Facebook Ads Case Study: My 10x Profit Ad Campaigns

Ezra: Live. How you doing? As we’re here live from my studio, got a maple table. Love this table. And I’m ready to tell you about some Facebook Ad stuff. Hope you’re doing well. You might have gotten an email from me. You might see this on my personal profile. I’m going to verify that we are indeed live on Facebook. So let me go ahead and do that. And well, it looks like we are. Beautiful. While that’s happening I’m gonna go ahead and just share this now. Beautiful.

All right, so it’s two weeks before Black Friday. Many of you watching are e-commerce retailers, meaning you have a brand or a service or something that you’re offering your community or the entire nation via the internet that you’d like to sell this holiday season. And so I’m gonna show you a little case study of one of the things that we’ve been doing lately and kinda the way that we look at advertising and we look at amplifying our message to our fans and subscribers and people who we want to know that we exist. So when we look at advertising, when we look at the prospect to customer journey, we kinda look at it in three phases as you can see here.

So we’ve got before, during, and after. Now, before they are even a prospect, they’re just hanging out on Facebook or they’re hanging out on Pinterest, or they’re hanging out on Instagram, and you’d like to get your message in front of them. So that’s like one group of people. Then there’s the during phase, which is they’ve heard about you. They’ve seen an advertisement for you. They’ve engaged with your content. They heard about you from their friends. Maybe they visited your website, you know? They’re in the process of becoming a customer. And then, finally, there’s after they’re already a customer, you know? They’ve purchased from you so they’ve done business with you which is really cool.

And the way that we break this down from an adverting perspective because one of the things that we’ve really focused on is how to amplify our message through paid advertising. And I think that if you have a business or you have some kind of an offer that you wanna get out there, the best way that you can do that, or at least the most consistent way that you can do it is through amplifying that message via paid advertising. And the best source of paid advertising is Facebook. It’s the easiest to use. It’s got the most reach. I mean, Instagram is great, Pinterest is great, Google’s great. YouTube’s great. There’s a lot of great ways that you can amplify your message and depending on what you’re selling, and I can see we got a bunch of folks live with us here which is cool. Rico Glover’s live with us. I’m gonna just give myself some of these little likes because those are fun. Give me a little finger tap, a little love on there. So depending on what you’re selling, that’s gonna kinda dictate the best sort of platform for you to use to amplify your message. But I’m gonna focus on Facebook because I think Facebook is really the most relevant for most people.

Now, when we look at Facebook, we break down three pillars, and it’s broken down from that prospect to customer journey.

So the first pillar is awareness and acquisition. Now, these are groups of people who don’t know about you yet. Then we have retargeting, and this is the during phase. People who actually know about you already. And then we have loyalty. Now loyalty is where most of your money is going to be made, most of your profit is gonna be made…

My doorbell just rang. We are in the basement. You can’t see it. Back here I’ve got my Jujitsu studio. It’s a walkout basement. Right over here is like 10 acres of trees and we’re in New York, so the leaves just came down. They’re all over the yard. It’s beautiful colors. It’s cold. I’ve got land beavers out there. Had a giant spider in here this afternoon. Anyway, you can see a little bit behind me, our little rock wall back here.

So, awareness and acquisition is where you’re getting your brand in front of people who don’t know who you are yet. So you’re gonna exclude your customers, your subscribers, and you’re gonna attempt to get your message in front people who look the most like people who’ve already done business with you in the past. And that’s sort of your first attempt to generate leads in sales.

Retargeting is kind of retargeting people who’ve shown interest in your brand and what we like to do is track funnel engagement. So what we mean by that is every offer, let’s say, you may not be an e-commerce business owner, but every offer has a like sequence to it, right? Hey, you’ve got a video about your thing, and then maybe you’ve got a landing page that tells more about it, and then maybe on the landing page they click the checkout button and they go into a shopping cart. So there’s a sequence of events, and what we like to do in that middle pillar is break up that sequence of events. So okay, people who made it to page one but not page two. People who made it to page two but not page three. And for us, that’s people who saw a video and I’m gonna show you some Facebook video ad results in a moment here. You’ll be able to see exactly what I mean in sort of a practical case study of this, but the greater frame is communicating with people based on how much or how little of your content they’ve consumed, how far they’ve gotten down that prospect to customer journey. You wanna tailor your messaging to where people are at. You don’t wanna just yell the same stuff at everyone. You wanna communicate with folks based on where they’re at.

And then finally, there’s the loyalty campaign or the loyalty pillar. And this is where you’re kind of using special deals and complimentary products and stuff like that to increase retention and lifetime customer value. Now, what I wanna show you today is going to focus on the loyalty pillar so that’s what we’re talking about because this will be your most profitable section of your entire business. If you’ve done all the work to get people to know about you, to get them to actually take you up on the offer that you’re making and then finally, you’ve now followed up with them and delivered on the promise you made, because anyone can make a good promise and generally promises are what sell, right? The person who makes the best promise is generally the one who sells the most upfront, right, because people have not tried your stuff yet. So the better your promise, the better your marketing copy, and your videos, and your landing pages, and all that stuff, the better that you will sell.

But you have to deliver on that promise. You have to have a good product. You have to have good customer service. You have to have integrity. People can feel that, and they know that. If they receive your stuff and it’s no good, you’re hosed. But if they receive your stuff and it is good, which I’m assuming it is. If you’re hanging out with me, you’re probably selling good stuff because we really promote that heavily, you can do a lot with repeat customers and reminding people that you exist, and reminding people of other offers you have. And that’s what I wanna show you today, is how profitable this particular pillar can be because in our industry there are buzz words for traffic and conversion. Those are kind of like buzz words, and those are great words by the way. There’s a traffic and conversion summit that I generally speak at every year that’s about those topics. It’s put on by Digital Marketers, it’s a great company, but there’s a third part to the puzzle that people often ignore, which is repeat business.

