5 Lessons From Spending $1 Million on Facebook Ads in 11 Months

Here are the top five ways to improve your Facebook ads specifically for your agency or any sort of B2B business that sells services and that you need to generate leads for. So paid ads are one of the four ways to acquire customers alongside content and outreach and partnerships. These are what are the top of funnel. So in this video I'm going to focus on paid ads that go to lead magnets. You can also send paid ads to digital low ticket products, usually $100 or less. But I'm going to go with ways to do it specifically for this kind of funnel here. So let's get right into it. The top five ways to do so are changes to the ad creative, that I'll go over, changes to the lead magnet and how you promote it, that I'll go over your conversion mechanism, having multiple different offers and posting content alongside your paid ads. I'm gonna go over what you need to do, why you need to do it the step by step, and then I'm gonna finish the video off with five quick wins that you should be able to implement within 24 hours that help your ad performance. So a little bit about me. This is a picture of me right here. I run a one on one consulting program for agencies and B2B businesses called 1000X Leads. Inside there are about 150 clients doing $215 million per year combined. And this is what's working for me, for my business and for them right now. Not eight years ago when Facebook ads were cheap, not even a year ago, right now as we speak. So I'm gonna get right into the five ways here. The first is the ad creative. So how I'm going to do this is I have some notes, I have, you know, the actual steps, and then I'm going to keep going just like that. So the first thing that we want to do is deal with the ad creative. So the ad creative is the start of the entire process. If we go back to the top of the funnel, this is where people are coming in, people that don't know about us, all of that kind of stuff. So if we improve the top, you know, the middle and the bottom are going to be improved by default because there's going to be more people going in. So the ad creative is the start of the entire process. And really, when we say we want to improve our ads by making the ad creative better, what we're really talking about is we want to get a lower cost per click. In most cases, a lower cost per click is going to improve our ads. If it was $2 cost per click before and now it's $1. You know, that's going to improve the ads. Cost per click is a function of the cpm. The cost per meal, the cost per thousand imp, how much you pay for the ad to Facebook multiplied by your click through rate. We cannot do anything about our CPM directly. That's kind of just the price. The only way we can influence this is by making better, more relevant ads. And that's really what we're doing here anyway. So that leaves us with, if we want to get a lower cost per click, we need to increase our click through rate. We need to get more people to click the ad. So for every thousand people who click an ad, if you 5% clicked on it instead of 2.5%, that would be twice as effective. The same 1,000 people. You can do this in a number of different ways. So here are eight ways that we can do this. We can have a better offer, which in this case, you know, what we're promoting in the ad will be more appealing. We could have a better hook, which is the first three seconds grab their attention. We can have a better ad design as a possibility. We can create contrasting colors and designs and use imagery and stuff and formats that stand out more in the feeds so that when they're scrolling Instagram or Facebook, a higher percentage of people stop and take a look at our ad instead of just scrolling past it. We can promise a bigger benefit or a more accurate benefit. Accurate's not the word. A benefit that is more what our target audience wants is what I'm trying to say. I can't really think of how to say it right now. Another thing we can do is emphasize speed. Like if you download this, you know it's going to save you a lot of time. We can emphasize how easy this makes it. If you download this, it's going to take a lot less effort. And we can incorporate better social proof or just proof. In general, a better click through rate should mean better performing ads. This is going to be the case in 95% of times. The only situation where this isn't true is if you made the ads super clickbaity or just irrelevant. Like if you had a Facebook ad agency and your original ads were for, you know, a UGC guide and you changed the ads to focus on a thousand free chatgpt prompts like that would probably get a better click through rate, a lower cost per click, but that wouldn't necessarily make your ads better because that's just completely irrelevant. Now that's what I'm trying to go out here. And if our landing page opt in rate stays the same and the quality of the leads are the same, which is like the new improvement to the ads is still relevant. The better cost per click will mean more leads for the same cost. If you were getting, you know, $5 cost per lead before and you double your click through rate, you'll get two, $2 and 50 cents cost per lead now. So we can do a combination of these eight things to increase our click through rate and then by definition, you know, make our ads better. The next thing we could do is a better lead magnet. And this is partially what I meant before when I said a better offer. If we change our ads to promote a different lead magnet or offer that is simply more desirable while still being relevant, our ads will perform better. So you might make a bunch of different lead magnets and certain things and certain lead magnets will always be simply more desirable than others. Even if they are all important to performing your service. Even if they're all jam