The Marketing Atlas Show - Episode 7
In this live episode of The Marketing Atlas Show, host Hernan Vasquez walks viewers through current advertising market shifts, noting that CPMs have fallen 35‑50% and CPCs 30‑40% according to Statista, while click‑through rates remain strong. He then explains how agencies and solo marketers can differentiate themselves by producing helpful, authority‑building content rooted in Cialdini’s reciprocity and authority principles, and by targeting that content to precise audiences. Vasquez shares his testing framework: run dozens of low‑budget ad sets, identify the winning audiences, and double down on them. He contrasts native (platform‑specific, selfie‑style) imagery with stock photos, arguing native images generally outperform. A substantial portion of the show is devoted to dissecting Facebook’s “Power 5” features—auto‑advanced matching, dynamic ads, automatic placements, campaign budget optimization (CBO), and account simplification—highlighting where each works well and where it falls short. Throughout, he promotes his $27 Perfect Ads course and the No BS Advertising Club, encouraging viewers to visit his website for further training and personal help.
Chapters
What's going on up in this place? So we're going live on the YouTubes, and I think yes, we are going live on the YouTubes. We're going live on the Facebooks, and we're also going live on a couple of other places. So what's up, everybody? Hope that you guys are doing great, and welcome to the Marketing Atlas Show. Just so you know, welcome to the show. My name is Hernan Vasquez. Thank you for being here, and I'm not going to be moderating comments on the different platforms. Just head over to marketingatlasshow.com to ask your questions, and I'll be more than happy to help you guys out to answer any questions that you might have regarding marketing, regarding advertising, regarding pretty much anything that you guys want. Okay, so with that being said, welcome to this episode. Thank you for being here. We're going to be diving into questions in a second. Now there's a bunch of things happening right now in the world of advertising that I want to share with you guys. First off, before I forget, go to hernanvasquez.com Perfect. HernanVazquez.com/perfect. If you want to take your advertising to the next level, I'm selling my brand new Perfect Ads course for just $27. And on that course, you will learn how to create amazing Facebook advertising, great YouTube ads. And not only that, but today I uploaded a new training showing you how to create great banner ads. So if you're into banners for retargeting, that is what you want to do. Go ahead and go to HernanVazquez.com/perfect. Now, A lot of people are asking me, okay, Hernan, if this is so good, why are you selling it so cheap? And the answer is, hey, listen, I want to help. I want to get as many people as possible in this program because I think that copywriting, advertising, media buying is going to be one of the best possible skill sets that you can have if you want to feed your family, if you want to get people, if you want to go ahead and grow your business and take it to the next level. Level. All right, so with that being said, I also want to share with you guys a couple of things. And this is kind of distracting for me because I have like so many windows open, but now I'm going to focus here. I want to share with you guys some really good news. In fact, yesterday I went live on my Facebook profile, and it's public by the way, so you can go ahead and check it out on Facebook. I just put it on a comment on the marketingatlashow.com And by the way, you can go there and ask questions if you want. And I just posted a video there that I did yesterday. It was also a livestream. And on that livestream, what I tell you guys about is how the impact or how the industry, the advertising industry is changing. And it's really important that you pay attention to that video. If you want to check it out, I would really appreciate that, not only because you're awesome, but also because I show you how The CPMs, which are the cost per 1,000 impressions, are down across the board. They're down anywhere between 35 to 50%, and the CPCs, which is the cost per click, which is what we're paying to advertise on these networks, are down anywhere between 35 to 40%, or 30 to 40%. I don't remember the numbers right now, but I grabbed that number from a website called statista.com, and it was really, really interesting for me to see that. Because not only advertising is cheaper, but also people are still clicking on ads. There's a metric called CTR, click-through rate, which is how much people are clicking on the ads versus how many people are actually watching the ads. Then CTR is a really good metric for us to understand if people are— okay, the advertising is cheaper, but that doesn't mean anything. Well, it does because people are still clicking on the ads and they're still buying stuff. All right, so that is something that you want to consider as well. So anyways, go check it out, that video. It's on marketingatlasshow.com. If you scroll down to the comments, you will be able to see them. I'm also going to share it here. But you know, it's pretty good to see how, you know, this is a great opportunity