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Michaela: Welcome back to the show. Today, we're going to go deep into the marketing dark arts for ColdFusion developers with Facebook advanced audience creation and tracking and I'm here with Logan Mayville. And he is speaking at Miracom in the digital experience tracked. (I think remember that right.) And we're gonna look at how Facebook strategy is different from Google Ad Words; totally different way of doing things.
And what the keys to that are. And also, we’ll look at some creative tips and tricks you can use in advertising your products and services and how lead generation for enterprising B2B can be done using this as well. And we'll also look at privacy and some of the Facebook data breaches that have being in the news recently. And some of the creepy advertising that goes on and how that works and what you could do about it. So welcome Logan.
Logan: Yeah, thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.
Michaela: And just in case you don't know Logan, he is a digital marketing consultant for Southwestern consulting and he specializes in direct response niche tips for lead generation and e-commerce. And he has done work together with Shawn at Mura. So Blue River Mura. So let's just come back to that. How is Facebook so different from Google Ad Words? Because a lot of people are familiar with using Google Ad Words and using that to generate traffic to their site or maybe they had to work together with a marketing team in their company to do this. But Facebook is quite a different animal.
Logan: Yes and so the strategy you use is quite different. So the basic differences is that Google ad result we call poll marketing. You already know what the person wants because you've established their intent to their search. So basically, you're in the middle of what they're looking for and you can just slide your product, your service in front of them with a well-placed ad. Facebook is totally different. It's push marketing which is like interruption marketing as familiar with like radio and T.V., right. We don't necessarily know… The persons are looking for us, we just kind of jam an ad in front of them and hope for the best. Now of course the better you are with targeting, the more relevant your ad will be hopefully. So that's a key distinction.
Michaela: So if you're going to push your ad in front of me, aren't they just gonna ignore it?
Logan: Definitely, the large percentage of people will ignore it. When you think like a successful click through rate which means if someone saw the ad versus how many people saw the ad versus how many people click on it, two to four percent is healthy. So that means 95 percent of people are ignoring your content and that's okay. And that's kind of just how advertising works at scale.
So you're right that it's irrelevant to most people whether that's because your ad sucks, or they're not interested, or you did the targeting bad, or it's just not the right time of day for you to be putting an ad in front of them. So there's a lot of reasons why someone wouldn't click. So we're pretty… were pretty… as advertisers, we’re fairly comfortable in that two to four percent range. Obviously, eight is better. But it's not realistic in all cases.
Michaela: Now if you’re not immediately asking them for something, what are you doing if you're using doing Facebook advertising?
Logan: Yes and that's a great question because that is the key to success. That's the key to increasing your click through rates. So basically when someone's on Facebook, they're looking at pictures of their families, kids, or they're watching videos and they're basically just hanging out. So when your ad comes through, it needs to not necessarily solve the pain point, but catch attention based on relevance. And on first touch especially if someone doesn't know your brand, you’re just cold targeting them with ads that the key is to give. So you wanna give value without asking for in return. And so a lot of business owners make the mistake of thinking that a free consultation or a ten percent off coupon is value; and it is.
But not in the sense, not in the context of someone on Facebook. So what people on Facebook want is they wanna hear more about their pain points. They wanna add clarity to what they're dealing with on a daily basis or something in the back of their mind. So blog posts and videos which are both ungated forms of content… When I say ungated, I mean you don't have to enter your email address to access the content such as like a white paper download or something. Those forms of ungated content to build trust provide value and basically make a good impression is your first step with Facebook ads.
Michaela: What’s your second step?
Logan: Exactly okay the so here's what we do a bit more technical. The second step is that if they watched your video and you're using Facebook ads, you can actually track what percentage of the video they watched. But I’ll come back to that. Or if it's a blog post which you have the Facebook pixel installed on your site, you can track their activity on your site. Now that includes not only the content they view, but the videos they play, the buttons they press, the forms they fill out, the money they spend, if they add anything to their cart. You can basically use all of that data that they're creating while they're on your site. So step two is basically warming them up and capturing their data. Now I should mention that it's not like…
If an unknown contact clicks my ad and lands on my site, I don't know their name, email, I don't have a contact there from. All that data is faceless. But I can still use it to retarget them. So for instance, if you're selling umbrellas, you've got red ones and black ones and someone clicks an ad and only looks at the black umbrellas, you wouldn’t wanna send them an ad for a red umbrella. So that's all kind of child's play stuff. Like intro Facebook ads. And so I think your question was what was what step two. And that's kind of capture data and learn about the traffic that you're generating.
