TJ54 – Facebook Targeted Ads Tricks That Deliver Leads For Less Than $1.00 ~ Laura Betterly

Welcome back this is episode#54 of Traffic Jam, I am your host James Reynolds and you’re tuned in to the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic to your website and market your business better online.

Talking of marketing, I want to acknowledge Jay Baer who’s just launched a new website called MarketingPodcasts.com which is the first search engine for marketing podcast. I know if you are listening in to this show then no doubt you practice marketing and you enjoy podcast so I am pretty sure you are going to find value in to this new site just as I expect to do so please do check it out – a great initiative from our friend from the show Jay Baer, it’s www.marketingpodcasts.com. Of course you will find TrafficJam listed there but you’ll also find a bunch of other great shows too so please do check it out.

So on to today’s show, the first thing I need you to do is go to TrafficJamCast.com/54 because I put together a set of cliff notes of the show which you can refer to when listening along the show episode. You’ll also find a full transcript as well as exclusive episode artwork. So go ahead, visit TrafficJamCast.com/54 then listen on to the show.

So we are joined today by Laura Betterly who is a very well rounded traffic specialist. She’s got an agency that specializes in paid and organic search in social media, display advertising and social advertising so she knows her stuff in many areas. Laura’s released several courses teaching several marketing strategies as well as aimed and produced with information product marketers. She’s been featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal as well as CNN and NPR. She recently did a show with Kevin Harrington of Shark Tank Fame. Whatever your online business model, I am sure you are going to find real value in this interview so let’s get started. Here’s Laura Betterly and this is TrafficJam Episode#54.

James: Welcome back listener! This is Traffic Jam episode#54 and joining me here today is Laura Betterly! Laura, how are you doing?

Laura: Good! Thank you so much for having me on. It’s an honor.

James: Well, it’s my real pleasure and I think when it comes to traffic generation, you are pretty versatile and I am excited to see which direction this interview will go in, but I think to kind of kick things off, let’s start at the peak. Imagine you have a traffic genie and you can just ask for one single traffic source, what would it be?

Laura: It would be Facebook hands down. And I have been involved in traffic from the beginning of the internet which makes me a dinosaur in internet years but nonetheless, the biggest exploits and exploits meaning where I can get the largest patches of traffic at the most affordable prices, is Facebook hands down.

James: And is that what it does for you in terms of why Facebook is so appealing? The fact that there is just so much available traffic at such a low cost?

Laura: Well, it’s more than that because I can find my exact target market very, very easily and there’s things like audience insight where I can look at competitors pages and look at things that people who like one thing other things that they have in common. Facebook is partnered with good data and that means in a lot of cases that there is personal information that is available for individuals and for marketers that anyone can go ahead and get really – so you know, if you really want to get it down, I mean on a personal level, well yeah, there is no such thing as privacy. At the same time, I kind of like the fact that even for me the ads that I get served to me on Facebook are exactly what I am interested in. unfortunately, I buy way too many shoes nowadays.

James: I saw a video that you have done the other day actually where you were slagging off Zappos because they’re retargeting on Facebook and they’d like you to find a pair of shoes that you wanted but you couldn’t actually find. I guess that is one way that you should not do it if you are using Facebook targeting.

Laura: Yes, exactly. But retargeting, which is another broad subject when it comes to this is actually a wonderful thing. Because it used to be somebody can come to your webpage and if you didn’t answer their question right away the only thing that would happen is they would hit the X at the top of the screen and they are gone. But with retargeting, you can follow them around and you can offer them something else. And if they said no to that page, they might say yes to something else. Or you can add more value because part of any marketing campaign especially with Facebook has a lot to do with building credibility and building your audience so that they understand who you are, you build your personality so they trust you. So sometimes they are not going to buy on the first click. The first click should be something that is of value, that puts you on top of mind, something that goes ahead and allows that individual to start to say, oh, this is someone who understands what I really need and want. And build value, and build value and to the point where they say, this is the information that I am getting from these guys for free; well then of course, when I buy something it’s going to be of huge massive value.

James: Yeah, well let’s get started with Facebook and talk about really how we can get going with it. it’s an easy platform to get started with but I guess like any paid traffic source in the wrong hands and you do things incorrectly, can also burn through a lot of money as well. What should our listener look out for in terms of pitfalls and how they can be avoided?

