Did you know that mastering Facebook Ads doesn’t have to be complex?

To show you, we’ve interviewed three Facebook Ads experts to give you their opinion and viewpoint on how to be successful with Facebook Ads.

From scaling to fine tuning, we hope you enjoy this deep dive.

Subscribe to BoostSauce to learn even more marketing and sales knowledge, faster…

 

When it comes to Facebook Ads, there are only a few people we turn to for amazing advice that works across the board for different goals. Whether you’re in SaaS, eCommerce, or lead gen, you’ll be excited to learn that the recipes these experts will share will all help you hit your goals faster.

 

     

Join Our Guests Below:

Dennis Yu: CEO @ BlitzMetrics

Dennis amplifies exposure and sales of successful entrepreneurs via systems, analytics, and young adults certified in our digital marketing training. He is also a Contributing Writer for Social Times, Social Media Club, Tweak Yo Biz, Business 2 Community, and Social Media Examiner.

Nuggets Dropped x104

“People always buy based on the why. Not just impulse”

 

Tim Chard: Agency Director @ Bell Curve

Tim helps SaaS and eCommerce companies achieve growth through paid acquisition. Outside of consulting, he previously managed the marketing channels of AdEspresso (acquired by Hootsuite in 2017). Notable achievements include growing organic traffic 390%+, hosting multiple webinars with 500+ attendance figures, scaling their paid ads, and fully owning/automating their lead acquisition.

Nuggets Dropped x46

“Get your UVP from researching bad alternatives”

 

Matt Nelson: Director of Paid Social @ KlientBoost

As the Director of Paid Social at KlientBoost, he is a thought leader in PPC and CRO for Facebook and other platforms. He cares about the analytics and metrics that matter, which is making money for the client. His accomplishments include getting a BA in Business and recently his MBA from Cal State Fullerton as well as a Contributing Writer for various blogs.

Nuggets Dropped x77

“The biggest impact is not from the ad copy, it’s the visual”

 

Facebook Ads With Dennis Yu

 Dennis: Hey, hey.

Johnathan: Hey Dennis, how are you?

Dennis: Good, bro.

Johnathan: Awesome.

Dennis: I’m in the beach. I’m Gonna be in San Diego, I go to L.A. all the time. I should catch you part way.

Johnathan: Yeah, I mean it sounds like it’s very close. But you know how it is, it’s like a four hour drive between Orange County and L.A. at any given opportune moment. So, we’ll probably never see each other.

Dennis: I Ubered from L.A. down to San Diego just three days ago, so I know.

Matt: Oh man.

Johnathan: Dang, well that’s quite impressive. But Dennis, you know the name of the game in regards to this podcast. You have the co-host, Matt Nelson, our director at Paid Social, here.

Matt: Hey Dennis.

Johnathan: We’re here to talk about Facebook advertising. And more importantly, everything that you do at BlitzMetrics, the things that you do for your clients, whichever ones you feel comfortable mentioning. I know that you’ve done some case studies and stuff like that, but if anybody’s getting started with Facebook advertising.

Let’s talk about the foundation, first. What do you care about, if you were to say, hey, I really love you as a friend, I’m gonna help you out and not charge you a thing. What would you tell that person to begin with?

Dennis: Plumbing.

Johnathan: Plumbing, all right.

Dennis: Digital.

Johnathan: All right, okay.

Dennis: Digital plumbing. All the tracking, all the different tags inside one Google Tag Manager container. Because then you build marketing audiences. You can see the effectiveness of what’s converting or not, you can look at cross channel reporting. You can build audiences that go between email and social and Facebook.

And for this friend, that’s fictitious, that wants to grow their business, if they wanna have success on Facebook, they have to bring something that’s already working. See, Facebook’s an amplifier.

Johnathan: Got it, I like that.

Dennis: So if you put a $10 bill in a machine, you might get $100 back, times 10, you put zero, you put an egg in the machine, you’re gonna get zero back. So Facebook’s the ultimate re-marketing machine because it allows you to build these sequences.

