S4:E8 - Future of Facebook Marketing with Ben Simkin | The Wolfs Den

Oh, don't you stop rolling, gotta get home.

Alrighty, welcome to today's show. My name is Mark Ottobre, owner and founder of Enterprise Fitness and Wolfpack. Today I'm here with the Wolfpack, an elite community of personal trainers looking to grow their business and career as legitimate face-to-face coaches teaching best practices in training, nutrition, and business so you can get results for your clients and be handsomely paid to do it. Today's episode of Wolf Stand is switching from our usual focus on nutrition and training into business content. On the line, we have the one, the only Ben Simkin. Ben Simkin has helped his clients generate over $1 billion, that's B, billion dollars in sales from Facebook ads alone. In the marketing circles, he's known as the Kingpin and Facebook's number one marketer. By his peers. He's a dear friend, and it's always a pleasure to speak with you, Ben. One of the sharpest minds in business I know. Thanks for coming on, Ben. I know we're going to get into some, some great stuff. How are you going today?

I'm good. It's an absolute honor to be here in your community, and, uh, always good to talk to you as well.

So yeah, so, so much to talk about, so much to talk about. We have the Wolfpackers on the line, as I said, the community of trainers They've all got their pens and notepads ready. We'll get to their questions later, but what I wanted to start with was, I mean, I know it's a broad question. We could probably just spend some time on this alone and unpack this question, but it's pertinent. What, in your opinion, what do you think makes a great ad?

What makes a great ad? Well, that is a good question. Well, what makes a great ad? It comes down to the biggest thing, and I always teach this, is that, I'm sure you've all heard of this expression, I think it was, apparently it was Abraham Lincoln that said it, but if I only had 10 hours to chop down a tree, I would take 8 hours to sharpen the axe. And so you've got to think about that, In terms of what does that mean in advertising and marketing, it means the 80% of your effort and your results will come from the preparation side of things. So, what is the preparation? Well, the preparation is understanding who your target market is. So, understanding who are you writing your ad towards, like what kind of client do you want specifically? And then figuring out and researching exactly what are their motivational emotional drivers, what are the things that are going to make them tick, what are the things that are going to make them want to click on your ad and go through and want to become a client. There's certain phrases and things you can say to them based on your understanding of them from a psychological point of view that will elevate your results dramatically. And I do a lot of this sales training because sales and advertising is the same. So, um, so when it, uh, in 1923, um, a man called John E. Kennedy— not the other guy, but John E. Kennedy, uh, who is the father of, uh, modern advertising— um, he said, uh, that advertising is salesmanship in print. So, what you say to a person in a sales situation is basically going to be the same in your ad. And within our organization, we have a sales team, and one of the things that I find with new salespeople that come into the company is that I will say, "When you get on the phone, say this exact sentence or say these words because these words have been proven to get a client." and they'll go and they'll go change them into their own words, in their own perspective, and they won't be getting the sales. So it's interesting that, um, that's one of these things that, that they, uh, tend to fall down on when they first start. So there's that words and phrases and things that you can pick up that will drive an emotional response to, uh, essentially want them to do business want to do business with you.

And I know this question, there's so many facets to it, but are there any things that you see, uh, on say Facebook, um, specifically— we'll talk about Instagram in a sec— but on Facebook that whether it's, uh, copy— so I mean, one side of it's copy, we've also got the, the photo, we've also got video that we can, we can look after. Um, what in your opinion, like, these things need to be, uh, changed interchangeably? Like, is there one medium that's preferred over the other, a combination of all using remarketing? How do you play that game?

Yeah, so I guess when it comes down to the technical side, we go on to the other part of the process where you figured out who your target market is, you know what you have to say to them to convince them, to persuade them to do that, then you've got to look at, well, it's really good. See, I've been doing Facebook ads for— this is my 11th year doing Facebook ads as a real, you know, legitimate business. So we're talking, you know, 10, 12 hours a day, uh, 6 days a week, um, and so on, uh, for over a decade. And when you first started with Facebook ads all that time ago, it was very difficult. It was a very manual process. We would have to write manually probably up to 300 to 500 different ads for a campaign. Now, the good thing about what I was doing is that the clients were paying me a lot of money, 6, 7 figures to do that, so I didn't mind sitting there writing 500 different ads and then having to rework it all and figure out what works and what doesn't work. But now, what you've got now is, is you have the artificial intelligence system in Facebook ads that will do 90% of the work for you. So you want to come up with one ad message, so you want to come up with copy for one piece of copy to start off with, and you want to choose 6 different images or videos, so have a mixture of images and videos, but choose 6 of those and put them into the system. Set up automatic placement, and Facebook will figure the rest of it out. It will tell you, okay, out of these 6 images, everyone likes this one image better. I'm just going to run this one image to all of your prospects, and it'll do it all automatically for you. So it's pretty, pretty damn good.