Traffic and conversion, right? Get people to know about you, get them to say yes to what you have. Follow-up, do good marketing, provide value, make additional offers. And the case study I have to show you today is in relationship to that particular part of a business, which is the loyalty. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna take you into Facebook Ads here and I’m just gonna pop back over to this screen right here, so what you can see here on the screen is two campaigns.

Now, these are both campaigns that are running in the loyalty pillar. And they’ve been running, these particular campaigns have been running for about three, four months now. And you can see that in total, we’ve spent $62,000. I’m gonna zoom in a little bit further here and pull this over. We’ve spent $62,000 in advertising, buying video ads on Facebook. And we’ve generated about $583,000 in revenue. So it’s about a 10X, and you can expect that in your loyalty pillar.

In general, in the loyalty pillar, you’ll see astronomical results, great results because these are people who’ve done business with you in the past. And I’m gonna show you exactly the ad units and what we’re doing but basically, these campaigns are performing very well. And then your retargeting will be your second best, and then your awareness and acquisition will obviously be your worst. And I see a lot of people advertising their brand. And they just try the awareness and acquisition phase. They try to get their message in front of new people. They target people who don’t know about them yet and they don’t have the retargeting down, meaning they’re not people who then engage with them, they don’t follow-up with them, and then people who buy they don’t follow-up with them, and they think that their advertising didn’t work. It’s not that it didn’t work. It’s just that it was incomplete. It was only that awareness and acquisition pillar that I showed you previously in this live video. You gotta have both those other two pillars. So coming back to the computer screen here, what we can see is that these campaigns performed very well. So I’m gonna show you an actual ad set within one of these campaigns.

So here what we have is a group of people…and the people that we’re targeting, I’m just gonna show you the targeting group here. You can see this is spending $75 a day. We’re running these ads on mobile news feeds and desktop news feeds on Facebook, so we’re not using the right column placement or Instagram or Messenger. We’re just using those two placements because we find those to be the best. And we are running this ad to a customer list, and these are people who purchased our Boomstick Trio or our Boom Color but have not ordered Boomsilks. Meaning they purchased our most popular product, our second most popular product, but not our third most popular product.

And look at this, it’s a small group of people. It’s only 95,000 people. I mean, it’s pretty big but, as far as Facebook audiences goes, it’s pretty small. And we’re doing the United States, so anyone in the United States who falls into that audience. And what we’re doing is we have an ad unit here and this ad unit is literally just a video ad. It’s essentially the sales video that we use for this product. It says, “Hey, let me show you how we create our Boomsilk product which is handmade, and organic, and edible. It’s like really cool stuff.” And then it says, “Shop now.” And it leads you directly to our product offer page. So it’s a video on Facebook that if you watch it and click through, and by the way, there’s a couple of ways you can click through this video. And this video here is not doing as well. You can see it’s costing $16 per sale, spent $821 to make $3,000 as opposed to this other video that we ran for a very long time that was costing $6 a sale, so we should probably switch back to this video because this one’s doing much better.

And I’ll show you what this ad unit looked like here. And this is literally just the sales video that we have on our product page. And you can click the link above the video here, and that’s about… I think when the video is done playing, there maybe a little link you can click over to the offer page and let’s just wait and find out and see if that’s the case. Nope. So basically, the only way to click through is above there. And with this other ad unit that I showed you, there’s a couple different places you can click. But this is basically loyalty pillar bought X but didn’t buy Y. That’s like, your most powerful segment in your loyalty pillar. And I wanna go back and show you these pillars again one more time just so you’re with me here.

So we have awareness and acquisition, which is people who don’t know about you yet. You’re getting your brand out in front of folks who don’t know about you yet. Then we have retargeting, so people who’ve engaged with you to some degree, and my strong suggestion for your amplification of your messaging within this particular pillar of your advertising campaign if you’re running ads. Or if you’re not running ads, at least you can see it now how to sequence it. Is to communicate with people based on what they consumed. So track your funnel segments, right? You’ve a sales funnel. Let’s say you have a video ad that leads to a product offer page, that leads to a shopping cart, that leads to checkout. I mean, that’s pretty standard for most businesses. They basically have an advertisement that then leads to an offering that then leads to a checkout. So segment, those four spots, and say, “Okay, they saw the product offer page but they didn’t move to the cart. Target them with one message. They saw the cart but didn’t move to the checkout, target them with one message so you can break that up.

And then we have the loyalty pillar which is what we’re looking at now which is our past customers. And within that loyalty pillar, or I’m calling these pillars. That’s my own lingo word. It’s not industry-wide lingo. But within that loyalty pillar, the most powerful or most profitable segment is gonna be bought X but not Y. And we break this up, we say, “Bought our most popular product, but not our second most popular product. Bought our second most popular product, but not our third most popular product.” So let me show you how we take these even a level deeper of this whole communicating with people based on engagement. So I showed you that we are targeting people who bought X but didn’t buy Y. This is one of our bought X but didn’t buy Y segments.

We’re using a video advertisement, okay, to target them. Now, if they watched this video on Facebook, we created an audience of anyone who watched at least 50% of this video on Facebook but still didn’t buy. So they saw this on…they were people who purchase one thing but not another. We showed them a video advertisement for that other thing. They watched this video. Now some people are watching the video and buying. But other people who are in this audience, and I’m gonna show you this audience here. This is like taking that behavioral segment another level. We are running advertisements like this. Like, “Hey, we know you watched 50% of the video for Boomsilk and still didn’t buy it. Now we’re gonna show you an ad for Boomsilk, that’s an image, right? And we’ve got a bunch of different image ads that we’ve used and these are just…we create, we change this every week. But the point here this is that sort of core fundamental philosophy that I want you to understand which is communicating with people based on what they’ve consumed.

And look at the markup here. It’s about a 10X, $1,700 to make $18,000 on this particular ad set. And if I can pop into here real quick, if I can uncheck this I’ll actually show you the targeting group here, here we go. And what you can see is that this is only spending $10 a day by the way, so it’s not spending a lot of money. And the target group are people who if we scroll down a little bit further here, here it is. People who have consumed 75% of our Boomsilk video that’s running on Facebook but are not yet a buyer. It’s only 4,300 people, so that’s a really small audience but it’s incredibly profitable. I don’t wanna save that. I’ll just cancel out of here. I don’t even know how to cancel that without saving it, so I’ll just skip over.

