With many brands experiencing lower than ever visibility it seems that advertising is a necessity if you want visibility in the Facebook News Feed.
Getting started on Facebooks Ads platform is easy, but getting real results requires insight and an in depth understanding of the tool. Facebook do provide training, but some of the biggest secrets to leveraging Facebooks Ads platform don’t get taught. At least not to the general public.
Lucky for you I’ve located a man who knows the platform inside out. He puts millions of dollars through the system and knows exactly how to get targeted ads in the news feed.
But better still, with his step by step formula not only will you get more visibility, but you’ll grow your audience, drive engagement and get more leads and sales ringing through your business than you could ever imagine.
OUR GUEST:
Curt Maly was exposed to the world of sales and marketing at a young age. He landed a position as a telemarketer at the age of 15 which set him up for management positions within call centres as large as 400 people strong.
Later as a real estate investor in Austin, Texas, Curt discovered non traditional (online) advertising techniques like social media ads. He became fascinated by social ads and within no time had ditched his real estate career to manage social ad campaigns for others. Along with fellow real estate investor Nick Bridges he formed Black Box Social Media which focusses on managed advertising campaigns primarily via Facebooks Ads platform.
Curt Maly and Black Box Social Media now manage over $500,000 in monthly ad spend on Facebook, across 37 different niches.
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A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:
Here are some of the highlights from the 51st episode of the Traffic Jam Podcast…
- Getting Started with Facebook Advertising.
- Who’s the Right Audience For You?
- How To Segment Your Campaigns in Facebook.
- Step 2: Know Your Audience Demographic.
- What Content To Put Our For Maximum Response.
- Getting Responses for Business Posts.
- Promoting to A Wider Audience.
- Promoted Dark Post.
- Facebooks Ads Budget.
- How Facebook Tracks Activity on Your Page.
- Using Pixel for Your Perfect Avatar.
- Retargeting in Facebook.
- Opt ins on Facebook is Necessary.
- Create Your Lead Funnel!
TWEETABLE MOMENTS:
If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Curt Maly quote from the show:
You can also download Curt’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.
To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:
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Hi there listener! Welcome to episode#51 of Traffic Jam. I am your host, James Reynolds and this is the podcast show that helps you build and grow a profitable audience online. Before we jump in to the show, remember that each episode comes with a set of bonuses that help you implement the strategies shared on the show. Episode#51 is no different at all, you can get the bonuses for this episode by going to TrafficJamCast.com/51. Today, those bonuses include a downloadable MP3, full transcript, episode artwork and a referenced guide showing the 7-step Facebook ads formula shared by today’s guest.
Before we get to our guest today, a shout out and a thank you to Stewart, Alice, Denver, Ferdinand and Steve who all commented on Episode#50. I’d love to hear from you too so please stop by the episode page if you have a comment or a question for me or today’s guest. We’d absolutely love to hear from you.
Let me introduce today’s guest, his name is Curt Maly and like some of the very best experts we’ve had on the show, he was introduced by a former guest of Traffic Jam and in this case it was Ryan Levesque. Curt is a Facebook ads specialist and aside from teaching others how to advertise effectively on Facebook, he runs an agency that supports different clients in 37 different niches and he manages over half a million dollars of ad spend in the platform each month. He’s an absolute Facebook ads rock star and entirely self-taught on the platform. So here we go, to teach you how to leverage Facebooks ads effectively, Curt Maly from socialmediaadgenius.com.
James: Hey there listeners! Welcome back. This is episode#51 of Traffic Jam and joining me right here is Curt Maly. Curt, how are you doing?
Curt: I am doing excellent James, thanks for having me.
James: Thank you! You’ve got this whole 7-step process where you take someone from basic beginner to a Facebook advertising ninja starting with the core fundamental stuff and then all the way up to things like funnel targeting and custom audiences. Let’s take a look at that process, perhaps starting with the basics first, where do you suggest our listeners get started with Facebook advertising? What’s step one?