Michaela: So this explains why when we go and look at a Facebook ad, other ads pop up later because they’re remarketing stuff to us elsewhere.
Logan: Correct and to do it well is to add context to the ad. So for instance, let's say that you have a demo video and it's five minutes long and you send it out as an ad to cold traffic. Some people are gonna watch it for three seconds, some people are gonna watch the whole thing well five minutes which is a life time on Facebook. Those two people are very different people when it comes to what you need to send them next.
A person who only watched three seconds, it means that they didn't absorb the demo message and they need the demo message reiterated to them hopefully in a different form; send an info, send an info graphics, send a blog post, send a podcast episode. The person who watched the whole thing, we have to assume that they got the message. Because again, five minutes is a long time to spend on a video on Facebook. So that person needs to receive an ad that's farther down the funnel so to speak. And so good advertisers will take that data and provide a more relevant experience to the [inaudible] [07:34].
Michaela: Okay, now you mentioned the word funnel. Not everyone is a web developer or may understand what you mean by that? What?
Logan: Yeah we tend to… we love our buzzwords in marketing. So what we call the marketing funnel is basically kind of this picture; a funnel. And the top of it being awareness and that's kind of like oh I understand your… I've heard your name before. I know your brand a little bit. I sort of know what you offer. I have a general idea of you. Maybe I've been to your site. That's what we call like the awareness funnel. It's the widest part. It's where you put people in the top.
The middle of the funnel is kind of that consideration face. At this point, the person has not only do they know who you are, but they know who you are in the context of what they're trying to solve. And they probably have a good idea of what their alternatives are or at least that's what they're trying to clarify in this considerations step. Okay, I could use ColdFusion. But I could also use a separate and maybe that's true, maybe it's not. But basically, they're weighing that alternatives.
And then the bottom of the funnel, the pointy end where all the money comes out is that decision phase. That's where you start you know, it's request a free demo, it’s sign up for a trial membership. The messaging changes drastically. And basically good marketers have systems for working people down the steps of those funnels. And then I guess when some people leak out as they do you put them back in the top or something like that. And you get that helps you visualize.
Michaela: Yeah absolutely, I’ve got this visual of this funnel with lots of people at the top and it kind of narrows down until the buyers turn out at the bottom.
Logan: exactly
Michaela: You're treating people differently and giving them different information at each step so.
Logan: The good ones do, yes.
Michaela: Yes, so you're using the Facebook pixel which really is just a cookie to be able to… Even though you don't know their name and e-mail, you can still know what behavior they've done.
Logan: Correct and now I'll just say this generally. When it comes to a cold audience to someone who you target through their interests or the behavior or where they live; some like that. A warm audience is someone who's either clicked on your ads, watched your videos, or been to your site. I've been doing this for about eight years and probably 85 to 90 percent of my results you know, lead gen and e-commerce and sales comes from some form of retargeting. That's how powerful it is [inaudible] [10:07] touch.
Michaela: Right, so that's where you only display ads to people who've done certain behaviors on your website already.
Logan: correct
Michaela: Now are you limited by what behaviors you can track in this why or?
Logan: Not really, so I've worked with web developers in the past and I used to… But this was years ago. I always say like, “Hey can you do this, or is it possible to do that?” And they always look at me and they say, “Anything is possible.” And so when you think about it what's running this kind of cookie based retargeting system is JavaScript and your ability to kind of execute event tracking is kind of only limited by your imagination. Facebook has what it's called nine standard events.
Those are things like fill out a form, view a page, buy something, add something to your cart. It tracks those natively. But if you use a tag management solution like Google type manager is a popular one. You're really only limited by your imagination because you can track things like scroll that. You can track things like time on site. Basically, anything you can set as a goal in Google Analytics you could fire an event for in Facebook and you can create an audience based on that event.
