There’s a list of questions and answers with time stamps, as well as a full transcript below.
Questions & Answers
1. Question: Can you please elaborate more specifically with examples if possible, how we can utilize the work we did for Value Proposition Canvas as we’re writing our ad copy. How did the theme, lead, and hook and the ad copy relate to the jobs, pains, and gains? Canvas was hard, but great work, and I would love to make the most of it as I’m writing my ad copy.
Question (2:53-3:39) | Answer (3:39-16:30)
2. Question: Most of my audience is on Instagram, can I use all of your recommendations for Facebook also for Instagram ads, especially regarding the copy, length, and content?
Question (17:16-17:24) | Answer (17:24-21:36)
3. Question: If I have a multi page pre-sell site of three pages and the third page being the opt-in, followed by delivering the lead magnet and soap opera sequence series, should I set my goal and ads manager as leads or sales?
Question (21:42-21:52) | Answer (21:53-43:10)
3. Question: My Facebook account was restricted, but it’s a little bit strange. What happens? Why does this happen? What goes on? What’s the deal with my Facebook account? Either me not having access to it or the accounts’ been shut down, whatever. I’ve created a new ad account, but I feel doing ads on Facebook is not a professional move. It’s too unstable. There’s no support. You can be banned for no apparent reason. I want some peace of mind in my business.
Question (43:11-44:52) | Answer (44:53-55:29)
4. Question: Is it a good idea to run branding and engagement campaigns before a conversion campaign to warm up in a cold audience and build a custom audience, which can then be used to create a lookalike audience for the conversion campaign?
Question (56:00-56:13) | Answer (56:13-1:09:46)
5. Question: What’s the best strategy when using a messages campaign, objective? Any thoughts on that?
Question (1:09:50-1:09:55) | Answer (1:09:58-1:12:53)
6. Question: I would love to know if you have experience with YouTube ads and if this is something that you recommend?
Question (1:13:47-1:13:52) | Answer (1:13:52-1:23:49)
7. Question: I’m having some trouble with Google keyword research. Here’s the background, starting a new business with a product, I know is highly in demand. It’s quality niche erotica, but with a lot of competition free and paid. I’m offering a subscription service with weekly stories in both texts and audio formats. She said that was inspired by a case discussed by Peter and [inaudible 01:24:44] problem. I’m finding very few ads on Google whatsoever. And those I find are for sex toys, lingerie, and sometimes books. Most of the top Google entries, when I niched down, when I described the type of erotic I write are for Amazon books, but not paid ads. I know that there are a few apps and websites that offer something similar to me, although on a much bigger scale and with less kinking niching. I realized that Google is probably not where I want to advertise, but I wonder if I misunderstood something or maybe you have some ideas for me moving forward with keywords, I’m using my phrase, baking a cupcake. I’m planning to advertise on adult sites, and we’ll be doing Facebook. I’m planning to build at SOI around the mixed topics of erotica, fantasy creativity, writing sexual wellness, kinks, psychology, personal development.
Question (1:24:19-1:25:42) | Answer (1:25:43-1:40:00)
8. Question: I read in the traffic engine that Shawn would give some slides, videos, examples of how to apply Google ads and build them. I can’t find them.
Question (1:40:24-1:40:30) | Answer (1:40:30-1:41:56)
9. Question: When can we expect a live case building from Shawn. Building a sphere of influence and traffic engine for a new service product?
Question (1:41:56-1:42:00) | Answer (1:42:00-1:44:03)
10. Question: Shawn advised to shut off mobile and tablet devices for Google ads. I’m wondering about those mobile phones because mobile today is 80% of all use devices and therefore Facebook ads targeting just on mobile is a good starting point. That’s what I learned from you guys and others, so how come this is different for Google ads and why do you exclude mobile phones for Google ads?
Question (1:44:11-1:44:30) | Answer (1:44:30-1:59:13)
11. Question: What’s the best way to use a multi page pre-sell site with a Google ad? I built a six page multi page pre-sell site, but it feels long for a Google ad, where our target group has a more urgent need to solve a problem or fill their need or desire. How can I approach this?
Question (1:59:20-1:59:33) | Answer (1:59:33-2:10:20)
12. Question: Can you give some advice what to write in the Facebook ad headlines and subtitle? There’s nothing mentioned about that, only about the ad copy itself. There’s nothing shared about that and I think that we have an impact on CTR All to prequalify.
Question (2:10:20-2:10:33) | Answer (2:10:33-2:14:08)
13. Question: I do client work as an agency and my questions are from the perspective of being a better marketer for my clients and attracting better clients. The reality is most clients in my metric are competition driven businesses. In my 10 years of doing business online, I have never ever met a different kind of business owner until TLB. By definition, they want quick results and they want to sell ASAP. Even though I want to grow my agency with SOI principles, the marketing I do for my clients is instant gratification marketing, which is what they want. Shawn, how did you, or do you balance this direct conflict of thinking when you owned an agency?
Question (2:14:47-2:18:43) | Answer (2:19:03-2:37:00)
14. Question: Growing my agency was free of influence principles. The comment Peter made in Tiny and Mighty is a good one. I have seen social engagement in organic sales explode over the last three years. SOI put simply is delivered via our website, the eyeballs hang out within social platforms. I’m an introvert. I really do not want to be on social media all day. At the same time, I’m not an SEO guy. Shawn, how do you use sphere of influence principles to grow a new agency? Or how would you use sphere of influence principles to grow a new agency if you had to start again today, had 12 months to make it work? So I, in parentheses, want to get clients immediately.
Question (2:37:00-2:37:07) | Answer (2:37:07-2:42:33)
15. Question: My audience was primarily an Instagram. When I go to automatic placement, about 80% of my impressions go to Instagram. Does that mean that Facebook’s telling me to focus on Instagram versus Facebook? And if yes, should I keep on setting up Instagram ads from Facebook manager or from the Instagram app?
Question (2:43:07-2:43:30) | Answer (2:43:30-2:42:33)
16. Question: Could you recommend some Instagram Ads courses you trust?
Question (2:44:31-2:44:35) | Answer (2:44:35-2:45:29)
17. Question: I don’t currently have 50 to 70 sales per week, but I have 3000 customers accumulated over two years. Can I use that email to set up my custom conversion for sales versus the leads? Or does it have to be a weekly sales number?
Question (2:45:30-2:45:45) | Answer (2:45:45-2:46:13)
18. Question: Am I understanding correctly that warming up the audience is in line with creating better prospects?
Question (2:46:14-2:46:20) | Answer (2:46:32-2:48:39)
19. Question: What if you went for conversions and then if people land on the buying page, but they don’t buy, you retarget them with videos to re-engage or indoctrinate them and then push them down a path of education that ends up with the offer and a different angle? Would you just retarget making the offer again if they don’t buy the first time?
Question (2:48:47-2:49:05) | Answer (2:49:05-2:53:40)
20. Question: I set the Facebook ads conversion to purchase, but purchase in my custom event means that they get to page two of our six page MPPS. Is this a good way to go?
Question (2:53:53-2:54:04) | Answer (2:54:04-2:54:45)
21. Question: I have a Dutch relationship coaching business. Most couples don’t have this in their relationships, but that’s a broad desire and they normally talk most about communication problems, but the real problems are deeper. Then you have the couples that have real problems and almost are or on verge of divorce. We can deliver the magic. So that couples in just two days are back in love again and have all the tools to go and grow from there. But how do we connect coaching with the needs that they want?
Question (2:55:50-2:55:56) | Answer (2:55:56-2:59:30)
22. Question: Quick follow up to the agency’s sphere of influence question. Would you focus on SEO or paid traffic to get people to see it?
Question (2:59:32-2:59:42) | Answer (2:59:43-3:02:45)
Transcript
Shawn (00:00:00):
All right. Just as people get added here, we’ll go over a couple of housekeeping things. So everyone who sent a question in, and when I say sent a question in, many of you sent many chapters from War and Peace, so thank you for that. I’m going to go through. We have seven questions that were received in advance. I’m going to go through six of those, I think. And then the last one really is a client services question. So what I’m going to do with that, just to be fair to everybody, is I’ll answer the first six questions that are more specific to this call for the core traffic engine training.
I will then answer any questions that are submitted on the call, and if we still have time after that, I’ll answer that the last question that’s more of a client services call. But then it’s fine if we have time. It’ll just be a matter of where that fits. So I want to make sure that today’s call is as broadly useful as possible for everybody. What do you think, André? Want to dive in and get started?
André (00:01:00):
Let’s do it. Yeah.
Shawn (00:01:03):
So just so everybody knows from a panelist perspective, obviously I’m on the call, André’s on the call, Loren is also on the call. And any of the questions that are related to Facebook video, we’ll do two perspectives. We’ll get Loren’s perspective, and my perspective. André will always chime in with his perspective whenever he feels like it. Just to clarify, Loren is a far, far, far more skilled Facebook tactician than I am. And when I say tactician, I don’t mean that in any derogatory sense. What I mean is that he is in the trenches of Facebook doing the work, knows it far better than I do. I’m much more of a Facebook strategist. So I think it’s very helpful to have both of those perspectives. So whenever there’s a question that’s related to Facebook, we’ll take two of those perspectives and just layer them on together. All right. Anything to throw out there before we get started, André?
André (00:01:57):
I don’t really have anything to add.
Shawn (00:02:02):
Just sitting there drinking your coffee. Like, eh, whatever.
André (00:02:05):
I am actually. Espresso. Yeah.
Shawn (00:02:08):
Of course. All right. One apology in advance. I will mispronounce some of your names. I’m just going to do first names. I apologize. It is what it is. I’ll do my best, but let’s dive in. So first question. Actually, I’m not even sure I’ll identify people’s questions, that way I can screw up your name. All right, identify names. But here’s the first question, and I’m going to read… Excuse me. I don’t think anybody, maybe one person actually submitted one question. Almost all of you submitted many questions and some with background and context. I want to make sure everybody hears all of that. So for this first question, I’m just going to read what was submitted. There are three different things. Once we get to the end of it, we’ll go back to the beginning. And, André, I think you’re going to want to chime in on this one too.
All right. So first question, can you please elaborate more specifically with examples if possible, how we can utilize the work we did for Value Proposition Canvas as we’re writing our ad copy. How did the theme, lead, and hook and the ad copy relate to the jobs, pains, and gains? Canvas was hard, but great work, and I would love to make the most of it as I’m writing my ad copy. Then most of my audience is on Instagram, can I use all of your recommendations for Facebook also for Instagram ads, especially regarding the copy, length, and content. And then if I have a multi page pre-sell site of three pages and the third page being the opt-in, followed by delivering the lead magnet and soap opera sequence series, should I set my goal and ads manager as leads or sales?
So lots of questions here. Let’s start with the beginning. So Value Proposition Canvas is not… You’re not trying to create a template. That’s what I want to be really clear about here. What you’re trying to do is uncover the big levers in a market subsegment or maybe a markets segment. What we think of as markets are often collections of markets. I think I may have used this example on the traffic engine. I can’t remember specifically, but I worked with a client that had an analytics software package and they really thought they had one audience and they marketed to one audience. But when we did the Value Proposition Canvas, it was very clear they had three and what made it so clear was that the jobs, pains, and gains, particularly the pains, were different for three different sub segments of their larger audience.
So that’s really what you’re looking for here, is you’re trying to find that match between. And it doesn’t have to be jobs, pains, and gains. It could just a very specific job somebody needs to get done. There’s a very specific need. And one of the reasons the Value Proposition design is so impactful is that you realize they’re different expressions of jobs or functional jobs. That’s what we tend to think of as a job, but they’re also emotional and social components of jobs. And often the emotional and social need is far more important than the functional need. The example, I teach a college class in entrepreneurship, and the example I use, I like to make fun of myself all the time in the class. Students seem to enjoy that for some reason. But I drive a full-size Toyota Tundra and the functional need that truck serves, I live four miles from pavement.
So I do need a four wheel drive truck. Excuse me. I live in a place with winter. So there’s a functional need. I need to go from point A to point B. But I have the most expensive trim line that the Tundra comes in. It’s the TRD Pro like it’s $20,000 more than a base Tundra. So there’s no functional need that that’s… I mean, sure, I could tell myself there is. You can make up something about how I need the extra suspension travel or something, but that’s nonsense. There’s an emotional need. I certainly don’t want to dissect this on the psychiatrist’s couch here or psychologist couch, to figure out what weird things are driving my decision. But that’s what the jobs pains and gains tries to uncover. Is if you try to sell me in this example, a basic Toyota Tundra, and you say, listen, it gets you from point A to point B, it’s got the same four wheel drive.
You’ll save all this money. That doesn’t resonate with me. Whereas if you were to sell, in a similar example, when my wife buys a car, all of the savings, the value that she gets. That really matters to her. That her emotional need for a vehicle very different than mine in many ways, polar opposites, which is always the truth. So what you’re trying to uncover when you do the Value Proposition Canvas is not so much the theme, the lead, the hook. What you’re really trying to narrow in on is what is the thing that moves that audience, just moves them at their heart and soul. That it’s the thing that’s more important than anything else. And the Value Proposition Canvas is the framework to get those ideas out of your head and start assembling them.
So then you can start pressure testing them. What often happens is somebody goes into a market and they think, let’s just say, it’s a market of 10,000 people, and they go into a market of 10,000 people and they’ve done the Value Proposition work, and they have identified 10 jobs and 10 pains and 10 gains, and their messaging talks about 30 different things. And there’s no one in that audience that cares about those 30 different things. It just doesn’t work that way. But perhaps within that audience of 10,000, there’s a subset of 3000 that are really motivated by one of those jobs and at the expense of everything else, if they could just get at that one thing is so impactful. So that’s what you would focus your ad. That would be the theme of your ad.
It’s that one thing you’re always reminding yourself. Am I speaking, excuse me, to the thing that actually matters. That sounds so obvious. I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen in 22 years, I’m excited to say 22 years, and it was November 3rd was when I started my 23rd year in business. So in 22 years, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people forget what it was they were actually trying to accomplish and what they’re advertising. It sounds so obvious, but you look at an ad and you’re like, I don’t even understand what you’re selling here. What is this about? And you realize someone along the way, just kind of forgot, and that’s the beauty of the Value Proposition Canvas is.
To get it out of your head, what you think are the main movers for your audience, realize that probably when you find five things that you really think matters, let’s say it’s five jobs that really matter. Those five jobs don’t matter to everybody in your audience, which means you have smaller audiences within the audience, and then you need to speak to those smaller audiences very specifically, and that’s where you get these really high leverage results. So I want to make sure that’s the best answer here. So, André, any thoughts to add to this? You use the Value Proposition Canvas. We both use it. So any thoughts to add there about how that relates to this particular conversation?
André (00:09:38):
Well you and I interviewed one of our best friends yesterday, Jonathan Boyd, and so I guess that’s something we’re going to be sharing on Friday as we do this recording now, and so we can certainly link to it in the show notes for this call. It’s not something that we can quickly unpack how Jonathan approached figuring out what that thing is that his market really went deep down, this emotional thing that’s driving them forward, that just pulls them forward to take action. And for Jonathan, this is slightly out of context, but for him, it was the ultimate lead guitar light bulb moment, and that’s how he packaged up that idea. But there’s ad copy and then landing page copy that unpacks that idea. And by the time they get to the bottom, that idea is packaged up in a way that just drives him crazy.
So for him, all the work that he did to uncover that is the stuff that’s inside of the Value Proposition Canvas. It’s talking to prospects and customers on the phone, which was one of the main things that he did. So that should not be understated that the Value Proposition Canvas is a framework that you can do the work, but it doesn’t replace speaking to humans at every opportunity whenever possible. There should be… It’s important to speak to people that represent your market and have those conversations because there are nuances that they’re going to say that won’t reveal itself in any other way. So I think those two things, when you overlap those two ideas together, the Value Proposition Canvas framework, the idea of speaking to people on the phone and asking them questions.
There’s a really good book called the mom test, just do a search on Google. I think it’s the momtest.com. You can go to the website, you can download the PDF. I think it’s free or you can go to Kindle and purchase the book there. And that’s really all the different questions and how to think about asking real life people, how to start to unpack those nuances that are in there in their head. And they don’t necessarily know what they are. They can’t necessarily articulate it clearly by just asking simple questions. So you kind of got to dig around a bit to reveal those things. So I think that’s all I’ve got to say, but we’ll point this recording to the call that we did yesterday with Jonathan, and I think it’ll add a nice nuance to this.
Shawn (00:13:02):
And I’ll add one last thing before we move on to the next question, which is just by way of example, just to kind of give you an idea of what you’re looking for. Because I oftentimes the Value Proposition Canvas is a gold mining exercise, right? It’s a framework that captures thinking. It directs thinking, but it also captures thinking, and it helps you organize your thinking, and to realize that you’re talking about different things. When you talk about something that is a pain, that is different than something that is a gain, which is different than something with a job that somebody is trying to accomplish. You’re not mixing those things in together into this sort of incoherent soup with 50 different bullets of benefits, and it’s overwhelming, and people just glaze over. We’ve all done that.
So the framework, the idea is really to give you a place to collect and organize and then pressure test ideas. One of them that I’ll share, that’ll kind of help you understand how this leads to insight. The client that I mentioned before, when we discovered that they had three markets, one of those markets, and if you can imagine, this is pretty obvious in retrospect, that one of the markets that would use it as a software analytics package would be agencies like mine. So this was very close to me. However, if you’re an agency, the thing that you learn very quickly, if you run an agency, or if you’re a service provider that you learn very, very quickly is clients want reports. I don’t know why. It baffles me because most of them have no idea how to interpret the data in a report.
