Episode 61: How to Spend Your First $100 on Facebook Ads for Local, Online, and Physical Products

But first, one of the questions we get asked all the time is – how do we scale our traffic campaigns without our conversion cost skyrocketing? And I always resort back to – no, it’s not audience targeting, it’s not bidding. It actually, usually comes down to your offer and your messaging, and I’ve seen so many examples of when somebody takes the time to come up with the right video, whether it’s on their landing page or it’s a video ad. It can completely transform their business.

And I just got done spending the last couple days with Chris Stoikos, who we had on Episode 56, the founder of dollarbeardclub.com, talking about how they went from a brand new company to 100 million video views and $11 million in sales in just 13 months, without even really understanding anything about sales funnels, or Facebook ads, or anything like that. And he’s doing a really cool event in October that he mentioned on that podcast. I’m going to that event. I’m actually planning on taking my new video editor with me, and I’m super stoked about it.

And since my son, Kyler, and I were down in Southern California at a cool event called Brick Fest Live that a friend of mine, Chad Collins, runs – Chris found out we were down there and offered for us to come down and hang out with him for a couple days. So, we hung out at his house, had an epic time; Kyler hanging out with the bearded bad asses. Chris and I ended up really hitting it off – I asked him if he would do a free training about the blueprint to making videos like this to get people to want to buy from you. And what we’ve found is the fastest way to turn a losing campaign into a winning campaign is to create a really good video people want to share and I’m talking for paid traffic.

And so, we actually ended up making a video. We made a five-minute video that you can go check out at dominatewebmedia.com/100m. On that page you can watch the video where Chris talks about the number one thing to make these crazy, awesome videos, as well as a sign up for free training that we’re going to be doing – showing the blueprint to make these videos that not only work for organic traffic, but also as a perfect recipe for scaling out any paid traffic campaign. And then we’ll also be talking about his upcoming really cool event with some epic speakers, so that’s at dominatewebmedia.com/100m.

Alright, let’s get right into it. Molly’s going to start it off with how she would spend her first $100.00 in Facebook ads for a local business.

I would split the budget into two, and I would run different types of ads. The first ad that I would run would be pretty promotional. Depending on what your business is, this is going to change. But, if you were a restaurant I would make a post on your Facebook page simply explaining some sort of discount or some sort of special that you have going on.

I wouldn’t say, “Hey, on Wednesdays we have $2.00 margaritas.” I would create a special that’s evergreen – that someone could use every day, and even if you feel like you might lose a little bit of money on this special, I promise that these people are going to come in and they’re going to buy other things and they’re also going to become repeat buyers if they have a good experience. So, really give a good discount. Not 10% off appetizers, right? Give a free appetizer or give a two for one meal – something that’s really appealing that someone honestly can’t say “No” to.

And the ad, which can start as a post on your Facebook page or it can just be an ad, however you want to go about it, if you post it on your Facebook page you can use the boost post button, like I talk about in the article I mentioned earlier, and you just want to target people within your city. So, if you’re a dental office, definitely do some sort of special for new clients. So, maybe $99.00 and they get all their X-rays free or do free teeth whitening. If you’re a salon, maybe you do a free haircut with a color. If you are a clothing store, maybe you do 50% off summer merchandise.

This ad is really there to get someone interested in actually crossing the threshold of your front door and coming in and visiting your store, your bar, your salon, your dental office, etc. So, I would spend $50.00 over five days – $50.00 simply target just your location. I show you how to do that in the article. Target the city that you live in and give a special.

Give these people a reason to visit, and I promise you this will get shared, especially if you use copy like, “Hey, Austinites,” right? People that live in Austin refer to themselves as Austinites. Or, “Hey, Dallas Residents.” Really make sure these people know that this ad is for them and this business is located close to them in proximity. If you call them out in the ad, it’s going to draw a lot of interest. You’ll also see a lot of engagement and shares because even if they aren’t going to come to your restaurant, they might share so that their friends can see and because they feel like it’s beneficial because it’s a certain discount or deal that’s happening in their particular area.