Michaela: It's almost creepy that you can track someone's behavior to such a depth and then give them different content.
Logan: So I would say that yes as a concept it is creepy. And it's a tool and how you use it, right. So when you think about it, what the advertiser is trying to do is provide a better experience, a more relevant experience in order to facilitate the sale. So depending on what you're selling, it could be used for good [inaudible] [11:55]. But I think that most people who know how browsers work; developers and such are pretty aware of this level of… I guess creepiness.
Michaela: Well it's one thing to know it exists, it's another to see the details of how the sausage is made.
Logan: Yeah, it's a good point.
Michaela: So if you’re creating ads, are there any tips and tricks you can share that will help people out.
Logan: Yes, I think the first thing you need to understand is how people interact with the ad and the newsfeed and which I'll say… When I say Facebook newsfeed, the ads look like content. They don't look like ads. They're not simply relegated to the sidebar like a typical display ad would be or a banner ad. They look just like content. The only thing that's different is they have a little grey sponsored tag. So these are videos in your newsfeed, these are posts; single posts, these are like product ads that scroll sideways. And 85 percent of them are more are being served to mobile devices, so just think mobile first of all. Everything I say just remember that it's on mobile.
So the way people interact with Facebook ads is that you're thumbing through your newsfeed and the image catches your eye. So the image is there for the most important part because what the image does is it gets you to stop moving your thumb into hover. So once the image, you take in the image whether it's necessary related to what you're selling is not as important as the fact that it gets them to stop; it's eye catching. So color is very important step… Greyscale can work. It's not like necessarily like muted colors versus popular colors. It's just something that stands out. Stay away from blue which kind of washes out with the Facebook interface.
So then after they view the image stop coming, they glance at the text which is basically the area where you would write your Facebook post. They read that and ideally, that should be 90 characters or less which is only room for one thought. So if you're writing ad copy, keep it to one. That thought however, you do not need to sell your product. You need to sell that click. Especially on their phone, people don't wanna waste the click and have to press the back button. That just sounds so laborious you know. What you're trying to do with that text is you're trying to convince them that this is worth a click.
And so when they get there, you're landing page copy and your website copy has to take over and sell your product. So you have one last ditch effort with your ad trade off if you didn't sell them with your clever sort of post copy. You have what's called the headline which is only 25 characters. And what I like to do with the headline is just be extremely literal. This person is trying to decide if they're gonna waste the click on you or not. So just tell them exactly what you're giving them. Don't be cute or clever in the headline. You can save that for the text. So there's a kind of the three ways that people interact with ads.
Michaela: And in some ads, you may not even be asking for a click. You may just want to view your video.
Logan: Correct and so I should mention, you're selling the click, but using the actual words ‘click here’ is not advised. What you're basically saying is whatever your issue is the answer is on the other side of this click.
Michaela: Right, so and then if you do… If people do go off to a landing page, does it matter what's there or?
Logan: Oh, 100 percent! So for Google ad words, what happens in the landing page is the keywords have to match. So that the header tags on the landing page need to match what's in the ad copy, it needs to match what's in the keyword that you're buying; that's called quality score. Facebook doesn't have that and it's a little more creatively driven because we can use images and videos and things like that. What needs to happen or what should happen is called ad scent.
So does the ad smell like the landing page, are there the same colors, are you repeating the same words, does it look and feel the same? The human brain is just kind of wired that if there's too big a disparity between the style and the colors from the ad to landing page, it kind of jars the brain and we think that there must have been a mistake in my click. I must have gone on the wrong place. So keeping your landing page looking and smelling a little bit like your ad is crucial
Michaela: That makes a lot of sense. So you can use this for enterprise or B2B?
Logan: Yes, definitely and I'll put it to you this way. I wouldn't just say Facebook ads is this solved any problems you're having. Facebook ads can accelerate an already working lead generation system. Through use of that funnel basically, you're putting more people in at the top of the funnel. I wouldn't try and create a legion system for B2B enterprise products out of Facebook ads. Because that's kind of a big cookie I think that what its role is is if things are working with AdWords, if things are working with the traffic you're driving to these landing pages, if you're getting some leads, Facebook can help you scale that.