Most of the data that you can report is not really actionable at the system level. It makes no sense to me, but after 22 years, I still haven’t figured this out, but it’s true. Clients want reports. And that’s really one of their biggest desires that they want to see a report in a PDF. This thing that they get, that they can share and point to, and this particular software package did not create reports. You couldn’t create reports. And it was better, to be clear, it was better because of that. But when you have a subset of your audience where, perhaps the biggest pain they have, as it relates to the work they’re trying to accomplish, is that their clients need reports and you’re selling them something, or you’re trying to sell them something that does not create reports. It doesn’t do the thing that you need more than anything else.
That’s a pretty tough sell, and if it’s left unanswered, people just don’t buy it. Agencies just don’t buy the product or they buy it and they’re very unhappy later when they’re like, Well, wait a minute, how do I create reports for my clients? And you say, Well, you can’t well. And that was happening a lot. So the Value Proposition Canvas was the architecture, it was the framework that helped us really see that. That if we’re going to go to this audience and this audience has this primal need for this particular thing, and we don’t do it, we need to either say in advance, we don’t do that, we’re not for you. Or we need to figure out a way to do it or we need to have a very clear alternative. That’s really what Value Proposition Canvas does. It shines lights on things like that and made it clear that that was just one subset of what they thought was one audience. All right. I’m talking about this a lot, and I want to give Loren a chance to take over for a while here. So second question. I’m sorry,
André (00:16:30):
Sorry, Shawn. There’s just a quick question from Kevin, just in the comments about what you said just early on. He wants to know if he should hang on or not.
Shawn (00:16:42):
I mean, well, sure. I mean, I think we’re going to go over a lot of things that are valuable on the call. So from that sense, yes. I think it’s valuable for you to spend time on the call and listen to other people’s questions from the perspective of, is your question going to get answered. We have seven questions so far. We haven’t seen anybody else drop any other questions in our track record. So far as we’ve gone three hours every time. So probabilistically speaking, I think we’re going to cover that seventh question, or I could just say yes, we’ll cover it. So yes, we’ll cover it, Kevin.
Okay. Next question. Most of my audiences is on Instagram, can I use all of your recommendations for Facebook also for Instagram ads, especially regarding the copy, length and content. So I’m going to have, from tactical perspective, Loren can answer this far better than I can. But from a functional perspective, from a strategic perspective, Instagram is not Facebook. Clear and simple. You don’t go to Facebook with the same intent that you go to Instagram with.
Your mindset’s not the same. The infrastructure is not the same. What you get when you’re on Instagram is not at all the same as what you get on Facebook. So no, from my perspective, not even close. I’m very curious to hear Loren’s perspective. And Loren and I, just to be clear, we don’t share these questions in advance. We disagree with each other sometimes. I say disagree. We have different perspectives on things, and that’s part of the deal. There’s no canonical right answer to these questions. Most of the time. Some questions there are. Most of the time there isn’t. So oftentimes you’ll have different perspectives and listen to both of those perspectives and find the ones that resonate with you. So, Loren, take it away.
Loren (00:18:25):
So years and years ago, liking Facebook pages was really popular. Now people just don’t. It seems like people are liking pages less and less often, but people tend to follow pretty liberally on Instagram. So when someone says my audience is on Instagram, that doesn’t necessarily mean if you use paid traffic, that your audience is not on Facebook. It just means that for whatever reason, organically, you’ve got a lot of followers on Instagram. Maybe you have a lot of engagement. I’ve seen it where people have tons of followers. They don’t have a lot of engagement and they think their audience is on Instagram, but it’s really just people who followed them a year ago and never see them or care about them. So I normally encourage people, give Facebook a shot as well. Obviously the platform is the same. The Facebook ads platform is how you place Instagram ads.
So you can do them at the same time, but I would encourage people, yeah, don’t leave out Facebook. It is a powerful platform to get in front of your audience. And even though you may think you may have more engagement on Instagram, even if you really do, you can still get in front of those people through paid traffic on Facebook in a very powerful way. However, if you did want to optimize your ads for Instagram, I would start off just kind of thinking about Facebook and letting Instagram kind of be to the side. But if you wanted to optimize for Instagram, shorter copy is needed on Instagram. You can only get so many characters. I forget whether it’s 2200 or something, but you can only… It’s very few words compared to what you can do on Facebook. So your copy will need to be kind of moderate length as opposed to longer copy that a lot of times we advocate.
You could still pack a lot into that, but it will need to be a little edited, and then if you preview it on Instagram, you’ll notice that your intro does not appear in the exact same way. You don’t have the same amount of words that make it what a user sees as they’re scrolling. So your intro will have to be even shorter to pack in what you want to pack in so that the user sees it while they’re scrolling. Also Instagram obviously is image heavy and very video heavy. Facebook is that way also, but Instagram is even more so. So the importance of your image to stop the scroll or to communicate information is going to be even more important.
So testing that it’s going to be even more important. And then finally videos, you are limited, I think it’s a minute or two minutes. I think it’s two minutes, currently, that you are limited for a two minute video on Instagram, which sounds like that’s a lot of time. And it is. But one client I’m working with their best performing video is over 20 minutes. So with all those caveats, that’s how you’ll need to adapt is mainly just those tactical Instagram limitations. But other than that, I would just advocate try both and see what works.
Shawn (00:21:36):
Cool. Thanks Loren. That’s a much better, more nuanced answer. All right. Last question from this original series. I have a multi page presale side of three pages. The third page is the opt-in page followed by delivering the lead magnet and soap opera sequence series. Should I set my goal on ads manager is leads or sales? This is a really important question, and it’s an important question sort of in what it implicates, because what we optimize for… The way I used to think about this was wrong. That the way we’ve captured it in the traffic engine is correct. But in the past, it was very easy because of how we think about the structure of which, I’ll just call it, say, a funnel. I don’t love that term, but we’ll just use that because we all know what it means, but there’s a logical sequence in a funnel, in a process.
And because of that, we make the mistake of thinking that the Facebook algorithm somehow reflects that logic so that when somebody… Let’s just say for the sake of argument, that you can buy something. Before you buy it, you need to opt in, and before you opt in, you have three pages that you read, and before you read that, there’s an ad. So you could make the case, first I’ll optimize to get people to go from my ad to my landing page because that’s the first step. So why wouldn’t I do that? And maybe then I could optimize for people who opt in, because that’s the next link in the chain. And then, well, at that point, then I could also optimize for people who purchase, because you can see the logical chain of progression there. But from Facebook’s perspective, each of those things that I’ve just described are discreet.
They’re not linked. So that Facebook knows if you’re somebody who clicks on a lot of stuff, you may also be someone who buys. But the fact that you click doesn’t also mean because the click is the precursor to buying that you’re more likely to buy. It just means you’re more likely to click, and then when you opt in, we think that because you have to opt in before you can buy, in most situations, that opting in is a behavior that indicates you’re more likely to buy later. From Facebook’s perspective, those are discreet entries. Lots of people opt in for free stuff. So when you optimize for opt-in, Facebook is going to look at the pool of people inside your audience who would have exhibited that behavior in the past. Same is true for purchasing. So in an ideal world, you want to look at your actual end goal and optimize for that. Where the challenge comes in is the number of events that need to happen in a certain period of time to give Facebook enough data, and that’s what requires us to make these decisions. In an ideal world, you would say, I am going to optimize for sales. The two things that can create issues with that, and I’m sure by the time we’ve finished, they’ll be 30 things. But the two things that can immediately create issues with that are, do you have enough sales in a week to get the benefit of the Facebook algorithm and or do people buy in a timeframe that is short enough that it feeds into Facebook’s algorithm? So 28 days is the maximum, and I know Facebook changed that for a while, it went to seven. And Loren can speak to sort of where the current state of affairs is with that.
So if it’s a very straightforward process, if someone sees your ad, reads your content, ops in, sees an offer, and they do it yes or no, and it all happens in within a 24 hour period. Okay. Then you don’t have as many concerns, then it’s about volume. But if you have the multi-part presale site, if you have a long soap opera sequence in between, and you start extending the period of time that it takes somebody to convert, then that muddies the signal a little bit. And what we’re really trying to do is give Facebook a very clear signal. Loren, do you still feel like 10 conversions per week per ad set is somewhere in that neighborhood. Feels right? Where do you think the current thinking on conversions per week, per ad is at?
Loren (00:26:12):
10 per week. I’ve heard 50 per week is what they want. 10 per day.
Shawn (00:26:17):
Or 10 per day. I’m sorry. Yeah. 10 per day.
Loren (00:26:20):
10 per day is what some people advocate. Also I’ve heard 50 per week, which is obviously about seven a day. There’s no limit. It’s not like you get 49 conversions in a week and Facebook doesn’t know what’s going on, and then all of a sudden you get that extra one to bump you up to 50 and Facebook optimizes and it’s just a golden rainbow. You just try it and you see if it works because sometimes Facebook will be okay at 20. Sometimes they may need more, up to 50 a week.
Shawn (00:26:57):
Yeah. To return to the actual question, we’ve told you a lot of things that now, if I were in your position, I’d be scratching my head saying, well, I still don’t know exactly what to do. So I think of it as a series of gates that you have to go through. So the first gate that you have to go through at the ad set level, where am I likely to get 5 to 10 ish conversions per day at the ad set level? So if you have the ad spend to do that and it’s sales that, do that. Often that’s prohibitive, you don’t have enough ad spend to get there. The next logical conclusion for that is then to optimize for leads, and I think it’s hard. I want to be cautious. It sounds like I’m overthinking this and really focusing too much on the nuance, but leads is, from my perspective, leads is a challenge because so much of digital marketing is based on this, what I think, is a flawed model of lead generation.
So Facebook has enormous amounts of data on people who become leads and opt in for free stuff. The entire model, internet marketing is built on the foundational model of offer. Some increasingly attractive whizzbang video series, a PDF, ebook, you name it. Keep ramping up what you’re giving away for free, which creates really, really big audience segments of people who download free stuff and download free stuff isn’t your business model, I don’t think. So I don’t love lead optimization. I think if you don’t have a better alternative, it is what it is. I think really you have to be aware of what your saying to Facebook and what Facebook is doing in return. And what you are saying to Facebook in this situation is I want you to go find… I’m going to make up a small number of an audience, but this isn’t what you would do.
Just imagine it’s bigger. Let’s assume there are a hundred thousand people in this audience that you’ve identified through a set of characteristics. You think those are that’s my tribe. Or more accurately, my tribe is in that group of a hundred thousand people. And you say, Okay, I think I might ad budget will allow me to get 5 to 10 leads per day so I can get the full benefit of the Facebook algorithm, and the lead is the precursor to the sale. Therefore, because I’m getting leads, I’m also getting people who are likely to buy because you can’t buy if you don’t opt in. That makes perfect sense. That’s not how Facebook sees it. And Facebook isn’t going out of their way to tell you that’s not how they see it. They actually want you to think it works that way because that you’re more likely to do it.
And I’m not suggesting anything nefarious. It’s just a little bit, I believe, an intellectual slight of hand. And what you’re doing instead in that scenario is you’re saying to Facebook, here’s this pool of a hundred thousand people. I believe my people are within that. I can afford to get 5 to 10 leads per day. And I want the benefit of the algorithm, so I’m going to do that, and what they’re going to do is go find within that group of a hundred thousand people, people who do probably the most common conversion event in internet marketing, which is they become leads.
So knowing that, choose wisely, I guess, is my my message. And then the question becomes, what’s the alternative? What else could you do? Well, again, it’s all within the confines of 5 to 10 conversions per day. So it could be a custom conversion that they see page three, if that’s what it takes because you have a three-part series. It could be leads. Ideally it would be sales. Just know what you’re getting in return for the input that you’re putting in. To bring this to a close, if I had this exact same scenario and I.
Shawn (00:31:00):
[inaudible 00:31:00] if I had this exact same scenario and I had enough ad spend that I couldn’t quite get enough sales, like maybe I was getting three to five sales per day. I think I would… Loren might talk me out of this, but I think I might still then just optimize for sales and hope that I was giving Facebook enough data, even though it was a less pronounced signal. It was a more valuable signal. I would probably lean in that direction. So, we’ve spent a lot of time on this first question. This is a great question. These are foundational things that we need to talk through so I really appreciate that question. All right, let’s jump on to the second question. Yeah, go ahead.
André (00:31:43):
I’ve got some dumb questions related to that. Just playing devil’s advocate here for a second. So, I’m guessing it could be possible that… So, the very first email that goes out on the Soap Opera Sequence, let’s just say for argument’s sake to keep it simple, that there’s a PDF download, which is the promise lead magnet. Presumably it’s possible to, if anybody clicks that link to download that PDF, it triggers this conversion process which is still a lead. So, that lead would be different to somebody that’s just opted in which will be different to somebody that’s that’s gone past page one, for example. Would Facebook treat that lead, which is obviously harder to get than somebody that’s just made it past page one, for example, or who’s just managed to opt in, but they don’t click the link to download the thing, which is a signal that somebody that’s motivated to make a purchase in terms of just, what are the signals going to be?
It’s probably somebody that’s going to be doing everything, clicking the links, would that lead be slightly better? So, you’d get less of them but then Facebook’s algorithm would think, “Actually, this is weird because this person’s getting less leads than everybody else in the pool that we’re sending them. Maybe we should send them better leads.” I’m just using maybe bad language. But does that process, do you think it happens where if you make that lead as hard as possible, as difficult as possible that it becomes over time, a better lead that they will send you?
Shawn (00:33:36):
Well, it wouldn’t be a lead in their custom conversion. And that was actually, that was an example I was thinking about before you said that. So, I devil’s advocated myself and then you devil’s advocated me. So, I like [crosstalk 00:33:47] advocate. So, I have a good friend, Jeremy Blossom runs Strikepoint Media. They do lead gen at scale, just staggering amounts of lead gen. And one of the distinctions Jeremy makes, which I think is a really important distinction. And I don’t know what their naming convention is, but I’ve named it a qualified lead. So, instead of optimizing, simply for leads, they look at what percentage of those leads actually consume the content, go to the next thing. So, I think in the scenario that André just presented, and this is certainly a way to think about doing it, is you could have, let’s say email number one fulfills on the promise of the opt in.
So, you opt in for something, you confirm that you’ve opted in. And now let’s say, the promise that you made was a three part mini course that is delivered over email. So, it’s hard to track from that perspective, but you still want to signal that somebody is qualified in some way. So, rather than have it just delivered by email, I might in that, the first email that they get, and maybe the second or the third, depending on how far you want to move it down the line to amp the quality up. But I might not put the content in the email itself, and instead they get the email, “Hey, thanks so much for signing up. This is what you’re going to get. We really appreciate having you here to access your X, Y, Z click here.” Then when they click that, that fires the conversion event pixel.
And so, yes, it’s a more qualified lead than just saying, “Oh, somebody became a lead by act by virtue of opting in.” And any thoughts on that, like I mean, we can kick the conversion event down the road, really as far as we want to go, just do you have any thoughts about when that’s smart to do that, when it’s not smart to do that, where we can get ourselves into trouble doing that, just riff on that for a minute.
Loren (00:35:50):
Yeah. So, there are custom events that you can do. You can make up any event, you can call it whatever you want to. So, that say you’ve got a multi-page pre-sell, someone goes to page two, you can fire an event there that they click to page two. You can create a custom conversion from that event, the same for clicking to the next page. And then they opt in going to the email if they click to download. One thing about email is I’m always wondering if the pixel would fire just depending on email clients and everything else like that, that would be kind of tricky potentially. But assuming that you could actually get the pixel to fire there, you could do that. What I would do was set up, there are standard events and there are custom events, okay.
So, a standard event is lead purchase. These predetermined events that Facebook has, then there are custom events, which is you just create whatever you want to do. Then there are custom conversions, which is you saying, “Out of all these events, I want you to uniquely track this particular event.” What I would do is at the very beginning, set up whatever custom events you want to set up whatever custom conversions you want to, even if you do nothing but track. For instance, you could fire a custom event, and we do this for multi-page pre-sell. You could fire a custom event once someone has been on the page for say eight seconds or something like that. And that would be indicative that the person is actually reading and actually consuming the content. You can fire those custom conversions all throughout the funnel to track everything you want to track.
Then you could of course, track the lead, do they open up the email and go to the lead magnet? You could track anything further. Do they go to the sales page for your product? Do they add to cart? Whatever you want to add into the future. Do they spend two minutes on your sales page? Whatever custom conversions and customer events you can think of, I would just set all that up from the very beginning. And then that serves two purposes. Number one is you can track, so you can see in the Facebook dashboard, you know what, for some reason, we’ve got a really big drop off here. Why is that? Is that expected? And what can we do to improve that if needed? And the second is because you have those custom conversions set up Facebook is getting that data. Then you can use that later to optimize if you want to.
Part of the problem with optimizing, if you’re using a custom conversion, as opposed to, if you’re using a standard event, just like lead, Facebook gets that, they’re like, “Okay, I know what a lead is. I can optimize for the standard conversion.” But if you have a custom conversion, Facebook might not know exactly what that looks like. What does this custom conversion mean? What, type of people follow this and actually trigger this custom conversion? So, the earlier you can set that up, the more data that’s going to give Facebook, even if you’re not optimizing for it now, Facebook is tracking that data so that you could have the option of optimizing for that later. In the case of Strikepoint, they can get away with that. They can use something like a custom qualified lead event because they’re driving enough volume that Facebook can figure that out pretty quickly.
