Facebook Advertising in 2024 Using AI → Depesh Mandalia

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Is it easier to put a price against saving your dog's life or against something which has a battery life of 12 months? And that's the difference between emotion and functional. You spend an hour learning about ads, you're not going to launch anything. You know, you're watching video A, video B, video C, making notes. You're an hour in and you're still kind of trying to figure things out. With AI, you could launch within an hour. Actually, with the agency game, it's a kind of, it's. It ends up being a lose, lose situation because the better you do for clients, the more you scale them up, the more you end up charging and also the more likelihood that they're going to say, hey, we'll bring all the ads in house.

So on this episode you're going to learn about copywriting frameworks as well as everything you need to know from an AI perspective. With social advertising, media buying, it's a great episode you shouldn't miss right now.

This is the 2x e commerce podcast hosted by Kunle Campbell.

Hello, welcome to the 2x e commerce podcast. I'm super excited about this episode. It's a an interview I had with Dipesh Mandalia. Now, if you've been following this podcast, you know that he's been on this show about three times. First was in 2015. I mean, the early days of this podcast. I started this podcast In November of 2014 and about eight months after I interviewed Ashi Shabari, who was the CEO founder of a company called Lost My Name. They're a storybook company that personalized stories for children to read essentially. And Deepesh then was his chief marketing officer or digital marketing lead at the time. And they had done like $15 million in sales and they sold 600,000 copies in just two years. It was a fine Blend of product and market. And Deepesh handled the market bit and Ashi, who's the founder, handled the product bit. So that was quite an interesting conversation. You could search for it if you want to. It was published on 6 August 2015. That's the first time Dpesh was here. The second time he was here was on was as an entrepreneur. He had launched two things. He'd launched an agency and a community. And he came here to speak about brand driven performance marketing, which is a methodology he devised, a framework he devised that was very interesting. It was received very well by you guys. It was one of the top at the time episodes. It was in 2020, July of 2020 and it was one of the top episodes for 2020. Given the fact that it was published in July. It was a very interesting one. You could still go for it there. Loads of, just loads of anecdotes. He talks about his story, Lost my name, marketing through storytelling, nurturing creativity and then this brand driven or brand driven performance marketing methodology. That was the second time, the third time I invited him in 2018 to speak around just quarter four, what you should be doing with Facebook advertising. And he happily obliged. Now, this episode you're about to listen to, he's in a somewhat deep, different place I would say at this point in time. So he's, he's no longer an agency holder, I'm not going to reveal too much. And he's, he's launched a, a community, it's called Ad Signals. And, and he's also launched a very, very interesting AI driven bot that creates, or a GPT essentially that creates, you know, copy for, for advertising. It helps you create and formulate, you know, copy. It's like a prompt builder essentially. And then it has like copywriting styles. So if you want it to sound like say Frank Kern or David Ogilvy, it has like those prompts to allow you to sound like certain people or certain, you know, marketing voices, which is quite interesting. So we discuss AI predominantly. We discussed like the fundamentals of marketing. I really liked the, the Fundamental Pit or bits of marketing. And he sort of got me to, to think about my, my, the ad accounts we were running, which was, which was quite interesting. But if you want to get ahead with AI on 4, 4 and you, you, you, you essentially buy social advertising, you just must listen to dipesh. He's a very trusted voice in the space and the only thing he does is Facebook advertising. He does nothing else apart from Facebook advertising. At the very end of this podcast, there's going to be an offer, right? He's going to make an offer to add signals. Just stay to the very end, listen to the very end to understand what that special offer is to yourselves. For now, enjoy the conversation, listen to the end, and then you know you get the offer. Cheers, guys. Hey, ecommerce trailblazers, ready for a game changer in your podcast lineup? I've got just the thing. Tread Secrets, A new podcast that's all about giving you the operational edge in e commerce. Let's got straight to the chase. Unlike most e commerce podcasts that dwell on marketing and growth stories, Tread Secrets dives deep into the operational heart of e commerce. This is where the real magic happens. Why tune in? Because Tread Secrets brings you the nuts and bolts of e commerce success. We're talking the nitty gritty of inventory hacks, cash flow management, sales strategies, supply chain inter cases, product sourcing secrets, and the ins and outs of financing. It's your personal wisdom you need to keep your business not just running, but thriving. Hosted by Peter Beckman, CEO of Tread, this podcast is a treasure trove of insights from industry experts and successful e commerce practitioners. It's like having a roundtable of mentors, each sharing their best kept operational secrets. Don't let this opportunity slip through your fingers. Search for Tread Secrets on your favorite podcast app or visit Tread IO that's T R E y D IO Podcast. Hit the subscribe button and stay ahead of the dynamic world of e commerce. Remember, it's T R E y D Secrets, the podcast where e commerce operations meets success. Tune in now and transform the way you do business. Hey Dipesh, welcome to the 2X eCommerce podcast. You need no introduction. You've been on the podcast before. But for people who don't know about you, you're the CEO at SM Commerce and founder of the BPM Method which is Brand Brand Performance marketing or Brand Driven Performance marketing. Exactly. Method. I can't forget that. Which is key to driving you know a lot of performance from from your ads. You're a marketer entrepreneur for 15 years. You're a former Londoner, a Calgarian or a Canadian. You're currently managing an agency, coaching clients communities to building great results results through Facebook advertising through your BPM framework and you're essentially created over $100 million worth of value in revenue in Facebook advertising. A lot of people when you speak about like Facebook advertising and experts on there, you're you're top, you're on the depeche, your big dog, your goat. Without further Ado, I'd like to welcome you to the 2x e commerce podcast.

Yeah, pleasure to be back. It's been, I think maybe five, six years since we spoke and the digital world has changed so much. So I'm looking forward to sharing kind of where we're at right now as well.

Fantastic, fantastic. So what has changed? Let's play catch up. How are you? What has changed generally? And then we'll jump right into like, you know, social media and Facebook advertising.

