Facebook Ads For Thought Leaders with David Schloss

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap them in bacon. For business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business, pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week, our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo. All right, welcome back. I am excited to allow you to eavesdrop upon my call today. If you have listened to this show for any amount of time, you'll know a couple things. Number one, I think of this as the single most selfish podcast on all of itunes because you're about to hear conversations that I would be having anyway with people that I want to have these conversations with and learning things that are directly applicable in my business. This is not a podcast simply to help tell touchy feely stories and talk about all of the emotional moments that I know a lot of podcasts do. But I know that your time is valuable, my time is valuable. And I want you, when you're done listening to one of these episodes, to be like, man, I can't believe I didn't pay Brad for that. That is insane. Like, I got more value, actionable value out of his podcast than I have out of multiple courses that I've purchased, etc. And you always know that the questions I'm asking are the ones that I personally want to know the answer to. That being said, sometimes if you're brand new at this whole thing of business and marketing and everything that goes into that, you may feel a little lost at some times because we don't always cover the most fundamental of concepts. And that's okay because there's always ways that you can go learn the fundamentals. And oftentimes some of the guests that I that I interview have more resources that you can explore. This episode today is going to be a higher level conversation than you may be used to hearing about. We're going to talk about primarily Facebook advertising and it is always one of the most popular topics on my entire podcast and because everybody wants to know how to get the monies from the Facebooks. And I want to introduce you to David Schloss. Now, David and I have known each other for quite some time now through mutual friends. We've worked together in the past and I've just always been super impressed by his mastery of Facebook advertising. And you can talk to 10 different Facebook media buyers and get 10 different, completely different strategies. One of the things I know about David's is that his stuff works. He's been doing this stuff since 2007. Started in his college apartment. And over the years he's helped hundreds of businesses improve everything from their website traffic to their customer acquisition using social advertising. His business is called Convert roi and it takes complicated social ad plans and turns them into easy to follow revenue producing campaigns. And this dude is managing over two and a half million dollars a month in paid advertising via Facebook and Instagram. It's also rated as one of the top experts to watch by Forbes and has been featured all over the place from entrepreneur.com, business Insider, HuffPost, and now on the big boy of them all, bacon wrap business. David, welcome.

Appreciate it, man. Thanks for the awesome intro.

Yeah, buddy. So it was good to run into you when you came out to San Diego a couple weeks ago and we reconnected and always good to hear from you. I mean, as you know, we see each other what's going on on Facebook all the time, which is kind of cool. Makes you feel like you didn't really lose contact with somebody. And one of the things I always love is you're always sharing on Facebook, like some of the really cool stuff that's working. You're sharing what the Facebook ad reps are telling you and whatnot, man. Like if anybody's been in this world of trying to buy ads and make stuff work on Facebook for any time, we've seen just some really dramatic changes over the past year, two years, five years, etc. And it's always changing. Right? So it's, it can be really frustrating. I know for myself because I'm not like I set, when I'm working with myself, my own businesses and my clients, I set the strategy, the higher level strategy for the media buyer. But tactically, I don't have the time and inclination to kind of keep track of everything that's working. So that's what I wanted to talk to you about today is what's really working? What can people kind of walk away with and go, man, I really feel a little bit more enlightened that I spent the time on the show today.

Yeah, I mean when it comes to Facebook, you're very much right about it evolving and changing constantly. You know, at one point, and I'm sure you remember this, years ago, Facebook would make algorithm changes or platform changes maybe once every quarter. You know, just to make it aligned with whenever they would do their quarterly reports, they would maybe do an a, some sort of platform change or maybe update some interest and things like that for a week out of the three months that things are going on. And it was great because we would practically be know exactly when things were going to occur. We knew when our results were going to be bad. We were able to forecast things. Now forget it. Like, we have no idea when algorithm changes are taking place. And if we do find it out, it's because a group of media buyers come together, analyze results of one another, and go, yeah, something's wrong. Something doesn't make sense. And it may not be the most efficient way of doing things, but it still works in a sense where, you know, if I get together with 20 or 30 other media buyers and we're all seeing downward trend, at least we could share it with our audience and say, hey, for all of you running ads, it might be time to slow things down a little bit. Yeah, but the old days of running ads, which old days really can just go back as far as three years ago, wasn't even that long.

The ancient times.

Yeah. Just even three years ago, we would be able to forecast when problems would occur. Literally know exactly the day that things might go wrong and prepare for it. And now you're. You're sort of in this waiting pattern for announcements from Facebook or something gets out to the general public, like the Cambridge Analytica stuff that went on. And you know, for the average person that runs ads, like, it's really not a huge deal. But then when you look at the general public who's running ads at, you know, $20 a day, 50 bucks a day, and they're just trying to build some awareness around their brand, it could freak you out. It could freak you out a lot because you constantly feel like you're behind or that Facebook's lying to you or that they're not giving you what you need in order to be successful. So it's a ever evolving and progressing ecosystem is the way that I look at it. Because, you know, Facebook knows they're not perfect. Even Google got their stuff together when they went through their whole, you know, issues couple of years ago.

Those of us remember it. Yeah. Those of us who've been in the business for a while remember it.

Yeah. When they were shutting down accounts left and right and there was very little customer support. I mean, now I could literally call a number and be in contact with a rep in five minutes. At Google, you couldn't do that five years ago. Four years ago. Right.