But the point here is that we are segmenting people. We’re communicating based on what people have done, so we’re asking people to engage with us and then we’re being responsible about that engagement. So we’re saying, “Hey, we’ve got a video we want you to watch.” And then if they watch that video, we’re showing them something else. If they don’t watch the video… The frame here is awareness, retargeting, loyalty. Those are your three pillars and communicate with people based on where they left off. Now, I have a three-part video series where I go really deep into this Facebook video ad stuff, and I’m gonna run a little video for you because this Facebook live for Smart Marketer subscribers is brought to you by Smart Marketer. So I’m gonna show you a quick little video and then we’ll get back into some other stuff I wanna show you. So watch this video about our Facebook video ads training.

Hey, Ezra here, and if you’re interested in how we leverage video advertising to be profitable on Facebook, I put together a three-part video training series. If you click the link above this Facebook live video, you’ll land on this page, which is gonna ask you for your email address. It’s also gonna tell you what’s in the three-part series. So once you enter your email address on this page, you’ll be sent an email that will send you to this video which is kind of how we look at advertising today. We have a video here, it’s 15 minutes long and a PDF. And after you consume this video about kind of, the way to look at advertising, the overview, the eagle-eyed view of how you look at advertising we’ll send you this next video, which is basically how to build out a profitable sales funnel using video ads. It breaks down our video ads, how we do that. There’s also a PDF documentation for this video as well. This is a video too. We’ve got a little bit of long form content that explains what’s in the video, though, I do recommend that you watch the video. And then finally, we have a third video in the series which is our video ad formula, so it’s how we put…

Ezra: You have to tell me when it’s over. Is it over now?

Man 1: No.

Ezra: …put together the videos that we leverage to advertise, and all of these videos lead up to a training program called Facebook Video Ads Mastery that you can check out if you’re interested. But either way, you should go through this three-part training because it will change the way that you look at advertising. So click the link above this video to get access to this page and go through the three-part video training. I’ll see you soon.

So apparently, I’m talking over my own ad because I don’t have my ear buds in to tell me when it’s over. But anyways, I’ve got a three-part video ad training that I’d love you to check out. There’s a link right above this post where you can enter email address and get that training in. Whether or not you decide to check out the course that we have, I think that this training will really help you because we’ve kind of changed the way that we look at advertising, and it’s been very effective for us. We’ve been able to 6X our business this year. We went from a seven figure business to an eight figure business. Fundamentally, with this philosophy, leveraging these strategies that we’ve come up with and video advertising in particular.

So, moving on. A new thing that has come out, it’s the last thing I’m gonna show you today. We’ll make it a short one. But a new thing that’s come out on Facebook that I think is really exciting that I think reinforces this strategy of communicating with people based on their behavior. It’s called engagement audiences, so let me show you what these are. So now, when you’re inside of Facebook, what you can do is you can come…you have this option to create your audiences. There’s a bunch of different types of groups of people that you can create. You can make custom audiences which are people who visited your website and stuff like that. Lookalike audiences and all this stuff, but when you go to custom audience and you click engagement on Facebook, you saw the video ad engagement. That was the audience where I was running those link ads. I was saying, “Hey, anyone who watched 75% of my video advertisement, show them this advert. Show them this link advertisement.” So that’s that.

But there’s this new one that’s brand new that’s for your Facebook page. And when you click on page here what happens is it pops up a window and it says, “You can now create an audience of anyone who’s ever engaged with your page.” And you can set the time frame. And one thing to remember about retargeting audiences, people who’ve followed up with you in the past or who’s engaged with you in the past is that the more recent that engagement happened the more effective that audience will be. So for example, most people set their retargeting audiences to be 30 days. So they say, “Anyone who visited my site in the last 30 days, show them an ad, or anyone who read my article in the last 30 days, show them an ad.” The shorter the window the more profitable. So if you’re on a tight budget, I’d recommend starting with a seven-day window. I don’t know why I had to do the seven for you. I don’t think that’s actually gonna help you get that point any further, but I did just draw that in the air. That happened. So, seven day windows meaning, “Hey, someone who’s on your website in the last seven days or viewed your product in the last seven days is a lot more likely to re-engage with you than someone who viewed in the last 30 days.” So the shorter your window the better.

So now back here into Facebook, these new audiences basically, they’re giving you a new source for behavioral communications. So you can now communicate with people who’ve engaged with your page, or – and now this thing’s freezing – or anyone who’s like engaged with a poster in ad, so if they click like, love, ha-ha, sad, angry, if they shared it if they commented on it. You can build a list of those people, communicate with them. Anyone who’s sent a message to your page and this is kinda cool because you now have the ad unit where you can have an ad that then opens up Facebook Messenger. So if someone has sent a message to your page, you can now have them click an ad that opens up essentially a Facebook messenger.

So what’s coming and what I’m excited about here is post-level engagement audiences. Right now, these audiences are for your whole fan page. Anyone who sent the message to your fan page in the last 30 days, anyone who clicked on any post in your fan page in the last 30 days. But eventually, we will see post-level engagement audiences. So you set this particular post, anyone who clicked like, love. For example, this Facebook live that I’m doing right now is a post, and I will be able to go in and create and audience with people who liked, loved, engaged with, etc., your post, or this post rather.

So, that’s it for today. Let me just take a look and see if I got some questions. Wow, we got a bunch of people with us, that’s super cool. Carol Leeman’s on the line. Dave Newgass is with us. Okay, questions. Is there any discount for the course I follow now, Traffic MBA? Yeah, you can check it out. Go through that training series and then you’ll hear about the course from there. Denny, says I’m a legend. Thanks, dude. Rob Ongo’s here from Maui, I believe. Steven Wagner wants to know, “Who comes up with this stuff first, Ezra or Ryan Deiss?” in his comment because I guess this similar content to Digital Marketer. I actually shared some of this content at the Content and Commerce Summit in Orlando, Florida which is an event they put on there, are a great company. And Molly Pitman who teaches all their traffic stuff is a genius, and we’re in actually close communication. This stuff is our stuff, though.