If I consume video A from Matt, then I can show video B from Jonathan and I can, then, show Lenny Page C that features me or what have you. And it’s just building relationships one step at a time and I think people miss that because they’re so caught up in the tools and the changes and the data and all that stuff.

Johnathan: The new algorithms and it’s interesting you say this because in our world, we’re very much direct response. We gotta prove the money. And I know you do, too, but you also talk a lot about the brand side of things and how that can help things out.

So you have this fictitious friend. You’re figuring out the plumbing is now correct. You’re using Google Tag Manager. The audiences are set up. Is there any type of audiences that you see perform differently for different types of business or is it always following a certain recipe of this audience first, then this, and then this?

Dennis: Man, you used all of the words I love, thank you so much. We think about three stages in this funnel. Because we like to eat, let’s just say we have a three-layer cake. We have awareness to consideration to conversion.

Three stages in that funnel. Google and Facebook, they use the same terminology. The brand people are at the top. They build an awareness, they’re entertaining. 

Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, they’re about being friends and eating Chicken McNuggets together and getting diabetes together.

Johnathan: Dipping it in the BoostSauce.

Dennis: And at the bottom, people are buying things. Yeah, you have your joint clients. Yeah, 20 piece Chicken McNuggets for $5. I had someone else try it just ’cause I wanted to see the conveyor belt and the automation they have that’s gonna come over to the US.

Johnathan: Oh, no way, okay cool.

Dennis: Yeah, it’s amazing. But as a direct marketer, because we wanna drive sales that come in through branded search and come in through key words that are very obvious that you and I know, we have to drive that initial intent and Google calls that the zero moment of truth and I don’t believe that’s true.

I call it the negative one moment of truth because people have to have heard about your brand, heard it from friends, heard it from somewhere else and then wanna type that into Google. Then, when they see your ad on any channel, decide, you know what, I think I actually believe that enough, I’m gonna click on it.

And so that’s where brand marketing and direct marketing work together. That chasm in the middle is engagement. So how do you do both? Re-marketing. 

The $1 a day one minute videos are how you bridge brand marketing and make it effective and measurable and dollar-wise, profitable for a direct marketer.

You can have your cake and eat it, too. Your three-layer cake.

Johnathan: Wait, so let me stop you there for a second. So your Dollar-A-Day strategy is, you’re basically mentioning awareness and then you’re mentioning one-minute videos. So if you put those three things together, is that the main premise of the Dollar-A-Day strategy?

Dennis: You ever play Tic-Tac-Toe?

Johnathan: I have and I usually beat people because they don’t know that you should always start in the middle.

Dennis: That’s right and that’s always your strategy. So in this case, our strategy is, we want three awareness videos on the top. That’s the first row on the top.

In the middle, we want three engagement nuggets.  We are sharing knowledge about how you do something. You’re not selling, right.

And then the bottom layer, you earn the right to sell. And what you can do is re-market.

So if you label these boxes, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, then anyone who consumes videos one, two, or three, these one-minute videos, we’re gonna spend $1 a day and re-market them down into the next layer.

So they can consume four, five, or six. Anyone who watches at least 10 seconds of any video, four, five, and six, I’m gonna re-market down into seven, eight, and nine, which is another video.

Or it could be a landing page.

Johnathan: Sure, sure.

Dennis: Or you know, messenger box or whatever. Then I drive them to the website, I wanna ask for their money. So the beauty of marketing on Facebook is that with video, and only with video, can you say, anyone who saw this one video, Jonathan, I wanna show them this next thing in the sequence.

And I’d like to go against 10-second video views because it defaults at two or three seconds. That doesn’t really count ’cause people, they’re still scrolling and they accidentally played the video. 10 seconds means they’re paying attention.