Curt: That is a really good question James so I am going to preface it with a couple different disclaimers or advance notices. Basically, here is the thing. Just a small little insight, we’ve run over $5 million in Facebook ads for over 33 to 35 different verticals, different branches so what I am going to give you can absolutely work on everybody’s business. Whether you’re an 8 figure business or if you’re really just starting out. So I am going to quickly give you the 7 steps and then we’ll take some time explaining through the seven steps. Remember, this can work for pretty much any business, almost any business, you just have to get good on your targeting which I will explain, and it doesn’t matter where you get started, you just have to get started, regardless if you are a small food trailer business or an eight figure business that is just rocking it online. What we do is in our first seven steps, if you want to write this down while you are listening, Step#1 is we really want to identify what our avatar is, our direct marketing message. And I am going to talk about exactly on how to do that. But what we want to do is we want you to find who do you we want to market to and really the first step is to drive likes to our business page or fan page. Driving likes is not about building online credibility of getting tens of thousands of people. What we’re doing is we’re pre-qualifying our audience. What we’re saying is we believe our avatar is this and we are validating this message, we’re testing and verifying our message if it works with our like campaign. From there we start bringing people in to the page or start bringing more people in to the page that we believe are qualified avatar and then we start working on our engagement which is really step#2. We find our best engaging post, from step#2 we move to step#3 and it’s where we promote those posts. So we find what resonates best with our avatar that we drew likes to and that they engaged with, so now we are going to promote that post, we are going to make sure that our fans and our friends are seeing this particular popular post. The most popular post leads us to step#4, those turn in to some of our best ads. Those are called dark posts. Dark posts will appear on other people’s news feeds, they’ll appear on mobile, it looks like it is directly coming from our page but the dark post, and the post doesn’t actually show up on our fan page it just shows up in advertising in news feeds. Now that we know what dark posts and how advertising works, step#5, we make sure that the ads are congruent. Like native advertising, and we’ll get in to that term here in just a moment, but we do all that work to move in to step#6 where it targets directly in to your funnel, your website, your landing page, your video, and really what ends up happening is depending where people land on your website. We can retarget with really specific ads, that’s step#7. But really where the conversation starts out James is people really, really, really need to define their avatar. They really have to define it.
James: Well, it is interesting what you said there. Perhaps we’d like to drill in to some of the validation and data that might tell you if you’ve got the right audience or not. You said start by putting in a campaign that is going to develop likes and if that responds well you know that you’ve got the right sort of audience. What sort of audience should people be looking for to understand that hey, I seem to have the right audience here and this is worth developing out further down the sequence?
Curt: Great question! I want to answer this for your audience, for people who either have lots of experience running ads and have a big list or just starting out. So the first thing is, it really is either A if you have an email list that is a couple thousand people, now these could be emails or phone numbers, and this could be people who registered for an event or could have purchased a product or signed up on your website, those can actually be uploaded in to Facebook and Facebook can tell you specifically inside of Facebook insights what the makeup of those people are. Or you can do it from a fan page or from a small little pixel. What happens is for a lot of our clients like for the agency that we run, they say, hey Curt, I have a pretty good idea who we should target for our avatar, we tell clients we’d like to validate with a like campaign if they have less than 10 thousand leads that we could analyze. And I say, look at this client, imagine this from any level, imagine all of us were listening or standing on stage, imagine there are 800 people in front of us right now, just 800 random people, and let’s just say we are selling something to help entrepreneurs, right? We have an entrepreneur on the box product. So what we are going to do, standing on stage, we are going to say, how many people in here love to be an entrepreneur? Who’s like us? Notice that they’ll like us and I’d imagine looking out at the audience of 800 people and imagine 300 people raised their hands. Then we’re like at least these people are interested in entrepreneurs. So now we say, how many people would like to read about how Richard Branson bought Virgin Airlines? And let’s just say, a third of those people raised their hands. So what I’m doing is I’m segmenting people. I’m getting people to raise their hand to say are they even emotionally involved with us, and then step #2 is start going for that engagement. So to know if people are qualified and if they’re resonating with your message, you should be looking for click through rates on your like ads over 1%. So you should really find out your control and then test a couple of ads. But we want to figure out, where are we finding the best targeted which means the highest click through rates on ads where people are raising their hand resonating with your message. And that’s some of the best, easiest qualifying that we can do that starts building your brand to figure out what people want to connect with you with. Does that make sense?