So in, in short, what makes a good ad first and foremost and above all else is knowing your target market. And then being able to get inside their brain, talk to them the way they need to be spoken to, and also recognizing that, you know, what makes a great ad in the fitness community, for example, might necessarily make a terrible ad for business. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's understanding those nuances and, um, yeah, starting, starting with— so I suppose as a, as a mandatory skill, I know you, you have a big thing on, like, taking stock of the client, who they are, understanding them, understanding the client.

Yeah, well, you know, that's a good thing, actually. Um, really good friend of mine by the name of Bond Halbert, um, his father— Bond's father was called— was Gary Halbert. He was— he's the world's number one copywriter that ever lived, okay? So he, he is, is, uh, he's now, um, gone over the rainbow bridge, but he was when he was alive, he was the number one, world's number one copywriter. And Bond, my friend, who lives in LA, and I go over there quite a lot and hang out with him, and he actually started with his, working with his dad when he was 9 years old. So imagine being in the meetings, in the business meetings and the marketing meetings with the world's number one copywriter since your age, age of 90, he's incredible. And a funny thing he said to me, he said, you know, in fitness and in health, there's, you know, there's, you have these, everyone has a secret to what they want. And the biggest thing people want in terms of fitness is that they want to look good naked. But nobody's going to say that to you. Nobody's ever going to come into your, you know, into a sales meeting or Facebook message and say, I want to look good naked. But that is the secret desire that they have, right? So then you— and you can't also say that, you can't go to your client and say that either, but it is this unspoken underlying thing that you have to be aware of and say, well, how do I approach this in a way that I can talk about it without talking about it, um, at all? And then you understand that, what's the motivator? And then you ask them what the motivator is, and they'll tell you, well, well, I want to feel good, I want to look good, and you can kind of understand where that's going. So understanding your target market is not just about, okay, what am I going to say, but understanding the mindset so that you know and understand them in, in, in, in depth as well. Does that make sense, or not really?

It makes perfect sense. Perfect sense. So I suppose on that, as, as someone— I mean, I see it in my industry, I'm pretty critical of what I see gets pushed out. I imagine you'd have the same. You're seeing ads that come in. Would you say that one of the big mistakes, at least to me it seems like this from my limited marketing knowledge in comparison to what you know, what I see is that people are relying too much on the technology and not relying enough on actually understanding their market and having an ability to write good copy, the fundamentals of what makes a good marketer. Do you see that or not so much?

Absolutely, I would 100% agree. And it's this path of least resistance. As humans, we're always trying to conserve calories, conserve our mental brain, all these things where it's like, okay, what's easy for me to do? Well, I'm going to click on a bunch of buttons on Facebook and run an ad. I haven't thought about the ad. I haven't spent more than 20 seconds thinking about what I'm going to say. I haven't spent any time understanding who my target market is. I'm just going to click the buttons, choose an image, and then hope for the best. And then if it doesn't work, I'm going to blame Facebook. But that's human nature. We are all trying to— we're all programmed to try and find the easiest route in life. But when we're aware of it, you as in the fitness game, you know, more than anyone about that. And so, um, and so what you got to do, I mean, you got— it's painstaking. It can be painstaking. Like, to give you an example, um, we recently redid a campaign for our own company, for my company, um, and I spent 40 hours researching my target client. Um, I don't know anyone who would even bother to do that. But in your game, like in the fitness game, you don't need to do that. My business is a lot more complicated and has a lot of facets. But the point is that if you want to spend 1, 2, 3, 4 hours thinking, just sitting there and thinking or talking to your clients and reflecting on conversations you've had and trying to put yourself in the shoes of other people and really thinking about what can I say in order to make them want to do to, to work with me. You know, that is the, that's the underlying question. What can I say? What can I do? And what can I say?