We’ve got Cathy saying she’s super happy. Jason Gray says, “We don’t all have it yet.” Bruno says, “It’s very advanced stuff.” Victor says, “Me and my partner got your course. You rock.” Thanks, Victor. I appreciate that, man. Any other questions while I got you all here live? That was all I wanted to show you for today, a bit of a short show. Matheson Maggelby, he’s like my best customer and he joined. Welcome, Matheson and Carol Raine.

Harry Gillum’s on the line. Harry’s is in my Blue Ribbon Mastermind, really good dude. Rick, that guy I went to high school with. Big Rick, what’s up, bro? Yeah, man. This is the longest my beard has been. He says my beard is legendary. I’m letting it go, man. My wife hasn’t complained yet. Chris Nelson says, “Awesome stuff, great meeting you at eCommerceFuel.” I just went down to eCommerceFuel Live in Savannah, Georgia. Hadn’t been to Savannah. What a cool place. That was cool.

BL Louis says, “How long after the purchase do you target existing customers?” Day one we’re running ads. So we say, basically, anyone who’s purchased in the last 60 days sees these advertisements. So it could be the very first day after they bought. Now, we also are sending emails, right? So if you purchase from us, we have a whole onboarding pre-arrival sequence. So before our products come, we are sending you emails to get you excited and let you know what’s coming, showing you what’s in the box. After you get our product, we’re sending tracking numbers and stuff, obviously. But after we get our product, we’re saying, “Hey, here’s a piece of content that might help you with it.” And so depending on what you’re selling, right? Smart Marketer, this business that you’re engaging with now is an information company, so we sell informational courses and software as a service. And so, what we’re doing post purchase as far as communication and onboarding and education is a little different than the stuff that we do in our physical products company where we’re actually shipping out physical products to people.

Now, Kenneth Dyer is saying, “What’s up, dude? I heard your talk at eCF. You’re the Facebook king. Question, at eCF, you said, ‘If you want to master something, you should follow the top people from each category.’ Who can you recommend in the various categories in e-commerce?” Okay, so thank you for bringing that up. Actually, what I said was that the key to mastery, the skill set that you want to require as a human being is the skillset of mastery. And simply put, mastery is simply the willingness to put your attention in one area consistently over time. If you pick up the instrument, I don’t know if you can see my instruments here. You pick that thing up, 30 minutes every day you’re gonna get better at it. So it’s really about consistency of attention in one place to develop the skillset of mastery. Now I do also believe that it makes sense to pick one, two, three, four people and consume all their stuff, right?

Find a couple of people that you think are cool, that you think are really good at whatever you’re trying to learn. And just everything they’ve got, go through it because it turns out that subject matter is sort of nebulous, right? And it’s like a language and the more that you do it and the more that you hear and the more that you’re in it, the more it starts to fire. Now, all of the various categories in e-commerce, dude that is like a huge… It’s too big of a question. If you wanna narrow your question down and say, “Who do you think the best conversion people are?” Or whateve,r I’ll answer that.

David’s asking, “Do we target broad to narrow?” So one of my core principles of advertising is that targeting goes from wide to narrow. So you start wide and then you filter down. And these three pillars that I just explained to you kind of are a wide to narrow thing, right? It’s people who don’t know about you yet, people who have engaged with you, and people who have bought from you. So yes, you do start wide to narrow and that is a description of how advertising works.

Jason Gray says, “Do you know when we will get the new page targeting option?” My Facebook rep told me that it’s rolling out to pretty much everyone. And my camera just died here. I went black for a second. Don’t worry I haven’t gone anywhere. We’ve got a couple different cameras here. One of them is this one over here, which I’ll look at now so that you can see that I’m looking at you.

Peggy Reskin says, “Thanks for this useful video.” Peggy who raised me, what’s up, Peggy? Heather Rodriguez in the house, good to catch you live. Mark Lunden says, “So useful, thanks for all you do, much appreciated.” Miko says, “Great stuff, just like your talk.” Okay, Dean Eagle’s got a question here. Feel free to give me the little… I’m going to do it to myself to you can see it happening. Give me these little love things. I like to see them. It’s nice to see that stuff, you know, see it coming in.

So Dean says… Are we back on this camera by the way? Yeah, this is a better camera. You can switch back and forth but… Dean says, “Do you set up the loyalty and retargeting pillar campaigns before you start driving acquisition, or do you make sure acquisition is working well before the others?” I think that…and I think this is the problem that people have is you can’t look at just one. You have to look at all of them together or you don’t get a real picture of what’s possible, right? Obviously, if you don’t have a list of customers, if nobody’s ever bought anything from you, you’re gonna have a hard time in the loyalty pillar because you don’t have a lot of people who are loyal to you yet, right, because they don’t know.

So you’re gonna definitely want…sorry about that. You’re gonna definitely want to set up awareness and acquisition and retargeting at the same time. So basically, what you do is you say, “Okay, these are the new people I think I wanna get in front of, people who live in New York, Texas, California, and Florida who are 30 to 45, who are men, who are interested in CrossFit and who are interested in paleo diets,” right? A really targeted segment of people that you wanna put your message in front of. And I recommend starting somewhat targeted like that to make sure that the message that you have is gonna resonate with that core group of people. And then you track your funnel events. So you say, “Okay, I have a video ad, it leads to an article, that article leads to an offer page, that offer pages leads to a checkout, so I’m gonna create a group of people who land on the article page, a group of people who land on the offer page and a group of people who land on the checkout but don’t buy. And I’m gonna communicate with them in different ways.” So you would set up the retargeting ads and the awareness ads at the same time and then loyalty would come later.

