Why Nobody Can Make Facebook Ads Work Anymore, with Depesh Mandalia — Copywriters Podcast 271

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Welcome back to the Copywriters Podcast with your host, the world's greatest copywriting coach, David Garfinkel. David, how are you doing today, Nathan?

I'm good, how are you?

I'm good. And I'm excited for today's episode because we're going to be talking about something that me as a paid advertiser and copywriter, I am super frustrated with right now. So I'm going to sit back and absorb as much as I can out of this week's episode.

All right, well, great. Let's get into it. So if you wanted to find out how to make your Facebook ad start working again, who would you turn to? Well, I think I found someone you'd like. His name is Dipesh Mandala. Besides being a successful agency owner with over $100 million in sales for clients to his credit, he's also a gifted speaker, coach, and teacher. Depeche left the corporate world with his when his job kind of evaporated in the 2009, 200789 financial meltdown. But he landed on his feet and within 36 months he had his first seven figure year at first as an affiliate marketer. Fast forward to 2018 and he began training entrepreneurs and other marketers with something he calls the BPM method. Today he's going to tell you about it and why it's very profitable with Facebook in the current environment, even after Apple has clamped down on the data available to marketers. But first, I'm going to tell you this copy is powerful. You're responsible for how you use what you hear in this podcast, and most of the time, common sense is all you need. But if you make extreme claims and or if you're writing copy for offers in highly regulated industries like health, finance, and business opportunity, you may want to get a legal review after you write and before you start using your copy. My larger clients do this all the time. Dipesh, welcome and thanks for being here.

Thanks. Pleasure. I'm looking forward to it.

So am I. And before we get into it, let me set the stage with a few brief comments. The title of this episode is why Nobody Can Make Facebook Ads Anymore. Obviously, our guest and his students still can. And I'm really looking forward to what Dipesh has to tell us. I want to draw one distinction right away. What's important is both copywriting and strategy. Now, the best copywriting has strategy behind it. A lot of people, though, write ads and copy the what without getting enough into the why. And Depeche has a neat list of five questions that include three whys, and we'll talk about them later in the show today. But the unavoidable truth is you just have to think a little harder if you want to make things work. So with that, let's get going. Dipesh, you say that copywriting is your secret weapon, and I wouldn't say that's true of every Facebook advertiser, but I'm glad to hear it from you. What do you mean by that?

So if we go back to, you know, when, when digital really started off, it started off with paid ads, display banners and things like that, and we had to work harder to try and find the prospect and convince them to take the click. Then you move over to the days of when Facebook started, and Facebook made it really, really easy to find people who are actively in market to do something, to convert, to buy, to book a call and things like that. And I think over time what's happened is people, I think marketers have become a bit lazy and just relied more on the algorithm and it did work for a good time. And we'd forgotten some of the principles of what actually used to work. And I go all the way back, hundred years back and think about the marketers and advertisers of those days and how hard they had to work. So some of the brilliant copy examples that we see from the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, etc, they were copywriters really in deep flow of human psychology, persuasion and things like that. And I think what I'd seen, at least for Facebook, is we'd forgotten some of those principles, but also forgetting that humans haven't really changed that much. So how we interact and how we influence and how we connect, it's still the same. So, you know, with, with my experience in particular, I had a love for copy since I was really young, so read a lot of books and I would enjoy writing fiction, nothing special, but just like I'd read, I'd read Lord of the Rings and I'd write my own little mini four or five page version of it. And I like to draw the maps and all these kind of things like that. I used to like to get lost into the kind of creative world of fiction. And then I took that into, you know, when I was at school, I was really, really bad at exams, but give me an essay and I did really well. So I kind of had that passion for just exploring words and I think that put me in strong position in marketing. So I first got involved with landing pages with funnels and things like that. And I think I took that common thread through everything I've done over the last 20 years in the online space is it for me, it just all starts with copy. Who am I talking to? What mindset are they in, what stage of awareness are they in? And how do I trickle them into the next stage? So it's never right. Write an ad, get this person to buy. It's where is this consumer right now? Where do I want them to get to next? And then where do I want them to go after that? So I think that's been my kind of more old school approach.

