How to Launch and Scale Your Business With Facebook Ads – Mojca Žove – MicroConf Starter 2018

0:00[Music] [Applause] it is lovely to be here this is my second talk on micro conf and I talk to a bunch of you yesterday and the thing that came up the most in our conversations was this is such an amazing community I love it I'm going to be back from micro Kampf next year so what I want you to do right now is to give a round of applause for yourself so let's do it there you go perfect anyway today we're going to be talking about Facebook Ads naturally but first I have to take care of an important thing I saw tweet from Patrick a couple of days ago and you've probably

0:56seen it on the slides today on his slides Mike had his kids on his slides the tweet goes if you can see it my favorite macro comb tradition family photos on virtually all speaker sites is a nice corrective against the prevailing narrative of you have to be totally committed to the company and crushed code with your forehead for your 20s to ever be successful I totally agree with that that said I do not have a traditional family I'm childless by choice one of the reasons being I'm just bad parent material let's just get it out there second of all my mom frequently sends me memes like this she

1:37sent this literally yesterday so if you can't see it on there I don't know so husband asked do you ever have the feeling we should have another kid or a kid me I sometimes have a feeling I can do crystal mad but then I think better or not this is me anyway but I do have a weird family so this is my cute little dog Jackie she's amazing and cute little husband you know he's amazing - he's somewhere in the audience I do not know where he is he's usually there he is he's usually he's usually nervous for my talks more than I am so Travis is that use I

2:15shouldn't just give him give him a pat and tell him that everything's going to be okay okay that was good that was good I love that just a little bit about myself this is me on Sunday you can do weird in Vegas we we rented an excavator and what you can do is like you rent it for an hour and a half and they let you dig up holes and you can like put huge tires in a pyramid and then play basketball and wave we literally took an excavator and we waved at the cars that were driving by and honk the horn it was awesome you know where to find me if you want to

2:57do the same thing anyway I work with seven plus figure companies I help them develop Facebook ad campaigns help them run Facebook ad campaigns launch Facebook ad campaigns I know it doesn't look from like that from this picture but I am a professional anyway today we're going to be talking about Facebook Ads if you do want to tweet anything you can tweet it you can mention me you should mention me I'm at mort's Amar's I know that that is a little bit confusing but that is my maiden name protip do not book a hotel room under your maiden name they will not let you in and if that happens at 3 a.m. is

3:35going to be even harder and your room will spell to smell like raw peeled potatoes ask me anything about it later I know everything today we're going to be talking about Facebook Ads let's start with a story so when I first launched that was years ago I launched a product eyes productized service called super-spicy sessions so I did tear downs of social media profiles for my clients and back then everyone did mostly b2c Facebook ads and everyone told me b2b is a bad idea for Facebook has do not do b2b advertising and I was like yeah but I want to give it a try I was work I was

4:17doing Facebook ads but then back then but not not like today I specialized for Facebook as now I didn't back in the day so when I launched super-spicy sessions I decided to do an experiment what I wanted to have is some sort of an auto semi automated automated pipeline I wanted to get clients automatically through Facebook ads so not chase them down one by one and I decided you know what let's do Facebook ads for that and I did it and the first campaign that I did I invested 10% of the price of one super-spicy session in facebook ads and I got a clients like the person paid me

5:00immediately after that I got another one so I asked myself why isn't everyone doing that why is it just me why do people say Facebook ads this is just for b2c e-commerce don't do it for b2b and when I a couple of years later I asked my audience why aren't you doing Facebook ads and these are the reasons that usually came up so it's too complicated its time-consuming and takes me hours to launch one campaign and then at the end is it's expensive I just spent $100 nothing happens or a thousand dollars for promoting my business nothing happens I get zero results overall one of the main points

5:45that came across frequently was I don't even know where to start if you've done Facebook ads before you know that when you log into Facebook ads manager there's just like a ton of options like you there's objective different objectives different targeting options like what do you do so what we're going to do today is we're going to take all of those excuses and we're going to just throw them in the trash can and we are going to work on a strategy that you can implement for your business you can validate your project your product with that or if you work with clients if you do Facebook ads or any kind of marketing