If it’s a smaller operation where they don’t have that volume, you might want to go with a standard event to optimize for it at the beginning. So, that Facebook kind of gets it. Hopefully that kind of makes sense, but I guess all in all, I echo what Shawn says, people, this seems to be one of those perennial questions that gets asked so often. And I understand because it’s the question I asked and still ask myself so often, but the reality is what we’re talking about is ultimately one human being selling to another, and that’s taking place over seeing an ad and clicking to a multi-page pre-sale and consuming that content and opting in and going to a sales page. There’s so many psychological factors and communication that goes on in the midst of that, trying to boil that down to just give it to the computer and let the computer do everything. It’s really, it’s much more complicated than that. So, I would totally go the approach that Shawn advocated, let’s figure out where you got five to 10 per day of a conversion as far down the funnel as you can go. Figure out that you got five to 10 per day, optimize for that. If it’s working great, maybe dip your toe in the water and try a different event later. Just to give you an example, Jonathan Boyd, who André and Shawn talked about earlier, he’s at one point sent traffic to a multi-page pre-sale where they opted in for a PDF. And then they would see an upsell or a VSL for a $27 product. And he was optimizing for sales because he was doing enough volume that he was getting 20, 30, 40 sales a day. So, he could do that.
I looked at that and I was kind of like, or we talked about it. And I was like, “Well, let’s just try doing it as a lead because you’ve got this multi-page pre-sale. I mean, your leads are pretty qualified. Let’s just try optimizing for a lead and see how that works.” And we were able to reduce our lead cost significantly, but then our cost per purchase went up a lot. And that’s just attributed to what Shawn said is that the Facebook algorithm, if you tell the Facebook algorithm to give you cheap leads, it’s going to give you cheap leads that might not necessarily convert into purchases, but that’s an example right there, Jonathan, where you can use a multi-page pre-sell lead magnet, optimizing for purchases, and he’s making it work.
Shawn (00:41:43):
All right. That’s great stuff. Thank you, Loren and André. And I’ll just close that question with one sort of overall point I want to be very clear about something. The traffic engine is, and I say this all the time in emails, in the content, it’s a learn how to fish, not here’s a fish course, because the here’s a fish courses, generally don’t work for the overwhelming majority of people who go through them. And the underlying assumption is, and the data shows, that over 90% of people never complete courses. So, you can give something that works for a part of an audience, knowing that most people aren’t going to go through it anyway. So, there’s no downside to the person who does that from my perspective, that’s just not ethical. It’s not in line with my values. So, what we’re trying to do here is get you in motion towards something, but also recognize that this is a learning how to think about the platforms course, because there’s so much nuance.
And if we just say, “Do this, optimize for Y.” We’re doing you a terrible disservice, it really does require this ability to take a step back and look and think, “Well, if I make this choice, this is what’s actually happening. And does that make sense for my business?” So, that’s just a little caveat here. All right, let’s move on. We’ve spent 44 minutes on three questions. Nice job Shawn. Okay, second question, “First thanks for your awesome course.” Thank you for the awesome compliment. This is a question we’ve heard in various forms lately, so I’ll just read through the whole thing. And then I’ll answer this question, but it’s a broader question that I’ll answer at the same time. So, “My Facebook account was restricted, but it’s a little bit strange.” Here’s the context, “I didn’t advertise at all this year.”
He sent an ID confirmation in, he traveled. Facebook says they responded, it takes a few weeks to respond because of COVID-19. He doesn’t have access to chat. He has chatted. They’ve never responded. It’s been six weeks. And he can’t access his account. And it’s from his perspective they locked his account because they didn’t respond to him. And so, he’s created a new ad account. And so, there’s two parts of this question that I think are really important. So, the first part is we have somebody with issues accessing their Facebook account. Well actually, I’ll share both of the questions, then we’ll go into the answers. So, that’s part one. What happens? Why does this happen? What goes on? What’s the deal with my Facebook account? Either me not having access it or the accounts’ been shut down, whatever there’s that set of questions. And then the second one, “I’ve created a new ad account, but I feel doing ads on Facebook is not a professional move. It’s too unstable. There’s no support. You can be banned for no apparent reason.” He wants peace of mind in his business, and he closes with, “You probably don’t have any answers, but maybe.” And there’s a third question too about a French agency that I’ll answer at the end. So, let me say this in plain language as possible, working with Facebook sucks, plain and simple. Facebook is miserable. I spent the overwhelming majority of, by time and by dollars, of my hands-on in the trenches experience with advertising was with Google, not Facebook. Facebook is an entirely different animal. Google has policies that are published. And if you violate those policies, there are ramifications. And if you don’t violate those policies, you’re fine.
Facebook has published policies. Those published policies are not complete. There are things that you can do that violate policies that you are not told. There are also people who are openly violating the policies that if you do the same thing, you will suffer ramifications that they are. The example I love to use is the Motley Fool, financial newsletter, having pictures of marijuana plants in their ads, promoting a Pot Stock newsletter. It is an immediate direct crystal clear violation of Facebook’s terms of service to show a picture of a marijuana plant in a Facebook ad. I know somebody who saw that the Motley Fool was doing it. They had a similar product, they advertised it, their ad account was banned. Their business manager account was banned and their individual access to Facebook was banned. And the reason they were given was you violated our terms of service.
You put a marijuana plant in the thing. We clearly say not to do that. And that person’s response was, “But so does the Motley Fool and this ad has been running for years?” And the answer was, “Yeah, right. It is what it is.” So, Facebook is not great to work with and I understand how that feels as an advertiser. I’ve woken up plenty of times for my business manager account restricted. I couldn’t access client accounts. It happens sometimes. And usually within, and so far, knock on wood, 24 to 72 hours later it’s reinstated saying, “Whoops, sorry, it was an AI thing. Didn’t mean to you didn’t do anything wrong.” But that sucks. That’s a really hard way to run a business, especially when you’re responsible for lots of clients. But wait, there’s more, it got a lot worse recently because of the U.S. presidential elections because of the nature of the U.S. presidential elections, and I don’t, whatever your political persuasion is is fine.
You do you I’ll do me, but because we had at least one of the two political parties, and depending on what you believe, we could say both political parties seem to have a really loose tolerance for the truth. So, Facebook has made some pretty sweeping decisions about political advertising, and they’ve got a lot of heat and we don’t need to go into why all this happened. But Facebook was miserable. And then somebody took the dial that was on misery level three, and just spun it to misery level 30 because of the U.S. elections with accounts getting banned, support not being able to keep up, individual access, being shut down, you name it. So, we can lament that reality, happy to do with you. And we can all cry in our beers together because it sucks. Or we can recognize that the Facebook platform for whatever reason does not seem to be particularly mature.
And you still just approach it with integrity. That’s my strategy and I know that’s Loren’s strategy that we’re going to be buffeted by winds outside of our control. You, when you advertise on Facebook, you as individuals, agencies, whatever, you’re going to get knocked around by Facebook, with things that are out of your control. The only thing that you have control over in that situation is how you act on the platform. If you try to bend the rules, if you try to get away with stuff, if you don’t take the time to learn the rules and violate them, you most likely will not be able to use that platform. And, it just is what it is. I can’t help you there. They’re not particularly friendly about that. And if you try to game the system and you get an ad account banned and you just create a new one, they will consider that a violation of their terms of use.
And if you do it enough times then you’ll get banned as an individual from advertising on a platform, which is a real treat. And if you try to create a new user profile, the more you try to get around it, Facebook knows massive amounts of data. They can figure this stuff out. So, the things over which we have control is how do we do our work? And what we’re trying to do in the traffic engine is to say, “Here’s where all the quicksand is. But more importantly, recognize it’s a social platform, overwhelmingly social platform. And we want to be good actors on that platform. We want to approach it with integrity. We don’t want to call people out in ways that are negative. We don’t want to call people out in ways that make them feel bad. We don’t want to say things that are disingenuous. We don’t want to over-hype claims, even if we sold something and somebody got this incredible result, but that result was unusual.”
We’re not going to talk about that. We’re going to be cautious and conservative, and we’re going to use the platform in a way that reflects what the users of that platform expect and your individual audience. And you can do all of that and still run into problems. That’s the sad fact, but at least then if you run into problems, you can have an honest conversation with a person in support, like chat, or however you do that and say, “I’ve approached this platform as a good actor. I understand the terms of service. I’ve been doing my best to be a good actor on this platform.” If they can’t go find something that’s a clear violation, the probability of your account being reinstated or your access being reinstated is much higher than if they go and they’re like, ” Well, wait a second, you’ve got 50 disapproved ads that you never did anything. We’ve given you…”
Because if you think about it, a disapproved ad is a signal from Facebook back to you, “Hey, this is a problem. You need to do something about it. You struck a match here, there’s a candle burning. Now there are 50 candles burning. Now it’s starting to look like a bonfire and you’re not paying attention to it. So, guess what we’re going to do? Shut off your access.” Right? So, you’ve got to listen to Facebook signals. So, I realize for all of you who’ve dealt with this it’s very small comfort. This is a miserable experience. If I could wave a magic wand and not have to advertise on Facebook, I would wave that magic wand in a heartbeat.
But the problem and the opportunity is that Facebook is a massive aggregation of audiences with very granular access and it can produce incredible results. So, we approach it, knowing what we’re in for. Loren’s done a masterful job in the traffic engine of explaining how to approach the support team when you’ve run into an issue, I encourage you to re-read that section, really do that. You’ve created a new ad account. So, I want you to be cautious. I just want you to know that by doing that, you have technically violated Facebook’s terms of service, because it looks like you’re trying to undermine their rules so that can create problems. So, I don’t want to suggest it’s sunshine and unicorns, that by doing that things are going to be okay. They might be, right, whatever happened in the other account could be in error.
And if you create a new account, and you’re a good actor and you do the right things, it may be fine. But we just don’t know, and that the creating the second account may very well be viewed as trying to undermine the Facebook platform and sort of the approach. So, just proceed cautiously with that. As far as Facebook’s too unstable, it’s miserable. I don’t want to do it, there’s Google too. I mean, if Facebook makes you miserable, one of the reasons the traffic engine includes Google and Facebook, partly it’s because of intent, active intent with search versus passive potential interest with Facebook, they’re wildly different platforms, but Google is a more mature platform and they’ve been around a lot longer. They have a lot better support staff, and they enforce their rules much more clearly.
And the rules that are enforced or the rules that you’re given access to, there are no other rules. So, you don’t violate things that you weren’t made aware of. So, if Facebook just isn’t your thing, go through the Google side of things, really max that out, and then come back to Facebook later. And then last question here, and Loren I’m going to have you jump on these too. So, there’s just a third question appended here. “Do you know an excellent French agency for Facebook, YouTube, Google ads?” I don’t, but André and I both know someone who might, so I will follow up with you by email about that and see if I can find somebody that could fulfill that need. So Loren, anything to add on the Facebook side of things, account side of things?
Loren (00:54:19):
Yeah. So, I’m not exactly sure with chat support, it’s different in different countries, but just click around. And sometimes it moves. It moves all the time actually. I’ve seen it in different places, click around and just see if you can find it, because sometimes I’ve seen that you just have to click in the right place, know where it is. Other than that, just pretty much echo what Shawn says, there are things you can do. If your personal profile’s restricted, like you can get verified. You can, make sure you have two factor authentication on make sure that if you get your personal profile verified to run political ads, I don’t exactly know the process in other countries, but if you get verified around political ads, even if you’re not intending to run political ads that signals to Facebook that, “Hey, I’m a real person. They’ve looked at my ID, they’ve vetted me.” And then just be patient it’s horrible, it stinks. And believe me, we could sit around and commiserate like Shawn said, but I think he had some good advice.
Shawn (00:55:29):
André’s sitting back going, “Screw Facebook. I’m never going to even think about this.” André you want to commiserate on Facebook or we good? All right, André’s not jumping in for this excitement. All right. Are you on mute?
André (00:55:44):
Sorry. You caught me getting some water.
Shawn (00:55:46):
Oh, nice. Yeah [inaudible 00:55:48] coffee that I don’t have. All right, we’ll move on to the next question. So, pretty short question. Two questions here actually, I thought there was one. So, first question, “Is it a good idea to run branding and engagement campaigns before a conversion campaign to warm up in a cold audience and build a custom audience, which can then be used to create a lookalike audience for the conversion campaign?”
I love this question, right, so if we were having this conversation three years ago, three or four years ago, my answer would be so different. So, three or four years ago and earlier than that too. Because there was so much you could do on Facebook. And because it was so cheap to do those things, then everything that you’ve just described, made so much sense. And because the algorithm was less mature. So, you run a campaign to get whatever you engage with an audience on how they do a thing or they click on something, you’re showing them something that’s intellectually interesting and you can get super sophisticated like this. You try to find something that’s interesting to the subset of your audience that’s most motivated, right? So, an article or a headline, you’re not trying to appeal to everybody, you’re trying to create this signal and then you get them to engage with it. And you say, “Oh okay, because they clicked on that thing, It was an article or a blog post that you created that was very specific to the niche within your audience.”
And I’ll give an example of this in a second so it makes more sense now. And then, because they did that, you warm up that audience. You show them more content like that, and maybe you show them some videos, and you’re building rapport with them with these interactions, and then all roads lead to Rome at some point, and you’ve got a warm audience now, and that warm audience you are showing your offer to, and that warm audience becomes the foundation of a lookalike audience that starts the whole process over again, right. That worked when clicks were cheap and the algorithm wasn’t very smart and lots of people still do this.
And so, I want to be cautious, I’m very opinionated about that. I’m very opinionated in general, but I’m very opinionated about this particular idea. What I think it hides sometimes is it’s a really good way to do a few things. It’s a really good way to feel like you’re busy. It’s a really good way to feel like you’re making progress. It’s a great way to use the system, the Facebook platform, and you can make it very sophisticated and make sense intellectually. But what I also notice it does is it allows people to have very fuzzy thinking, and I’m not suggesting this for the person who’s asking the question this isn’t you at all. It’s a very important question. And I appreciate it. This is not feedback to you to be very clear.
This is feedback about how I’ve seen this play out in the world, but what I think about is can you sit down with a sheet of paper and a crayon and show me how your business works? It’s straightforward, right? It’s like, “Here’s an ad. Here’s a thing they buy here.” Or, “Here’s an ad. There’s three pages there are five emails and in email, four and five they can click on a link to buy.” Right? Can you draw that for me on a piece of paper? And if you can, can you then go to Facebook and make that work just as bare bones? Is that it, can you create an ad that pre-qualifies so that before somebody clicks on the ad, there’s a much higher percentage chance that they’re the right prospect because you’ve told them all the reasons why the wrong prospects should go away.
If you can do that, then get them to the landing page, you’ve really done most of what people try to do with these other very sophisticated contraptions is how I think about them. They make sense and they they made a lot of sense, and I’ve done a lot of these to be clear. And we did a lot of these for a long time. They made sense when traffic was cheap and the algorithm was dumb. They don’t make much sense anymore when traffic is expensive and the algorithm is super smart or super capable. So, here’s an example of how I used this in the past. I had a client for a period of time who had a product for sales managers, not a salesperson, a sales manager. It was hard to target sales managers on Facebook at the time that may be different now. You can target selling professionals broadly speaking, but not the sales manager.
And her product, the agency she worked with before and got her enormous amounts of engagement at the ad level and the landing page level. And then everything fell off a cliff. And the reason it fell off a cliff is everything they were doing was targeting sales professionals, big promises for sales professionals, but that’s not who her audience was. So, she was getting a false signal. So, we went back and the engagement campaign that we created was hyper-focused on content that was only interesting to a sales manager. And we were very clear about that. So, we got a much better signal. I mean, that’s kind of a way that you can use engagement on the front end, as long as you don’t make the mistake of clouding and muddying the signal that you’re getting, which is very easy to do. So, sort of going all around this topic in order, I’m doing that. Because again, this is a teach to fish class. I want you to know how we think about these things. So, the way I think about this is maybe, maybe you should do all of that, but you should not do all of that before you have demonstrated with clarity that you can go from A to B and sell your stuff, because if you can’t go from A to B and sell to the most responsive part of your market quickly from ad, and ideally from my perspective, if you.
Shawn (01:02:00):
From ad. And ideally, from my perspective, let’s say you had a $27 product, if you can’t sell a $27 product from an ad to a landing page, I’m not sure I’d go too much beyond that until I could. When we put all these other pieces and we just keep adding layers of abstraction that we don’t know if the thing, we need to first prove that the thing we’re trying to accomplish we can accomplish. And that is the scariest thing in the world to do. And that’s why people don’t do it. It is terrifying to put yourself out in the world and say, “I’ve created this thing that’s valuable. And I’m going to put it out there and see if you think it’s valuable too. And I’m going to let you make nasty comments about it.”
Because God knows people make horrible comments on Facebook. I’m going to put myself out there and let you come back and say terrible things about me. I’m going to do that because I want to see if this value I’ve created is actually valuable. That is terrifying. So what often happens instead is we forget to prove that part of it. And we’re like, “Well, we’ll do this other thing and we’ll warm up an audience.” And sometimes warm up… Again, this is not for the person asking the question. This is broadly speaking. Sometimes warm up an audience means cross your fingers and hope they like you more. And they won’t say bad things about you later. That’s a lot of what’s happening here because we’re driven by this terrible fear that we’re going to get judged for this value that we’ve put out into the world.
And it takes enormous courage to act in the face of that fear and to stare at and say, “Yep, that’s probably going to happen.” I love what Todd Herman does. If you know Todd Herman, he wrote the book, The Alter Ego Effect. He’s done a bunch of other things the 90 Day Year. But Todd Herman every month has one of the designers on his team. They make a poster, they hang in the office and Todd hangs one in his personal home office. He makes a poster of the nastiest comments that people left on Facebook. And these are really, really good comments. And this is a family-friendly environment, I won’t share any of them, but outstanding comments just to take the laugh at it. Just to take that out of there. So, this is a long circuitous answer to a short question.