And luckily, Facebook does have reps now, but it's still not. I mean, you have to be doing some good volume to get really good service.

Yeah, it's. It's definitely a volume game. Like they have different levels of representatives that can help you. But even the lowest of the low when it comes to their support, reps don't truly understand the full makeup of the ad platform, which is a problem. Whereas when I talk to people at AdWords, they seem to understand the platform inside and out, even if it's someone who joined the team maybe six months ago. And so that, that seems to be an issue for a lot of advertisers where, you know, they have a rep and they think that this reps gonna give them the solution to solving the problem around their ads that aren't converting. And then lo and behold, you try something out from those reps and nothing's really changed. And so, you know, when it comes to the Facebook world, it's just as cutthroat as it was five years ago in terms of the competition. But you have to understand that it's a much of a learning game as it is for me, as it is for them. So I'm constantly learning. So if the media buyer and me is learning something every single week, reading blogs every day, watching YouTube videos, you got to think that the average business owner doesn't realize that they need to do the same.

You know, you just brought up a great point there and just to kind of diverge a little bit because, you know, we both work with clients, we're both consultants, and I tell a lot of my clients, like, listen, you're. You're paying me as much for what I'm paying attention to that you're not like that. The stuff that'll affect you because you're running multiple aspects of your business. I'm paying attention to a lot of the big things, but I'm paying attention to a lot of the little stuff. That's one of the reasons I do this show, is so that I can pay attention to what's working, what's not working. And you can start to, you know, do triage on a failing business, a failing campaign, a lot quicker, simply by paying attention to that stuff. And a lot of business owners do. They just don't have time to manage the microscopic thing. That's why they pay people like yourself, like me, our retainers, in order to help them navigate this area. So what are some of the things. Let me ask you this. On your aspect of the business, who would you say that the clients, the types of clients you work with are predominantly. And granted, we've got local businesses, we've got Professional services and experts and thought leaders and course providers and coaches and consultants and E commerce. I mean, do you do a little bit of everything or do you kind of have a sweet spot?

Well, all the ones you just mentioned are like 90% of my clients. So when it comes to, I call them digital publishers. So essentially they're putting out content to where maybe they're looking for coaching students, maybe they have books, they promote, they speak on stage, or maybe they just teach something around certain subjects, like how to get into real estate investing, how to get into E commerce. Right. So they're essentially educating the masters. Yeah, yeah. Thought leaders. Perfect. And so I work with a lot of those types. Not because it's an easy cash grab like some people believe, or that it's a easy industry to get into. It's actually not easy at all.

Not at all.

But it's one of those things where I've just been in the space of helping people build businesses and educate the masses for over 10 years. That's where I got my start, was trying to become an influencer at 18 years old, teaching people how to build a business online. So I just stuck with my roots. And naturally, over time, I built up this network of individuals who teach others what they've done for the last 10, 15, 20 years. So I work with a lot of people in, let's say, for example, real estate. My first client ever was in real estate, in the investing world of real estate. And even to this day, I still call that person a digital publisher because a lot of real estate investors are showing other people how they do it and they're doing it through webinars, coaching, maybe they do group coaching or mentorship style of educating. And so they're just, you know, sending people to webinars or getting people on the phone and trying to close them into becoming a client or customer.

Yep. So let's dive deeper into this now. So talk about a couple, a couple of the things that maybe were working recently, and there's some things that aren't working. And I think if anybody's been buying ads, knows that, you know, Facebook has taken away some of the partner categories and some of the ability to do that. But are there any other big things that, you know, a lot of people are doing and maybe in the past six months or so just have not been working so well?

Well, I mean, there's, there's obviously going to be some people who are still experiencing the amazing side of doing all these things I'm going to mention. So, you know, you can you got to look at it from your own personal results. But for example, in my own world, we've constantly sent people direct to auto webinars for years, right? Straight to a registration page, get on the webinar, buy it, yes or no, and then that's it, right?

Yeah.

Nowadays there's a more in, there's more depth to it. So you find that retargeting sequences are far more lengthy. Meaning, like sometimes it takes someone as long as 45 days before they buy your thousand dollar course. Before, I used to just send a ton of traffic to a registration page. You know, a thousand people sign up for this auto webinar. 500 show up and view it. And then maybe, you know, 20, 30, 50 people buy.

Right.

It was very easy math. You would just know for every dollar you put in, you'll make three or four back, sometimes even six back. And it was just easy, you know, just send as many people as you can. Now the marketplace has evolved in a sense where they understand what's going on. They know when it's an auto webinar, they know when it's live, they know when you're faking that it's live. And they also know, they also know that in an automated webinar, sometimes the player controls are there, sometimes they're not. And the ones that have a player control, they're going to skip to the end and look up what the offer is. It's all the stuff that we use to hide.

And especially if you're selling any kind of things, things to marketers or business people who kind of get it. You know, if you're, if you're in a totally separate niche, like you're selling knitting or whatever, it might be a little different. But anybody who's tech savvy knows, okay, I know how to figure this out. I know how to find what you're, you know, get to the damn point. I'm tired of making you feel as though it's like it's not alive. It's, it's evergreen. It's a video on demand. And you're, you're right. This was, you know, with some of my clients, I noticed a big drop off in that working, which is sending traffic to exactly like you said registration page, automated webinar. I'd have one or two little retargeting ads and it worked for a while. Stopped working.