The second $50.00 that I would use would be on a video ad and the reason I would do this is because if you’re a local business, you’re a brick and mortar, you really have something to show, right? You have some sort of space that you want these people to visit and if in a quick video that you can record on your phone – if you can show them around and show them the experience – what they’re going to experience when they come to your restaurant or your salon, it’s really going to speak to people who are more interested in the experience versus maybe a discount.

With the other $50.00, I would target the same area, the same city, and I would simply run an ad that does a video tour of your location. Now, in the ad copy above, you can still use the same promotion or discount that you’re using in the second ad, but this video ad’s going to speak to an audience that’s more interested in the experience that would be had. Even a dental office, the dentist that I go to in Austin, it’s really cool because all of the patient rooms are actually open. It’s like an open area. It doesn’t feel like you’re in this small room and they have TVs and the experience is worth whatever the price of going to that dentist is for me.

If they did a simple tour of the office, even if again, you record it on your iPhone, just walking around, maybe introduce an employee. That’s really going to speak to people that want that experience, that want the personal feel, that want to meet the people that they’ll actually interact with when they go into your brick and mortar.

Same thing with the restaurant. Take a video on a busy night of people interacting and having fun. If it’s a salon, same thing. Walk around, show how awesome your space is and maybe have one of your customers say a quick testimonial into the camera. So, I know that sounds simple, but it’s really a way to show off the biggest asset for your business, which is you have a physical space that people can actually come to. And if you’re able to entice them with the coolness or the beauty or some particular part of your space that’s really interesting – maybe slide in a testimonial or interview someone that works there, maybe it’s a waitress that a lot of people interact with or the front desk person at a dental office, someone that this person is likely going to interact with if they actually enter the business.

Just to recap: I would run an ad that’s simply a promotional ad for $50.00 over five days. Target your local city and that ad – maybe use an image that shows people having fun at your restaurant or an image that, you know – maybe you’re giving away a free appetizer, so you have a picture of the food and a little bit of copy on the image that says free appetizer. Same thing with a salon. Maybe it’s a picture of someone getting their haircut and it says free haircut with color. So, that first ad is going to be directly about this promotion.

Now, the second ad – the second $50.00 over five days targeting the same people is going to be a video tour. You could post this on your Facebook page and boost this ad the same way you did the first ad. It’s just a different medium. Instead of using an image, you’re using a video, and in the video you’re going to give them a tour of your location, maybe a testimonial from a customer, or an interview with an employee.

I hope that helps, guys. Running ads for local business, I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but you definitely have an advantage because you know who you’re targeting. It’s people who live within the certain vicinity. So, I highly encourage you to create a really irresistible offer that people can’t say “No” to, and also show the personality and show why people should come visit your local business. I think it’ll get a lot more people through the door and hopefully they will become repeat customers.

Now, there’s definitely a direct relationship between price and how much effort and how much you’re going to need to spend in order to get that conversion, to get that sale. For the sake of arguing here, let’s say that we are in the less than $100.00 range for this physical product. Maybe the average price is $50.00. Maybe there’s a lower price that goes down to $7.00. So, it’s probably about the ranges that work the best anywhere between $7.00 to $47.00, and I think under $50.00 has a fair likelihood of converting on cold traffic inside Facebook.

The higher the price you go, the more effort you’re probably going to have to expend and the more money you’re going to have to spend because typically there is a very direct relationship between the price of the product and how much you need to spend in order to get a conversion. And the higher the price of the product, the more effort you need to put in to convince people and indoctrinate them into why they should purchase it.

Let’s say the product is under $50.00. I would divide these into two separate categories. First off, is this stuff that you have to explain – something that somebody maybe doesn’t know about? They’ve never heard of it before. They have no idea what the thing is. So, you need to follow our three-step formula in order to get them to convert. I’ll show that to you in just a second. Then there’s just cool stuff that people might not even know exists, but if you just show it to them and explain what it is, they’ll buy it. And this has to be a really cool product. It’s got to be something that they hadn’t seen in a while, and it’s got to be really targeted to specific interests that are more likely to buy those products. We’ve got two examples for those that I’ll talk about in just s second.