And that means I can, then, show them the next thing. So maybe in an ideal sales journey, they would be 5 or 10 minutes of the long-form video or a landing page that has different components necessary to bring people down the funnel, the eye of the funnel, whatever version of your funnel.

But let’s say we break those into different components and then we allow them to trickle into the news feed and we let Facebook’s algorithm determine what messages should be shown next. What’s your favorite guilty pleasure? Like on Netflix or HBO, Game of Thrones is this weekend, right, the last one?

Matt: Don’t talk about it, I’m still behind.

Johnathan: I actually never got my wife to buy into that so I can’t even talk about that.

Dennis: You know, I’ve never even seen one episode.

Johnathan: There you go, you and I are so alike.

 Matt: We’re safe.

Dennis: But I can tell you that, if you watch Game of Thrones, then if it’s HBO, it’s gonna recommend, you might also like this show. If you buy something on Amazon. Like I left my, left my freaking AirPods in the hotel two days ago.

Johnathan: Dude, love AirPods.

Dennis: I gotta buy, I wonder how many hotels, or gyms, that I’ve lost stuff in, like charging cables and things like that. So I go to Amazon and I buy another one. And it says, oh, well people who bought AirPods, they also like this.

People who bought this kind of, and I’m a big fan of popcorn. As in, I have a real movie theater popcorn, not the microwave nonsense. It says, people who bought this kind of popcorn also bought these accessories and also bought this.

That’s the algorithm at work. That’s called a collaborative filter.

It’s the same thing on Amazon, on Apple, on Spotify, on Facebook, I would even argue, Google.

I spent time with Gary, we were both at Pitch Marketing in Visalia and the algorithm determines what’s next.

So if you feed lots of little pieces in these three stages of the funnel. The algorithm knows who is a knee-jerker, wanna buy right away, impulse person, who is a tire-kicker where they need a lot of information along the way, who’s just sitting on the toilet and consuming funny videos but will never actually buy anything. 

Johnathan: That’s also Matt.

Dennis: The algorithm knows all that

So if we allow the algorithm to do the work, and we put the ingredients to allow the algorithm to dictate the journey of what the next step is for our users, then we look like we’re amazing optimizers ’cause the ROI looks good, we have our plumbing in place, like we talked about, and then it’s just a matter of stacking more items, playing winner-stay-on.

I know you guys’ client lists are killer when it comes to testing all the zephyr stuff you’re doing, or any of the stuff I’m probably not allowed to talk about. But all the testing that’s going on and we’re just doing the same thing on the Facebook side, we’re just reading things, things that are working well, we find a winner, we put more money on it, and the Dollar-A-Day strategy is, I initially put $1 a day for seven days, so I’m spending $7 on a constant.

Yeah, it’s not much, but if it meets some basic standards, like people are actually watching the first few seconds of it. Facebook’s optimizing to, what they call, a through-play, which is they watch all the way through, just like it sounds.

Or at least 15 seconds, so if I’m getting through-play for three cents on one of these videos and the other videos is up at like 30 cents, well that tells me something. It means that people don’t like it. And the cost of my re-marketing audiences is really high, so I probably need to find another way to do that.

Maybe my intro isn’t very good. Maybe there’s not motion. Maybe I’ve got the wrong targeting. There’s all kinds of things that are wrong. And so as I continue to add more and more tests that I’m adding to this three by three grid, I’m gonna eventually have my greatest hits where I have three awesome things for awareness, three awesome things for the consideration middle phase, and then conversion.

What’s the best way to get them to buy. Is it a sale? Is it a free trial? Is it a compelling story? What is the price, whatever it is.

Johnathan: For sure.

Dennis: And that’s all that you really have to do. Anybody, and we find that it works whether you’re selling insurance or real estate or paper towels or ice cream, whatever you’re selling, it’s the same thing.

We’ve done the same thing for RESBO. The same thing also works for the local dentist. The same thing works for, you know, we sell people’s, you can get your face on a pair of socks at our site. One of our test sites that we run through Shopify. It’s on BlitzGif, you can have your face on a pillow.