Yeah, for sure. So I actually went into the agency space in 2017, so I launched my own agency and went down the typical route of hey, we serve ads for clients and you know, going to run your Facebook ads, Instagram ads, et cetera. Did that okay for a few years. But then we realized that actually with the agency game, it's a kind of, it ends up being a lose, lose situation because the better you do for clients, the more you scale them up, the more you end up charging and also the more likelihood that they're going to say, hey, we'll bring all the ads in house. So we had clients with us for six months, 12 months, falling off the conveyor belt and saying, hey, we'll just take it in house. Some clients, it didn't work out for, you know, and they've gone within one or two, three months. So we then looked at that and said, how do we create better lifetime value and work with clients longer? And actually within that, I start to look at training courses, consulting, coaching and things like that. So I guess the long and short over the time that we last spoke is I focus a lot more on the coaching and community and masterminds and things like that because there, I believe, is a need for different parts of the market in terms of business owners. So talk about E commerce, for example. There are three stages that people go through. Number one is I want to launch. I've got an idea, I've got a store, found some products, I just need to get started. The other one is I've got started and now I've hit a roadblock. You know, my ads are now too expensive. I can't make this profitable. Things like that, common, common problems. Then the third stage is things are going really well, we need to scale. So my agency would focus on the third part, but the, the other two parts would, I think, being underserved. So one of the challenges is if you're starting off with, with an offer and you've never run ads before, one of the mistakes is to go to a freelancer or an agency and say, hey, go and run this. Because most of them are not very good at offer development. Most of them are not very good at looking at funnels and avatars and things like that, which is a core part of what I teach and what I practice, which is the BPM method. Brand Driven is all about the avatar, the customer and their mindset and things like that. Performance Marketing is the typical acronym cpa, cpm, cpc, roas and all those kind of fancy keywords that we like to throw around. So I've merged both, but I feel like the new business owners quite daunted by all the possibilities. You know, even when you just log into Facebook Ads Ads Manager for the very first time, there's just so much going on and I wanted to try and simplify that as much as possible. So two years ago I launched a paid ads mastermind so people can come in, take the training, go look at all my material, and get access to experts, weekly calls and things like that. Fast forward into today. My goal is how can we integrate AI to speed that up. So if you imagine in an hour's time, let's say you've never run ads before. You spend an hour learning about ads, you're not going to launch anything. You're watching video A, video B, video C, making notes. You're an hour in and you're still kind of trying to figure things out. With AI, you could launch within an hour if you just ask the right questions and AI will lead you through that. And I think that's the massive possibility that now we can enable so many more people to get success from whichever platform, whether it's Facebook ads or something else.

You made some really valid points on there. You can launch right away with AI. Okay, so in my opinion, there are two aspects of all of this. There is the words copy, which also links to the Persona development and all of that stuff. And then there's also the ad creative. Right now there's lots of UGC ads out there working really well, converting well. You need to script those ads, which you could use generative AI to do, I guess. And you need to get someone to actually make those ads, those video ads. And then copy is become so simple. So what is from a top level? I know people pay for this information, but what are the key steps? How would you. I just launched a brand or I have a brand that's working really well from a Google AdWords standpoint and I want to start to get performance from Meta. If I join the BPM Method group, how would you sort of educate me to take the necessary steps so that if not in a couple of hours, in a few days, I would have ads. I'll start testing and start to see results and start moving forward.

Absolutely. So we start off with something called the 5W avatar. So it's a buyer Persona. Someone sent me a website yesterday and said, hey, could you critique this and let me know what you think of the website? And before even looking at the website, I said, who are you targeting? Who's this for? Who's the prospect? What's their mindset? And things like that. Even when I, you know, with 15 years in this game or whatever it is, look at a website or a funnel or an offer, I still need the context. Who is it for? What stage are they at? So, for example, when I'm creating an offer, I'm looking at, am I creating an offer that's a painkiller or a vitamin? A painkiller is solving something short term. So if you've got a headache, you take a painkiller vitamin is to enhance something and improve something. So if the offer is about going to make this better than the whole messaging shifts and that kind of pain versus opportunity allows you to understand how to pitch your products. So, like, one of the top mistakes people make with Facebook ads is they'll just launch an ad and they'll just get some creative and some copy. Then the key thing is, let's just get people into our landing page. And our landing page will do the job without thinking about what stage that prospect's at. So when I'm building my avatar, there's five things I look at. Number one is, who am I targeting? Like, really high level, you know, let's say we're taking gifting for moms. So women 25 to 40 with kids, whatever it is that are interested in whatever, then I'm looking at what I'm presenting now. The what is the transformation. So take, for example, I think we first connected after I had some success with Lost My Name Now Wonderbly, which sells personalized children's books. The transformation we were offering was being able to gift something with a lifetime of memories that was completely personalized to that child. And that was the core reason why we scaled that from 800k to 26 million. Because there was something stronger than, hey, it's just a personalized book. And we went deeper into that. Then the third stage is, what are the emotional hooks that are going to get you into this product? And, and one of the things about this is over the last 10 years, I've studied a lot of behavioral psychology just out of interest. And then I started to connect into marketing. And when you hook someone emotionally, you break down the barriers. Like everyone has a buying resistance, even though they're all willing to buy. So if you go into a car showroom, you know the guy is going to sell you or the woman is going to sell you something and try and twist you and stuff like that. But they don't say, know what car do you like and stuff like that. They want to understand what do you want to feel about the car. Do you like driving fast? You like being safe? You've got kids, they're going into the emotional because you can't defend against that. I'll give you an example. About 2016, 2017, there was a really popular product that was being sold by affiliates. It was an LED dog collar. So you could get this from AliExpress and people were buying it for a $2, selling it for $20. But they were just talking about the functional benefits. So it's bright, it's led, it lasts a long time, it has a battery. And then some people start to talk about the emotional side, which was this could save your dog's life. Now tell me, is it easier to put a price against saving your dog's life or against something which has a battery life of 12 months? And that's the difference between emotion and functional. So when we build our avatars, we're looking at the emotional, then we add the functional benefits like returns and you know, all guarantees, all that kind of stuff. Then the fifth part of avatar building is what are the objections, what are the rebuttals? So if we have any kind of product we're presenting, what's the reasons why someone wouldn't buy it? And you have to list these things out because your customers going through those same thought processes. So even if they're thinking, you know, this LED dog collar for example, could save my dog's knife. What are they, what are their, what's their front part of their brain stopping them to do, like to go ahead and buy the product. So we then go through, can I trust this brand? Is there a refund? How long will it take? Will it actually they're all the questions that go through, so we have to list them. When you get all of that put together, then you have the basis for an ad campaign and then you can start to communicate to your prospect in the language they're going to use and start to tap into feelings. And quite often I get comments saying, yeah, but not every product or every service has a feeling attached. I 100% guarantee it has. Like, I've been doing this for a very long time. Everything and anything you're promoting can be put into something which pulls an emotion. And when you can find an ad that does that, first of all, the creative process becomes easier because now you have a theme. So if you're talking about an ad which is, you know, this LED dog collar could save your dog's life, would you have an ad with the actual product or would you have an ad with the owner and the dog looking happy and all that kind of stuff to project to them? This is the thing that you want, and this is the thing you want to keep. No one cares about the LED dog collar. They care about the dog. And that's, I think, the mistake that people make. So when we were selling children's books, we weren't just presenting the book. Hey, it's personalized. We were sharing the book with a mum or a dad or an aunt or an uncle or a grandparent. Like, well, grandparents absolutely blew up, blew up for us because we showed grandparents with the grandchild reading this personalized book. That's what people want. That's what people are paying 20 pounds or 30 for for that experience. They weren't buying a book, they were buying an experience. So, like that alone, if you just nail that, you're going to get your ads working 100 times better.