Um, so yeah, yeah, I absolutely love it. And just to, just to kind of restate, I suppose, my perspective on my personal, you know, that's what I love doing is thinking about my client. I hate, like, I would say my tech skills are actually low, but my empathy and understanding of what the client's going through is exceptionally high because of all the years that I've done. And I actually get by with with very low tech skills because I understand the client and how to speak to them. And, um, so yeah, I, I, it's, it's great to hear. Ben, why do you think, um, yeah, I was gonna turn on the light. Sorry, sorry.

Yeah, I was just gonna say, you know, there is this, there are things that when you're on your side of the fence or your side of the table, you are a, you know, you're a fitness professional, you No, so much. And there's this thing called the curse of knowledge. So the curse of knowledge is once you know something, you don't remember what it was like to not know it. You don't remember the emotions, the feelings, the issues, the struggles that you had. You can kind of sort of figure it out, but you want to put yourself in the shoes of, you know, if your person is— I mean, you just pick a demographic. Maybe you pick someone who has never trained before, what emotions are they going through? You know, doubt and anxiety and all these kinds of different feelings that you probably can't even remember or maybe have never experienced those things. I know I have the same issue in my— I've been in business since I was 16 years old. So, you know, I can't possibly imagine, but I do try as hard as I can to, you know, remember what it's like to be, uh, when starting out, for example. So I do put a lot of effort in trying to remember that, but it's the curse of knowledge. You try to put yourself in the shoes, you— it just takes time. You got to think, you got to, you know, you got to try and feel those emotions. I think that's probably really important as well, try to feel, feel what they're feeling right now. So yeah.

Yeah. What, why do you think Facebook and Instagram, and I suppose in general social media, but why do you think Facebook and Instagram are such powerful marketing tools? I mean, some of the guys obviously seen the new documentary, The Social Dilemma, that's come out that kind of shows a little bit under the hood of what's going on. And I know you've spoken about Facebook, and if I get this right, it has over a million offline touchpoints or something like this. So, you know, you've said it before that Facebook knows what you're going to buy before you know what you're going to buy. Yeah. In summary, like, how do you describe that as such a powerful marketing tool?

Yeah, well, when you think about, okay, I've got to sit down and think about what does my client really want, what are their goals, what are their desires? Facebook does that on a whole new level. They have these massive computer systems. AI tracks a million data points about your behavior. What you do, when you do it, where you go, what you buy, um, what you're clicking on. But don't think of it as a list of, okay, here's a list of stuff that this— that you did this morning. It's— it then extrapolates what is the behavior of that person, what are the values of that person, what emotions are they feeling based on all of— and you can pick up, I mean, if you're on a basic human level You can observe somebody, um, in life and observe a few things and deduce things about a person. But on a whole new scale, you've got somebody who, uh, you've got a company that's got a million data points on you about absolutely everything in your life, more than you can even imagine. Uh, and they have— in the past, there's been videos and articles and things leaked out that they've been able to retract off the internet, that they know things like if you're in a relationship, they know that you're probably going to become engaged within a certain period of time in the future, even if neither party knows that's going to happen. They know that a couple will split up before either of them know. They know what you were going to buy next week. Um, like, it's intense, and it's good for us if we're in business because we can use that to our advantage to get in front of the right people, the right prospects. And in a way, it's good for the users because they're not going to be seeing advertisements that aren't relevant to them and annoy them like we used to do when we watched TV. We used to watch a whole bunch of stuff we would never buy They were annoying. We wanted to fast forward. We never wanted to see the ads. But now you're getting served ads, oh gee, that's what I really want. If you have your client who's like, I really think I should, I've just got, I recently got divorced. I really should get back into shape. I'm looking at, I just looked up a few diet programs and things like that. And there's this behavioral thing. Facebook knows you're eating junk food. Blah, blah, blah, and the ad comes up, you know, about your fitness thing. I mean, that's, that's incredible for everyone involved, in my opinion.

Powerful. I suppose the only, uh, well, what was your opinion? You've seen this, I'm guessing you've seen The Social Dilemma. What was your opinion on, you know, I've seen parts of it.

