Making the Most of Your Facebook Ad Spend with Keith Krance

In this Episode

• [01:24] – Keith talks about his recent five-day Facebook advertising event. He explains why he held the event, and talks about some of the topics that were covered there.
• [05:22] – We hear more about effective (and ineffective) hooks in Facebook advertising.
• [9:01] – Keith returns to the upside he mentioned a moment earlier, using an example of being in health and fitness.
• [11:31] – We learn what the letters stand for in the UPSYD (pronounced “upside”) ladder that Keith talked about. U is for unaware, P is for problem-aware, S is for solution-aware, Y is for your solution, and D is for deal.
• [16:43] – Stephan steps in for a moment to clarify what Keith has been saying.
• [17:12] – Your sweet spot may be the people who are aware of the problem but not the solution, Keith explains. He explains what he means using the example of playing bass guitar.
• [21:15] – Keith responds to Stephan’s comment about providing results in advance by offering an example of one of their clients.
• [23:08] – Stephan changes things up by inviting Keith to critique one of his ads. He describes it in detail, setting the scene for Keith’s advice.
• [25:35] – Keith offers his feedback to Stephan’s ad. His biggest point is to move further down on the UPSYD ladder to appeal to less of a niche audience. He also goes on to recommend simplifying terminology and gives a couple examples of how to do so.
• [37:25] – Does Keith think that driving people directly to a webinar sign-up from a Facebook ad is too much too soon?
• [40:22] – Stephan mentions that it sounds like he should be replacing his image ad with a video giving a keynote presentation that offers value on its own. Keith agrees, and clarifies. He mentions his three-step video ad guide. He then goes on to talk about the length a video should be.
• [44:54] – How do you “Facebookize” a YouTube video?
• [46:51] – Keith talks about how to scale campaigns on Facebook, explaining why using a smaller budget and letting Facebook have time to do its work can be an effective strategy.
• [52:22] – With only a few minutes to go, Stephan starts a rapid question session for Keith. First up: what is critical to have in the first few seconds of an ad on Facebook to capture the audience’s attention?
• [53:01] – Does Keith ask any trick questions when interviewing people to hire?
• [53:41] – Any tips about Facebook exclusion lists?
• [57:03] – What are Keith’s best practices for the images or the headline?
• [59:06] – Keith lists the best ways to reach him if you want to learn more, take his training, or work with his agency.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to Marketing Speak! I’m your host Stephan Spencer and today we have Keith Krance with us. Keith is co-author of the best-selling book, The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising. He’s CEO and founder of Dominate Web Media which currently manages and oversees $1.5 million to $2 million per month in Facebook Ad spend in over 80 different ad accounts. Keith co-hosts the top-rated podcast Perpetual Traffic along with Molly Pittman, who’s also been on the show, and Ralph Burns. Keith, it’s great to have you on the show!

Hey, it’s great to be on, Stephan, I appreciate it. Good stuff.

We were just talking about, you just came off of doing a five-day certification on Facebook advertising. You had different agency owners and business owners who were learning all the ins and outs of Facebook advertising. Five days worth, that’s substantial. I’m curious, where was most of the time spent? Was it more on the retargeting or on the different ad types? What were the big three that took the most time to go in depth on?

Sure. One of the reasons why we decided to do a five-day event like this was it was a longer term play. There was no pitch at the end, there was no, “Hey, join our Mastermind for 25k or 50k a year.” There was no pitch. It was purely, for me, because we have so much demand for coaching, for agency services, that we want to have people that we can refer that we feel confident that we can refer. There’s a difference between somebody buying one of my courses or going through a short online certification to somebody that spends five days immersed in this stuff that we get to see kind of how they react and how they answer questions, and we can go really deep into some of the areas that people have a tendency to either glaze over because it seems a little bit too broad in general and not down in the nitty gritty specific retargeting audience sizes, bidding, and all that stuff which most people want to dig into especially if you have AdWords kind of a history and background, kind of a scientific mindset. It’s what happens with Facebook, because it’s such a unique beast, because you get rewarded or penalized so much both in terms of their algorithm as well as in terms of how these leads that you might be generating or these clicks that you might be generating, how much quality that they will end up being when they hit your website, when they opt in, when they buy your product. What we did was we spent five days and went really deep and one of the things that we spent the most time on was messaging and your offer, really your hook in your offer. People were kind of amazed at how deep we went into that. By the end of the week, everybody looked back and they’re like, “Wow! At first, it was a lot of surprise, you guys were spending so much time on really figuring out what’s the right hook to get somebody to look at your ad and take action but not only take action, take action by clicking and coming to your website or coming to your landing page with open arms, with their ‘virtual guard down’ as opposed to guard up.” What we do is we try to use these unique hooks to, of course, gain people’s attention, any way we can get somebody’s attention is important but with a platform like Facebook, which is like the online party or coffee shop as opposed to something like Google where people have intent, it could be an online version of yellow pages where, in most cases, they’re going to have intent, not necessarily when it comes to display advertising. Display Google is going to be similar to Facebook in certain areas. However, with Facebook, because we have so much more room to work with, we can write longer ads, we can run video ads, we can do a lot of different things. Once you really understand, both awareness level that somebody is at in Facebook, within that audience that you’re targeting, and then if you can come up with the right hook and that might be related to your opt in or lead magnet or your product, right hook to get their attention and then more importantly, to move them to take action willingly and want to learn more, and want to opt in, and want to read your emails, and want to show up on your webinars, and want to, most importantly, buy your products. We spent the most time, by far, on that stuff.

Let’s go a little deeper into that. Give me an example of an ineffective hook and an effective hook.