packed with good information, some are simply sexier. They're going to get more clicks, they're going to get more attention. And that's just the way it is. And that's why testing different lead magnets in your ads is so important. It's not super uncommon to see certain lead magnets outperform other lead magnets by 2 to 3x, sometimes even more. We have 12 lead magnets for our own marketing at 1000x leads. And the difference between the best performing ones and the worst performing ones is like the best performing ones get about a dollar cost per lead and the worst performing ones that we don't use anymore, we're getting like $12 cost per lead. It can be pretty dramatic. And it's important to realize and remember that people don't know how good the lead magnet is or isn't until after they download it. The quality of the lead magnet has absolutely no bearing on the performance of the ads. And this is something that you really need to realize and separate in your mind because it's very important in this case. When I say better lead magnet here, I don't really mean do anything to the lead magnet itself. It means doing a better job of promoting the lead magnet in the ad. So that can mean a few different things that could be a better promised results, more proof of that promised results. You can give them a clearer idea of what they're getting. Vagueness and lack of clarity can kind of hurt ad performance. You can do a Better job of calling out and the target audience and identifying like if it's for agency owners, you put agency owners in your ad, that makes it more relevant and more agency owners are going to click, implying that will save them time, implying that will save them effort. Emphasizing the lead magnet is free and emphasizing how quick and easy it is to access are all things that are going to make your lead magnet ads better. So let's take a look at an ad. This is a notepad app ad and it's one of the best places to start in my opinion. So this is an ad that I actually use for myself. So let's go and you know, prove that I doing what I'm saying here. So calling out the target audience, grow your agency instead of grow your business or you know, whatever, where it could be vague, it could get people who don't own agencies in it, you know, grow your agency is pretty clear. I would say it's not going to, you know, if they don't have an agency, they're probably not going to click on this ad. Grow it by 300%. You know, promised result with these 12 free trainings. Free, that's one time there. We'll put a tally there. So more proof of the promised results. You know, a good way to prove it is by subtly, you know, 12 examples from eight and nine figure agencies. The fact that there's examples from these kind of improves that in a way that this stuff works. Right? So here we go, the four main lessons you need to learn. How to design your offer and funnel. These two things, I would say kind of paint a more clear picture of what they're getting. So they're getting four main lessons. How to design their offer and funnel. They're getting templates and they're getting, getting examples. That's really what they're getting. You know, if you just make a big claim like this, you know, grow your agency by 300%, that's very unbelievable on its own. Right? And that's why it's very, very important that your headline, if it's going to basically touch to the desired result like this, it's very important that your sub headline and your bullet points back that up and kind of do their best to make it believable. If the, the headline is what result they're going to achieve, the bullet points in the sub headline, if there is one, is how they're going to achieve those results, what and how and they work together. Implying that will save them time. You know, templates implies that will save them time. They don't have to do it on their own, implying it will save them effort. You know, templates and examples both save them different effort. Download for free again at the bottom, that's number two and emphasizing how quick it is to access in just five seconds. So these are real ways that you can kind of make your ad better without changing the lead magnet, without really changing the subject of the ad. They're kind of micro optimizations that if you add them up like really get to big results. And it's very, very, very important that like when you're running ads, maybe if you run ads right now after this video, you like take this, you know these eight things and measure how yours do. It's a little different with video, but it's the same concept. An ad is an ad, whether it's an image, a video, whatever the headline or the main idea, if it's a video, should focus on the promised result. And like I said, the sub headline typo there, bullet points and other stuff should focus on how this will be true, what is true, how it will be true. Very important, the one, two punch of an ad. So like I said, this calls out agencies, it promises growth, it says free twice, it tells them about the lessons and it touches on speed and effort with the templates. Examples from eight, nine figure agencies is proof. So it looks good to me and it is performing well. Hopefully you don't just copy my ad, but it is what it is. The next thing here, the third way to make your ads better has nothing to do with the ads themselves. And the last three examples of this, you know, the last three ways that you can improve your ads actually have nothing to do with the ads themselves. And this is a, a paradigm shift that I'm going to go out over later that you really have to understand when it comes to lead gen ads. So there is a dilemma when it comes to paid ads for Legion. You want to collect as much information as possible on the form, but for every form field you add, your cost per lead is going to increase. So you would ideally have stuff