Ken Tucker

Mari Smith, who is a social media thought leader and a premier Facebook marketing expert, also commonly referred to as the Queen of Facebook. Welcome, Mari.

Mari Smith

Ken. Thanks for having me. I'm excited. I don't think I've ever had three interviewers on one, so I'm excited to see what you got for me.

Ken Tucker:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Mary, Grateful that you decided to be on. I've been a big fan of yours and I think I, I met you at the Twitter conference in Los Angeles in 2008, actually.

Mari Smith

Wow, that's amazing.

Ken Tucker

Yeah, so I've been a follower of yours for a long time. And full disclosure for our audience, I've taken several of Mari's courses and they're all fantastic. They range from Facebook and Instagram Lead Generation Made Simple, Facebook Organic Marketing Mastermind, also referred to as F Bomb. And yeah, they're, they're fantastic. So I highly recommend that you guys check out Mari also a great Facebook group called the Social Scoop. And so there's just constantly fantastic information about what's going on in the world of especially Facebook, but also Instagram as well. So. Yeah. So, Mari, I'm going to go ahead and get started with the first question.

Mari

Okay.

Ken

How has Facebook, Facebook's algorithm evolved in 2025 and what strategies should small businesses use to maximize the organic reach and engagement?

Mari

The number one change which has been slowly rolling out over the last several years. I'm saying several because here we are 25. So yeah, pretty much in 2022. And, and, but still a lot of marketers and everyday users are oblivious to this and blatantly copied from Tik Tok. It is the AI powered discovery engine. It's what the algorithms are based on and that is that it's no longer just friends or followers. It's interest based. And so these AI powered algorithms can predict with incredible accuracy with what it thinks you will be interested in seeing. So our feeds now Facebook and Instagram, probably threads too, and many of the other social platforms are copying this too, I think. X, LinkedIn, YouTube. As much as 50% of the content you see in your newsfeed, your feed is suggested for you. It's not from friends, it's not from people you've proactively chosen to follow. And so as a user on the user end, it can be very frustrating. You're like, oh my God, you know what happened to all the comments content from my friends? Whoever you get that kind of dopamine hit and you get like, it's like exciting. You don't know what you're going to discover next. In in fact, Meta claims that their time on site has gone up Facebook and Instagram by like 6 or 7%. So I think your question there, Ken, was like, how, how could businesses maximize like that change? I, I listened to a little bit Gary Vaynerchuk. You all know Gary Vee, longtime industry friend as well. We go way back and you know, I, I don't like follow him like religiously, but just lately, the last few months, he's kind of come back on my radar and I've really been paying attention to what he's saying and I'm like, oh my gosh, he's. We're talking the same language because there's never been a time in the history, almost what two decade history of social media marketing or social media platforms where the playing field is totally level. So a small business owner with an account that has 500 followers has just as much chance to create the next viral hit as somebody with 50,000 followers. Because of this, not non followers. You want to really start paying attention in your metrics to your views to non followers. That make sense?

Ken

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that, that's pretty exciting.

Mari

It actually is, Ken. I know because it's like, wait a minute. And this is what Gary Vee talks about. So I mean he, he's a massive agency with like 3,000 employees, right. And like major brands as clients. And he's like, never before have we been able to just like produce amazing content at scale, test the heck out of it, see what the algorithms fly with. Then you put, you know, like before you even put a single dime on the paid side. So, you know, you don't have to like just throw money. Like I think like the super bowl ads are probably the most expensive ads in the world. You're like sitting there crossing your fingers, oh, I hope this works. Right. But it's like on social media, it's like you can test so much pretty much for no or low cost. And certainly if you're favoring the short form vertical videos and repurposing them across, you know, your reels on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok shorts, on YouTube, the whole works. So yeah, it's pretty exciting.

Ken

Yeah, I mean, you know, I, I know in I, I and I learned this from you that you know, the Facebook algorithm for the last several years has been de emphasizing organic content for most, you know, most pages where it's, where it's been dropping down, you know, slowly but surely. And the sentiment of a lot of people has become Facebook's a pay to play, you know, platform, and it sounds like that's, you know, while that still may be an element, and it's certainly always going to be an important targeting element, there is now a new opportunity for small businesses to take advantage based on these algorithmic changes you're talking about.

Mari

Very much so, Very much so. The emphasis is on creating really, really excellent quality content that has a strong hook, which we can absolutely use AI for. So a really strong, compelling hook and you just dive right in, you capture attention within the first three seconds. You put great covers, great thumbnails on your videos, and it's pretty short and succinct. And it could either be entertaining, but certainly educational, informative. Some people go for humor, but definitely not like constantly pushing link posts with promotions. That's just not going to fly with the algorithms or with the users. So your goal here is to craft your content actually for maximum shares, maximum engagement. Sure, you want reactions, you want comments, but I love shares. And Adam Messeri, you know, the head of Instagram, he talks about how one of the key metrics that they look for, the algorithm looks for is private shares. So people who will DM you someone else's real or, you know, content. Good. Hey, I thought you might like this. I saw it, you know, cat videos fall in that category.

Ken

Yeah, absolutely. So you, you mentioned several different types content, like reels, you know, are, are. Do you see anything working better than other forms of content? And also I want to ask you about this, you know, this kind of exploding topic that I'm seeing on faceless video. Do you see faceless video performing as good or better where it's AI generated than, than a live human doing these, you know, these videos? Do you have any data on that?

