The experts are joined by special guest, Franziska Iseli, co-founder of Basic Bananas, to detail how Basic Bananas uses Facebook ads to fill their events, which has ultimately helped to grow their business. Franziska will share the system she and her team have utilized to sell out events in every major city in Australia, and then internationally in major cities in the United States and Canada.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
- Basic Bananas’ long-term strategy to selling out local events (« and what they do if people aren’t responding).
- The two types of ads Basic Bananas uses to spark interest in their events.
- Their approach to knowing how much to spend to gain event attendees.
- The question Basic Bananas asks at events to get their attendees to relax and enjoy the presentation.
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Perception by Franziska Iseli and Christo Hall (« use code PPT for an exclusive discount on the book!)
Episode 52: Results of 687 Facebook Ad Surveys (…And a Pep Talk from the PT Team!)
Episode 53: Ryan Levesque Shares 4 Steps to Creating Personalized, Segmented Campaigns for Your Audience
Episode 58 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):
| Keith Krance: | Welcome back to Perpetual Traffic, Episode 58. We have a very special guest today. Franziska Iseli from outside of Sydney, Australia and Molly and myself on today to talk about some really, really cool stuff on how to use Facebook ads to fill up local events. Now Franziska, how’d I do on the name?
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| Franziska Iseli: | You did all right actually. Hi. Thanks for having me on the show.
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| Keith Krance: | Thanks for coming on.
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| Molly Pittman: | Way to go Keith.
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| Keith Krance: | We were sort of practicing before.
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| Franziska Iseli: | We’re going to practice my name another time. It was pretty good.
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| Keith Krance: | Franziska, you are originally from Switzerland, right? We met a couple of years ago at James Schramko’s event. You are outside of Sidney. I’m really, really excited. Molly and I are both excited to have you on today. Before we get into how you’re using Facebook ads to literally drive people and fill up local events in cities you’re not even in, tell us a little bit about how you got started.
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| Franziska Iseli: | Yes, sure, yes. If somebody thinks that I have an accent, just pretend that it’s Australian. Our business is called Basic Bananas. We started in Australia about eight years ago and then we launched in the US two years ago and then two months ago we launched in Canada with a Canadian partner. What we do at Basic Bananas is we focus on running workshops for small businesses educating them on marketing.
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| Basically helping small businesses through better marketing. Marketing that is exiting. Marketing that doesn’t suck. Marketing that isn’t annoying and boring. My background is in that. Before I took the leap of faith about eight years ago I was working in advertising and marketing. I did actually do my university degree in marketing and political science. Mainly to impress my dad.
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| Keith Krance: | Exactly. Impress our parents. I went to college to become an airline pilot originally and so my parents are bummed out because I’m not using that anymore. I’m not a pilot anymore. I told my dad that my newest product is call Facebook Flight Plan. I was telling him about how I’m using all this stuff that I learned in college and checklists and processes and he was so excited. Yes, some of the money that we invested was actually put to good use.
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| Franziska Iseli: | At Basic Bananas we use Facebook advertising very heavily. Also to get into new markets in new cities. In Australia, we are in six cities, six major cities. With the system that I can share today for local events we can go anywhere.
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| Molly Pittman: | What is Basic Bananas do? What do you guys offer?
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| Franziska Iseli: | We offer workshops where small businesses come and they learn how to promote their business. They learn how to attract clients to their business. It’s all sorts of industries. We have everything from farmers to consultants to lawyers, accountants. It’s actually very fun. It’s a fun business because we get to work with so many different businesses and help them with their marketing.
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| The main program that they come for is called The Clever Bunch and it’s a twelve-month program where they come in each month. It’s a group of no more than fifteen people. They work on their business. For the next thirty days before they come in again they have to implement what they’ve learned.
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| Then also we have an online program called The Marketing Smarts because we get a lot of people that are not in the cities that we are but they find us and they want to be part of something. They go through an online program which is called The Marketing Smarts and that goes for twelve weeks. Everything is online. It’s a self-paced program.
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| That’s really our two main offerings that we run. It’s all about helping small businesses through marketing that doesn’t look like marketing. Really, the best marketing, and you guys would know that with Facebook advertising, the best marketing doesn’t look like marketing. The best marketing fits in with the media that you’re using. On Facebook if you’re run a campaign, the best campaigns don’t look like they’re ads.