That’s my favorite thing to do. But recognize, and this may be different for your situation. The person who asked the question or those of you listening may say, “But wait a second.” And I think somebody here has just asked, “Okay, so tell me [inaudible 01:04:30] what about a high ticket offer?” So this is where the nuance gets really important. This is where we need to think about what are these other things that we’re doing? How are they contributing? And the first question I would ask anybody, any situation, any dollar amount, have you proven the offer? Meaning have you sold the offer online as you’re presenting it? If the answer to that is no, don’t do any of the other stuff. Just figure out how can you sell it online? You have to go through that gate first. You have to be able to sell this thing to another human being online.
However, you’re going to do that. Maybe you close by phone, if it’s high tickets, fine. But you need to do the thing that is the ultimate thing that the system is supposed to do first. Then once you’ve shown that you can do that, that in some capacity, then it becomes a matter of what’s additive here? Maybe it’s additional campaigns and different audiences that are crafted the same way. Maybe it’s changing the structure of the campaign. Maybe it’s adding an engagement campaign on the beginning. In that situation, it makes a lot of sense. Maybe it’s doing, I mentioned this, I had a conversation about this with somebody earlier or maybe last week about when to do a retargeting campaign when you don’t want to get clicks. Which not so important on Facebook, cause it’s a CPM environment.
But if you pay for clicks on Google display network, it’s a funny thing to think about, like, why would you retarget and not want clicks? Well, if you were an expert in a field and somebody comes to your site and they don’t know that you’re an expert in your field and they’ve had some exposure to you. And then all of a sudden they see you everywhere and they see you… There’s no call to action, they just see you positioned as an expert. That’s very valuable. So campaigns like that can be additive. So returning to the original question through this lens of high ticket, yes, if you have sold this start to finish, A to B, you’re selling it online and you have some level of success with that, then start working outward from that and say, “Okay, what would amplify the results that I’m already getting?”
[inaudible 01:06:45] If you’ve own sphere of influence, you know this idea of instilling beliefs, perhaps there are three or four things somebody needs to believe and internalize before they can accept your offer. So you could do an engagement campaign where you’re covering those beliefs and it might be multiple touch points at that point. Or it could be a single touch point where they come in and there’s a whatever, maybe two or three videos or three or four pages of content where you’re establishing these beliefs and that somebody who put up, let’s say it’s three pages of content. Somebody who makes it to the third page in that engagement campaign might actually be the basis for a good look, alike audience to start over again. So yes, there are ways this can work. Just don’t let it be a reason to do a lot of things that generate heat, but no light.
Meaning that a lot of things happen, but it doesn’t move the needle. It doesn’t make the boat go faster. That’s the phrase that I love so much, that’s in the free paid traffic training is everything is subordinated to making the boat go faster. And if the thing that you’re doing, you can’t in a very short period of time show how that thing is making the thing that you care most about happen more, then you have to be willing to let it go. That’s a really long answer to a question. Loren, thoughts to add on this?
Loren (01:08:13):
Go ahead. I think…
Shawn (01:08:15):
Talk for an hour about it.
Loren (01:08:17):
No, I think it was great. I mean, it’s funny. I was thinking how I’d answer it. And it was pretty much the same thing. Three years ago, two years ago, this was popular. People would do this, they’d put out a video and then they would retarget video views. And that worked then because traffic was cheaper. And exactly Shawn said the algorithm wasn’t as powerful as it is now. More and more now where people they are having results with is, just going direct for what you want. Direct response instead of having to engage in audience first. In terms of high ticket, you can try it. I mean, it’s something you could do engagements and then you position them for the sale, but you may find more success in a traditional lead gen type of environment where maybe you’re sending them to a webinar.
And the reason is you’re getting their email address. There’s some hand-raising that they’re doing already. There’s some more relationship that they’re engaging with other than simply just watching a video on Facebook and all of that may be conducive to you being able to engage with them more particularly because you can email them as well. And that may help you secure that high ticket sale more, but all of this is just stuff that you can experiment with. But my gut would tell me that the tried and true models will probably be what is going to give you the most success.
Shawn (01:09:46):
Loren, there’s a second question here, and I’m going to let you answer this because I’m not going to have a good answer to it. What’s the best strategy when using a messages campaign, objective? Any thoughts on that? [inaudible 01:09:56] very often.
Loren (01:09:57):
Yeah. So messages campaign, like first of all, be very careful whenever if you have any automated follow-up. A lot of times that’s what people do with these messages. They’ll put them in an autoresponder type of sequence. Be very careful with that because Facebook has rules about that. I’m actually not that familiar with those because they change all the time. And I’m seeing pages that are getting restricted, going back to our earlier conversation on compliance, I’m seeing all sorts of accounts and pages and people that are having issues because their chat sequences is noncompliant. So that’s an entirely different issue. If you’re talking about just messages, in terms of talking with someone. I’ve just used it as a call to action. Just think of it like a phone call. How could you get in front of someone and want to continue that conversation?
I think of it, it’s more of does this selling process, does this communication process require a conversation? Is that going to be the best way right now for me to have a one-on-one conversation? And if so, well then, that would lead itself into a messages campaign. I don’t start with saying, all right. I’ve heard someone say, “Use a messages campaign, now let me figure out how to do that.” I think the type of campaign is dictated by the communication strategy that you want to have. So I’ve used messages campaigns before for super small businesses that just didn’t have the resources to even have landing pages. And it was just a way to… It was like a local gym, one of my friends gym’s, and he just wanted to get members.
So it was just like, “Hey, we’ve got these specials coming up, do you want to message us to learn more?” Then have good salespeople on the other side who understand the process of selling. Because if they think that Facebook’s going to do the magic and I pretty much just send people like, ” All right, here’s where you send your check.” That’s not going to work. But all sorts of things you can do just to encourage a conversation in messages. There’s no real unique strategy. Generally I wouldn’t do anything goofy, like some direct response open loop. And then if you want to find out the answer messaging us, no, that’s really not going to give you success. It’s more just, “Hey, we’re selling a car, we’re selling a red widget, whatever it is. If you want more information, we have these particular specials, we can tell you about. Whatever questions you may have reach out to us for more information.”
And sometimes that works. I’ve seen it work with case study type stuff, where you’re like, “Hey, we had these great results for this client. Do you want us to tell you about it, how it may be a fit for your business? Hit us up here on messenger”
Shawn (01:12:53):
Great stuff, Loren. Thank you. All right. A quick pause to thank our sponsors. We don’t have any sponsors, but I just want to take a moment to thank all of you who are on the call, your attention… André and I talk about this all the time. Your attention is the most precious commodity that you have, and the fact that you’re sharing some of that with us, deeply appreciate that. So thank all of you. If you hear things on today’s call… A couple of things, there’ll would be another call as part of this cohort, any future calls that happens through the traffic engine, you have lifetime access to it, all the updates, everything. You’ll always be able to be on the… If you hear something today and you want further clarification, just reply to an email, one of the weekly emails and it gets to me and I will reply to you there too.
So I’m just mentioning that as we transition to the next question. This is a short one, and we’ll have a little fun with this. I love this question because I hear this a lot. So I would love to know if you have experience with YouTube ads and if this is something that you recommend? So, yes I’ve done a lot of YouTube advertising in the past, it is not something that was included in the traffic engine, very deliberately for a few reasons. One of the reasons is that a few… When I say a few reasons, I’m going to get up to 25 or so in a second. But one of the reasons is it’s an entirely different approach. Fundamentally from the beginning to the end, it is much more of a volume approach and also corollary to that, it is one that in my experience, not only benefits from significant budgets, but actually requires significant budgets.
So, when I say significant budgets, I mean, in my experience, nosebleed budgets. The larger reason why I didn’t include it in traffic engine is because everyone who I have spoken to who does YouTube well, like really well paid YouTube, they all have some variation of the same story. And that story distilled down always sound something like this. We spend about half a million dollars on YouTube before we figured out how to make it work. And if I hear that, and let that sink in for a minute. First of all, it’s not an exaggeration. These are companies that are spending millions and millions and millions of dollars. Often millions of dollars a month to make their digital advertising work and YouTube doesn’t… The people who I’ve spoken to and I’ve spoken a length with a lot of people to really understand this, they have similar directionally relevant commonalities.
Like one of the things you’ll hear a lot. Is there a certain ways to target on YouTube that work in most ways don’t. And then within that, of course, it’s the first five seconds of the ad that is really selling people, paying attention if you’ve ever spent any time on YouTube, you know that if that first five seconds doesn’t grab you, then you’re going to click, skip ad. So there’s certainly some things like that that we could have included in the traffic engine. We could have had this broad overview and brought people what I would consider 80% of the way out of potential quicksand and giving you a good starting point. And probably I’m talking myself into this now, which is always dangerous. This is something that I do on Q&A calls, which I really wish André and I were closer in the same space for these calls.
Because of what I would really like him to do is when I start going down where these roads, I would like him to punch me in the face before I finish talking. But he can’t. So I’m not protected. And don’t get excited about that, André. Because I know that for other reasons, sometimes you want to punch me in the face.
André (01:16:41):
Having said that.
Shawn (01:16:42):
I’m just making you really think about it. So I can imagine at some point in the future, in the next six months or so that I might include like a missing chapter or something about here’s what I’ve learned from people who spend lots of money on YouTube. Here’s what matters and put that as a two or three page overview. I imagine that will happen because I’ve talked to some really smart people doing YouTube, but I don’t want it to be part of the traffic engine because I don’t think it’s necessary. It’s additive, sure. For some businesses it could be very important. I get all of that, but I want you to get the active intent first. I want you to build on a rock solid foundation of people who are raising their hand saying, I am looking specifically for what you have to offer. Go do that. Do that really well, exhaust that first.
Really get everything you can from that. Then go to the people who are like, “I’m not even sure I’m interested in that, but I might be.” All right that’s Facebook, that’s the GDN. That’s other things. Then there’s a lot to explore there, too. YouTube, it just doesn’t make the final cut for me. Now, if you’re in a business that is just dependent on video, and that’s the only way that you can sell, I want to give something for that audience and at the same time, I’m terrified of distracting anyone. It’s like, “YouTube looks fun. I spend a lot of time on YouTube. I love to make videos. I’m not going to be at the level of advice that I would be from my experience elsewhere.
And I do know… I’ve seen six figure mistakes made on… Actually I’ve seen seven figure mistakes made on YouTube. I’m thinking about a particular client I worked with last year who… And this will all end with this. This will frame the YouTube conversation, I think in a nutshell. I was hired by a company last year, last summer, who was spending $2.7 million on Google. And when I heard that and I knew… I’m sorry, 2.4 million. When I heard that immediately the hair in the back of my neck stood up and I was like, there’s no way they’re markets that big, it’s been niche market.
There’s no way they can be spending that intelligently. And most of the time in my experience, I don’t know that I’ve ever looked at an AdWords account that within two to three hours, I could find that 50% of the account was waste. That’s conservative and that’s not hyperbole. That’s not me wanting you to think how smart is. None of that nonsense, it’s just that if you follow how to do AdWords, now Google Ads based on Google’s advice, waste is going to be a big part of that. And it is what it is. So I’ve never been in a situation, I’ve been in these many, many, many dozens of times where I’ve looked at an account instantly. Usually it’s 10 or 15 minutes. You just go through like, “Yep, here’s where all the waste is.”
So this particular client spending $2.4 million, that overall was ROI positive, meaning they were making more money than they were spending it, level of 2.4 million. It took about somewhere between five and 10 hours. I can’t remember total. Between five and 10 hours, we reduced their ad spend by $1.7 million and increase their qualified leads by 17%, simultaneously. And overwhelmingly we did that because of the money they were wasting on YouTube, just bleeding money. Every campaign that they had was intellectually sound. Like you could go look at it, you can understand how and why somebody created it. You can understand the messaging. You could understand why it should work yet, 1.7… And I don’t know what percentage of the 1.7 million, but at least a million and a half.
And that’s not monopoly money. That’s not like, “They were doing this thing and they wasted a million and a half.” But, this is $1.5 million that the owner of the company could put in his pocket at the end of the next year and still get better results. It was $1.7 million that could be taken out of their advertising account with no adverse effects. None. In fact, because of the way that the ads bin was working and the things that were actually working were shutting down earlier because they were robbed of ad spend, their performance increased when we pulled out that $1.7 million, they got a much better total result, not, like comparatively better results.
So just imagine if you have a business spending, and I know this is a weird thing to do, but imagine you have a business spending two and a half million dollars, $2.4 million, and you pull out the overwhelming majority of that and get better results. And you find out that the reason why you had wasted nearly $2 million was because of this particular platform that was not paying results. I mentioned this to you, so you can understand why I am so hesitant to recommend going down that road. To be clear, YouTube works for lots of people. There’s a big move toward YouTube now because it’s the wild, wild West and Google has really made themselves, particularly YouTube and alternative to the nightmares that are experienced on Facebook.
I don’t know why Google seems to be really lax with their rules on YouTube these days. It’s very strange, but they’ve made that decision somewhere. So there’s a big attraction to go like give YouTube a try, or it can punish you mercilessly financially. So that’s a very long warning about this. So yes, there’ll be something for YouTube and the traffic engine, but please, please, please proceed with caution, spend… Think about YouTube, this will be my metaphor for YouTube, which I don’t know. This is odd, but think about YouTube as your Vegas vacation. Only put money in there that you’re willing to lose.
When You sit down at the blackjack table in Vegas, the odds are slightly against you. They’re slightly in the house’s favor. When you go in, when you sit down in a casino to play casino game, other than poker, then when you do that, you are putting yourself in a position where over time you’re likely to lose. So the money that you bring to the table should be money that you’re prepared to lose. When you sit down to try YouTube, give it a whirl, just make sure that the money you’re spending on YouTube is Vegas money that you’re willing to lose. Here’s my metaphor. Okay.
I’m just reading, [inaudible 01:23:36] comments. That’s good stuff. All right. So let’s go to the next question. I assume André and Loren don’t have any thoughts to add about YouTube.
André (01:23:49):
No, you’re Just making me nervous with all these new promises.
Shawn (01:23:53):
Yeah. No promises, damn it. But I keep sharing that same YouTube document that I’ve put together. So I’m just thinking we should do that. No promises though. It’ll be a surprise if it happens. I should be punched in the face more often. All right, the next question. I’m not sure whether my question is too specific to my business or not, but please feel free to tweak as needed, make it more widely applicable. All right. Let’s have some fun. I’m having some trouble with Google keyword research, preach. I know what you mean. Here’s the background, starting a new business with a product, I know is highly in demand. It’s quality niche erotica, but with a lot of competition free and paid. I’m offering a subscription service with weekly stories in both texts and audio formats. She said that was inspired by a case discussed by Peter and [inaudible 01:24:44] problem. I’m finding very few ads on Google whatsoever. And those I find are for sex toys, lingerie, and sometimes books. Most of the top Google entries, when I niched down, when I described the type of erotic I write are for Amazon books, but not paid ads. I know that there are a few apps and websites that offer something similar to me, although on a much bigger scale and with less kinking niching. This is the first time kinking in erotica neurotic but he’s in a traffic engine Q&A call too, by the way. So thank you, Sarah. That’s pretty awesome.
Let’s see. I realized that Google is probably not where I want to advertise, but I wonder if I misunderstood something or maybe you have some ideas for me moving forward with keywords, I’m using my phrase, baking a cupcake. I’m planning to advertise on adult sites, and we’ll be doing Facebook. I’m planning to build at SOI around the mixed topics of erotica, fantasy creativity, writing sexual wellness, kinks, psychology, personal development. So, [inaudible 00:23:42]. How do we approach this one? First of all, look at the terms of service. I don’t have any experience in this niche and I know that there’s some weirdness. I know on YouTube, for example, you cannot… This is so weird with YouTube, you can’t pay for advertising in any sexual space, but you can do any of that organically. And that’s perfectly okay. But it seems like a strange distinction. Either it’s okay on the platform or it’s not. I do have some notes from somebody Sarah, that I will send to you.
It’s somebody who is in this niche. It’s just something I can’t broadly share, but I think sharing it with an individual, I can pull the highlights out. And what I’ll do is I’ll obscure who the person is. So then, and I’m respecting their privacy. And this is something that was sent publicly. So that’s fine. I’ll send that to you, that will be specific just to get you thinking. I don’t think it’s necessarily a direct answer to this question, but it’s just additive and it’s about a market that you’re in. So there’s a lot here. So a couple of red flags to think about, this is applicable for everybody, regardless of what niche you’re in. When you search for something that you believe is a perfect search for your product and there are no ads that show up that is a huge red flag.
15 years ago, 12 years ago… 15 years ago, that was a really good sign. I found a place that uncontested space, cheap traffic, whatever, there are no unexplored niches anymore online. And I’m going to Google search, that there just aren’t. So if there are no advertisers, that generally means there’s no traffic. And that doesn’t mean there’s no traffic in your niche. It just means there’s no traffic for the search term that you’ve used to find it. So, how would I approach this? I think I would go to… What I’m going to do here is just a thought exercise with you.
So if I woke up tomorrow, owning your business, knowing what I know, how would I detangle this and figure out how to move forward? So I think the first thing that I would do is I would go to Amazon and I would find books that, and I’m assuming that I could find books that are representative of something that your audience, that you’re trying to reach reads. I’m going to make that assumption. If that’s not true, you can let me know in the chat. But if that’s true, I would then go look at the comments and look at the phrasiology in the comments, because what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to find how do people describe? What language shows up in the comments? And then when I see that language, I’m going to go back to Google and then just start playing with it.