Um, probably because I know a lot more of the tech stuff that they probably don't even show in there. I didn't really get involved. Um, with watching that kind of stuff, it's probably had more of a political stance, I assume. Uh, I don't know, but, um, I, uh, I didn't, I didn't watch the whole thing. I watched some of it, but, um, I would say most of it's probably dead on. But there's probably a lot of stuff that they don't share, either they want to share, are allowed to share, or don't know as well. You know, I've been entrenched in this for 11 years. Um, I'm VIP with Facebook, so we, we get to talk to the actual programmers of Facebook and so on and so forth. So I get the behind-the-scenes level as well.

Yeah, amazing. Um, I suppose the— probably the— probably the big foot point or footnote for me was, um, just the, the footnote where it was everyone's feed is obviously tailored to them. So everyone's getting, you know, if they're in the point, I suppose that they really made was if you're a Republican you get the news feed that supports the Republican viewpoint. If you're a Democrat, you get the news feed that supports the Democrat point of view. And then the conversation in the middle is not to be had because people are getting these customized news feeds that support, you know, to the echo chamber of bias.

Yeah, yeah, I think so, to a certain point for sure. I know that they keep— they, they try to they keep trying to find this balance, but it's definitely not balanced right now. So yeah.

Yeah. In business, so I know for the fitness industry at large, probably one of the biggest industries for this, you know, there is a lot of trainers who focus on followers specifically on Instagram. So I suppose the first question is, is followers simply a vanity metric or do followers result into cash?

At a certain point, it can be a positioning thing, but it's not the be-all and end-all of— One of my companies has a very small— I mean, I got my personal page is big, but that just happened organically over time. I've been doing it for a long time. To bother trying to buy fake followers or anything like that. But on one of my pages, actually our biggest company I should say, has, um, after 15 years of running it, 5,000 followers. It's our biggest company, it makes tens of millions of dollars and has a very small amount of actual online followers because you want to focus on, uh, the inquiries, the leads, getting in front of people, talking to people. And more than the, the followers. So, you know, you want to, you want to go where you want to go. Well, there was this fellow by the name of Willie Banks. He's a famous bank robber, right? Uh, it's a true story. And, uh, and the— and one, he got caught and he went to prison. And, um, the journalist said, Mr. Banks, why "Did you, why did you rob all these banks?" And Willie Banksy said to the journalist, he said, "Well, that's where the money is." So you gotta go where the money is. You gotta go to talk to people. So followers don't translate into money. So you wanna go where the money is, the people, and talking to them and getting in front of them, getting on the phone call, getting in person.

So, so fundamentally, um, the, the, the— it comes back down to something, you know, sound business fundamentals, the ability to get a lead, contact that lead, sell the lead, service the lead, ask for referrals as the base point. And then followers on top of that is nice, may or may not help your marketing. And I suppose then, um, how does it compare in your experience if someone— if you've worked with someone who's got a huge following What I'm seeing a lot of these days is people who actually have quite substantial, 100,000+ followers, but they're still also relying on ads to, to get the target customer in. Is this, is this the same kind of thing that you've noticed, or—

Yeah, absolutely. I think it was about, you know, the, the years, the years, uh, morph into decades at this point in my life, but I think it was about 6 or 7 years ago now. It's quite a long time where they made a fundamental change in their algorithm on Facebook, the system on Facebook, where they said— where, well, they didn't say it, but they were not going to push organic content anymore. Uh, the Facebook ads, the paid promotions, the paid advertising was going to get more, um, was going to be pushed more. So it obviously has to do with profit and bottom line for them. So, you know, maybe like 8 years ago you could run organic content and get some really good— I mean, I got— I had a video that I put up, got, uh, I think it's got 50 million views organically. That was like 10 years ago. Um, but now you would have to run ads to get that kind of thing, and you wouldn't even get that. So it's more about using paid ad, creating one really good advertisement that hits all the hot buttons of your target market running ads to it. That's the fundamental.

Yeah. And I know I'll get asked, so someone will ask me off the line because they'll secretly ask me after, but if someone's goal was to grow followers, let's say, do you have any hacks for that?