6:26for your clients you are able to implement that as well growing a business and launching a business and getting yourself out there is as easy as possible nowadays it hasn't been as easy a couple of years ago where there was no Facebook no Twitter no Facebook ads no Google ads you had to work really hard to get in front of people today is just a matter of investing ten dollars for a blog for promoting a blog post and you get in front of people so you have to take advantage of that technology so let's talk about why most advertising campaigns fail I worked and talked to hundreds of

7:14clients and customers and my audience who was who are launching Facebook ad campaigns regularly and usually these are the reasons that their campaigns fail so first of all they've tried to sell to cold audiences directly if you try to think of it from a real real life perspective this is like you would go and knock on a door to a stranger and try to sell him or her your $50 ebook they wouldn't know who you are are you really a professional do you know what you're doing do you have any kind of authority do you do you know what you're saying what you're teaching so selling

7:57to cold audiences directly is a bad idea second of all usually they want to close the deal too quickly when I ask people when we talk about their Facebook ad campaigns they usually say yeah I do retargeting and I invested hundreds of dollars in retargeting and it didn't work and when we tried to dive in deep we always come to the same conclusion they did retargeting but what they did is they someone who visited their homepage and immediately after they retarget that person and show them an ad for a fifty dollar ebook or for a $100 software or whatever someone that visits your homepage it's not

8:39automatically a customer so you need to talk to them you need to qualify them so why is the particular is the deal too quickly is the second mistake that people usually do and third one is optimizing for the wrong metrics I talk to a lot of you yesterday and we were talking about Facebook ads and how you're working with Facebook and how how's your experience been and usually I know that someone said yeah where we were trying to get people to download a download our app and we were talking about okay so which which objective did you use when you are trying to launch your Facebook ad

9:18campaign and they said well traffic so if you don't tell Facebook what you want Facebook to do naturally you won't get the results that you want so optimizing for the wrong metric is the third most common mistake that people do when launching Facebook ad campaigns before we dive into the specifics of launching a Facebook ad campaign we have to talk about the most important thing and that's about the technology that you need to take take care of before you launch your first campaign and that is the Facebook pixel every one of you probably heard about Facebook pixel already if you don't know what it is it's a snippet of code that you have to

10:03implement before the end hat tag on your web page Facebook's instructions are very clear so if you're interested in learning more about that you can go into your Facebook Ads manager they will let you know everything there is to know about it but you basically implement it on your webpage and then you're able to track your website visitors and their behavior so what do they do on your web page which blog posts are they visiting you can track conversions you can group people into multiple audiences people that have read your blog post people that have visit your contact page you can do a lot of things it takes you two

10:37minutes max to implement this snippet of code to your web page so if you don't have that already you have to do it today even if you do not plan on advertising on Facebook in the near future it would be in your best interest to do that today because when you do decide to run your first advertising or Facebook advertising campaign you will already have a lot of data generate it and collect through this Facebook pixel and you would be off to a much better start than without this so do it today 2-minute task really it's absolutely nothing before you go to sleep you got it now we

11:19can talk about the Facebook advertising funnel that you can implement in the next couple of days when you're going to be flying back to your home country this is the typical funnel that I implement for most of my clients it does the the practical examples do deviate a little bit because the more you get to know Facebook ads in your business and how your customers behave the more detailed this will become but this is a fantastic foundation this is the starting point for all of my clients and I work with seven-figure companies and we do exactly this so though for the top of the funnel is attracting visitors this the second

12:03layer is generating leads and the third layer is closing sales and you can imagine this as three separate campaigns you will have one campaign for attracting visitors you will have another campaign for generating leads and you will have the third campaign for closing sales today we are going to be talking about these things as well so for each of the layers or for each of the campaign you're going to ask yourself four questions and these four questions will let you develop this campaign in detail get to know your target audience a little bit more and craft the message that you want them to hear the first question that you're