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| There are hundreds of different ways to market a small business that most people don’t know. Actually, most small businesses and some of the listeners might resonate with that, they come along when you ask them, “What strategies do you use to promote your business? To get business to make more money to attract clients?” They go, “Word of mouth.” That’s not a strategy.
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| Molly Pittman: | You can’t control it.
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| Keith Krance: | That’s about hustling 24/7 and burning yourself out.
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| Molly Pittman: | Absolutely.
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| Franziska Iseli: | Exactly. A lot of them burn out and a lot of them give up. I don’t know the stats exactly in the US but here the failure rate of small businesses is quite high because they don’t invest in themselves and education and they don’t listen to your podcasts probably. The failure rate of small businesses is quite heavy. Because word of mouth is not a strategy. It’s just you doing a really good job, well done, and so people refer you.
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| Molly Pittman: | Yes. It’s like organic traffic. It’s great but you can’t control it. You can’t turn the water hose on and off.
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| Keith Krance: | Okay, I want to back up just a second. You have two offerings at these events. You talked about The Clever Bunch, which is a workshop and The Marketing Smarts. Do you offer these at your initial live event or how does it work?
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| Franziska Iseli: | Let me quickly tell you how the structure works. In those cities where we run these face to face programs, they’re super effective because people have to come in. They’re held accountable. I just did a tour actually, a national tour last week where I traveled to each city. It’s just so beautiful to see how much they implement because they almost have to because it’s almost a bit of peer pressure.
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| You’re in a group of people where they watch you. Did you do this from last month? Did you implement? Some don’t implement of course. It’s normal. The ones that do, they get results. What we do is we first run an introductory session in each city called Blast of Marketing. It’s a three and a half hour session. That session is an introductory session where anyone who runs a business can come and check us out. We do things quite differently. We’re quite cheeky and we’re a bit different I think.
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| They need to like our vibe. If they’re super conservative and they don’t want to change a thing in their business and they don’t want to have fun, we’re not the right vibe. That’s fine. There are other people that can help them. Before we take anyone into the main program, The Clever Bunch, they have to come to one of these blast off sessions in one of these cities. That session is only $27. We don’t make money. We pay more. I want to talk about that too.
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| You need to know your numbers. We actually pay more for one bum on the seat than we make. These events cost us money because at that event, the introductory session, depending on the city how big our venue is we can take up to about one hundred people each session. Then the people that come to the session, if they like us they can apply to become a member of twelve-month program.
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| We use Facebook advertising to get people to come to these local events where they have a half day with us and they learn marketing. They actually learn that the blast off is jammed packed. The blast is not a pitch. It’s three and a half hours of content. We just give. We give, give, give. We show them how to put together a one page marketing plan. They don’t even ever have to give us money to already get results.
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| Some people do. Some people never work with us after they’ve done that then they email us and say, “I can’t believe after three months of coming to your blast off I’ve done this, this, this and this. I’m like wow, this person really took action. It’s incredible.
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| We use Facebook advertising to drive people to come to the small event, the $27 event, and then when we go into a new city we basically find a venue to host that local even. We run Facebook campaigns to drive people to come to this event in a new city. We just did that for Vancouver a month or two months ago.
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| You know, that was interesting and almost a bit disheartening at first. We went into Vancouver, pumped, we have a Canadian business partner Eric. He’s amazing. We got to the venue and were like, let’s do this. We can do this. Australia is quite big here. We are the largest provider of marketing education. Most people here know us. If you say Basic Bananas, most people that run a business, a small business, they’ve heard of that name before. It’s an easy to remember name.
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| In Canada, nobody knows us because we’re new. Nobody really cares about us. It’s like launching obviously a whole new business even though we already have a business. We go there. We take the campaigns that work in Australia. We put them into Canada. Launched them in Vancouver and crickets. Nothing. We spent quite a bit of, not too much money but maybe a few thousand dollars probably. We didn’t get a lot of bookings.
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| We’re like, okay, maybe this is not the right market. You start doubting yourself. It’s all in your head. It’s all bullshit. Because there’s small businesses there and they need help. We were like, “Okay, this is not working.” We basically just had to keep adjusting the campaigns to fit into Vancouver for people to be interested in us.
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| Also what we found is we need to gain momentum. They would have seen Basic Bananas the first time. Maybe they would have thought, “What the heck. Is this like a banana business or what do they sell, bananas? I don’t want bananas.” They see us again. They see us again. They see us again. Now probably two months into campaigns, our customer conversion is dropping. At the beginning was quite high. At the beginning I probably paid up to two hundred bucks per conversion. Now I’m happy to spend up to one hundred bucks no matter which city we’re in. Usually it’s lower than that.
