you said, I think you said you would bet that in two years Facebook Stories or Instagram Stories will be the thing that you have to do and that will be hugely successful. Are there any other Facebook, Instagram things that you think will shape the future of how those two platforms help companies to be successful?
Bud Torcom: Well Facebook's purchase of Oculus and what they're doing with VR is going to be coming pretty quick. I mean they have Oculus Go now and as marketers it's going to be our job to go in and be like, "Okay this is starting to get legs." which it will.
I mean one day it won't even be a bulky thing on your head anymore, it's going to be contact lenses that you'll pop in and your brain will 96 or 97% believe that you're in Paris but you're not you're just sitting in your bedroom. You're going to believe that you're in Paris like okay if I'm in Paris right now through Facebook Oculus and I look over at this French bakery and I walk in and there's this awesome bread.
Well if my client sells that bread, I want to be able for have that pop up and they can reach out and tap it and that would allow them to buy it virtually. And then it will show up to their house via Amazon or whatever within the next couple of days, so VR is going to have a big play.
Another big play that I've been embracing, I was putting off for a while embracing it personally until I realized part of this is just not an option anymore. Which is too bad but that's a whole other podcast and that's just one about liberty and whatnot but it's dead. It's my job to build on top of voice devices like Google Home and Alexia and we have all sorts of different clients, a lot of them dealerships honoring commerce and whatnot.
But for a dealership example I need to find out, I need to be thinking okay how are my dealerships going to be able to come up top first when you say to Alexa, "I need an all-wheel drive vehicle in between 20 and $30,000." Because that's where things are going because voice is convenient. We thought it was really convenient to be able to just go into our phone and just change a song out of the blue or something.
But it ends up becoming more and more convenient to just as you're cooking to be asking Alexa about a car and you're having a conversation with somebody and now Alexa is even able to show it to you with Alexa's Show being out. That world is one that I really think marketers need to be starting to pay real close attention to.
Steffen Horst: Great. Well Bud it has been a pleasure talking to you, this has been really informative. I hope the listeners got a lot of points they can take away and then implement themselves. If they can't implement it themselves and if they feel like you know what that sounds like someone that really knows how to set up a successful Facebook campaign or Instagram campaign, how can they get in touch with you?
Bud Torcom: I'm very active myself on LinkedIn, Bud Torcom, T-O-R-C-O-M, I'm the only one on there that has that name, same with Facebook. You can hit me up on AmazonMedia.com and I'm really into just helping people out too, so if you just have questions and you're not looking to hire me, you'll be surprised how much I'll help you out and answer and good karma comes back around all the time. I'm not one to be like, "We get honors for that." I'll let you know something that you're doing right or something that you're doing wrong, I have no problem with that, it gives me joy.
Steffen Horst: Sounds good, okay. Well thanks everyone for listening. If you like the performance of the podcast please subscribe to us and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast application. If you want to find out more about Symphonic Digital you can visit us at SymphonicDigital.com or follow us on Twitter at Symphonic HQ. Thanks again and see you next time.
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