The Facebook Disrupter: Facebook Ads Top 100 Advertiser | Business Development, DTC, Lead-Gen & SAAS

8 Men Enter - 1 Man Leave @CTtheDisrupter vs. @CJSlattery vs. @marketerdylan vs. @rabahrahil vs. @rileyfara vs. @Giebz  vs. @nckdoren vs. @ImSamThompson

Lets dive deep into old strategies, why they are coming back... and if they are a good idea for you

Crypto, Football, Shopify, Hot Takes, ABO, Interest Groups, BFCM, Stories & MORE!  I met Dylan years ago at the Inaugural ManyChat Conference. We had been talking ever since he noticed me spamming “Guru” & “Expert” Facebook groups like AdLeaks, with value posts before I got banned from them.  Brent, is brand new to DTC Twitter… but has a 5year pedigree at Shopify and is a true stud.   We laughed, and learned… had a blast and give these fine folks a follow on Twitter or Insta!  Brent Stirling: Tech-ish. Growth & Sales at @Shoelace. All things social. Gamer, dad, urban farmer, always saying the quiet part loud. Prev: Growth at The Big Green Bag TW: @Brentertainer IG: @Brentertainer  Dylan Carpenter: Head Koala @ Koality Media. Facebook Ads Addict. Beer League Goalie. Texas State Alum. I probably spend $30k/day in ads. Co-Host of The Rich Ad Poor Ad Podcast TW: @MarketerDylan IG: @DCarpenterMedia

We talk about Success with Facebook Ads, why we don't use Segmentation, the Value of Market Fit, why Relationships & Partnerships are important, Facebook Ad Account Architecture and SO MUCH MORE!

Facebook Ads MBA Program Alumni  - 7-Figure Entrepreneur and Super Cool Dude!!!

Good Facebook creatives versus bad creatives––what makes an ad good or bad has a lot more to do with the business than you might think.  There are plenty of trendy ways of making ads, and there are always fun new approaches that people are trying. However, you also have to consider that static images have been working since before the Facebook pixel. Testimonial videos have worked since day one. User-generated content and Influencer content have worked since day one.   The bottom line is the actual quality of the content has far less to do with the success of the ad than the actual customer journey and business results.  I can’t tell you how many times something with a typo, lo-res video, or terrible product shot someone took on their phone beat out a $5000 video shoot.  What you need to pay attention to, more than anything, is the business results that your ads bring.  Also, you have to be precise with your goals for your ads...  Are you trying to generate more content to create greater stability? Are you trying to generate more content to increase your ability to scale?  Are you trying to just find one thing that actually works?  The right answer––even for the same exact ad account––can be wildly different depending on this question.  The real trick is being able to prioritize your business objectives and testing practices to deliver your desired results in a stable, projectable, and systematized fashion.  So what makes a good ad good, or a bad ad bad? Well, it’s a matter of asking yourself…   “Does this ad actually bring me a higher quality customer for my business objective of the campaign?”  Sometimes you might want something highly engaging. Sometimes you might want something that’s going to be very good at driving a sale. Sometimes you might want something informative. Sometimes you might want something that’s going to reach new people. Sometimes you might want something that’s going to keep someone who already loves you coming back. Every single one of these objectives might have a different winning ad.  So, the most important thing is clearly delineating what success looks like…and then testing your way to finding the best deliverer of that result!

Instagram has just made Instagram Reels ads available…  This is super exciting for folks who want to take advantage of this inventory. Let me walk you through what you need to know, how to plan for it, how do use this to succeed and one of the biggest mistakes that you should avoid.  First off what you need to know is simple, this will be widely under priced attention. And will be amazing for people looking to get more attention and awareness For their business.  When planning to use this new ad unit, We need to focus on what is attention words to us, and have a very clear definition of a success means. Perhaps Success is getting a certain amount of clicks, or a certain level of engagement rate, or maybe it’s just a matter of getting more people to know what we’re doing. Once we know what success means, we have to remember to use the right types of campaigns. From brand awareness to conversion, traffic to engagement, every campaign type has a very specific ability inside of Facebook. Always remember to prioritize what ever your overall business objective from every penny you spend is when choosing this campaign type.  In order to use this exciting new placement for success, We have to remember what the purpose of this and tape it. Instagram Reels are a short video, that people are used to experiencing for fun, and information. So in designing what ads to use, make sure that you are using creative that is fun and entertaining. One of the best places to start, is with content that works organically. Remember the Facebook paid algorithm, is just the exact same as the organic algorithm, only a pain to reach even more people.  Lastly, one of the biggest mistakes that I’m sure many many people are going to be making, is to utilize this specific campaign take to drive conversions at scale. While he can be exciting at a low spend, and can completely help small businesses maximize the value of the dollars… This should not be a cornerstones of a business trying to drive dozens or hundreds of sales on a daily basis from their Facebook ads.  Every time Facebook comes out with a new ad tape, it always is super cheap. Just remember, the people that see these ads in their experience, I’m not used to seeing ads there, and will behave in a way that is probably not nearly what you might expect, especially in relation to how your ads may have worked elsewhere.