Mari

I don't have any data, Ken, but I gotta tell you, I personally am not a big fan of these AI created faceless videos. And I know many of my, our industry peers, you know, know names and they're touting these faceless videos and you can start a YouTube channel and get all your followers and I'm like, yeah, but how are you monetizing that? I hope you're monetizing that. But for me personally, this gets into the area of like where AI is going and how, I mean, I'm a big fan of AI. I know you call it a tool. I totally agree with. It's a tool and it's how we use it, it's how we train it. But for me, I just feel like where everything is accelerating at such A rapid rate, the more you can do what we are doing right here today. We've got real human beings that don't think that any of the three of you are clones. I know for sure this is the real me. So it's like there's a use case use, you know, there's places for clones. But this authentic, real human, human to human connection live is great. Video is great and certainly on the reels. Yeah, I think that as I mentioned, like with the compelling hooks and capturing the tension in the first three seconds and then going right into somebody on camera. Now of course you can splice in all kinds of B roll and that could be AI produced if you want. You can use AI to change your background. In fact, last month Adam Masseri published a video on Instagram touting Meta's moviegen, which is basically their answer to open AI Sora and to be able to create pretty amazing video. But initially they're going to bring it out fairly soon to Instagram where you'll be able to just put a text prompt in and change the, the background or you know, add something in to, to. My cat just jumped across camera and moved it cable. Hey, you little rascal.

Ian

This is authentic webinars.

Ken

Yeah.

Mari

Shut the door. And then she'll be meowing at the door. Yeah. So yeah, authentic, real. You can't make that up. Well, you could if you wanted to, but yeah, so I would say favoring the short form vertical videos. I, I don't know. What do you think of the faceless videos? Are you guys seeing any clients go crazy with it?

Ken

We, yeah, not, not so far. But it is certainly intriguing because one of the challenges, you know, with the folks that we typically work with is just literally producing content. And so, you know, if you have no content, you have no chance. At least if you can use some faceless content.

Mari

Yeah.

Ken

You know, then maybe that, you know, from a production perspective, maybe that's going to help some small businesses and, and also those camera shy business own.

Mari

That's a really good point. I think that's the number one people, number one reason that people don't do video get on video at all. It's just very confronting for people. They don't like themselves on camera, they're not sure what to say or they're shy or.

Ken

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So what about Facebook groups? Are Facebook groups still a really important platform for, for folks to be using?

Mari

It's a tough one, Ken, because I have seen people really struggle to get traction in a new group. It has to be Again, back to that word, compelling. Right? There has to be this strong reason to keep coming back to the group and oh, you know what, I want to cite something. Here is Gina Biancini. She is the founder, co founder of Mighty Networks. Right before that, co founder of Ning. Remember Ning? I know we're all oh yeah, old enough of the right age to remember Ning. I like Ning. That was a cool, cool one of the OG social networks or platforms. But Mighty Network is really good. So Gina and her team did this study where they were they discovered with I want to off the top of my head, it's something like 90 accuracy of what determines the success or failure of a group. And it's. I asked people this a lot in my courses and people, okay, it's the, you know, it's, it's topic, it's how charismatic the influencer is. You know, it's the content. It's not. What it is is the amount of engagement and conversations and collaboration between the members.

Ken

Okay.

Mari

And I'm like, wow. So I have almost stumbled upon magically this flywheel effect in my own social scoop group. Thank you for mentioning it earlier because I honestly, I don't have a content strategy for that group. I post content in when there's some timely, relevant, topical News. But otherwise 90 of the content in my group is created by the members asking for support, sharing resources. And so if, you know, if small business has the time to do that, one of my top clients, they do that as well. It's very, very much the members engaging with one another, asking questions. And so there's a use case for groups. But don't think that you're going to start a brand new group and all of a sudden you're going to have 50,000 members and you know, the cash register will ring. It does take a bit strategy these days.

Ken

Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Thank you.

Ian

Hey Mari, you, you actually alluded to some analytics already, but I wanted to ask you what are some key changes that have been made to Facebook and Instagram analytics and how can small businesses effectively use these insights to adjust their marketing strategies?

Mari

Sure. Yes. Hello, Ian, my fellow Canadian. I'm glad we're talking about metrics because this is a very timely. I want to say it was August of 24 that Instagram suddenly announced by real from Adam Misseri that they were creating what they call a unified metric. So no longer would you have like videos, views and impressions on your post and then reels, plays on your reels. That's all this unified metric called Views. And then in the last maybe month or so, Facebook rolled that out for everything, all types of posts. So it's all views and views of a plate replaced impressions and they can count multiple. So you got three, you know, it looks like three views, but it could be one person watching three times. And views on a video historically on Facebook were three seconds, whereas a reels play has always been exactly like tick tock, it's one millisecond. So now you might see an uptick in some of your metrics because it's just that fleeting moment that any type of content, whether it's a story, a real, a carousel, a regular image, a regular video on Facebook that is just flat across the screen, that counts as a view. So important to know. And then I would say for sure I mentioned it earlier chatting to Ken there, that the non follower. I want people to start to really pay close attention to your non follower views, you know, especially on your videos and on your reels on both Instagram and Facebook. You can get in there into the metrics and see that because that just shows you that if you're getting like maybe 50% or even when it starts to tip the balance and you're getting maybe 60% of your views from non followers, now you can kind of like as a marketer, as a small business person, take that filter off those glasses off of like chasing the followers. Oh my God, if only we had more followers and we'd make more money. No, I'm here to tell you in 2025 that is not your mantra. You want to be chasing more views and. Well, not chasing me. You want to chase more leads and sales. That's what pays the bills. But in general, for analytics, that's what I would say there, Ian, is. Yeah, the unified views metric, making sure that you're keeping an eye on the non followers. Yeah.