Laura: Well, first thing, you never test with a large budget. Test with $50 or less, and you are going to see a couple of things. First, you have to be a statistics junkie. You have to look at what is actually going on. The first thing, and this is email, as well as Facebook and what not. The point of an ad is to get the click. That’s the only point of the ad. The point of a subject line on an email is to get somebody to open on it. So when you get somebody to click to your landing page wherever you are sending them, the thing that that’s supposed to do is to illicit some sort of response and it could be a share or a like, or an opt in for some free content. There’s some guys that are doing quite well with what we call the reverse engage squeeze I call it, which is where they send people to really just great content and then retarget them through the opt in after the fact. And for social that makes a lot of sense, but you have to remember we have to look at, first of all, is your ad getting clicked on? If it is getting clicked on, good then the first part of the equation is done but if you are getting clicks and you’re not getting the reaction that you want out of that then you’ve got to go in and you have to say, why am I not getting engagement or why am I not getting the opt in or what not, and look at competitors. There is a great tool called Follow.net that is absolutely free. There is a paid version but I’ll tell you I love it because you can go to a competitor’s page and it can give you all sorts of information. If they have affiliate offers what do there landing page look like? What keywords are they ranking on? As far as contextual ads, what do they look like what kind of images are they using and what kind of banners? And you know you have to start with them. Most people would say you have to throw some stuff on a page and see what happens. I always say that’s the wrong way to go, the first thing you need to do is know your market! Know what is engaging people in your market. What are your competitors doing? I have to tell you, if your competitor has a landing page that has been up for a year and a half and they are still driving traffic to it, chances are, it is a good page. Now, I am not saying rip off the page, what I am saying is get the elements of that, look at the ones that are successful and look at what they have in common and make sure that your page has that. You know how many pages I look at that don’t have a phone number on the header? Hello? You want people to call?

James: That’s a classic, right? I mean the amount of people that send people to a webpage and almost shun them away without giving them any possibility to do business with them, it is quite amazing. It just baffles me sometimes.

Laura: Yeah, it’s called Unmarketing and they want to know why they are going broke. The truth of the matter is if they are good at what they do then people need to find them but you also need to let them know that you are to be trusted and that you can solve whatever problem that is and that depends on what kind of business that is. Not everybody is just an online business. A lot of people have a physical locations and they actually talk to humans. Believe it or not!

James: Well, I think it is a great point and is perhaps one that many people shun over the whole research phase of a campaign really lays the foundations for success. You’ve mentioned a great tool but going deep in to your process, Laura, what sort of steps do you go through to kind of evaluate a campaign in the market before you get launched in a campaign itself?

Laura: Well, I first of all go to follow.net and I sometimes go a little deeper with some other keyword tools. There’s a couple of social tools that are not great at looking at social ads but nonetheless that’s what exists for right now. But the other great tool, or actually two cool tools, one is Facebook graph search and you just go to Facebook and you can say pages liked by people who like and insert whatever that is. And you start to look at those competitor pages. And then you can go to audience insights and get all that big data information like if you look at somebody like Tony Robbins or Brendan Bouchard who are very, very big in social media, you’ll start to see a pattern of things that people also like; they like success magazine, they like Sandy Karowski and it is very funny, you start to see these patterns of what else. Because part of it too is you can have a great ad and a great landing page and if you send it to the wrong target market, you’ll think that you don’t have a winning combination. But when you send it to the right target, it goes on fire. It’s like can I get more traffic? Can I do more? Can I spend more? If you spent a dollar on ads and you knew every time you spent a dollar you made two dollars back, you would try to spend as much money as possible. And that is really where we take our clients to, that point where they have to turn down the ads spent because they are so darn busy they can’t keep up with all the business.

James: Yeah, exactly, it’s the slot machine scenario where they acknowledge to so often right? I mean put a dollar in and get a two dollar return out, you are going to stuff that slot machine with as much money as you can get your hands on.

Laura: Exactly! Exactly! But you know, everybody thinks that there is overnight success, and one shot deals, and sometimes you get it right, the first time around but normally, that’s the exception to the case. The truth of the matter is if you do your research right, you are then starting with a slate that is most likely to get success but then you have to look at the analytics. If you have any in page analytics. If you are using video, have video analytics. If you look at a video and you see that 63% of people are leaving in the first 30 seconds, then you know there is something right before then that’s repelling them so you have to start being smart, being a detective in fact. I think part of marketing, the biggest part of it, is being a really good detective- knowing what’s working and what isn’t. And it is funny because I started this life out as a musician saying I would never, never use math! And I now use it every day, so I now made my high school math teacher happy.