like name, email, phone number, website, etc. But including all of those would make your cost per lead three to four times higher than if you just did email yourself. And that's just a fact. You can test it yourself if you want to. If you can live with that, good for you. But it is a fact that you have to be aware of and you can use a conversion mechanism to kind of get rid of this dilemma altogether and get the best of both worlds. So when you're doing your form for your paid ads. You just have the email as the only form field, one form field. But then you redirect, redirect your thank you page to a conversion mechanism that requires more information to access. A popular term or phrase is enriching your data and this is an example of that. So what you do is you'd run your paid ads to a page like this to keep your cost per lead, you know, as low as possible. Just the email address, you know, headline, you know, sub headline, you know, pretty basic. I would say less is more when it comes to these type of pages, in my opinion. But once they submit the form, they're redirected to your conversion mechanism. Whether that's a webinar or a group or a live workshop or some paid products or something specific or unique to your business, whatever that asks for more information to access. So in my case, I use a group and to join the group I hosted on school, they have to give me their email, their website and their monthly revenue. If they don't, they get declined from the group. So this is kind of how I get the best of both worlds. I keep my cost per lead as low as possible here by just asking for their email, but I also get a percentage of them to join the group and enrich their data. On the back end it's about 30%. And that is not good, that's not bad, that's just what I get. So what you get is going to be, you know, that's a benchmark to measure yours against, I guess you could say. So this is a great way to improve your ads because this doesn't actually improve the ad themselves, but more information means a higher percent chance that you're going to close. If you know their website, you know their revenue, their phone number, you can call them, you can qualify them ahead of time, you know what their website is, etc. So this, although it's not going to increase your click through rate, for example, or lower your cost per lead, it's gonna lead to a higher close rate, if that makes sense. And that is what ads are all about. To get revenue, not to the end goal here is not to get a lower cost per click or something like that, it's to get revenue. So this is an example of how you would improve your ads. The next thing is multiple offers. And this is, if I had to choose one out of the five, I would say this is the most important, important. So this is the number one reason most people's ads don't work because they don't have multiple offers. No matter what you do, 99% of the leads you generate from ads will be unqualified. And there's nothing that you can do to change this. It's just like gravity, it just exists. Most people, if they looked at their list, would agree that this is true. You cannot force or you cannot choose or prevent anyone from downloading your lead magnets. You put your country, you put your age range, your gender. If you do that, if targeting, if you do that in Facebook and it shows it to who it thinks is best, you know, that's how it works. You don't choose after that. If 99 cents out of every dollar you spend on your ads are immediately wasted, which is basically true with 99% of your leads being unqualified, it's not very conducive to having success with paid ads is it seems very prohibitive to profitability. This fact is true with pretty much everything. But it doesn't matter as much with content or outreach, for example, because even if they're unqualified, you're not losing any money in the same way that you're losing money with paid ads. People invest money in their content. You got to pay for cold email domains and software and contacts, for example. But it's nowhere near as expensive as paid ads. So this is a very, very big problem that most people just don't solve. And as such, it's one of the five things on this list. The problem is that most people's only offer is their main recurring service. So if they do email marketing, their only thing they really offer, the only thing that someone who sees their ads can buy eventually is, you know, full service email marketing. We actually need six or more offers for a total of seven to succeed with paid ads. So we need to have a paid product, which is a info product or templates or whatever under $100 that they can just purchase. The next thing we want to do is stuff our lead magnets with affiliate links. So if they click on the links and sign up for the software, we start to build commissions. Monthly recurring revenue through affiliate. We also want to have a course. There's always going to be a certain percentage of the market who wants to do it themselves and learn as opposed to having you do it for them. This is also good for people who just can't afford your main service, but are qualified in the sense that they want it and they need it. A program is kind of like a course, but you know, with more one on one or more coaching calls. That's usually a little higher price than a course. Referral partnerships. So let's say you have an email marketing agency, like I said, you know, 10 seconds ago or 20 seconds ago, there's going to be certain clients who need this, but they're going to be either too small for you, you should have a referral partnership with smaller agencies or freelancers and collect a fee, or there's going to be clients that are probably too big for you that you'll just really can't serve. You'd have a referral partnership with a bigger agency and collect a fee. Also, you know, you could have