Oh, that, that's great. And more people should do that. So briefly in the big picture, how has Facebook advertising changed? I mean, most people know this, but it'd be good to review it. How has it changed to become harder to make it work?

Sure. So when I first entered Facebook, it was around 2012 and it was because I was doing affiliate marketing. I was doing a lot of organic search results, so SEO search engine optimization, and my SEO results tanked. So I was getting lots of free organic traffic. In 2012, Google made a big change and I wasn't up to speed with it. And that's where my affiliate business went out and kind of died. So I needed a new traffic channel. So I was looking at paid searches, too expensive for my niche. And then I fell into Facebook. Now, my first entry into Facebook was thinking more as a paid search marketer, that I needed to write direct response, copy, get to the point, short copy, etc. Nothing worked. It took me 18 months to figure it out. But then when I did, I realized Facebook is actually more akin to TV than something like Google search because someone's not really going onto their TV show. Looking forward to seeing the ads. But we know through decades of experience, ads do work, and it's the same thing with Facebook. So I think my first understanding was if you can nudge them out of their social browsing with something interesting, with something intriguing, then you can bring them into your funnel. So I think Facebook captured that kind of essence of TV advertising, but they went a million times further by being really precise. So with tv, you don't really know if that person's in market. With Facebook you do. So from about, I'd say, you know, 2012 to 2018, 2019, you could really just launch an ad and it had to be okay. And it generally worked really well. And I think that created this sense of Facebook ads is easy. You just need to get ads running. And for a time it did work. So then obviously Facebook have had some challenges. Data privacy, governments and things like that. And I think Apple saw an opportunity. So Apple are a competitive business. They saw an opportunity to increase the size of their walls around their garden and block Facebook out. So in 2020, in 2020, they announced that on iOS 14 devices, so the operating system, there'll be a prompt that says, hey, do you want this app to track you? And they used Facebook intentionally as the example for using this app feature. So they introduced it in 2021. Essentially, that meant that Facebook could no longer track people who had opted out of tracking on iOS. IOS represents the majority of users of the Facebook app. So without that tracking, there's two problems. Number one, as an advertiser, you lose some data, you use some stats, and now you're flying blind slightly. And then from a targeting point of view, you can't target as well as you could. So we lose some targeting options. So that puts the onus back on the advertiser to work that little, much harder to be able to find the prospect and to fly essentially in kind of the dark when it comes to data. So that's the confusion that's been created, and it has knocked out so many businesses and so many advertisers from that because they haven't understood what's going on. Facebook haven't really understood what's going on. There's been bad communications. I work quite closely with Facebook, and I think internally there's so much broken information that not one source is clear on. This is exactly what we need to do as advertisers, and we're all figuring out. It took me months to figure out the right solution as well. And we're all working through this together. So now we're in the situation where, you know, Facebook doesn't have the enhanced tracking and targeting it used to, but it still works. And there's still many, many people making lots of money through Facebook. But you have to make the shift and understand what that shift is as well.

I know this is what you teach in your coaching and in your long seminars, but if you could boil it down to one change we need to make to make Facebook work, could. Could you pull that out?

Yeah, absolutely. So when it comes to Facebook targeting, there's lots of different ways you can target. Going back, let's say, 20 years, if you are running banner ads, the way you target is to say, hey, run this on some websites, and I'm going to use my banner ad as bait to try and get someone to click my ad. So the thing you do is to say, hey, if you suffer from back pain, dot, dot, dot. So you're calling out your prospect. And that for me is the one biggest change we have to do with Facebook is you can no longer rely that Facebook is going to know who's got back pain and give you the targeting ability to get those people and create lookalike audiences and things like that. Now you, as the marketer, as the advertiser, as the creative, as a media buyer, you have to call that prospect out. So previously you could allude to back pain, but you know, you know Facebook's going to find you people in that kind of. In that kind of targeting potential. But now you have to be a lot more explicit. And it's something I've always done anyway. But I think a lot of advertisers have become lazy, that Facebook will just find me the right people. So that's the one change for me is really be clear on who you want to put their hand up and worry less about the targeting. So I talk about broad audiences. So if I'm looking for someone with back pain, I might go anyone between 25 and 65, for example, and that's it. 25, 65 US male, female. That's my targeting done. Then from that pool of, let's say, 40 million people or whoever it is, I only want the people to put their hand up that say yes to these things. So, you know, if you're suffering from back pain and you know you're, you've tried all the remedies, I want people to give me the yeses and then they'll read on. And then I just want them to get to my landing page where I can expand on my offer.