Sure. You’ll see it all the time out there where you might see a Facebook ad or display ad where somebody might be selling a Software as a Service. I like to use that example. Somebody that actually does a great job of this is SamCart, the guys over at SamCart and the founder is Bryan Moran. I know his background a little bit. I can understand why he does so well with his Facebook ads for his Software as a Service company, because his original experience was running Facebook ads. He actually sold Facebook ads courses. It was one of the first courses I ever bought back in 2010. Now, fast-forward, he has a software company. I’ll see a lot of ads out there where it’ll say something like sign up for your free trial and automate or something like sign up for a free trial for a marketing dashboard or, “Would you like to have all your analytics in one dashboard? Click here for a 30-day free trial, or Click here to see a demo.” Another example I’ve seen recently is somebody selling a franchise opportunity where people would create, it’s almost like a musical daycare and they were, “Work with kids all day, amazing fun environment and own your own business. Click here to see franchise opportunities.” What’s happening is they’re meeting people where they’re not quite aware. In our certification, we actually created this acronym mostly based on what Eugene Schwartz talks about in one of his books. We created an acronym around it called UPSYD. If you can understand this, you’re going to give yourself the most UPSYD potential when you’re running a campaign because if you get this stuff right, then scaling your campaigns, really going deep into your audiences, your bidding, your budgeting, that’s the stuff that can take you from $700, $800, $1,000 a day to $15,000 a day like we have with a lot of our clients. Go back to those two examples, Bryan Moran over at SamCart, what he does is he knows he’s selling a product or a solution that helps people design checkout pages, order forms, makes it easy, proven templates kind of like LeadPages has done for building landing pages. If you see any of his ads, they will not say anything about checkout pages, order forms, split testing order form designs, all that stuff which is exactly what a software does. His hook, in his case, will usually be around how to 4x your business, or how to 4x your profits, or simple sales funnel without any tech issues, that type of stuff. It’s very simple and it’s going deeper into the sub-problem that he knows most people in his audience that he’s targeting have. Most business owners, he wants to target people that maybe are a business owner, have an online business, small business, medium-sized business. He knows what is the problem that they have. Well, it is they want to get more sales or all of their whole sales funnel in general is just too technical. He leads with that and then once they come into his funnel, either through a webinar or something like that, then he can educate them on why his product is the ultimate solution. Back to the franchise situation, somebody might be selling franchise sales and it could be any kind of franchise sales but it could be any kind of franchise sales, we’re talking about a $30,000, $50,000, $80,000 investment and so you have to find out how much people are aware of the problem that you solve and then you have to be able to figure out where to meet them. Back to the UPSYD that I kind of mentioned here, what that is is if you understand, if you take a big audience, let’s say for example, you’re in health and fitness. A great example that we use throughout our event quite a bit was for my course called Facebook Momentum, which was also the prerequisite for people to show up at the certification, I created a business from scratch. I started a brand new fictional business, bought the URL, created a new Facebook page, added a new ad account, started running ads, made the landing pages, did all of this so people got to go through this whole thing prior to getting to the event. The challenge was that it was a health and fitness business and my last two years, I got into intermittent fasting. Do you know what that is?

Yeah, I do. I have another podcast show Get Yourself Optimized and we go all into biohacking.

Perfect. You’ll love this. This will all kind of relate. I promise I’ll bring back the UPSYD acronym in just a second here. Alright.

Okay.

We created this fictional business and I called it Ketogenic Living. About two years ago, I was listening to a podcast and I heard about this intermittent fasting thing. It was actually a productivity podcast kind of like your biohacking and stuff that you’re probably into as well. I wasn’t looking to lose weight, I wasn’t looking to use anything like that, I just was interested in that and I tried it out and then I realized, holy crap, seven days later I lost ten pounds. I didn’t actually think I needed to lose any weight. I just thought I was 38, a little bit bigger now. You get bigger bones when you’re getting in your 30s and 40s, kind of like Michael Jordan.

Bigger bones, yeah right.

Bigger bones, right? I was like, I didn’t think I was overweight at all. I really wasn’t overweight but all of a sudden I lose ten pounds in a week and then I lose ten more in a month without even trying, without going on a diet, it’s just basically based on my eating schedules. Where I was, in that situation, when I got into intermittent fasting, I would call myself really completely unaware. I was unaware of the problem. I was completely unaware that I was overweight, I wasn’t looking to lose weight. I wasn’t aware of intermittent fasting or really what it was two years ago, two and a half years ago. I, of course, wasn’t aware of any ketogenic lifestyle intermittent fasting stuff out there. The UPSYD ladder that I talked about is U is “unaware”, P is “problem-aware”. You might be overweight, a little bigger, maybe you’re low on energy but you’re not aware that there is a solution like intermittent fasting. You’re aware that there’s diet programs out there but you’re just aware of the problem but you’re not aware of the solution like intermittent fasting or the Atkins diet. The next one is S, this is where you are “solution-aware” but you’re not quite aware of the person that’s selling that solution. Now, I’m aware. If I’m on the S level, UPS, then I’m aware that there is intermittent fasting, that there is this ketogenic stuff that people are using out there but I’m not aware of ketogenic living, this brand, this new brand. The next one is Y. Y is “your solution.” If I was aware of this ketogenic living or some other brand in that industry, then I would be aware of your solution, of your problem. The last one is D, which is just “deal.” It’s the most aware, they just want to deal, they might need some retargeting ads, those types of things. When I was trying to figure out what kind of lead magnet am I going to do, I got to create a campaign and I want it to have success for these guys. It’s a brand new business, I’m kind of like taking a big risk here as I’m recording all these videos and by the way, the campaign ended up doing just better than we ever even thought it would do. The reason why is because this whole awareness level is if I take an audience on Facebook, let’s say just general health and fitness like Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Beachbody, Atkins, a lot of those types of things. There’s lots of audiences, big, general audiences on Facebook, let’s say it’s a 2 million person audience, which these days we can consider the sweet spot on Facebook about 500k to about 2 million now. That’s about our sweet spot for ad size to start with. We can get into that in  little bit more in a second. Let’s say you have a 2 million-person audience, within that audience, you’re going to have people that typically will have different levels of awareness. You might have somebody that’s completely unaware. I read Men’s Health but I’m completely unaware. I have somebody that’s aware that they’re overweight or they don’t have energy, they don’t have focus in the morning and then there’s people that might be aware of the solution, that they’re aware—there’s people that are aware of the solution of intermittent fasting and then there’s people that might be aware of your solution. That number is going to be much smaller. You have to realize where people are at and then what kind of hook to create. If I wanted to create, “Hey, intermittent fasting, what to eat, when to eat, how to make it easy and never get hungry when you’re going through your fasting period in the morning,” if I have that hook, I know that a general population isn’t quite aware of this. It’s kind of a new trend, not super new, but kind of a new trend. If I want to target some of the traditional health and wellness audiences on Facebook, if I lead with that, people are going to be like, “Who the heck are you? What the heck is that?” What I did is I knew that I wanted to target a bigger broader audience. I want to target people that might be similar to where I was. I found a hook that was this, “Is breakfast really the most important meal of the day?”

