how to get clients with facebook ads

Interviews with Influencers by Dallas McMillan

How to get Clients with Facebook Ads for Coaches & Consultants with Sam Bell

Interview URL: http://digitalinfluence.com.au/how-to-get-clients-with-facebook-ads-for-coaches-consultants/ Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzjN6GTbscQ See more Digital Influence Interviews: http://digitalinfluence.com.au/interviews

2016-11-15-FACEBOOK-TRAINING-WITH-DALLAS of 18

Dallas McMillan: Okay. Well hello. Welcome to Digital Influence. Today, I'm interviewing Sam Bell and we're talking about Facebook ads and how you can use them to attract clients and grow your business. Thanks for coming on the show Sam. Great to talk to you today.

Sam Bell: My pleasure man. Thanks for having me and I'm excited to share some awesome information that people will find useful when it comes to running Facebook ads for their business.

Dallas McMillan: Yeah, I really appreciate you coming on the show. I sent a bit of a call out. I sent a call out to heaps of my friends and colleagues on social media and asked them to recommend someone who had proven results attracting clients on social media advertising, specifically Facebook ads. I started talking to Sam. It was really evident quickly that he had some great experience here and both high-‐level understanding so he could help us understand how it works on the big picture. Also, he could give us some really specific advice. Unlike most of my interviews, Sam is going to be really diving in and showing us really practical, tactical stuff today which will be helpful for anyone who is already doing ads or wants to get started, wants to know how it works. This won't be a talkfest. It will be some practical information that you can use immediately and see how things actually go together.

Sam Bell: Awesome, awesome. Excellent.

Dallas McMillan: Sam, tell us a bit about your business. What is your business model? What do you do for people and how did you get into it?

Sam Bell: Sure, just real quick, I own a digital marketing agency called PPC Boutique. We specialize in running Facebook ads, Google display, and YouTube ads specifically for coaches, consultants, author/speakers, info-‐marketers, and service providers, specifically. I've been doing this for quite some time actually. Before I started my agency, I actually was a real estate investor. I used to buy and sell a lot of real estate in the metro Atlanta area. Around 2006, 2007, I really started leveraging social media and web 2.0. This is when it was really, really, really new at the time. I started leveraging it to actually market and sell my properties. From that point, I actually created a training program educating other real estate investors how they can also leverage web 2.0 technology and social media so that way they can actually create a brand and start marketing their businesses.

From there, I've actually managed to get into the whole real estate info-‐marketing world, if you would, and done some joint ventures with some people and built some relationships. Through that, I actually started doing some consulting for a few people. Around 2009, Google did a big ban on Google AdWords, so a lot of people who depended upon Google at that time as their main lead generator for leads, they were basically out of business. I actually started doing some consulting work and helping people either get their accounts back active or get them back on Google where they could actually run their campaigns compliantly.


From there, my agency just evolved to where we actually started doing it for people on an ongoing basis. Obviously, once Facebook opened up their ad platform, we expanded over there. It actually has shifted over the years. When we first started, we were probably 80% Google, 20% Facebook. Now, it's the other way around where it's 80% Facebook, 20% Google. Google still has a ton of traffic but since then we've been very fortunate to work with other people outside of the real estate investing vertical and other verticals and just really see a lot of data. Just really determining what's working, what's not working because things change so fast but there are also some core marketing principles, especially when it comes to marketing online, Facebook specifically, that just work regardless of what changes they may make.

Dallas McMillan: Fantastic and that definitely is a critical element that things are changing all the time. You've got to be on the ball but also your marketing fundamentals have to be there. It doesn't matter what you do. You can't just use the latest tricks if you don't have your marketing fundamentals right. Even my own business, you've realized years later, "Oh my god. Of course that didn't work." I was missing the most obvious things about nicheing or my message. Having both of those in place is critical and that's something that you're going to help us understand today. Looking forward to it.

Tell us about how Facebook is different from Google Ads because, in a way, they're offering different things, aren't they? With Google AdWords, mostly people are searching. They were already looking.

Sam Bell: Exactly.

Dallas McMillan: It's common lead generating whereas with Facebook, it's often they're not looking at all and it's more demand generation where suddenly they're thinking, "Oh, gee, maybe I should do that," which they probably weren't thinking five minutes before they saw your ad. How are they different and why is one better than others in different situations?