And that's just kind of my recommendation from doing this for a long time. I should also point out. I do strongly feel that… especially with B2B with high ticket B2B purchases that don't get made all in one time. You need to be thinking more about driving traffic to blog posts a lot of top of funnel content which talks about pain points as opposed to solution points. And you need to be cognizant of that. That might be a six to eight touch system before you can even grab a lead or grab an e-mail. But if those clicks are coming, those six clicks are coming at 50 cents per hour or less, it's affordable. But so there are definitely some industries that I have had catastrophic failures with Facebook ad campaigns for. I.T. just seems to be one of those. But I don't mean [crosstalk] [18:06]
Michaela: Maybe because web developers and I.T. people understand what's being done.
Logan: Maybe that, but from kind of speaking with some network administrators and things is that when they're not at work, they have a very good habit of like turning off. Like they're really good at kind of zoning out what they were doing at their day job and not looking for solutions and things like that. So that might be part of that too. But I don't rule out any ad channel until I've tested it. And if the funnels working, if you're getting leads and you're getting traffic, I think you could definitely add face what you're makes and see if you use a proper system and see if you can… what your results are.
Michaela: Great! So and how does this fit in together with content marketing or personalization that people might be doing on their site already?
Logan: Yeah that's a great question. So Facebook and content go hand in hand. It's the ultimate platform for it. Because basically, one of the things people don't do with Google AdWords is they don't wanna pay for the research click. You know when someone's… with like ColdFusion for example. I'm sure there's plenty of topics that people are just researching and they're not looking to buy. And you might be able to tell that based on their search is that’s accurate. [19:32]
[19:50]
Michaela: You might be able to tell you know whether they put buy words into their search is one way to tell.
Logan: Yeah, so basically when you think about Google AdWords, people are gonna spend a lot more on the buying keywords. You know if they can tell that someone is ready to buy.
Michaela: What sort of rates are they’re paying for Google AdWords?
Logan: So that's a great question. Like so I'm not gonna use technology. But like let's say like a local plumber. Did you know how much expensive emergency plumbing keyword is to buy? That could be 60 dollars a click.
Michaela: Six… for one click! And if someone clicks accidentally cause to they just wanna research, the plumber is paying 60 bucks.
Logan: Exactly, so what people do who are really targeting that buying behavior, those emergency gotta have a plumber now type people. They are trying to eliminate the research clicks by using what's called negative keywords in Google AdWords. So a negative keyword does is it says if this keyword is present in any part of the search query, do not show my ad because of that exact thing. You don't wanna waste money. So here's the deal though. We're talking about emergency plumbing which you know, let's face it. We understand why that's an emergency. But when you’re talking about just people researching, that maybe traffic that you want. You may not be able to afford eight dollars a click for it or ten dollars a click for it.
But it still might be traffic that you want your site because you can upgrade them after they go through these tutorials and things like that. So with Facebook, we have the flexibility to buy those research clicks so to speak because they only cost 50 cents or maybe 20 cents if you're really good. So I think that's again a huge difference is that content if we've got it, it's cheap to buy that sort of traffic. And then of course you have to have systems in line to upgrade that person into a lead gen which would you know… We've all been on sites where they have whether it's email overlays or live chat and things like that.
Michaela: Yeah and so, but the way this is going back into your own Facebook ad funnel is that you've got the Facebook pixel on your site on every page. And when someone goes to some content they found through search, now you know hey here's an anonymous person who's interested in emergency plumbing or emergency ColdFusion or whatever it is. And now you can hit them up later with a whole sequence of things.
Logan: Yeah, ideally, you would want to kind of logically move down their buyers’ journey with your ads you know, kind of engine them along. So if they bite on the top of the funnel and they consume that content and everything goes well, it makes sense to target them with the next step. If they don't buy maybe they need a different format of the top of all content. Whether it’s blog posts, podcasts, video, or something.
Michaela: Now let's talk about something a bit more controversial. You know Facebook sort of has a quasar monopoly on people's social identity at this point.
Logan: they do
Michaela: What are your thoughts on that, Logan?