for everyone that's on the offense instead of being in the defense, or, you know, trying to get more people into their ecosystem. Specifically, if you have anything online, this works really well. And if you don't, don't worry because you can pivot to the online world and it's still— there's a lot of opportunity, uh, being open right now out there. Okay, so I hope that you guys are safe. Let's jump into some really interesting questions that I have. Uh, let me see that everything is coming up good and we're good. Okay, great. So, uh, we're really good. All right, great. So let me go to, uh, let me actually go to, uh, Marketing Atlas Show. For the questions. All right, so let me share my screen. Boom! Let's share my screen. There's this guy right here. Okay, cool. So I'm going to, um, I'm going to order them for newer, and this was the last one that I had. And Arman, who is a big supporter of the show— thank you, Arman, I really do appreciate that— um, he had some questions posting on, on the comment section. I don't know, I might get rid of a, um, I might get rid of the, the the Facebook comments and have something else instead, like Discuss, or if you have any other ideas, please let me know. But he had some really good questions and I want to address them. The first one was, how can an agency differentiate itself during this time and get more clients? And this is a great question, and I want to give you guys an idea of what we are doing to actually different— differentiate ourselves. And I'm going to go to the good old whiteboard here so that you can see. What we are doing. And this can be applied for an agency, but it can also be applied for pretty much anything out there. And in one way, shape, or form, you always need to differentiate yourself, right? Uh, because let's say that you're selling— I don't know— that you're selling furniture. Well, there is a lot of furniture, uh, being sold online, right? Or let's say that you— if you're, if you're a coach or a consultant, there's a lot of, you know, coaches and consultants out there. So how do How do you differentiate yourself? Well, it's actually pretty simple. The way you do it is as following: you need to create content. Okay, so content, and you guys can see this. Yes, so content. You cannot escape. Let me move this. Okay, so you cannot escape the fact that you need to create content. Content will be the major differentiator. If you haven't read the book, I think you have, Armand. But in general, if you guys haven't read the book Influence by Robert Cialdini, I really, really recommend it. I think we talked about books. on episode 4 or something like that, and I really recommend that book. The reason why is because it tells you how we operate as human beings, and there are 2 main principles that drive the need for you to create content, okay? And this needs to be helpful, by the way. This needs to be helpful content. And there are 2 main drivers of human behavior. The first one is reciprocity, okay? Reciprocity. So the first human driver is reciprocity. The second one is the concept of authority, okay? So reciprocity and authority, and these 2 concepts make the whole content thing really meaningful. The reason why is as follows: because if you put out a really helpful piece of content, if you put out a helpful video, helpful blog post, whatever that is, then people will start, A, like you, know you, and trust you, right? So you might, you might show this authority, uh, this authority principle. Authority, like back in the day when we were like starting to get on our 2 feet, there was— this is like millions of years ago— it was due to physical prowess, right? The biggest male usually in the pack will win, right? And that will— he will have the authority. But now there, there are hundreds of types of authority. You could have like moral authority, or you could have you know, mental authority or experience. So there's a lot of— or economic authority. So there's a lot of different authorities that you can, that you can, you know, that you can develop. So in our case, we're going to be doing the good old trick that I learned from my friend and mentor Frank Kern, which is help people by actually helping them, right? Demonstrate that you can help people by actually helping them right now. So this is like principle number 2. Number 1 is because When somebody watches content, a piece of content, and you start investing in the bank of content, then what happens is that people start trusting you and they want to reciprocate. They want to reciprocate in any way, shape, or form. Usually that is doing business with you, okay? But we're not going after this. This is like why this works, but content is a must. And you're going to show this content to relevant, relevant audience audiences. Okay, and yes, this is an arrow, by the way. Let me do it, let me make it better. So you're going to show this helpful content to relevant audiences, and these relevant audiences are usually people that you want to target with your content, right? It can be business owners, or it could be stay-at-home moms, or it could be dog lovers, or it can be chiropractors. It doesn't really matter. What you're going to do is you're going to grab your helpful content and you're going to show it to these relevant