Okay, that's really good. And that's, you know, from my perspective, exactly what old school direct marketing is. You would put an ad in a magazine and you get people to raise their hand for an offer and, you know, call in or write for a free report or something like that. So what's old is new. And, you know, I want to go back to something you said before and see if we can expand on it a little bit, because I love what you say about the evolution of technology, which is fast, versus the evolution of the human mind, which is unbelievably slow. Could. Could we talk about how the teachings of the old masters of copywriting, which we focus on a lot in this podcast, how you see them applying to Facebook advertising.

Absolutely. So I'll give you an example. Claude C. Hopkins, one of the things he wrote about, which I found quite fascinating when I read it first 20 years ago was how he did split testing. So he would run an offer in two different magazines or whatever it is, and just have a coupon code and they had different coupon codes so he could track which magazine or publication it went to based on redemption in the store. And, you know, this is talking about 100 years ago. This was the kind of tech that they were using, but it was highly effective. It was super accurate. Now fast forward to where we are now. People are starting to reuse that kind of mentality and think, all right, actually, if I can't track by pixel and I don't really know who's clicking and Apple's blocking my users and things like that, maybe if I use a coupon code, I can tell who's clicking and who's actually buying. And actually, now I've improved my accuracy even more because I know if they've clicked this ad and it's got this coupon code attached, there's only one way that you would have got this ad. So, you know, there's, there's teachings like that which I think have been lost because we were, you know, spoiled for data for, for many years that we're now having to go back and look at those kind of things. You know, some of the great examples of the Halberts and the Ogilvies and some of the headlines they produced, people are starting to go back to that now in terms of the ads and the landing pages. There's a lot of talk now of advertorials which were kind of. They've always been there. They've always been there in the background. So advertorials are essentially. They might look like a blog post, but really they're selling something that's the kind of long and short of it. People have been using it for many years despite Facebook being so success successful. But I think it's now coming back into prominence because of the way we are finding it harder to get people to put their hand up and find people in Facebook. So therefore, we now need to use a softer approach. So everything. I'd say the majority of ads on Facebook over the last five years have been super direct response. So here's an offer. Buy it limited time and put pressure in trying to get that sale. Now we have to ease off the gas and say, right, okay, we know we don't really know if this person's in market, but let's test to see where they are. So you can run the ad, get them to an advertorial Some people will click, some people won't. And we can try and remarket to them to get them back in through a different offer. And I think that's a big change where we're looking at what used to work 50 years ago and things like that. And you know, on your point of technology versus human mind, you know, some of those principles, I don't think they'll change even for hundreds of years in the future because the human mind still reacts to, highly reacts to emotion. You know, if you can get emotion into your copy, if you can paint a picture with your words, if you can influence someone based on where they are right now and where they could be and things like that, I don't think, I can't see that changing unless Elon Musk gets his AI implants and starts to change the way our brains work. So that principle, those principles are still going to work. And I think for the best copywriters in the world, they are great psychologists, they understand the human mind and how to influence. So regardless of what platform comes along, and I firmly believe this, if you're really good at copywriting and you understand the human mind, I don't think that you'd really worry about making money online. I just think that that one skill is good enough. Because in 10 years time, let's say Facebook is gazumped by TikTok or anything else like that, if you're, if you're good with your copy and you can stitch together funnels and user journeys, the platform's irrelevant.

Yeah. One thought I had when you were saying all of that is those of us who are counting on the rapid evolution of the human mind have pretty much given up by now. Could you talk about the four things that you focus on to build a perfect ad campaign, Facebook or otherwise?