Logan: It's… because again, as a business person, like I enjoy that level of access and the level of data because it helps me do my job better and make my clients happier and help them grow their businesses. On a personal level, it's a little bit off putting to have so much data in the hands of a private company to me. Who doesn't… really the F.C.C. and United States like the government hasn't caught up to regulating digital ads.
Now whether you're into regulation is a totally different conversation entirely. But it's a little bit of the wild-west so to speak in terms of what's legal. You can almost think of the way like when drones became popular. The F.A.A. was very slow to roll out sort of regulations. And that had massive implications because flight safety is critical. You can’t fly a drone into a jet turbine. And so when they finally made very strict laws around that, it clarified things a little bit. What was the original question?
Michaela: Facebook monopoly on your social identity. Because you have your social identity and you share stuff and there's a lot of data there.
Logan: Oh it's a no, it's a great point. So it's a little bit sad to me that this isn't baked into an internet protocol that's like free and open source. Like the way that we can email each other and in the way that we can access secure websites and things like that. Because social identity could have been built into that in the same way. But no one really thought of it at the time the internet was created and you can't really blame them.
But the problem is because someone might say, “h, what about this this new platform that is private? You know we don't collect your data.” Well those exist and they've been popping up for like almost five years. But the problem is the switching costs. So basically, if I wanted to do that, I would have to go there, make my profile, and then get all of my 1,400 friends to go there as well. And it's when you think about that task, it's just never gonna happen, you know?
Michaela: yeah
Logan: And so at the worldwide global scale that Facebook's on with two or three billion people or whatever, I just don't see that ever happening. Like it has become the social identity. And they'll be people listening to this podcast who say like, “Well I have a Facebook profile. I don't know what this guy's talking about.” And yeah in your case you're right. But when you get two billion users of anything, it's a monopoly you know.
Michaela: Yeah, I mean and also, it's not just Facebook. It’s also… What's that photo sharing site they bought?
Logan: Instagram
Michaela: Thank you, Instagram. Sorry my brain was a little not working there. They have a whole ad network it's so it's even if you know on Facebook they’ll still track you. And even if you didn't have a Facebook account, if you go through any website that has a Facebook tracking pixel on it, they’re grabbing your data. And then they can use that to redisplay ads through another ad network on the websites.
Logan: Yeah, probably selling data between their partners and things like that.
Michaela: I mean you see that if you can go… if you engage with an ad on one site sometimes, the ads will follow you around the Internet. And that may not have been a Google ad. It may have been a Facebook pixels.
Logan: Yes and [crosstalk] [26:46]
Michaela: And the thing is it's not just like tens of thousands of data points on every person.
Logan: Oh more than that probably, yeah.
Michaela: So let's go to something and maybe it's not more controversial. But in the news now the whole Facebook data breach thing where I think it was a 50 million Facebook account bits of data got hacked.
Logan: Yes and so basically for those who didn't know, this actually happened several years ago is a firm; a research firm called Cambridge Analytica. And what they did is that people took a survey on Facebook through an app that they had built and I don't know the full details. But basically, those 50 million people, it wasn't just pixel faceless cookie data. It was personally identifiable profiles that were paired with some of their actions which is a big no no in terms of the terms of Service. And the kind of crappy part about it was that Facebook knew about all this and they didn't say anything until they got called out which is a little bit sad.
Michaela: So yeah this is whole… it’s made it more public that there is all this data out there. It's tied together.
Logan: So here's a point that maybe not everyone knows who's not running Facebook ads every day in their life like me. People are kind of open arms about this, right. They think that the privacy is really at risk. And so Facebook made an announcement today or last night that it is ending its relationship with its third party data providers. Think like Experian, think Acxiom. And so a big portion of what they were doing was like household information. Whether you're going to buy a truck or a car or not, purchase behavior, things like that. Facebook eliminated its third party data providers tab or ties or like me. So I can't use the third party data anymore to target people.
And what's so odd about that announcement is that it has nothing to do with the breach. So it was a reaction that was more of a P.R. move than an actual safety and data privacy move. And so again disappointing and but here's the thing. I couldn't care less that that data is gone, that I'm no longer able to target by those things because those were not effective.