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| Keith Krance: | Interesting. Got you. Got you. Basically, it sounds like your goal is to get under that, right around that two hundred dollars, if you can closer to one hundred dollars per attendee paying $27 to come to the three-and-a-half-hour introductory session. At that introductory session it’s not a big pitch. You’re giving tons of value, which is awesome. When that person emails you now they’ve got really good results. You can use that and leverage that in your marketing for future events.
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| Franziska Iseli: | Exactly.
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| Keith Krance: | At that event, you’re main offer at the end of that three and a half hour session is just to continue on. Sounds like a pretty soft pitch for The Clever Bunch. How much is that and how long does that run and what’s your typical conversion at an event?
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| Franziska Iseli: | At the event, you’re exactly spot on. I think we have to highlight that. You have to add value. You have to give value because this is a long-term strategy. Unless you just want to run this event once and make a bit of money and disappear onto a tropical island somewhere. You want to really blow their mind. They will talk about it. We sell out at every single blast off and that’s not normal in the event industry.
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| Not in Vancouver but in Australia we sell out every single session. We have between three and five hundred people each month attending these sessions and hardly anyone does that because they burn out their market. If you add value like there’s no tomorrow people will talk about it and they will come back even if they don’t buy.
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| At these sessions we only have the one offer which is Clever Bunch. We spend ten minutes at the end. We even ask for permission and it think that’s a very good tip for our listeners. We actually at the beginning of the event, we say, “Hey, is it okay if at the end we let you know a little bit about one of our programs?” Because they’re already sitting there and they’re thinking, “Is this going to be a pitch? What are they going to do? We don’t know these guys. This is going to be annoying.”
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| We just basically tell them up front, “Hey, you can relax. At the end we will share a little bit about our programs if that’s cool.” You really want to give them a little bit of a head note so they all say yes. That they hear your voice and they say, “Yes, it’s okay.”
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| Keith Krance: | Their guard goes down now. Now they know. You told them.
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| Franziska Iseli: | You can see the energy just relax. Like, okay, woo. It’s not a whole three hour pitch. I can relax now. We hardly get anyone leave. We have a break in the middle. Again, that’s unheard of in the events industry for cheap events. People leave. I’ve left many events. But we don’t hardly get anyone walk out because they want to stay because they know there’s so much good stuff coming at them.
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| Then in the last ten minutes we share The Clever Bunch with them. I’ve actually wouldn’t offer The Marketing Smarts that we run, which is our online program. It’s only one thousand bucks. To put all that effort into getting people into the room and working your ass off and giving rally and then you have a thousand dollar offer. Even if say you have fifty people in the room and ten percent buy it. Five grand. I don’t know. It’s a lot of effort.
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| We don’t offer that at the blast. But people that can’t afford The Clever Bunch, The Clever Bunch is between eight and ten grand for the year. It’s quite affordable compared to other programs out there for what they get. Some people can’t afford that. Some people just can’t spend ten or so grand a year on their marketing education. They then get offered The Marketing Smarts if they want to do something else.
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| Keith Krance: | A few days later basically. Is that how that works?
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| Franziska Iseli: | They usually get a call a few days later. Day, two or three later from one of our team members just to check in with them. “Hey, how’s it going?”
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| Molly Pittman: | Makes sense.
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| Franziska Iseli: | Yes. They usually just rave about the session and then they usually get asked, “Are you looking at working further with us or where are you at?” Of course, there’s lots of people that right now they’re good. They want to go and implement what they’ve learned and they can’t afford anything. That’s totally cool. We don’t ever disrespect anyone. They’re great too and they will maybe come back later if we keep nurturing them with our funnels.
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| Molly Pittman: | What do your ads look like and what do they say? How do you really spark the interest here initially to get people to come to the event?
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| Franziska Iseli: | We actually, it’s very interesting. We always, of course, split test and you guys will talk about that a lot. We have two types of ads that work very well. One is my favorite one. It’s a long copy one. Long as in maybe three hundred words. Not huge long but kind of longish for Facebook.
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| It sounds a little bit like a press release. I love that one. I love for especially new cities where people don’t know us yet. Most ads we start with attention small business owners or we just write small business owners.