Hey, we’ve got 25 comments on this thing, cool. Kenneth says, “Follow-up. On behalf of my team, who is your favorite SEO guy, search engine, marketing guy, email guy? My skill is Facebook so that means I follow you.” Thanks, dude. Yeah, we’ve got a really good email. What we’re really good at is content amplification. Creating content, automation, advertising. So we’ve got an email marketing e-commerce course that’s coming out that’ll show how we do our blogging, how we do our automated emails and our manual emails. It’s gonna be a really cool course. Digital Marketer, obviously, is fantastic. I would follow Andrew Youderian. I would follow Pep Laya.

For search engine optimization, I’m kind of out of that world. I did a lot of search engine optimization in 2005, 2006, 2007. Haven’t really focused a lot on SEO. I think Neil Patel’s really big. He’s got a blog called QuickSprout and for SEO, I mean, my viewpoint would be, have your content marketing strategy be your SEO strategy, right? Produce really high-quality content.

Okay, Lorenzo says, “What’s the best strategy to scale a winning ad?” There’s a lot of strategies to scale a winning ad, but basically, if you’ve got a piece of creative that’s doing really, really well then what you wanna do is get it in front of more people, so find more audiences. The way that you scale is not actually with a piece of creative, it’s not actually with an ad, it’s with audiences. Audiences provide scale. So putting your message in front of more people who are similar to the people who have responded to your message in the first place. And a good baseline for you is you can spend $100 per day per 100,000 people in your audience. It’s a pretty good baseline to go off of.

Jeremy Lee Henderson, who’s like a black belt in Jujitsu who’s a badass who’s out in Pennsylvania, I think, says my stuff is awesome. Thanks, dude, appreciate it. We got Chris Smith, says, “How long after post changes…” I don’t know what he’s asking, sorry, Chris.

Dave Newgass says, “In this episode of Think Act Get, mastery, what is it? How can you get it and where do I find it?” Okay, so yeah it is like an episode of “Think Act Get.” I have a podcast called “Think Act Get,” you can check it out at thinkactget.com. It’s by James…or with me and James Schramko, and it’s really more about the philosophy and mindset side of thing. We talk about money. We talk about sex. We talk about mastery. We talk about fear. We talk about all kinds of stuff that’s confronting and overwhelming. We talk about being human, and we relate that back to business. It’s a really cool podcast if you’re into that stuff.

Buck Risbey, my man in the house. And then we’ve got John Hunt who’s saying, “For video ads, do we choose video views as the objective, the conversion optimization objective for that particular campaign?” And let me show you what he’s getting at here. So if you’re inside the Facebook Ads manager and you were to…we’ll just go back to my Facebook ads manager here. We’ll unselect these two campaigns. So if you were in this and you were to create a campaign, he’s asking, “Do you use, on your objective, up here on the objective, do you use video views or increased website conversions?” Video views or increased website conversions.

The answer is going to depend on the pillar that you’re advertising in, right? So if you’re advertising in the loyalty pillar to people who are already your fans, who already know about you, who already bought from you, you might wanna use video views because it gets wider exposure. For awareness and retargeting, you’re always gonna use the conversion objective. And the reason is…Facebook won’t tell you this. They’ll tell me this because I spend a lot of money with them, and I’m really tight with them, and we’re one of their bigger advertisers. And we went to Facebook, we spent a day with them and they broke down, it was fascinating. And we cover some of that stuff in the course, actually. You can…above this video, there’s a link. You can opt in and get our video training, or at least three videos in our video training series.

Basically, they told us that Facebook segments people into three segments. So you, as a Facebook user, you are either a converter, a clicker, or a scroller. So they have you tagged as you’re more likely, based on your past history on Facebook, to convert, opt in or fire a conversion action based on all the activity that you’ve done your whole life on Facebook people are tracking that, right? If you click on someone’s ad, then you end up opting into their email list, you end up buying their stuff, you’re firing conversion actions. Now, if you’re a clicker, you’re someone who’s most likely to see a post, click on it, like it, share it, etc., watch the video. And then if you’re a scroller, you’re just someone who scrolls through the feed. You don’t click stuff. You don’t comment on stuff. You don’t share stuff. You don’t really participate.

So if you’re using the video views objective, Facebook’s gonna put you in front of those clickers and scrollers first, and if you’re using the conversion objective they’re gonna first put you in front of the people who are more likely to convert. And this is why Facebook campaigns tend to do worse over time is because first, they put you in front of all the people who they think are gonna be the best, who are gonna convert. And then, as you run out of those, they start putting you in front of the clickers and scrollers and then in front of the people who just do nothing. And that doesn’t mean that you can’t convert those people, it just means it’s a little bit harder. Pepijn, my man, Pepijn is our Chief Platform Officer, and he’s on the court team here at Smart Marketer and he just posted in the URL for thinkactget.com.

Basel wants to know what’s the best type of ad for a jewelry store? I think video ad. I think starting with video. The reason I think starting with video is because Facebook is making it really affordable to run video ads because they know that most people watch the video and never leave Facebook, and Facebook doesn’t want people to leave Facebook. They want them to stay in the club. So if you’ve got a video advertisement and you’re willing to put a video out there and let people watch it on Facebook without ever leaving, they’re gonna make that easy and cheap for you.

However, if you’re smart, you then track who watched 80% or more of the video and you run an ad with a link to your product offering. So video ad for sure. I know a lot of people who are crushing it with video ads. Chris says, “How long after running page post engagement until you change to website conversions?” We never run page post engagement. A lot of people do this thing where they create a page post and then they optimize it for engagement. I don’t wanna be in front of people who are gonna engage with the post. I wanna be in front of people who are more likely to convert. And this is the thing that I see wrong with most campaigns. Tell Facebook the objective that you’re trying to achieve. If you’re trying to achieve conversions, and you’re telling Facebook to just get you engagement, there’s a disconnect there. And every time we switch to that conversion objective we do a lot better.