You can have your face on oven mitts. And it works for a business like that. What would be in common between a business that ships socks with your face on them versus a high-end luxury real estate agent in Orange County?

Johnathan: Nothing at all.

Dennis: You think nothing. From a content standpoint, nothing.

But from a strategy standpoint, because it’s the same algorithm that’s determining what’s showing up in your news feed. It’s the same algorithm that determines, hey if you’re on Amazon and you buy this, here’s other stuff you might like.

And the more competition there is, the more powerful the algorithm is, the higher the filter power is, because it means more and more stuff can’t be shown. The algorithm has to be smarter about what’s being shown.

And all we do is let the system work in our advantage. In our favor instead of trying to cheat it and play all kinds of SEO games. You know all the different games. The SEO people are the worst when they try to do Facebook ads because they try to play their old games.

Matt: Dennis, you literally just gave us 30 nuggets there, so that was awesome. You mentioned you do a lot of testing to find those top three in each category in the funnel, those heavy-hitter videos.

Once you have that secret sauce and you have those nine videos that are just crushing it for you, at what point do you start to exhaust them and realize, all right, I might need to start switching these videos up again.

And now that they’ve maybe fatigued and what not, what’s your process when you start hitting that wall, there?

Dennis: Man, I probably answered that question 100 times in the last 12 years. Ever since we started advertising in May 2007. But I have a different answer, now. 

Johnathan: Ohhh, dun, dun, dun.

Dennis: Now, what I used to say, what I used to say is that, that’s my own Chicken McNugget now.

Johnathan: Okay, there ya go.

Dennis: Instead of the 20-pack, I got the 30-pack, the Dennis sized, it’s not super-sized, it’s Dennis sized. But usually, when ads start to burn out, or the CPA starts to go up, then it could be the audience has been maxed out.

And it could be maxed out because you’re selling Christmas trees and now it’s January. Or you’re only targeting people in a very narrow area, like people who are really hard core about a particular thing, like guns, and well, actually, there’s a lot of them in the US.

Whatever it is, you exhaust that audience, and then you have to expand out to things like look-a-likes, or expand out to interests that are not quite as tight, but are bigger. See the quality, quantity trade-off?

And then maybe dip down a little bit lower. Or maybe it’s, you’re running off a remarketing pool and you need to increase the size of that remarketing pool so you have more to yield down in your DR side.

That’s the traditional way of looking at things. What I’ve found in the last year with Facebook, in particular, is that once the system has figured out what’s converted, if you have at least 50 conversions per week, per asset, which is Google’s system, then you can run untargeted against the entire United States.

Unless there’s certain things, like legally, you have to target 18 plus or certain kinds of restrictions, but once the system knows what’s working, the oxymoron, or the irony or catch-22, is that you can actually run untargeted because if the objective at the bottom of the funnel is conversion, the system will sub-target against whatever target you have unless any targeting you draw around any audience puts Facebook in handcuffs where it can’t go outside of that region that you drew.

Even though, you could say, hey, I’m selling women’s, whatever kinds of stuff. And so therefore you target just women. But maybe there are some men that would buy because some men might want those products, who am I to judge?

Maybe they’re buying it as gifts for their wife. And so I’m just gonna run untargeted. Or, you know what, I really know that my demographic is males, 40 plus, who are veterans and military, and first responders, yeah that might be true.

But there’s also other people. There’s still are other people that are 20, there’s still people that are females, there’s still people that are all walks of life, not quite as high-density, but when you allow the algorithm to draw beyond your area, it can find, the filter power is so strong, it can find those people efficiently at the target CPA that you have.

So when it’s working, you set a manual bid, you duplicate that ad-set multiple times over so now you have multiple audiences, each one is trying to teach as many conversions as possible at your target CPA, if you’ve chosen conversion as your objective, not website clicks, which is how you blow money. 