relationships with agencies or people who sell adjacent services. So if you do email, you have partnerships with Facebook agencies, Google agencies, SEO, etc. And you just try to refer back and forth and collect fees. This can be an extreme amount of revenue if you really make it a part of what you do. You know, have understanding with your referral partnerships that you need these fees because you know you can run more ads. It's another stream of revenue for you. We have the recurring service already. Almost everybody's going to have that. But we also want to have a one time service. The one time service is very, very good because it's cheaper and less commitment. And it kind of like they can try you out if that makes sense. And then if you do a good job on the one time service, you know, it's very natural to upsell them to the recurring service. It's a lot easier to sell them the one time service first and then the recurring service after, especially to cold traffic audiences, the ones you would get with paid ads. I'm going to show you the math because hopefully you understand what I mean here. But until you see the math, it's hard to comprehend how important this is. So let me sit up straight in my chair here and get prepared for this very important math. I have two versions here, Version A and version B. So version A is going to assume a hundred thousand email subscribers with just the main recurring service. 100,000 email subscribers from paid ads, from content, whatever. Right. But all we have is our recurring service. So 99% of people who are not qualified are essentially just going nowhere. They're just stopping here at unqualified. And that's basically it. So let's do the math. 100,000 total subscribers. 1% will always be qualified and 99% won't. That's a thing. Thousand potentially, you know, potential clients, but not all of these. 1000 potential clients are going to contact you or book a call. In many cases you'd be lucky to get 10% of these to do so. That would be 100 calls. If you have a 25% average close rate, which would be pretty decent from cold traffic. If you are one of those people who only talks to referrals and you say I have 100% close rate, not going to be realistic when you run paid ads and do this kind of stuff. So easy math. In this case, 25% of 100 is just 25. We I assigned a $10,000 net lifetime margin per client. Might be high, might be low, I don't know. But we got to choose some sort of number here. So if we get 25 clients times a $10,000 lifetime net margin, that's $250,000 in profit from these clients, basically. But if we had to pay $5 cost per lead and to get these hundred thousand subscribers, that is $500,000 in ad spend, isn't it? And for those of you who can't do math here, 500,000 in ad spend minus $250,000 in profit is a $250,000 loss. So the too long didn't read version, not very good ads. We're losing 50% of our money. Not the best version B the same 100,000 email subscribers. But now we have all seven of these offers. So nothing changed from the content or the ads or the outreach or the partnerships or the lead magnets or the emails or the conversion mechanisms or the website. All that changed here is that these offers exist now. So we still have the same 100,000 total subscribers and 1% are qualified as we did here. This is the same list in this example. But because we've added this one time service now that's less risky, less expensive, less of a commitment. 15% of people book a call instead of 10% which leads to 150 total calls. This is due to the addition of the one time service. Now instead of 25% we get a 40% close rate because there's less risk, less commitment, less if it goes wrong. It's not as catastrophic with the one time service. Some people still might buy the main one, but more people will buy the one time. Now because of this, we're getting 40% close rate instead of 25. We're going to get 60 clients instead of the 25 originally. To make this fair, I lowered the net margin from 10,000 in the original to 7,500 because not everybody who buys the one time service is going to upsell into the recurring one. So we got to keep it fair. 60 clients times $7,500 in net lifetime margin is 450k in margin. We're still spending the same $5 cost per lead on the same hundred thousand subscribers. And that's the same 500k in ad spend. Only this time we're making 450k instead of 250k. Still a $50,000 loss. But that's not all right. We've added five other offers too. If we just get 1% of these hundred thousand total subscribers to buy any of our digital products for a total of $100 total, said total twice there, that's $100,000 in revenue. If just 1% of these hundred thousand total subscribers sign up for any of our affiliate links and we could have multiple and people could sign up for multiple and that would skew the results positively. In this case, that would be a thousand people signing up. And if they got a $25 average MRR commission and they churned after three months, all conservative numbers in my opinion, that's another 75,000. If we just referred 0.1%, which is one in a thousand people, to someone else and we got an average $1,000 referral fee, that's another hundred thousand. If we just got one in every thousand 0.1% to buy either a course or a program at an average profit of thousand dollars, that's another hundred thousand. All of these offers are basically digital. You're selling air, you're selling information, you're selling leads, you know, you're selling your ideas. There's no labor costs. All of these are going to be 95% plus margin with stripe fees and maybe some software being the only costs. So let's add these all up. I'm going to save you the adding part. It's $375,000 in revenue at 95% margin. That's about 356k in profit. If we take the 450k from our services the one time and recurring and add it to this 356k, we