12:45going to ask yourself is what is the goal of this campaign what do I want to achieve the second question is what is the asset that I want to promote third question being who is the audience that I want to reach and the fourth question being what's the approach that I need to take to achieve that goal easy way to remember as GAA and that stands for a goal asset audience and approach and let's start with the top of the funnel attracting visitors what's the goal at the top of the phone the goal is to make the first connection through value if any I know that some of

13:28you have been to the growth Edition and during Gale actually talked exactly about this when you're reaching out to a cold audience that you eventually you want to sell something to them you have to make that first connection through value you need to build trust you need to establish Authority you need to establish yourself as someone who can talk about that topic professionally and essentially our goal is even to tag them with the Facebook pixel so we can collect those people in a separate audience and retarget them later the assets that you want to promote at this part is you want to promote valuable blog posts you want people to walk away

14:21with something valuable something that they can implement something that will let them see the results by themselves because you will be in a much better position by then you can also promote video content Facebook is really strong on video so if you have video if you don't have it just created it's very simple you don't need a professional gear you can do it with your phone one of my first even my videos today are recorded with my phone so if you have five minutes of your time in a day pick up a phone hit record and talk about something valuable and upload that to Facebook and video content accounts as a

15:03great asset at this point as well if you don't exactly know which blog posts would be the best to use at this point just go to your Google Analytics and see which blog posts is the most popular at the moment that is a good start if people come to that blog post organically and they stay on the page they read it through it does have to mean that it's valuable they like it so take that blog post don't spend any time writing a new blog post just take them popular one and implement it to your Facebook ad campaign the audience's that you want to target at this point are

15:41cold audiences so we want the top of the funnel to be scalable we want to reach as many people as possible you can use two different approaches at this point you can use interest targeting interest starting is basically you go into Facebook Ads manager and you write in interests that your target audience is interested in there are two approaches that you can take with interest targeting you can target your competitors usually your competitors have a similar or the same audience that you have practical example Jon Loomer love that guy he's a great Facebook advertising consultant and expert great articles so I personally I have the same

16:32target audience that he has and Jon Loomer is an interest that that's in Facebook Ads manager so I can target Jon Loomer and I will reach his audience so another thing that you can do with interest targeting is targeting people or companies that are in the similar space that you are and reach the same the same audience but are not your competitors practical example John Lee Dumas would be one guy he has a great podcast his listeners are usually small business owners so targeting him and targeting his audience would be a good idea for me at that point as well and the second option that you can take our

17:15look-alike audiences let's talk about the technicalities just a little bit what look like audiences are for example if you have an email list of your existing customers and you want to reach people brand new audience that is similar to that audience of your existing customers you would want to use look-alike audiences what you can do is you can upload the email list of your customers to Facebook and a look-alike audience and what Facebook will do is they will analyze the people on your email list they will match those email to emails to actual profiles on Facebook they will analyze those profiles see what common interests they

18:02have which what are their demographic information how old are they usually which gender whether they come where they coming from and then they will create a brand new cult audience called the look-alike audience that is similar to the audience of your existing customers and that audience is usually a great way to start for at the top of the funnel so for advertising blog posts or any kind of other valuable content and the approach you would want to take is to have a very powerful hand headline and a branded design if you have a logo that's very distinct or some colors that you regularly use on your webpage you

18:48would want to brand your ad up a little bit and constantly use similar colors and your logo on the visual so people create that connection and throughout the presentation I'm going to show you some ads that match this description and this approach so you can get a better sense of how a good Facebook ad should look like and this is the first one I don't know if you can seal that yeah you can okay so this is an ad that we did for Jonathan Stark if you're not familiar with him he talks about he practically teaches about value-based pricing and this was one of the best

19:23performing blog posts that he organically had and we just advertise it on Facebook as you can see if we go back it has a powerful headline Jonathan at that point didn't have a like a branded design and colors that he used but we did focus on the copy and the communication powerful headline how to get paid 100% up front this is interesting people are interested in that they it sparks their interest and then the copy goes have you ever tried demanding a 100% upfront payment how did it go and if you haven't would you like to and you got people nodding at this point I asked for a 100% upfront payment