Johnathan: Crazy, I have a quick question ’cause I wanna talk about other things, too, but basically, let’s reiterate the nine boxes, so to speak, of the three videos. So you mentioned at the top, you have awareness. And then the second layer down was the more knowledge-sharing type of videos.

So for the awareness, let’s say that we’re a service-based business, like you and I are in the agency world, what would you recommend those top three boxes of those videos be about? And do they all have to be different or can they talk about the same thing?

Dennis: You want them all to be relatively different. Because you’re gonna create variations against each one to find winners. So we talk about why, how, and what, which is the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel.

So why, I’m just gonna start with why. So a why is, when I was 18, I dropped out of high school, I wanted to be a professional athlete. True story, I wanted to run for Nike. But I didn’t make the world qualifying times. And therefore, people can identify. 

Think about how you identify with Rocky or, what’s his face, Harry Potter and all of these stories are around some kind of protagonist you identify with. They go through some kind of challenge and then in the end, they win.

They kill Voldemort. They beat the Russian guy in Rocky or whatever it is.

You understand that’s the part during story, right? So that’s what we’re doing, too, but we don’t have to do Hollywood cinema style million dollar budgets, we use our iPhone. And we interview customers. We interview subject matter experts. We interview our founder. We give stories, ourselves, if we’re an agency owner. Jonathan, you’re the face of KlientBoost, like it or not, right?

Johnathan: I do like it.

Dennis: We’re journalists and we’re collecting the stories that have some kind of, something that happened. Like I was cut off at Whole Foods yesterday and I was gonna get pissed at this lady but then I remembered that everyone is dealing with internal challenges, so I decided I would be kind.

I tell a story, and from the story, I then extrapolate into some kind of mission and value, some meaning, something that my audience will identify with. 

Johnathan: And that’s the knowledge level? The second level?

Dennis: Okay, that’s the why.

The why is getting people to identify with you, to like you. You’re talking about shared experiences, things we can believe in.

And so if we are a tribe and we believe that something is important, that the environment is important, or that being able to spend time with our family and go surf at the beach at Huntington Beach is really nice, whatever it is, we believe in certain things, which is really saying, hey, we are the same.

This is our persona, then we also believe that we’re gonna take these particular steps to hit that goal.

So, we believe, means there’s this thing off in the distance that we are, this land that we’re heading to that we believe is very important, it’s so valuable to us. Therefore here are the steps that we’re gonna take and we’re going to equip you with the steps.

Here’s the knowledge on how to get there. Any goals, any mission that’s worth while you can break down into steps on how you get there. The rest, you let be tough stuff. And then when you share knowledge, so let’s say I share a story about, my family’s really important because of this story that happens, I tell the story and then I say what it means, I don’t say what it means.

If I say what it means first, then I’ve robbed them of the opportunity to experience the journey with me. Then, I can give tips on how to become a family, how I’m a family man, how I protect my family. The special ways that I say, that I surprise my wife, with good tips. Or things that I do to make sure my children turn out the way I want.

Or here’s my self pretenses. Well how’d you get it again? There’s all different kinds of how you use certain things. Like, oh that’s interesting.

For example, I can tell you that, yesterday I went through the airport security with nothing but my iPhone, no credit cards, no wallet, no nothing because I left it, I lost it three days ago. How’d I do it? I had Clear, so I just put in my fingerprint. I was also going to Milwaukee yesterday. They didn’t have Clear.

What happens? They bring over the TSA phone and they verify, tell me the cross-street where you live or the color of your roof, and they’re looking at your thing on Google maps.

I’m sharing expertise on how do you get around certain situations. Wow, that’s really fascinating, right? So the why might be, oh let me tell you, I love to travel and to be an entrepreneur and run my agency from all over the place.

You know, I was in Hawaii four days ago and I enjoyed some things in Hawaii. And I can tell stories. And then people wanna know how. How I’m showing, how do we manage our agency. How do we train our people. How do I get through security.