Ian

And, and if you were to take the non followers views by non followers, how can you then transition that into actionable, you know, tasks or tactics that you could then employ to try to get more views?

Mari

Well, yeah, good question. So you want to really assess your winners. I call them unicorns. Excuse me, my friend Larry Kim calls them unicorns. It's basically the content that's performing better than any of your other or your most recent content. So maybe you got 2x5x10x the. The view. And so start to really track and, and keep a note of. Okay, what, what really worked about this? What are people saying in the comments? Are we getting more DMS on this? Are we getting More clicks on Instagram, you know, the link in bio or whatever on, on Facebook. I suppose with reels you could put your link in the caption on reels, but maybe you want to try putting your link in the, in the first comment on, on Facebook really for any kind of post. But, but taking that and translating into tactical, you know, CTAs, I think on Instagram, one of my favorite CTAs is to go ahead and deploy that, the chat bot like through manychat. And so you could say, you know, DM us the word, you know, free, free resource or something a little more exciting than that, you know, free gift or. And then when they comment that it automatically triggers. I know you guys probably know about this maybe for your listeners then you can set up this whole sequence where now they're getting added to your CRM and you can, you know, flow them into a nurture sequence to basically turn into conversions.

Ian

That's awesome. And right now we're talking mostly about native analytics. Are there other tools that you would recommend employing as far as data analytics or analysis of how things are working for you on the social media channels in order to do better that are outside of Facebook or Instagram?

Mari

Well, here's where we could probably bring in some AI. So for example, you can go into Meta Business Suite which is going to pull in your Facebook and your Instagram. And then, you know, you can get your metrics from your other platforms too. But you could download like the last six months of data or the last year of data of like everything you can possibly export and then go ahead and take those files and upload them to Chat gbt. Or you can also use Meta AI. Meta AI will allow you to upload files. I think not as many people use it just because Chat GPT was first to the scene, but it's really powerful Meta AI. So you could go ahead and use that to analyze, you know, spot patterns, spot trends, maybe dial in your audience a bit more, find winning approaches just depending on the prompt that you use. So that'd be one tip there. The other thing is possibly there are third party tools. I think depending on the size of a business and their budget, they might be investing in a, a social media management tool that also probably has metrics. I know a lot of folks like Metric Cool or Social Pilot. I'm sure you guys have your favorites too. There's another one called Amplify. Remember them? I know way back in the day they were called Social Bakers and then they, they morphed into Amplify. I think they're one of the premier platforms when it comes to analytics.

Ian

Awesome, awesome. Thanks.

Mari

Sure.

Paul

Marty, can we maybe start digging into ads a little bit? I know a lot of our, our clients want to run ads on Facebook and, and there's a whole lot around that. What are your top recommendations for small businesses that want to run ads on a limited budget to get the, the best bang for the buck?

Mari

Limited budget. Well, so if it's an ecom business, right. They're actually selling goods, then I would recommend trying a really low price point like an impulse purchase. Because I know a lot of folks, myself included, have bought so many things off Instagram ads in particular, I don't know what it is about Instagram. You're just surfing through like oh, that's something I need, you know, add to cart. So possibly trying that low, low price impulse purchases. Otherwise I think if you're on a budget, I really like to focus on lead generation and try to get that cost per lead as low as possible and then you go ahead and you sell in your email follow up sequences. And so for that there's an ad unit called lead ads. And because a lot of folks use Facebook, I suppose maybe the older demographic are on their desktop and then many of us who are in the business were using both a lot desktop and mobile. But lead ads do real well on mobile and especially when you're having it go to messenger. In fact you can even select it where it can be the, the form, the lead form where it's pre populated. I wouldn't get too crazy asking that many, you know, form fields. Just name an email is usually plenty. Maybe one other qualifying question, although I do notice a lot of B2B more on the enterprise level. They really like to ask numerous questions because then they're really going to pre qualify people. So depends if you want volum them or you want pre qualified. So lead ads where they are, they can either send you a message on WhatsApp or Instagram or messenger or fill out your little form which is oftentimes already pre populated. And so yeah, that's, that's what I'd recommend for a lower budget. And then the other thing too really as we were talking about earlier with can, is just because of the way the algorithms work nowadays to really make that incredible organic content test like crazy iterate. Then add your budget once you've done some good testing in terms of.

Ken

Sorry Jeff, just real quick. So while we're talking about the lead ad forms being pre populated, one of the things that we've seen is actually a lot of accidental submissions because it is pre populated. So I recommend at least asking one or two qualifying questions just to get somebody to take action to confirm that they're actually filling out the form instead of accidentally landing on it and submitting it and not even really knowing about it. We've run into that as a serious problem.

Mari

That's wild because I thought that Facebook actually makes you do one more tap because when they first came out years and years ago, their little moniker was Tap Tap Done. And so it's like you tap on the ad or the, you know, the form and then you make sure it's got the information that you want to submit. Because I might want to use a different email than my Facebook email. Right. Then you hit another tap. But I see what you're saying. If people are accidentally submitting that, that's, that's, that's not good. So yeah, great tip.

Ken

Yeah, thanks.

Jeff

In terms of different levels of the funnel, you know, going from brand awareness, engagement, conversion, are you seeing any better or worse places that Facebook ads work? And especially if you bring in the different formats, what formats are working? Well, different places. Do you have anything on that?