First off, for stuff you have to explain, they’re just things that people are familiar with, but they don’t know there’s a difference in this particular product. This is particularly true in the supplement space. There are lots of companies that are selling supplements, but a lot of people think, “Hey, if you have one particular supplement in a specific category, it’s the same for all of them.” In that case, you need to explain the difference as to why your supplement is different from the rest.

Or maybe you have an instructional DVD series. You have to show people that yeah, there’s lots of DVD series on instructing – let’s say it’s for guitar lessons, for example. So, I play guitar so this is something that definitely fits the mold here, and you have to differentiate yourself in the Facebook newsfeed to show people that you know what you’re talking about for them to buy it and that you know what you’re doing.

So, that would be two separate examples, but using the same formula. The formula that we use for these types of offers, these types of physical products, are as follows: First off, for our video, I would spend most of my time crafting the video. Knowing I only have $100.00, but I would make myself a really good video that’s probably anywhere from fewer than ten minutes to maybe a little bit more. There’s no perfect video length. We’ve done videos in the newsfeed for 25 minutes. We’ve done some for fewer than 15 seconds. It doesn’t really matter how long it is, but you just have to provide the value upfront.

The three-step formula that we use is, first off, you have to get somebody to stop the scroll and get the click. Think about your ideal customer thumbing through their newsfeed and then all of a sudden they come to your video and they say, “Whoa. What is this thing?” So, we usually use something like a pattern interrupt, which might be to tell people to stop the scroll and turn up their sound. That’s one way in which we do it. It doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes it’s just a demonstration. A pattern interrupt is like in the case a guitar DVD series or physical product for guitar lesson – maybe it’s just a guy playing guitar and he’s really ripping it up. You know? Maybe you’re into rock, or jazz, or blues, or whatever it is, and he’s playing it, and you see that and that’s gonna stop you. As a guitar player, I would stop my thumb scroll and watch that.

One of the things we’re really noticing right now, especially in mobile, is if you do click to watch the video. sometimes you actually have to click again in order to up the volume. It’s really helpful to have some kind of text overlay. In many cases, we’ll have customers do the text that mirrors exactly what the video is actually saying. Maybe in the case of the guitar lesson – maybe he’s just ripping it up and then he starts talking about what that technique was that he just used. So, you can either do it one of two ways. You can have fly in post-production text on screen or you could just simply upload what’s called an SRT file and have the video itself transcribed and then show that.

A lot of people – and it’s depending on what data you look at – upwards of 70% to 80% of folks view video in the newsfeed, but the sound is off. If you’re missing any sort of text overlay you might be missing out on people who don’t turn up the sound. Don’t discount text overlays.

Sometime in that first ten to 15 seconds, you need to really get them to stop the scroll. So, sometimes we have folks wave their arms. That’s probably going to get tiring after a while. So, I would just have something meaningful in that first ten seconds. Whatever that thing is that your product does, show that. Or show something about hitting on a pain point of your particular target audience. If you’re selling a supplement, you can hit on that pain point or maybe teach them something that they didn’t really understand or really didn’t know existed.

We’ll use that a pattern interrupt to start off, and then we’ll get right into sort of the second part, which is to educate and entertain. In the three-step formula, there is stop to get the scroll, get the click, and then there is the educate and entertain portion, which is the vast majority of that video and that’s where you would teach them how to do or whatever it happens to be. It would teach them something about your supplement and why these 11 ingredients are so essential to maintain health and beauty.

So, teach them something. Inform them of something that they didn’t realize before, and this is like the Aha! moment you want people watching your video to have: “Hey, that guy’s a really great guitar player. I’d love to play like him.” Or, “Hey, I didn’t realize I was missing all those ingredients in my diet. Maybe I should consider getting all those things.” In both cases, what you’re doing is you’re providing value up front, you’re educating, you’re informing, you’re entertaining, but then at the end – and the third part – you go into what’s called your pivot.

So, you pivot. You say, “Hey, if this information that I just taught you was great, if you like this guitar lesson, and you want to learn more, click below and get my free DVD series. You just pay shipping.” Those type of offers work extremely well on Facebook by the way: “free plus shipping.”