Jeremy wants to know what we’re using for our live streams. Is it Wirecast? Yes, we’re using Wirecast with multiple input sources so we’ve got our video, computer here, and we’ve got our video feeds, and we’re running…we have another computer back there that we’re using to run our ads. Speaking of, which, I’m going to…this live webcast by Smart Marketer is brought to you by Zipify Pages. Now, if you’re a Shopify business owner, Zipify Pages is sort of a necessary tool. It’s a tool that allows you to build landing pages, direct response sales funnels, video sales letters, all kinds of really cool landing pages right into your Shopify store. My viewpoint is that by the end of 2017, pretty much every Shopify business owner will be using this thing because it’s that powerful. It’s in the beta stage right now. I wanna show you a little video about it, and I’ll tell you a little bit more about it. Check out this video, and then I’ll get back to your questions.

Man 2: Looking for a quick and easy way to create high converting landing pages and sales funnels for your Shopify store? Well first, what is a landing page? Well, it’s any specific page that you send traffic to, to prompt a specific result. Let’s say a newsletter signup or a holiday sales page, or any goal that you might have. And if you create a series of pages that share a common goal, let’s say a landing page, a sales page and a post-checkout thank you page, then you have a sales funnel.

Landing pages are perfect for growing your business by boosting leads and sales, but right now there’s a big problem. To create a landing page for your store, you can either hire a designer and a developer to create one for you, and that takes time and money, or you can use a landing page builder, which is faster and less expensive. But the problem is none of the landing page builders on the market integrate with your Shopify store, so you have to deal with confusing plugins and sub domains and skewed analytics which is extra cost and extra hassle.

Well now, there’s a solution. Introducing Zipify Pages. Zipify Pages is an e-commerce landing page and sales funnel builder that seamlessly integrates with your Shopify store. Start by choosing a template from our ever growing template library. These page templates come directly from our eight-figure, e-commerce stores that are built on Shopify. We test what works and we put our best templates into Zipify Pages. After selecting a template, it’s easy to customize it to fit your store by using our drag and drop editor. You can choose from our collection of conversion elements or blocks, as we like to call them, like featured products, countdown timers, social group sections and more. Once you have the page just the way you like it, click publish. It’s as easy as that. You now have an amazing new page published right to your Shopify store. Your page will look great on any device. It’s 100% mobile responsive and all of the data is under one domain. So tracking leads and sales and Facebook is easy, simple, and accurate. High-quality landing pages and sales funnels as soon as you need them. Zipify Pages, check it out today.

Ezra: Zipify Pages. I think that it’s the most powerful thing we’ve ever created from a software as a service perspective. It’s in beta right now. We’re gonna go public with it in February, so a couple of months. If you wanna get in on the beta, if you’re interested in Zipify Pages, send an email to help@smartmarketer.com. We’ll give you a discount. We’ll have you be part of our R&D team and it’s really incredible. I mean, such a good tool. So back to the questions. And again, that’s help@smartmarketer.com. Just say, “Hey, I saw Ezra live on Facebook. Super interested in testing out your Zipify Pages beta program.” We’ll get you into the program, we’ll give you a discount.

All right, so continuing on, we have Miko saying, “Which conversion event would you generally target? Add to basket or purchase?” And by the way, I didn’t expect this to be a Q&A session, but I’m super happy that all these questions are coming in. So thanks for asking questions, and I will answer them. So Miko says, “Which conversion event would you optimize for?” So you can see here on my computer that there’s this objective that we’re setting up our campaigns. We’re saying “Hey, Facebook, we want you to increase conversions on our website.” Meaning we want you to get people who are gonna opt in. And then when you continue and you’re setting up your ad set, what you get to do is decide to optimize that ad set for a particular conversion event which is gonna be up here. So you can use a bunch… You can say, “I want you to get me people who are likely to add a product to the cart. I want you to get people who are likely to purchase.”

I always use the add to cart conversion event to optimize for, and the reason I do that is because when you optimize for a mid-funnel conversion event, that’s what I call it. A mid-funnel, meaning in the middle of your funnel, people are adding a product to their cart. At the end of your funnel, they’re purchasing. You’re giving Facebook more data. Facebook on that conversion event, right, because an add to cart happens six times more often than a purchase happens. So if you let Facebook optimize for add to cart, they’re gonna look for people who are most likely to add the product to the cart which is gonna end up being people are most likely to purchase, but they have more data to use when they’re optimizing for that.

Cathy says that “With a video ad, does it need to be a Facebook live video or just a video you upload?” Well, I would actually recommend that your video advertisements for your product or your service, don’t be Facebook live videos. I mean, while we use that in certain cases for our software, for our information, stuff like that, but if it’s for an e-commerce product or a service, or something like that, you probably want it to be more focused on the story behind the brand or the benefit that the product gives. So basically, most ads that I see are video advertisement that’s show and tell. So it’s showing you what the product does and it’s telling you about the benefit of owning that product. “Hey…” I saw one yesterday. “Get this shirt that will make your belly sucked in.” Or whatever, it’s this thing that makes you look trimmer or slimmer than you are by squeezing you. It doesn’t look very comfortable. I don’t wanna wear it, but it showed people… It was kinda cool. It was show and tell and it went straight to the product offer page, so it was a cool video. So I recommend that your videos be benefit-driven and that they be about the story of who you are and who your brand is and that they demonstrate the ownership benefit of the product.

Now, Martin Williams, what’s up, Martin? Says, “Is it advisable to try and generate a phone call with a video ad? If so, any tips on how to do that?” Well, a phone sale funnel meaning where you’re driving people to call you on the phone is generally only used for higher ticket items. Dude, you don’t need a phone call to sell a $50 backpack, right? Someone doesn’t need to get on the phone for that. But if you’re selling a service that’s several hundred dollars or even a coaching program or something that’s several thousand dollars or a lot of these lead generation places, which are generating leads for cosmetic dentistry and stuff like that will go to phone calls. And I think the best way to do that would be to have a video ad, again, about the benefit of engaging with that particular service provider and then I would run it only on mobile, and I’d have it go to a page that was click to call like, “Click here to talk to a specialist right now.” They click the button, it dialed the person up. So I would do that particularly to mobile phones, Android and iOS devices, Apple or Google phones basically and have it be click to call.