Mari

Well, formats, I think, I think the different places in the funnel, I like to recommend spending about maybe half your budget. No matter what your budget is, spending about half of it on a warm audience, you know, doing retargeting. So I, I really like video views as a warm audience. So you could, you could use, you could increase. So here's what I would recommend. So let's say you're doing some really great reel on Instagram and, or video and, or Facebook and it's one of your unicorns, you see, it's getting more reach. Okay, you're going to go into Ads Manager, you're going to boost it and, and to get, to help it, to increase those video views. Now you're going to go in and gather up that audience of video views and they're relatively inexpensive to retarget and you could include, you know, numerous videos, regular videos, lives, reels, Facebook, Instagram, the whole works. And by the way, they are still currently 3 seconds in ads Manager. I, I did check it the other day and, and I've got, I've got a memo into Meta, one of my ad contacts in Meta to say, you know, hey, is this going to ever change it to the 1 millisecond inside of ads Manager? But hopefully not. We'll see. I'm saying hopefully not, but maybe that would be a good thing. They're not going to be that targeted if they're only seen it for 1, 1 millisecond versus 3 seconds anyway. So you create your video views, custom audience and now maybe retarget them with more like a, maybe a lead ad or, or direct to a form on your website which you can also do with lead ads. But yeah, just to kind of warm people up and get them used to you get them seeing you as opposed to going for cold. Although I do have some clients I, I personally don't run ads for, for people I don't, that's not part of my business model. But I have clients that I work closely with who I, I recommend agencies to them and they are finding, you know, cold depending on there's a certain price point that you can reach a code audience for going right to a sale. But generally speaking I like to warm people up and, and go for the awareness or engagement objective is what will get views.

Jeff

And then let me ask about boosted posts. You know we get a lot of people that don't want to go through all the effort of creating a full up ad campaign. Are boosted posts worthwhile or is it just don't even bother, just go straight to the ad campaigns. What are your thoughts on that?

Mari

Yeah, it's funny Jeff, because it's a bit like being at Vegas, right? They're always tapped into play the slot machines, give us 20 bucks, we'll make this go further. You could get 10,000 more reach. It's very tempting. It's, it's, it's a little manipulative. However, yeah, there can be use cases and this is directly from meta that they recommend allocating maybe only about 10 of your overall budget. No matter what that is, you're only spending a thousand a month. Then you know, maybe a hundred bucks total on your boosts. They can be really good. If you're in a hurry, something's time sensitive, you're out and about, you've got your mobile device, you see something. Oh my gosh, this is really getting some great traction. Hit that boost button and just give it a little bit of a lift. Just keeping in mind as soon as you hit the boost button you can no longer edit the post. I've had a few folks ask me that I want to edit this like you boosted. It can't be edited. You know, you got to start afresh. But otherwise, yeah, going into Ads manager is, you guys well know you're going to get way more, you know, abilities to split test and, and placement selection, whatever you want to do mind you my last. Yeah, I just want to add something real quick, Jeff, because I think with the AI inside of Ads Manager, I think that, you know, Facebook is actually really wanting us to just have as, have as little involvement in there as possible, like to take the hands off the steering wheel and let them do their thing with, with the AI.

Jeff

That actually kind of plays into my, my last question on this thread. You know, most of the ad platforms want to be very good at taking your money, right? So, so what are some cost saving tips for small businesses to avoid overspending on their ads?

Mari

Well, you know what's interesting, I, this comes up in my own community as well about you know, what's a good budget and you know, how to stay in your budget. But if my personal opinion is there's, there's not necessarily such a thing as, as overspending because if you are getting a solid roas right. Return on ad spend, then it's a matter of your, you've got this self, self liquidating model. For every dollar you put in, you're getting $2 back or three or four or five. So my recommendation is you're going to go ahead and create your own internal benchmarks. And I've seen, you know, some, some small businesses, they're getting like I just was working with a client recently. They, I, I had them fire their agency and hire, hire a different one because their, their roas was like, like low to me. It was 1.2, 1.7 maybe. And that just felt low to me. So I, I really encourage them to have a whole different strategy and set a much higher benchmark and you could, that's going to be up to each individual business and you're going to keep passing and iterating. But I mean, you know, something like five or six is pretty huge for, for every dollar you put in, you're getting, you know, $5 back. But keep, keep on trying and experimenting just to make like Gary Vee says, make incredible organic content that you then use that as your ads so you know it's going to perform well and you can get your roas up.

Jeff

And watch the analytics, watch the metrics.

Mari

Exactly.

Paul

Hey Mari, this is Paul. I work with Ken.

Mari

Hi.

Paul

So anyway, we're both sitting in a hotel right now, so my Internet connection seems to be a little flaky.

Mari

Okay.

Paul

Just wanted to let you know, but I think we all know that AI is going to change pretty much everything whether we like that or not, whether we want it to or not. It just is so Meta has Some AI tools that they say will improve through organic and reach and paid marketing efforts on Facebook and Instagram. So can you talk a little bit first about what those tools are and how to leverage them, how to use them?