20:02all the time and when like when I tell people about this I always get asked why do I ask for 100% upfront payment how often do I get away with it and what do I do when clients push back and these are the questions that Jonathan was getting from his target audience so he just repurposed that content for a facebook ad copy and then it goes through many years I learned exactly how to address my pre payment terms in a conversation with clients if you also want to start billing 100 percent upfront and don't know how to or maybe you just weren't successful let me teach

20:34you how simple powerful headline it attracts people attention and the ad was really really successful when you have the top of the funnel you want to create your second campaign for lead generation the goal of this campaign is to get that first transact the transaction it's not a monetary transaction I know but still it is a first transaction they are giving you their email address and that counts as qualifying basically what you're doing is you are dividing people into two separate groups the first group they might be interested they were they read your blog post they know who you are but maybe they're just lurking from

21:19now on the other hand you have people who are interested in what you have to offer they want your content they want your software so with lead generation you separate those groups those two groups of people into separate groups and yeah you have a you have a qualifying process the assets that you would want to promote lead magnets so whether that's an e-book cheat sheet checklist email course free trial if if you have a software free trial is a great lead magnet or asset to promote at this point what I do want you to keep in mind is if you are promoting it ebook cheat sheet checklist whatever it has to

21:59be highly valuable it has to be like a snackable content something that they can take and they can implement and again see for themselves that this does work this person or this company they are an expert in their field and that is the goal of the asset promotion and lead generation the audience for the second part of the funnel is a retargeted audience so you want to promote lis your lead or your software or free trial tube to your blog post readers so people that have previously visited the blog post that you promote it on Facebook or another thing that you can do in facebook is

22:39advertise to top web page visitors basically what you can do is go on Facebook and create a custom audience of people that have spent the most time on your web page so they probably read your blog post your whole blog post they have been on a couple of pages and they have spent a lot of time on there or you can target people that visited your contact page if they visited your contact page it means that they were actively looking for your content they're interested in contacting you maybe they didn't have time to do that at the moment but these are the people that you want to target for your lead

23:15generation ads and the approach that you would want to take is first of all you want to reiterate pain I always say that you have to make them hurt and then you want to communicate a specific outcome what are they getting from this lead magnet what is the outcome going to be at the end you absolutely need to have a clear and strong call-to-action don't leave it hanging out there don't just say yes this is what you'll get and then just leave it at that have a clear and strong call-to-action as yet let them know what you want them to do this is a great example of a good whole

23:58degeneration ad why should gaining expert angular skills be intimidating and time-consuming so we're really making them hurt learning should make you feel good it should be fun and with proper structure it shouldn't take you days to acquire a new skill you can now increase your angular knowledge one bite-sized video at a time lessons are concise most Under ten minutes long so we are already communicating some sort of an outcome they are hosted by world's top angular developers that solve problems in real time screen sharing every every step of the way call to action join the programming elite today by creating your own free account on a kettle io as you can see

24:45again the design is branded if you go on their web page they have just beautiful graphics so we just used one of it for for our Facebook ads and it works really well at the end and the headline section of the ad you can see join egghead today so again a call to action we didn't just say ik head is the best no we let them know what we want them to do another good example with a slightly shorter copy we reiterated the page okay bye yeah I have to put it in context this is an ad for time tracking software for construction companies so now if you if

25:24any of you have like an excuse my business is not good for Facebook ads this is this is an ad for time tracking for construction companies their target audience our company CEOs of construction companies so very specific at the beginning of the ad we reiterated the pain no more repetitive tasks and handwritten time cars therefore this is the number one pain that they get when they when they use out paper timesheets and then secondly with clock shot you can focus on the most important work we are communicating some sort of an outcome and at the end see what our customers have to say we use testimonial at this point this is

26:01a great way to generate leads or to close sales I'll have another one for the third part of the phone and then you can see that at the bottom we have GPS time tracking for mobile workforces and a clear call-to-action at the bottom so you can start using clock shark for free designed and created with construction companies in mind sign up and let's start saving your money and time today it is clear they know exactly what to do at the end you have sales and this is you should not miss this part of the funnel this is what we're here for we want to close people on Facebook