James: My gosh, I can resonate with you there, I mean my previous incarnations, I used to run a photography company surrounded by creative people all day and now I just dive in to all these data like two worlds that couldn’t be further apart, to be honest.

Laura: Yeah but you know what? The one thing that I think that makes it creative for me is that there is a little bit of art along with the science of it because you’ve got to have the right creative, you’ve got to have the right copy, you’ve got to write the right background so it is a little bit of a – I don’t know what to say, I am a bit of a savant on it but you just have to have a really good understanding of what is the aesthetics of it also, otherwise it doesn’t work. And what’s funny is I teach a lot and I have thousands of students and the ones that get it do well and the other ones just pound their heads against the wall.

James: Yeah, I can understand that. So we’ve mentioned research, we’ve also mentioned a bunch of other things like ad copy and just really understanding the audience. What are some of the other leverage points in your opinion that can kind of leverage up campaigns the fastest?

Laura: Well, again, it’s getting the right message and getting that click and also spending time looking really, really well. What are the people’s interest? What is their income level? Where are they located? I mean, why advertise cosmetic dentistry in a neighborhood where most people are on welfare? They can’t afford it. So you have to be kind of smart on that. It’s your customer avatar. You look at your existing customers, you look at who is your target customer, is it somebody who has an x amount of expendable income and lives this way and is married has 2 kids, whatever that is, sometimes it is something different but you know who your ideal customer is and you go ahead and you craft your audience based on that and then if you look at your research correctly, you’ll also craft your creative based on that. Now you have to remember, with Facebook, it is not like search. With search you’ve got somebody who says I want widgets and you say, hey, I’ve got great widgets, right? With Facebook, it’s a social platform so if you’ve got great widgets, you might have to come up with a funny meme on widgets that gets them excited, because you will want your competitors and look at their posts and look at what gets engagement and what doesn’t. If you’ve got somebody with a million followers and they post something kind of sales-y that’s got one like and one share, you know that that’s not getting any engagement. You look down and you say, oh my god, that’s an inspirational quote that has been shared two thousand times, well now you know you are in the kind of right area of engagement. And so you have got to figure out a way of taking that message and turning them in to something that is going to take them to your website. And I guess that’s the art of it.

James: Yeah, that’s the creative part. It certainly is, I mean, you can take the signs of looking at headlines that have been successful for others but if you don’t adapt it to your own audience and be a little bit creative around it, then I doubt you can expect too great of a result. So you mentioned about targeting and I know you work directly with a lot of small businesses, are you ever faced with the challenge of business owners saying, hey that is great Laura, let us go after our perfect target market, our ideal customer avatar but hey our product can be bought by everyone, let’s just send a message out there to a wide audience? Have you ever come across that? That seems to be a running theme when I speak to business owners.

Laura: You know that is interesting. Usually I am right when it comes down to it but I can grant that a customer might be right and usually what I will do is say, okay, let’s test it. And I will test it. I will take a small budget and I will test it. now, truly interesting, with the new options that Facebook has, there are some guys who have great success but I actually have not had a chance to do it myself but using conversion pixels to go to a wide audience like that, there are some guys who are doing quite well. Basically just saying, all the United States, men and women, but the optimization point and that is for anyone who doesn’t understand is Facebook, because they have all this data on individuals, they know, if somebody, if you put out a data on your thank you page, that’s the page that somebody goes to after they do the action you want to. So if they do the opt in to the thank you page after that or if they buy something it’s the thank you page after that. You can say to Facebook, hey, I want to optimize for people who hit this thank you page and you let Facebook figure out the terms that way and your relatively large budget that way don’t usually run out of it because what happens is that Facebook looks at everybody who hits that thank you page and finds things that they have in common with one another and so they’ll serve up that ad to more of those type of people and it is really interesting because all artificial intelligence and there is nothing we can basically understand how their algorithm works, all I can say is when I do optimize for that even when I target put the audiences there, you know, darn, I am getting a lot more opt ins than I used to because there is a whole thing with impressions, right? So let’s say you have an ad and you’re bidding for the click and you start getting really good opt ins on it but then you start to see this thing called frequency. So let’s say that the audience that you set up is half a million people and then it hits 10,000 people and you’ve gotten really good opt ins but it doesn’t seem to go over that 10,000 people and you just start seeing that the same ad gets shown over and over and then of course your opt ins go down because people get blind to it, but of course you had 490,000 other people who should have seen that ad who didn’t. When you go to the optimization like that, it starts to decrease the frequency and extend the reach which is why when you go real general like that, it sometimes works but you have to have enough budget and enough time to be able to make that kind of kick off. That makes sense? It’s so hard to explain in audio without going in PowerPoint but that’s really the crux of it that works incredibly well.