I'm, I'm grateful to have you again. You know, just refreshing with that refresher. And I think everything has an emotional price or cost. You know, you really need to dig into what emotions are we selling with. With. With. With. With the book. Example. Lost my name. You are selling happiness, you know, happy parents, a very fulfilled, you know, child who sees their name over and over again. There is always that emotional hook. Let's take a short pause to hear from our sponsors and we'll be right back. So if you have been following my journey here on this podcast, you'll know that I'm a co founder at Octelion, a consolidator of digital first. Good for you. CPG brands. We acquire CPG brands with the view of scaling them up. We currently have a portfolio of three brands, all powered by commerce platform Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. Whether you're a garage, startup entrepreneur or IPO ready, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run and grow your business without the struggle. Shopify puts you in control in every sales channel. So Whether you're selling Saturn shits from Shopify's in person pos or offering organic olive oil on Shopify's all in one e commerce platform, you're covered. And once you've reached your audience, Shopify has the Internet's best converting checkout to help you turn them from browsers to buyers. I remember the first brand we acquired was running on another platform with quite poor conversions with we made it a point of duty to get it migrated over to Shopify and our checkout conversions literally doubled. What I love about Shopify is its ease of use. I don't think there's any other e commerce platform that beats its usability. Shopify powers 10% of all E commerce in the US and Shopify's truly a global force. Powering Allbirds, Rothys and Bot Brooklinen, millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across over 170 countries plus Shopify's award winning 24 help is there to support your success every step of the way. This is possibility. Powered by Shopify Sign up for $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/e commerce x2 or lowercase that is go to shopify.come commerce x2 to take your business to the next level. Today that is shopify.comecommerce x2. Just going through your 5W avatar, your 5W steps or 5W steps. What I grabbed from there is who are we targeting? What stage are they at? What are the emotional hooks to get the product then I think you mentioned.

And what are the functional benefits?

Functional benefits. And then, and then why not? Objections.

Yeah.

Okay. Okay. So in the what stage are they at? Could you just iterate on that? I didn't really sort of capture. Capture that.

Yeah. So I subscribe to Eugene Schwartz's five stages of awareness. So what that does is it looks at a buyer market and says where are the people that you're prospecting? So I'll give you an example. A lot of the non brand searches on Google are further down the funnel. A lot of them that people are bidding for because that's where the money is. So to give you a simple example, if someone's doing a search for an LCD television on Google, they're kind of higher up their search path because they haven't yet defined the size or the brand or the features. Now compare that to someone who's searching for an LCD TV. LCD Smart TV, 42 inch Sony. They're further down the consideration process. So that second keyword has a higher conversion rate. So most People start bidding there. The first keyword doesn't have a great conversion rate, but if you can capture someone higher up, it's cheaper and you can get them converted later on. So, for example, if I was to run an ad for something as broad as LCD tv, I might have a landing page which has a guide on choosing your LCD tv. I'm not selling them anything yet, I'm just giving them value. And the same thing happens with Facebook as well. Although you don't necessarily have the same bidding opportunity to know exactly what they're looking for in your messaging, you can pull people out based on where they are. So for example, if I'm going for some. So one of the things I look at is there's a stage called problem aware and there's a stage called solution aware. Problem aware says, I've got this neck pain solution aware says I'm looking for the neck hammock to help with my neck pain. So you can call those prospects out just based on your ad. So one ad could say, hey, if you're suffering from chronic neck pain, these are probably the reasons why this is what you can do. Click here to find out how you can find a remedy for it. Whereas if someone's problem solution aware, hey, if you're looking for a neck hammock that is, you know, verified by Dr. Oz or whatever it is, so the way you message that plays a big part into the type of people you bring in, then right at the bottom of the funnel is most aware. So people that are now just ready to buy, then you know, that's pure direct response, but that's a smaller part of the market and it's more expensive. So when people struggle with Facebook ads and they're like, you know, the cpm, the cost per thousand impressions is too high, or my conversion rate, you know, I'm struggling, whatever it is. Often people are going for the most aware market because that's the easier pickings. But the competition is at the maximum at that level because everyone's going for that. So when I build ad campaigns, I start off with my avatar. Then I start to think about if someone's problem aware, what language are they using, what are they thinking, if someone's solution awareness, what language are they thinking, etc. So problem aware would be my dog was out at night and it ran off and I couldn't see it because it was dark and whatever. Then there's also a problem unaware market, which is the broadest market of all. If, for example, I say ran an ad and it went to an advertorial. An advertorial is just like a blog page and it said, you know, 70. I'm just making this up, but you do your own research. 72% of dogs killed in the UK in the last two years. It was due to the dog running off in the dark and being hit by a car. Let's just say that was a stat that we found. I'm now creating a problem that you're going to be aware of by saying, hey, if your dog runs off in the dark, it could either get lost or get hit by a car. So now I'm creating a problem in your mind. You're not ready to buy, I'm not ready to sell, but I might just send you to an advertorial which shares a story. This is David and this is what happened to him. This is Jane and this is what happened to her. Oh, by the way, you could alleviate this with this LED dog collar. And here's all the features and benefits so you can, you can create sales quite quickly. It's just about how you're hooking them in. What's the first conversation you're having with them? Now if you're problem unaware and you see an ad that says, hey, this LED LED dog collar is great, 50% off, limited time offer, doesn't mean anything, you've just lost the conversation. So I think that's the way I try and approach it is think about where the market is, what they're thinking and how you can build that bridge between the ad and your landing page.