Sam Bell: Sure. That's a good question. Basically what it comes down to is intent. Essentially, with Google, when someone actually goes to Google, they actually type in a keyword. They actually have a much higher intent. Therefore, they're much more qualified in terms of where they are either in the buying process or research process. The probability in terms of them actually converting is also much higher, as well. With Facebook, you don't have the intent but you have a much better targeting in terms of demographic and psychographic and really just understanding exactly what it is, what emotional and psychological triggers will get someone to respond. Even though the intent is different, if you understand how to communicate with people on Facebook and you really understand your avatar and your targeting is correct, you can get just as high conversions if now higher conversions from Facebook, as well.

Dallas McMillan: Awesome. I must say, Facebook marketing is the marketing medium that makes the


whole concept of the client avatar so much more valuable than other mediums. We've all seen the exercise to work out who your ideal client is. It's a 38 year old, married man who's got two kids with dogs called Roger and he reads this and does that. How do you actually use that information if you don't have access to those marketing channels. Whereas, with Facebook, if you know they like something, if you know they've got a dog, you can actually target those things really directly. To me, Facebook ads are really the first time that it's almost worth filling out the avatar with complete seriousness because you can pretty much target everything that would go into an avatar with Facebook ads.

Sam Bell: Yeah, absolutely. That's the beautiful part about Facebook. They have so much data on their users and you're able to really leverage that data. They do a good job of really sharing that. One of the things that have also really made Facebook even more powerful from a marketing perspective over the past year or so has been the implementation of their Facebook pixel. Now, they've had conversion pixels for some time but the new Facebook pixel which allows you to really optimize and target based on that, they've done a really, really good job. Their algorithm is extremely strong once you get that pixel seasoned enough and you get enough data. They actually make your job much easier. If you have your targeting and your messaging correct on the front end and you get enough conversion data once that data in that pixel is seasoned, then it almost becomes easy.

Dallas McMillan: Yeah and it's something that I've only really started to see the power of recently and partly with the new pixel. We should just say a pixel is just a tracking code so it tells Facebook that someone has visited your website or viewed one of your ads on Facebook. What you can do is you can work out the people who are already clicking through to your page and then target people like them. Then, as you get more dialog, the people are getting to the page and opting in, you can target people like the people who are opting in. Then, eventually, as you get enough data, you've got enough buyers, you can target people who are like your existing buyers. When we say, "like," it's largely based on how they perform with other Facebook ads. That brings us on to one of the other tricks of Facebook marketing in that, very often, you're targeting people who like another provider in you industry, one of your competitors. If you wanted to sell webinars, you might be targeting Amy Porterfield because she's already successfully selling webinars. That's the shortcut to targeting. It's not always about, "I want a male from 13 to 48 years of age who lives here and has this job description." It can be they've clicked on this ad almost.

Sam Bell: Yeah, absolutely. That brings up a very good point and really which is one of probably the most important things is really just understanding, again, who is your target. Then, also, understanding your niche too. Within a niche, you have a certain demographic that have a higher propensity to either buy or take whatever specific action that you're looking for. The better that you understand your niche and your vertical then the easier it is to also understand your avatar.

There's actually a few shortcuts that we use, I guess you could say a few hacks, if you will, that allow you to bypass that. You mentioned one of them already is, if


you know some of your competitors or who are some authority figures in that specific marketplace and you know that they're already marketing or selling a very similar product or service, you can very easily target those individuals. The challenge sometimes though happens when you want to go into a certain market or vertical and you might not actually be able to target that specific person on Facebook, even though they may have a big audience or a big following. It's weird. I don't know exactly why Facebook does that but there are some instances where you'll go to a page and that page may have over a 100,000 likes. When you go to actually target as an interest, it's not available. You may see another page that may only have 30 to 40,000 likes and you can actually target it as an interest. I believe it has to do with the algorithm, how many people are actually talking about a particular subject and it's just based on the amount of likes. I know that's part of it but there are some ways to actually leverage that and find alternative targeting sources that you may not have been aware of previously. I'm happy to share some of that on the call today.

Dallas McMillan: Awesome. Perhaps we can start off just by talking about the big picture process of how we're using Facebook ads. This is something I've talked to other specialists about and I cover in my training but just tell us how most of your clients use Facebook ads. Where do they sent them? What do they get them to do? How do they eventually turn them into a customer?

Sam Bell: Yeah, that's a great question. The majority of our clients, again, are coaches and consultants. For the most part, we use the webinar model. Basically, we have a Facebook ad driving people to, just not a webinar but an automated webinar. I want to make that distinction. Basically, we have an automated webinar that we're driving people to. They register for the webinar and, essentially, the call to action on the webinar is for them to complete some application or survey which pre-‐qualifies that lead. Then, from there, they generally have a phone consultation or strategy session at which they're presented with the opportunity to enroll in whatever program or service that our client is offering. That's pretty much the standard model, especially when you have big ticket products, anything $1000 plus.