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| Molly Pittman: | Call your audience out. Absolutely.
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| Franziska Iseli: | Exactly. We don’t want to waste money on people that are not business owners or we don’t want to waste any time later.
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| Molly Pittman: | You want to write a long amount of copy because it is a big sale. It’s a big ask to ask someone to come attend an event in person. The long copy, I love that you said that because even to get someone on a webinar online for an online event is a big ask.
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| Franziska Iseli: | It goes along the lines of something like, attention small business owners, Franziska and Christo, the founders of Basic Bananas are coming to town. I’m saying this off my head here so I don’t have it in front of me, off my head. I’m not off my head. I’m saying it on top of my head.
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| It says something like, attention small business owners. The founders of Basic Bananas, Franziska and Christo are coming to town. It’s so exciting. They’ve been working with small business owners for the last decade. Over five thousand people have attended the session. It talks a little bit about their struggles. Unfortunately most small business owners don’t have a marketing system in place and they really struggle with having focus and direction when it comes to attracting clients.
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| It’s educating them and then a little bit more about this sort of stuff and then it talks about in this three and a half hour session we will discover five things. Number one, how to plan your marketing. Number two, how to find your market. Number three, the latest marketing trends. Number four, how to de-mystify and simplify online marketing. It just tells them what they learn and then it tells a little bit below it has about the presenters. It tells a little bit of a bio. Franziska is the winner of Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2013.
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| Molly Pittman: | Establish credibility.
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| Franziska Iseli: | They’ve been featured in this media, blah, blah, blah. It says if you’d like to come to the session book your ticket now. The sessions always sell out. Of course as with any marketing you never lie. You don’t make up stuff to get people. Tell the truth. Tell the story. I actually think it works because it’s in third person. It sounds like a press release.
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| Molly Pittman: | I love that. It’s someone else telling a story about you.
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| Franziska Iseli: | I think that works extremely well.
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| Molly Pittman: | You target the local city. Do you say anything about the city in the ad?
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| Franziska Iseli: | Yes. Sometimes we do. Sometimes when we get lazy. We should. When we don’t get lazy we do. Some of them we get lazy. What we do is we create one and then we basically duplicate that.
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| Molly Pittman: | I’ve always found that to be so beneficial though if you’re running a local ad to really call out, “Hey, Austinites,” or “Hey, do you live in San Diego?” What kind of images do you guys use in your ads?
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| Franziska Iseli: | You know, and again this is very interesting because we use a whole bunch of different images. The type of images that work vary across the cities. Again, sometimes we’re really doing so well in one city and we’re like, “Oh, this image is awesome. Let’s put that into Vancouver,” then it doesn’t work. Really the types of images we use are images from the sessions. They actually work quite well across everywhere. They’re not stock images. They’re even sometimes a bit amateur images you take on an iPhone.
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| Molly Pittman: | It looks like a picture that you would see scrolling through a news feed that a friend would post of an event. It’s going to catch someone’s attention and especially if you can really capture the excitement in a room of a live event. Someone really learning. Whatever the biggest takeaway is from the event. If you can capture that in a photo.
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| Keith Krance: | Love it.
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| Franziska Iseli: | Exactly. We use the live images. Then we also use images of Christo and I looking good. We always have to do photo shoots for PR. We did the one in San Francisco and we’re looking pretty bad ass. Then we also use, funnily enough I used the stock image, which was just, and I don’t usually like using stock images but I used this image.
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| It was an image of a beautiful sort of hipster image of a computer, notebook, one of these beautiful images that you can find as a stock image. I used that against another image, which was an image of I think a workshop. That image of, it had no face in it, which is really weird, it did really well in Vancouver but not so well in Australia. It was a faceless sort of image which usually doesn’t work that well.
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| Molly Pittman: | I would say the key there to pull out of what you just said is that we teach a lot of things. You read a lot of things online. But especially if you’re targeting a local audience you have to take these principles and figure out what works for you. What works in Austin might not work in San Diego. What works in Sydney isn’t going to work in Vancouver.
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| Keith Krance: | You’re not going to know. You’ve got to let the audience tell you.
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| Molly Pittman: | Exactly. You have to test it.