In the scramble to accommodate for aggregate events manager, and iOS14 updates in Facebook… I’ve seen a lot of people return to the use of interest groups.  Interest groups, were developed by Facebook to compete with Googles affinity audiences. This was done back when Facebook was a PPC platform, before the Facebook pixel existed, before there were Conversion Campaigns, before we had the algorithm, before we had real machine learning, and reliable LALs, and even the EdgeRank system even existed.  So, why are people coming back to interest groups after they’ve been obsolete for years now?  1st off, I have seen a lot of people see success in isolated fashion with interest groups. these can absolutely be helpful at a small budget, where you are unable to leave the Learning Phase, And Facebook is your only source of reliable traffic...  However, historically these audiences breakdown at scale and are far less stable / efficient than broad audiences that prioritize the customer experience and the user flow while matching creative to need.  This will likely not change, and there is no reason that interest groups should perform better today than they have in the last six months or last six years. There is one fundamental reason behind this. The Facebook engineering team has not changed the base code behind how interest groups are populated or implemented in the auction.  In short, Interest groups were obsolete… and absolutely nothing has changed in how they’re built.  What made them obsolete has only been further magnified. Because of this, as it currently stands, and will likely not change in years to come, interest groups ultimately perform a function at an extreme lack of scale, But prove to be a liability when stability, efficiency, and growth are priorities.

Using Facebook for lead generation can be extremely fruitful, but how do we control for the quality?  Facebook has its own lead gen ad unit, or you can also use Facebook ads to drive somebody to an onboarding experience on your website. The real trick is how do we get a lot of these people while also at the same time not sacrificing the value of any one of them.  First rule of thumb, lower cost leads are almost always worse.  Second rule of thumb, at some point even 100% conversion rate leads don’t come at enough volume to make business work  So the real trick is figuring out the balance.  When we’re trying to run lead gen, a very big mistake is to treat it as something different than any other Facebook ad.   Remember, leads are almost the exact same thing as an add to cart.  When someone signs up as a lead it doesn’t mean that they’re actually going to buy, just like when somebody adds to cart it’s not a guaranteed sale. We don’t really ever try to optimize a conversion Campaign to adding to cart, but far far too often people focus on getting the lead as a success of a lead gen ad.  So what are we supposed to do?  Well, we really have a couple of options…  First off, let’s make sure that Facebook knows what a good lead and a bad lead is.   We can do this by passing back to Facebook when a lead becomes a sale. Just like when Facebook knows when an add to cart becomes a purchase,   We are letting Facebook know what a high quality bit of traffic is versus a lower quality.  The second thing that we really want to do, is to make sure that we get people through the lead generation process who are most likely to actually make a purchase.  Far too often the priority is set at as many leads as possible. However, all this does is make the sales person‘s job much much harder and wastes everybody’s time and money.  So just like we don’t wanna have click bait ads that lead to a high bounce rate, we also don’t want to have leads that generate  a high rejection rate.  So in order to make a good quality lead be something that Facebook can deliver, we need to be able to track that lead’s life cycle, and also make sure the end user is of the most value.  There are many ways to do this, but the easiest and most direct way of improving the value of lead, is to make the user more informed and the process more difficult for them to actually complete the lead process.  If you look at some of the best lead gen brands in the world, the actual onboarding process is far more complicated than it could be.  If you want to see who does this extraordinarily well, go sign up for a Fabletics subscription or go check out Quip.  Take a look at the brands who sell subscription products, because for them, every initial purchase is just a lead to a long sale cycle.  The more informed, and more enthusiastic, and more self-qualified anyone is when they complete the lead process, the higher the likelihood that they’re going to turn into a quality customer.  Your job is to find the balance!

A lot of folks are starting their business happen to be also bootstrapped. The path to success for them and the issues that they face are very often similar. Here are three big tips in the one I recommend to anyone trying to start a business from bootstrapped place.  The number one most important thing did I recommend any business understand, is there numbers. You need to know: What is your allowable cost per acquisition What does Success look like for now, not just long-term And also how much can you afford to invest in solving business problems  The Second most important thing for bootstrapped start up businesses to understand is their systems. Do you have scalable solutions to repeated problems Do you have a system to handle hi touch workflows Do you have Documentation in Transparency around day today activity  The third most important thing that bootstrap start ups half to now… Is runway. How much money can you spend over how long, and was one result, for you to be able to maintain your path to success? If you lose $.50 on every dollar this month 30 next month 10 month after that and start making a profit six months from now is that OK? Can you lose $.15 on the dollar for the next year and a half? Ultimately, can you define success by various stages of losing less and less before you begin to see profit?  These are the three most fundamental skills that most bootstrap start up to succeed do well, and most to fail miss out on!