audiences. We usually do video views campaigns on Facebook or engagement campaigns, but you can use pretty much whatever you want on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, whatever that is. You can go ahead and show this to these audiences. Okay, so this is how you differentiate anything from anything else. And the reason why agencies need to take this so much seriously right now, because I know a lot of agencies that are having a hard time. The reason why is because they used to have like local clients. With Semantic Mastery, we serve a lot, a lot of local agency owners, and you know, a lot of local clients are having a hard time right now. So how do you pivot? Well, you pivot by putting out a lot of good helpful content, and then you show that content to relevant audiences. You can do this with a YouTube strategy, for instance, right? If you start— I have on this YouTube channel, if you're seeing this, if you're watching this on YouTube. If not, go to hernanvasquez.com/youtube and you will find over 4 years worth of content, 5 years worth of content in there, right? And the reason I've been so diligently putting in content, putting out content and optimizing, SEO optimizing that content, is because it can get found by relevant audiences. People are searching about how to, you know, how to get online clients or how to optimize my Facebook ads. You can, you can actually search for for a bunch of keywords on YouTube and my videos will come up. Okay, so the mechanism that you use to do this doesn't really matter as long as you're doing it. And then once you do this, you show it to relevant audiences and then you will make an offer to them. Okay, this is also really important because a lot of people, they're afraid to make an offer. They're really good at putting out content, they're good at optimizing their content so the relevant audiences are seeing them, but they're not making an offer. And if you're not making an offer, you're not going to get that money. You're not going to get that, you know, that client, that people to take action. You cannot help people. So I'm always making offers. And I told you guys, hey, go to hernanvasquez.com/perfect to actually get a copy of my brand new workshop. So if you get that workshop, it's going to help you, and I'm also making an offer. So you want to devise some sort of a similar strategy to this and implement it, whatever that is. It can be a blog post and you optimize for SEO. Of course, it's going to take longer. You can be really helpful on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, whatever that is, you want to implement this strategy. The mechanics, the platforms, they are not relevant, okay? What's relevant is that you implement something like this, okay? So I hope that helps. And this is how you differentiate anything. Agencies in specific, they can help their client by actually helping them and then telling them, hey, if you want to come on board, we'll help you develop a COVID-19 plan if you want, and, uh, you know, COVID-19 plan, 19 emergency plan if you would, and that's going to be, you know, where you want people to be. Okay, cool. So let's go back to the screen. Hope that this helps. We have another question from Arman. In your opinion, what are the next steps after somebody— after someone finds the winning audience of their branding campaign? Okay, great question. So on this case, Arman, once you— once you implement this structure right here, let me go back to the— to the— to the camera. Once you implement this structure right here, you will notice that these audiences, some of them are performing better than others. What we do on Facebook specifically is we run a lot of different audiences. We run 20, 50, 100 audiences at a low budget a day, like $1 a day. And then we, we, we discovered that this audience is working, this audience is working, and this one and this one right here. So what we do is we stop the ad sets, we stop the ad sets that are more expensive to us, and maybe they're not as relevant or as responsive, and we double down on those ad sets that are, or those audiences that are responsive. And we double down because we want to spend more money on the audiences that's shown to be more responsive, if that makes sense. And I'm doing this, and I feel like, you know those guys, those weather guys that are saying, well, there is a you know, this cold front coming and you want to take your umbrella with you. But I'm doing this so that you guys can see this. Okay, this is pretty cool. So that's basically what we do is we grab the winning ad sets and we duplicate the budget, or we start to spend more money on those winning audiences so that we can get more people into our audiences and we can show them more ads. My good man Arman, hope that that helps. But that's basically what we do. All right, cool. So Rodrigo, what's up Rodrigo? Oh, by the way, this is the, this is the link I just, I just left left you guys the link here so that you can go ahead and, uh, and, uh, check it out. It's a really good video and it tells you why you need to advertise right now. It's really good. Okay, so, um, Rodrigo is asking, hey buddy, are you seeing stock pictures working better than native pictures lately? Um, not necessarily, Rodrigo. Like, honestly, I'm