James: Absolutely! Perfect. I might ask a slightly more technical and advanced follow up question and that would be how do we segment those campaigns so that we really are able to zero in on that perfect side of the audience that we really want to target?
Curt: That’s a really great question. So a couple of things on this. The first thing I really have to mention is Facebook works on momentum, so the longer that you are running ads, the better results that you are going to see and the better trends you are going to see as well. Starting and stopping are going to give you a completely different result than continually running ads and here’s what I mean. So remember I ask that question, are you excited to be an entrepreneur and come out like us? That can make people come out and raise their hands. So I take a look and say I am targeting the word entrepreneur with a picture or a key phrase that has just that, are you excited to be an entrepreneur kind of like us and I am seeing that I get a 1% click through rate. Great, now what I am going to do is I am going to target a different keyword. Maybe it is a business magazine like entrepreneur magazine, I am going to use the same copy, I am going to use the same picture, and I am going to see what click through rate I have as well. As I start to get some numbers in and it starts showing me where I am getting my low cost likes and a high click through rate, now what I am going to do is I am going to start split testing new keywords. The key to this is always finding your one control ad and then I always try to beat that with two other ads. So if Entrepreneur Magazine is working really well, what I am going to do is I am going to split test their ads and I am going to say, can I beat the click through rate and the cost per like of what I am currently targeting right now? And I am always trying to beat one another so I am always establishing a control and I am always testing two other ads.
James: Nice! Good. I think we’ve kind of covered off stage 1 really nicely there, what’s stage 2, where do we take it from here?
Curt: What happens is, when we kind of round out stage 1 is let’s say that you’ve ran some like campaigns for three to seven days, you can now go in Facebook’s report and it will actually tell you what keyword is performing the best what gender has the best demographic that’s clicking through on your ads, what’s the five year age range for people clicking on your ads. So now you can really start to see where that avatar starts to form. The second part is posting some engaging posts. You don’t have to post 10 times a day. Quite honestly, a lot of our clients, we post just once or twice a day because 95% of our time and budget honestly is really in paid ads. But we’re starting out, we want to find out, okay our avatar is coming in with page likes, what articles or what are they engaged with? This could be anything from blog articles from your branding to see what articles they are interested in, this could be going to other fan pages that they may like and looking with content that’s really popular with other pages, I mean, there is thousands of news stations out there pretty much reporting the exact same thing. People are just finding which news source they connect with. You can do the same thing, find out what news engagement from other pages, get that engagement in front of your avatars that are coming on in, figure out what resonates to you the most and then start moving on to where you are going to promote at least one post per week. It’s really that simple.
James: I heard the other day, and actually you might have been the source of this information that kind of warm, fuzzy content works best on Facebook like events, or the birth of a baby or maybe getting married or something. In your experience, is that what sort of content works best in that environment?
Curt: Yes, and I am super glad that you brought this up. So this is really interesting. Let’s talk about engagement and then as that moves over to promoted post. Facebook did a kind of scary experiment years ago, this recently just came out and what happened was Facebook wanted to see if we put negative toned news in the news feed versus positive in the news feed, can that influence the user’s behavior and can that influence their posting, right? It is a little creepy and here is what Facebook found out. Facebook found out and their hunch was well if we post pictures of other people’s wedding while going on vacation, are friends going to be jealous and spend less time on Facebook? Actually what they found out was that people wanted to look at their friend’s weddings or vacation and they want to share the fun memories that are exciting. Now on the other side, they found out on the negative post is that people kind of let it influence their mood so a couple of things started to get happening. People who were seeing the negative post on Facebook pretty soon they started posting what they can post and they started spending a lot less time in Facebook. So what happens is Facebook is really looking for feel good stories, nothing negative. Do you hate waking up in the morning where you had joint pain and you feel lonely? Facebook doesn’t like those ads. That may work in direct response marketing but Facebook wants feel good stories. Stories that are going to make people smile, stories like that make people spend more time on Facebook and really look at more articles. It really has to be positive. Now keep in mind, organically, trending with paid traffic you are rewarded if it is a paid message, if it is negative, you can pay a lot more on your ad cost unless they see engagement on your post.