It's not necessarily not working, it's just, it has to be more in depth, meaning your retargeting might have to be that the first 14 days that someone's on a retargeting list, they're getting success story videos from some of your best students. And then from day 15 through 30, they're getting objection videos from you where you're answering questions around what may be stopping them from buying. And then day 31 through 45, they're getting another set of success stories, but this time from people who are starting their first business. Right. So now you're having to sort of manipulate the process of getting someone to fully trust you. And before, it used to be that if you delivered an ad to someone on Facebook and they clicked it and there was an assumed level of trust already I trust you enough to click on your ad and watch your webinar. Now most people look at ads and go, I don't trust this person. From the very beginning, they don't trust you. And so you have to establish that trust in a much slower fashion. The ones who already trust you, maybe they've seen your content in the past and they've seen that you've been educating first before selling, they naturally will go through the progression of at least listening to your webinar. But there's more assumed risk, there's more assumed dishonest honesty. So there's a lot more convincing that goes into the webinar world than even just six to 12 months ago.

Right, yeah, I've noticed that as well. So let's talk about some. Let's talk about a campaign. Let's talk about what to do. Like, I want people to walk out of here with a, with a sore hand or reminding themselves like, oh, crap, I've got to go listen to this like three or four more times because this David dude really knows what the hell he's talking about. So let's map out an ideal, at least in the top level strategy for what you would do. You're a thought leader and you've got a product or service you're selling, whether it's a digital course or coaching or something of that nature, or you're a consultant and you are trying to get, trying to really establish your presence and do this in a way that does roi. Let's talk about what that might look like tactically.

Sure. So the process I'm going to outline here are for the people who actually want to do the work. Okay. So there's no shortcut here. This is just the real way of doing this. If you want your, let's say your first ever webinar promotion to actually work instead of having to do it over and over and over.

Yep.

Or any sort of promotion, it could be getting people on the phone. So what I find is working today is creating content that is micro. So micro being 60 seconds or less. If you, let's say you're doing something that's Instagram, short form Facebook video, maybe something you want to post on YouTube as well. But it's like the tip of the day type of thing. And the reason why I say that is because you want to create sort of, let's say three to five of those videos that sort of become your pillar content. Your content that you're going to become well known for. That if you pieced it all together, it might come up to one core strategy that might be involved in, let's say in my case, five tips to promote a webinar. So it's successful from day one. Right. So instead of just launching one video that's five minutes long, I'm gonna do it as five one minute videos, easier to consume. Right. And you could take people down one video after another. People who watch 25 or 50% of video one, show them video two. Right. And you just keep them going down the line. Now the reason why you want to do that is because what you're doing is you're developing, once again, like I mentioned, trust within the marketplace. Now, just like any other ad, you could always split, test your content, right. You can create 30 pieces of content at a minute a piece and then find the five most popular and use those as your pillar pieces of content that you would promote to the masses. Right. But the goal here is that you have five micro pieces that you eventually are going to be using to develop video audiences.

Let me interject real quick here. Okay, let's say there's five videos now, five pieces of pillar content. Are you saying only to like to show maybe the primary piece of content and then show video two to the people who watched only like a 25 to 50% of video one or, or to put all five of them out there and build a, I mean assuming that these videos are not necessarily sequential, that they have to see them or put all of them out there and let them all start to build an audience as well. So that somebody might see video one, they may see video four, the next day they may see video two, which one of those?

So if you're going to go the route of creating multiple pieces, meaning like.

Let'S just say 25. Let's just say, let's just say it's five.

Yeah. If it's just five, you're going to have to show them all.

Okay.

Right. So you're going to. You're going to put all five out there, one a day or one every other day, and you're going to see which one's getting the most response. And the reason for that is because the one that ends up getting the most response, in this case if you only created five, is that that ends up becoming your viral piece or the one that you become known for. Right. So that one tip that you're delivering might be something that people have never heard of before, they never thought of before, and naturally gets shared and commented, liked quite a bit. And because of that, it builds up one heck of an audience. Right. People who watch 50%, 75%, 100% of the video. You're getting all the engagers, you know, the like, comments and shares. You're getting all those people created into a custom audience. Because your whole goal here is that you're creating a list of people alternative to an email list, but you're creating a list of people that when you decide to launch a webinar or you decide to do a application, the phone call model, these are going to be the first people that you advertise to, because they obviously like what you're creating. Yep. And so if you only create five pieces, there's nothing sequential about it, but at least you want to make it to where each content makes sense to go along with each other. Right. So if I'm going to be talking about Facebook ads, I want to make sure that all five of those pieces focus on a different piece of the Facebook ad environment. I don't want one video to be about Facebook, one about YouTube, one about Twitter. Unless my goal is to see what my audience is most responsive to.

Yes. Now let me ask, on calls to action on those, are you doing some of those without calls to action and just using those to build up video view audience, or do all of those videos, do you suggest having a specific cta?

You might. If you're going to only create five, you're going to have a specific CTA at the end of each one.

Like probably more. Yeah, you have less.

Exactly. And if you have, like I mentioned, more videos, like, let's just say 10. For this example, you have 10 pieces and you know that one set of five is sequential to each other and the other set of five is sequential to each other, then you might not make a CTA until day three.

Bingo.