I like it.

“Is breakfast really the most important meal of the day or is it the most important meal that should be skipped?” That’s the hook, basically. And then, I go into two big myths about breakfast then it transitions into seven health benefits of intermittent fasting. What I do is I use that hook of the breakfast hook, which is kind of curiosity-based, and then I move them into why that might be a myth. It’s not a video ad, and, most cases, I would do an ad like this as a video ad but I wanted to do this so we could prove to people that you can do it not necessarily without a video but you can have a longer copy ad. This is a long copy ad and then I go in and I literally list out the two big myths and then I list out all seven, evidence-based, health reasons why intermittent fasting is amazingly healthy and will continue to be a hot trend in 2017. Because of this, I created this free guide, beginner’s guide to intermittent fasting where they can go download. I created it on the fly, only made a few audiences because it was kind of a beginner course. It’s cruising out right now, sub-dollar leads, without any optimization at all, six cents per page like and just kind of cruising along. That’s without any optimization, without any other ads, without any video ads, anything like that. That’s the one thing that you want to understand. Now, if I was to say, “I want to do an intermittent fasting cheat sheet.” It was like, “Hey. These are the supplements I use. This is what I use to do intermittent fasting not having side-effects like headaches or get really hungry.” What kind of audience can I target in that case?

They need to be solution-aware. People who have perhaps the Bulletproof diet book or, Dave Asprey, or Bulletproof executive or, Bulletproof Radio, that sort of thing.

Exactly. If you want to go have something like that but not the great lead magnet, that’s going to be for those types of people, super cheap leads, probably don’t need a lot of ad copy but in a situation where people might not be aware—a lot of cases your sweet spot is the people that are aware of the problem but they’re not aware of the solution, especially your solution. The best example that I can give, I tell this to people every single day and once you truly understand this, this is why we went so deep into this and by the end of the week and our last call, these guys, we’re quizzing them now and they’re coming up with the right hooks. It’s kind of like showing up at a party. If I show up at a party, and let’s say it’s a party, there’s 100 people there, they’re all into playing guitar in general. Let’s say a musician owns the house and you had a party, a get-together with a bunch of musicians and they’re all guitar players and I teach bass guitar lessons. Some of them might be good, some of them might just do it for fun and they’re just all across the board. I show up there, it’s kind of like targeting that two million-personality and some people you know play the guitar. Somehow based on your audiences, your interest audiences, or maybe your lookalike audiences based off of your leads or your sales. But I show up to this party, there’s 100 people that play the guitar and if I go up to you, let’s say you’re at that party Stephan and I shake your hand and we start chatting, I know that going to the party that probably maybe only 5% to 10% of those people have intent, are actively looking to improve their guitar skills. Probably 90% to 95% of those people are at a level of intent which is kind of at the lower half of that UPSYD awareness chart. They might be aware that there are solutions out there but they’re not probably aware of my solution, and they might not even be aware of the problem which is becoming a better bass guitar player much quicker and easier. I meet you, shake your hands, we start chatting for awhile, you’re like, “Yeah, I just play once in awhile but it’s kind of like too much work to get really good. I don’t really have two hours a day, three or four days a week to spend to get good.” I’m like, “Stephan, dude, most people don’t realize this, but there’s a bunch of shortcuts. Check this out.” I go grab the guitar, sit on the corner, and I give you a couple little kind of ninja tip to play this Another One Bites The Dust rift. Five minutes later, you’re playing this rift, you’re like, “Holy crap. I didn’t realize that.” “Yeah, dude. I’ve actually got some free trainings online. If you go to this website some time next week, go there and you can download some free trainings or I’ve got this $10 little cool guide you can check out and you can learn more. What else do you like to do? Do you have any kids?” You see how that played out? You’re at that party, you’re in the target audience but you don’t have intent, you are not aware that there’s a better way to play the guitar. I have to use my ad copy, maybe it’s a video, maybe it’s mad copy, maybe it’s my lead magnet, to be able to take you from unaware to aware or unaware of my solution to aware of my solution. Once you do that, then the sky’s the limit. This is why a digital marketer is always so successful because Ryan Deiss who came and talked and did a two-hour kind of session on hooks and hot seats at our event as well because it was on Austin, this is why their ads always kick ass right out of the gate because they are so good at creating offers and hooks that the people get. Does that make sense?

For sure. It reminds me of what Frank Kern talks about, results in advance. You teach them to play the F chord for free as part of a teaser to an entire online course on playing the guitar. They feel that sense of mastery and success and then it’s a lot easier for them to buy the actual product. It kind of reminds me of that. You give them some level of a teaser to what their appetite, they didn’t even know about your product, they didn’t know that they wanted it until they got some results in advance from it.