James: yeah, how do you apply that to a business page? I guess coming up with those feel good stories in a business environment could be a little bit more challenging. What types of topic or content or events that may be happening on a day to day business lives might be good to post on Facebook?
Curt: So here’s a couple of things. Motivational statements, those things work great what happens is for example on name that caption or fill in the blank, people get on Facebook because they want to see what their family and friends are doing and they really have 30 seconds to a couple of minutes, especially if they are mobile, which is a large percentage of Facebook traffic is they kind of just start flipping through the screen and like flip, flip, flip, hey what shoes should I buy? The blue or the red? Or hey what do you think about having people put their comments be really, really high engaging. So what you want to do is some motivational statements are great, some information statements is great, but you know the greatest reason for engagements dropping typically on a business page, we saw this the other day while we’re taking to a small business, they were a local savings and loan or a local bank where they were talking about CD rates. That’s all that they talk about. They did not have any engagement. And then we had this picture of a scuba diver with the seal that comes up over on his right hand side smiling and we’re like, caption this pic, all of a sudden people were captioning it, they are having fun. A lot of people do a lot of self-promotions, what you are looking for is if they really focus on their avatar, what would they want to read on a newspaper, or what’s the really funny video they may want to see? I can tell you this, there is a great example Facebook gave of a plumbing company. I mean, how do you advertise a plumbing company on Facebook? You talk about plunging toilets, right? So what they do is they’re like, hey everybody it’s a picture of James standing next to the van. Hey everyone, meet James. James has been a plumber for over 23 years, he is happy to assist any of you and when he is off of work he enjoys crocheting and underwater basket weaving. And like James may have a small weird look on his face. Well, it is funny. People are looking at it, they’re laughing, or maybe this plumbing company has a school mascot and they say hey! call in to order your service today and $10 goes to the school and he has a picture of a mascot holding a phone to his ear. It was just fun and exciting and got people to click on the links. You can do some really creative fun stuff and that’s what Facebook is looking for.
James: Yeah, good stuff. Cool! Now once we’ve got some engaging content, you of course advocate that we start promoting that and getting it out there to a greater and wider audience, at least first within your page following, do you suggest people just use the standard boost function or is there a better way to do it?
Curt: That is a great question. Typically what we do is we go straight for engagement so we get the regular organic engagement, and then what we do is we tell people, it the boost post button. So you hit the boost post, and you want to change the default setting. We take the most popular post from the week and we learn this from the audience insight inside of our fan page. We boost the post for a minimum of three days. Typically we say $5 a day for three days. Because here is the thing, you’ve spent money to get all the likes where they came from, let’s say their engagement opt in. you’ve already figured out what their engagement is overall. There are a lot of people by the way who are voyeurs. They don’t click like, they don’t comment on stuff but they see your stuff and they read it. They just don’t engage with it. So if they don’t engage, they are not going to see your post. So you have to take your most popular post of the week, again, this could be a blog article, maybe a super big tip. If you have a couple of minute video, if it’s done with an iPhone, those are working really well right now, like a 2 minute video, when you hit that boost post, it’s going to target your business page plus your fans for three days for $5. This is like Coca Cola always advertising. It is keeping your brand and message in front of people who are watching but not engaging. So, step#1 figure out your best engaging post, step#2 boost that for three days, which if you find out that that boost post is working, then we’re going to take that boost post, and we are going to target this, we are going to tie it back in to the keyword where we are getting our best responses from our like campaign from step#1. So we are building our branding to our page, and we are extending out so we are bringing our target to entrepreneurs. They are seeing the like campaign from us and they are seeing one of our most recent popular post. Does that make sense?