I love that, I love that. Thanks for, for breaking down, you know, this, the stages. So, so when you, you have this thorough understanding of the 5W avatar and you, you sort of, you know, understand particularly those stages of awareness. What, what do you do next, as you know, to really go to market on, on, on meta.

Absolutely. So the next step for me is going through those emotional angles or hooks. Usually I've got three to five listed out and then creating a campaign for one hook. So if one hook is, you know, it's, you know, for example, let's say Christmas is coming up and you want a unique gifting idea for a lifetime of memories, which was the personalized book. So now I'm taking that hook and turning that into an ad. The various, the simplest ad format is ada Attraction, interest, desire and action. I would take that into a spreadsheet, create those four rows, Aida. For the, for the attraction part, I would write a unique hook, let's say three ad Variants. So hook one, hook two, hook three. Then for the interest, desire and action phase, I would copy across all three ads. Now the reason for that is if someone sees your ad in the newsfeed and they don't click that read more to expand the text, then the rest of the text is irrelevant. So that's why I place so much emphasis on testing that first part. And then what I do to start is I don't go wild on creative and videos and stuff like that. I just find something simple that will get people to hit that read more button because that's the only thing that matters at that stage. If they don't read more, they're not going to read the whole block of copy. So then I just. All I want to do at that stage is validate my message. Does it resonate with the audience? So I then I start to pick out an audience right now and it maybe wasn't less the case back in, you know, 2015, 2016. Most of my ads I run broad. I don't do interest targeting, I don't do lookalike targeting. I just set demographic, age and demographic and that's it. So female, 25 to 50. And then I'll start running ads to it. If I have look alikes, I will test it. I might test interests. But the algorithm right now is very good if your messaging is good. So for me, that's why I place the emphasis on what stages, the prospect, what kind of message do they need. And when you go for broad audiences, you worry less about all the configurations of audiences and focus more on the creative and the messaging as well.

Interesting. So would you go with like, from a creative standpoint, would you go with like a static image that just pairs up with.

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

Because it's faster. That's the thing. Like, you have to. I've seen people that will plan campaigns for weeks and weeks and weeks and then launch. You know, they got 10, 15 different versions. I want to go through fast iterative testing because everything is theory until you run ads. I've been doing this for 15 years and even now, if I jump into something too early and I haven't been through my process, there's a high chance it will fail. Just because, you know, Facebook ads doesn't mean that you're going to crush it for every single launch. You do follow the process. It works. Who are you targeting? What are the hooks? What are the emotions? And then get testing fast and test with small budgets, start to build up that knowledge of, all right, this works. That doesn't work and then you can iterate. Right. Okay, we've got this angle that's working. Let's now try different sets of images. Let's try a video. Let's try maybe carousel versus, you know, whatever format you want to play with on Facebook. Then you can get to that stage. But there's processes you have to go.

Through from an attraction and an awareness standpoint in, in Today, like in 2024, when people be listening to this podcast, where are people gravitating towards? Is it written copy or is it the visuals you talked about, the read more? When you say read more, is it the call to action read more button or the read more in terms of expanding that text? Expanding the text to really read the story?

Yeah. And to be honest, it differs between Instagram and Facebook. So Instagram is a more visual format. Videos generally work better on Instagram, but I would say for Facebook, just because most of our traffic is on Facebook, that the text is so important. So the first few lines of your main ad copy, the headline at the bottom and the image, they're the three things that are the biggest focus. In fact, I ran a survey some years ago and it was asking people when they actually click the ad, which part of the ad was the reason why you actually interacted and ended up clicking. So most people in that survey said the image is what get them got them to stop and take notice. Sounds obvious, but the first line of copy was the second most important thing for them. So it wasn't the headline below the image, it was actually the first few lines of copy. If that was good enough, then that got them to take interest. Call it thumb stopping creative. That's the thing you need to think about. If someone's scrolling, what's going to take their notice. Now the creative has to link to your ad. It can't just be some wild random creative that's just there to generate a view, but it has to be relevant. So for example, I've run meme ads. So one of the promotions I ran some years ago was ad set budgets versus campaign budgets. And I had a product which we were promoting for campaign budgets. And the image had someone who was sweating looking to press a button ABO or CBO and just didn't know which one to press. That got people to take notice. And the people that were interested in my product would take notice. People that wouldn't, wouldn't. And that's fine with me. So then you focus on that copy and get them to click that read more. Then you can Convert them into a click as well.