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| Franziska Iseli: | You know what? I also did, the other day I found this image of a cat with yellow eyes. Our brand is all black and yellow. It’s a black cat with yellow eyes. I thought, I’m going to run an ad that is totally irrelevant. This picture has nothing to do with anything. It’s a cat but cats are cool. I thought, I went against all the rules, relevancy and all that, and put this ad out there. Same copy as the other ones with this cat in it. Of course, I got so many more click-throughs than the other ads. But totally no conversions.
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| Molly Pittman: | There’s no ad sense. Someone thinks it’s their friend’s cat and they’re clicking over and they’re not taking action.
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| Franziska Iseli: | It was just an interesting quick test because I thought, “Oh maybe I can disprove some theories here and come up with my own theory,” and of course it didn’t work. It was quite obvious.
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| Molly Pittman: | I love it.
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| Franziska Iseli: | A quick other gold nugget I will share and then I’ll tell you how we use it. We did a survey, and this is really awesome to do for your listeners too. We did a survey to our database basically asking them what are struggling with the most? What’s one thing you would like to learn? We had about four questions. What’s one thing we could do even better at Basic Bananas?
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| We went through the data and we looked at what are they struggling with? What are the commonalities? What do they really want to learn? There were about three main struggles. Actually, the biggest struggle was getting clients, attracting clients, getting business, growing business. That was one struggle.
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| The other one was time management and overwhelm. The other one was staffing problems, so growing a team, et cetera. Now we basically run ads, one is addressing the overwhelm. It says something like, “Are you overwhelmed? Are you over having to work your butt off to make a little bit of money in your business, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”
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| It focuses on the overwhelm. One focuses on more marketing. If you want to grow your business, la, la, la. We don’t do actually the staffing one at the moment. It’s great to actually get your audience, if you already have one, and if not that’s fine. When you talk to your customers and clients and prospects, just hear what they’re saying. Listen to them. Use their words.
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| Keith Krance: | One hundred percent agree. Yes, in Episodes 52 and 53 we actually talked about survey results that I did. We had Ryan Levesque come on. The creator of the Ask Method. I pitched his program pretty hard for a couple weeks. The reason why is what you just said.
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| If they just implement what you just talked about. A real good deep-dive survey. To be able to get that exact languaging. It’s crazy. I’m coaching some people through it right now and it’s really cool some of the stuff that they’re learning from their survey. Their deep-dive survey results.
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| Franziska Iseli: | Most of our sessions are $27. Now a lot of people ask when they run their local events, “How much should I charge? Should I charge nothing? Should I charge a little? Should I charge a ‘lottle’?” Really, you’ve got to test it. You’ve got to test it.
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| Keith Krance: | I think you should charge a “lottle.” That’s the best one. A “lottle.”
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| Franziska Iseli: | Maybe on your Facebook ads wouldn’t work so well. I don’t know if a “lottle” is the best answer here. You’ve got to basically check which one gives you the highest conversion and it’s also very funny, we’ve got lining pages where we run ads where they come for $27 and some are $47. We’ve also tested $97.
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| We don’t do free but you could do free if you wanted. I know a lot of even my friends in this industry that do free events and it works for them. I can’t be bothered. I want a little bit of commitment from people when they come. It’s $27. You can do free. Some people love the free events.
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| Keith Krance: | Have you ever thought about doing $27 or $97 and then you get your deposit back when you show up? I know some people do that. That seems kind of complex.
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| Franziska Iseli: | They do it. I’m like, I love simplifying. Since my life is very simple and cruise-y and so are our businesses. Also, I’m like, “Come on dude, $27 or $97. You come, you get so much value.” If somebody asks for their money back, which hasn’t happened, they totally can. I would never withhold someone’s money.
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| We also sometimes get someone, a book, just recently I saw an email one of my team members asked me, someone booked and then they said, “Sorry, actually I can’t do it now.” Can I give them a refund? Of course. You can refund anyone who wants a refund seriously. If they come to the session and everyone wants a refund, fine. It just means we haven’t done a good job. I have no problem refunding anyone for anything if they think they need a refund because it’s not about that for me.
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| About the price points, it’s very interesting. Sometimes we run ads or we’ve done it in different cities where it’s $47 and in another one it twenty-seven. We test and it doesn’t mean that $27 gets a better conversion rate. Sometimes you actually get people to commit more and want to be there if it’s $47.
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| There’s no answer. If somebody tells you, “Hey, you should run an event for twenty bucks or fifty bucks or a thousand bucks,” they don’t know. You don’t know. Ask the market and run ads. Have maybe two lining pages split test which you gets you a better conversion because it doesn’t mean that the smaller one gets you a better conversion.