Yeah, absolutely. And this has come through kind of years of trial and error and just trying to figure out when I've had a success. I like to deconstruct it. I don't want to just know I've had success, I want to know why. And over the years, one thing I figured out is if you get these four elements right, you can conquer any market, any niche, any, any country, any, any industry and things like that. So it boils down to product, audience, offer and funnel. So regardless of your advertising platform of choice and what you're selling, if you can find a product that has an active audience and stitch that, stitch the product and audience together via an offer and then push them into the funnel, that's the Basic building blocks of any success. So, you know, with the product and the audience, there'll be some products that need an audience created. They're very hard to market. Then there's products where there's an active market already. So, for example, I read somewhere, I can't remember where, and maybe you've heard this before, is, you know, where is the best place to have a hot dog stand? Well, where there's a hungry crowd. Yeah, that's the way I see kind of marketing, which is if you have a product and there's an active market, then it's a. Then the challenge is the offer. Can you get the offer strong enough in order to get people into a funnel? If you have a product, let's say you're Elon Musk and you've got electric cars, you need to now create a market that's a whole different ball game. So it's playing with the same elements in the same blocks. It's just how you connect those together changes. And then you can plug in any ad platform. It could be TV, it could be Facebook, it could be TikTok, that's that comes after. But getting those four building blocks clear and correct or as best as you can, that's 80% of the job done. So, for example, when we talk about audience, some people like to go really deep. You know, what magazines they read, what TV programs they watch, things like that. I only want to know what's the general demographic. So male, female, age, I. E. Life stage, maybe income level, just to give me an idea of where they are. But then I also want to know what's the product actually offering them. So for example, if we're selling. So one of our clients was selling macros. So macros, when you're working out a small meals that are designed to be the right level of protein and carbohydrate and things like that. So when we looked at their avatar, there were people that wanted to lose weight, there were people that wanted to bulk up their muscles, there were people that wanted to run marathons. So. So already we've got three avatars. And they could all be the same gender, they could be all the same age, it doesn't matter. But the way we're going to communicate to them is all different. So if you want to lose weight, then our macros make it easier, makes it easier for you to stay on track, things like that. If you want to gain muscle weight, then our macros have great protein. So the way we talk to people is just change slightly based on the Avatar and what we're trying to do with the offer is say, hey, here's a product. We know that you have a need, we know understand your, that the transformation that you're looking for and here's the, here's the bridge to get you over to that product. And that's the offer for me. So some people see offer as, you know, does it have to be a discount or a bundle? I'm not talking about promotion. And I think people get confused between what an offer and a promotion is, but the offer is literally can I convince you to click? And by the way, one of the challenges I find when teaching media buys in particular is I want the highest click through rate I can get, which is I want as many people to click this ad as possible. I take the opposite route, which is I only want the right people to click. And again that's where the copy comes in. Where if my click through rate is low compared to maybe your ad or you know, whoever I'm competing with, I don't care as long as my conversion rate on the other side is good. And that's the thing that people need to balance out. And that's where a great funnel comes in as well.

I, I know what you're talking about. I've spent hours with a particular client that has a very high payoff offer, just tweaking a few words here and there to, to get exactly the right people to click.

Absolutely.

So one thing that's really helpful that you've come up with is a way to get started on strategic thinking. I mean, to some people the word they need to look the word thinking up in the dictionary. But even some very smart, educated, competent people may not be good strategic thinkers. You've come up with a method you call your five Ws. Could you just briefly walk us through those?