Exactly. Another example is a client of ours, who they are spending about $20,000 a month on Facebook ads. They’re running Google ads, they’re running YouTube ads, and they were doing okay but they’re selling a supplement. It’s like a green powder that you can take on the go and it’s got all these great superfoods in it, all natural, organic whole foods. Right now, for the last year and a half, we’re running Facebook ads directly to their sales page for $60 a month, recurring subscription. Not a free trial, recurring subscription with a couple bundle offers and average order value from cold traffic on Facebook is $100 per order. What we’re doing is that’s ramped up to about $15,000 a day right now. We are using the platform. We know people on Facebook. What we’re doing is when you give a value like what you just said there, a couple of things happen. Yes, it helps turn people from unaware to aware, either unaware of the problem to aware of the problem or unaware of your solution to aware of your solution. Now, they’re ready, they want to learn more. But the other thing that it does is it signals to the Facebook algorithms that your ad is highly engaging. [Dennis Hue [00:25:37] who is a mathematician, he was the head of analytics for American Airlines, Yahoo.com, and you name it. He talked about this on our podcast, episode 50 of The Perpetual Traffic podcast about how the algorithm, once you get up to a ten relevant score, it’s actually exponential. You get rewarded exponentially for a highly engaging ad and you get punished exponentially the other way for a non-engaging ad and because of the social cues, the amount of people, how long they hover over it, the amount of likes, shares, comments, stuff like that. With videos, people will sit and watch that thing for five minutes. Some of our best videos are over ten minutes long in the news feed-called audiences. Back to this example, what we do is he had a great video on YouTube already showing people these amazing 11 superfoods and what they do for your body. Showing each one at a time, a picture of it, where you can get it, blah blah blah and at the end of the video, it transitions to, “Why spent $300 a month going to whole foods when we made it for you and you just pour it, scoop in water and it tastes great?” What he’s doing is he’s making people aware of these amazing superfoods and what they do for you so they’re going to want to share that because it’s great value whether they want the product or not, then he transitions, he pivots to why you should come and check out this product and we’ve made it easier, we’ve made it faster for you. That goes directly to a sales page and is producing a ton of ROI.

Awesome. Let’s actually critique one of my ads because I’d love to hear you rip it apart and say it’s missing a hook, it’s missing the right words, it’s the wrong format, all that sort of stuff. If you’re game for that?

Sure. Let’s see what we can do here.

This ad we just ran last week, it starts like this, “Business owners, are you frustrated with the performance of your website? Keep missing out on traffic because you’re not showing up for the right keywords? Can’t compete with big keywords but still want to build traffic organically? See more.” You have to click see more to see the other bullets. The main image is a woman in front of a computer, her head’s down and she’s got her hands over her face, she looks really frustrated and her boyfriend, I guess, behind, standing, looking at the computer too over her shoulder, his hand is on his forehead and he looks frustrated too and perplexed and then the headline underneath is, “Webinar: Are you targeting the right keywords?” Underneath that, “Hi, I’m Stephan Spencer, internationally recognized SEO expert and best selling…” Then the call to action button says, “Sign up at www.stephanspencer.com.” That’s my ad and I’m sure it sucks. I’m ready for you.

Okay, sure. If you can actually take a quick a screenshot and throw it in the chat, I’ll look at it too to help a little bit but I’ll get into it, no big deal. First of all, no, it doesn’t suck. You understand. My question is, you’re right there, you understand kind of the frustrations that people have in your market that have been doing this for a while. My one question is who do you want to go after? How aware do they need to be? Because to me, the solution that you provide seems like a solution that almost anybody that has a website needs. Right?

Yeah. Anybody who understands that their website needs to be targeted better, pretty much.

Gotcha. “Business owners, are you frustrated with the performance of your website?” That’s a great hook. However, “Keep missing out on traffic because you’re not showing up for the right keywords?” The keyword thing is this is the kind of ad that I think would work great for people who are UPSYD, they’re way up there, basically. They’re up there where they’re definitely aware of the solution. This is a unique one. Even they’re aware of search engine optimization, a keyword might not resonate that well with them, same with organically. A lot of people don’t know what organic means. They think it’s organic food.

Sure.

Unless they’re deep in this industry. I would look to see what the first example that I talked about, SamCart. Follow those guys. Follow what they’re doing. Those guys get it. They’re leading with sales and simplicity. They don’t say anything about order form design, split testing, templates, they don’t say anything like that in their ads. It’s too far down the funnel. It’s too far up the UPSYD ladder. What you want to focus on is what’s the real problem this is causing that? They’re probably losing traffic and sales. I would leave with something more like this, “Are you frustrated with the decrease in traffic to your website which is causing decrease in sales?” Maybe not both of those in the same sentence, maybe, but traffic people get and sales people get. The thing is, even if somebody is already aware of SEO and they’ve been in that world, you’re still going to resonate with them. Lead with the bigger problem here which is traffic and sales, those are the two things, profits. I would just stick there and stay way higher up. I wouldn’t even touch the keyword stuff, any of that, until if this was a longer copy ad, way down in the copy or if it’s a video, you could hit on it as you transition so that’s the reason why, or maybe it’s the next page, maybe it’s after they opt in. It’s the video that they get to watch after they opt in and they’re waiting for their guide or on the webinar. It says sign up so it’s probably a webinar.

Yeah.

Can’t compete with, “You still want to grow traffic organically?” What you have to do is you have to make people aware that the landscape has changed. You could say, “Are you frustrated with your traffic or your sales? And then you maybe give them an a-huh moment. If you can give them an a-huh moment, what that’s going to do is it’s going to all of a sudden make them like you and trust you more but it’s also going to have them want to share that. A good book for your listeners is the book Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger. This is one of those books where you want to listen to or read once a year probably because you just pick something up. He has six principles to why people share things and why things go viral. I always resonate back to these two because people think, “If I’m going to make something that’s shareable, it has to be funny.” I can’t make a funny ad and the thing is most of our clients don’t. I mean, yeah, we’ve worked with guys like Dollar Beard Club. One of my best friends, Chris Stoikos, and their videos are hilarious and they go viral so their facebook ads are easy. But a lot of our clients can’t do that. However, of the six principles to why people share, one of them is people like to share useful stuff, useful tips, utility like the book Youtility talks about. As well as people like to share things that make them look smart or make them look like they’re in the know. I always try to figure out how can I give somebody an a-huh moment somewhere in the video ad, in the copy, or in the advertising itself. That’s number one. Maybe you’re making them aware of something that has changed. That the landscape has changed which you know it has. You’ve got to go there and then focus still at the higher level. I could see the whole ad, it’s a little harder–I’ll let you kind of maybe respond to that and then we can work it out.