Then the what is, oh and the way we pay for all of this is that we do Facebook ads. And here’s how we do it. And so it’s just naturally from why, how, to what. 

Johnathan: I was so impressed.

Dennis: It doesn’t have to follow that sequential.

Johnathan: Well and that was the crazy part I was gonna ask. Because you have three videos in the first batch, for example, so if somebody watches video two, can they watch any video of the next three, for example. Does that story flow together quite nicely that way?

Dennis: Yeah, they don’t have to connect. The idea of why, how, and what, is, there’s many examples of why stories. It could be any customer. It doesn’t have to be, see I give a topic wheel, which is a whole nother thing.

When you think about your brand, what are the other topics that are just outside it?

Self-defense, patriotism, loyalty, honoring America, being a first-responder, the first amendment, second amendment, I mean there’s all these different things. There’s all these different areas of knowledge that tie to the product.

Then, from those areas of knowledge, I try to tie those back to people that have various stories. And so Facebook’s news feed is nothing but a bunch of stories and so I need to get stories in there as one minute vertical videos off of public figure pages that I boost for $1 a day to build re-market audiences.

And those re-marketing audiences sequence to other items that are at that same level or below.

So videos one, two, and three, you can, then, watch any other videos one, two, and three, or four, five, and six. If I re-market down to the next layer and now someone watched video number five, he could watch video number four or six, or he could watch seven, eight, or nine. Which don’t have to be videos, but ideally they are.

Johnathan: Do you exclude Matt from them watching videos one, two, and three once he’s taken that next step? He’s watched at least 10 seconds?

Dennis: No because Facebook knows where people are in the sequence. We’re relying upon Facebook to do the work for us because Facebook, Facebook’s very good at showing you what you actually want to see. You know you claim you don’t wanna see it. People will claim that they don’t like Donald Trump, well then stop clicking on Donald Trump because you’re feeding the algorithm that.

Matt: Dennis, when starting the why section of it, you mentioned that you only like, you recommend doing conversion oriented actions, not optimizing for link clicks. Even on the why step, do you recommend staying with the conversion action rather than link clicks?

Dennis: So the why at the top of the funnel,

Matt: More so video views.

Dennis: I like to go for, for video views or boosted posts, and I know that Facebook says not to boost posts, but it works really well and we spent a lot, it was hundreds of millions of dollars boosting posts. You and I know, Facebook says certain things and their account managers are supposed to say it, but what they say isn’t necessarily what works. The same thing with Google, too.

Johnathan: Yeah, I was gonna say not just Facebook.

Dennis: I mean, yeah maybe eventually it’d work. I mean, I’ll try.

Matt: Are you coughing about CBO? Cough, cough, CBO?

Dennis: CBO is another issue that we’re all gonna be forced to use, later. I think that if CBO is meant, it’s like training wheels for people that don’t know how to set budgets. 

Johnathan: What’s CBO?

Dennis: So assuming Facebook does flex-billing. Campaign Budget Optimization, to be able to spread budget between ads set up into the campaign level.

Johnathan: Got it.

Dennis: And it’s something that we can opt into now. And we can, we’ll be forced to do it later, but I think you should just go ahead and do it now. They always give you like a six-month grace period, but you should just go, anytime that’s up, I just go ahead and do it now.

Johnathan: Let’s resist til the last day. Just kidding, that’s what we do with the Google Ads interface, we’re like, all right, we’re forced to know this now. So, cool.

Dennis: And it’s like, Google and Facebook both try to expand the audience because they know that people will micro target too far, there’s three or four different ways. They try to expand the audience.

Now audience expansion on Facebook, I wouldn’t do that, ’cause they’re not very smart about it. But look alike audiences, yes, I would do that. That’s a form of audience. Or exact or broad match, those are all ways of audience expansion. Oh you should add some keywords, too, that they suggest. Maybe, maybe not.