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| Keith Krance: | Wow, that’s interesting. You’re settled on twenty-seven but it’s not necessarily, there’s not like a super hardcore data to decide on that it sounds like.
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| Franziska Iseli: | We’ve done forty-seven. I actually think, and it’s something we’ve discussed recently at one of our strategic meetings in the business. We said, “Hey, let’s maybe test forty-seven again maybe for a new city or maybe just because we can’t be incongruent if in Sydney we have ads that are twenty-seven and forty-seven and then suddenly the same person sees both. It’s a little bit incongruent.
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| They said we could maybe switch a whole city onto forty-seven and see if the conversions go up or down. There will be a change and actually, my gut feeling is telling me that they might go up. But I maybe just imagining it. I don’t know. Again, I’m pulling this out of my thing. Facebook will tell us. Facebook will tell us.
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| Keith Krance: | Yes. Exactly. Okay, okay. I love it. Love it. Basically, you’re right now twenty-seven is the main price point. You’re running some longer copy ads. You’re running short copy ads. The basic framework of the ad copy sounds like a press release. It’s talking in the third person and you open up with credibility, authority, then you go right into frustration or challenge. Then you provide a solution.
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| You make them aware of the frustration of the problem and then you provide them the solution which lists out what your event entails. Then you give them a call to action and you even have some scarcity in the ad itself. That’s a great formula for any ad in any industry. Love that. I have a question. Have you guys been running any video ads?
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| Franziska Iseli: | Yes. Absolutely. We have some very cool video ads actually. One of my clients, she’s an animal trainer. She trains animals to do tricks in movies. She said, “Hey, come out and we’ll do some cool videos at my farm.” We are on some ponies, mini-ponies, and horses and there’s a dog barking. It’s very funny. We have those running. They go really well.
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| We also have a video ad where we’re talking. We haven’t done the one where … That’s the next one I wanted to where people have to stop and watch you. Where you have the big text. I think you guys do that too.
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| Keith Krance: | I’m moving more towards having text over it that tells the same story instead of blatantly saying, “Hey, click on mute.” I like that. At least for the first thirty seconds, twenty seconds maybe. I could see with your case, I know you mentioned how you like the third person, sounds like a press release.
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| I could see a video. You guys are great on camera. Doing the interview style. Somebody’s interviewing you or you’re answering questions and then it pans out to two or three really good testimonials like you’re talking at the event. I think those type of videos work really well.
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| Franziska Iseli: | Yes, yes, yes.
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| Keith Krance: | Then you add some testimonials of people that have gone to these sessions and that would crush it. The great thing about video ads is the video of custom audiences are just working so well right now for us.
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| Franziska Iseli: | It’s amazing. We also have testimonials videos that we use for our re-marketing campaigns. They’ve already seen us. They’ve already come to the page. Then we use the testimonial videos and they work so well.
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| Keith Krance: | Got you. I bet. I bet. This is great stuff.
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| Franziska Iseli: | The audience is probably wondering right now, what’s your conversion rate? Again, it depends per city. Sometimes we run it and we just have the highest conversion rate and sometimes it’s like, that bombed a little bit. It might just be the audience that’s it in and maybe it’s us presenting. I don’t know. Maybe we didn’t surf enough that week and different lives, I have no idea.
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| But, the average conversion rate across all cities is around the ten percent mark. That’s always what we aim for. If we have say fifty people in the room, we expect about five people. Sometimes it’s a little bit less. That’s our sort of KPI. Is to have a ten percent conversion rate.
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| Keith Krance: | If you were going to go start over and you were brand new because I know a lot of people, they plan an event like that and then they freak out because they’ve only got twelve people that are going to attend. They don’t want to do it because they don’t have enough people. Talk to those people.
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| Franziska Iseli: | I really just had that example in Canada. We ran our very first event in June and we only had maybe fifteen, sixteen people came. Half of them walked in late. Totally disrespecting the whole thing and no sales. No sales. Sixteen people, fifteen in the room, nobody bought. A lot of interested people. Eric, our partner, I had a call with him after. He was so disheartened. It’s hard. This thing is hard.