do about 806k in margin. Same 500k in ad spend down here, but now we have 806,000 margin and now we're turning a $306,000 profit. Congratulations, these ads are now profitable instead of unprofitable. Absolutely nothing changed about the ads or anything else. Just the fact that these offers exist when they didn't before is how this is going to make it profitable. And that's why this is the most important thing on this list in My view and the reason why most people's ads just don't work. The fifth and final thing is posting content alongside your ads. Again, nothing to do with the ads itself, but this is going to make your ads perform better. So content and ads both generate cold traffic and views and all that kind of stuff. But there's different degrees of cold traffic. Traffic from ads are much more cold than traffic from content. If you watch this YouTube video like you're doing now, or you follow me on Twitter and you download my Lead Magnet, that's a lot different than if you just saw an ad and downloaded it. Much better this way, but a lot less scalable for most people. They trust you infinitely less when it comes from ADs versus if they came from content for the reasons I just said. And this is why posting content on your profile alongside your ads is so important. If they click on your profile, they see your content, they start watching it, reading it, it is far superior in comparison to having a bare profile with nothing on it. The content will make them more likely to follow you, more likely to see you again in the algorithms and retargeting ads, and more likely to click your link or call to action. Anecdotally, having a bunch of content and followers and engagement also lowers your cpm. I can't really find any documentation on that, but it seems to ring true for myself and dozens of other people who I've talked to. And I know. Let's get into the quick wins that I promised. So I promised five quick wins and they're gonna be right here, so let's dive right in. The first quick win is what's gonna be called the hook test. And this is something you should apply to your ads within 24 hours. And you're just gonna get way better ads based on this. So whether it's an image ad or a video ad, there's always a hook. The hook is generally referred to as the first three seconds. So in the first three seconds, there should be something that grabs their attention. They should know what the offer is and why they should download it. Really put your ad inside cap cut or a video editor cut off everything but three seconds and really watch this part of your ad and just see if it passes test without, you know, the rest of your ad there, it's going to hopefully give you some great insights and save you a lot of time and trouble. The second one is the value test. So like I said way up there, I'm not going to scroll up, but does the headline focus on the result and do the sub headline and bullet points focus on at least two forms of implied proof, social or otherwise. At least two forms of reducing the time and at least two forms of reducing the effort. I'm gonna have to scroll back to this because I know some people might won't forget. But like this. This is the headline, this is the desired result. The bullet points touch on how they're gonna get the result. So two forms of proof, you know, eight and nine figure agencies, the four main lessons. This implies that I really know what I'm talking about. And eight and nine figure agencies implies that this is gonna work two forms of time and you know, effort templates save time. Examples to save time. They both also save effort. Download it for free too. That's another thing and this is so fast and easy. You can do it in just five seconds. Really cross examine your own ads and really apply the value test to your ads. You're going to get a lot lower cost per lead by doing so. The next one is content purposing. I'm just going to put the three there. I put the one and two there. So brainstorm a list of two 200 plus FAQs that have to do with your service. Then make five tweets per day each answering one of these FAQs. So you know, it could be a story, it could be a how to, it could be an example, whatever. Then you want to cross post these using hypefury to LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. So you have content on all profiles in a very time efficient and effective way. The fourth quick win is to segment your emails based on revenue. So if you have in your form you ask for revenue ranges like how much do you do? 0 to 10k, 10 to 25k, 100k to a million, a million plus, whatever. Segment your email flows with tags. So like for example, if someone says 0.0 to 10k, they're unqualified probably for your service. Why would you send them emails about your service when you could send them emails about your course, your program or your digital products instead? You're going to get a lot more revenue doing that instead of your main offers that they can't afford anyways. You're wasting a big opportunity here. And this is one of the best ways to really take advantage of all those extra offers that we talked about in number four. The final one is to link to your YouTube videos in the emails. When they download your emails or your lead magnet, they're added to your email flows and they're pretty cold in every single one of your email flows. If you're sending one per day or whatever link to your different YouTube videos, there's no better conversion tool than long form educational videos just like the one you're watching right now. It's really the best. And these are the top five quick wins that you can really do based on this video. So like I said before, I teach all of this stuff and more in a one on one consulting program for agencies and B2B businesses called 1000X Leads. That is the end of this video and I will see you in the next one.