Johnathan: Exactly, so with the Dollar-A-Day strategy, this sounds amazing by the way, and we can make in the notes, too, how you basically can execute that, how you can create an audience to move them through.

I wanted to talk about any other recipes that you find successful beyond the Dollar-A-Day, because my other question, I guess, let me go, really, back quickly to the Dollar-A-Day. If you have budget for more than that, can you increase your budget to more than $1 a day? Is that allowed?

Dennis: Oh, absolutely. We see big brands where they say, you know I have $1 million a month budget and this Dollar-A-Day thing is for small businesses. That won’t work for us.

Oh, yes it will because you initially start with $1 a day on any particular post or whatever it is that you’re testing, and maybe you have whatever, 5 or 10 new ones that you’re testing per day and each of them are starting to spend $1 dollar a day.

And we know that 90% of our stuff, on average, will fail and that’s just how it is. No matter what the industry is. Well, maybe the exceptions are Golden State Warriors. They’re win rate’s way higher ’cause anything Steph Curry incorporated–

Johnathan: Yeah, it’s annoying.

Dennis: It just seems to win.

Johnathan: But good for you.

Dennis: it just seems to go in, you know?

Johnathan: Yeah, I get your point. Wink, wink. We all know.

Dennis: But hey, 90% of stuff is gonna fail. And we don’t know, you and I know ’cause we’re pros, us three, that we put out 10 different adds and we think, oh this is gonna be the winner. And you know what, it’s this other one. And in hindsight, oh it’s because of this reason.

But 90% of our test is gonna fail and that’s why we have the data. And so we put out lots of these things and the ones that win, we’re gonna put more money on. We’ll put another $30 a month per day. And we look at it again.

Then we put another $100 for another couple weeks, and then pretty soon, after four or five rounds of upping the budget, now, we’ve spent $10,000 on this one thing.

We ran a campaign with Infusionsoft. We put $3 million on one ad. One video ad. But do you think we just said, okay we’ll just put it all one ad?

Johnathan: Bet all on one ad, yeah.

Dennis: No, no we initially put, literally, just a few dollars on it. It was good, we put more and we just kept putting on more. And Facebook put a case study about it and Sheryl Sandberg signed the plaque and sent it over and that whole kind of thing. They do that if you spend a lot of money. Just like Google does the same thing.

I don’t know who does better gifts, they’re both very good if you spend a lot of money.

So the thing is that a lot of people will look at these case studies that Facebook showcases and they’ll think, oh I could do that, then they try and it doesn’t work and they’re like, ah it doesn’t work.

Well, what you don’t see is that before we had that one winner that was driving tons of leads for super cheap, for Infusionsoft, they’re now called Keap but they’re still Infusionsoft to me.

We had dozens, maybe even like 100 different videos that we made, all different ways to try and get people to do a free trial, or talking about how email is difficult or all the different things that small businesses have with marketing automation. But it was just this one where Natalie was taking this piece of paper that had an email icon on it and ripping it in half and saying, email I’m breaking up with you.

Johnathan: That was it.

Dennis: And so that caught their attention, that was the one. ‘Cause it caught their attention and then it talks about how Infusionsoft became, in time and this sort of thing. You should try a free demo now. And it was a 15 second video ad. And it killed it on Instagram, and just in general, getting people’s attention.

But we would have never have known ’cause we tried all these different ways, things with the founders of Infusionsoft, all kinds of cool tips on how you get into the inbox. Whatever kinds of stuff, but it was that one that won it and we never would have known.

And that’s the thing that every time you see a marketing winner, ’cause all you hear about is winners on the podcast and conferences. You just hear about, it’s like, wow I lose all the time. What’s wrong with me? All I do is get, why is it that all these other people are winning all the time and I lose all the time? It’s because they don’t talk about their losses.

I lose all the time. Somebody asked me on a podcast a couple days ago, oh so Dennis, when was the time that you felt like you were successful? At what point did you become successful and then everything was happy and rainbows and unicorns after that? And I said, never.