Yeah. So I, I wanted something so bear in mind, before starting my agency in 2017, I was working directly with clients. So it was really me just running things and defining what needs to be done. When I started my agency, I, I realized I needed to template all my knowledge and all my experience so that others in my team could follow suit. And that was a challenge because I'd never done that kind of thing before for my own business. So I wanted a template that was easy enough for a media buyer with very little experience to understand how to construct copy and creative and ads. So the 5W avatar was essentially taking one of my biggest learnings in marketing, which came from David Ogilvie, from something he wrote around 1930 which was the ager cooker sells manual. And I do encourage anyone that wants to learn copywriting just to read it. It was written in a very different time. So some of the wording is maybe different to what we expect in our times and the way he talks about women and things like that. But it was meant as a sales guide based on his experience of going door to door selling cookers during or I think it was during or just after the American Depression. So if you imagine these Aga cookers are high end cookers. I think at the time I can't remember what it was, but I think in, in today's money value they're like ten thousand dollar cookers. So they're not something that you just go through electrical store and just pick up. So he's walking door to door trying to sell these at a time where a lot of people couldn't afford it. And he became the top salesperson for eager. And part of what he did was he'd go door to door, go through so many failures and make a note of why did I fail and what can I try next time I knock on the door? Which for me is very similar to testing ads on Facebook because that's all you're doing. You're knocking on these doors of people in the newsfeed seeing which ads work. But what he did is then write up his attack strategy. So if he's on the front foot, this is what he's going to do and his defensive strategy, if he's on the back foot and now he's getting objections and people have questions or concerns, he had a list of everything that he's experienced and he must have knocked on thousands of doors and there was nothing that he didn't predict was going to happen. To the extent that he knew if he could get into the house and into the kitchen, his close rate massively went up because by then he now has context of at the time where the lady is going to be cooking. So he put all of these into the sales manual and what he created was something where for anyone reading it who is in the EGA team or was in the eager team at the time, they can follow the same process. So I wanted to create something similar for Facebook ads. So the idea was using some of those principles, I wanted to create the emotional hooks that you could template up. So I have five W's. So the first one is who are we targeting? The second one is what's the transformation that we're offering? And then the next two are why would Someone be interested in this from an emotional point of view. And then why would someone be interested in this from a benefits or functional point of view? And then the fifth why is, why would someone not be interested in this? So this is now objections. So when you construct this whole piece, what you end up creating is your full funnel battle plan for advertising. So you've got your top of funnel ads which are front foot. So what are the emotional opportunities that we can break into this potential audience? Then you've got your functional benefits that help to back up your angles. And then you've got your retargeting ads and your copy for your landing page, which is we're going to handle objections as well as. So take taking a really simple example, back in 2016, give or take, there was a really popular affiliate marketing product which absolutely took off. It was the LED dog collar. So the idea was you could buy an LED dog collar and your dog could be seen in the dark, both if you're walking the dog, but also if the dog ran off so the dog doesn't get run over. So most of the copywriters at the time were writing very direct response copy which was it glows in the dark, the material is safe for your dog, the batteries last a long time, things like that. But the ones that were able to scale this offer, they didn't write any of that. They picked an emotional hook which was this LED dog collar could save your dog's life. Like that was enough. Now all of a sudden you've gone from making a functional decision of is this LED dog collar that is safe for my dog, it's bright, it's got batteries, it worth $30 to is it worth $30 to save my dog's life? And now you've changed it from a very left brain decision to now a right brain decision. And that for me is the difference between the copywriters of old and copywriters of now. Especially when it comes to media buying, of trying too hard for the sale and forgetting that when you sell on emotion, you have a higher chance of conversion because you're tapping into something which essentially the human mind can't deconstruct properly. So if I said to you, I've got this device, it's going to cost you $30, but it could save your dog's life. There's no way you can compute your dog's life to $30. It just, your brain just can't handle that. It's too for you to consider that you could lose your dog just because you didn't spend this $30, that's gonna, that's that you just can't, your brain can't cope with that. Whereas if I said, hey, I've got this LED dog collar, it's safe, your dog, it's bright, it lasts long. Do you want to buy it for $30? You can quite easily say, I don't know, not sure, I'll think about it. So I think that's kind of what I wanted to bring out in the copy. And then the objections are, you know, just handling. If someone is going to consider buying this product, thinking ahead, why would they not? And I think that's often missed out by media buyers. That kind of comes as an afterthought. But I think that's as important as coming up with your front foot copy as well.