And I’ll look at the book titles. I’m going to look at the book authors, that would be another thing that I would try to do. If they’re very popular writers in your niche, I don’t always recommend this strategy, but sometimes it works. In my belief on paid traffic in general is people tell you what they’re looking for with their search intent. So if somebody is looking for Coke, don’t try… Near Pepsi and [inaudible 01:28:59] like, “Hey, if you’re looking for Coke, what do you think about Pepsi?” What they think about Pepsi is they’re looking for Coke, and that’s why they searched for Coke. That’s not always true. Sometimes, particularly if you’re consuming content and you like a certain writer, there’s a certain vibe that you like,a podcast that you like, then others that are related can be attractive too, because that’s additive. There’s more of what you already like.
So I think I would experiment a little bit with that. I would search. I would find that the people who are the authors in that space, that are more closely aligned with what you’re creating, and then I would go search and see what shows up there. And most likely there won’t be single big hits in there, but I would probably have a campaign that aggregated lots of… Maybe the top 10 authors, assuming they’re 10 in a space. Top 10 authors. And my ad copy would really speak to… I would recognize it, they’re not searching for you, it’s like they’re searching for somebody else. And my ad copy would really be around this idea of, if you fill in the blank, so and so, the author. Then I think you’re really going to like the X, Y, Z series on whatever. Which, and then you do the copy writes itself. So I would try that.
I think I would do that first. If there are big personalities in your space at all, I would do that. I would mind the comments looking for what are the things that people say in reviews that were really positive? I believe the positive reviews and what do they have in common? When someone says… And it’s, they’re usually phrases, the way she described, fill in the blank or whatever. And I don’t know this market. But that’s what you’re looking for, because then take that phrase and go to Google and search for it, see what happens. Because you’re on a data mining expedition at this point. Because I suspect you’re in a market… Most markets are 80, 20, 90, 10, 95, five where there’s just all the traffic is in a really tight grouping of keywords and the rest falls off.
I suspect you’re not in a market like that. I suspect you’re in the pointy sine wave market where they’re just… In aggregate, there’s a lot of traffic, but individually there isn’t a big one. That may not be true. And what you’re looking for with using the phrase baking a cupcake is… I don’t know for you, if that is as important, what I’m always trying to do, was always trying to do was to find the pieces that I could assemble in a way to find the market. So it’s usually some combination of three or four words. That is really how people are finding this particular thing. I don’t know if that is true for you. I could imagine, and this is wrong, but just let me think out loud for a second. But I could imagine a scenario where like it’s erotic and erotica plus whatever an interest is plus writing, whatever our story. Okay, that’s one set of characteristics.
Now let’s going to this next one, it’s erotica plus this… And you can build that out. I don’t know for your market if that’s really it. And I guess the other question… There are two other big questions. One, where does the platform stop allowing you to do this? There are some things you can’t advertise on Google, and it’s not always by the niche. For example, you cannot advertise on Google, in the United States for a poker website. An [inaudible 01:32:56] poker website, but you can advertise the free version where there’s no money. So for years, party poker had a US…
Shawn (01:33:00):
… version where there’s no money. So for years, partypoker had a US site that taught you how to play poker for free. You could advertise that on Google, but if you wanted to advertise the paid one, that was technically illegal in the United States, you couldn’t. So your advertising may be something like that, where there are things that you can advertise and then things that you can’t, and you may be crossing into the you can’t part when you’re getting no search results. Because Google doesn’t say to you, sorry, there are no ads for this because we don’t allow it. They just don’t show ads. Which I don’t know that that really matters.
Go look at the terms of service very closely and see… I would just keyword search through there, look at erotica, look at sexual wellness, look at all of these things, and even if you can’t, to be clear, you still can. And I don’t mean you can by breaking the rules. I mean, you just need to do something that is within the guidelines. So you can then deconstruct what you’re doing until you get, this is the wrong phrase, but until you get into a safe space. A safe advertising space. So you just move backwards from the thing. What does somebody who reads your work… What is something else that they might do before that that’s still… If it doesn’t dilute it too much, how do you get back to a place where you can have an entry point in your business that you can advertise? It might be… An example is not really popping into my mind for this. I’ll give it some more thought though and I’m sure something after this call will pop up and I’ll reply to your email. But that’s really what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to get an understanding of the architecture of this market. Where are the edges? Where can I not go past? What can I not do? We have to start there. This is the whole off-limits territory. I can’t do these things. Here are the things that I can sort of do, and I’ve got to be careful with the language. And then you figure that out. Here’s what my audience is looking for. And then you match those two things up.
Well, my audience is looking for all these things based on our reviews, but here are all those things I can’t do, and here are the ones that remain. And then you’re just kind of building up that list of what’s left that is within the bounds of what you can do. That’s a long sort of weird answer to this question, but this is a tougher one. I guess the other question here is… How do we think about this? Can you build an audience around something that that’s something is a clear signal that it’s your audience, but that’s something you can advertise? And then you do a really more of the “selling” by a different method. Email is a great example. I mean, I know a company that for years, they sold gun lasers on Facebook. And to be clear, you cannot sell gun lasers on Facebook, but you can attract people who are interested in gun lasers, who you later, by email, sell gun lasers to from Facebook.
The question, can you sell gun lasers on Facebook? Yes, but with steps removed. And to be clear, that doesn’t mean that you click on an ad and it’s about being a prepper and then you hit a landing page that you click to page two and on page two there’s a gun laser for sale. It can’t work like that, because Facebook is present in the whole funnel and they understand the whole funnel. But you can build a relationship with somebody, which is very much in line with what André and I talk about a lot, is you’re building a relationship with somebody and maybe the point of conversion is deeper into that relationship, which often has many benefits anyway, but you’re doing that later where you’re providing the real value that you’re contributing in what you’re creating a little bit later, and you’re attracting them with something that is related enough that you’re getting the right audience, but it’s not causing problems on the advertising platform.
That’s a long answer to this question. I do want to think about this a little bit more, so just expect an email from me to this. This needs to percolate a little bit for me and I’ll ask around others as well.
I just want to double check the Q&A quick. Okay, let’s see. All right, so the… Yeah, I did a weird thing. I think it’s out of order. So there is another question and then Kevin, your question, we’re going to get to it. No worries. We’re having too much fun here.
Loren, André, your contributions to Google and erotica? I mean, I know this is really both of you are well-known for this, so anything you want to add in that? I can’t wait for Loren’s answer to this one. You guys are just leaving me hanging on the erotica [crosstalk 01:38:11].
Loren (01:38:10):
I think I can’t add much to what you did.
Shawn (01:38:18):
Hey look it everybody, Sean [inaudible 01:38:23].
André (01:38:24):
I think my gut says that there’s so much opportunities to find with enough digging. One thing that I was thinking, but I’ve just checked and I couldn’t find the resource anywhere. But when I was at a writing workshop a few years ago for Kindle publishers, there’s some books, I mean, there’s a whole bunch of them, but they were showcasing one in particular. It’s a online book service where you… They write genre fiction. So they will do a search for the genre that they think they’re going to write to market. And this, it was like a graphical representation of genre books, and then lines pointing out to people that have purchased this book have also purchased these other books. But it’s all very visual. It’s kind of like a mind map and you can zoom out and you can see how all these genres and books are connected visually. It was amazing to see that.
I’m guessing that there is many opportunities to find books that are easy to advertise for that this audience buy that’s less obvious. I think that was just the one thing that popped into my mind. Otherwise, I’m guessing Arvin used the GDN4 for a long while, but I’m guessing there’s a lot of opportunities over there for this market. Thinking laterally.
Shawn (01:40:02):
You haven’t advertised your erotica writing on the GDN for a long time [crosstalk 01:40:07]. Thank God. I just noticed Robin’s on the call. What’s up, Robin? I don’t know how I didn’t see you earlier.
All right, let’s jump into the… Not the last. The last question in my document, we’re jumping all over the place. Let’s see. Read in the traffic engine that Shawn would give some slides, videos, examples of how to apply Google ads and build them. I can’t find them. There are a couple in there. I hate answering this question because I feel awful about it. There’s going to be a lot more of that. It’s all connected to the example offer, and we made the example offer about 50 times more complicated. It was the right decision, I just wish we were… Not we, this is me. I wish I had thought it through more.
I had a very narrow vision for how I was going to bang that together and make it fit into the traffic engine, and then after a couple of conversations, I realized the real value of this is to have it permeate across all of our courses and to really go deep. So, many of the things that are connected to that you just start tugging on the thread.
First and foremost, I apologize. Second, it is happening. A bunch more are going to be added before the end of 2020, in tandem with the example offer ramping up, which is in the process of happening. So there are some in there. You’ll find I think I the, I believe it’s module four, with a Google how to optimize an account. There is a long one. There are others in there too. I just have to figure out the video thing. I’m a writer and I like to explain stuff, but for some reason, video just kicks me in the ass. And I don’t understand why. But I hate excuses, so forget that I said all of that. It’s going to happen. That’s what matters.
When can we expect a live case building from Shawn. Building a sphere of influence and traffic engine for a new service product. Same answer, same question. We’ve gold-plated this to make an amazing, which is a wonderful form of procrastination. We’re learning. Again, 100% mea culpa. My responsibility. It’s going to be visible in 2020, and then ongoing after that, this is a live business within the traffic engine that people will always see. And if it doesn’t, if it fails, there’ll be another one. And if it fails, cool, right? That stuff happens.
My big fear, talking about fear earlier, not to wax too philosophical about fear, but one of my big fears with the example offer is that we were going to succeed and make it look like succeeding was easy. And then the reality is, if you’re the best marketers in the world, 80% of offers fail. And my fear that’s been really causing me angst, and I should just get past it, but this is just speaking to all of you as friends and colleagues here, that the real fear has been that we’re going to do something that’s going to be really successful and then somebody is going to watch that and they’re going to fail and they’re going to think it’s them. And that bothers me, because if somebody goes through the traffic engine and they fail at an offer and they think they’ve done something wrong and I’ve inadvertently contributed to that, I would feel horrible. Because every one of us is going to fail 80% of the time when we do this work. That’s the nature of the work. We can stack the deck in our favor, lots of ways we can do that. If you go through module 6.5, that Facebook testing framework, you can stack the deck lots of ways, but I don’t ever want anybody in this program to think that the work that we’re doing and the work that you’re learning is easy, because it’s not. And anyway, it sounds like I’m rationalizing and I’m not. This needs to get done. It’s going to get done. I’ll shut up about it now.
Next question. This guy Shawn, he says a lot of stuff. I’m noticing by the comments he’s maybe saying some dumb shit here. So Shawn advised to shut off mobile and tablet devices for Google ads. I’m wondering about those mobile phones because mobile today is 80% of all use devices and therefore Facebook ads targeting just on mobile is a good starting point. That’s what I learned from you guys and others, so how come this is different for Google ads and why do you exclude mobile phones for Google ads?
I love this question. This is a think about it question. A learn to think question. I think I’m going to let Loren talk about this for Facebook. I might say a couple of things on Facebook. But our behavior on a mobile phone, yes this is true demographically, yes it may be different for your particular market and who your audience is, so understand that there are caveats to all of this. But in general, our behavior on a mobile phone is not analogous to our behavior on an iPad or another tablet, which is not analogous to our behavior on a laptop or a desktop.
Yes, I buy stuff from my phone occasionally. I’m 49. So I’m not a millennial and it’s not my primary device, but I don’t interact the same way. And the data that I’ve seen over time, significantly shows that mobile users are, by any measure, in most businesses, of less value than a desktop or a tablet user. Not in the existential sense, kumbaya, we’re all valuable and wonderful little snowflakes and individual snowflakes, unique in the world. But when you’re on your phone, and I think this is especially true for Facebook… For me, the analogy I think about all the time is, how many times have I been just scrolling through my phone waiting in line at the grocery store to check out? That’s not the mindset I want to pay for somebody’s attention when there in.
That’s maybe the best way to think about it. You’re paying for somebody’s attention and all attention is not created equally. My attention when I’m on my phone is not the same as my attention when I’m sitting in front of my desktop, for the most part, broadly speaking. And I think that’s true in large audiences. I’m not saying in the traffic engine, don’t do mobile traffic. I’m saying don’t do mobile traffic immediately. Again, this is stacking the deck in your favor. If we look at a large group people, and in that large group of people, there is a subset, 20% of them, that are on a device that statistically the data shows they are far more likely to actually convert. They have a keyboard, it’s easy, they can see it there, they’re not monkeying around with their goofy thumbs, all that stuff. We’ve stacked the deck in our favor. If we can’t convert them in that environment, in the best of all possible situations, how the hell are we ever going to convert them when we add in 80% of them who are looking at their phone driving? Who knows what else? Standing in line at the grocery store. It doesn’t make sense to me.
Your viewpoint, when I say you this is not the person who asked the question, this is you, the broadly speaking you, the empirical… Anyway, it’s you broadly speaking. The royal you. Your business may be different. You say, “No, no, no, no. My business does X, Y, Z, and it’s all phone and it’s an app.” Then your business, that makes sense for you. But broadly speaking, when I sit to advertise and I’m saying I’m going to give you money for your attention, I want really high quality attention. If I can architect the system, engineer the system, to get better attention, and there are lots of ways to do it. I can do it with mobile. I can do it with geography. I can do it with time of day. I have lots of levers I can pull and I want to pull every single one of those to get a result. And that result for me is most likely going to be the gold standard. That’s going to be the best.
Most likely I can’t build my entire business on only that core of traffic, but if I don’t know the gold standard, if I don’t know what I can get in the best possible scenario, I have nothing to compare what happens when I start adding in other stuff.
Let’s just say for the sake of argument, I advertise on Google, one campaign, one keyword phrase, and it’s for everybody in the United States, it doesn’t matter where they are, it doesn’t matter what time of day, and doesn’t matter mobile versus non-mobile. And I get a suboptimal result. Maybe I spend $10 and I get $5 back. Well, what’s the problem? I have no idea. What do I do? I don’t know.
Maybe now I have to start monkeying around with something. And I’m like, well, maybe it’s time of day, and I change time of day and then it wasn’t time of day. I don’t have a baseline to work from. Now compare that to if I sit down and I say, I’m going to stack this deck entirely in my favor. It’s going to be during business hours, coast to coast. It’s going to be in the part of the country where I can… Whatever. I can ship to if I have an actual product. I can ship to in two days, it’s for the same cost of regular shipping, because that’s how fast UPS gets there. I am going to do desktop only, because I believe… I’m going to stack all of the deck in there in my favor.
If I do that and I spend $ 10 and I get $5 back, guess what? I’m done. It’s not going to get better than that. I can’t optimize my way out of it. It’s clear the best possible result I’m going to get sucks.
Or I spend $10 and I make $40 back. That’s my gold standard. Now I add mobile traffic and my $40 goes to $20, but I’m still ROI positive. But I know what happened. I know that when I added mobile, I’m still making money, but I’m making less money than that core group. But there’s a lot more mobile traffic, so I’m willing to make that deal. And then I say, well, maybe my time of day was a little too restrained so I’m going to expand the time of day. And I expand the time of day by six hours and my ROI stays the same, but I get a lot more traffic. Excellent. Now I know how time of day impacts my business relative to the gold standard.
I can just keep doing it. I can layer on another campaign that’s farther away geographically. I can start doing things. I’m doing them all really intelligently because I know in the best of all possible worlds, the result that I’m going to get, because I’ve engineered that to give me that baseline.
This sounds like something you sort of hear in passing. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. If I could tell you one thing about how to beat everybody on AdWords, how to think so differently that nobody can compete with you on AdWords, that’s part one of two.
The other part… This isn’t an open loop where I’m like, yeah, sorry. I’ll tell you later. The other part is just to cycle faster than they do with your improvements. Once you cycle faster, this is right out of Jonathan, I think it’s [inaudible 01:51:43]. That’s weird. [inaudible 01:51:52].
I’m worried that I’m conflating my friend Jonathan Boyd with the other Boyd. Weird. Anyway, sorry. I didn’t mean to go on that weird tangent. I just hadn’t ever made that connection. [crosstalk 00:19:02].
Loren (01:52:01):
Wasn’t it Jonathan Schubert?
Shawn (01:52:04):
No I’m thinking of the 60 second Boyd. [crosstalk 01:52:10]. Now I have to explain it because I’ve done this really weird thing. [crosstalk 01:52:14].
André (01:52:13):
It’s John Boyd [crosstalk 01:52:16].
Shawn (01:52:15):
John Boyd, yeah. So John Boyd was a US… He was an aviator and a pilot. They called him 60 second Boyd. And the reason he got this name is he had 267 air training engagements, and he would make it a bet that you could start on his 6:00 position, the most vulnerable position for a fighter pilot, where the enemy is right behind him. 6:00, if you imagine the clock face. And that within 30 seconds, he would swap and he would be in your 6:00 position. And he never lost an air engagement.
He is the founder of the OODA loop, and he said we all go through this four-part process. We observe the situation and we orient to it. We make a decision and we act. And whoever can go through that cycle faster, he said you’re getting inside your opponent’s decision cycle.
Not to glorify war in any way or glorify anything associated with war in any way, but the US strategy in the first Gulf War that was so overwhelmingly successful from a military perspective, not to diminish the humanitarian disaster in any way, shape, or form, but from a purely military perspective that was entirely informed on Boyd’s theories of maneuver warfare. He was a brilliant strategic mind. With that as background, early in my career in AdWords, I read Boyd’s work. For some reason, I mapped that to AdWords. So the two parts, if you want to be the best in the world, Google ads, the two things you need to be able to do better than anybody else are narrow the field down to a pristine core that is most likely that you’ve stacked the deck entirely in your favor using levers like geography, time of day, and mobile versus non-mobile. You get that gold standard before you add other things.
Simultaneously with that, you go through the OODA loop faster than everybody else. You get some data, you observe it, you orient yourself to it. That’s the critical part that most people miss. You look at the data, you say, what does this mean?