Yeah, I've got a funny little hack. I don't recommend it, but it's something that's really funny that one of my colleagues came came up with, uh, and you'll laugh, but what you— if you really wanted to grow your followers, you can run an ad to get followers. But what, what you can do is you, you run an ad, you do a post, you do an ad that says, um, follow my page if you love Jesus, and then you run it in like Colombia, Spain, like all these high Christian countries. And that, you would get a lot very cheaply for that. So that's, that's a little hack rather than buying the fake. If you buy the fake ones off these websites, you get these bots that aren't real people. So they're, I mean, it's slightly better, uh, but if you really wanted to get the vanity metrics, you could try that, uh, if you wanted to. It's pretty funny.

That's hilarious. I reckon I know the guy who did that too.

Yeah, you did.

He's got the hacks. He's amazing. Stuff that guy does. Now, obviously everyone, COVID has affected Melbourne, you're up in Brisbane. COVID's affected us hugely. It's also affected you guys up in Brisbane as well and across Australia. How have you pivoted? I mean, this isn't the first crisis we've been in as business. The first crisis was, you know, it's been many crises, whether it was the GFC or whatever it was. But how's COVID affected you? What do you predict generally across business? It's always great to hear your insights.

Right, it's a few questions there. Um, which one should I start with? How to pivot. Um, yeah, so what's the easy way to talk about that? Well, I think that— well, I think that there's a couple of points that I could make here. Um, you know, I've been in this game for a while now, um, since I was 16, so about 4 years. I'm just joking, but it's been quite a while. One of the big things that I figured out after running into a brick wall a few times and kind of almost bowing out a couple of times in my early 20s was that you need to have some cash reserves. So the way to do that is you need to do 2 things. This is what a lot of people do is they chase money, right? They want to make more money. right? And that's what you would call playing offense. So the offense is going after the money, right? But a lot of people don't play defense with their money. So what that means is you need to say, well, I need to monitor my expenditure. I need to see where I can be more efficient, where I can save money, and so on and so forth. Do I really need to buy that new car? Do I need to buy that big house? And so on and so forth. So you want to think about playing defense and offense. Obviously, you want to enjoy your life. So I'm not talking about eating rice and noodles and living in wherever, but I'm talking about being a little bit smarter. I mean, even if you're only 10% or 20% smarter than you are now at your finances, that can make a big difference. So that's the first thing. Number 2 is to have some capital reserves. If you can save up 2 or 3 months of capital over time, you're not going to do that overnight, but over time you can do that. These things tend to come in cycles. I actually spoke to all of my business community about this and a few of my colleagues about this back in August, that there was going to be something going on in the next 12 months. Obviously didn't know there was going to be a bat involved. But I knew that there was going to be an economic crisis of some sort because I saw the signs. And the reason why I saw the signs is I got caught up in the last— well, not the last one, but the one before that. And everything looked exactly the same way. All the signs looked exactly the same way as it did before the last crisis, that was the second, the one two times ago. Where I got caught up in it, almost went bankrupt actually. I was holding on by the skin of my teeth in my early 20s. And I recognized that. So you have to then shift gears, shifting gears sometimes, and then figure out, okay, what do we need to do now? So then you do that. You will have, you'll get through this no matter what your situation is right now. No matter what your bank account balance is, your debt level's at, I mean, you can say it's the absolute worst you've ever been, but I guarantee you 100% that you will get out of it. You will do really well. You will actually be on top of the world because this stuff happens every 7 to 10 years. You will have really, really good moments where you're making absolute bank, and then you will have times where the economy just takes a dive, and those are the times, like, in the next one you'll be prepared for it, okay? So don't even worry about where you're at now because you will get to a point where you will laugh. You will laugh at the money that you're in debt with because you're like, yeah, I make that easy now. You know, I remember like in my early 20s, I was $300,000 in debt. I had zero dollars in the bank account. And I was screwed, you know. And, and I got— I ended up paying that all back. And now it's like, well, that— if that happened now, it's— I wouldn't break a sweat, right? Because, uh, because you, you grow into it, you know. I guess it's like training. You grow into where you're at. If you were to ask me to bench like 200 kilos or whatever the world's best is, I wouldn't have a chance. But I, I could grow to that. you know, over time. So think of it like that. Hope that helps.

Yeah, it definitely does, and very sensible, sensible advice. Um, before we open up to the lines, we've got one or two questions left that I'll ask, and I'll open up to the Wolfpackers. Um, as a marketer, what's something practical that we can all start doing today to see a better ROI on our ad spend?