seeing that native pictures are working, are working, is still working better. Than stock pictures. Maybe you're testing, so maybe in your case they might work best or better, but not really. Like, most of the ads that I'm running on Facebook, they are both native, aspirational, okay? And that is part of something that I teach on my, on my Perfect Ads workshop and how to come up with these good images, right? So native and aspirational, meaning that they're native to the platform and Meaning that, um, that, you know, that selfie pictures are still working way better than stock pictures in my experience. It doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, in your case will be the same, but in my experience, native images are working the best. And native images, by the way, and what a native picture is changes by the platform. So on Facebook, a selfie with your kids or selfie with your family, selfie with your, with your pets, that's considered native image, right? But on LinkedIn, then maybe a more polished image where you're like on good lighting, you're wearing a tie or a nice suit, or you're well dressed and whatnot, that is considered native imagery on LinkedIn versus Facebook, right? On IG, native images might seem— might mean something else. So native images are still working best for us, or well, really well for us. So, but again, it depends on the type of ads that you're running, and it depends on what you're doing. We are still seeing that native images are still working really well for us, and that's part of what I'm teaching in the, uh, in, in the, um, in the course, in the program. Okay, cool. So, all right, so let's, uh, let me share my screen right here. We have Felipe. Welcome, Felipe, to the show. Thank you for being here. Let me, um, let me zoom in. Okay, so Felipe is asking, hi Hernan, how are you doing? What's up, brother? What do you think about the Power 5? Did you test it? Do you think it's already mature enough to be largely used? Great question, my man. Thank you for asking that question. For all of you guys that are not familiar what the Power 5 is, let me actually search for it. Power 5 Facebook. Okay, and here you go. Okay, so this is it. So it's Facebook.com/business/m/power5. Okay, so the Power 5, they're basically— what they're basically pushing with the Power 5, or this framework of running ads on Facebook, is how Facebook can take away a lot of the guessing from your advertising and make quote-unquote advertising easier or less work-intensive for us advertisers. I think that this Power 5 idea is fantastic and I love it. However, there are some things that they need to fix before we can largely use it. So here's what Power 5 is. Uh, let me go, let me go step by step. So auto advanced matching is a thing, it's a toggle that you switch on on your pixel and basically starts matching a lot of additional data and a lot of additional information through everyone that's going to your funnel. So it's basically something that you want to turn on on your pixel. So you go to pixel settings and then you turn auto advanced matching and it will start performing better. Okay, so the other thing, so this is like no-brainer, just do it. The other thing that is working really well is dynamic ads. Dynamic ads right now are working extremely well, are working really, really well. Dynamic ads are working really well for cold, for warm. We're seeing that they're working really well, and I still recommend that you give them a shot. Now, automatic placements, it's kind of on and off, it's kind of hit or miss. So here's why. Usually I run most of my campaigns, most of my warm campaigns I should say, for people that already know who I am and they have been around and whatnot, I run them with automatic placements. However, what I'm seeing when I go into the breakdown of the placements, which placements are bringing home the bacon, meaning which placements are giving us really good results, are usually the Facebook feeds. Okay, Facebook feeds, maybe some Instagram feeds, but usually we're seeing that Facebook feed. So what I do is I launch ads specifically for the Facebook feeds on mobile and desktop and they tend to work really well. So automatic placements are hit or miss. They can give you good results. The CPMs, if you're running dynamic ads with automatic placements, are beautiful. But then you need to pay attention to— then you need to pay attention to how much you're paying per click, or per acquisition, I should say. Okay, so again, I think that it's a good idea, but unless they make the Audience Network really viable like Google did with their Google Display Network, automatic placements are still going to be hit or miss because there's this huge amount of websites out there that we cannot use. So we're limited to the, to the, we're limited to the performance and the inventory that works, which is, you know, the feeds basically. So, so automatic placements, I think it's a great idea, but you know, it's kind of hit or miss. In some cases it works, in some cases it doesn't. Campaign budget optimization, the same thing. The idea, the theory behind it that you only need to control traffic at the campaign level, that's great, but sometimes campaign budget optimization, they do not work. I have another video also, I think it's on YouTube now, but it's also on my Facebook profile. It's public, by the way, talking about when I use campaign budget optimization and when I use ad set level budget. 