Or maybe the transition is: Hey, to get all these seven or eight ingredients – and it’s really hard to find them because you have travel all the way around the globe to get them all in one supplement – you can do it just with this product, and you can enjoy all the benefits that I discussed in the video, so click the button below and get – whatever the name of the supplement.

To recap the three step formula: Intro, stop, get the scroll, get the click; middle is educate, inform, entertain; the end is a pivot, and at the end you want to have some kind of call to action that hovers on the screen and says, “Click below,” or “Click the link in this post to get whatever your product is.”

 The second category, like I said before, is the stuff that you just have shown. So, you might have a really cool thing that maybe is $7.00, or $8.00, or $10.00 – maybe it’s free plus shipping – people just don’t know this thing existed. For quite some time we were selling this cool military can opener on Facebook and it was a ten-second video that just showed the thing in action. That’s all it was. Really no sound – it had some sound, but it had some text overlay on it, which we added in later on. And it sold like gangbusters.

The point is, that’s all it was: Just an explaining of what the thing is. Now, if you have a physical product a lot of people use – explainer videos, I think those are good. Sometimes they’re a little bit overdone, but if they do explain your product well and then the natural resolution of whatever that thing is, is click below to get this thing, then definitely use an explainer video. And there’s plenty of agencies that create explainer videos. Just Google it, and you’ll be able to find plenty of them.

Another one that I’ve seen plenty of times in my newsfeed is the Everstryke Pro, and that’s just a really cool lighter. In the video – it’s a short sort of looping video. It’s 15 seconds – it just keeps looping over and over and over again. It’s a great example of just showing how cool this thing is right to people in the newsfeed and the pitch with this is that you can basically light this thing even if it’s raining outside. So, there’s water and it’s drizzling down and it’s really well produced.

You know, you don’t have to have it produced as that, but the point is you’re showing the thing and how cool it is. If your product is so cool, or so novel, so different than what people are used to seeing, you don’t need to go through the entire three-step process which I explained before. You might just have to show the thing and then at the end of your video – it could be under a minute; it could be 20 seconds depending on how long it is that it takes to explain it – just have a call to action that says “Click below” or “Click the link in this post to get whatever your product is.” Really, really simple.

Those are the two types of physical products and the sort of two slightly different strategies I would recommend if I had $100.00 to put on Facebook ads. My first $100.00 of physical product, I would spend the vast majority of my time crafting that video. You don’t have to have it super high performance. We use ScreenFlow or Camtasia to do all the editing, or you can just find a good video on Fiverr. If – maybe you have $105.00 – $5.00 on your video products and $100.00 on your ad spend. There’s plenty of people in there that can do video production for you and add these elements in there.

So, hopefully that’s helpful. We’ll talk to ya’ll soon.

Now, before we start running ads, the first thing you have to figure out is your offer. That’s the number thing, and back in Episode 43, Ryan Deiss shares four steps to crafting and optimizing the perfect offer and on Episode 45, Ralph and I talk about five proven Facebook offers that convert. Go back and listen to those again, if you haven’t already listened to them.

In order to figure out your offer, it depends on which kind of funnel you’re going to build. The way I see it is there are two main funnels that are going to be the simplest and give you the biggest chance to win with running Facebook ads. Either 1.) using a Lead Magnet to Tripwire to Core Offer to upsell model, or 2.) using a webinar and then to sell your Core Offer on the webinar. Really, those are the two types of funnels that I would recommend starting with.

Probably the simplest is gonna be the webinar to sell your main offer. We’re doing it right now. We run cold Facebook ads to a webinar, and we sell an $897.00 product. Of course, the warm traffic audience is converting much, much, much higher than the cold audiences. So, you want to eventually be building these warm audiences as quick as you can.

The other type of funnel is Lead Magnet. You might have a checklist or a cheat sheet or a swipe file they can download and after they download that, on the Thank You page is what DigitalMarketer will call a Tripwire offer. It’s an impulse buy. It’s a low price, sub $20.00, product. It’s really just to get a buyer and get that person in the momentum. Maybe it’s $7.00. After they buy that, on the next page you might have your Core Offer. It might be $97.00, it might be $300.00, it might be $1,000.00.

Those are the simplest ways to get started. Depending on your situation you’re, going to want to choose one of those and get that going.