One thought that comes to mind is that people probably don’t know that there are tools that will allow them to spy on their competitors and see what keywords their competitors are ranking for and getting traffic for. We could maybe mention that and help them to look smart like tools like SEMrush or Searchmetrics. With that kind of knowledge, that’s pretty powerful. As far as what’s changed, there’s amazing new tools out there and there are tools that people are still using that they shouldn’t be that are not really very useful anymore for keyword research. I could talk about the shifting landscape in the keyword research space. I could talk about how Google AdWords keyword planner is basically a useless tool. Especially if you’re not spending a decent amount of money on AdWords, it’s completely hobbled that tool now.

This is all the stuff that I would add in the ad itself, at least on one or two versions. Maybe not on every one but I would test it out and see how it does. If you do a video, then better. A video can be a KeyNote presentation. We run Frank Kern’s ads and he does this a lot. Whenever he does a video, he will just do a screen record of a KeyNote. He might open it up with his face if he can because people recognize him and people have that connection but then it’ll transition after 10 seconds to just a KeyNote. I would start for you just using the text here that you’re talking about. If you’re going to go the keyword route as part of your hook, then you let them know right off the bat that one of the biggest mistakes that people are making is not showing up for the right search keywords. You might, just for some people that even keyword–I know probably 80% of people are going to know that if you’re targeting those audiences.

You’re not just showing up in Google for the right words.

Yeah, for the right search phrases. Search phrases is what people understand a little bit more or keywords. You can add keywords in there but I would test that just because if you have some kind of a service or you’re trying to target people that are the business owner that have never actually worked on SEO on their own, some of this language they won’t get, especially because on Facebook, if you can take them and make them aware of a solution they didn’t know about, that’s the holy grail. You are going to have some of those people. Of course your low hanging fruit is going to be people that understand SEO but there’s a better way. This will still resonate with them, right? You’re just slightly adjusting it to your search phrases and/or keywords or something like that, your keyword search phrases maybe you put it all on one. Most people don’t realize, there’s amazing tools like SemRush that will show you exactly what the best websites are ranking for. I could see another ad something like, “Want to know why your competition is showing up?” or something like that, “Want to know what people are searching to find your competition and not you?” Something like that. Then, you go into, “Hey, there’s tools that you can find out what your competition or what people are searching for or even I can see something like a hook, “ Business owners, how would you like to know what people are searching to find your competition instead of you and how you could turn the tables. Does that make sense a little bit? You’re kind of making them aware of a problem but you’re also making them aware of whoa, any way you can bring curiosity, the better as well which I’m sure you know. But you can do that and then a lot of times it’s to get them to read a little bit more and then especially is it your goal to get them to sign up for a webinar, a live, or an automated webinar?

Yeah, it is.

Yeah, absolutely. This is where typically, we always recommend having a type of ad, I have kind of a, I call it sort of a Facebook Ad selector tool and it’s just kind of a mind map that shows you how to select the right ad type depending on what type of offer you have. If you have a simple lead magnet like a social media swipe file, an ad example, gallery kind of thing, super basic, easy, lead magnet that somebody can download like a tool or a recipe book that people get, you might not need a lot of ad copy because you’re not asking them to do very much. They’re just getting a tool and they get to use that tool and whether they know you, like you, trust you, it doesn’t really matter. They see that lead magnet as a very simple tool they can download. You might not need as much ad copy or kind of content to make them aware of why they need it. But if you’re asking them to pull out their wallet and spend $60 a month recurring or you’re asking them to pull out their wallet and order your book, get your book for free but pay for shipping, pay $5 or $7 for shipping, if you’re asking them to do that right from Facebook, or in my opinion, asking them to sign up for a webinar, block off an hour and a half of their day maybe that day, maybe the next day, that’s very similar to kind of a less than $10 offer in my opinion. If you want them to show up with open arms and actually show up and have a lot higher likelihood to take action and buy something, you can use that ad to move them into that intent-based. That’s what we do and that’s the game-changer. It really, really is. I’m telling you Stephan, we’ve worked with, just now, I literally just sent a screen record video to one of our clients who I guarantee 95% of your audience knows who he is. We’ve helped them grow from a $12 opt in rate, or opt cost per lead down to like $4 and they have killer backend funnels. They know this stuff. But when it comes to just slightly unique hooks on the frontend of your ad and sometimes adjusting your lead magnet, in your case, no, it’s just adjusting the hook, then taking the time to transition them maybe on the ad itself or on the landing page. It’s always about how can you get the higher quality. A lot of people will just use all curiosity or they’ll be going a little bit to talking about where somebody has to be a little bit more aware. In your case, you’re doing that a little bit. If they’re aware of you or they’re really, really aware of SEO strategies or maybe worked as a consultant before, they’re going to get this ad. But the bigger market, the other 80%, 90%, if you do a little bit of what I talked about, all the optimization, all the lookalike audiences, all that stuff, will take care of itself. I guarantee it. To getting all that ninja-type stuff dialed in, like I said, that’s how you go from $1,000 to $5,000 a day. That’s how you really scale but you can never go to $5,000 a day if you don’t get this stuff right upfront. That’s the biggest mistake we see everybody making out there.

They’re just getting a tool and they get to use that tool and whether they know you, like you, trust you, it doesn’t really matter. Share on X

That makes sense. Do you think that driving people directly to a webinar sign up is too much too soon or should we get them to a lead magnet or to a blogpost first and then retarget them after that?

No. I don’t. I definitely don’t. I do it all the time. You just have to get in your messaging basically. A lot of times, we talk about, and I’ve talked about, I was one of the first people talking about running Facebook ads to blog posts, to warm people up and then retargeting people. This was back when we had to use perfect audience or ad role to retarget people. The thing is, right now, the landscape has changed a little bit and a lot of times we still do that but you can actually do that all in one ad, especially if you’re using video. But you can kind of, like kind of your situation and the ad that I talked about with the intermittent fasting, that’s like a 2,500-word post. You know that? Might be 3,000.

Wow.