Oh, That's a really good one. So in my 20s, I ended up getting a mentor, one of the world's best mentors, Jay Abraham. He's considered the world's number one business optimization consultant. And, you know, people— his feed, he's His professional fee is $120,000 for one day of consulting now. Highest paid consultant. So I actually, he actually mentored me in my early 20s. And he's really big on this thing called business optimization, okay? And it's something that I would walk into any business that I go into and I'll immediately see 5 to 10 opportunities for them to increase their profit and their revenue and their clients without them spending a single dollar to do that. I'm trained to do that. And, uh, and, and we do that in our companies, you know. We, we, we go down to the nth degree with that. So what you can do and what you should do and what's boring to you will actually make you more money than any of your peers will ever make. That will be focusing on their Instagram and their followers and their beautiful photos in there and so on and so forth. But The way to make 3 times as much money as any of your peers is to think now, okay, I've got to make— I've got to get everything that I can get out of all that I've got. So what that means is I've got to go, well, I want to get a list of everyone that I've spoken to in the last 3 years about training, about fitness, including all the people that never went ahead with me, including the people that did go ahead with me and stopped training with me. Including, you know, all these. So that's where you start. You build a list of, I want to talk to everyone that, um, I want to get a list of everyone that I've spoken to. Maybe I've quoted them, maybe I said, hey, do you want to train? They said yes, they didn't go ahead. Maybe, you know, training with you and their circumstances changed, okay, and they ended up not training with you. Um, so build that list. And then what you want to do is you want to go back to all of those people and just call them and say, hey, just checking in, you know, what's going on in your life? What are you doing with training? How's it all going for you? Just keep it real casual. Don't sell them, just keep it real casual. Just create an opening and they'll be like, yeah, actually I've been thinking about coming back to train. I never ended up achieving my goals, can you help me? You will open up all of these opportunities. It's not gonna cost you a cent. You will make 3 to 5 times as much as anyone else. We, you know, we call our— we keep a list of every person who we've spoken to over the last 10 years, and we are in continual contact with those people. And, you know, our profits, for the amount of staff that we have, there are— the amount of profit we make, we would probably have to have 10 times as many staff to do that if we weren't optimizing to that level. Love it.

I love it. It's, it's so true, right? It's so true. How many, especially in the fitness industry, people focus on just all the, you know, things that don't actually impact. And what you just said, it's like optimize, you know, whatever you're doing, start with optimization because it doesn't cost you any money. And, you know, one of the arguments as well is, you know, a dollar saved is actually better than a dollar spent in the sense that you don't have to pay money on a dollar saved. So if you can maximize each dollar that's coming into your business, you actually have a higher ROI and return on investment. So fantastic answer. Um, so last question, sorry, last question before we, we get into the Wolfpack questions. Um, any final thoughts, uh, you have, I suppose, on, on what we've been discussing?

Yeah, I think that the final thing that I want to say is, uh, and this is another thing my mentor Jay Abraham taught me in my 20s, And I'm so grateful for him and two other mentors that I had that were just old school, pre-internet, just knew what to do. One of my clients, he makes $300 million a year and he has a home office. He doesn't have a big business. Another client makes $1 million a year from his garage. And when you go visit him, he's hanging up his clothes. He's doing a lot. He's doing a round of washing. Hanging up his clothes and then going back on the phone and doing his business. So, you know, these guys just knew what to do, and they weren't worried about being busy for the sake of being busy. And so one of the things Jay Abraham taught me was that most people, you know, they fall in love with their product or service, you know, or their business. You know, look at my logo, look at my business, look at my Instagram, look and they fall in love with these, all these things, okay? But what you should be doing is falling in love, falling in love with your customer. You put all of your attention on your customer and wondering, how can I help them achieve their goals in a better, easier, or more effective or more enjoyable way? If you ask only those questions, and then figure out how you can monetize those things, you will win. Rather than spending 4 hours scrolling on Instagram or whatever it is that people do these days, figuring out how can I serve my clients better, how can I make it more enjoyable, more easier, more efficient, and more effective. And that is the key to, to getting there.