Granted, you can actually sell products that are $1000 from automated webinars. The challenge is that when you're going to code traffic, there's no relationship established, the offer has to be really, really good. Generally, the higher the price point, the more time you're going to have to spend to really, not only establish rapport and authority and trust, but to really show the benefits and features of the product or service to where someone would be willing to spend $1000 plus and not really have that relationship.

When you're selling higher end services, it's a much lower barrier to entry for someone to pre-‐qualify and then, from there, have the opportunity to speak with them on the phone. That way, you can really build that relationship, establish the authority, address any concerns, and then hopefully close the sale over the phone.

Dallas McMillan: Fantastic. Another huge benefit of talking to your clients like that is you get to work


out what's wrong with the offer too. Perhaps, you're almost selling people the wrong thing. By the sales process that you use, the sales conversation, you can actually ask what are you paying for it? Make sure you're hitting them in your ads, in your landing page, in your webinar because if you try and do everything automatically and just have a purely online business, you don't get that client contact which you need to develop a high value product that people are prepared to pay $1000, $5000, $10,000 for. Understanding the customer, always the key to marketing, sales, and great product development.

Sam Bell: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Some people use different sales mechanisms. We've just found webinars to be the most effective and then using an automated webinar model because, what we found through testing, is with live webinars, the good thing about live webinars is that you do have a very specific date. The challenge is that the more time that someone has in between the time that they registered from the time they attend, your attendance rate is going to be much lower. It's going to be decreased. On average, with live webinars, we'll see anywhere between a 25% and maybe a 40% attendance rate, 40% obviously being on the high end. What automate webinars, just in time webinars, the way that we structure them, we see anywhere between 50% to 70% attendance rate on the regular. That's pretty common ground actually. If you see with low 50% on an automated just in time webinar, then there may be something off with the messaging. Your attendance rates are definitely going to increase. The beautiful part of it is that it actually has to be present to give that webinar live. You can actually do a really, really good webinar one time, deliver the goods, prove that it performs and it converts, and then once you know that this one performs, then you can then take that and then put it into an automated evergreen format.

Dallas McMillan: Okay, awesome. Of course, the big question then becomes how do we get people to this webinar? That's really where the Facebook ads come in, isn't it?

Sam Bell: Absolutely, absolutely. The webinar and having that conversion mechanism is just one part of the equation. Then you actually have to get in front of the right audience, the target audience, in order to make sure that you are showing your offer to people who have the highest probability to actually convert into a potential sell. That really boils down to, again, knowing your vertical or your market, and then also knowing and understanding your demographic. Like I said previously, there are a few ways that we actually use to shortcut that. If you remember when we first started the call, we talked about the power of Google and how people who are actively searching on Google have a specific intent. The good part with Google is that if I go to Google and I type in a keyword, I have an intent that I am looking for a particular product or service or something to that effect. We actually leverage this to find targeted interests on Facebook. I'll be happy to walk you through that process if you're interested.

Dallas McMillan: Yes, sounds great.

Sam Bell: All right, awesome.


Dallas McMillan: I'll just raise the screen here and we'll have a bit more view of your Facebook ads

manager account. Great, looks good.

Sam Bell: All right, can you see my screen?

Dallas McMillan: Yes.

Sam Bell: All right, excellent. One of the things that we like to do, we actually just started going to Google and looking for keywords. I'll walk you through the thought process here. For example, if I was, let's say, a fitness coach or expert and I wanted to find people who were actively seeking out a fitness coach. I would actually start with Google. I'll explain. This will make more sense as I go through it. I'll go to Google and I'll type in "fitness coach." Let's see fitness coach online. Basically, what I'm looking for is I'm looking for the top sites. I'm looking for the top organic sites that are ranking. The reason is because these are the sites that get a ton of traffic for these specific keywords that also have a very high intent. Why does that matter?

Well, most sites that show up in the organic listings, if they get enough traffic, then they also generally have a pretty big organic following. Most sites that have a pretty big organic following also have a Facebook page. What I'm really doing is I'm using certain keywords to find sites that will have the type of visitors that have high intent that also have a page that I can potentially target. Does that make sense?

Dallas McMillan: Yes.

Sam Bell: Excellent. Let's see. Fitocracy, so this says, "How to get started as an online personal trainer." I don't want that. I'm actually looking for a personal trainer, right? "Gives you a private coach," so this may work. Born Fitness Coaching with Consultation, Just Go Fitness, Free Personal Trainer. Here's what I'm looking for. I'm looking to see, do they have a social presence. Generally, they will have some link to their social media account on their site.