James: Absolutely! And this is the step that you call the promoted dark post, is it?
Curt: It really is, that is the promoted dark post, and that promoted dark post is saying, hey look, we have identified the keyword entrepreneurs works really well with our likes, we identified this post works really well for our page and our fans, let’s tie those two together and we are going to target that one post because here is what happening. What you are doing is you are promoting this one post inside of different news feeds to be entrepreneurs. They could be on Entrepreneur Magazine. So now you are branding is really starting to take place and what you are really doing is you are promoting one post so now you are promoting the likes you’re getting 50 to 300 likes and now when someone comes to your page they’re like, men that must be a blog post that they just put out with 300 likes and 20 shares. It must be amazing. What is it? Which creates the open loop which creates people to click through your blog.
James: Yeah, nice. And this isn’t really costing very much at all, I mean you are suggesting just a budget of $5 a day for 2 or 3 days at a time once per week. I am sure this is within reach for even the smallest of businesses getting started on Facebook, right?
Curt: Absolutely! For instance we have a hair care salon out in Hollywood and all he wants to do is advertise in a 10 mile radius which there is not tons of people out there in a 10 mile radius but if he does a video which he promotes for $5 a day for 3 days and then he does the latest fashion, he can literally spend $20 – $30 and sometimes get more coverage than what your local TV station would give and this is really some great branding for just pennies in the bucket if you are doing it right.
James: Yeah, absolutely! Well let’s move on to some of these more of kind of intermediate strategies. I think the next step in the process is advertorials and I can kind of see how this concept will work well on Facebook because they are all about having sort of news based content, less promotional type stuff, less flat out actual ads. Tell us about how you put together an advertorial that takes real good effect on Facebook.
Curt: Good question. So now just to preface this, we’re going to step#5. As we go in to step#5, 6 and 7, this is really where we spend 95% of our money. Step 1-4 is just to help us get to understand what ads to be running. Once you start running a couple hundred or a couple thousand dollars a day, you’re going to start to get residual likes. You’ll still do the boost post engagement just to keep the brand out in front of you but 95% of your money is really advertorials, funnel targeting and retargeting. The advertorial really comes down to tell a story and it is what is going to be what we call native advertising. Native advertising, if you’re not familiar with that term, you can go to like AOL.com, Huffington Post.com, CNN.com and just start scrolling through all the news stories. And you are going to see news story, news story, news story, then you are going to see something that looks exactly like a news story but it’s going to say sponsored content. It looks like a news story, it looks like it should be there, and well that is what the advertorial is. So what would your avatar be sharing as your news article. So let’s just say, again we are talking about entrepreneurs. Your advertorial is going to be a small story – here are the five tools that absolutely every entrepreneur should have. Tool #1, tool#2 … to see the other three tools, click on the link below for free access. Okay so they understand it is for entrepreneurs, they understand what the call to action is, they’ve read a little bit of it, it is engaging content, and it is not negative, right? We’re not using any negative connotations, this is a positive experience, and then we are going to continue the story which really goes in to step#6 which is your funnel targeting. So what stories can we start telling, what we can add additional value that they can read from the ad? Remember Facebook doesn’t like click here to find out how you can win a million dollars or how to make a million dollars because it does not give any information for the landing page. This is super important and this is a little bit more advanced strategy. It is important to understand Facebook has recently really started to judge, okay someone is going to click on this native advertorial and they are going to click to an article that says find out more If that website is not congruent and people click back to Facebook right away, meaning they bounce back off of your site. People is charging people extra for ads because they are finding those ads to be not relevant. So how in our advertorial can we start a story that continues to our page that completes the story and either asks for information, buyer information so it is just the start and continuation of the story.
James: That’s interesting. I did not realize Facebook have been doing that. I mean Google have been measuring these types of techniques for some time especially with Adwords to see what ads are most relevant to users, I hadn’t realize Facebook has done it as well. Very interesting stuff.