Right. Or video three. But in this case, if we're talking about the minimum viable product here, like we're just creating five videos altogether. Then you're going to have a CTA at the end of each one of them. But the CTA might shift. So for example, on day one, you might say, you know, if you'd like to learn more about this subject, I put together a free training. Right. And then blah, blah, blah, blah, from there in day two, you might say, hey, I put together a free session. So you're just changing the language. That's really what you're doing. You're just changing the language. Once again, you could see whether or not free session, free training, free webinar, you could split test your language, these videos too. Because funny thing that you could figure out is with that same language change that you're making at the end of each video, you could test that in your ads. And if you notice that more people are making it to the end of your videos and clicking through to the link, which the link could be straight to a webinar page, you can see which of those videos generated the most clicks at the very end.

Yeah. And you can also change up what calls to action you ask for. So instead of sending over to a, to a webinar registration page, you can do a lead gen ad. You can have them, you can have them message you. And there's a whole bunch of stuff that you can do with messenger bots. I've done some other episodes on messenger bots and I've used them pretty successfully in some areas.

Yep.

And I'll actually digress. I'll share a strategy that I've used here a few times and I've really liked it. And I've used it in coordination with Facebook ads as well. So especially if trying to break into, you know, trying to make a splash in a, in a market where not everybody knows you as the expert. So I bought a business last year and I didn't know really anything about that business, but I found the most popular blog post that had kind of like a, kind of a checklist. Like, it was a really useful blog post, like, how to do this? And there were like 20 different steps and it was very detailed. So I created, and I created a post and I laid them all out and I was like, if you're wanting to do this, this is really how I would do it. This is where you should start. And I would lay it all out and it was like a 1500 word or a thousand to 1500 word post. Like really long but useful. I did just sporadic bullet points just to make it a little bit more Readable. But the entire goal for that I was trying to put in the person's head was two things. Number one, wow, this is really good. Like, this is really useful. Number two, this is really inconvenient as hell to read on Facebook. Like, I want this, but I want to read it. So what I would do is I would tell people at the top and the bottom of the post, and I was like, wow, this is. This post is longer than I thought. If you want a PDF or a printable PDF of this post, just leave a comment and let me know. By the way, you can also send them over to a squeeze page. I did the leave a comment, let me know because it fired up a manychat messenger bot. And then it would say, hey, I saw you comment on that post. Thanks. Let me know if you know what's your email and I'll send it to you. So I wanted to build my messenger bot, but what this allowed me to do in creating a really rich post up front is a couple things psychologically is, number one, I demonstrated the value. I wasn't saying give me your email and then I'll give you something valuable. It's like, no, here it is. I'm gonna give you something very valuable but somewhat inconvenient. And the convenient version, I mean, you can also put like, you know, do you want a PDF of this exact same thing? Just click here and I'll send a nice formatted pretty one. And it worked so well. I had so many comments and likes and shares on it. That's the other thing. You get a lot of shares because it's super useful. And then when you're starting to boost that and run ads to worked wonders. So that's one of the little strategies that I've kind of been deploying here lately.

And I'll even add to that in terms of what you'd be giving away or making a part of this whole content portion of the strategy. One of my clients, as an example, he creates, once again, micro content, puts Instagram story ads up. He puts up Instagram videos 60 seconds, puts up that same video on Facebook, 60 seconds long. All of these micro pieces go to his lead magnet, all of them. And what he really is doing is delivering strategies from within that lead magnet, because he breaks down somewhere like 30 strategies. So he said to me when he was originally doing this, he's like, I'm basically going to do 30 videos with each one of the strategies in the lead magnet being used in each of these videos.

Absolutely.

And, you know, the Person who watches the 27th video may have never watched the 15th video. And so in doing that, you know, he's created 30 pieces of content. He hasn't created anything since then. He's just repurposed them for different platforms. And then on top of that, we are able to see which day is actually bringing in most of the leads based off which one we are advertising the most. Right. So we found like, there are certain days of this sequence that are producing somewhere in the range of like 60 or 70% of all his leads. Of all of them. And the great thing about that is when he puts his webinar training together, he focuses his bullet points on the most popular days that people are opting in. So say that again. So the days that are most popular, the four or five strategies that are getting the most attention and the most leads, he uses those same headlines as the bullet points on his webinar training page because they're the most popular. So he's also, in a way, crafting what are the subject matters that people want to learn. When I do a long form training.

Yes.

And it's, it's basically unfolding all in front of him now. I didn't tell him to create all his micro content. He just woke up one day and decided, I'm gonna do it. And the great thing about it is the audiences we're creating from all this content are phenomenal. Right. We have Facebook engagement audiences, we have Instagram engagement audiences, we have video view audiences, you know, 25%, 50% all the way to 95%. And then we're able to create look alikes from everything. So we're creating the most engaged audiences possible for his promotions. And thus he's actually been building up one heck of a Facebook page presence because he started out with 2,3000 likes on the page. Now it's up to about 20,000. Naturally. Not buying likes. Not buying likes in a sense of like going to Fiverr or anything like that and getting likes. Yeah, we target all the viewers to like his page.

Right. Or doing the whole strategy where you post some success platitude and promote it to India in the Philippines and all the other like places that aren't your market and just get a bunch of irrelevant likes.

Exactly. So we don't do that at all. And we basically spend 10 bucks a day retargeting people to like his page from the video content he's already created. And so it's a great system because he's just doing content marketing, but at scale, he's Getting leads from it. These leads are signing up for his webinar and they're buying his course. Like he's getting 30 to 40% of people to show up on a webinar, which, you know, is ridiculous these days.