It’s just crushing it out of the gate, all day everyday without even optimizing it and now we’re optimizing it in the next level advanced certification. The point is that you can do that in the ad itself and if you start using video ads, now you have a whole other situation where now, you’re building these warm audiences three cents at a time. You might be paying three cents, maybe you’re paying five cents for somebody to watch 25% of your video. You’re building that warm audience way faster than a blogpost click but you’re also making a bigger branding impact with that person even if they don’t take action. Roy H. Williams, the author of the Wizard of Ads trilogy, one of the smartest guys in the planet, his advertising is responsible for 80% all Rolex and diamond sales in North America. Most people don’t know this. I’ve been really digging into his stuff and one of his things that he talks about is what impact are your ads making to people that don’t click, that don’t opt in, that don’t take action? Because a lot of times, they’re not clicking not because they don’t like you, it’s because now they’re at front of the line at Starbucks and they’re at the checkout counter or they saw your ad and they’re about to click on it and they got a notification, ding ding, on their phone, they got a text message with a funny picture, or you name it. When you’re doing this and you’re creating these ads that people like, it signals to Facebook so you get that exponential love which drives your costs down, and drives your impressions up and you also get people that are coming into your world now with open arms, with their virtual guard down instead of up like a boxer.

This is amazing stuff. By the way, I will include the screenshot of the ad that I sent you. I’ll include that in the shownotes so listeners can see what you were critiquing. It sounds like I should really be replacing that image with a video. Doing a video ad, driving people still to sign up for the webinar but giving them some sort of powerpoint/KeyNote type of presentation of these are the three things that you need to know about how the market place or the SEO world has changed but not using a lot of the terminology, you’re just kind of keeping it more high level.

Exactly. Unless you’re introducing the terminology for those people. Kind of like in the ad itself. Unless you’re introducing then it’s okay, for the people that don’t what they are. Number one is I would say is, quickest thing to do is I would do this without the video first. It’s going to be the fastest and you can start to get some kind of feedback from the audience and see what the data tells you, is it given high relevant scores, are the costs per lead coming down, are the show up rates up a little bit? You can start there. If you do a video, it’s kind of the same framework. I have a three-step video ad. I’ll give it to your listeners if you want. We can put it in the shownotes. We have a three-step video ad guide that walks you through some of this stuff and it has a bunch of examples in it as well but if you can. In the video, the great thing about that is you can really see to the next step. The key to doing a content video like this and people ask, “Well, how long should it be?” Honestly, this type of video, I usually say three to six minutes is the sweet spot but my best video ad was nine minutes. It generates customers for $5 a piece. One of our customers has a 15-minute video that absolutely crushes it because it was already on their YouTube channel, we just kind of Facebookized it, added some text overlays and stuff like that. But a lot of times, you might have a 30-second great video that draws curiosity in. That works. There’s no really sweet spot. But for this type of content video, typically, you’re actually given a little bit of value so it might be two to three minutes up to six, seven, or eight. Don’t worry about the limit basically but the key is let’s say that you make people aware of this frustration of not getting traffic from Google anymore and you tell them, you show them the tools. The key is, I’m kind of making this along with an answer, is that when you give them an a-huh moment, when you give them a tip, try to seed the next step. You’re, “Hey, there’s tools like this, this, and this, check this out. I can do this.” You’re showing them, people love that stuff. You’re showing them how they work. “On the webinar, I’m going to show you how we did this in this case study. You can sign up for it if you click the link below this video.” Then, you go to the next point. “I’ll send you a link to a video where I do this as well. It’s a six-minute video where I go through three, I think I go to three biggest mistakes business owners are making with their Facebook ads,” or something like that. I’m giving them value but I’m also seeding the webinar throughout. Yeah, it’s a six-minute video but I was given a call to action a minute and a half in. It wasn’t like hardcore and all sales-y, it was authentic and it was natural. That’s the one thing and the most authentic and natural you can be. You’re authentic in general as it is as a person so people are going to resonate with that. I would always try to start doing video if you can. That’s going to build your brand much faster. It’s going to build your warm audiences. The other thing is, guess what, you’re building even more data that you can create lookalike audiences off. Some of our video view audiences is like 50% viewed. We might build up to 200,000, 300,000 person audience very quickly off people who have watched 50% of your video. Guess what, they might not have opted it but that’s a lot of data you’re sending to Facebook to create a lookalike audience off of. Now, you’ve got a cold audience based off of 200,000 people that would have took you a lot longer to generate leads. Granted, a lead is a higher quality but you know, they watched 50% of your video, that’s pretty good. A lot of times it’s all about data. The more data Facebook has, the better that they can create this lookalike audiences off of. That’s a whole other conversation but there’s always a fine line of that.

I love it. You mentioned Facebookizing a video that was done as a YouTube video. What are the things that make it Facebookized? You’ve got like captioning, you have maybe kind of some headline or something at the top and at the bottom or something like that. Walk us through.

Honestly, it’s not a lot. It’s really just captioning is the main thing. Captioning is really the big thing. They somehow can have a visual representation of what you’re saying in that first five seconds. The most important thing about video on Facebook is that it’s going to be on mute at first so you’ve got to have some kind of a way to tell the same story or maybe you have some kind of a pattern interrupt where you’re doing something crazy or weird or it’s a close up of your face or just text in general though telling the story and making it as big as you can, what will help. There might be a question like, “What about the 20% text rule?” The 20% text rule does not apply. The 20% text rule is that Facebook will not let you have an image that more than 20% of the image is covered with text. I’m sure most of your people know this but with video, we get this question a lot. I’m doing a kinetic text video, well, you can have 90% of your video covered with text. You just can’t have the thumbnail, the pre-play image, thumbnail, more than 20% text for the right column ads that are not autoplay. That make sense?

Yep.

That’s important there. Other than that, that’s really it. Just maybe have maybe another subtle text overlay, call to action in the middle of it when you do tell them to take action but using the subtitles work great. There’s a lot of ways you can do that now. You can just add subtitles to your video and that will help it perform better.

What’s the best way to do the subtitling?

Depending on the length of your video. Facebook is now doing it for you. Just let Facebook do it and if it looks good, you can go in there and edit it. If they don’t, they something like it’s too long or something just honestly go to Elance and have somebody create an SRT file, S as in Sierra, R as in Romeo, T s in Tango, and then you could upload that to Facebook. That’s that. I’m sure I would say that the one question that your audience, because I know you have a high level audience and people are probably like, “What about targeting and bidding, and budgeting?” I have a good campaign, and I increased my budget, and my cost per conversion, my cost per lead, CPAs go through the roof. Have you ever heard of that frustration at all?