Amazing, amazing answers. So what we'll do now is, folks, if you can all just switch on your webcams, we'll do a photo and then we'll go into audience questions with you folks. So just chuck on your webcam, get it up there. When we go into questions, by the way, we'll just do, we'll just do our questions as questions only. We'll minimize that way we can get through everyone. Just waiting on a few more of you. Put on your webcam, we'll get a photo for the Instagram. Make sure you check it out if you're listening to this on the podcast. @MarkOttobre. That's O-T-O-B-R-E. Ben, what's your Instagram handle?

@BenjaminSimkin.

Go follow Ben. Go follow me if you're not already. Take a photo. All right, I'll post that in a minute. All right, let's open up the lines and keep your webcams on, folks. I'm going to shoot first to Mr. Frank Francois, all the way from Montreal, Canada. Take it away.

Hi Ben, hi Mark. My question is, I got a grant for about $2,000 in Facebook ad credits that I have to use by the end of the year, and what would you recommend I do with that? So I have about 1,000 likes on my business page, and I haven't really done Facebook advertising before.

Okay, sure.

Okay, great, good question. So, I guess the first thing is, what is your primary goal for what is your primary business goal in terms of like what do you wanna do, what do you wanna achieve in the short term?

Get more clients.

Okay, great. So I would run an ad, how is the situation there by the way with the, is the gyms open, like what's going on with all that?

Right now gyms are closed, I'm operating under the radar, so I'm not signing any new clients. But hopefully we'll be open next week, but that has not been confirmed yet.

Okay, well, so you can wait till next week and decide you're going to do one of two things. Either, either things, either things go really well and the gyms are open and you get business as usual, or number two, you figure out, well, maybe I could help other people. Okay, so, and how can I do that? So to give you an example, I've actually recently engaged, uh, if you don't mind me saying this, Mark, Um, would be good to talk about that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.

Uh, I recently— I, I, I had planned to come down to Melbourne to, uh, train with Mark, uh, at his, at his gym, um, but because of the restrictions we have, I'm not allowed to travel. As, as a country, we're not allowed to travel interstate. So I was like, well, I still want to achieve my goal of getting fitter and improving my health and so on. And I'm not going to let anything stop me. Okay, so I'm going to go, well, let's— how do we do this? So I actually contacted Mark, and we're doing it all over the, uh, over the inter— internet, over interwebs. And so you'll find you have people that are like-minded, people like me. Okay, so people that are driven, people that are conscientious, uh, uh, people that are, um, you know, are driven by ambition and, and these kinds of traits. So that's really important for you to understand is what kind of person who's going to want to do that, who's going to say, you know, the question, you know, that, that quote, the question is, the question is not who is going to let me, the question is who's, who's, who's going to stop me. So that kind of mentality, right? So then you go on to that, that's the psychology of these people, right? So the other thing is like maybe there are people that, uh, that follow you and see the results you're getting that are not only— and this is an opportunity for you as well like you, you want to see that this is an opportunity for me. I could now— I can now work with anyone in my whole country, in my whole time zone, uh, in every city, um, because now I'm doing an online thing where I can help you achieve your goals before Christmas, um, and, and showcase that and say, well, now I can open it up. We, we're going to do this, we're going to do that, we're going to do that, right? So that's a really good thing to do, and you'll find you get you get clients from doing that. It's possible and it's definitely achievable and you'll find those people. So then you want to think about, well, who are the people that are, who are more likely to do that? So, have you ever, everyone here out of the Big Five personality type? Maybe raise your hand.

They should have, because we taught it in November and there's the video up on the Wolfpack site. It's the OCEAN model, openness to, open, extroversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, so with the big 5, you're going to go after people that are open, openness, openness to experience. So they're not in this final, final tunnel of like, the only way that I can achieve my goal is by going to the gym and seeing a trainer in person. You know, you're never going to get those people. So openness to experience and conscientiousness, because you're going to have to have people that are conscientious that you give them a spreadsheet or a plan, that they're going to follow it to the letter. So you have those ideas. You think about, well, what are the other— what's going on in their lives? And typically, people that have those— and then you could even go into low agreeableness, but that's another story. But talk about— obviously, business people would be one of those prototypes of people. Wouldn't you agree, Mark?

100%. I was just thinking right now, like, what you're giving literally is million-dollar advice on how to capture this market based on— and again, reiterates what we said at the start, which was understand your clientele and look at, all right, let's make the product. Who are we connecting this product with? You've just, you know, in like less than 5 minutes, you've given a full psychographic description of exactly who's going to be suitable for an online an online product and hitting it that way?