Curt: You see here is something that I really want to get by that I used to train about a year ago by completely talking the other side of it. Here’s what it is, we used to tell Facebook, you may have heard this before, and Facebook wants you to keep traffic inside of Facebook. Everything that you do, either they want you to do this Fan page tabs, they want you to keep traffic inside of Facebook, and people used to share website links like socialmediaadgenius.com and would come up with this little link preview of the article, and we would call that the gray box of death because it would tell Facebook, hey Facebook I just shared a link and when someone clicks on the link it would take them out of Facebook so we don’t show this post as much because we don’t want people outside of Facebook. Well, Facebook had then come out with a year or two ago tracking pixels which we will get in to in just about a minute. What Facebook did now, which you can say be a little creepy just like Google, the more that people started to place those tracking pixels, now Facebook can see what is going on on your website. So now Facebook wants people like from a blog or an advertorial to link on your website because that is the only way for Facebook to see what you are looking at and how relevant it is to their user database.
James: Interesting! So have they now started to adjust cost per click prices and ad serving based on people actually putting that pixel on their website and driving people away from Facebook itself?
Curt: Oh, in huge ways. Here’s what I mean by that. I met with Facebook back in March at a big event here on Austin, Texas called South by Southwest Big Tech event and I sat down with Facebook and I said look this conversion tracking pixel doesn’t make any sense, like I have a hundred sales but it shows 125 and they look at me, James I swear they said this – Oh, Curt, the conversion tracking pixel doesn’t actually track conversions –
James: It doesn’t quite say what it says on the tin right?
Curt: Yeah, so I go what do you mean? And they go actually, it tracks your conversions. And I’m like, what? It actually reads and profiles your buyers, people who opt in, or people that go to key websites that you target. So Facebook’s actually collecting the data building your perfect avatar. So this is where Facebook blows away everybody else. Not only can they target offline actions, like people who buy green smoothies, that’s like an actual targeting option, but I can now even target people who have purchased 3rd party services from a Facebook ad. It means that they purchase by the conversion pixel. This is really kind of the secret behind my sauce that Facebook taught me, that I have taught in courses and masterminds or whatever. When you put in that conversion pixel, it is not necessarily tracking your numbers, it is seeing how many people come through your door and once you get to a certain number like a couple of hundred, you can tell Facebook, really James this is the most powerful thing you can do on Facebook now – you can say, Facebook, I want you to target entrepreneurs, let’s say there’s a million people in the US, however, I want you to target the people who look like buyers, so that takes let’s say a million people, that condenses it down to 500,000 of the best cream of the crop because they look like my buyers, and Facebook, I don’t really care what I pay for clicks, I just want you to target for me to get more sales. So I want you to go out and find entrepreneurs, segment that audience to the people who look like my buyers and only go out and market to people who have a high probability of buying, I don’t care what the cost per click or the click through rate is, if my product is $297, I am willing to pay $100 for everybody that you find in that group. I have never seen targeting like this before and Facebook learns from it and literally we have taken products that where- I will give you a quick example. We have taken products which is a water filter that they sell for $150. We were able to get people to buy it for $125. So they put in $125, they make $150. Not a whole lot of money but if you sell 10-20 of them a day, it adds up, right? After we got over 200 sales and Facebook target the same demographic we are going after, but also find the people who have a high probability of buying from us, our look-alike audience. Our cost went from $125 per buying unit by pitting in that one layer of audience down to $46. We did not change anything, we just said go find people who are like our buyers after we had enough buyers hits. It’s amazing what Facebook can do.
James: So is the goal then, sort of starting out at least in that phase, is just to build up a volume of buyers so that you can start to profile who those buyers look like and then go back to Facebook essentially and then say look, target people like this.