Let’s get into the Facebook ads. I’m going to give you an example of what type of ad you’re going to want to run – whether you’re doing either type of these funnels. So, if I was just starting out at $20.00 a day, then I would keep things very, very simple. I would have two main campaigns going, and once I got that going and got some momentum, then I would start to add more complex layers.

The first thing I would do is I would take $4.00 a day out of that $20.00, and run a Like Campaign – getting likes and fans. The good thing about a Like Campaign is it’s a great way to get practice in the power editor. You don’t have to be putting up pixels or building landing pages or Thank You pages or anything. You can get practice in Facebook, in the ads manager, in the power editor. I would recommend getting right into the power editor and getting used to that and creating a Like Campaign.

You’re going to do your target audience research, and maybe you take your four to five top interests and put those into one ad set, and run a Like Campaign at about $4.00 a day. That’s going to be a basic Like Campaign. It’s very small. It’s just going to be running in the background. The next thing I’m going to focus on is the most important part: your lead generation campaign.

I would take my other $16.00 a day, and I would basically run four ad sets into a website conversions campaign focusing on generating leads and that’s it. So, notice I have $4.00 a day on Like Campaign, and $16.00 a day on my lead gen campaign. At this point, I’m not doing any other campaigns. I’m not worrying about running traffic to the blogs or retargeting or any of that stuff yet. That comes later; I’ll talk about that in a second. But, what I’m going to do is focus on generating leads, webinar registrations, or Lead Magnet downloads.

Now, what kind of ads should I run for that? Well, that depends on your Lead Magnets. If you’re going to do a super basic Lead Magnet, like a social media swipe file, or a cheat sheet, or a checklist – something just super simple – then you can have a pretty simple ad. You’re going to use what we like to call a Link Post Ad. You’re going to use a Website Conversions Objective, where the image is a clickable link. It’s the most popular ad that you see on Facebook.

I’d make a Website Conversions Link Post Ad, and this could be a short copy ad or maybe it could be a little bit of a long copy ad as well, that’s totally up to you. It’s not necessary to have long copy, but it might be necessary in your case. However, if I was driving traffic into a webinar – if it was me, I would run a longer copy ad because a webinar is a bigger ask. You’re asking somebody to opt-in and schedule out 90 minutes of their day two days from now, three days from now, or later on that same day.

That’s a lot bigger ask, and you’re probably asking them to make a bigger sized purchase. You’re also trying to pre-frame them and build a lot of goodwill as you get into this, so you’ve got to remember this – you always want to be thinking about the end in mind when you’re running your campaigns. If I’m running traffic to a webinar, I’m either going to run a longer copy ad or a video ad.

So, you choose. I would focus on one ad. With that Website Conversion Campaign, I’m going to run it with four ad sets at $4.00 a day each. Now I’ve got $16.00 a day for my Website Conversions campaign and $4.00 for my Like Campaign. That’s $20.00 a day for five days.

These ad sets are going to be made up of your fans. If you don’t have any fans, yet, then you can have an additional interest ad set, but the next ad set is going to be your warm ad set and that’s going to be website visitors or any lists that you have that you can upload into Facebook for custom audience, any video views you have from warm audiences, etc. You can’t put all those together with fans because what happens is, Facebook will say, “Okay, they have to be a fan and they have to be a website visitor,” and then it just shrinks down the audience, making it too small. Your fans are going to be their own ad set, and then all your warm audiences – your customer audiences are going to be another ad set.

The next ad set I like to use is your top four to five interests that you find in your target audience research. This might be magazines, TV shows, those types of things. I’d love you to get a lookalike audience running as quickly as possible because with a lot of our campaigns we’re seeing lookalikes as the best audience.

What I recommend here is take a 1% percent lookalike audience –that’s going to be a cold audience in your country that you’re targeting – or maybe it’s all the main countries that you’re looking at targeting, like US, Australia, Canada – just depends on your situation. Take that off your biggest seed audience. For example, if you have 5,000 fans and you have 2,000 website visitors in the last 180 days, then maybe you’re going to use your fans lookalike audience. If you have a list of 5,000 people, that list is probably going to be your best lookalike audience.