Mari

Sure, yeah. Yeah, sure you can. So originally they had imagine.meta.com and that was just for their images. It was really good. But now that's been replaced with Meta AI. It's out in about 50 countries, maybe more. But also whenever you see that little kind of pink, pinky purpley circle logo that's now replaced your search bar, it's in the DMS, Instagram messenger, WhatsApp. And also sometimes it appears at the bottom of the home screen on your Facebook. It's dancing. It will have a little animation. Use me. It's like Zuckerberg's trying every trick in the book to try to get you to use Meta AI. And in fact at the end of 2024 they were declaring that it Meta AI is the most used AI assistant in the world. Well, hello, you got over 3 billion users and you're gonna shove that thing in every nuke and granny where people are using it whether they even want to or not. So then you can declare you're the most used AI assistant. But yeah, so I think that a lot of folks are using it similar to chat GPT and as free. I know there's a free level of chat GPT but on the business side you can certainly use to improve your organic content. You can go to Meta AI, meta AI and use it exact same as you would chat GPT Craft hoax craft. You know any of your, your improve your copy. You can make images. I mentioned earlier about that movie gen is coming soon. And then on the ad side, when you're in Ads Manager anywhere, you see the advantage. The word advantage with the little plus sign, it's got a little plus at the end of advantage. So you've got advantage plus creative that is going to enhance, let's say you upload landscape video and it will optimize it for reels and stories. Excuse me. Then you've got Advantage plus audience and this is the one I think is creating the most confusion right now. And I have discussions about it in my, my social scoop group where some folks are saying oh my God, it's amazing. Some folks are like oh my God, it's crap. But it's the audience plus is where you just your parameters, the, the specifications you put into to reach your, your ICA ideal customer avatar, right Are just suggestions. So then the AI is Going to go out much broader and find it's a little bit like lookalike. It works similar to lookalikes or you've got what's called control. So you're like, don't show this to anyone under 18 or don't show this to anyone side of Texas or whatever. Right. You got Advantage plus shopping. So anyone on the ad side can really. They're probably already taking advantage. Yeah. Pun intended here. Of the AI inside of Ads Manager on the organic pop. I don't know, I feel like the jury's out for me. I'm not seeing a lot of use case of. Of meta AI on the organic or really? Yeah. Using it as much as they do the other AI tools. Like, I'm just trying to remember the time frame. I want to say it was like October, November last year and I put a polo on my Facebook business page. Just a question. I'm like, okay, if you force. Force people to choose, if you could only Pick1Chat GPT or Meta AI. Yeah, I'm gonna miss several hundred answers. Nobody picked meta AI. It made me laugh. But. But then a few folks put in the comments. They're like, oh yeah, but I love meta AI for images. So honestly, I just feel like it's still early days yet. One of the most critical tools that will be coming online this year, I'm sure, and maybe even Q1, certainly by Q2. Zuckerberg keeps touting, is what they call the business AIs. Business AI. I think there'll be a fee for it. I think this is really going to be a game changer.

Paul

Okay, so you know, you mentioned chat GPT. Okay. The paid version of chat GPT is 20 bucks.

Mari

Okay.

Paul

So yeah, but let me. So how can businesses use AI to personalize customer interactions on Facebook and Instagram?

Mari

Well, that's definitely where the business AIs will come. So let's just. I'll answer that backwards. We'll start with the future, the business AIs. This is where they're going to come into their own. You'll be able to program like your own agent, give it a name, whatever, and just have this entire knowledge base, really, in essence, my understanding anyway of how it would work is to have your own GPT that's totally trained and programmed with your business's knowledge. So now you're going to have customers and prospects able to interact with that in the pre sales, in the during sales, and in the post sales. So I'm like, wow, how? I'm all in for that. So we'll see we'll see what Zuckerberg's got up his sleeve. I think that they have got that out already in beta, private beta with some companies. Otherwise, you're asking me here, Paul, like how a personalized customer interaction. That's where I would circle back to the chat bots. Many chat is probably one of the most popular, but there's two others folks can check out. It's called Chat Fuel or Larry Kim's company Customers AI. It's funny, it started out as Mobile Monkey, but he changed it to Customers AI, which I think is brilliant. It's a great, great domain. And yeah, so the chat bots, absolutely, you can pull in some AI, but I don't, I don't know in terms of like really personalizing interactions beyond. Beyond those. Just the chat bots and waiting with bated breath for the meta business AIs.

Paul

Okay, that makes sense. So final question for you real quick, and I think you touched on this a little bit. Are there ways to use AI to automate ad creation and optimization outside of what Facebook does? Just automatically, if you will?

Mari

Yeah. No. I'll bet you there's numerous platforms out there. The one that just came across my desk fairly recently is called Poppy P O P P Y like the flower Poppy AI. It's pretty reasonably priced and I've seen some agencies rave about it. I personally haven't used it, so I'm not talking from experience, but my understanding of what it does is not necessarily like really the automating, the ad creation optimization, but it is somewhat because it's at the beginning phase. So you could have it go and look at a whole bunch of competitor ads or doesn't even have to be a competitor, just be ads in your. In a totally different industry that you, that you admire or something or you like their approach and you can. It'll pull in like PDFs and YouTube videos and all kinds of data that you feed it and that goes out and crawls and it will craft you some amazing ads in certain styles that you tell it to. And so there's that. But yeah, inside of Ads Manager, they're going to try to get you to use their tools in there. I think this is probably an area. It's not something I'm super familiar with. Like I say, it's like ads. Ads are not really my forte, but I know, I know just enough about them to be dangerous, I like to say. But yeah, folks like my friend Tara Zircher, she's the founder of Successful Ads Club. Folks like her or John Loomer, you know, people that, that's all they do, that's their wheelhouse. It's just all day long as they, they specialize in ads. I will bet that they would know. And what's coming down the line with, with third party AI tools that you just feed it some information, it will spit out the, the most amazing ads. We probably could do that with chat, GBT or meta AI to a large degree.

Paul

All right, thanks. Good stuff.

Ken

Yeah. So Mara, you were talking with Jeff a little bit about, you know, lead ads from a lead generation perspective. What, what content seems to be the best to, to get people to give up their information and, and become a lead. You have any thoughts on that? And, and is it different on Facebook versus Instagram?