Your OODA loop might require three days depending on your ad budget, seven days. That’s one of the reasons why I recommend fewer campaigns, so you can put more money into fewer campaigns so you get data faster. All of this goes into this thinking, this is the underlying architecture of the traffic engine. This is how you do AdWords better than everybody else.
What happens is, you have fewer things that you’re doing that are so narrowly focused that you cycle faster than everybody else does. You make your improvements faster than everybody else does. And when you do that, at some point, the math does not ever allow the competition to catch up.
In very simple terms, if you make an improvement, a minor improvement, basic AB testing every week, or I’m sorry, twice a week, and your competition makes it every week, within two or three months, you are so far ahead of them in improvements that they can never catch up. They math just isn’t there. Unless they dump huge amounts of money in, assuming the market supports that.
This is a really weird tangent about a very simple question, but I want you to understand the thinking behind this, and that thinking is you have to engineer the best possible circumstance for your business to get the best possible result. Even if that result is small, that data is critically important. Now you know what is likely to happen under the best case scenario so that when you make the scenario less than optimal, you know the impact of those decisions and you can choose them at a granular level wisely.
If you go from no mobile to all mobile and things fall apart, you might go back and say, okay, let’s go back to no mobile, but then I’ll add mobile in. But I’m only willing to pay half of what I’m paying. You can just do the modifier in AdWords, half of what I pay for desktop I’ll pay for mobile because it’s just not that [inaudible 01:56:17].
Then you’re like, okay, that kind of works. What if I do 40%? That doesn’t work as well. What about 45%. There’s the sweet spot. And you’re always doing that. You’re always making those decisions because you know what worked.
That’s a really long answer. Holy smokes. From your perspective, Loren, totally different, how does this map to Facebook? What do you think about the same question? Turning on, turning off mobile traffic on Facebook, knowing that mobile is such an enormous part of the Facebook traffic.
Loren (01:56:53):
Generally mobile is going to get about 80% of your traffic. And I’m sure as time goes on, that may creep up to 85-90%. So it’s a huge, huge part of your Facebook and Instagram traffic because people use the platform differently when you’re waiting in line, when you have a spare moment in the day, for whatever reason, people open up Facebook, they scroll. I generally just go with include mobile because that’s what most of the people are going to view it through anyway.
There are occasions where I’ve… I don’t think I’ve ever set it to desktop only, at least not recently. You’re better off just kind of letting the Facebook algorithm do it. So I’ve heard of some people optimizing, they’ll have like one set of creative optimized for desktop and one set of creative optimized for mobile and running those both in tandem. That’s not really a best practice anymore.
What I have done is if I was going to a webinar where someone was going to register for a webinar, particularly if it’s an on demand webinar, where then they’re going to sit and they’re going to watch a 50 minute, an hour long, video, I have had that before, where you can actually set it up on Facebook where you can target a mobile, but only if they’re connected to wifi. So the theory would be obviously if they’re out roaming around on their data, they’re less likely to watch an hour long webinar. So there have been an occasion where I said, all right, I’m going to keep mobile in there, but I’m going to set it up only for wifi. And that worked. It actually worked really well.
Interestingly enough, it didn’t work any better or worse. I tested it later, opening up all mobile, and it didn’t work any better or worse. Then again, this was only a couple of months ago when here in the US we were on various stages of lockdown across the different states, so that may be a part of the reason why it worked then. Something to try out.
But generally I wouldn’t classify that as low hanging fruit for results. Generally that’s just something, if you had a compelling reason to test it, otherwise just open it up and let Facebook figure it out.
Shawn (01:59:13):
I almost skipped over the rest of these questions accidentally, and I’m glad I didn’t. There’s some good stuff in here. All right. Fourth question in this list, what’s the best way to use a multi page pre-sell site with a Google ad? I built a six page multi page pre-sell site, but it feels long for a Google ad, where our target group has a more urgent need to solve a problem or fill their need or desire. How can I approach this?
This is a very important question. Matching the intent of your audience to what happens next. Very important. So there is no standard answer. Six pages is too long, but 4.5 is perfect. There is no answer. The answer is, what is required to establish the beliefs that lead your prospect from the first thing that they did to the next thing that you want them to do? That’s really the way to think about this.
The example I use all the time in the traffic engine is the leaky roof example just because we can all imagine what that would be like. If somebody searches Google for fix the leaky roof, or roofing contractor near me, or whatever, I’m going to go out on a limb here, André may disagree with me, this will be fun. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you do not need a six page multi-page pre-sell site that leads to a PDF download of what to look for in a roofing contractor, and then a five-part soap opera sequence before that leads to your phone number. I’m guessing what they want to know is, are you available right now? And do you have 24 hour service? And how long is it going to take to get somebody over to my house, because my roof is leaking?
That’s an extreme example. Perry Marshall is famous for using the phrase he uses, does the prospect have a bleeding neck? That’s kind of gross, sure, but we get it, right? If you’ve got a problem where you’ve got a bleeding neck, you’re not going to do anything else until you solve this problem. That doesn’t mean the multi-page presale site isn’t helpful, because maybe you have a problem that there is a standard solution for and that standard solution or conventional wisdom isn’t ideal and there are problems that that person doesn’t know about, and what your expertise is saying, listen, I know you’re looking for X. The way most people solve for X is this, this, and this. And we get it. But here’s the problem, when you do that, there’s this other thing that’s going to happen, and we don’t want that to happen. Here’s why. So we do this instead.
Maybe that’s two pages. Maybe it’s one long page. The mechanics don’t really matter. But what matters is, what is required for the prospect to believe that you are the right solution to their problem? It doesn’t have to be problem solution, but that you’re the right decision for them to make? Whatever is required for that, is what you need to show them.
Now, in some situations, I’m imagining the roofing situation, I’ve had this happen so it’s very visceral for me. I remember it was December 23rd. I was supposed to go with my family to Texas the next day. My wife is from Texas. I came downstairs and there was an enormous puddle of water on my floor, where there was not supposed to be an enormous puddle of water. And I looked up, I live in a renovated barn, I looked up and the ceiling was wet.
At that point, here’s my only question, who can I call who can be here to fix that problem the fastest? The person who gets here the fastest I’m going to pay. In that particular example, if I call somebody and they said, “Well, we could be there tomorrow, and it’ll cost $1000, or we can be there in 20 minutes and it’ll cost $2,000.” I would have been willing to pay the $2,000. It was that important.
That’s not every situation, though, so you have to match, and this is where I think there’s some granularity that you need to think about. Let’s just assume for this conversation that you have 10 keyword phrases, and it’s a spectrum, a temperature spectrum. Glen Livingston came up with the term of bulls-eye keyword. I borrowed that from [inaudible 02:03:36]. I love that. There might be a search where that person, they’re looking exactly for what you have to offer and they already believe that the intent in their search is very clear. And it’s a tiny part of your market, maybe for every 100 clicks, it’s five. Those people, you might make the decision to send them to an abbreviated entry point into your business, because you can tell by their search intent…
Shawn (02:04:00):
Entry point into your business, because you can tell by their search intent that they already believe all the things that you need them to believe. They’re looking for what you have. It’s Very specifically that they’re looking for the thing. So you might decide that maybe it’s a thousand words on a page to confirm that that thing that they’re very specifically looking for is the thing that you offer. But then, as you get farther away from that bulls-eye, you might have people who are searching for things that are less specific because maybe they’re more in a research phase, or maybe they’re learning more, or where they’re looking at lots of options in there, and that’s expressed in their search intent. Well, at that point, then there’s more to talk with them about. There’s more to explain that then leads to that last page.
So you could, just thinking out loud, structurally, you could build a multi-page pre-sell site almost in reverse and then have, and I wouldn’t do it this way to be clear, this is a conceptual idea, but then you’re driving… the specificity of the traffic is sent to you deeper pages within that, is one way to think about it. Don’t do it that way, to be clear, just think about it that way. Like, what does somebody who makes this search need to know before they know that I am the right person or my product is the right product, and give that to them. And however long that is, is the right answer. Don’t come back and edit with a heavy hand, and make sure that you’re not repeating yourself and then winnow it down. I think six pages in general is probably… that’s a little tough.
And I don’t know if these are six pages, 250 words a page and who knows, and it’s more of like a staccato pop, pop, pop, pop through the six pages, or if it’s 6,000 to 1500 word pages, that’s a legit effort on your client’s part, but it may be awesome. Again, I don’t want to suggest… Like, I love putting barriers in front of the wrong people, but that’s the business I’m in, right? Most of the people who do what I do or do what I’ve done are in the business of removing barriers to get more people of lower quality to the end, to make them a number go up that’s meaningless. I’m in the opposite business. I’m in the business of putting every conceivable hurdle in front of the wrong people to get them to drop out of the race, so that only the people who remain are the people who should be there. That’s my game.
Yeah. You can play either game. You can play a variation of those games. That’s closer. But I like getting in the way of people who are not the right prospects. And I like to think about how to do that. So your six page, multi-page pre-sell site might be the best way to do that possible. I just think about just constantly, it’s the reverse of the traditional sales. You’re about through, they say, “Well, I’m not really sure I like it in black.” “Well, we’ve got one in white.” I’m the opposite. They’re like, “Well, I’m not sure I like the color of the car in black,” I’m like, “Fine. Maybe this isn’t the right car for you.” Right? It’s like I maybe go too far in that direction, but I like this idea of putting lots of barriers up, even for a Google ad, right?
It just all comes down to like, for your business, what is the thing that creates the path for the people who are going to be good prospects to follow? How do you show them the way? How do you pull them forward? And if you can pull a prospect forward who has through what they’ve shown in their search intent, if you can pull them in 1500 words from, okay, this is the right place to be. This person really has credibility, they have authority, they have empathy, they get me. They’ve got a really good solution and I want to do what’s next. If you can do that 1500 words for a subset of your audience, do it. And if there’s another subset of your audience that needs 3,000 words, 4,000 words, because you need to establish more of the foundation earlier, then do that. Don’t treat them all the same. I think it was part of the message here. So have a lot of fun with that.
I mean, it’s not a… There is no, again, this is a learn to think course. So I want you to think deeply about this. This is what somebody searched for. What do I think they need to get to make a really good decision to become a customer of mine? And in what ways would I prevent the wrong people from making that journey? These are two questions to ask yourself. Then you just build a mouse trap to do that, put stuff in the way of the wrong people. Right? And then, an example of this, let’s say you have a 45 minute webinar and you sell at the end. And then you go through a pretty typical webinar, you cover, you tell your story, you go through three main points and each of those three points has three points underneath that, and it leads to you, all roads lead to Rome again, and you get to this point where the offer is made. And that’s the logical conclusion of everything that you’ve talked about.
Conventional wisdom says get as many people to opt into that as possible. And what I start looking for is where can I throw up roadblocks. And the first roadblock you can throw up is say, by the way, this is a webinar and you have to give your email address for it. A lot of people are like, nope, I’m not going to do that. Cool. See ya. I’m good. I’m glad I told you. I’m glad I didn’t waste your time, you didn’t waste mine. And oh, by the way, it’s 45 minutes. I don’t watch a 45 minute webinar. Great, move along. Right? Those are the hurdles we’re throwing up.
It sounds like I’m trying to be a jerk. I’m not. I’m just trying to be kind to everybody. And I’m trying to say upfront in anything that I’m doing, here is what is required to be a customer of mine. I believe I have value for the right people. I don’t want to waste time of the wrong people. And here’s how to know if you’re not the right people so that I can respect your attention, you can go do something that’s more in line with your interests. It’s the highest form of respect. It sounds like I’m being a jerk and it’s not that at all. It is the utmost respect for the other person to be able to say in advance, here are five ways to know if you shouldn’t go past go in this situation.
It’s not quite that obvious, but that’s what I’m thinking in the back of my mind. What could I tell you that would make you turn around if you’re the wrong person, and that’s the right thing to do for you and parenthetically, that’s the right thing to do for me, because I don’t want to have to waste my time on it either. So it sounds like I’m being a jerk, but I don’t mean it that way.
All right. That was Google specific. So we’ll just jump to the next thing. Can you give some advice what to write in the Facebook ad headlines and subtitle? There’s nothing mentioned about that, only about the ad copy itself. There’s nothing shared about that and I think that we have an impact on CTR All to prequalify. This is a Loren question, but I can’t miss the opportunity to run my mouth about it for a second. Here’s what I hate about thinking in headlines. It is really easy to craft a headline that grabs somebody’s attention to get them to especially curiosity. There’s a lot taught in traditional copywriting and others on how to grab somebody with that. It’s usually sign it’s intellectually interesting and emotionally compelling. And there’s a… copywriters, I think, call these fascinations. So many copywriting courses are built around this idea of fascinations. And I just… for whatever reason, that bothers the hell out of me. I get it, and Loren can probably make a really good case for this.
So this is one person’s perspective. So taken in that context. I don’t need to fascinate you, right? I want your attention. I do want to attract your attention with something, but I don’t want to put myself in a position where I’m too focused on grabbing your attention in a way that’s going to give me a false signal. So I think probably I go too far in the direction of just like the Volvo philosophy of selling, which is, it’s boxy, but it’s safe, right? I go too far in that direction. Here’s the thing, this is what it does. If this is you, you probably want it. If this is not, you probably don’t. That to me, is respectful marketing, but there’s a lot of nuance there. So I offer that as context to say, don’t try to make your headline so compelling that it grabs the wrong attention. Let it get the right attention. And now for a much better answer to this question, Loren, how would you answer this question?
Loren (02:12:19):
[inaudible 00:08:20]. Well, I think what he’s meaning by subtitle might be the newsfeed description. I generally don’t spend too much time there at all. Just kind of about the author or just a brief description of the product or something, because that only appears a small minority of the time and no one pays attention to it. So, put something there, otherwise it’ll just default to whatever wordage is on your landing page, but don’t stress about it. In terms of the headline. Generally, what I found works best is kind of reiterating the main selling points of what you’re hitting in your introduction. So in your intro, the first two or three lines that someone sees on mobile before the see more link there, whatever pain points you’re hitting, whatever benefits you’re presenting, the name of the product, reiterating those in the headline just seems to work well, surprisingly.
Another thing is I like to use the headline to kind of show what the end result is. Is this a free ebook? Is this a webinar? Is this a $27 product? Is this a blog post? So sometimes I may just put like, bracket, master class, bracket, and then kind of, you can fill in the rest of the headline. It is a secondary way just to kind of compliment what you’re already hitting in your introduction. And you can try a few different ones if you want to. Generally, I think that my philosophy on the headline is just do a good one that doesn’t mess things up, and generally your image, your video, and then your introduction is going to do 95% of the heavy lifting.
Shawn (02:14:08):
I knew you’d give a better answer. That’s way better. All right. I lied earlier in. Kevin, I’m just going to answer your question because you’re impatient, then we’ll go to the other questions in the queue. So I think, let’s see. So lots of contexts for Kevin’s questions. I’m just going to read it. I think I’m just going to read it, start to finish. Listen for the nuance in this question, because there’s a lot packed into this, it is more about an agency perspective, but I’m going to connect it to the core for those of you are… Don’t check out if you think like, well, I’m not running traffic for clients, why do I care? I’ll connect it in ways that are meaningful for you. I hope meaningful for you, too. So, okay.
I do client work as an agency and my questions are from the perspective of being a better marketer for my clients and attracting better clients. So here’s the context. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time reading and rereading all the TLB programs. Me too, man. Don’t feel bad. Mainly I’m looking for connections and insights that I can use to help my clients improve. I’m also looking to make sense of inconsistencies in my understanding. I really hope you don’t find any inconsistencies in our descriptions. All right. However, I sometimes get confused with the ideas and principles across programs. Bellow are some extracts from TLB that have stuck with me. Hold on André, we might be in trouble here.
Okay. So from sphere of influence, organic marketing module, he said that this is a quote, if you want to send paid traffic to your sphere, to your SOI, just know that there are two opposing forces at play. Paid lead acquisition needs ROI quickly. It’s a short ROI cycle. And SOI is built on a long ROI cycle where the primary focus is on building attraction, desire and bonding first, long before any sale. I just want to mention parenthetically, this is a really powerful insight for all of us. I want to speak to this because this is a really big challenge that there’s so much nuance in. And when you start to understand it could be incredibly valuable.
Okay, next. From Tiny is Mighty social funnels episode, another quote, compare that to the CF blog where just about everybody with something good to share is welcome to guest post. Even though the articles are surely decent, look at the comment section, literally zero interaction, nothing happening. And then from traffic engine client services, getting result for clients, quote is, number one, get initial results as quickly as possible. Be wary of over-preparing it first. Okay. Now, all of that… So let’s see what Kevin has done here. I want to shine a light on a few things.
Not only has Kevin read the material, but he has gone deep into figuring out what it means and then how it relates to each other. That in itself is a masterclass in how to approach this material. And if you didn’t do it the first time through or the sixth time through, who cares, right? It doesn’t matter. Everything we have that we can change is in the present moment moving forward. So just know that you can approach it this way, that you can. All of these courses are built on the same foundational principles. You can find these threads in there. And when you do, it’s not one plus one is two, it’s one plus one is greater than three, there’s leverage when you find these layers in there. So hats off to you, Kevin, for doing that. That’s really deep work in here. Okay.
Now let’s get to the questions. Basically above extracts have two questions. The reality is most clients in my metric are competition driven businesses. In my 10 years of doing business online, I have never ever met a different kind of business owner until TLB. By definition, they want quick results and they want to sell ASAP. I’m nodding my head up and down, as I know Lauren is, too. Even though I want to grow my agency with SOI principles, the marketing I do for my clients is instant gratification marketing, which is what they want. There’s so much good stuff here for all of us. Okay. Shawn, how did you, or do you balance this direct conflict of thinking when you owned an agency? Oh, I can tell you how to do this wrong in so many ways. We’ll have fun with that.