Oh yeah.

That’s probably the biggest frustration that people have with Facebook, is how to scale their campaigns. I know we’re kind of running out of time here but I’ll touch on this in general. There’s a lot of different ways to do this. Ralph is a co-host on the podcast, Ralph Burns, who runs the agency side of our business. I run the education side. He has a five-tiered scaling process. However, the one thing to understand is that Facebook, they hate a lot of change really fast. It’s tough because you’re always trying to battle between having a highly targeted audience, but also giving Facebook the time to do its thing. In general, I’m going to give you guys a higher level understanding. In general, Facebook loves large audiences. As long as they have enough time throughout the day. If you have a large audience but you have a $500 a day budget, they’ve got 24 hours to do that. You think about Facebook audiences as the ocean and you’re an ocean full of all these maybe fish that are gray and black and white and all that stuff, and maybe your audience, the people in that audience that have intent are in that awareness level that we talked about. Say maybe they’re bright orange. If you have a big ocean, then you’re going to have a lot higher likelihood, there’s going to be a lot more of those orange fish that have intent and are the best percentage. I always say if you have a million-person audience, there’s going to be 5% or 10% of them that’s going to be the best part of those million-person audience. That’s where Facebook’s optimize bidding comes in. That’s why their website conversions, objective algorithm works so well but it needs a lot of time to work. That’s the problem. If you try to say, “Hey Facebook, spend $500 a day in this audience of a million people.” It’s not going to have the time. Your net isn’t big enough. You’ve got a net under there and you’re trying to go find all of those orange fish. It’s going to not be able to get them all. But if you have, let’s say, all of a sudden you have a $15 a day budget, same size audience, well, guess what, you’re going to have a lot more time throughout the day to go through and find those orange fish that are maybe only 10% of the entire fish in that ocean. In general, if you give Facebook, try a little bit smaller budgets, and then have as big audiences as you can, Facebook will be able to do its work. Sometimes, we will take an audience that has, let’s say, two million people and let’s say it’s only $20 a day or $10 a day in some cases, maybe $50 a day, then what they’ll do is they’ll actually double, they’ll actually just duplicate that ad set. It’s really weird. Or maybe you add 30% to your budget. There’s kind of two ways that works. Maybe you’re spending $20 a day and you might add $5 to that budget, so it’s $25. That’s kind of a way that most people will do it. What they’ve been doing recently in the agency which is kind of an accident how it happened initially but they’re actually really small budgets. We’re talking like $10 to $20 even if it’s a big audience like a million people. Instead of raising the budget, they’ll just duplicate that ad set. It’s like double in it but they’re not actually adding the budget to that one, they’re just adding a new ad set. It’s a little bit more of a loophole I think. The main thing to understand is that lots of audiences will work better, a lot of smaller audiences will work better for you. Maybe you have a bunch of lookalike audiences. Let’s say you have a lookalike audience based off of your 10-second video views, 25% video views, 50% video views, you’ve got a lookalike audience based off your fans, off your website visitors, off your leads, off your webinar registrations, off your customers. You can have $10, $15 a day budget on all of those audiences. The more ad sets you have but smaller budgets in general, I’m not sure what it is, it just seems to work better. We’ve got clients though that maybe every ad set is at $50 a day because they’re on bigger budgets and they have higher cost per action. That was probably a little bit confusing. I’m not sure what it was, but in general, the one lesson here is don’t take an audience, say you started out at $25, don’t just automatically make it $75. Raise it very slow or maybe test, cloning that ad set and see what happens.

That’s a great trick. I love it. Awesome. What is critical to have in the first five seconds of a video or first three seconds so that you capture the Facebook user as they’re scrolling through their newsfeed?

Some kind of pattern interrupt. It doesn’t have to be something crazy. Motion is what I see as the number one pattern interrupt that works. That’s why those guys that are doing those selfie camera videos that work so well but motion close up to the face, text overlay, something like that.

Do you have a trick question or two that you throw out to potential new hires? Somebody who’s going to do some Facebook campaign management at your agency, do you have trick question you ask them, little nuances about the power editor or something like that? What would be an example or two?

Man, let’s see here. That’s a good question. That’d probably a little bit better one for Raph because he’s doing a little bit more than that. Typically, we don’t really ask a trick question but we’ll have somebody give us a plan of action. If somebody comes on to test we’ll say, “Hey, look at this account. What would you do? How will you scale this campaign?” We can see them and they’ll send us a written out plan or do a screen record. We want to see how they can make their way around the power editor, how they see the way the audience is worked, etc.  We also might ask them about, “What would you do for this hook? This is the product. This is what we’re trying to get people to hop in for. What’s an idea for an ad?” That type of stuff.

Cool. Any tips about Facebook exclusion lists?

I would say the Facebook exclusion list, when it comes to the retargeting, we keep things fairly simple. Back to the supplement example, e-commerce. Yes, there’s ads running. If somebody hits the order form and doesn’t buy, then there might be a 3-day sale, then we’ll have a 3-day retargeting list, a 3-day custom audience. It depends on what they’re doing but it might be 50% off. What we try to do is we try to mimic what they’re doing in their autoresponder sequence. You might have a five-day. The one thing for people that bounce off a sales page or an order form that you’re trying to retarget, keep those days low, seven day or less. It sucks because it’s a smaller list but they just work better and it’s always recycling so you’re having new people come into that warm list and then people leave it as well. However, that’s still 15%, 20%. The other thing to this question is that the one thing that people disregard is they try to exclude people too fast and people try to get too ninja and exclude people that have already showed up on their webinar or registered for their webinar. They’ve seen one ad, then they try to give them a different ad. The biggest mistake that people make is doing too much of that. You want people to see your ads multiple times. That’s why big brands like Nike and you name it, Nike and McDonalds and all of these big brands run big brand advertising. That’s a whole other conversation. Another book that I would recommend is Pre-Suasion. It’s Robert Cialdini. It’s this book that he just came out with. Author of influence. Pre-Suasion has some amazing stuff in there. It talks about banner ads. People that are running banner display ads, Google ad, whatever they’re using for the platform, you’ve got to read this book. There’s one section in there that talks about the subconscious effect when people see a banner. They don’t even notice it, they only see it subconsciously, I can’t remember the specifics of it. This part I just actually read. It can blow your mind. It’s not what you typically hear at all but the point is when people see your stuff over and over again, it builds more subconscious trust with you. That might sound similar but get the book and you’ll know what I mean. He explains it in a completely different way that you’ve ever heard. The point is we see it all the time with Facebook, we just keep our audiences warm and cold so we’ll have one ad running like that video that I told you about, that’s running to cold audiences. Some of them are as big as 30 million because they have so many conversions on their pixel, Facebook can optimize that big audience pretty quickly but that same ad is running to warm audiences. It is. It’s big value anyways. It’s running to warm and it’s running to cold. The coupon ads that I told you about, people that bounce off the order for, those are only targeted people that hit the order form in the last three or seven days depending on the situation. But in general, keep it simple, let people see your stuff more often that you think.