80% of my campaigns are still with ad set level budget at this point. So when you're scaling, when you have a lot of pixel data, when you have bigger budgets, then campaign budget optimization can get you more buyers than ad set level budget. But initially when you're testing, when you're kind of dabbling into, when you're testing a new funnel or testing a new offer, then ad set level budget works the best. And account simplification, it's really tied to CBO. It's really tied to campaign budget optimization because the theory with account simplification is that you run less ads or less ad sets because now campaign budget optimization is taking over, so you don't need to run like 20 different ad sets. You just run 5 with larger budgets, broader audiences, and it usually works well. But again, I think that the theory is great, and I think that never an advertiser will know more than Facebook regarding its users, right? So I'm not trying to micromanage how the campaign works. I'm just trying to go out there, find broad audiences, and try for Facebook to do its best. To get me buyers. Okay, I think the concept of Power 5 is great, but I'm still hesitant about giving all of the control to Facebook. If you do CBO, automatic placements, dynamic ads, you will get the best possible CPM because this is what they're trying to push, right? This is what they're trying to, uh, to advertise on Facebook, if you would. So you will get the best type of placements, the best type of CPMs, but you know, in some cases the, the manual labor is still there for most advertisers, mostly for small business owners with not big budgets. If you're spending $150,000 or $200,000 a month, then you can go broader. You can, you know, leave Facebook to optimize. But initially, when you're starting out, you need to be a little bit more nitpicky. Again, I'm still using broader audiences, you know, I'm still using broad audiences and let Facebook optimize for the most part, but You know, but I think that this is— I think that this is a great concept. I suggest you guys, uh, go ahead and take a look at this. Uh, there's some, uh, there's some, uh, YouTube videos from, um, Affiliate World Asia that they put— that they like, they, they liberated those, those free— those, uh, videos and they're free. And there's one specific video about CBO versus ad set level budget, and I think that they were getting better results with campaign budget optimization But again, we're talking about a massive online store with massive budgets, okay, that they had a lot of data in the pixel. And, and that way, you know, it would make sense. So hope that makes sense. But this is really, this is really interesting. You know, it's basically all about this. So this is the simplified account structure, right? Which of course, ad sets, you know, if you have less ad sets, it's easier to manage. But you know, in some cases this doesn't work. It sounds good, but it doesn't work. So the same with this. So I'm sometimes I'm not seeing that the campaign budget optimization will be optimizing towards the conversion that's working the best. Okay, it's usually not optimizing toward that ad set that's working the best. Sometimes it optimizes for the ones that has the most engagement, and that doesn't work, right? Because we're looking for sales. Automatic placements, again, it's great. I think it's gonna work better if they make the Audience Network more viable. Other than that, it's not gonna work. And dynamic ads, they're perfect, they're great, they're working really well. And Facebook is really smart when it comes to mix and matching them, because with dynamic assets you can add dynamic ads, you can add like 10 different images, 5 different copy pieces and whatnot, and then Facebook will mix and match them. And I think that that works really well. All right, cool. So let's see what else we got. Let's see what else we got up in here. I need to keep on updating these up here. Page for the comments to show up. All right, cool. So it looks like that's it for the day. I'm gonna give you guys one more minute to comment if you guys so choose. Thank you, Rodrigo, for showing up, and, um, we will go from there. In the meantime, make sure please go ahead to hernanvasquez.com/perfect to actually take your advertising skills to the next level. Let's give it like one more shot to see if we have any additional questions. If not, we're going to call it a day. Okay, cool. I don't see any more questions, and we, we have a little bit of lag, should I say. But anyways, thank you guys for hanging out with me for a little bit. Hope that you guys are doing amazingly well. Hope that you guys are safe. Have a great Wednesday. I'll talk to you guys really, really soon. If you want my personal help, you know what to do. Go to hernanvasquez.com/perfect, or you can also join the No BS Advertising Club. There's going to be a link somewhere around here so you can join. And if you have additional questions, feel free to post them in the Marketing Atlas Show or marketingatlasshow.com. And I'll see you guys soon. Thank you so much.