Johnathan: Still not to this day.

Dennis: And I’ve been doing digital marketing for 23 years. I have 70,000 hours of experience in digital market. You hear the 10,000 hour rule? I have 70,000, not 17, 7 0 and I still don’t feel like I’m a winner or successful.

Or maybe it’s impossible or what have you. And so we all need to adopt that mentality of we’re always testing, we’re always humble and let that data tell us what’s winning instead of, oh I think this one’s better. Okay, let’s put $1 a day behind it and let’s see.

Johnathan: So get really cute about it. There was this one quote I read, maybe a week ago or something like that, and it’s basically what you’re saying. It’s the last thing to show from planting a tree is it’s fruit, right?

And so, like you’re saying, everybody’s showing their fruit at the conferences or on the podcasts, but to get to that point, they had to go through a lot of patience and trial and error it seems like. That’s incredible.

So I know that we’re coming close to the time, are you okay to stay with us a little bit longer or you have a hard cut-off?

Dennis: Yeah, let’s do it. No, we’re great.

Johnathan: Let’s talk about some other recipes. We talked about the Dollar-A-Day, is there anything else you can share with us in regards to campaign structure, optimization routines, anything like that that you have found to be more of a recipe for you?

Dennis: Yeah, fewer ad sets. 

Johnathan: Fewer ad sets, interesting.

Dennis: Broader targeting.

Johnathan: What?

Dennis: Yeah. I mean, even the guys that are spending $100,000 a day, fewer ad sets, larger audiences because we wanna let Facebook do the work for us.

All too often, especially with the little guys who don’t have enough budget that you can support getting to 50 conversions per ad set per week at the bottom of the funnel, this is how you can tell when someone is a beginner.

They’re a total noob if they think all about targeting. It’s all about the targeting, no it’s not. The limiting factor is always be creative and the limiting factor in creative is one minute per video. One of my friends, Matthew Januszek, he’s the CEO of Escape Fitness. They’ve been making barbells and fitness equipment for 24 Hour Fitness Lifetime.

That’s one of the players. And the guy’s fit. He’s about to turn 50 and I worked out with him recently and I said something like, just for fun, you know what, I worked out as hard as I could yesterday for four hours and I don’t have six-pack abs. Your whole thing’s a scam.

Well, it takes time and it takes a process and it’s like you said, it takes a while to make fruit. You can’t just plant the seed and then dig up the seed the next day and see if there’s any fruit and then the next day you dig it up again. Okay, there’s a little root coming out of the seed now and then a week later, there’s a leaf coming out.

No, you can’t just keep digging up the thing everyday. And that’s what happens on Facebook is that advertisers, they make an ad and then they look the next day and say, it didn’t convert.

Wait a minute, we gotta trickle everything through our digital plumbing, through the different stages from awareness to consideration to conversion. And whatever the normal lifecycle is for people to make a decision.

What’s the lifecycle on average for dating to marriage? Maybe 12 to 18 months, something like that, it takes time to build a relationship. You can assess the different stages along the way and what kinds of videos may feed people along, but Facebook is about building those relationships at the top of the funnel all the way down.

That means simpler structures, longer time periods, larger audiences, so that you can see what’s working according to the standard assessment, so top of the funnel I’m looking at video views, middle of the funnel, I’m looking at things like leads, and messenger, chats or people signing up for events like webinars or watching a video for, a longer video that’s maybe five minutes, or reading a blog post which could be website clicks ’cause if you’re sending people to website in the bottom funnel, it works as a conversion.

Your ROI, it’s getting the phone call, whatever it is that’s a conversion. And that simple three-stage funnel usually means most people need three campaigns. Maybe they need more.

So with Delta Defense, we have more than that because there are multiple stages in conversion, there. But generally, you only need a few campaigns. Within each campaign, you need just a few ad sets and the limiting factor is always being creative.