Yeah.

As most people are only getting 10% to show up on a webinar.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so are there any other. When it comes to, when it comes to doing tar. Let's talk about targeting and interest building. What, what do you start with? So typically when I'm building a strategy, we'll start at the bottom of the funnel and say, all right, well, let's go after the low, you know, the, the people who are closest to giving us cash. Everybody from abandoned carts to, you know, the most, you know, the ones who are the most recent ones, and then building it out from kind of from the bottom up. But when it comes to building audiences for cold people who haven't interacted with you, etc. Is there anything you're doing these days in order to make that more efficient?

Well, not necessarily to make it more efficient. I think it's just more along the lines of we, we have to create stuff that has, has a true purpose to what it is we're advertising because a lot of people are creating just content or different promotions that, you know, it's just more of a cash grab and it sort of comes off that way, if you know what I mean. Like, it's just the way that it's being promoted, the way that it's being put out there, it's like, it's like the trend of the moment or the hot thing of the moment, and it really just has no value being brought to the marketplace or to their audience. And thus it's a, it's a slow burn. And at the same time, it also doesn't last very long. Yeah, it's really just when you go into anything that you're going to be promoting or developing for your audience or the audience you want to generate, like, what's the true purpose behind it? Are you gonna be promoting this thing for a long period of time or are you just trying to get a quick hit, you know, for 14 or 28 days?

Right, exactly. That's a great point. What about. And I'm skipping around it because, I mean, you give me so much things to think about here. So I'm just changing subjects here. Yesterday you posted on Facebook one of your updates says direct from my rep Facebook in stream video and new event sources for value based lookalike audiences. Then you said Looks like a video show and podcast may be coming from these updates soon. So I want to hear about that. I started to read it and I got a little lost in exactly what you're talking about, but you seemed a little excited about it. So tell me what this is. You know, this is as of yesterday, what's going on there.

Sure. So for anyone who doesn't know I have this series, I call direct from my rep, where I talk to my partner rep at Facebook and it used to be my agency rep. I still talk to both of them. That's different levels of support. But my partner and agency rep both send me these updates that are going on from things that are evolving in Facebook. So it could be updates to the ad platform, it could be new opportunities that Facebook offers in terms of what they call beta opportunities of running different types of ad creative or ad placements that aren't open to the public yet. All sorts of cool things that are delivered to me through my inbox without requesting it. I'm just, I'm sent these updates sometimes three, four times in a week and then sometimes just once a week. And this update that came out, it basically pertains to. So with value lookalikes, it is, let's say you have a bunch of customers that have paid $97 for something and you have a list of a thousand buyers you can plug in. Obviously all those buyers, but with their value attached to it inside of Facebook. Now that functionality has been around for a while, but they are expanding the type of value and whether or not you have overall value of a customer value specific to a type of product. Right. They're trying to expand the options so that when you create this sort of thing, especially for like an E Comm store, I want to be able to create a lookalike based on the $17 buyers of a T shirt. But then I also want to be able to create a lookalike of all the people who bought a T shirt and then bought a bundle pack that was 20 bucks more. Right. So they're trying to expand how they equate value to creating lookalikes from those people so that way you can maximize your dollars for the people that you're targeting.

So different though than just uploading. Because if I like, you know, if I am integrated with my order, my CRM or I just download and upload, how is that different than me just manually saying, okay, this is my $17 buyers, these are my $97 buyers, these are my thousand dollar buyers. And then run lookalikes to all those manually. Is there, is there anything different there that I'm missing?

Well, on the surface, no. But what they're working on is integrations between. Let's say you have live real time sales coming in at that $17 level and like I mentioned, there's people who are buying bundles at 20. They want to be able to integrate both the store and the audiences together so that in real time, the custom audience and the lookalike audiences are being updated almost on like a daily level so that they evolve simultaneously without you having to manually do it yourself.

That's cool. I like that.

That's what they're working on.

Is that based on pixels or is that based with other pixels?

They're trying to do it on the pixel level and then have it all integrated within Facebook in their custom audiences. And you and I both know there are software out there that do this for you. But even Facebook has showcased that sometimes these softwares misreport things or sometimes they break.

Then again, Facebook misreports like a mother too.

Yes, they do. Of course, when they talk crap about someone else's software.

Yeah.

That person ends up going, alright, well I'm gonna keep building more stuff until you make it native into the platform, which is how a lot of things came to be on Facebook, of course. Yeah. So. So that was one of the updates. And then the other one was specific to. There's a placement option called In Stream, which are great for video content. For my primarily 15 seconds long, these.

Are the ones that interrupts. Interrupt another video, Is that right?

Yeah, so it interrupts or it comes after the initial video that you watch. So I watch a 60 second video from Buzzfeed. Then the next video in the sequence is an in stream ad, even though it says the next video is about to start. Okay, okay. So the reason why they're updating that is because now instead of just making it only video available for that option, you can now use images as an in stream and you can use that image to sort of tease people to go watch the full length video. So you don't have to use video across the board for that placement. Because there are quite a few placements on Facebook where it's video only. And then it might be a limitation of it's 15 seconds only.

Makes sense.

Now they're like, hey, you can use images in this placement and as long as it runs only about 15 seconds, you're good. And for some people that opens up a lot of opportunity because not everyone likes to jump on camera. Right?

