In this episode of the Marketing Atlas show, host Hernan Vazquez explains how to maximize customer acquisition through social media advertising, focusing on Facebook. He outlines the concept of an acquisition funnel that must “liquidate” ad spend—earning at least a dollar back for every dollar invested—followed by a monetization (profit‑maximizer) funnel that generates backend revenue from those leads. Vazquez stresses that scaling via manual bidding campaigns only works when the offer, funnel, and messaging are already proven at low scale. He then demystifies Facebook’s ad auction, describing how advertisers bid against each other for placement, why higher bids appear higher in the feed, and the impact of ad placement (top of feed, right‑column, etc.). To help viewers navigate frequent platform changes, he promotes a compiled guidebook (adsguide2020.com) that distills years of experience and millions of dollars in ad spend into a reusable template. The overall message is that disciplined funnel design, strategic bidding, and continual learning are essential for acquiring as many customers as possible.
Chapters
Marketing and advertising can be complicated. What's most important? What should I focus on? Direct marketing?
Email campaigns?
Social media? Cold calling? With Marketing Atlas, you'll have a clear guide to get more leads, close more sales, and take your business to the next level. Welcome to Marketing Atlas. Marketing Atlas.
Marketing Atlas.
With your host, Hernan Vasquez.
The topic for today and the stuff that I wanna talk to you guys about is how to get as many customers as you can possibly get using social media. What you need to have in order for you to grow your business is some sort of mechanism that will allow you to liquidate your ad cost, meaning that for every dollar that you're putting in on advertising, then you're getting a dollar or more back on the front end, okay? That is called an acquisition funnel. Now, the second funnel that most people neglect is the monetization funnel or the profit maximizer funnels. And what this does is basically that is your moneymaker. You're not making money on the front end from your ads. What you're doing is you're making money on the back end. So that allows you to get as many potential clients as you can. And the reason why is again because you're getting a bunch of people through the door and you're liquidating the ad costs on, let's say, a book funnel or a low entry-level funnel and whatnot. And then most of those people will be put on the back end, which is a monetization funnel. that will allow you to actually make money. Now that's the first thing that you need to consider. Now another thing that I'm doing a lot lately on funnels that are working, and keep in mind that if you're running Facebook ads, this is mostly a scaling technique. If you don't have your message dialed in, if you don't have a good offer, if you don't have a good funnel, if you don't have all of that, and I keep on hitting this mic because it's too close. If you don't have all of that, then this might not work for you. But if you have a proven offer, if you have a proven funnel, if you have an offer that's working and it's working well at a low scale, what you want to consider is to try something called manual bidding campaigns on Facebook. Now what you're basically doing when you're running Facebook ads or YouTube ads or whatever type of advertising, you're basically bidding against other advertisers in the same space. Let's say that you're targeting people that like Tony Robbins, for instance, right? And your product is congruent for that, and people that will like Tony Robbins, they have a high chance of actually liking your stuff as well. What happens is that you're not the only person trying to reach Tony Robbins fans, okay? There's a lot of other advertisers, sometimes hundreds hundreds of thousands of advertisers trying to target that exact same person. You see that some of the ads that you see on the Facebook timeline or your Instagram timeline, some of those show up at the top. That usually means that that's the best placement for somebody to see that ad. It can be because it's a retargeting ad, or it can be because that person, that advertiser, is outbidding the rest of the advertisers. So you have the first ad, usually you have a publication, you know, a regular post, then you have an ad, and then you have 2 or 3 posts, and then you have another ad. The lower you go, the more you need to scroll to actually find that ad, the less you're bidding. Right on that auction. That also happens with right column ads on desktop, right? That also happens on Google. Like what determines which ad goes the first and which goes second is how much money you're bidding. Hey, this is Hernan Vasquez, and I know that if you're running Facebook ads, it can get complicated.
Facebook changes stuff every week. Techniques are being updated, strategies are being updated, and some people are just not getting the results that they want. So what I wanted to do is to condense several years of experience and millions of dollars in advertising in one simple guidebook that you can get, that you can pull out whenever you're running your Facebook ads so that you can have a template that you can use. So if you're interested in getting a copy, go to adsguide2020.com. That is adsguide2020.com. Download your copy.
Hope you enjoy it.
Thanks, Hernan.
Now what happens is with a manual bidding campaign, you're overriding, you're telling Facebook, hey Facebook, do not bid for me. Facebook will, through their AI, try to bid the best possible amount of money for you depending on your competition and your marketplace to actually get you the best placement. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to go to the top, right? Sometimes it could be a second good placement or a third good placement and whatnot, and you will get clicks and conversions. But what happens with a manual bidding campaign is you're overriding that methodology that Facebook has. So you're basically telling Facebook, hey Facebook, for this ad, only bid $40. For this other ad set, only bid $100, or maximum you need to bid $100. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that Facebook will get you buyers for $100, right? Let's say that you're selling a book funnel or you're selling a book, you might want to get buyers for $30, $40. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be paying $100 per book buyer. What happens is that when you're bidding that much, You're giving Facebook a lot of leeway to actually bid against other advertisers. And the name of the game when it comes to paid media is he who can bid the most, he who can spend the most to acquire a new customer wins. If you have a great backend, if you have a great product or a great service and people keep on buying from you, then you can spend as much money as possible to acquire a new customer. And he who spends the most amount of money to acquire a new customer wins because you can outbid everyone and you can attain massive amounts of traffic. You can scale your campaigns a lot, you know, dominate a market. That's the whole name when it comes to marketing. It's a combination of your funnels, again, acquisition funnel and monetization funnel, but it's also a combination of how much you can pay to acquire a new customer. These 2 things go hand in hand, and if you can actually spend more money than your competitor, than your competition to acquire a new customer, then you're going to win because when they're trying to bid, you're going to outbid them. Your ads will get better placement. You will get The cream of the crop type of traffic, people that are spending money. Those are the type of people that you want to get into your funnel. So when you think about scaling, do not think about how do I put $1 right now and make $100 back immediately. That's not how it works with Facebook ads, no matter what the gurus are saying. You see these advertisers where people are saying, oh, we spent $2,000 and we made $200,000 back. That's usually not true, A, or it could be true, but it has a lot of nuances to it. And C could be a campaign that has been working forever, or D could be a campaign that is just retargeting, right? For most of people, putting a dollar in right now and taking more than a dollar back, a dollar or more back immediately, and then scaling through a backend funnel, that's the best way to go. All right guys, so I hope that this is helpful. If you have marketing and advertising questions, go to marketingatlastshow.com. It's a new show that I put together. I go live every Wednesday at 2 PM Eastern Standard Time, and you can drop your questions and I'll do my best to actually answer them. Okay, so it's more marketingatlasshow.com. Go there, drop your question, and I've been doing that for the past couple weeks. It's been pretty awesome. I've been enjoying it, so I hope that you guys enjoy it too.