Here we go. All right, Fitocracy. I just want to see how many, all right, they have 61,000 likes, right? We know that anyone that is interested in Fitocracy are people who are actively looking for a personal trainer or a fitness coach of some sort, right?

Born Fitness, personalize your fitness and diet plan now. Again, same thing here, all I'm looking for really is just the social and seeing what type of following. 35,000 likes, okay. Meet your goals, right? Basically, anyone that finds these sites organically are more than likely my ideal prospect. I'm doing this for sake of example. However, you will want to obviously read some content on the site and just make sure that the information on here is what your target prospect would potentially be looking for. This looks like it is. It doesn't have as many likes but that's okay because even when we come across sites that do not have a big following, that's okay because you can still leverage their social presence.


Here's another one, Changing Shape. Let's see how many likes Changing Shape has.

They have around 2,000. All right, this is a good start. Then, what we do is we go from here and then we use the Facebook tool, Audience Insights. If you're not familiar with Audience Insights, Audience Insights is a Facebook research tool that allows you to look for specific interests and see the demographic in that interest, see the psychographic, also see income data, the behavior of those individuals on Facebook. What I want to start doing is I want to start qualifying these particular pages and see if they are a potential target, right?

I'm going to start here with Fitocracy and see if they are an interest that I can target on Facebook. They are. You see that came up. Now, I can see the demographic. It's right down the middle. 51% women, 51% men, career-‐building, lifestyle, most of these people have a college education. 49% of them are married and they excel in IT and technical and arts, entertainment, sports, media. Okay. Now, here is something interesting that you want to pay attention to. Fitocracy, I'm looking for an affinity. They have an affinity of 1,317. What this basically means is the higher the affinity the more engaged these people are with this page. We generally look for pages with an affinity of 50 or above so, to have 1,317 affinity, means that these people are very highly engaged, which is a very good thing for us.

Activity, so activity tells me, do these people click on ads? Do they like pages? From what I can see here, yes they do. Most of them use both desktop devices and mobile devices. When I actually go set up my campaigns, I'm actually going to target both of those placements so that way I can maximize my exposure.

Household, so they're mostly homeowners. That's good. I can see that the average median value of their home is $200,000 and $500,000 so these people also do have money to spend, which is also pretty important because, if we're targeting people and they're all broke, that's not necessarily a good thing if we're looking to sell a product or service, especially if it's pricier. Then, also, they do have an affinity to use credit cards 66% of the time, okay.

Retail spending, online purchases, basically this would be a good interest to target. That's really how we use the intent of Google to find high ranking organic sites and then to begin to drill down and determine if they have a audience that we could potentially target on Facebook. This is how you can reverse-‐engineer, if you will, using Google to find targeted interests that otherwise you probably never would even target. I just did this off the cuff. I've never heard of Fitocracy in my life so this is something that I probably would have never found otherwise.

Dallas McMillan: To some degree, you can also find other keyword ideas and marketing phrases because you know what those people ... The people that like that page like what they're saying. They like what they're doing. They like what they're offering. You can look at their marketing messages and even their product offerings and think, "Gee, maybe I could offer something similar to that." It's a great way to see what's already working in the market that people are responding to and responding at a


high rate. You can spend ten years trying to build a Facebook following and never get that engagement. Or, you can model someone who's already killing it with that level of affinity and save yourself a lot of time.

Sam Bell: Yeah, absolutely. You can also see other pages that they like. More than likely, there's other pages that they're associated with, as well. You can take a look, like you said, at their content, see what type of content they're putting out there, which content is really getting the most engagement. That gives you an idea of some of the things that you may want to consider posting on your page or things like that.

You can even take this a step further and leverage and find similar pages to Fitocracy. This is one of the strategies that we use here in our agency. There's actually a site called Find My FBID. Basically, what this site does is it reverse-‐engineers. It basically converts the actual name of the page into the numeric ID that Facebook uses to identify that page. I'll show you why that's important in a minute. For Fitocracy, this is the numeric ID. Why this is relevant is because Facebook really does provide us with all the data that we need. There's actually a query that you can use within Facebook to find pages that are similar. I can say, "Facebook, show me pages that are similar to the Fitocracy based on the page ID." Now, Facebook has given me a list of other pages that I could potentially target that are very similar and are going to also have very similar audience that, again, I otherwise probably would have never even considered.