So Facebook essentially is, is helping you at scale, distribute a sales copy or sales letter more or less. And you're, you're, you're essentially filtering out those people who would interact. So how do you prevent, so what do you do with the data? What's, what are you looking for in the data Facebook provides you in regards to the segments of audience are really engaging. What are you really looking at?

So one of the, one of the core metrics to look at is when you look at click through rate, you can look at CTR or click through rate all, which means it takes into account all the clicks and then you can compare that to the actual button ctr. And the analogy is similar to how you look at an email open rate and you look at an email click through rate. So it's the same thing. Like what you're looking at with the ad is how many people actually interacted with the ad overall, which is good because they open the email effectively and how many actually clicked on the call to action because that's what you care about. But that ratio will give you an idea of even if your ad was good and it got them to take notice and they click the. Read more how many actually didn't click the call to action because there's something missing on the ad? Maybe the targeting was wrong, maybe the copy was wrong. That's a really interesting metric to look at whether your ad was effective. Essentially everyone wants a click and if you don't get the click, there's maybe something missing the ad. So that, that gives you a good clue as well. The other thing to look at is when you get that click into your website, you can fire a view content Pixel so VC for short. You can compare that to your outbound click. That ratio tells you how many people actually landed on the page and find that pixel. There's a few reasons why that pixel won't fire. Number one is your page load is too slow. Number two, they landed and they didn't like it and then they bounced back. So there's, there's different clues to give you an idea of where people are going. The third one I'd look at for E commerce is the click through rate into the cart. So from those that clicked from the ad to your landing page, how many actually added to cart? I don't necessarily, when I'm testing, care about how many people bought because the problem is an ad can only get them to your site. Then it becomes a site conversion problem. And I think that's where people get a bit lost, which is my ad's not selling my ads the problem. No, sometimes your ads actually getting people to your site, your landing page is the problem.

Yeah, yeah. And that's, that's a whole, whole nother conversation with regards to landing page optimization. Okay, so, so looking at just the, the placement, I get it with Facebook, I get the, the sales copy. How should should like e commerce brands listening to this or brand operators listening to this approach Instagram, you know, as, as a, as a placement, as a channel with, with advertising or with, with, with prospects? In that first bit, do they pay more attention into the video or the image? How would you, how would you approach it?

Yeah, I would be focused on the visual a lot more. So when I often start with testing, I do Facebook only because I just want to see which audiences and creatives work. Then when I find an angle that works, then I now start to introduce Instagram because it is a different look. Here's a bottom line. If Facebook and Instagram were two different companies, two different entities, whatever it was, no one would say, go and run your Facebook ads on Instagram. They'll be like, oh no, you need to edit it, you need to make it more visual and things like. But I think as marketers sometimes we get lazy and it's like, well, we'll just add Instagram as a placement and everything will be fine. It's not the case. For example, I run a lot of video funnels, top of video ads, top of funnel, with the intent of creating engaged audiences. What that means is I'll run a video to the problem unaware or the problem aware market which is nudging them towards interacting with my brand. So for example, if like, let's say I'm promoting something myself and I'm talking about the importance of avatars and how it helps you to profit from your ads faster. I might create a 30 second or a two minute video and just do some targeting on Instagram and Facebook with the intent of getting people to watch at least 15 seconds. I can then remarket to those, either with another video which says, oh, by the way, when you've got really good avatar, here's how you can now launch ads within 20 minutes. So then there might be another ad which says, oh, by the way, if you want access to this and a lot more, join my subscription, program or membership, whatever it is. And those kind of funnels still work well. And the key thing about that. So if you go back a few years, there was this whole concern about iOS 14 and pixels and things like that. When you do video remarketing on Instagram and Facebook, Facebook own all of that data. So that data is and should still be fairly accurate. So if a thousand People have viewed 15 seconds of your video, you can remarket to those thousand people with another message so you can drip feed them down the funnel without forcing them into a cell. And that's worked really well for us as well.

Okay, I've got all of this, which is super, time is running out. So I'm very aware of this. How do you put all of this and get AI to work to your advantage? What prompts do you use in AI? What's your preferred AI platform? And how do you just get started with AI to accelerate this, this testing process?

So November 22nd is when I guess ChatGPT3 or whatever went public. And obviously AI has been around for longer, but that's when I first started to pay attention. So it went public, I paid $20 a month to get access to. I spent months and months just playing around with it, no idea what it could do. And then what I realized was here's this AI brain and it's a super, super brain. It's taken knowledge from the Internet and all these kind of crazy things and it's is very clever, but it lacks context. So if you go and say write me a Facebook ad, you don't know where it's got its knowledge from, does it actually understand and all that kind of stuff. So I then spent months and months building context. That context was in the form of giving it advice on how I like to structure ads. So I shared with you one copywriting framework which is ada. There's many, many, many. So for example, when I go through. So I built my own AI app on top of OpenAI and what I do is when I'm writing an ad, I can select a dropdown which says this is for a cold audience, this is for a warm audience, this is for a hot that the problem solution, aware, etc. I can also say what kind of ad I want. Do I want a direct response ad, Do I want an advertorial ad, Do I want a story based hook, story offer? Do I want whatever it is. I can also give it a level of creativity and that basically tells the AI to either strictly follow my advice or recommendations, which is low creativity, or think a bit outside of the box. And then I can also give it copywriting styles as well. So I've got Gary, Hallbert and Ogilvy. I've even built mine in as well. So that when I'm going through this process, I can select these options and then give it just three things. Who am I targeting, what's the transformation? And why would someone be interested in this product? So it's just a few lines of input and in the background it's building this massive prompt based on what I put in and it then pulls that out into results. And I'm telling you, like I gave you the example of the avatar. That avatar process would take at least 30 minutes for someone who has a lot of experience to maybe a couple of hours for someone that doesn't. You can now do that in under 30 seconds in AI. So literally, if you just key in a few things and say, build me this avatar document, it will come back and I'd love to give you access to it. Yes, please.