26:43the goal is again to increase profits and to scale your business if you do the first part of the funnel if you do the second part of the funnel scaling your business is not that hard the assets that we promote at this point are usually tripwire product so if you are a consultant and you offer $5,000 consulting you don't want to promote a $5,000 consulting at this point but you want a tripwire product such as an prototype service super-spicy sessions that's a good example of a tripwire privatised predator service so offer a tripwire product or a service or if you do have a software you should promote

27:26your software at this point clock shark we use that's the time tracking for construction companies we use the same exact funnel so we promote a blog post and we have some good video content then we promote the free trial and then at the end we promote the actual software and that's a paid software they have to pay for it and it works really really well basically if you go to any restaurant you won't get the main course right at the beginning they will kind of you know slowly start you with a starting course like just something tiny and then you work your way up to the

28:03main course so don't like I said don't offer the five thousand dollar consulting right away but start with something smaller and then scale your way up the audience that you want to target at this point first of all existing leads the leads that they that's the people that signed up for the lead magnet that you previously promoted you can promote to pricing page visitors you heard Mike yesterday talking about how you frequently have to follow up with people it's not that they don't want to reply to you it's not that they are not interested in your offer it's just that they forgot seems that the same thing happens on your landing

28:40page maybe they have visited your pricing page maybe they did want to purchase your software but for some reason maybe someone just came and said you know what I have this that you need to take care of maybe they just didn't have time at that point maybe they were on on an iPhone and they didn't want to conclude that purchase on an iPhone so you have to retarget those pricing page visitors and at the end if you have a sales page that is for example if we're talking about software you have a sales page that is specifically dedicated to that software you can we target those people at this

29:16point as well and the approach they want to take when it comes to creative you have to focus on a specific buyer persona if your target audience are CEOs of construction companies talk specifically to them don't talk to people in general but talk to CEOs of construction companies if your target audience are service business providers talk specifically to them you have to communicate specific value proposition what will they get out of it what is the result of this and then at the end you can offer social proof and testimonials and I have a good example of that as well first let's talk about CEO warrior this is a coaching company for service

29:59business providers and let's go through the creative right now so when was the last time you took a vacation or surprised your spouse with some something extravagant if your service business so we're not just talking if your business but if your service business is sucking the life out of your life it's time to make a change and now we talk about specific value propositions so find out how one service business owner turned around his failing business and grew it from 1 million dollars to over 30 million dollars he'll share everything and hand you a customized roadmap to grow your business we communicate that in the visual as

30:38well and in the headline warrior FasTrak Academy are you brave enough how long has your service bid service business been struggling for take the reins back into your hands we accept only 30 applicants what we did for this ad is we talked to a lot of customers and to our audience and we had interviews and we took their words and just put it in our ad and it worked another one from egghead and this is for this is for the paid pro membership we had a special offer and again we started with do you remember those boring eight hour course that the courses that you had to sit through if you wanted to

31:20learn something new and everyone goes yes I know how it is 95 percent of the content is usually not useful at all but you have to watch it anyway to get to the part that you're interested in annoying right we know how it is your time is valuable that's why we're dedicated to respecting your time with egghead you can acquire professional knowledge one bite-sized video at a time our videos focus on the most important lessons you need to learn they pack more information in a fraction of the time no fluff no wasting time so if you're developer that knows how important productivity is you owe and everyone

32:00knows that you owe it to yourself to join our egghead family today get access to all videos and sign up for the pro version today again strong clear call to action at the end and another one from clock shark again we used a testimonial and this ad converts as crazy this copy is a bit of a longer one but I'll read it through because it's very good and it converts so let's by the way the number one problem these people have the target audience like I said our paper timesheets it's just it it just take takes a long time they're frustrating they're messy and people just don't want

32:38to use them anymore so we took their words again and said let's finally admit it paper timesheets are messy and you hate them and you can see that this is a strong language that we're using but it works they should have they should save you time help you with organization and proper time tracking instead you end up wasting even more time going through them trying to make sense of it all as you can see we're being really specific at this point and that's why because we went out there and talked to our customer the customers even if that means that you don't have time you're single founder you have time for only