Mari

Hmm. Honestly, I think, I think it does depend on your industry because like you know, B2B is going to be maybe more like white papers or free webinars. B2C might be a little bit different. I usually like to focus on anything that's compelling free education, but doesn't take long. Something that will help people to save time, save money, make money, you know, get ahead in life and business. I think it was Tony Robbins that popularized where people really kind of only motivated by two things and that's towards pleasure or away from pain. So depending on where, what hook you're going to use. Just showing people how you can create, get move away from the pain of spending so much time in their business. And here's how to automate more with systems and AI or whatever. I think too like short and easy to consume. I'm seeing a little bit of, of diminishing returns on things like one hour webinars or even like the evergreen webinars, you know, where you can pick your own date. I like to see ones that are pretty short and easy to consume. A quick example, you guys probably familiar with Jay Schwedelson. He's the founder of Subjectline.com and the guru Conference. I love him. He's just so fun. He's fun and funny. Well, recently this is like last month I saw go by that he was doing this free training on LinkedIn Live. So he had people register on LinkedIn Live and on the live they had like 400 live viewers. And it was very, it felt very informal, just almost like a fireside chat. But it was really packed with loads of information. And then at the end he didn't do like this big heavy sell and said go, you know, buy my stuff or you know, here's countdown timers and all the things that we do as marketers. He's like, just email me. And he gave out like an email address to say, hey, get if you want the slides and if you want this, and I got this extra thing for you and that bonus and that you want to be added to my list, you know, just send your email to here. And it was like, that was really effective. It felt really fun and engaging and personal and, and it was B2B. So.

Ken

Yeah, yeah. You know, for a while people have been talking about, you know, free courses or, you know, quizzes are, are good lead magnets. Yeah. You know, ebooks have been around for a long time, but I, I get the sense that they're kind of falling out of favor a little bit. Maybe, maybe, maybe a checklist is going to perform a little bit better just because as you mentioned, we need to have easy to consume content. But you know, I'd love to know if you see anything particular. And I know, you know, I mean, it's going to vary from E commerce to a brick and mortar business to a service area business, you know, B2B versus B2C. I mean, there are tons of variables, but what, what criteria should people be looking for when they're creating a lead magnet to, you know, to get that lead and, and you know, build that relationship?

Mari

Yeah, I, I think you're right here, Ken. There's, there's room for like innovation. Ebooks have been around for decades. I'm a skimmer. See, if you give me, if you give me like a quick summary or even a full transcript side by side with a video, like even, like a five minute video or something, I am gonna, my eyes are gonna skim through and even search for keywords on that written word. So I'm, I, my brain just tends to do better with the written word. But then I'll, I might watch the video as well while I'm like putzing around doing the dishes or feeding my cats or putting my makeup on or whatever. And I'll just put it at 2x speed and I'll consume the video or the audio. But I want to give a, an example. Something that I thought was really, really amazing. It really caught my eye. It was on an ad on Instagram and it was our good friend John Jantz. Right. The founder of Duct Tape Marketing. He's a legend, been around forever. I understand he's actually handing the business off to his daughter. I think he's kind of standing retiring and his daughter's taking over.

Ken

That's correct.

Mari

I saw this ad I couldn't believe my eyeballs. It was for an ungated lead magnet. So I clicked through and it says, watch this short five minute video. And I'm like, like what? I don't even have to opt in. I can watch this five minute video. Like tap on the ad and boom, it's there. I thought it was really cleverly done and it was specifically to help grow your agency. It was for agency owners to help them grow. But right below the video, he had a calendar booking system embedded and to go ahead and book your free call, your free strategy call or whatever. So I thought it was really cleverly done. Another quick example, my longtime industry friend Molly Mahoney. She, she's a firecracker. I'm sure you follow her. But frequently doing things like she'll do a live demo and this works well too, where you literally got your big computer screen, but you grab your phone and you're through your phone, you're doing a quick reel and you're showing something, what you're doing, but you're not revealing the tool that you're using. She's always demoing an AI tool. Hey, if you want to know what, what this is, you know, drop this comment, you know, let me in what I want in or DM me. And she's really good at doing those kinds of hooks for people to, to start generating interest and leads. Oh, by the way, one other quick thing on the leads. Leads, slash. Selling a drum that Gary Vaynerchuk is really beating loudly for 2025. He's predicting the top, top trend will be live selling. So if you have anybody in the E. Com business, then we're going to see a lot of live selling very, very popularized already in China. And you know, it's funny because Facebook and Instagram, it's like they, they've been there, done that, but it's like it's coming back. And then there's this app called. Is it whatnot? Not too so familiar with it, but it's called Whatnot, where it's like people are selling their things through live selling. It's impulsive, it's compelling. So, yeah, that's, that's. I think that'd be a great way to not only generate leads, but, but also possibly sales.

Ken

Yeah, cool. Yeah, I just saw Molly speak this week. Week, actually. So.

Mari

Oh, you were at that, that bought AI.

Ken

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, I think a lot of people, when they think about lead generation, they, they immediately think about having to pay for ads to be able to get Leads. But you know, like you mentioned Molly and, and I, I think there's a real strong trend for creating short form video in the form of reels probably particularly, you know, to just give those short little content bursts, you know, get that visibility, but also just have a nice easy way to have a call to action to get those people who are interested to raise their hand and say, yeah, I want to learn more about that. What are your thoughts about those?