That's, that's awesome. So who are we speaking to? What is the transformation you're offering? Why would they buy it from an emotional point of view? Why would they buy it from a functional benefits point of view? And why would they not buy it? And we're going to include those in the show notes. Thank you for that. It's really good stuff. Depeche. Okay, so in the, in the last few minutes, could you tell us about your seven figure Facebook ads course? Because I have a feeling we've only scratched the surface today.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think what I wanted to do was again going back into my agency. I spent about 2, 3 months looking for an off the shelf training course I could just give to my media buyers. I couldn't find one, so I created one for the agency and it worked. And the idea was I wanted, I wanted to share my experience, which was I've been deep in the world of brand marketing, but at the core I'm a performance marketer. So the difference is, and I had many arguments with brand marketers who would be all about the avatar and the look and feel and the aesthetic and the colors and things that I felt were irrelevant at the time because I was a performance marketer. I wanted to know how much is going to cost me. What's the click through rate, what's the conversion rate, what's the return on ad spend? So that's how I started off my marketing life. But then I started to appreciate that actually the truth of success is somewhere in between that and that's what I've developed over the last 10 years, which is if you can get deep into your avatar, you can understand the psychology, you can build funnels that persuade and convert, you can Kind of position your products based on their life stage and things like that, which are very big in the brand marketing world. But you also understand the metrics and the platform you're working with. If you can find that middle ground, that's where true success is and that's where our success came from in the agency as well. So the seven figure meta ads playbook essentially takes what we understand from human behavior and psychology and kind of old school copywriting and landing pages and influence, but uses it for Facebook advertising and it's merging that together. So it's kind of not just saying, hey, this is how you run ads, this is how you launch ads, this is how you create ads, and this is how you optimize and scale it. Takes it a few steps back and says, right, what's the product, what's the. Who are the audience, how do we build the avatar, how do we construct an offer, and what does our funnel look like before we even considered launching an ad? Because I would argue the ad part is the easy part, the avatar building the offer and the funnel slightly harder. But that's where the true money is made.

It's true. The money is made in all of that. Thinking up front on these few simple things that most people just gloss over, I agree with you. So we've set up a special link for you, right. For you, the listener. For DPS course, it's garfinkelcoaching.com Depeche D E P E S H and we'll put that in the show notes as well. People want to check it out.

Okay. A lot to go through today. I have one question for you just for clarity, for the listeners out there is your course. Looking at the sales page, it looks like it's pretty much targeted for Facebook advertisers or meta advertisers. Is that your sweet spot? Is that what people should be going there for if they want to really master Facebook meta ads?

Yeah. So here's the thing. So we actually have trained up like, you know, thousands of Facebook advertisers. They themselves have taken it to YouTube, to Snapchat, to TikTok. So they've taken the BPM, the brand driven performance marketing part of it, and stitched it themselves into other platforms. And the, I guess the key thing I would say is when you understand the principles of marketing, as I keep saying, it will work on any platform. For the seven figure meta ads playbook, we've made it as highly customized for Facebook as we can. But I guarantee once you understand the principles, you will make it work on any ad platform.

Yeah, it's been my experience that once you kind of understand how campaigns and how ad sets work, it it pretty much translates from one system to the other. The a lot of these platforms, they want to work with marketers, so they want to design the way their system works based off of what marketers understand. One more time before we're out of here. Garfinklecoaching.com depesh and that's D E P E S H. If you want to check it out yourself and it looks like a fantastic course, I'm probably going to sign up for it as soon as we get off of the call. And if you want to check out more of this podcast, head on over to copywriterspodcast.com anything else before we're out of here, Gentlemen?

Thank you. Depeche. This was, it was great information. I mean, you know, as an old school copywriter and copywriting coach, it was, you know, great confirmation bias for me on a lot of the points I've been preaching. Sometimes it seems like into a dark room for a long time. I can see why you and your students are making so much money with this. You really have a systematic approach. I do want to mention he was a coder, because you told me that he was a coder, so he kind of understands. I bet you're more of a software architect and one of those guys who was figuring how to, you know, thread the needle as he just seemed to be. But whatever you were, I think that was helpful. And it also helped you template things in a way that actually worked.

Absolutely. You know, my one takeaway is, look, just go back to Principles of Psychology. It just, you know, there's so many books around it and things like that. That for me, for me personally is the being the heart of copywriting and you know, performance based copywriting. Obviously, if you're writing copy for books, fictional and things like that, it's less about human psychology, but for marketing purposes, get into the psychology, appreciate the human mind, and then start to learn the kind of dark arts of influence. There's so much you can do, perfect.

Way to end it, the dark arts of influence. But we need to learn them.

All right, catch you guys later.

Thanks guys.