In terms of what is effective on Facebook, it's all more about pixel data, purchased data, and then creating what's called lookalike audiences based off of that data. These third party data providers, it's just another form of cold audience targeting. And as I told you in the beginning, 90 percent of my results have come from some sort of retargeting data source. So again they're trying to make amends by kicking out Experian, Acxiom. I don't lose any sleep over that because who does lose sleep over when credit card companies get kicked in the butt. But the idea that it was somehow we are safer or more private now is total fiction.
Michaela: Yeah, you could look at it as a distraction move to make people think something real is being done when it hasn't. Now we've been talking about the dark arts of Facebook marketing, but let's go to an even darker corner of the dark arts which is political marketing.
Logan: Yeah, okay, this one has a little bit of a run up and I wanna just say right now that I don't… I'm not here to speak politically or I'm not gonna share personal opinions or anything like that. But I was fascinated in the use of social media especially in the U.S. election this year; for better or for worse, right. So real quick though, go back a couple of years. I don’t know if you remember this, but there was a big headline. I don't remember what news out of broke it. But it was Facebook's running experiments on you. Do remember that one?
Michaela: I don't, but then I don't read the news anymore.
Logan: Good for you. So basically what happened is they published a large exposé that said Facebook is running experiments on you, on your sentiment. It's algorithm has… Facebook's algorithm decides what content you see. You don't see 100 percent of the content you're subscribed to. You see a very small percentage of it, so how does it decide what you see right? Well it's not public, but basically, it's affinity right. So if it sees me liking pictures from a certain user over and over again, it's going to show me more of that person's content; same for brands, same for everything else. But what happened is they started experimenting with like positive and negative messages and watching how people respond to that. So what happened is basically…
The reason experiments came about was because like 2014, the Facebook employees came back from Christmas break and there was like an inordinate amount of… (What did they call it?) Like spam content requests. Like asking for content to be taken down. And they're like, “Well this is really weird. This is the first time this has happened at this these millions of people. We have to hire 200 people to handle these requests.” So it started looking out why people wanted the photos taken down. And what they found was that in like 90 percent of the cases where someone was in the photo taken down or was reporting it as the illegal content, that person was in the photo. And so basically what it was is that person was… it was a bad photo of them.
And but they didn't have a… Facebook didn't have a way to say why they wanted it taken down, just that they wanted to take him down, but it was offensive or things like that. So what they started doing is when they would get those requests, a robot would send out why do you want this taken down and given like or radio buttons to pick. And so that is how the whole experiment thing started. It was actually a way for them to expedite their review process for tagging, okay. So then at that point, Facebook started to realize the power they had in these experiments.
And they gleefully ran experiments on people for like 18 months and they thought nothing wrong of it. And so when that article came out, Facebook was very, very surprised that people thought of that negatively. But what they didn't realize is that they're creating these echo chambers where people are only hearing what they want to hear and viewpoints that align with theirs. So when it becomes the politics, you can see how dangerous this is. Because let's face it, someone who's misguided and who has a very narrow worldview and is politically… I don’t know if unstable is the right word.)
But if they're just hearing that echoed back to them, they don't even realize the other person's point of view and you can see how polarizing that could be in the election. And when the digital firms that one of the candidates use this year like realize how powerful that was, they exploited it to an absurd degree. And beyond just kind of the political stuff, one thing Donald Trump did it was incredible was he raised like 350 million dollars in four months from small donors selling hats and pens on Facebook. And I don't know if you follow politics very closely. But that sort of donations from small donors has never been done before. And so basically…
Michaela: Well and here's the thing. It wasn't just the money though that's quite a lot of money in a campaign where a few billion is probably what they spend total including all the PAC money. But they had all those small donors info at that point so they could remarket to them …
Logan: yes
Michaela: … to encourage them to take other actions to get their candidate elected.
Logan: Two things, okay? So yes they could do that. They can also… once those pool of purchases build up into a big pool. Facebook has a tool called lookalike audiences that basically examines that data source which is a good data source because someone spent 15 dollars on a hat. So that's a pretty committed person. Facebook can say, “See that person? Go find me all new people who are just like that guy.” Even though I'm not gonna type in the gender, his location, his interest. I'm just gonna tell you I want more people like him. It's a very powerful tool.