The one that is most similar is CrossFit Invictus. Then we have Jim [inaudible 00:28:00], Rock Tape, Steve Paleo Gods. Look at this. You see the correlation? Born Fitness, wasn't this the guy that was in the organic result, right? Nia Shank, Quest Nutrition, these are all potential interests that I could go and check and see if they are available to target that we otherwise would never have even ... I've never heard of any of these other than Born Fitness, which we just Googled a few moments ago. It's a very effective strategy and tactic that anyone can apply, regardless of the vertical. That was just off the cuff, one keyword, but you can really dig deep and do a lot of research and find very good, high affinity targets and interests. The beauty of using this strategy is that most people aren't aware of it so those interests probably won't have anywhere near the competition of some of the maybe bigger, broader interests that you would potentially go after.

Dallas McMillan: Great. For any marketer, this is just the dream in terms of being able to find related content and look at how ... They're doing your market research for you in way because they've got their audience already. You can see what posts people are responding to and model those. We can do more, can't we? We can actually go and target those pages' most engaged followers with our ads and get our content right in front of them.

Sam Bell: Yep, exactly. Then, through the power of the pixel because my strategy is to get as very focused and targeted as possible on the front end, season the pixel with those really highly hyper-‐targeted people, and then once I get enough data, my pixel is


then seasoned with the best of the best, the most engaged people. When I tell Facebook to go out there and find and optimize for me based off this pixel, they're going to find the most hyper-‐targeted, most engaged people because of the targeting that we did up front.

Dallas McMillan: Fantastic. You're picking the right people at the beginning but then you're filtering or refining them and just the cream of the cream is who you're targeting at the end. Instead of that classic story that half the money I spent on advertising is wasted, you don't know which half, and of course really it's 99% of the money is wasted, instead you can filter it down just to the few percent of people who are most likely to, not only be interested, but to click and even to buy and just market to those people, or them and your best guess, and have large numbers of them as well. Rather than just having your handful of people, you can use that lookalike audience to expand it to hundred, thousands, or tens of thousands of people.

Sam Bell: Yeah, absolutely. A beautiful part is that, as you scale out and use those lookalike audiences, even if you scale it to 2,000,0000, 3,000,000 people, once you have that pixel data, you're telling Facebook to optimize. Even though you have a pool of 3,000,000 people, Facebook is only going to show your ads to those people that fit the criteria based on the data that's on your pixel anyways. That's really how you scale out. You can target broad interests and things like that. However, I've found this strategy to be much more effective. Obviously, at the end of the day, you always want to test so go see for yourself. Test, play around with it, but you don't need big budgets to do this. You can do this with very small budgets to start and scale out as long as your numbers work for you.

Dallas McMillan: For sure and it's worth mentioning, for people who haven't done a lot with Facebook ads, is that Facebook actually optimizes each campaign based on who is responding. As more people engage with your ad, it gets a better idea who to show that ad to in the future. Your ads can improve over time in performance when they first start. That's what the seasoning process partly refers to. It's Facebook gathering data. This is huge amounts of data that it's basing its calculations on, much more than we can handle ourselves. It's almost a big data type thing because it's referring to a lot of the other ads that have been run in the same niche as well, looking at audience behaviors. It pretty much knows the people who are not only going to click on the ad, but then who are going to put their email address in. That's something we just didn't have access to previously.

Awesome, so where to we go from there? We've got our audience list. What's the next step in the process?

Sam Bell: Sure, so once you have your targeting down and you understand who your audience is, then you want to make sure that you are creating the right message. Understanding that with Google, we can be very direct in our marketing because the intent is there. With Facebook, Facebook is social. People are not on Facebook to buy, to find a fitness coach. We really want to use the medium that resonates most with people on Facebook and that's stories. You want you ads to look native


meaning you want them to look like regular news feed. You don't want them to look like ads. You don't want them to stand out and scream, "I'm a marketing ad. Click on me." You want it to actually be more subtle and engaging. The images you use are important, however, you want them to look almost organic, if you will, just like it was their friend sharing it. You want to tell stories. You want to talk about things.

For example, I might write an ad, and just to stay in line with this, I might write an ad that says, "I was struggling to get myself in peak performance shape. I have my 20th anniversary class reunion coming up. I was just worried that I wasn't going to have the same look that a lot of classmates saw when they saw me 20 years ago. I started doing some research online and I came across this guy over at Born Fitness. I was absolutely blown away with some of the results that they got. I said, 'What the heck. Let me go ahead an give it a try.' I went and I subscribed to their email and I downloaded this e-‐book. I was absolutely amazed at some of the practical things that were in the e-‐book that I was able to implement and get in my peak look and feel in time for my reunion. I think you would really like it. You should go check it out and see for yourself."

Dallas McMillan: Yeah, cool, so it's very personal. It's still obviously got some personal intent there but it is conversational and it's talking to someone one on one.