James: Yeah, in fact we covered this on a couple of episodes back with our mutual friend Curt Maly. We were talking about how those campaigns were optimized based on intelligence but you said we probably don’t really know about, I mean Facebook are making connections between those people that have landed on that thank you page that we probably don’t even know about. Like the color of shoes that they like to put on in the morning, I mean who knows what those connections are but Facebook are optimizing around putting that ideal persona together for you. I think Laura that covers things very well. If you have a point here about the way Facebook here are developing that are a success of the platform has been that they always do innovate in terms of how their platform works and the audience options that are available to us, where do you see Facebook advertising go next? What’s sort of around the corner?

Laura: Well, I think it is starting and they were in to a quantity phase where they were taking every advertiser and almost every ad with very little exception. Of course they had certain rules in their terms of service which are very specific but I see it going the same way Google Adwords went which is where they had all the advertisers in the world and they were taking a lot of different business. And I am seeing that accounts are getting shut down and you can get another account, it’s not like you’re banned for life like what happens with Google but I think they are going from a quantity phase to a quality phase. And so advertising that isn’t social or is to sales-y or that makes claims that can’t be backed up by science are just getting disabled, shut down, or otherwise and they are doing it from a viewpoint of they want users, people in the newsfeed to see things that they want so if you have an ad that’s a little annoying and it gets a lot of complaints, it will get shut down. And if you get enough of those, they are going to shut the whole account down. They still allow squeeze pages, they don’t like exit hops so you’re going to have to look at what is going on and make those adjustments based on that. It is still relatively affordable in comparison to something like Google AdWords but I think the future is really going to be more about quality than it is about how much money you have.

James: Yeah, and I think this is a natural majority of the platform which we have seen Google adwords go through right? They at one point got very strict upon advertising regulations and shut down all affiliates which were sending people to affiliate pages. What page it lands on and I guess that same thing is happening with Facebook, they just want to make sure they get a better quality of advertising which will result in a better user experience and keep people in the platform.

Laura: That’s correct, but there is, just like Google despite their do no evil moniker, it still means that there’s some small businesses who inadvertedly kind of put themselves in the whole thing. And then organic engagement, we already know organic engagement is going down and it will continue to go down and everybody goes why are my posts not being seen? And I am like, you know, you are using Facebook for business, the fact that they gave it to you for free for a while doesn’t mean that they have to give it to you for free forever and it is kind of funny because I call it the crack tailor handling which is the first hit is for free. And then they’re like, okay, pay me. And they have a right to ask to be paid! If you are making money off of a life form, they have a right to be paid for it. it is great if you can exploit it for a while and get free traffic out of it but you know, the purpose of their business just like the purpose of our business is to make more money than they spend and you’ve got to respect that.

James: Yeah, well Laura you’ve been involved with plenty of campaigns and I know you run campaigns for other well-known marketers online and you also handle some for your own clients, what has been some of the most successful campaigns that you’ve been involved with and had the most success?

Laura: I think if you already have someone who has a great personality or has some of their own celebrity juice and not necessarily a Grammy award winning artist although I have dealt with those. But somebody in their niche, who is the rock star of their niche, it gets a lot more engagement. This is personality based marketing. So those kinds of campaigns do extremely well but I also found that, in doing stuff with personality development also and you know what’s very funny because I am not really kind of a fufu you know, don’t get me wrong I believe in positive thinking and what not but I don’t think because you think a positive thought, if you don’t do something about it, a million dollars is not going to end up in your front doorstep. Sometimes I would get kind of these fufu thoughts, whatever and I go, you know, there is nothing that is going to replace doing something really effective. I am really sorry. But I found that, with these guys, I had started my regular hard hitting campaigns and I was failing and I was failing pretty badly. And when I switched and did some competitive research, I switched it to more of an inspirational quote with an afterthought of oh by the way if you’d like to find out more about this about yourself, click here. And that got, not only great engagement but it got a lot of shares and the lead cost was less than a dollar which I have not seen forever so I was pretty happy. But you know it surprises me sometimes what works and what doesn’t which is why I stopped saying what I know is best because I’ll go okay let’s test it and see what happens. I had a client that walked in and told me that their product was going to change the world and that kids are going to do better in school and marry this and we are all going to stay together and I thought okay great I am in to this and he shows ma piece of plastic that goes on the bottom of the bed sheet so that they don’t bunch up at night. And I am thinking this guy is a psycho. This is psycho! And you know what, we did some research because he had already paid and I was like oh my god, what will I do with this? And it did not end up being like a campaign like this but what we found out from the research was that there were 2 markets that it would actually work well with and it wasn’t promoted as changing the world but guess what, it is being sold in hotels and it actually saves a lot of time and money for hoteliers because they spend less time making the beds in between and then I ended up parting friends after giving him his different markets and I saw it in Walmart and I thought this guy was ready for the rubber room between you and I.