That’s awesome. One last one, then we’ll finish up. Best practices for the image and/or the headline?

Best practices for the image is, some of the standard stuff is keep it so it’s contrasting if you can. But one thing that Molly Pittman’s been talking about and some really cool stuff is that if you can create, and some of this stuff comes from Roy Williams as well from Wizards of Ads, but he was already doing some of these naturally, is if you can have an image that people can recognize that is something that they kind of do on an everyday basis. For example, she used this ad, I forgot, I think it was the seats for selling out for traffic and conversion, time is running out. She had an ad of an image of a cell phone battery on the red. Anybody that has a phone, a smartphone, and they see their battery it’s not red, that image on their phone, that was the image, people recognize that. Even though it had nothing to do with the offer, it was one of the best ads that they’ve ever performed. Sometimes, if you can have something where it’s more of like a metaphor, that works really well but images are a little bit tough. Headline, like I said, just boom, any way you can. Hit that number one thing to give them an a-huh moment. You can call out that audience. do that as best as you can but then you’re coming to issues with Facebook and getting ads approved. The headline, the number one thing would be to really dig into that higher level solution. Like I said, SamCart was doubling their sales or it was frustrated with building the sales funnel, or it might be frustrated with traffic, or maybe you have a curiosity-based headline and then the ad goes into a little bit deeper.

Focus on the pain points or build curiosity and then address that curiosity in the ad copy.

Exactly.

Got it. Awesome. Thank you so much. Now, if somebody wants to work with your agency or if they want to get some of your training, take your certification, how do they reach you?

The best way to reach me is go to www.dominatewebmedia.com. Listen to our podcast Perpetual Traffic, you’ll find it in iTunes. If you go to www.dominatewebmedia.com right now, we have a new program, we’re not selling our new course yet, it was only offered to people that preordered it, we’ve got a ton of free stuff on there. You can go to services and you can fill out an application if you’re looking for more help, if you’re looking for coaching or you’re looking for services, the agency is backed up right now as far as coming into our agency. However, that’s just why we did our certification because we have this core group now and we’re going to have within about three weeks from today we’re recording, maybe less, we’ll have a site on our website that will have our certified consultants and the level of ad spend that they’ve done and it’s a very small core group of people, like I said, I spent five days immersed with as well as the next four weeks. We’ve got more practical application they’re going through as well as practical exams. My background is in the airline industry before owning businesses and stuff. We’ve kind of built our certification around similar to the process of learning how to fly a new airplane.

Cool.

We will have more. We probably can’t take you on the agency right now, however, we might be able to point you in the right direction or get you in the cue to chat with Ralph or someone on the team. Lots of free stuff on there. Everything I talked about with the ketogenic, you’ll be able to watch the whole process. That will be available really soon maybe by the time this is done recording. I’ll check that.

Amazing. Thank you, Keith. This was mind-blowingly awesome. Thank you for getting down to the runway level with me on actually critiquing an existing ad. Listeners, do check out the shownotes for the different links and the books that were mentioned and all that, also the transcription of this episode, and a checklist of actions to take based on what we discussed in the episodes. All that is available at www.marketingspeak.com. Of course, go to www.dominatewebmedia.com and check out the awesome training and certification programs and so forth that Keith’s company offers. Perpetual Traffic is one of my favorite podcasts, definitely you want to subscribe to that one as well. Thank you again Keith, thank you listeners. This is Stephan Spencer, your host, signing off. Catch you on the next episode of Marketing Speak.

Important Links

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

☑ Offer something of value to potential customers without necessarily including a pitch at the end. This can pay off in the long run.

☑ Write down three potential effective hooks for my product or service, and three that might be less effective, to help clarify the difference.

☑ Come up with five separate compelling hooks: one for people at each of the five UPSYD stages.

☑ Use those five hooks as inspiration to create one single hook that would be equally interesting to people regardless of their stage on the UPSYD ladder.

☑ Focus on marketing to people who are aware of the problem, but not the solution. This is often the sweet spot.

☑ Provide “results in advance.” My audience will be more inclined to buy if I give them a sense of mastery or success before they spend money.

☑ Examine one of my current ads in detail and determine where its audience falls on the UPSYD ladder.

☑ Ask a friend in a different industry to read my ads. If he or she doesn’t understand any terminology, simplify it to appeal to a broader audience.

☑ “Facebookize” a YouTube video by captioning it to give my audience a visual representation of what the video is saying, because it will be on mute at first.

☑ Create more ad sets with smaller budgets on Facebook. In general, as counter intuitive as it may seem, this tends to be more effective.

About Keith Krance

Keith Krance, author of the Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising is a former local business owner who juggled franchises and businesses in multiple locations but had a vision for something that served others on a much bigger scale.

His previous career as an airline pilot and skills with navigation and strategy served him well when he founded Dominate Web Media.

Keith’s team has helped clients in dozens of different markets all over the world, working with both small businesses and large companies, and they currently manage and oversee an average of $950,000 per month in Facebook ad spend – generating hundreds of thousands of new leads and several million dollars in revenue for their clients.