Yes please.

Honestly, it's mind blowing and it will come back with different emotional states. It will come back with the rebuttals, it will give, give you ideas on targeting and all that kind of stuff. So this is why within an hour, probably quicker. Even if you've never run ads before, AI can build your avatar, it can build your ad copy, it can give you some creatives. And we've built a chat interface where I've uploaded the BPM method, which is my training program. I've uploaded blog posts, I've uploaded like all the content I've produced. I put it all into this chat interface. Now you can have a conversation with the AI almost as if you're speaking to me. And I've been monitoring this for many, many months. It's insane and I approve of it. You cloned yourself? I've cloned myself. But the craz thing is, I'll give you an example. I was looking to launch an offer last month and I was like, I'm running to. And I was having a conversation with this AI, which is kind of like myself. But I had this conversation and it said, yeah, there's a case study that SM Commerce did in 2018 and this is what they did and stuff like that. I completely forgot about that. What a great idea. And the crazy thing is like, that's my own case study. AI has reminded me now for this use case, you should do the same thing you did in terms of 2018. I'd completely forgot. So like, honestly, it's mind blowing. What it's what it's doing for us.

And, and it also advances marketing because, you know, people would learn from those questions. People learn from questions. You know, it's all about asking the right questions. And, and when, you know, people are plugging in answers to questions, they're just much more enlightened marketers. Right.

This is an interesting thing because I monitor the chat logs because we're doing it for quality purposes and want to keep improving the AI. I'm seeing transformations in these ad copies. So someone might come in and say, I've never run ads before, can you tell me where I get started? And it's like, right, you need to launch a business manager or send you a link to Facebook to say go and follow this process. Then you need to add the pixel. Then you need to is giving people step by step advice. And then it's like, okay, I've done all that, what do I do next? And it's almost like having your own personal media buyer without spending thousands a month on an unknown quantity.

Yeah. And it's like a trainer at the same time.

So absolutely.

It's phenomenal. Phenomenal. Good, good, good source. So it's a GPT app. Right.

So we've got two parts. One is an app we built on WordPress which uses the OpenAI API. So that's doing all kind of magic in the background. So I've got a developer working with me on that. The other one is a chat style interface. So one is dropdowns and kind of things that you input and then it spews out ad copy and stuff like that. The other one's a chat interface where we've just uploaded all this like case studies and guides and stuff like that. We can have a free flow conversation. We find people end up using both. So you want an avatar created, go use the app. You then want to have a free flow conversation. Like someone. Some chats come in and say, I've written this ad for Facebook. It's not working. Can you improve? Give me three variants and it will give it 10 seconds, 15 seconds. You now got three AD variants from the one you put in. Or for example, you can take data from Facebook, CSV data. So commissary separate values, copy and paste that into the chat and say, here are my stats, can you tell me what to do next? The AI will analyze that and tell you what to do next. Okay, your click through rate on this ad isn't that good. You should maybe pause that. This one's looking good, give it more budget. So the AI is telling you all the things you should do and you don't need to be an expert in.

All of this suppression. This is really, really good. I would, I'm definitely going to link to it in the show notes. If you have any special offers, let me know. I would, you know, just announced it at the start of this, this, this conversation for people listening to really, really, really good stuff I want to jump into. So, so, so that copy bit, it's freaking nailed. We get that. What about scripting, like the creative direction? One of the challenges I'm personally facing is I can no longer be a creative director. I just don't have the bandwidth. I, I'm solving other problems. So, so typically back in the days with clients, I would, you, you know, get, get, get, get their problem, get their avatars, you know, get the hooks. I would put the hooks together. I work with a video editor and really, really just nail the creatives and even, you know, interview the, the founder. What, how can AI really help with, with, with the creative process for, for videos? So, you know, you can just give UGC people or video editors or you know, a studio or, you know, your talent essentially all of those scripts or guidelines to really execute for your ads to scale up, especially in this day of reels and TikToks and all of that stuff.

Absolutely. So one of the things that we've done is we've taken scripts of ads that we've run in the past and uploaded that to our AI. You can do this yourself. If you go into OpenAI, you can create your own GPT now you can, you can get like, let's say you've got five years worth of scripts that you've run from videos that perform really well. Literally just take those, put them into one PDF or separate PDFs, upload those into your AI. What AI will then do is when you ask it a question, it will use that documentation as context. So if you say, right, I've got this client, here's the avatar, here's how we're targeting, here's what we're doing and we want to create a video script for them. It will go and look at all these past video scripts that you've created, that you've authorized that these are good scripts and it will create a new one based on that. So that's kind of what we're doing right now. So we can create YouTube scripts, TikTok scripts, video ad scripts of Facebook. And my AI can do that because we've uploaded all of our content, so it knows what good looks like. So no longer is it going off into its vast expanse of billions of data it's picked up off the Internet. It's looking specifically at what's worked for us and then trying to interpret that to create something new. And we upload frameworks for VSLs, video sales letters, frameworks for just all kinds of creatives. So that's us telling the AI the things that we want it to focus on and then it will fill in the blanks.

And I guess you can also throw in competitors script so it has even more context as to what it's going up against. So beyond ChatGPT, what AI platforms excite you the most?