Mari

Oh my God. I honestly, I think if there's one of the best performing content formats that is the most underutilized realized, it's stories. I think that brands and businesses of all sizes just forget to do stories or because they're ephemeral. Right. They're gone in 24 hours. And when the whole concept came out, as a marketer I was just like, what the heck? Who has time to create content that disappears? But now it's like earlier we were talking about how the algorithm shows your content to non followers. So that's all of your feed content, but stories are only shown to your followers and you can never like jam up the feed. You can't like overdo the algorithm. If you Want to post 20 stories in a row, no problem, because the user is under their control as to how many they consume or not. Right. Tap, tap or swipe to the next one. And so stories, the beauty of stories on Instagram in particular, but also on Facebook is you can include links, links and calls to actions. But I wouldn't overdo it. Just do all your promotions and CTAs and links non stop because that's going to not get as much engagement. So in the stories you can be more informal and more personal, more humanized, real people, background, behind the scenes kind of stuff and maybe some of that. And then interspersed with your offers and your CTA and your links with reels. Yeah, I think the most compelling and easiest CTA on Instagram is the dms. You know, DM us this word or comment this word and then they get the, the DM comes through the manychat or whatever one that you're using.

Ken

Yeah, awesome, thank you.

Mari

Oh, oh, by the way, those of you paying for meta verified, I don't know why. Well, I probably do know why. It's a monetary play. But meta has introduced like multiple levels of the meta verified. And if you pay for the higher level, I don't know anyone that's doing it, I certainly wouldn't do it. But you do get the opportunity to put links in reels at one of the higher levels of Meta verified. FYI.

Ken

Awesome.

Ian

Hey, Ken, I just wanted to check with you how our time's doing, because I know we have a few more.

Ken

Questions, but yeah, we're, we. We try to keep this at about an hour, so we do have a few more questions. So. Ian, Jeff, lightning round. Yeah, sure.

Ian

I, I can do a super fast question for you, Mari. Ad budgets for local businesses like dentists, roofers, you name it, remodelers. Is there kind of a starting point or a sweet spot for ad budgets this year?

Mari

Gosh, the first number that comes to my mind is like 1500. But, you know, if someone can do 5000, great. But it's all about the ROAS, right? It's got to come back to don't even spend a dime unless you know for sure your. That your ads are yielding a positive roi. Yeah. And the other thing too, though, I like to say is if, if someone is brand new to ads, you're going to take maybe the first thousand twelve hundred and know that, that you're just going to slowly burn through that to just test, test and iterate. Or just test and iterate with your organic. Before you add a dollar. Yeah.

Ian

Awesome. Thank you.

Mari

You. Yeah.

Jeff

I can chew up the, the time that maybe that, that even would have spent on that question. Just maybe at a high level in general, if we can dig into specific marketing strategies that you think small businesses should implement on Facebook and Instagram, you know, in 2025.

Mari

Yeah. Overall for the strategy, it's. It's like the name of the game now is organic. Content is the darling of social media and has to be really, really compelling. So whether it's entertaining, I personally love to see, like, where it's humanized. There's real human stories, there's short, engaging videos. It's real people, I always say, like, tugging at people's heartstrings if you make them, if you can move them emotionally, if you make people laugh, cry, or go aww. So an example real quick, one of my courses, I think, Ken, you might have been in this one there. One of the participants in my course, they were selling like steel enclosures for farms. And when you looked at their Instagram, it's like so much of the gear, like just pictures and sometimes little videos of, of the, you know, the steel enclosures. And so when they switched to having one of their guys doing like, they call it like the walking man style of videos. So like someone's following around with a camera, just a phone, and then he's demonstrating the various styles of fencing and Enclosures. It was just so much more engaging. You say, oh, okay. Wow. I see this in. In context, not just like a. A brochure kind of style of your social media marketing. Does that make sense?

Ken

Yeah.

Jeff

Yeah.

Ken

Do you think having a human face influences anything in the algorithm?

Mari

I think it does. A hundred, a thousand percent. No question. Yes.

Ken

Yeah.

Paul

Does it have to be a real human face?

Mari

I knew that question.

Ian

I love it.

Mari

What's that, Ian?

Ian

I said I love it.

Mari

That.

Ian

That came from Paul, the.

Ken

The glowing orb. So, you know, Paul. Paul does not appear on camera.

Jeff

So we're just waiting for him to get his AI generated avatar.

Paul

I'll work on that.

Ken

So.

Paul

So I'm glad I got this question. Ms. Mistakes in Facebook and Instagram marketing. What. What are some of the common mis. Misconceptions, Whatever. And you know, you kind of touched on one. The way I see it is ad budget. It's amazing how many people think they can get results for 500amonth and it's just not going to happen. To me, that qualifies as a myth.

Mari

Yeah, yeah. There's. I would say for this year, in 2025, my number one mantra is going to be stop chasing more followers. It's not about the followers. I even saw somebody put a comment in recently. Marketing professionals say, in the future, will we even need followers? That's how profound this change is. Because if the AI is going to be able to do things like, like, like putting our content in front of people who've never heard of us, we don't know they exist. But all of a sudden, because the AI is so sophisticated and clever that it knows, oh, there's a buying intent here, because it's been watching the things that you're. It watches the ads you've been consuming. It watches the websites you're looking at. Oh, wow. Oh, why don't we put this ad in front of this person? Boom, you've got a sale. So. So just this whole idea of, like, if I could. It's a vanity metric metric. If I only had a million followers, then I could retire. It doesn't work that way anymore. So that's funny. Not funny. My. My main drum I'm beating. I would say also, Paul, a myth or mistake would be link posts. It's just. Yeah. Putting too many link posts. And. And we do want to use our link. So go ahead and try them in the first comment, try them in the stories and then just. Yeah, stop chasing vanity metrics. Remember what pays the bills, leads and sales.

Paul

Yes, absolutely. But, yeah, I like your comment about followers because it's. You absolutely correct. Everybody wants to chase, oh, I have this many followers. So what did they do Anything?