Sam Bell: Exactly. You want to incorporate stories and people. If you really think about it at the end of the day, humans pass knowledge down through stories and story-‐telling. When you market on Facebook, if you think in terms of a storyteller, you think in terms of, not so much of, "I'm selling something," as much as, "I'm trying to connect with someone." If you can connect with someone on an emotional and psychological level, then you can actually move them through the process without actually trying to push them and shove them. They will pull their way through the process naturally. That's something to definitely test and I would definitely recommend. You don't have to be a top tier copywriter. There are some basic elements, again, that you want to make sure that you have in your stories of course. At the end of the day, if you just tell a good story and make it personal and they connect with that story, you'll be surprised at the results you can get.

Dallas McMillan: Awesome. I love that point that you don't need to hard sell them. In fact, particularly with high ticket stuff, if people feel like it's being pushed on them, they're not interested. They have to want it. They have to think, wow that looks great. I'm interested and feel like it's almost a serendipitous discovery or exactly what they've been looking for or, "Wow, this is something new and exciting and I can't wait to get involved," rather than feeling like they've just been shown a product catalog or something.

Sam Bell: Yeah, absolutely. Again, that's just something just to keep in mind. Once you have your targeting, you have your ad, you have good imagery, then it's really just a matter of launching the campaigns and testing them and see which ads people respond to. That's where your images really come into play. You want to use


images that would be relevant to that story or that will stand out or that would catch someone's eye. I'm oversimplifying the process but at the end of the day it really is that straightforward. If you have your interests, your targeting correct, you have a good story to go with it, you have imagery, and people click on your page, that will probably be the next optimization point. As people are looking at your ads and they're clicking on your ads or getting traffic and you're not seeing the conversions or people aren't taking the actions that you want, so they're not opting in or they're not registering for your webinar or downloading your e-‐book, then it's probably a landing page issue.

One of the things that we like to look at is the continuity of that story, right? Whatever we promised in the ad, whatever we said that they were clicking on the ad to go and do, you want to make sure that you have continuity there and you deliver on that message. The whole purpose of the ad is to get them to click on it. The whole purpose of the landing page is to get them to take the next step and the next step and the next step.

When you're looking at your sales process, your sales funnel, understand that each component serves one purpose and it's just to get them to go to the next step in that sales process. The ad sells the click. The landing page sells the opt-‐in or registration. After they opt in, then your [inaudible 00:39:27] does what it's supposed to do or the webinar in this case would sell the application. Then once they take the application then you sell the product or service. Just keep that in mind. A lot of times people make the mistake of trying to sell in the ad. They're trying to sell the product in the ad or they're even trying to sell the product on the landing page. That's really not what those sales mechanisms are for. Those sales mechanisms are meant exclusively to service one purpose and that's to pull people through the next step of the process. Keep that in mind and don't get too caught up in trying to sell before they get to the proper point where they need to be sold.

Dallas McMillan: You still need to know where they're going ultimately so you can be sending them in the right direction. It really is just about, you're just pitching for that next step. Otherwise, people, they don't want to be signing up for the application call on the ad. They've got no interest in that. All they're interested in is learning more about this offer. There has to be congruence there too, doesn't it? If the ad is of a happy young person doing something outdoors and then the landing page is really corporate, there's going to be a disconnect and people are going to feel like, "Oh, [inaudible 00:40:52]. This is not what I thought I was getting in for."

Sam Bell: Yep, you got it man. You got it.

Dallas McMillan: Awesome. Once there, we were talking about the pixels effectively at each step there, they're just getting tagged and then we're able to target them later, provided we've got enough data. This really is a scientific process, isn't it? It's numbers driven. There's a creative component and you've got to get that right. You've got to get the story and the image right, but really it's a numbers game and it's not a shoot from the hip thing to do it well. You might get some quick wins


doing it that way but in the end you've got to be a bit of a slave to the data because you can't make it up.

Sam Bell: Everything is data-‐driven. That's the beautiful part about marketing online. You can measure everything. You can measure every conversion point in the funnel and sales process. It is, you have that creative element and maybe you also have the mechanical element where you are looking at numbers, stats, and data. I would recommend, though, that you just really understand your numbers because a lot of times we get caught up in vanity numbers. How much am I paying per click? What's my CTR? Really, those things are relevant but the ultimate number that I'm looking at is what is my return on investment? If I put $5 in, am I getting $10 back? If I could put a dollar in and get two dollars back, I don't really care what my CTR is. None of that other stuff matters now. Granted, if I can make adjustments and improve those metrics, it will effect the bottom line overall. My main focus is am I profitable?