And then second question. Growing my agency was free of influence principles. The comment Peter made in Tiny and Mighty is a good one. I have seen social engagement in organic sales explode over the last three years. SOI put simply is delivered via our website, the eyeballs hang out within social platforms. I’m an introvert. I really do not want to be on social media all day. At the same time, I’m not an SEO guy. Shawn, how do you use sphere of influence principles to grow a new agency? Or how would you use sphere of influence principles to grow a new agency if you had to start again today, had 12 months to make it work? So I, in parentheses, want to get clients immediately. Okay. Really good stuff here. What I want to do is I want to answer Kevin’s questions, that are more specific to an agency business, but then simultaneously I want to pair that with a corollary thinking about how it applies beyond just working with clients. The first question is, I’ve seen this more times than I can count, it is very near and dear to me, and it’s so pervasive. And that the question really is, when you’re working with clients and in parallel with that, when you’re trying to get something going for yourself, there are these two, and André called these two opposing forces, that’s a really brilliant insight from André, that you have on the one hand, I need something to happen now, like the cash register needs to ring, but on the other hand, the actions that I take to get the cash register to ring faster are most likely taking me farther away from what I actually want, which is long-term, happy, repeat customers.
And if you have sphere of influence… There’s a video of Rich Schefren in there. And he says what I think is one of the most profound things that the way to think about marketing ever spoke, and Rich is just a brilliant individual, but the way he describes how he’s been successful, he makes it a formula. And the formula is this, what you think is the problem is X, so you do Y, but the real problem is Z. And Y make Z worse? How many of you are going, what? Like, does he have a head injury? I don’t have a head injury. Let’s think about this. Let’s put some… let’s fill in the blanks. What you think is the problem is you’re not exercising enough. So you join CrossFit and kill yourself in the gym. And then when you do that, your cortisol goes up, super stressed, you’re hungry, you eat a ton and you actually gain weight. So what you think is the problem is you’re not exercising enough, so you exercise yourself crazy, but exercising actually makes the problem worse and gets you farther away from results. That’s the formula.
So that formula, that frame of formula… Formula is the wrong word. Framework. That framework we can overlay here. And if we think about it, what we think is the problem is we need customers right now. So to get customers right now, we do all these fill in the blank. We do all these crazy things. We give away a million bonuses, we put a countdown timer on, we have false urgency, we buy, buy, buy, buy. But the reality is when we do all of that, we actually get far fewer customers. Right? That’s the truth. This is not conjecture, this is not hyperbole. This is, between André and I, we have over four decades of experience. This is a fundamental truth that we have uncovered. We see it everywhere. We talk about it all the time. That when you optimize for these short-term signals, you do that at the expense of the long game.
That however is… there’s not a lot of solace in that. You’re like, right, I get it, but I still need to make money right now. Right? And from a client perspective, you really have… This is the question. I pulled the question out in the first part that Kevin asked, how did you, or do you balance the direct conflict of thinking when you owned an agency? The short answer to that is not well. Meaning that I have become increasingly curmudgeonly in dealing with clients. And I have unfortunately recently fired clients because I don’t do client work anymore. But before that, it was an enormous source of frustration for me.
So there’s a gentleman interviewed by Tim Ferris, named Graham Duncan, a talent expert, I highly recommend that interview. It’s phenomenal. One of the things Graham Duncan mentioned in that interview is he said, “Our genius is right next to our dysfunction.” I don’t want to be cautious about thinking about my genius, because I say it with all humility, but if I do have something that rises to the level for me of genius is it is my ability to see with clarity, how to get from A to B. I really can see that, and it makes sense to me and I can connect the dots, at the larger scale. So I can see like, okay, this is what really matters. That’s my genius. Adjacent to that, right next to that is my dysfunction. Which is if somebody… If I have that conversation and somebody agrees that the data is accurate, the assessment is accurate, they agree with everything, but they’re like, “Yeah, but I still want to do it this other way.” I can’t do that.
When I say I can’t, I don’t mean, pay me enough money and I’ll do it. I mean, my brain doesn’t work that way. Loren and I just had this conversation the other day, I want to be very cautious not to do anything that would point to what it was, but this was the gist of the conversation. We’re selling our core offer on Facebook, and really we’re about at breakeven. And lots of things are going on. This is a market dramatically affected by COVID, so lots of things are going on. So, number one, we’re trying to do this thing that we’re starting to have some success with, but we want to try something different. Instead of selling our core offer, which the price point is in the thousands of dollars, what we’re going to do instead is we want to sell a really low cost version in the tens of dollars.
Okay. Right. That makes sense. The way I would look at it, I’d say, okay, so if you’re selling a low cost offer, it’s because you want to get to the high cost offer. So the question was, in the length of time this business has been in business, how many people ascend through that path? They buy the really low cost offer and they eventually buy the core offer. And the answer was the data showed that nobody that. So now here’s the data that I have in mind, and then followed by, but we want to try it. So this is my genius says, hey, the thing that we’re trying to do is sell the core offer. Let’s engineer a system that sells the core offer. Here are the steps. Let’s do it. Let’s figure it out.
My dysfunction shows up when the client says the following, we want to do X in the hope that it leads to Y, but in the history of our business, X has never led to Y. And we’ve been in business a long time. My brain short-circuits. Because to me it sounds like, we want to try this thing that we know doesn’t work. In some people, that’s fine, whatever, you’re the client. And that’s sometimes the answer, right? And this really, this is the honest answer to your question. And this is really where I got back to where I’ve been most successful dealing with this question. And I think this is the answer to your, how do you balance this?
There are a couple of ways. One, and this will contribute to your second question, too, one, I think you need to create a manifesto and put a stake in the ground to attract the people who you want to work with, who are looking for you. There are a lot fewer of them, but there are also a lot fewer people trying to reach them. And I think you want to do it with a little bit of attitude. And you don’t have to be a jerk, but I think you need to point out the problem very clearly and say, and I wouldn’t say this is how my clients have done it. You can say, this is what I’ve observed, people want this thing to be true. Yet, everything they do is undermining the thing that they really want. And I won’t do it that way.
And then you show them how. You very like, this is a multi-multipage pre-sell site, show them, show pictures, describe it, put it right in their face and say, if this is you in which you’re… if what you really want is you have an offer that you want to sell, that you want to scale, you want to do all of these things, yet, you’re undermining every effort to do that because you’re doing these five dumb things. I mean, you decide how much animation you want to add to that. I would do it with a lot of attitude just because that matches my personality. I think that’s the front-end.
And recognize that 99% of the people who go to this are like, “Yeah, screw this guy.” Right? That’s whatever, and good. Right? Because then you don’t have to work with them. Right? That’s one path that you can take. There’s another path that you can take. And both of these are equally valid. The other path that you can take is… And I did this a few times. It’s oddly liberating right up until it’s not. For me, it was oddly liberating at first, but the time bomb was taking and I finally imploded. What I did, it was such an obvious realization, is I realized at one point, my job is not to decide for the clients. This was quite a long time ago. My job is not to define success for the client. My job is to hear the client’s definition of success and determine if I am able to provide that for them.
I mentioned this in some of the client services content, I need to define that broadly across psychological factors, too. Like, how do they want to feel about the work? Like this client I was mentioning before, what makes them feel good is to feel like they’re doing something. Right? It’s empowering. We’re doing something, and maybe that something’s not going to lead to a perfect result, but we’re doing something. So one approach that I could take is I could rise to that and say, okay, you’re hiring me to accomplish this thing that you have said is important to you, and I have been an honest high integrity actor and said to you, here are my concerns. I think what you want is this thing. And I think that the way we’re going about it is not going to get you that thing. However, I also recognize that you are the client and it is my responsibility to provide you with what you want. So I’m willing to do that. That sounds really great. We can all hold hands. We can sing kumbaya. We can feel really good about it.
But let me tell you the other side of that, that I learned the hard way. When the thing that the client wanted to do fails spectacularly, and you knew it was going to fail and you told them it was going to fail and you showed them precisely how it was going to fail, and then it fails, there is going to be zero attention paid to the fact that you said it was going to fail. That is the most common form of client amnesia I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Where the client has a dumbfounded look on their face. “What? You didn’t think this was going to work. Why didn’t you tell me?” You’re like, I don’t know, here are the 45,000 words of emails I wrote saying, we shouldn’t do this.
I know someone who has done a lot of client services work. And one of the phrases he said… And no one knows this person, too, I’m talking about Stan Noah. I just love this. He said that people hire consultants so they have somebody to blame when things go wrong. Right? People hire agencies for that, too. It’s comical, right? How you craft your business, and I get a sense, Kevin, from the questions you’ve sent in different contexts and these questions and the depth of thought you’re putting into it, that that’s not going to be you. You’re not going to think… You’re not going to be comfortable with that. So I think for you, the answer is, put your stake in the ground and don’t be subtle about it. Build a front-end that says, this is who I am. Right? If this isn’t who you want to work with, cool. There are lots of people who do this differently.
Hell, I would even… I did this for years, right? I had the worst website for the longest time as a design build company, which was hysterical, it’s a badge of honor. My website was, here’s what we do, here are my five competitors who also do it. You should go look at them, too. Right. And then come back. Go talk to them and then come back. Right? And I had more people comment on that. They were like, wait, we didn’t even call your competitors. Who does that? And I was like, but to me, it was like, you know what? Don’t like the thinking. And I didn’t… I tend to externalize this. And again, we’re almost seeing like, I’m on the psychologist couch here with my dysfunction. I’m highly motivated by righteous indignation. That was my early righteous indignation where I was like, if you call me and say, we’re kind of interested in this project or whatever, but we’re also going to be talking to your competitors, right? Like that, that dynamic, screw you, don’t call me back. That was my… I didn’t say it. That’s what I was thinking.
So what I did is I just engineered that into my sales process. It was like, listen, here’s what we do. Here’s our experience. Here’s how long I’ve done it. Here’s who we’ve done it for. Here are other people who do what I do. Go talk to them, first. Go find them. And then feel free to reach out at that point. Because what I was doing was I was taking away that ability to say like, “Well, we’re talking to your competitors, too,” because good, I already told you to do that. Right? So we’re on the same page. It sounds crazy and it matches my personality, and I don’t recommend this for everybody.
But I think for you, ultra high integrity, you’re doing the work and going deep in the material, you really want to learn this stuff, I would put that stake right in the ground and say, this is who I am. This is how I do things. This is why I do things, like a hundred percent transparent. Here’s how I think about it. Here’s why I know this is the right approach. This is, in order to work with me, you need to agree that this is how we’re going to do it. And if you can’t, that’s perfectly okay. There are lots of people who will work with you to get you suboptimal results. I even say it like that. I just put it right out there. There are plenty of people who are willing to do it a different way, but I won’t do it that way. So when you work with me, you’re agreeing in advance that we’re going to do the right thing to build your business the right way, period. Like that, wow, what a position. I’m excited just thinking about you doing this. So do that.
Now let’s take these questions and let’s apply them to all of us who are not in the agency setting. What is the lesson that we can learn from this? Well, lesson number one is, and this is the bedrock core of everything that André and I talk about all the time, do not optimize for things that are not the thing that is most important for your business. The thing that is most important for your business is to create happy customers.
Now, what is a happy customer? Noah and I had this conversation earlier this week. Just full disclosure, Noah and I are friends. So when I’m referencing Noah, just know that in context. So we’re friends, we’re having this conversation back and forth. What is a happy customer? Why is that the best metric? I mean, we got really deep in this conversation. And it’s a hard metric, because we can make an objective thing that approximates it, like you could call like true customers. So a true customer might be a customer who buys and does not refund. That’s not a happy customer. Right? You want a happy customer. Well, do they reply? Are they a super fan? Now there’s lots of nuance, but we all kind of know we would see it if we saw it. We’d know.
So from that context… Taking this question that from the agency question that Kevin asked to all of us, when we’re thinking of non-agency environment, it all boils down to this phrase that I apologize for swearing about this, but don’t do dumb shit. Right? That’s really the name of the game we’re in. And one of the dumbest things we can do is try to get a result so fast that we undermine the result that we actually care about. Everything is in service to the result that we actually care about. Now, the caveat to that is if you’re doing something and you need to produce sales to make that something exist, maybe you’ve gone out…
Shawn (02:35:00):
Produce sales to make that something exist. Maybe you’ve gone out on your own. Maybe your job disappeared because of COVID. I don’t know your situation, but if something happens, then that is the context in which you’re operating and then do the thing that sells faster because within a large audience, there is a subset of that audience. I’m one of these people that I will buy something in 30 seconds after I’m made aware of it, if the promise is compelling, it matches up with a need that I have and the price point is right. I did this yesterday. It’s like 60 bucks, $67. I bought it if is miserable and it’s offer, and I couldn’t refund, I suppose, but if it’s not great, it’s not great. It’s not at the $7,000 thing. Some people do that, reach those people first and be upfront about it.
Say, “Listen, here’s what I’m doing. This is going to be what’s involved.” But right now, what I’m really looking for are the people who need this most. And I want to get this in their hands as fast as possible. But no, in exchange for that, it’s going to be a little rough around the edges. And I’m just trying to as fast as possible to get this thing that I’ve been spending some time thinking about or working, whatever it is. I’m getting it out as fast as it possible. It’s going to look like this. It’s not going to be super polished, but if this is something you need right now, that’s great. And maybe you’re going to get it for less. You’re going to be a founding member, whatever it is, sell the hell out of that to the subset of the market that doesn’t care about that other stuff. And there are plenty of them, they do that. Just don’t get into this business after you’ve done that thing. Well, that worked really well. Let’s just keep doing that. I know, go for the rest of the audience, too. The rest of the audience it’s a longer cycle, probably. So I want to be paying attention to the time here, too. So I want to be cautious. I just love these questions, which is funny because I thought they were agency questions, and then when I actually spent the time to read them and really go deep, these are just broadly applicable. Second question that he asked about… So how would I use the sphere of influence principles to grow a new agency if I had to start again? I would do it. Again, be cautious how I would do it. I personally would do it the way I described for you, but be very cautious that I am bringing 22 years of experience… Well it’s 27 years because I did the work before I owned an agency.
I’m bringing 27 years of experience to the party and I’m bringing a certain reputation to the party and the context really matters. So I can pull off a variation of this, where if I could put my stake in the ground and say, “This is who I am, this is what I’ve done. This is how I work. If this does not resonate with you, that’s awesome. We’re still friends, but move along.” That’s what I would do. If I change your question slightly, and if I wanted to grow an agency where I didn’t have any of that benefit, what would I do instead? I would actually go back to the audience and offer a masterclass, which incidentally, that was not written prescriptively as a course, it was written descriptively of how I actually do that.
So what you’re seeing in the audience and offer classes just is me writing how that works, like how it has worked, and I’ve done it a bunch of times. Then we’re going to update that to combine some things. So it’s a description of what I actually do. So I would go back to that. I would go through that, and what I would be looking for is I want to position myself very differently so that I am a category of one. So I would look across what other agencies were doing, like how they were describing their things. I would talk to people. I would call [inaudible 02:38:59] and I’d be very clear. Listen, this is what I’m thinking about doing, I’m not trying to work with you. I don’t have any intention to working with you, but here’s what I’m most curious about.
And when you listen to the recording of… With Jonathan Boyd here, you’ll really get a lot of insights on this. I would do that. I would reel and then I would make a value proposition. That to me was the thing that everybody was asking for. What did they want the most? I don’t think it would be many things. I think it would be one thing. Category of one, we do this one thing that’s really important better than anybody else. And hear all the things we don’t do. That’s how I would approach it. Here are the 50 things that an agency could do, these are the 50 things that your agency might do. We don’t hear the 49 of them that we don’t do. We believe this is the most important one. Here’s why we believe it’s the most important one.
I have a feeling that clients would want to get results very quickly. So I would connect what their deepest desire, I would present it to them. The people we work with, we got the results for, or whatever. I’m losing the phrasiology here, but really I would project to them if this is you, if this is the thing that matters most to you. If you want to work with an agency that is 100% focused on getting this particular result, this particular way in this particular timeframe, then that’s what we do. And that’s all that we do. And I would be up front simply if you want SEO and you want… Great, we can recommend people to do that. But we don’t do that.
We do this one thing. And it just, amd in your thinking in your mind, just so happens that one thing we do is the thing that you want more than anything else. That’s how I would position it. And I would then the sphere of influence principals come in, because what I’m really doing here is I’m pulling them toward me by saying, “Here’s the thing you want more than anything else. This is the thing that wakes you up in the middle of the night. And if it’s the one thing, if a genie in the bottle popped up, it’s the one wish you want granted and I am the genie in the bottle and I can make it happen. And I would take them through that entire journey. So that by the end of it, all they want to do is whatever is next.
I would not persuade from moment. I would pull them toward me. I would crank the desire, dial up to 11 by… And again, only because I’m also willing to do the work to be able to deliver on the promise, this isn’t sales bullshit. This isn’t me making up a big story and then trying to figure out how I’m going to deliver on it. I’m going to go in to be able to deliver the goods. That’s one of the reasons I want to focus on narrowly is because if I focus really narrowly, I can be the best in the world at something pretty fast. If I remove all the distractions. So I’m willing to do that work, but I’m only going to do that and service is something that I know is ultra important to a client, and I will not do any new.
And the other thing I would do that would be a little different than what I’ve done in the past, while I wouldn’t change what I’ve done. It got me exactly what I wanted, but the thing I would change is I would do that one thing at the expense of everything else. And I would almost be indignantly angry if somebody asked me to do something else. I’ll be like, “Hey, we love what you’re doing here, could you all stop talking?” No, we do this. That would be for my own benefit. I know that sounds weird. But anyway, I want to be respectful of time. We usually try to cap this at three hours and we’re getting close. So, great questions everybody. I want to go to the Q&A, there are questions, but I’m not sure. I suppose that I already answered. [crosstalk 00:07:46].