Mari

Yeah, exactly. It's just the ego, our money.

Paul

Engage with anything.

Mari

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Yeah. I would rather have a much smaller following and, and have more, you know, more engagement, more clicks, more dms, all the things. The way the algorithms are working or, you know, a smaller audience that really engages. Well, you know, like my social scoop group. Okay. Would I like to have 250,000 instead of whatever it is, 26,000 these days, maybe, but whatever, you know, you just, you just serve the people that come to you the best that you can and focus on keeping on top of all these changes, which is why people are listening to this podc, which is awesome. I'm really glad that you guys are doing this.

Ken

Yeah, thank you. Yeah. I guess just to kind of follow on, on with that, though. In terms of followers, one thing that is very important, I think, is, is building a quality email list. So how can you get people from social media onto your email marketing list so that or text marketing list is appropriate, you know, or even remarketing, you know, opportunities where you don't actually know the person's name or have their direct contact information. But that's, that's really ultimately, I think, more important, obviously, than just followers. Like you said, followers is purely a vanity metric.

Mari

That's right. That's right. Were you asking me a question, Ken?

Ken

Well, just. Do you have any thoughts or recommendations about how you take people off of social media?

Mari

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Ken

Get them onto an email or text marketing list.

Mari

Well, that's the thing. Back to the lead magnets, right? Just has to be so compelling, timely, quick and easy to consume. Helps people save money, make money, have a better life, whatever the deal is. You know, on the Facebook group side, for those folks that do have a group or thinking about a group and really have a compelling reason for when There are some tools like I use one called group Funnels in, in the admittance questions, I just ask people three questions and then the third one is like, you know, would, can I send you my. My free social media guides or. Or, you know, resources and, and they. I just have them enter the email. There's two of them. There's their group Funnels and there's one called group Leads. They're GDPR compliant. It's just a chrome extension. It's not an API because there's no API in groups anymore. But yeah, just really driving people either the DMs just trying to like, lower the friction and make it so seamless that people see something and they're organic. They're like, wow, that looks amazing. Yeah, sign me up. I mean, I, I can't tell you how many email lists I'm on. I'm always signing up for stuff.

Ken

Yeah, absolutely. I think it was Donald Miller that, you know, talked about the value of, you know, an email address right now is like 25. So perceived value, I mean, people have to feel like they're getting at least, least $25 worth of value before they're willing to give up their email address.

Mari

Wow.

Ken

And I know that's probably a statistics that that's a couple of years old, but people need to realize, you know, and to go back to digital marketers mantra, you know, value in advance. I mean, that's the key if you want to start building a relationship and take advantage of anything in online marketing, you know, it really has to be a value in advanced strategies, strategy. I think.

Mari

I love that. Yeah, I love that. And I think something that Ryan Dice has said over the years, founder of Digital Marketer, is that a lead magnet needs to deliver exceptional value. I think he said like within the first five minutes. And again, that's an older stat. I want to say, like in the first, like 60 seconds, it's like you want people to go, wow, is this what I get for free? You know what, what will I get if I pay?

Ken

So yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, Mari, we're running up on our, our time limit here. I wanted to thank you so much for being our guest today. I also wanted to, you know, give you an opportunity to let our listeners know. How can they learn more about you? How can they find out about, you know, the classes that you have? Because they're all fantastic. As I said before, I've, I've taken, I don't know, at least five or six from you, I believe, and they're all tremendous. You're somebody that I really value, you know, as a thought leader in our space and making, you know, digital marketing less, and particularly social media marketing less complicated for people and more actionable. So how can people find out more about you?

Mari

Well, any of the socials, Mari Smith and marsmith.com my website. Come and join my social scoop group on Facebook that is linked through from my Facebook page. It's just at Mari Smith Smith and as I often like to say, just Google me. So yeah, and you can reach me in the DMS usually in Facebook and Instagram. I don't get to LinkedIn as much, but I will eventually. I mean, if you message me there, I'll see it sooner or later, so. Yeah, thanks.

Ken

Okay, awesome. Well, thank you so much. Just one last thing. Is there anything else that you feel like we haven't really talked about today that we should share with our listeners or just anything you want to kind of re. Emphasize, guys, before we.

Mari

No, I appreciate you saying that. I think that there's really interesting times right now with the rapid acceleration of AI and these constant changes. And there's Zuckerberg just the other day announcing, you know, they're gonna do. Do away with the fact checkers, and people are freaking out, and they're gonna leave Facebook and go to Blue sky. And it's like, I really encourage everybody, marketers, small businesses, to just take that deep breath and come back to what's important to you. You know, focusing on your business, your strategy, your methods. Educate yourself, but never feel panicked or overwhelmed or like you can't keep up. I think keep up is just a ludicrous notion. There's. Nobody can keep up, whatever that even means. So just do your best each day and serve your clients, and all will be well. Yeah, that's my parting wisdom.

Ken

I'm glad you brought that up, because we frequently talk about don't let your personal biases influence what you decide to do and what marketing channels you decide to use. You know, and I mean, if you're id, it's really. It's not about you. It's about where your ideal customers are and if they're still on. On Meta or on Instagram, you know, you. You shouldn't walk away.

Mari

Right, yes, that's true.

Ken

Yeah, absolutely.

Mari

Yeah.

Ken

Well, thank you very much, Mari. It's really an honor to have you on. I really appreciate it and thoroughly enjoyed our conversation.

Mari

My pleasure.

Ken

Ian. I will let you take us out.

Ian

All right. Thanks again, Mari. And until next week, folks, keep calm and mark it on.