Now, Govind is saying, “Hey, Ezra Firestone.” Using my last name, dude, getting official. “Any tips on how to grow our Instagram following?” Yeah, dude, run ads. Advertising is the fastest way to grow your following, right? Use direct response advertising to get your brand out there. Now of course… Check this out, I’m getting a call as we speak, that’s kinda weird. I’m gonna decline it. Look, you can post content to Instagram. You can hashtag a whole bunch. You can follow people. And yeah, you might grow your Instagram following that way but my philosophy and the way that I’ve grown several businesses..

I now have three multi-million dollar businesses in different industries operating simultaneously with the same team. And every one of those businesses the bread and butter, the backbone is content amplification through paid advertising. I create relevant and useful content that I think that target demographic will find valuable, and I give it away for free, and I spend money to advertise it. And then once people are like, “Man, this is a cool brand.” I say, “Hey, by the way, we have these other things that we think you might like that are relevant to you that you can buy.” That’s the whole strategy in a nutshell and it works really well. I think you should do the same. Amplify content via paid advertising, get people to engage with you, start a conversation and then make an offer that is gonna be hard for them to refuse. Actually, offer people stuff they want. It’s kind of the secret.

Jason Spar, my man, also in my Blue Ribbon Mastermind. Dude, what’s up? Says, “Thanks for keeping us on the cutting edge, EZRA.” All in capital letters. You’re welcome, bro. We got David Heinz says, “It’s badass.” Jeremy Lee Henderson says, “Do you ever turn you live casts into actual ads?” All the time, everyone we do. For Boom by Cindy Joseph, if you check out our fan page. Don’t go here yet, I’m gonna do this for a second. I’ve got my man Ant Charles on the switchboard rocking it.

So if you look at my Boom by Cindy Joseph fan page here, you can see that we have these Facebook lives that we do. I’m just gonna zoom in a little bit so you can see these. Let me scroll down here, find a Facebook live. We haven’t done one in a week or two because we’ve been a little busy. These are all just pieces of content that we produced. Imagery, may be a while… Oh, here we go. So this is a Facebook live, right? This is us sharing one of our Facebook live videos. Let’s see if we can actually find a post where we did go Facebook live. May be a while, we do a lot of engagement here.

Here we go. This is another one that we shared, but this was basically a live video that we did and then basically, when we do these live videos, we then… Now, here’s one. This is perfect. So we do these live videos, we talk about some stuff. We’ve always got to link back to our website on them or link back to an offer. Then we amplify these. We turn these into an advertisement and we run this as an ad to our fans, subscribers, and buyers. So at the same time that we’re targeting people with sales messaging, we’re also amplifying content. So you don’t ever just see from one of my brands, “Buy my stuff, buy my stuff.” That’s not cool. People don’t wanna just be sold to, right? They wanna be engaged with. They wanna be in a conversation with your brand about a subject matter that’s greater than just whatever you’re selling. So yeah, you should turn your live casts into ads.

Stephan wants to know, “When can we get Zipify Pages? I’m already on the list but no news about it.” It’s available, dude. We’re in beta. Go to email help@smartmarketer.com and say, “Hey, I wanna get in the beta for Zipify Pages.” Please do that now and we’ll get you in today. We got a couple hundred people in the beta. It’s going great. We’re adding in new features every day. We just finished two new templates that are going in there. For those of you that have never seen inside Zipify Pages, it’s crazy, you guys. Basically, we have all these templates in here and you can choose them, and they’re all based on what’s working for us, right? These templates are based on stuff that we are using in our business that’s working. You can add or remove elements. You can say, “I wanna throw in a new piece of content. Maybe I want a product offer and a countdown timer, and then I wanna set this countdown timer to countdown 12 hours every time someone lands on the page, and when that runs out, it’ll show this content that’s below.” It’s just an incredibly powerful landing page builder. And we don’t have the full content catalog as far as training on how to use it. It’s still in beta. But once we produce all of the videos that kinda show you everything this thing can do, your business basically won’t be able to operate without it.

All right. Oh, Matt Callan’s in the house. My man Matt Callan, what’s up, bro? That guys a legend. John says, “Hey, Ezra. Thanks for putting on live video. I work in the financial industry which is absolutely incredibly regulated when it comes to online marketing. Will Facebook ads be a viable option for advertising retirement, insurance, investments, business planning, executive bonuses?” Dude, the financial industry is one of the largest spenders. I don’t know if that’s a correct word but they spend a lot of money amplifying ads and absolutely yes. You could… Oh, man, I’m late for a call it turns out. All right, well…

John O’Connor’s in the house, Elan’s in the house. Pepijn, who’s my project manager is texting me saying, “Hey, you’re late for a call.” I’m gonna push it back 10 minutes so I can stay on with you guys a little bit longer. So we’ve got… Yeah, so you can run ads for sure in that industry. Rob Burns is in the house. Hot Rob Burns, not hot Rod, hot Rob sells hot sauce. I mean, he doesn’t actually sell hot sauce. He makes like crazy intense hot sauce. He’s a beast. He also has a cool company where he does videos for e-commerce businesses. I owe him, I think, an article about how we’re using his business so that I can share it with you guys. So you’ll be hearing a little bit about Video Telepathy from me coming up soon.

Now, we’ve got John O’Connor. John O’Connor who is the guy who coaches, speaks at my events, eCommerce All-Stars. He and I go way back. He’s seen this thing since before it existed. He knew me when I was managing the yoga studio so many years ago. But JOC, who’s turning 42 on Saturday, so let’s all wish John a happy birthday, is competing in his very first Jujitsu tournament in New York City on the 19th. I think it’s the IBJJF Pros, so if you wanna see John O’Connor live, show up there.

But we’re gonna be producing a project management course called the Six Week Sprint, I believe, it’s gonna be called. But it’s about how we manage projects because a lot of being effective in your business and in your life comes down to how you’re managing projects. And so it’s a very important part of business that nobody wants to hear about or buy. It’s hard to say, “Let me sell you project management information.” Right? But Facebook advertising is a lot sexier. People are a lot more interested in Facebook advertising. But things like infrastructure and project management are as important if not more than your advertising strategy, so that would be fun.