I'll walk you through a scenario so we can reverse-‐engineer the process to see exactly ... How will we do this? How will we determine if our offer is effective? Just sticking with the personal coaching thing, let's say we sell a personal coaching package for $3,000. Not even $5,000, let's say $3,000 for a personal coaching package where we work with people, all right. We've taken them through this whole process. Let's say that I'm not really a good closer. Let's say I have to talk to ten people and only close one out of ten. I will hope that, if people go through your sales process, that they would be more qualified that you should be able to close one out of four, one out of five. One out of six is industry standard across multiple verticals but let's just say one out of ten. Then it really boils down to, in order for me to speak with ten people, how much is that going to cost me to speak with those ten people?

Even when people fill out an application and they schedule a call, you're not going to get 100% show-‐up rate. Let's just say you only have a 50% show-‐up rate. The reason I'm giving you really the worst case scenario is because that's how I like to build my campaigns. I'm like, "What's just the absolute worst we can do?" If we can make the numbers work under the absolute worst case scenario, then we should be good.

Let's say we got 10% close rate on the phone. We only got 50% show rate so in order for me to speak to ten people, I have to get 20 applications. If I know that my gross sales revenue is $3,000, what am I willing to pay to get those 20 applications? In this case, if it costs me $100 to get one application, times 20, it's $2,000. It would cost me $2,000 to make a $3,000 sale. Now, those numbers are still profitable. They work, but I understand that in order for me to make this work with those metrics, I need to be at at least $100 per application.

Let's keep walking backwards and say, "Okay, well, what do my numbers need to be on the front end in order for me to be at $100 per application?" Let's say I pay $10 for a webinar registrant. Let's say I put 200 people on a call, so that's $2,000. I


get 200 registrants but I'm only going to have, if I'm using an automated webinar, let's say I have the worst case numbers, 50% show-‐up rate on the automated webinar. I'm actually only going to have 100 people on. If I only have 100 people that actually attend the webinar, then I need to close at at least 20%, meaning out of that 100, I need to get at last 20% of those people to fill out an application. That means that that conversion mechanism, that webinar, needs to do a really good job of at least getting people to complete the application in order for me to hit my numbers.

If I fall below that and I'm only, let's say, at a 10% close rate, then I know I'm in the red and I'm going to either have to reduce my cost per webinar registrant or increase my conversion rate or increase my close rate or increase my show-‐up rate. You can play with each of those metrics to see where you can increase it. Obviously, the more you can tweak the front end of the funnel the better. If you can reduce the cost per registration, if you can increase the conversion rate on the actual webinar, then you can make those numbers work all day. That's how I would walk through that process to look at the economics of the actual campaign to see if it even makes sense.

Dallas McMillan: Great, yeah. This is one reason why you need to be something high ticket because if you're trying to sell something for $100 at the end, even though it seems like, "Oh it's cheap. Lots of people should buy it," a lot of people just aren't interested in buying anything at all today. You've got to have something relatively high ticket in order to make a lot of this work. If you're selling really cheap stuff, you'd probably use a different sales process.

Sam Bell: Absolutely.

Dallas McMillan: You might have a $10 widget in the Facebook ad itself and not have all these steps because of the conversion. While doing it this way, you get to tweak each part of the process and really get scientific and go, "Look, you know what? My webinar isn't converting like it needs to do. I'm getting great clicks. They seem qualified, the ones I'm talking to are great and I'm closing at a high rate, but I'm just not getting them signing up to apply. Let's try [inaudible 00:48:26] this webinar or let's change the offer and get really serious." You can break it down and sometimes it's only a few words in the offer makes all the difference. Unless you have the discipline of knowing your numbers and having repeatable processes, then that's impossible. It's all guesswork and you just can't improve it. Whereas, with this way, you can get it to work then you can scale it. If you can turn a dollar into two dollars, then you're putting thousands of dollars in. Whereas, if you're turning two dollars into one dollar, you've got to fix it before you scale it up.

Sam Bell: Yeah, exactly. That's why you start with a small budget. $50 to $100 per day and then once you get it dialed in, you know your numbers are working, then you can scale it up to $500 to $1000 per day. It's all a numbers game at that point. Once you know what your numbers are, a lot of people are like, "I hear people spending $2000, $5000 a day. How do they do that?" Well, they know their numbers. They


know how everything's going to back out. You want to spend as much as possible when you know what the backend holds.

Dallas McMillan: For sure. It's also worth pointing out these need a reasonably high profit margin product too. The example you just ran where it's costing you $2000 to get a customer and you're charging $3000, if that's highly labor-‐intensive to deliver, that's probably you don't want to be selling too much of that. Whereas, if you're selling an online course that's costing you hardly anything to deliver, then you'll take that all day long. Making sure the product is high profit margin is important if the customer acquisition cost is high.