Yeah. And that's that's tremendous because yeah, a lot of people don't and they're just like, well, but I got a great image and I can get a good graphic designer to create something and they can click over. What about, what about Instagram? You doing a lot there?

I love Instagram, so I get a lot of leads from Instagram for many clients. But the nurture process for Instagrammers is very different from Facebook people. Now, I know a lot of people who hear that are gonna say, aren't they on both platforms? Platforms, not necessarily. So I get a lot more younger people on Instagram, naturally, you know, 1835 primarily. Now, of course, for a lot of products that I sell, most of the people are between, let's just say 29 to 45. So there's a large piece that's not buying anything for the most part, which is that 18 to 28 year old range. The cool thing is that they do buy very low ticket items. So if you're able to create, even if it's a digital product, right. You know, the tripwire style of thing where it's 17 $7. 27. If you're able to create a call, I'll call it the millennial base of customers in your email list, you know, people buying smaller $7, $27 type of items, you can nurture them their way up to buying something. Higher ticket, it just takes longer. And that's what I'm finding with a lot of my clients now in the fitness space. When we promote something that's already 27 bucks, we're getting tons of people on Instagram buying. It's within their wheelhouse already. And so you got to think, if I'm trying to teach people how to do Facebook ads, I'm not gonna get a lot of buyers that are 22 years old, but I can at least show them the importance of Facebook and how to use it from, let's say, content marketing standpoint. And I might be able to sell them a $7 guide.

Right.

Or a $27 mini course, but I'm not going to sell them a $997 course. It's going to be a lot harder. Yeah.

And for business, for business thought leaders, consultants, professionals, et cetera, using Instagram, my take on that has always been that kind of Facebook is where you, you know, Facebook, it's LinkedIn, etc, it's kind of where you educate people. And Instagram is more where you bond, inspire, motivate them and kind of let them have a window into your world as Opposed to try to deliver a ton of value.

Yeah.

Right. So. And I know some people are using Instagram TV and they're using their stories, like, although also, I gotta say this, I hate. I don't care who it is. There's not a single person that I go to Instagram to learn stuff from. From where. Where I'm like, oh, my gosh, I want to hear him talk about Facebook ads, or I want to hear him talk about how to do X, Y and Z. I'm always just like, all right, either entertain me, show me, show me another side of you, or make me think something a little different. Give me a little epiphany. And that's how I. I kind of use Instagram. And I see, like, especially in the professional space, right? Where, I mean, people aren't really on Instagram to be like, oh, man, I.

Want to learn today, right now. Of course you can create an audience that wants to learn.

Yeah.

So, for example, you know, the Gary V. Style of things. But that has to be nurtured into the audience. So I don't post a lot on Instagram, but when I post it's there has a purpose to it. Yeah, Right. So when I put up a screenshot of something and I did this in an Instagram story, too, I did, like, multiple stories to see what would happen. I did one where the first story was about a client who was getting fantastic results on Facebook around the narrative of ads are too expensive. So I created a story that said, wow, ads are so expensive that I'm still getting $10 purchases for a $30 product. Right. So I was just debunking that really quick. And then I went into three strategies we used, and I broke them down in 15 seconds. A piece of. Yeah, I got so many messages about, hey, how do I do this too? It was all. Because it was quick and easy to consume.

That's the whole point right there. It's got to be quick, easy. It's not like the long winded things, like, I hate going on somebody's Instagram story. And they're like, I'm gonna. I'm gonna talk for like five minutes here. And they've got 50 different little like, Instagram stories. You have to click, click, click, click, click, click, click, over. It's like, no, dude, you lost me. Like, give me a little something and then send me off to learn more.

Yep, exactly. And that last one, I mean, if, of course, if I was giving something away, my last story would have been, if you want the full detailed process, go Here. And it would have just been a lead magnet. Sure. But the point in doing that is I'm just buttering up the audience to understand what my zone of genius is. Right. I'm just, this is what I do for a living. This is what I focus on every day. And if you want to learn more about it, you can go here. And that same thing can be done with your image content or the video content you're posting on Instagram natively, where it's 60 seconds long, you have more time to break it down. And if you're gonna do a group of different pieces of content, like you can make it a three day thing, like this is day one, day two, and day three, you reveal the last strategy and then you're gonna tell them where they can get more. Right. It's just like doing a miniseries sort of thing on Facebook as a lead magnet, except you're giving away three, three strategies. And if you want the other, you know, seven others, you got to go here and download it. And so make sure, once again, I'm gonna keep saying this. You have to have a purpose. What is it that you're gonna be delivering? Is there a sequence to it? What are you gonna deliver? Day one, day two, day three. And it works the same way on Facebook. You know, you've seen how I post my case studies when I, when I was doing them frequently, you know, I would tease about it. I would reveal a couple strategies one day and then I would just drop the big bomb of the case study on people. And I would have 2, 300 people saying, oh my God, this is crazy. I can't believe you gave away all this stuff. And I can't tell you how many clients I would get from that.

Absolutely. It's a lot.

Yeah.

That's fantastic. What are some of your favorite tools that you're using right now? Whether it's, whether it has to do with research, ad management, like, you know, management anything. Just I love, I love tools.