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| He thought, “I’ll go in there. Do this thing. Add value and kill it.” I always call it the post-event depression sometimes. You only have it when you kill it. I don’t know if you guys have it but sometimes when you’re so high and you’re doing this and then suddenly you’re like, “Oh, it’s over.” He was a little bit in one of these slumps. I said, “Eric, it’s the first event in a new city. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it.” He was still beating himself up about it for a few days and then he did his second event and he had maybe twenty-five people in there.
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| Again he thought, “Oh, it’s very small. It’s a bit sad.” I said, “No, Eric, just do it because you need to practice the content anyway.” Then he had seven applications. Seven people then applied. That doesn’t mean, they won’t all join. He had seven applications. Out of that, he’ll probably get three or four people that actually then will join the whole program. Again, that’s ten percent. It usually works out that it’s around the ten percent mark.
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| Keith Krance: | That’s thirty to forty to fifty thousand dollars for one event.
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| Franziska Iseli: | Yes, he can stop crying, right?
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| Keith Krance: | Exactly. That’s somebody taking out, wasn’t you out there doing it. It’s somebody new but they’re taking a proven system. I see this happen all the time on a smaller level. On a smaller scale with Facebook ads. People are like, Facebook ads don’t work or video ads don’t work or long copy or short copy or a cheat sheet or swipe file doesn’t work because they have one minor thing that’s off. A lot of time they just need more experience.
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| Franziska Iseli: | The last thing I quickly want to share is you’ve got to know your numbers. No matter what you’re doing, just know your numbers. I know it can be a bit annoying and I’m not a numbers girl either but if you run local events, run them a few times. Figure out how much are you making? Let’s say you have ten people attend. You make ten grand. Then you know for next time that if you do that a few times and you figure out your numbers, let’s say you always have about that sort of conversion rate.
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| Ten people, ten grand. You know that each person in there is valued a thousand bucks. Each bum on your seat is valued a thousand bucks. If you have fifty people, you potentially make fifty grand. Once you do this a few times you really start getting to know your numbers because then you know how much you can spend on a Facebook ad.
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| Molly Pittman: | I love that. Yes, you can do the math backwards.
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| Franziska Iseli: | People, they come and they say, “Oh my god, I would never spend a hundred bucks to get someone to come to my event. Are you crazy? You’re losing seventy bucks. Are you not normal because you’re paying for the venue, you’re spending your time.” I’m like, “I know my numbers.”
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| Keith Krance: | This is good stuff. Good stuff. Is there, I know, you guys just launched a book that’s doing really well. Where can people find out more about you?
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| Franziska Iseli: | Yes, we actually did. I’m a little bit, this is one of my favorite words lately, I’m flabbergasted. Do you guys have that word also in America?
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| Molly Pittman: | Yes.
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| Keith Krance: | We do.
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| Franziska Iseli: | I love this word. I have two favorite words at this moment, flabbergasted and epiphany. I’m flabbergasted and I had an epiphany because this book that we launched, we spent about two years writing it. It’s called Perception. It already became, within five days it became an Amazon best seller. I think it’s because our audience, our community, our businesses went on there and bought it. We sent them an email about it and left reviews. We had thirty reviews in forty-eight hours I think, which is amazing.
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| People can find us on basic bananas, B-A-S-I-C and then bananas like the fruit with an S dot com (https://www.basicbananas.com/). If they want to check out the book, they can do the same with a forward slash perception. Basicbananas.com/perception. We ship everywhere. We ship all around the world. If anyone wants to check it out they are welcome to do that.
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| Keith Krance: | Sweet. Sweet. Love it.
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| Franziska Iseli: | Let’s do a special offer for your audience. I’ll get my team to set it up where they can use the code PPT, Perpetual Traffic, PPT, on that page and then they only pay for shipping and handling.
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| Keith Krance: | Okay. Cool. Cool. You’ll do that at the coupon code.
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| Franziska Iseli: | Yes, Yes. We’ll do something like that.
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| Keith Krance: | PPT.
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| Franziska Iseli: | PPT. Of course, if they want to come and say hi anywhere else I’m on most social networks, Instagram, Facebook, anywhere. We have a lot of projects going on. Of course, I’ve got my own website franziskaiseli, which they might not be able to spell. You can always see on there what I’m up to.
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| Keith Krance: | Awesome. We’ll link out to this stuff in the show notes at digitalmarketer.com/podcast. This is Episode 58. Franziska, this is awesome stuff. Thank you so much for bringing it.
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| Franziska Iseli: | You are so welcome. Thanks for having me.
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| Keith Krance: | All right. Talk to you soon.
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