Sam Bell: Again, building on the worst case scenario now, we do numbers much, much better than that. I like to give an example because here's the thing. When you first launch a campaign, especially if you haven't driven any traffic to it, you can expect the worst case scenario. You have to understand your buying data. One of the things that normally disheartens a lot of people when they first run Facebook campaigns is like, "I did all these things. I built it out like I was supposed to. I got my funnel right. I swiped the best funnel sequence and it bombed." Well, the truth of the matter is that most campaigns bomb when you first launch them. You're just buying data to see how bad it's going to bomb and then you fix it from there. There are some instances where if you may have run traffic before or maybe you've done joint ventures or JV traffic and you have some metrics, it's going to make it easier for you because you have at least a baseline to start with. When you have no baseline, no nothing, understand that the whole purpose of the campaign is just to buy that data. Then once you purchase that data, you have that information. Then you can make those tweaks where necessary to where you can turn it into a profitable campaign.

Like you mentioned previously, depending on the type of offer because there are some instances where you may not have a high ticket. You may have a low front end of $100 or maybe a tripwire with an upsell. In those cases, the whole objective is to break even on the campaign. If you can break even on that campaign, then anything you sell on the backend, that's $1000, $2000, $3000, whatever the case may be, that's pure profit. A lot of these front end funnels that you see where people are doing free book giveaways and all these different things, they understand that my objective isn't to make money, I just want to acquire a paying customer, understanding that once I acquire that customer, 60 days down the road this customer is going to be worth X amount of dollars. My lifetime customer value may be worth thousands of dollars at that point.

Dallas McMillan: You can do that at such scale and also be building up your data and your pixels where you can then say, "Well, I'll have more of them, thanks. I'll go out and target people who I know convert in my offer." It really is this incredible feedback loop if you can get it right. I'll tell people that I've spent plenty of time doing Facebook ads and it is not as easy as it looks. Sometimes you get a win and you think, "Oh this is going really great!" and then it fizzles out. The big difference I see is that discipline to follow a process, to really get clear about what the interests are and work the


numbers. It's a very different skillset to what entrepreneurs have generally. To be a great coach or entrepreneur or consultant, often there's a lot of feel to it. People need to take risks. They need to be creative and that's not the game that you're playing when you're doing optimization for something like this. It's a different skillset but the discipline can pay off.

Sam Bell: Yes, big time. Patience, discipline are definitely two key factors when it comes to running Facebook ads. Just like anything, it takes time. It takes practice. I honestly believe that buying media is one of the best skillsets that you can develop next to copywriting. If you can write copy that converts and you can buy media or drive traffic to that copy, you can pretty much write your own check.

Dallas McMillan: Awesome. You've given us tons of valuable information. You've explained it in a simple way but it really is pretty high level stuff. What if people want to know more? How can they learn more about what you do and how your business works? Or, do you have any other training that they should check out if they want to take their Facebook skills up a notch?

Sam Bell: Absolutely. You can head over to adagencysecrets.com. I have a training webinar where I go over some case studies and I actually go a little bit more in-‐depth about our process and some of the things that we were able to accomplish with some of our clients. That's just adagencysecrets.com. I think I pulled up the site somewhere here. I don't know if it's still there. Yeah, there it is, adagencysecrets.com. You can just go check it out and you can register for the training and it's a lot of good information that I think everyone will find valuable.

Dallas McMillan: Fantastic Sam. We really appreciate your time today. I've certainly learned something and I appreciate your down to earth and simple way of explaining what's a pretty complicated topic. I think it will leave lots of people feeling inspired about the potential to use Facebook ads to get more clients in their business.

Sam Bell: Absolutely man, my pleasure. Thanks for having me and my biggest thing, everyone go out there and take action. Implement and test this stuff. The information that I've shared is definitely practical and you can get some results. It's just taking action on it.

Dallas McMillan: Fantastic. Thanks again and I look forward to chatting with you more. Appreciate your time, mate.

Sam Bell: Sounds good, Dallas. Take care.

Dallas McMillan: Bye.

Sam Bell: Bye bye.


How to get Clients with Facebook Ads for Coaches & Consultants with Sam Bell

Interview URL: http://digitalinfluence.com.au/how-to-get-clients-with-facebook-ads-for-coaches-consultants/ Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzjN6GTbscQ See more Digital Influence Interviews: http://digitalinfluence.com.au/interviews

how to get clients with facebook ads

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