Let’s see, Rob Burns wants to know how he can get girls to like him and why are my guitars so small? Rob Burns is a goofball. Okay, Adrian says… Now we’ve got someone below him correcting him. It’s a ukulele. Meryl says, “Awesome, thank you, Ezra. We use your philosophy and tactics on Peachymama store. We’ve also installed your one click. Helps a lot. Thanks so much.” Well, you’re welcome. I’ve got a couple of people sharing the video. Alex Piem is here saying I rock. Thanks, dude. Kenneth Dryer says, “Why do we have to pay $400 to be in the beta program?” I’m over… Okay, so this is a software as a service, meaning it’s a software that you’re buying from me that I’m providing to you as a service. And I’ve spent over $100,000 and over a year of my time developing this software. And it’s gonna be more expensive when we come out with it publicly, so by being in the beta, we’re giving you a discount to beta test it and it’s actually really sound. We haven’t had really any bugs yet. We’re just adding in new features that people want. So yeah man, it’s pay to play. If you wanna play with this thing, if you wanna use it in your business, you gotta pay for it. Will it make you considerably more than that over the lifetime of you using it each year? Absolutely. Yeah, it’s not a free beta program. Sorry. If I made it sound like it was free, it is not. You gotta pay for it, man, and that’s cool. It’s worth it.

Phil’s in the house. What’s up, Phil? Chill with Phil on Thursdays. Phil runs the biggest Shopify Facebook group in the world I think. You just Google Shopify Phil, you’re gonna find him. He does his own Facebook lives. He’s a really smart marketer. Get in there with that guy.

Shane says, “Hey, Ezra. I’m in Jen’s social guild. What are your top three tips for getting social media side of your business off the ground?” Step one, produce a piece of content every week. A video, an image, and article, do that. Once a week, you produce a piece of content. Now the beauty of producing a video once a week is that videos are easily translatable into text, content, audio content, and image content, right, because they are video. There’s image and there’s audio so you can transcribe it, turn it into an article, or make highlights. You can take a screenshot and put a quote on there and now you’ve got an image. So video really lends itself to repurposing well, which is why we always start with video and then we repurpose that. We pull quotes out. We make quote images. We transcribe it and we turn it into articles. So one piece of content a week, spend $10 a week amplifying that to your fans and that’ll kick your social media really off the ground a lot because people will see your content, they’ll share it, they’ll engage with it so that’ll be my strategy there.

What is Phil doing? He’s posting links in here. Christopher Vogelman’s in the house. And we’ve got Alex Vermont, “How do we get into the beta?” Email help@smartmarketer.com and say, “Hey, I wanna be a part of the Zipify beta.” Rob Burns said, “I wanna ask how much will it save you and how much will it make your life easier?” Yeah, dude. Oh my, God, it will save you so much money not having to have a designer and developer. But I didn’t come on here to pitch my Zipify Pages. I just wanted to show an ad about it and if you’re interested in it, check it out. I will have a pitch for it. I will do a whole product launch and I’ll have sales videos and webinars. I’m going to sell it very heavily because I really think it’s like…it’s changed our business. We built this for ourselves and that’s our strategy. We build stuff we want and then we offer it to people because if we want it, then other people might as well.

Laura Betterly. Laura Betterly and I go back since the beginning. She’s old school in the game. Laura Betterly was producing IM courses and information courses like before everyone, so what’s up, Laura Betterly? She was sending email back in the 90s. CJ deSousa is with us. And I think that’s the end of our… Oh, we got one more question from David Heinz. “How would you use Facebook video ads for affiliate marketing?” Well, affiliate marketing these days is generally you’re linking to a CPA offer, right, where you’re trying to get someone to enter an email or become a lead or buy something for a commission or you’re sending people to other people’s stuff. And basically, what you would do is you would review whatever the thing is you’re sending people to on video and then send them there. That’d be the easiest way to do it.

Well, I’m gonna play an ad here for our Facebook Video Ads training. I’d love for you to check it out. There’s a link right above this video that you can click on so I’m gonna play a little message about that and if you’re interested, you can click the link above this video to check out that training series. As we’re here for Smart Marketer live, thanks for all the questions. I’ll catch up with you next week. Check out this little bit of information about our Facebook Video Ads training.

Hey, Ezra here. And if you’re interested in how we leverage video advertising to be profitable on Facebook, I’ve put together a three-part video training series. If you click the link above this Facebook live video, you’ll land on this page which is gonna ask you for your email address. It’s also gonna tell you what’s in the three-part series. So once you enter your email address on this page, you’ll be sent an email that will send you to this video which is kind of how we look at advertising today. We have a video here. It’s 15 minutes long and a PDF. And after you consume this video about kind of the way to look at advertising, the overview, the eagle eye view of how you look at advertising, we’ll send you this next video which is basically how to build out a profitable sales funnel using video ads. It breaks down our video ads, how we do that. There’s also a PDF documentation for this video as well. This is a video too, and we’ve got a little bit of sort of long form content that explains what’s in the video, but I do recommend that you watch the video. And then finally, we have a third video in the series which is our video ad formula, so it’s kind of how we put together the videos that we leveraged to advertise. And all of these videos lead up to a training program called Facebook Video Ads Mastery that you can check out if you’re interested. But either way, you should go through this three-part training because it will change the way that you look at advertising. So click the link above this video to get access to this page and go through the three-part video training. I’ll see you soon.

All right, well that’s it. Thanks so much for hanging out with me, Smart Marketer live, November 17th, 2016. We’ll do these every week at 3:00 p.m. Eastern on Thursdays so I’ll see you next Thursday at 3:00 p.m. Be there and we’ll cover some more case studies and some of the things that we’re doing. I really appreciate you hanging out with me. And I love these questions. Keep asking them. I’ll keep answering them after I go through the content that I want to share with you. See you soon.