Sure. So from an ad standpoint, I'm still, I'm using a software called Reveal Bot. It's great for creating rule automation inside of Facebook. So if you want to have things that automatically scale, turn off, turn on basically any sort of functionality, it's a great software for that. I know you can do it natively in Facebook, but the way that revealbot has it set up, it makes it very easy to set up rules and actually do it the right way. So that's why I love using that tool. In terms of a CRM, I use Insightly. I love Insightly. It connects with Google Gmail suite. So like, if I want to track when I last had a conversation with someone via email, it has it all inside of that tool and it lets me know, oh, you connected with Brad 15 days ago. Make sure you follow up with him. Right. And it basically will allow me to set up more follow up automation. I could put all my templates in there. I also can tell when someone has opened or not the email I sent them. It's just like yesware, but instead of it being only that, it's also CRM. Definitely love that platform. It's where I basically input all of my contacts from my phone to Facebook.

I'm no longer using Contactually. Yeah, but I used to use that and I really liked it. I've kind of been looking for some other stuff, so I'll check this out.

Yep. And the great thing about Insightly is it integrates with this tool called Boomerang. I know you've heard of Boomerang before, so I still use Boomerang. And because Insightly and Boomerang can integrate together, I could set up all of my follow up in advance with Boomerang. And then when that follow up goes out, it automatically inputs when the follow up was sent out into Insightly based on the person I sent it to.

Oh cool.

So I don't have to manually do it at all. It's like, oh, you know, message will be sent out in two days to Brad. It sends it out two days later. It puts a little note inside of your contact card that says, don't forget, you know, you sent out this message on this day to Brad and then it'll tell me whether or not you opened it. So beautiful. I could set up. That's why when I follow up with all the prospects that I have, I set it up all automated so I'm not there at 6 o' clock in the morning trying to write everything. So the day or the time that someone logs in, it's the first email they see. I set that all up the day before and then I don't worry about it until it goes out.

Oh cool. I love that. Any other tools that you use, whether it's in general business or in Facebook?

Well, right now I am testing out a couple of dashboards when it comes to like reviewing data. One of the ones that I've been looking at is called Up Hex Uphex. They're new so I don't have a true review on them yet. But one of the great things that I've been looking at when it comes to ad dashboards, very similar to like Gecko Board and all these other ones that break down your data, is that I'm looking for dashboards that can give you suggestions on that data too. So the great thing about Uphex is that when you connect your ad account to their dashboard and then it pulls all your data, it then analyzes all your campaigns and gives you suggestions based on the campaign objective. So if, let's say I'm running a conversion ad to a campaign and it's producing leads, but it's not producing purchases, that dashboard will actually tell you what is wrong with the campaign and what they suggest doing. Oh, wow.

And that's all up Hex, huh?

Yep, yep. It's all built in there. So they originally were just a data dashboard and then they start adding recommendations to it, like a recommendation engine.

That's huge.

Yeah. So of course that's going to become a lot smarter with their AI as more suggestions come through and more data is pulled. But you can only imagine if it's like, in a way, it's sort of like a crowdsourced solution for coming up with recommendations based on pulling more data. So, you know, a year from now it could be even more powerful where it tells you exactly what to do. So I'm giving that some hope and allowing it to do its thing. But it connects with Facebook, it connects with AdWords, and I believe it also connects with Twitter ads.

Huh. Sweet. I'm gonna look into that.

Yep.

Anything else? Top of mind.

Those are pretty much the main tools. Like I'm in those every single day and Evernote, obviously, for everything that I take notes on. But that's sort of commonplace now. But I mean, those are the. The main tools that I'm pretty much opening them all the time.

I dig it. I just. Speaking of tools, I just did one the other day. Demo, like a 38 minute demo. I'll put a link to it in the show notes if anybody wants to see it. But I've been playing with Kartra. Have you played with that yet?

I have. There's so much going on in there.

Yeah, it's super cool. I really like it. I've used everything. And some of them I like, some of them I don't. I like how integrated it is. That's just because it keeps you in one system for everything. So I kind of dig that. Cool, man. So what's a nut you're trying to crack right now in your business, in your life or something? This is where I can, myself or some of my listeners can kind of help you that easy. You know that the easy nuts are like, I just want more clients. Right. So that's not what I'm talking about. Is there a skill you're trying to learn? Is there a person you're trying to meet, find, hire? Is there money you're trying to raise? Is there. Is there a challenge you're kind of trying to figure out, why the hell can't I figure this out? Just, you know, what's a nut you're trying to crack?

So I'm actively working on this, but it's removing myself from every piece of the business. Yeah. So it's the. It's essentially systems and hiring. Now, I have said for the last three years that that has been my core focus, but up until recently, I realized I was completely half assing that whole thing. Yeah. And I didn't start taking it serious until earlier this year when I went to the hospital from overworking myself, bad health, all sorts of things. And it wasn't until then, March of 2018, when I made the decision that I need to focus more on my systems. Because I'm in the hospital, I can't do anything, and I don't know if my business is running.

Yeah, that's a wake up call and a half, right?

To go to wake up and a half for sure. Yeah. Because the first thing that goes in your head is, am I gonna be okay? And then the second thing is, oh, my God, what am I gonna do with my business?

You know? Have you ever read, have you ever read John Warlow's book Built to Sell?

Yes.

Yeah. I'm interviewing him in about a week. I've always loved his book about. Especially as it relates to an agency. Is it. How do you get it? Yeah, using systems, using the team, et cetera, in order to kind of remove yourself from that. And then another guest on my show had. He's. He's been on the show two times, Michael Mallowitz. So he wrote a book called Profit first, which. I don't know if you've heard of that, but I, I recommend it to everybody. It's like such an amazing way to think about your. Your business, accounting and finances. It's very simple, but it's like, oh, my God, it's forehead slappingly.