Curt: Yeah. So I mean literally you hit the nail right in the head. Let’s say we go back real quick to step, 1. If you don’t have any of this buyer data how do you figure out your likes and engagement and the promoted posts and the dark posts, you start running advertorials and you start running what we call seizing the pixel. A hundred buyers is great but 200 give you better statistical information. 400 gives you even better statistical information. So if you already have a buyer’s list you can upload a buyers list and go after a look alike audience right away. So what ends up happening is we show you step 1 through 5, if you do have a list, we’re going to do step 1 through 5 for kind of a branding but moreover we want to get as many people as possible past that conversion pixel first because that is really the second stage, once that conversion pixels what we call seasons for a hundred plus buyers. Now when we start targeting the lookalike buyers, the numbers are just astronomically different.
James: Yeah, I can see. That sounds awesome. Let’s kind of speed through these last couple of steps. Step 6, funnel targeting and I just want to ask you about what types of funnels you see working best on Facebook right now. It still seems to be that whole herd of people that just go after the Facebook ad traffic to live event webinar type funnel and promote to people on the backend. That seems to be pretty successful in some spaces, what are the types of funnels that are working really well on Facebook right now?
Curt: Another good question. It basically comes down to this. What do want them to do? Do you want them to watch a video? Do you want them to opt-in? What do you want them to do? A lot of people believed that they can send direct traffic over to like a video sales letter directly over to a webinar sign up. Typically, what Facebook has told us, there is actually an attribution link and most people would click on this that most people would see an ad, or click on an ad the very first day and don’t buy. It usually happens within a 28-day period. That’s another reason why you need to keep running ads. But what ends up happening is, Facebook says, look, if you are going to send people directly over to a video sales letter with no opt in, they are probably not going to buy the first time so you have to keep running an ad. What we find that really works is get people to opt in to your offer and we see that really, really works is getting people to fill out a small survey which I know you have some guests in the past that have talked about that as well. Because as you see what happens is, not only can you segment your list from the survey, but when people start answering those questions the segmentation is awesome and they have a higher probability of opting in. and the real money that we’ve seen, and I have spent like I said millions, we work with a lot of 7 to 8 figure clients and those people can do the following. Get people to opt in to build their email list and they are going to have a chance or an offer to buy something right now. If they don’t buy something and I am kind of moving in to step#7, we are going to retarget them with ads which says he I noticed you did not buy this here’s a discount, or I notice you did not buy this, here is an additional video, or I know that you have showed interest in this, here is another video. But what we specifically want to happen is we want to run people through the right parts of the funnel but they really have to opt in if they want a good follow up. So here is your ultimate goal. If you need people to opt in and buy once they opt in within a couple of days, and you are making a margin on it even if it is 5% above profit, awesome! Because your follow up email will pick up anything else. Now we see a lot of clients who are happy with either break even or making 80% of their investment back but they know the money is really made in their longer term follow up. So your best scenario is to break even on the front end of your products below to 97 but I tell you what I see more and more of does not like direct sales, Facebook likes relationships that leads in to retargeting of blogs, repurposing content, and getting people to opt in, provide value and close, close, close along the way.
James: Yeah, well that makes sense. I’d be super happy if I can make my Facebook ads run through an opt in even though that there is more stuff that can be sold on the back end. I mean if you can just acquire a customer for nothing, it is a pretty darn good situation to be in, right?
Curt: Absolutely! Absolutely.
James: Cool! I think let’s get close to wrapping things up there, we haven’t quite too much on retargeting so I think any final points on that Curt before we kind of close out? What’s some retargeting tips that you’d be happy to share with our listeners?