You won’t know which one is going to work best until you start testing, but in this case you don’t have a lot of ad sets to actually work with. So, for me, my – all contacts – 1% lookalike has usually been my best one.

Once you start getting more audiences and you have more budget to add more lookalike audiences, go ahead and add more. Run one with your: 50% video view lookalikes, 75% video view lookalike, all customers 1% lookalike, all contacts 1% lookalike, website visitors 1% lookalike, fans 1% lookalike. You get the point. It doesn’t matter if there’s a lot of overlay and similarity, you want to have more ad sets in the end. So, starting out there – I would just start out with my best one.

If you’re in a situation where you’re starting out at $50.00 a day, you can have three or four lookalike audiences. Then, what I would recommend doing is splitting up your interests, your three to four interests. Instead of having four to five into one ad set, split those up so they each have their own ad set so you can now measure the data much better when they’re separated out. But, if you’re in a small budget, you don’t really have the option to do that. So, you always have to take your specific situation.

Then, what I would recommend doing is creating one ad, and here you’re going to drive traffic into a Lead Magnet, like a simple magnet, such as a swipe file or a cheat sheet or a checklist. I would recommend doing a link post ad and maybe make two versions of that ad copy if you can. Or two versions of the image. If it was me and I was at that limited budget, what I would do is I would make two versions of the ad copy because, in my opinion, I want to know what ad copy is resonating with people. Images, you can quickly test those in the future, but in your case if it took you a real long time to come up with one version of the ad copy, then just test two images.

If you’re running traffic to a Lead Magnet – a super basic Lead Magnet: cheat sheet or checklist style – then you can use short copy. You don’t have to have real long copy in this case because it’s a super simple Lead Magnet, it’s a good offer. Now, if you’re driving traffic to a webinar, you’re asking somebody to do a lot a more. You’re asking them to block off an hour or more of their day, and then you’re probably asking them to buy something much more expensive right out of the gate. So, in that case, I would start out with a long copy ad or a video ad, because I know I’m asking a lot of that person.

Now, why am I not saying to run traffic with blog posts and all that stuff? Think about Facebook as this: Let’s say I teach piano lessons, and I get invited to a party where they’re all piano players. Well, if I show up at that party, odds are that probably about 10% of those people are actively looking to improve their piano skills. The other 90 are just into piano. They’re probably not into that right, now unless they were made aware that there’s actually a better way, but they’re just not into that right now or maybe they are, but they’re the person that needs a little more time to build that relationship.

Well, Facebook’s the same way. Let’s say you’re targeting an audience that has a million people in it. Well, odds are only 10% of those people have intent, right? Are ready to take action now. But, 10% of those people is 100,000 people. So, what you want to do is focus on those 10%, and focus on your lead generation campaigns because that’s going to generate ROI, and you want to find out if your offer will work with cold audiences as quick as possible.

Once you start to get that right, and once you start to get a little momentum and money back, then you start to run traffic to a blog post or run a video ad because what’s that going to do? That’s going to take the other 90% and turn them from not having intent to having intent. That’s a little bit more complex, and it takes more work.

So, I always recommend – start out with a lead gen – but understand if you want to scale massively, you’ve got to tap into that other 90%. And that’s where our whole traffic system that we talk all the way back in Episode 1 of this podcast comes in, because we want you to build a machine – a perpetual traffic machine where you’re perpetually warming people, where you’re perpetually turning audiences into fans, into leads, into buyers, into raving brand advocates. But, it all starts by getting momentum, so you want to start with generating leads, getting momentum, getting ROI, so you can continue the game to add more complexity later.

Alright, so I hope that makes a lot of sense for you, and I hope this was a great episode. I hope you’re in, one of the services or industries we talked about today. For anything we mentioned on the episode, head to digitalmarketer.com/podcast for the show notes and once again, go to dominatewebmedia.com/100m to watch that awesome video about how Dollar Beard Club went from zero to 100,000 million video views and, more importantly, had people banging down their doors to buy their products without even having all their systems in order or having perfectly optimized Facebook ad campaigns. Alright, talk to you soon. Have a great day.