The other thing that should be on the look like audiences which are very powerful. Buying a small ticket item in marketing is called a trip wire. And basically what happens when you buy a small ticket item like a book you know, for seven dollars or a hat for ten dollars is you become more committed to the cause. And once the marketer comes back to you with the bigger ask say your vote, you're already committed that small amount. And so again the switching cost, you don't wanna go back. You've already built this goodwill. That tripwire has actually a larger effect down the line on your purchase decisions or [inaudible] [35:44] decisions.
Michaela: Yeah, so it kind of locks people and to whatever the cause is whether it's commercial, or whether it's practical, or whatever the thing is. And we're talking about the dark arts, but this can be used for good as well. I mean it could be like let's save the planets and plant trees and people who pay see an ad to like help out reduce carbon emissions and they buy a tree in Patagonia or whatever. They're more likely to go down that funnel and help out the cause more, and attend events, and what however you wanna see it.
Logan: I agree
Michaela: It is just a way we’re changing how humans interact. So I think it's here; very interesting. Anything else in the dark arts before we switch to a couple of other questions?
Logan: We've gone far enough down the dark path today.
Michaela: Yes, we’ll come back from the dark side Luke or Logan. And so as you may know the ColdFusion Alive Podcast is all about making ColdFusion alive. Because there's this whole mean out there that ColdFusion is dying. Very silly mean because actually, the sales have been going up every year. Anyway, I would like people to believe that ColdFusion is an alive and modern language that can create fabulous apps. So I'm just kind of curious from you with your marketing hat on. What would it take to make ColdFusion even more alive this year?
Logan: I think that it sounds like there's an awareness level issue that you're trying to solve, right? And so what I would say is marketing that focuses around the pain points way before they get to ColdFusion. So what are the things developers don't like doing when they wake up in the morning? When they first fire up their computer, when they first… they're trying to shut it down. Basically explain those in detail with good content; high quality content. And then retarget those people and open up the discussion for solving those problems.
So again, I think it always kind of starts with awareness. But yeah, the idea is don't shove the solution in their face until we've clearly identified the problem. Because a lot of people go through life without really understanding their problems. They kind of just are frustrated again and again and again and they don't necessarily know why. And so I feel like it's the marketer's job to get in front of them and add clarity to why they're frustrated and then work them down a path to solutions.
Michaela: That is an interesting insight. We'll have to see if we can get Lucee, C.F.M.L. and Adobe C.F.M.L. and all the people in the ColdFusion community to do that, to help increase awareness and guide people towards the ColdFusion as a solution for that. And then final question is, what are you looking forward to at Miracom?
Logan: Oh! Great question. Okay, so I have to admit I went last year. I was invited and I was kind of blown away. I go to a lot of marketing conferences. It's kind of just in my nature. And in Sacramento, we don't have access to a lot of sort of the high quality content marketing speakers and thoughts that are going there. And so I still have notes from art of Allie's presentation last year. I went and bought her book the next day. Something I thought about. I have no books, the sticky notes from a year ago. So this year looking forward to that caliber of speaker on content marketing and digital sketches like the one we're having today. I think that it's… I'm really looking forward to Park Howl’s [39:25] keynote.
Park Howl is a copywriter who basically created a framework around storytelling because stories are something that they go back to you know, the biblical days. It's a human psychological thing that we all understand. We get the hero, we get the challenge, we get the people who are trying to put him down, and then we get the resolution. And we are brain there is kind of wired to understand that. So why aren't more websites and products and marketing campaigns built around this concept of making the user the hero, not the product the hero? And so I think that that will be interesting. And then the Blue River Miracom guys are just a nice group of people, very sharp. (So I love to hang around them too.)
Michaela: Fabulous! Now if we want to find you online, what are the best ways to do that?
Logan: Yeah, well you can look me up on my biography on our website at Southwesternconsulting.com. I'm also a fairly avid Twitter user. You can find me at Mayville and then LinkedIn. If you search Logan Mayville hopefully, I should pop up. There's not a lot of Logan Mayvilles out there.
Michaela: Great! Well we’ll put all those links in the show notes at the TeraTech site together with all the cool stuff that you mentioned today. And thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Logan: Yeah, thank you for having me. Is really fun.