Curt: A couple of different things, really important, this is something that will open up your eyes. For our product and for some of our clients, we see up to 50% of our sales coming through retargeting. So we want to be specific about it. When someone goes to our opt in page, what other information can we give them? I’ll tell you what I do. I retarget with a testimonial video so when someone opts in to our landing page, they are going to see two testimonial videos and they will also get to see a video tour of what we like to call our bunker. So they get to build rapport with me, they get to see some of my other students saying my name again. Now when they opt in to our funnel, they are going to watch a video sales letter or they can attend a webinar, now for the next five days I am going to show three different testimonials, I am going to show a tour of my office so people can see my face and know that we are real, and we are going to retarget to a fourth ad. I am going to retarget four videos. And what I mean by four videos is when they click on a page and my webinar is an hour long, but they are going to have four videos that are five minutes each that they can click on each video and make a buying decision. So each way through the funnel when I talk about funnels I will say, okay, if they just went through my landing page but did not opt in, this is good to retarget with all my blog posts and my post engagement posts, right? Because I can retarget my best promoted posts. And then I can start a look up and say if people opted in and they just did not have enough information to buy, what other information can I give and video works really well or you can also do like a 10% discount to build that report. And then the third thing is, as your buyers, that is the best place for you to offer a new product or service that you test market before you roll it out to everybody in Facebook and it is a great way to communicate. Did you see our webinar, we have an upcoming blog post or hey make sure you join this really important podcast that is going to happen next week. You can really target people based off of their interest and it can make a dramatic difference for your business when it is done right.
James: Fantastic! Well Curt, we have covered so much there. I mean we’ve packed a whole lot in to 35 minutes and I am sure we have just touched the service in terms what you help with people. I think we need to point people off to somewhere where they can connect with you further and learn a little bit more about what you do and how you can help. Where that might be?
Curt: It really is easy, you just go to SocialMediaAdGenius.com and really right there you can find out about myself or about my business. Or you can always send an email to my assistant as well, we have videos and everything on the site that can assist and my assistant’s email is Ashley@blackboxsocialmedia.com if you have any questions to me and just to be clear, we have two sides of our business, one is we educate others how to do it, we have group coaching that we show people how to do it, or I have a full agency and we will run it for you. It just requires about $20 thousand a month in ad spent if we do it for you so we are really selective on who’s ads we run for them but I’d be happy to help and answer any questions and help you master this Facebook thing.
James: Thank you! Well I am sure you have given people some flavor of what is possible either by learning the stuff themselves with your help or by having you do it for them so we’ll make sure that all of those links are placed within the show notes page of this episode which is TrafficJamCast.com/51. Thanks again Curt it has been an absolute pleasure and as I said, I don’t know if I have had an episode that’s crammed so much in so props to you on that.
Curt: Awesome! Thanks for having me James. I really appreciate being here.
So there you have it, that was Curt Maly and I absolutely did mean it. one of the most content packed of all 51 episodes so far. And because there was so much packed in to this show, I recommend you come over to TrafficJamCast.com/51 and download the full word by word transcript of the show plus the seven-step formula reference guide I prepared just for you. So go grab it now by going to TrafficJamCast.com/51. So thank you for listening in to this show. I will be back with another episode real soon and what an amazing guest I have lined up for you.
So to ensure you don’t miss that show, subscribe via iTunes and or Stitcher radio by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. Once again, for a direct link to the 7 step formula reference guide, MP3 and full transcript of today’s show, go to TrafficJamCast.com/51 where you can also join in on the discussion for this episode.
We end this week’s show with a traffic jam, Lose Yourself by Eminem and it is chosen of course, by Curt Maly. Enjoy!
RESOURCES:
- Social Media Ad Genius
- Email Curt (through his assistant)
- Black Box Social Media
- Curt on Twitter
- Find Curt on Facebook
MENTIONS:
- Ryan Levesque on Traffic Jam
- Entrepreneur Magazine
- Traffic Jam Episode 5o
THE TRAFFIC JAM:
The Traffic Jam track is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our show guest. Curt Maly has chosen the track Lose Yourself from American rap artist Eminem.
Lose yourself was released on October 28, 2002 as the first track to Eminem’s movie 8 Mile. The track was written and produced by Eminem himself, along with longtime collaborator Jeff Bass, one half of the production duo Bass Brothers.
Lose Yourself – Eminem
HERE’S WHAT TO DO NEXT:
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7 Step Facebook Ads Formula
The special episode bonus includes a simple one-page reference guide showing you every step of the 7 step formula, full transcript of the interview, plus an MP3 you can download direct to your desktop.
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