James: Yeah, well there are some lessons there, one is you talking about thinking one thing would work and then it didn’t and based on that experience based on your understanding of your own customers and your own market or someone else’s and you’ve got to test those scenarios to see what really, really works. And I guess the second one, related to your bedsheets scenario is that you’ve got to understand that someone else’s problem again may not be your own unless you dive deep and find out what that is, you’re never going to have a successful campaign and to the hotelier I can imagine that changing bedsheets is probably a pain in the ass- mind the pun!

Laura: Oh, yeah. No worries. I was thinking more about rogue bedding and I was just like, I don’t know how to spend this.

James: Oh, dear. Anyway, minding puns, you might have noticed that I said genie or had a genie reference in my opening question, it was 100% intentional because I know you’ve put up a cause quite recently called Traffic Genesis with a couple of other very successful marketers. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that Laura?

Laura: Yeah, Traffic Genesis not only teaches Facebook and how to run them for yourself but also, my partners on that, Mike Filsaime and Andy Jenkins are really good marketers so they show everything from how to actually create a really good map and funnel for your business. They did so much training I can’t even think half of it but it is about how to write your copy and how to design your pages and what you should have and what you shouldn’t have. It is really set up quite nicely. I did my piece of it but they did so much as far as the content goes as far as really understanding how to build everything from start to finish which is awesome and then the other thing about it which I love is that we have a Facebook group and every day I am answering tens of questions, sometimes hundreds of questions on things that are happening because with the platforms, the basics of marketing don’t really change. You are trying to create an understanding so you can bring business in but the technology changes very rapidly like in the last couple of weeks Facebook has changed the interface. It doesn’t change basically how you do your ads but where your pixels are, where you put your audiences that changed! I was like, wait a minute, it was here yesterday, now it’s ta dah! So our community is great because we really get in to on a daily basis what’s what and what’s changing and I love it! I actually prefer working with others that way more than doing all the heavy lifting for our clients.

James: Yeah, well that would make sense. The last things, where a great place to send people off to if they want to dive a little deeper in to all this stuff and perhaps get some help from experts such as yourself Laura, so shall we include as a place for people to send off to? Where else should our audience connect with you on the internet?

Laura: Oh, well I have a Facebook page and that is Facebook.com/LauraBetterlylive and then of course there’s my personal blog Laurabetterly.com which I think you called in another day, I don’t know if you noticed but we updated it on Friday so if you saw it before that it’s much prettier.

James: Well, we’ll make sure that that now prettier link is included in the show notes so to you the listener head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/54 where you’ll find the links to Laura’s Facebook page, her personal blog, and also to Traffic Genesis plus any of the other resources mentioned by Laura in today’s show, so all that remains Laura is to thank you for coming on. You promised it will be a blast and we’d have some fun and that has totally been the case so thanks for coming on today.

Laura: Oh, thanks for having me!

So there you go that was Laura Betterly and as mentioned at the end of the interview, you can get a link to Laura’s sites by going to TrafficJamCast.com/54 where you can also download an MP3, full transcript of today’s show plus my own notes on today’s interview instilled in to a mindmap for you to refer to when you’re next building a Facebook Campaign. So head on over there now, the link is TrafficJamCast.com/54 where you can also comment, ask questions, and join in on the discussion for this episode.

If you have not done so already, you should subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio so you’re the first to get TrafficJam as soon as they are released. The links to do that are TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and tht of course ids for iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher for Stitcher radio.

Now we end the show this week as we do every week with a traffic Jam. It is a track chosen of course by our guest today, Laura Betterly and she’s gone for very appropriately, Happy by Pharrell Williams. So, enjoy this song and I will see you back here for another episode real soon!