Good question. So right now, Descript, I absolutely love descript. If you haven't used it, it's a video editor with AI capability. So for example, when we create some video nowadays before, I'd have to take it to a video editor to get it edited and maybe take out the arms and the R's and add some B roll, which is additional video and add some formatting and stuff like that. We can do it within 10 minutes. And my virtual assistant is doing it now, so she's able to use this AI tool and do something a video editor would probably take two, three hours to do and probably charge hundred times more as well. So that's a big tool that we're using. Another one I'm using for my coaching calls is a tool called Read AI for Zoom. And what that does is when I used to take coaching calls, I'd make notes, take actions and share it with the prospect. Read AI does all of that. So what it does is it joins the meeting, takes all the notes, it summarizes, it creates action points, create short video snippets in case you want to go back and look at specific things. And it will send it to my coaching client as well as to myself, a record as well. So now I no longer need to do it. And the way I'm using AI right now is when I find a problem, my first thing is, can I solve it? So to give you a completely unrelated example, I have four children in school right now, and therefore we have four sets of schools and teachers sending us emails every single week. So we could end up with maybe 15 or 20 emails coming into the inbox. Very, very difficult as working parents to keep an eye on. I have AI now attached to Gmail via zapier, which will look at those emails, it will go into OpenAI, it will interpret it and just send us a list of actions to take. And that also gets CC to my va, who then makes a weekly list of the things we need to do. Now all of a sudden we don't even Check those emails anymore. All we do is check that to do list. What do we, okay, you need to pay that fee for that trip. Okay, you need to fill in this form. So it's just action, action, action. So. And a completely other example, just to give people ideas. We have five kids, we have various allergies in our family planning meals is a nightmare. Now the AI that we built has our meal preferences and everyone's individual allergies. And all I do is ask it, can you give me five meal ideas for the next week? It will give those five meal ideas catering for all the allergies and give us the ingredients we'll need so we can double check what we need and it will give us alternatives. We don't like those ideas. Like honestly, the depth of things that you can do and the breadth is just stunning.

It is, it is. I like, I like the, the application to your family in Cuisines and school. What I do with AI now is, you know, sometimes with correspondence with the school, you as a parent can get emotional. You know, you can get ahead of yourself with just typing, especially if outcomes are not aligned with what you expected. So I use GhostWrite, my Gmail and you know, for responses, not all the time, but sometimes I just put bullet points and you know, AI, you know, just kind of spits it out in a professional, you know, manner in which, you know, it's devoid of, of emotions and you know, you get a good response time. Sometimes they respond instantly because it's so efficient.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So it's, it's good. But I really like the fact that you, you're actually getting AI to, to, to actually automatically give you action points off the back of what it is, you know, sort of processed. So do you have multiple profiles of like ChatGPT or is everything just, you know, bundled up into, into one. How, how do you manage all of this? Because context is really important, right?

Yeah, every, everything's through one login. So I pay $20 a month to get access to all the latest versions of the public GPT on OpenAI and then I use the API to plug keys into my apps. So I built my own app as I mentioned, for my advertising for the kind of helper apps. I either use the built in GPT functionality so you can go to OpenAI and just create your own little mini bot that way, or I use Zapier and I can connect anything to OpenAI. So through Zapier you connect to OpenAI, put your API key in and for example, for my email assistant, zapier connects to Gmail and it's looking for specific emails from specific email addresses. And if they come in, it will then take the content of the email, push it out to OpenAI, give it the prompts which says summarize this, pull out the key points and respond back. And then that will send an email back to me, my wife and my assistant and then she'll figure out what to do from there. So like they're the three ways that we're using it right now.

Incredible, incredible, incredible. And then what are your thoughts on, on the, the more graphic aspects of, of VR. And I don't mean in the negative aspect, I mean just, just generating, you know, videos and images. Do you see what do you see? What's your, what were your prospects there?

Yeah, so I built my own GPT on OpenAI which creates AD images and I have to say I was mildly impressed. Especially for product based businesses for services. It's not quite there. We're still doing some work on tweaking but like for example, you know, I did some experiments. We created ads. In fact it was, I went to some creative websites where, you know, where they list like award winners, where they've won a creative award and stuff like that. I went through those and took out the descriptions of the creative. So there'll be like this won an award because of this and this is what it did. I pasted that into the ChatGPT and say create an ad for this. And it was very, very good. Like one ad was for some headphones, some high end, high quality headphones designed for people that want class and luxury and all that kind of stuff. And the ads came back so good. It was like a really posh house and the headphones were nicely presented on the, on the oak table in the lounge. And like I just felt like I wouldn't even be able to brief that to an agent, to a creative person who just came up with it. But those, those creatives are really good. And the key is when you're creating something like that, to keep reworking your prompts because you'll never get it right first time around. So it might come back and it's like added some text and sometimes it hallucinates and comes up with random text. So then I'll change the prompt to say when you create the image, I don't want any copy on it because I can then put it into Canva and add copy myself. I just need the base creative. So they're the ways that you keep tweaking. Regarding video, I've been playing with an app called Runway, and I've been very impressed with that. So Runway allows you to, in a similar way, to take a prompt and create video for it. So for example, I wanted to create an ad for one of my products and I wanted a woman sitting in a cafe, drinking coffee, almost like taking her time and sipping it slowly whilst the world around it was zipping around really fast. And I put that in as a prompt. And it took two or three prompts. But what came back, I was so impressed. And it took me about two minutes to create that video. And if I brief that to Video Creative, even if they got it right first time, you're looking at a day turnaround. Okay, here's the brief. Then we'll do it and stuff. I did it in two minutes. Like that's, that's the power of what we've got right now.

Yeah, I agree. I'm going to check out the Runway. Runway. Depeche, we're running out of time. You know, you have a hard stop. However, however, we need to do some rapid fire questions. I can't let you go without, you know, doing this. And if, like, not if we should do this again in a few months. I just feel like we haven't covered enough. But we've covered a lot. Like masses. Like mass. A lot, a lot, a lot. In this 40 minutes or thereabouts. Okay, first question. Ready when you are. First. You ready?

Yeah. Let's go.

All right. When do you think you'll be retiring?