Loren (02:42:47):
Yeah. I can probably bang those out pretty quickly. Because some of them are related to previous questions and I’ve had a chance to read them while you were-
Shawn (02:42:57):
Cool. So yeah. Why don’t you answer the first one about ads manager?
Loren (02:43:01):
Sure. Well, actually let me see.
Shawn (02:43:03):
[inaudible 02:43:03].
Loren (02:43:04):
Yeah. This one and they’re related. We were talking earlier about someone who said their audience was primarily an Instagram. They say they had a follow up here in the Q&A that when they go to automatic placement, about 80% of their impressions go to Instagram. And does that mean that Facebook’s telling them to focus on Instagram versus Facebook? And if yes, should I keep on setting up Instagram ads from Facebook manager or from the Instagram app? That’s interesting that 80% of the impressions are going to Instagram. I wouldn’t necessarily phrase it, that’s Facebook telling you to focus on that as in, you need to exclude Facebook, but just keep that in mind. I would still do it within the Facebook ads platform within the same way that you place a Facebook ad, as opposed to through the Instagram app. Facebook just treats Instagram as a separate placement, not really a different platform.
So still within the Facebook ads platform, I’d still leave it on automatic placement. The only thing I would really change is when you’re coming up with your creative, keep in mind that 80% of the people are seeing it on Instagram. So maybe have the creative optimized for Instagram viewers, like what we talked about earlier. Really prioritizing an image, a video that doesn’t go over two minutes, if you do use videos and then the copy that is shorter. And then the, the first line you’ll see fewer characters. So that should hopefully take care of that question. Also later on, he said, he’d appreciate it if I could recommend some Instagram ads courses that I trust. I don’t really know of anyone that’s totally amazing. A lot of Instagram education is going to come in the context of Facebook ads because it’s really just a flavor of Facebook advertising.
So digital marketer. I cut my teeth on digital marketer and I would say they’re trustworthy. They’re very beginner focused, but that might be a place you could look for the Instagram specific stuff. Other than that, anyone that teaches about Facebook is probably going to touch on Instagram, particularly a lot of the e-com, and I don’t know your particular industry. If you’re focused on e-com versus selling information products versus high ticket lead generation and maybe different, but a lot of the e-com advertisers, Instagram is major there. And so there’s a lot of education based around e-comm that may be helpful. And then he said also custom conversion follow up question. I don’t currently have 50 to 70 sales per week, but I have 3000 customers accumulated over two years. Can I use that email to set up my custom conversion for sales versus the leads? Or does it have to be a weekly sales number?
No, you can use that list to set up a custom audience that you can then make a lookalike off of, but it wouldn’t help with your custom conversion. The custom conversion is, well, I guess, yeah, I wouldn’t do it, it would be more complicated, but just set up the custom conversion and get that regular input. Facebook does need a regular influx of those conversions to keep it dialed in and going well. Kevin had a question, you said, “I understand warming up the audience is in line with creating better prospects.” I think that was us talking about the videos and branding campaigns. Shawn, do you want to chime in, or you just want me to keep going?
Shawn (02:46:32):
Yeah. And I think it’s… I’ll just chime in very quickly. So, yes is the short answer. It is in line, but it’s also light attention that’s I think that’s the only distinction that I would make. So I think you can actually make a sphere of influence. I think you can make an entire sphere of influence informed narrative arc without a multi page pre-sale side. I think the genius of sphere of influence is that André taught a method that actually instilled principles. And when you learn the method, you also learn the principles. So from the micro, he taught the macro, which I think was brilliant. And from that perspective, I think you could [inaudible 02:47:16] chain pieces of you could have engagement pieces with video and with other components to start the beginning of the multi-pay… Effectively be a multi page pre-sell site from a content perspective. So I don’t get locked into the view of… The big insight for me, I was one of the first people who were the first [inaudible 02:47:36] users for sphere of influence. And then there was an aha moment where I was like, “Well, this doesn’t just have to be on the page. It could be at a system level. It could be these touch points. I could be establishing things like credibility and authority.” So, I think about it much more broadly. I think, yes, it’s in line with what you’re describing, but at the same time, I think you can go broader from than that, too. Run with it, Loren.
Loren (02:47:59):
Yeah. And, also too, you got to think in terms of your resources. Absolutely warming up an audience is going to give you a better prospects. And if you bought every single Superbowl commercial this year and bought full page articles in the New York times, every single edition, you would definitely have better prospects and you’d have warmer audiences, but that’s just not cost-effective. So a lot of times it is when you can have a long form of Facebook ad, for instance, that is the sole touchpoint that takes them through that journey. It’s doing that in the most cost-effective way, but that being said, try it a different way, see if it works.
Another question, Shawn here, the guy we were talking earlier about, he said that the reverse of that strategy, what if you, you went for conversions and then if people land on the buying page, but they don’t buy, you retarget them with videos to re-engage or indoctrinate them and then push them down a path of education that ends up with the offer and a different angle? Would you just retarget making the offer again if they don’t buy the first time?
Shawn (02:49:05):
That’s a great question. So a couple of ways to think about this. First question you have to answer is why didn’t somebody buy? And this is the question nobody answers. So whenever you get 100 people, see your offer page and of those 100 people, two of them become customers 98 didn’t. That’s a pretty strong signal that what you’re offering is not compelling or what you did before the offer is not very compelling. And then 98 people are like, “If I only get two more of those through retargeting, I double my conversion.” Sure. But start by doing a thought exercise. Here’s what everybody did before they got here, before they saw this page. And then here’s what they did when they got here and then go at your Google analytics, whatever it is, for every 100 you saw this page, two purchased.
50% likely. Your data will observe data. 50% or more were not on that page longer than maybe five seconds. So what does that even mean? Is it even real traffic? Who knows, but what was that? Half the people didn’t even engage, why were they here? What happened? And then are the remainder, what does qualitatively? What does that remainder of traffic look like? What was going on there? And you think about the textural differences. Let’s say some significant portion of your traffic, gets to your order page and they stay for 10 minutes and they don’t buy. That’s really weird. You’ve engaged them for 10 minutes, yet they still didn’t buy what the hell happened versus you engage them for 20 seconds and they didn’t buy. Well, those are two very different strategies to figure out what went wrong. In all of the solutions start with knowing the problem.
And this sounds so obvious, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in situations where we were devising solutions that had no relationship to the problem or they were so unrelated. The problem is we need more sales. Okay, but why didn’t you make sales? Well, we didn’t make sales. We need more sales. It doesn’t make any sense. So you have to get that texture of this happened, but qualitatively, this is what happened. And now what do I as an intelligent human being think might have been the problem? If somebody is on your page for 10 minutes and they go through all that content, whatever, and they get to the end and they don’t buy. There’s a, probably a strong signal, this is a price issue, unless prices earlier, well, I’m just making this up, but it’s a pretty strong signal.
You really had their attention, but maybe that price was just way out of their league, which could tell you about the quality of your traffic and everything’s, but they were there for 10 minutes, they still didn’t buy. I’d love to retarget those people. And I would love to show them a different way. And maybe the specific question. Maybe you’re trying to sell with video. And if you retarget to a written sales page is better. Maybe you’re trying to sell with a hardcore direct response, benefits focused, offer page, maybe your audience doesn’t respond well to that. And maybe when you retarget and retarget to something, it’s a much softer, much different approach, maybe a narrative approach or something in [inaudible 00:17:21].
There are all kinds of nuances here. So yes, when people don’t buy retargeting them to re-engage and because they’ve raised their hand already, they almost all the way there. It’s very high quality, but don’t do that without really doing some excavating first. Figure out, ask yourself why didn’t these people buy? And don’t settle for the first answer that comes to mind. Keep writing stuff down. If they’re on your email list and you can see who it was, send them an email, reach out. Don’t be weird about it. Reach out, be like, “Listen, I noticed you were interested in this thing and this isn’t some weird automated thing, but a lot of people have gone to that and they didn’t buy, and I want this to be accessible. So would you mind sharing, what about it? What could I have done better?” And if someone [inaudible 02:53:14] give them… Don’t use this as a weird way to offer a discount code.
That’s not what we’re doing here. I can’t stress this enough. You want the answer to the question or the answers to the question? Why is this happening? And then engineer the solution to address what you uncover. Don’t just create solutions looking for problems. If that makes sense? You want to go to the next one, Loren?
Loren (02:53:47):
Sure. Let me see. So one quick question that the Cohen had was, he set the Facebook ads conversion to purchase, but purchase in my custom event means that they get to page two of our six page MPPS. Is this a good way to go? I would not recommend that. I would recommend if you use a purchase event or a lead event or something like that, actually make it a lead or a purchase. If you’re doing like a click to page two, you can make that a custom event. Or you could just have that be a page view event that is a custom conversion, but generally don’t try to get cutesy with Facebook like that, where you’re firing events when something’s not happening, because it’ll come back to bite you. Facebook is getting a picture of all those people who click the page, too as purchasers, and that’s really not accurate. And then it’s just better to work with the algorithm in that way. But then you just think the other, Shawn… No.
Shawn (02:54:45):
Well, I just want to connect something that you just said to clarify for everybody. Facebook has a body of data that says this person does this thing that we agree is a purchase, they buy something. If you call something else that it doesn’t make it that, it just confuses the algorithm. You’re basically saying we’re going to call something a purchase that leads to a purchase that’s not a purchase, but send me people who do this other thing. It’s just a mismatch. So, just don’t do that.
Loren (02:55:18):
And I guess two last questions we’ll hit quickly from Cohen again. So how can we apply this in our Dutch relationship, coaching niche? Most couple…
Shawn (02:55:26):
That’s your specialty, Loren. Perfect. We were just talking about how your Dutch relationship…
Loren (02:55:30):
I have a Dutch relationship because most couples wants to… They don’t have this in their relationships, but that’s a broad desire and they normally talk most about communication problems, but the real problems are deeper. Then you have the couples that have real problems and almost are or on verge of divorce. We can deliver the magic. So that couples in just two days are back in love again and have all the tools to go and grow from there. But how do we connect this with the needs that they want? I guess what I would say is I’ve written for the marriage niche before. Shawn and I actually, we worked with a marriage counselor. And this goes for any customer, you just determine their needs. And then how does your product or service meet those needs?
A lot of times, the difficulty with marriage is they don’t want to face the reality that maybe they need counseling. Maybe they need better communication. Maybe they need what they really need. They just want to fix their partner. So anyway, for whatever that’s worth, if you can, somehow you’ll need to communicate in a way that actually resonates with them, because sometimes they don’t want to face the truth of what they truly need. But Shawn, what are your thoughts?
Shawn (02:56:42):
I’m trying not to laugh out loud at this. I’ve been married 24 years. So this idea of fixing your partner, I like that. That to me it’s analogous. Was it Mark Twain said it like, “There’s some lessons in life you can only learn by doing them, like picking up a cat by his tail.” Like trying to fix your partner relationship, probably is analogous to picking up a cat by its tail that you very quickly learn why that was not a good idea. Obviously, we’ve been doing this a long call if I’m laughing to stuff like this. So, I think the answer that Loren said is exactly the answer here, which is, and how you do it. It really depends on, and I think you can do it multiple ways to hit different parts of your audience. So one segment of your audience would like to see their desired future reality presented to them.
And then how do you explain how you get them there? That’s very common future pacing you hear about a lot that you described for them, what they in their heart they want most from the perspective of their relationship. And you dimensionalize that emotionally. And really you’ve described that to them in very genuine terms. This is not a trick, a very genuine terms. And then you work backwards. You’ve shown them what they want to know, you explain how you get them there. You can also flip that around and you could focus on what it may be for some part of your audience is the most immediate thing, which is they’re seeing the problem. This is what’s happening and then connect it. This is what happening, but this is what you really want. And then we know how to get you from where you are, to where you’re going.
It’s another way to approach it. And there are lots of things in between, and there are lots of ways to deal with what you do with dialogue. You can make the first two lines of the ad that people see, it’d be the phrase that they are hearing either in their head or their spouse say. That’s really impactful and that might grab their attention. There are lots of ways to you go about doing this, but what they all have in common is that you are getting to the core of what they want most. That’s marketing, that’s selling, that’s everything, and it is so easy and this is Seth Godin comments about it’s much easier to, we’re not talking about to persuading business, we’re directing interest and desire already. We’re just making a channel for it. We’re not trying to create it.
I think Seth Godin, I love this phrase. If you open a nudist colony, sell to people who are already nudist, don’t try to convince people to become nudist. That’s marketing and sales. So when we get really good at that is when we get the skill to have the patience to listen and to be present and to hear what our audience really wants, and then to move heaven and earth, to organize our offer, to give them exactly what it is that they want. That’s the name of the game. All right. Last question from Kevin. I was right, Kevin, we saved your question to last. Just not the question that we thought. Okay. Quick follow up to the agency’s sphere of influence question. Would you focus on SEO or paid traffic to get people to see it?
So I would focus on paid traffic for a couple of reasons. One of which, the whole reason that I created the traffic and just because I have some level of control over it. I think too much of SEO to me still feels like voodoo, black magic. It just doesn’t make any sense. Yeah, I know it works, but I don’t know how it works, it doesn’t seem to work super consistent, but the more nuanced to answer to your question is I want to, and this is something that André and I do very deliberately and that we enjoy doing. And I perhaps enjoy it to a fault. But when we teach, if you take a step back, if you read our emails, if you see how the series are organized. If you see that you have to actually actively engage to go further.
When you look at all of that, you’ll also notice that when we’re teaching, we never stray from what we teach, that what we teach is an expression of what we believe. And it’s not a trick, it’s who we are, that we know we can’t do it any other way. So, I mentioned that because if whatever agency model I created, how I got my customers, would be a demonstration of what I was selling, because I want to be able to subtly reinforce when someone says, “How do we know what you do works? Say simple. How did you hear about me? While we did X, Y, and Z.” That’s what I do. That’s why you’re here. I want to be able to have that level of conversation.
So, if I have an SEO agency, I’m not going to do a paid ad to get people. It’s like, “Wait a minute, why do you pay for traffic when you’re an SEO specialist?” I don’t want to have that conversation. I want it to be congruent. So whatever my specialty is, is going to be how I get customers. Assuming that’s possible. If there isn’t a direct analog, if it’s not in a traffic thing, I want it to be as close as possible. So if I only work with… And this was true for me, I’ve been true for a very long time. If I only work with clients who are referred to me by a trusted person or someone I know, a close person who is vouching for the client, if I only do that, then I want my lead generation to… Or I want my whole business to be congruent with that.
And I don’t want to have something that distracts from that. So I don’t want to say to somebody, I’m going to take your call because my buddy Noah says, you’re great. And then they see my ads all over Facebook. And they’re like, “Well, I’m pretty sure you take my call, anyway, because your ads are all over Facebook.” That’s not congruent. So whatever I offered for the service, I would want to be a mirror image of what I was offering to the client if that made sense. That’s the real answer to the question. Okay. I think we set a record André. This is three or six, I think is a record.
It was usually top out. We had this weird thing where we were almost exactly the same amount of time accidentally across five different Q&A calls. That was weird. So André has been quiet. He’s been drinking espresso this whole time, dreaming about all the fun stuff he’s going to do this afternoon. I guess it’s already afternoon. So anything to bring this to a close André, I feel like I’ve just been talking nonstop. Anything you want to add before we wrap up, today’s call?
André (03:03:17):
My ears are bleeding. Tell you, this has been pretty awesome, man. So this [inaudible 03:03:31] about 45 minutes on the row next. So the fun never stops.
Shawn (03:03:36):
The fun never stops. The whole time you’ll be thinking like this is almost as bad as listening to Shawn, [inaudible 03:03:40] that all the time. All right. So before we wrap up, thank you, Loren. I’ve had a great privilege of working with Loren for years, he is among the best in the world at what he does. True master of his craft and you will not find a better person and that’s what matters most. So thank you very much to Loren as always, it’s a pleasure of hanging out, spending time with André, even when he’s quiet. I know he’s taking notes. I’m going to hear about that later.
And to all of you who are on the call, most importantly, thank you for your attention. That’s why we do what we do here. So for everyone who submitted questions, everyone who stayed with us this whole time, we really appreciate you being here. And I don’t ever want to persuade anybody to do something because we’re not in the persuasion business, but I can tell you that after the 90 minute interview, 100 ish interview with Jonathan Boyd yesterday, you want to listen to that interview and the email is going to go out Friday, André, are we giving the email to everybody or that audio to everybody, or is it only people on the interest list? Have you made that decision?
André (03:04:43):
Yeah, I think it’s for everybody.
Shawn (03:04:45):
It’s okay. So then I don’t have to persuade you. You’re going to get it anyway. So I don’t feel so bad. But when you listened to that interview, the beginning was, I asked a bad question at the beginning and it we got off to a slow start, but at the middle to the second half is so amazing. Listen to it like 10 times, just to play it over and over and over again, that the second half of that conversation, it’s so brilliant, I can’t even describe it. And it costs you precisely your attention to listen to it. There’s no product here. There’s nothing. This is our gift to you. And it was a treat to talk to Jonathan. So thank you all. Look for that audio, and the audio and the transcript from this will be in the academy in a few days. Thanks everybody.
André (03:05:33):
Thank you [inaudible 03:05:33].
Loren (03:05:33):
It was a blast. Thank you all.
André (03:05:34):
Thanks Loren.
Loren (03:05:36):
Thank you.
End of ONGOING OPTIMIZATION Lesson