33:16talking to five customers that's enough get at least a couple of sentences a couple of things that they really struggle with and use that same specific language in your ad they're chaotic they're time-consuming they're everything you don't need to be wasting your effort on you need it again we're talking about the value right now so you need an effective time tracking tool that would help you automatically track your employees and save time on tasks that that can be taken care of by software something that is easy to use doesn't cost a fortune and works across all devices so that you can check the effectiveness of your team anytime

33:50anywhere clock shark will solve all of these problems and then some and then we talk about specific features so automate your time tracking track your team's progress on all devices so this is important if you're trying to sell sell software scheduler employees for maximum efficiency download reports and real time pay your employees and build your clients with just a few clicks thanks to our QuickBooks integration we talked about the specific cost of the software as well so and that and more all that and more for from only $25 a month a minor investment for maximum results clear call to action get rid of paper time cards today and

34:26start using the newest time tracking technology with clock shark what we do is we're using technology a testimonial at this point why because people love seeing other people's opinions they don't look like anyone can say my software is fantastic my software is the best anyone can do that but not anyone has good testimonials so contact a couple of people let them know you know what I want to grow my business I'm working really hard can I use your testimonial can I use your picture and promote it with Facebook ads to be honest most yeah most people that we contacted just said yes they they are they are willing to support you if you

35:09ask them basically the funnel that you're implementing with Facebook ads it's a qualifying process you want someone someone is a stranger at the beginning and when you offer them value and when they click on that valuable blog post when they read that video when they watch that video that you promote become a prospect then you offer a lead magnet to them and you separate people who are not really interested in your product and not really interested in what you do or maybe it's too early for them and you separate them from people who are interested people who are willing to convert people who want to try your software and then they become a

35:54lead and when you have a lead again you go out there and communicate your product whether that's in a book or a consulting gig or software whatever it is and then they become your customer I want to end with this so it's not going to be easy you're not going to nail your facebook ads funnel and your first facebook ad campaign just from the start when you wrote your first blog post did it went viral when you if you launched a couple of businesses and when you did like you when you launched your first business was it amazing was it really successful did it went viral it didn't it's going

36:40to take you a couple of times you're going to need to go back and reiterate so don't give up you have to be determined as you are determined when you're writing a blog post when you're writing the hundredth blog post that you did when you're recording your 20th video you have to be determined with Facebook Ads as well thank you all right thanks so much for that we have time for one question right now and once it's going to be here for another we do another workshop right oh yeah I think so yes yeah so she'll be around but one question right now right over here yeah

37:21so in your examples I - that there's a lot of long copy and Facebook we'll cut that cut that copy off it like two lines is it worth doing the really long copy and then also your images that you had a lot of them had a lot of text and Facebook always gets grumpy at my images with texts are like this is horrible your yeah you should definitely put less text in your images what are your opinions on that great question when it comes to long long copy I know it sounds weird but people read it so even if Facebook you know you said you know fees

37:57but cuts it off and then says like show more or something people do click on that show more people do read it we did hundreds of a B tests and we a be tested long form copy versus short form copy and long form copy outperformed every single time it performed way better than short form copy I don't want to say yes just do long form copy but a/b tested and I can guarantee that long form copy will perform a lot better and then when it comes to the text on the image Facebook does have rule that the visual shouldn't have more than I think it's 20% of text if it does you can use more

38:39than 20% of text on the image that said your reach will be a little bit lower we with clock shark with testimonials we do have more than 20% attacks on the image that's said again this is an a/b test that we've ran we had the same testimonial same visual and we just shrinked the text so it fit it was less than 20% and then we used the example that I have which is more than 20% of text on the image and even though our reach was lower with a higher quantity of text our ad performed way better than the one that had less than 20% of text

39:15so again with testimonials I found out that even if you surpass that threshold your ad will perform a bit better that said it's not always the case so again I would urge you to do an a/b test on that maybe tests are effective and they're really cheap on Facebook but yeah experiment a lot and yeah you will learn a lot from from these experiments all right let's give more to one more hand thank you [Applause] you