I tell people I'm Semi retired now. Five, 10 years ago, I had a plan. You know, work until 60, make money and stuff like that. But honestly, what I do every day, I choose to do and I really enjoy. And for me, I've seen people retire and they get bored and they get old faster and stuff like that. I kind of can choose what I do. If I want to work today, I will. If I don't, I don't. Like Mondays for me now are any other day. Two, three years ago were very stressful, you know, client problems, client accounts and stuff like that. So for me, I kind of consider myself semi retired. I spent so much time with the family. I do the things I want to and you know, if I want to launch an offer and do something, I can and bring extra cash in. If I don't, it's fine as well.

And that's because you're in creator mode and you're self actualizing in this stage of your life. And there is the blur. It's really A blur, really, in terms of work and your lifestyle. Second question is, who's been your most meaningful business contact in the last five years?

Interesting question. I would probably say. I'd probably say someone like Tim Burd. I think you might know him. He's a Facebook ads guru as well. And he's someone I looked up to before I was known in the space. And he's the first one I connected to. And he connected me to so many other things as well. And I think that's probably a big leverage that I've been able to apply. Even now, we're still close friends and we'll ping each other now and again. I've invited him to my masterminds, I've been to his, and we'll share knowledge and stuff like that. But it's. Sometimes you look at someone who's like, miles ahead of you and think, I wonder what it'd be like to work with them. And when you get to work with them, it's. It's brilliant because now you're considered at the same level, and people see you like that now as well. Then I'm looking at how I can help other people.

But you also put the work. I remember when you made the connection with Tim Burr, you were just not sitting on your laurels. You know, other. Other experts have. Have been, you know, given the same opportunity. But you, man, as in Facebook, you're like the king of Facebook. You're there pushing every day. From an emotional standpoint, people follow your story. So kudos to you. Really, really good stuff. Okay, so third question is, are you into sports?

I am.

If yes. What's your favorite team or athlete?

Team is Arsenal and sport is football. Although I have to call it soccer here now, which is confusing.

How do you follow Arsenal for. From. From Calgary? From. From Canada.

I have to wake up early.

Fair enough, fair enough, fair enough, fair enough, fair enough. Okay, final. And.

And by the way, I coach soccer as well, so, like, I'm a soccer fanatic.

Same here. I. So I. I never play football, but the. They. One of my. My sons, I tried to get him into a football club and they're like, well, we. It's a new group and would you like to be a coach? And I was like, okay, if I say no, they'll probably not set the new group. So I became a coach. Okay, final question is, if you could choose a single book or resources made the highest impact on how you view building a business or growing a business, which would it be?

The book I recommend the most is A book called Rocket Fuel. And the reason for that is in 2020, we grew our business to a point where I was super stretched and super stressed, and the next logical hire was an operations director. And we did end up hiring, but someone recommended me this book first, and what it helped me to understand was what my profile is as an entrepreneur and what I need help with the most. So one of the things the book covers is the difference between a visionary, which is most entrepreneurs, and an integrator, which is an ops person. And that's. That's what was making my business struggle and was making my life miserable, is because I'm not an integrator. I'm not a doer, I'm a thinker. So if I. If I'm coming up with a thousand ideas and I'm. I'm getting stressed out because I can't implement or get help in actually operating these ideas, then. Then that becomes a blocker. So the Rocket Fuel is a massive book for anyone that's looking to grow their business, their team, their operations, without getting stuck inside their business.

Amazing. Can't thank you enough, Deepesh. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on the 2x e commerce podcast. For those who want to find out more, more you know about you. I have a website which is bpm method.com I'll link to it in the show notes. Are there any other relevant websites or social media sites people should jump onto? I know Facebook is a big one. Sure to connect with you on your work. Especially the chatbots. Where do they sit?

Yeah, so the chatbots are part of our paid community on ad signals.com so there is a free trial. I'll send you the link out so people can have a play around with that. Everything else on depeshmandalia.com Fantastic.

Fantastic, Depesh. Have a wonderful rest of the day. Thank you for coming on the 2x e commerce podcast.

Pleasure. Appreciate it. Speak soon.

Cheers. So thank you for sticking to the very end. So what is the offer Deepash is offering you after this? This just to give you some context. After I recorded this episode, I reached out to Dipesh and I was like, you know, I'm going to join Ad Signals. I joined Ad Signals and when I saw all of the value that members of the Ad Signals community were getting, I was like, okay, you guys need to give me a special offer to. To you, the audience. For you guys, the audience. So that you can join in, in these conversations and really up your social advertising game. Because there are many elite level social advertising members in the group called Ad Signals. So if you want to go to Ad Signals, you can go to adsignals.com I've linked to it in the Show Notes. But here's the thing. I also have a special link which I have in the Show Notes of this. It's an affiliate link, being very honest with you, but here's what it gets you. So typically you have the cost of being a member. The monthly cost of being a member is about $297. If you go to artignows.com now and you want to join with an all access pass that gives you access to the builder, the AI builder, his methodology, Playbooks, soaps, his frameworks, ad formulas. In fact, there's content around YouTube advertising, TikTok, Google Ads, analytics and more, and weekly support calls. It's almost $300. It's $297. And what the offer you guys have is for the first month of subscription, you only pay 97amonth for that first month and then it reverts to 297. Now if you prefer to pay annually, the annual fee to join the community is $1,780. And he has given you guys a special offer of $670. I think that's about 55% off or thereabouts if my math is right. So that in of itself is value in my opinion. Personally, I'll go for the annual just due to the fact that 670, you know, dollars with that link, with that link I sent, I've shared in the Show Notes and now you're getting it. Instead of paying $1781,780, you're paying $670. So that's it, that's the offer. Use the link on there because the link takes you a special checkout that enables you, you know, get these discounts. So I will put that link in the Show Notes and you know, it's if you're serious about social advertising this 2024, I'll implore you to definitely, definitely, you know, do it. That's my Skype ringing in the background. But yeah, I'll implore you to, to definitely take it. Cheer.