Not only like who's suitable, but who like really damn well wants to do it. Who's like, yeah, who's like, yeah, sign me up yesterday, you know? Um, and then if you know people like that, if you are clients like that already, uh, or you can just stalk my page, is you look at what kind of fan pages they follow This is one of the things that I did in one of my recent campaigns. I looked up about 20 to 30 of my clients on Facebook, and you can go to the about section and go, what are their likes? Who are they following? What companies are they following on Facebook? I recognized there was about 12 commonality pages, 12 pages that pretty much 80% of my clients followed. And then it made a lot of sense when I looked backwards to make a lot of sense to how they're wired mentally. Like what are their values? What are their psychographics? What is their biology and so on and so forth? And figure out what kinds of people they are. Then you can use that not only for your marketing but for your targeting as well. One of the things you can do, this is a little hack you can do, and you guys, everyone wants to write this down, is that what you want to do is when you go onto Facebook, you do an interest target for Facebook business pages administrators, and that gives you a good subsection of actual business owners rather than trying to use the other ones. That's a really good one that we use. And then have some sort of level of fitness. Maybe they're following David Goggins. That's an easy one, right? I mean, anyone who's interested in training definitely would follow him. So yeah, so do that. In terms of the ad budget, I would do $30 a day. I wouldn't be doing a very big number. And I would be running, you're running your first ad for anywhere between 2 to 5, 2 to 4 days, or 2 to 5 days maximum. If you're not getting clients or leads or inquiries, you're not getting people contacting you within 3 to 5 days, then something's up with your ad. You're not hitting them where you need to hit them in terms of their emotions.

Okay.

So you will definitely 100% know if you're not getting inquiries. Now, if you are getting inquiries but you're not getting sales, that is a different problem, right? The problem then is I'm not handling those people. And I had this on a, on a coaching call last week. I had a client who was running ads, a student who I taught Facebook ads. She's like, yeah, I'm getting all these people inquiring with my ad, but they're not buying from me, so there must be something wrong with my Facebook ad. And I was like, how are you dealing with your client? She was doing it very wrong. And I said, don't do that. You know, don't deal with your clients like that. To give you a hack with that, the biggest, the best thing you can do is get them on a phone call as quickly as you can. Mm-hmm, yep.

Okay, and if we get the green light to open next week?

You get the green light, then you're pretty much almost gonna follow the same thing, but you're gonna target local people who are absolutely, totally dedicated to wanting to, wanting to get back in the gym before Christmas. Christmas and New Year's is one of those points. There are these anchor points in life that happen. For example, summer or spring break, Christmas, Easter, New Year's is these event points that everyone follows. It's like, man, I better get my act together.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, if you've enjoyed listening this podcast and you want to hear the full podcast and many more just like this, visit enterprisefitnessacademy.com. And better yet, join the Wolfpack mentoring program. That's ongoing mentoring for personal trainers and fitness professionals. You get access to over $75,000 worth of course material. We have been filming for, for some time. We've had special guests from all over the world in business training, nutrition, functional medicine, psychology, motivation— whatever your client needs, whatever you need to build your business to that next level, Wolfpack most certainly has you covered. And also, you get weekly calls, weekly calls with me, weekly group calls where I answer the pack's questions, give them inside advice, tell them what to do, what's working, and where to go next. So if you want that, again, visit enterprisefitnessacademy.com. You can download your free starter pack or even just connect with me on Instagram. It's @MarkOttobre. So folks, hope you've enjoyed this podcast. As always, Stay tuned for the next one. We would really appreciate if you could leave a, what do you call those things, a review, of course. If you could leave a review on iTunes, we would be most appreciated. Rate us 5 stars. Tell us what you like, what you want to hear more of. Go check it out at iTunes/TheWolfStandbyEnterprise. Fitness, you can find it, leave us a review. If you're listening on SoundCloud, also subscribe to us. And if you're out there on YouTube land, make— if you haven't already subscribed, got some fantastic videos on YouTube. It's @EnterpriseFitness on YouTube. It's @EnterpriseFitnessAU on Instagram. I'm at— on Instagram, I'm @MarkOttobre. That's O-T-O-B-R-E. Anyway, folks, we will see you on the next one. Till Until then, train hard, eat well, and supplement smart.