Cool.

But he just wrote a book and I'm seeing. Did it. Is it published yet or is it. Yep, it is just now live called Clockwork. Design your business to run itself. I have not yet run it, but our, our mutual friends Matt Wolf and Joe Fear, I know, are interviewing him on this and they, they got the book, but I'm going to check that out. So there's, there's a couple of resources for you in that department.

Awesome. Yeah, it's just one of those things where I figured, you know, if I ever wanted to sell the business or if I at least wanted to make it where it's running in the background so I can go focus on other things. Yeah, I needed to put more attention on that. And up until that incident, I was not putting any attention on systems whatsoever. Now I have a team, don't get me wrong. But I was still heavily involved in client communication and jumping on calls and talking about reports and all that other good stuff. And, you know, constantly I would hear from people like, hey, man, that 20 minute call that you're making to talk about a report, you could easily get someone at 15 bucks an hour to do that for you.

That's true.

You just got to, you just got to educate them on how ads work so they can, they could be sophisticated enough to talk about it at a high level.

Right. And the, the client doesn't care. I mean, they want to know that if there's a, something wrong, you're going to step in and talk to them. Right. And, but if I'm talking to a, my rep and that rep is smart enough and they're telling me everything I want to know, like, yeah, this is working. This isn't working. Here's what we're, here's what we're doing to fix what's not working, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, all right, cool. Like, I don't, I don't always need to touch the robe of the guru if the. Right. So that's. No, that's good. And I'm glad to hear that you're making that kind of more of a priority. Anything else you're really excited about going on in your work, whether it's business or personal?

Yeah, I mean, sort of a combination of both. But I'm actually excited for the fact that I can get back into doing one of my passion projects, which I used to day trade quite a bit when I was younger. Yeah, So I used to do stock and options trading and you know, up until the whole crypto phase, that actually reinvigorated me to look back into it just because I'm like, man, all these people making crazy returns. It reminds me of when I was 18 trading from my college apartment. And people would go, how the Heck, did you make three grand in two hours? You know, and, but I would do that. And I had not done it again since the age of 21. Like I hadn't traded in almost nine years. And so up until recently I started to get back into that world and it was almost like, you know, tapping into that, that old part of the brain where it's like, oh yeah, you still remember this stuff. Like you can still do this again. And you know, it's muscle memory for people and it is for me. So I started to get back in that world and I forgot just how much I enjoyed it. Because one, it's a finite period of time, right? The market's open. That's when you're working. When the markets close, you have a choice. You can either go do research or you could do nothing. Yeah, right. And so the great thing about that is that's actually the first time where I felt like I was putting myself on a schedule again when I was trading.

That's cool.

Because when I run my agency like I am right now, and I still continue to run my agency, if you don't set the hours, you will work all day, every day and do nothing else.

You're absolutely right.

You will just, you know, you'll work 24 hours if you gave yourself the opportunity to. And so when I started to tap back into doing the trading during the day, certain, during certain parts of the day, that's when I realized I was putting myself on a schedule. And it felt awesome because then by the time the market was closed, it was as if I was able to go do whatever I want after that. And I hadn't felt that feeling in so long.

That's cool.

And so to me it was a great reintroduction into that world. At the same time, that is when I realized I had to start working on systems again. Because you can't be taking 20 calls a day or eight calls a day and be trading at the same time. You're right. So you have to find time to be alone and focused. So, you know, in order to fully allow myself to be reimmersed in that world, I've been focusing entirely on the systems part. So it was a great eye opening experience. I did it for a week again. It was like, alright, I'm gonna follow this schedule and do what I used to do. And it was great. And I was like, I definitely want to be doing this more. Love it. Love it.

I've got some friends who are doing some big stuff in there. I may make an introduction. I Think you'd like them, but man, David, this has been fantastic. So for people who want to learn more about this, are you, first of all, first question, are you currently taking clients?

Yes, still taking clients. We have calls with everyone to make sure that they qualify.

So if, if they want to check you out more, if they want to see if they qualify, do they Simply go to convertroi.com?

Yep. So if you go to convertroi.com there's a button to email me directly. Once you go ahead and fill in all those details, it comes straight to me so I could see what it is that you do and what you're looking for. And then if you don't want to reach out to me on my website but instead want to have an immediate conversation, you can just go to my personal profile, facebook.com S C H, L, O S, S Y and I get messages direct to my inbox. I answer. And so if you want to make an immediate discussion and get something done now, you would go to my Facebook page and make that happen.

I love it.

Cool.

Well, that brings us to the end of our show today. David, you definitely brought the heat and I appreciate it. I know all my listeners do as well. Hopefully they learn some really good stuff. Reach out to David if you are looking to get your Facebook advertising managed by somebody who obviously knows what he's talking about. If you have any questions, if you are kind of stuck, if you're not 100% sure what you should be doing, given a lot of the changes to grow your business, send me an email to askbradaconrabusiness.com tell me what's going on and I'll either invite you on the show or I'll see if I can answer it for you. If I don't have an answer, I'll see if I've got a resource for you. I will put a lot of links from the tools David's using, some of the ones that I'm using in the show notes. And David, I look forward to hanging out with you again, my brother. And for everybody else, I hope you stay tuned for the next episode. Talk.