Facebook Video Ads ReImagined: What’s Working Now with Curt Maly Part I

Listen to the Audio Only Version

Facebook Ads are powerful, but with recent changes, they've become harder and more expensive to make work.

Today, you're meeting one of my personal secret weapons and resources that I work closely with to make it them work big time.

Curt Maly is one of the world’s most sought after experts on Facebook, social media marketing, and paid traffic strategies.

His exclusive Austin-based digital marketing agency, Black Box Social Media (BBSM), has a client list that reads like a VIP Red Carpet list made up of celebrities, reality TV stars, Shark Tank contestants, professional sports teams, speakers, New York Time best-selling authors and lots of small and medium-sized businesses.

To See Curt's Simple Steps For Creating Facebook LIVE Videos That Convert, visit: https://smag2.com/live

Here's a free resource for all my listeners from Curt: https://smag2.com/bacon

SPECIAL:  Watch Part 2 Of This Episode Where Curt Takes Us Behind The Scenes And Shares His Screen & Ads Manager

 

About The Guest: Curt Maley

Curt Maly, is one of the world’s most sought after experts on Facebook, Social Media Marketing, and Paid Traffic Strategies.

His exclusive Austin-based digital marketing agency, Black Box Social Media (BBSM), has a client list reads like a VIP Red Carpet list made up of celebrities, reality TV stars, Shark Tank contestants, professional sports teams, speakers, New York Time best-selling authors and lots of small/medium-sized businesses.

 

Facebook Video Ads ReImagined: What’s Working Now with Curt Maly

We have a very special video presentation and you can access that where you can watch myself and my guest on video if you go to this link. You can watch what we're going to do because we are going to be doing some screen sharing and talking about various things that might help if there's a visual.

This is going to be very special because my guest is Curt Maly. Curt is one of the most sought-after experts in the world of Facebook media buying, social media marketing and paid traffic strategies. He is also the not so secret anymore weapon that I utilize with my clients, with my business. He's the person that I first not only call when I need advice and help but often refer partner and strategize with him on my client accounts and some of the businesses that I own as well.

You are going to get a very special peek inside one of the people that I use for understanding this world even better. I'm going to end up asking some questions I already know the answer to for your benefit. That way, you can get these concepts that I already have up in my head a little bit cleaner.

The reason you're going to want to pay attention is that almost nobody out there is talking about the strategies that Curt is deploying and he's doing it in a refreshing, cost-effective, and revenue-effective way. I have not seen other people do this and I've been happy with the results that I've gotten from myself and from my clients.

He's based in Austin. His company is called Black Box Social Media and he has a client list that reads like a VIP red carpet list made up of celebrities, reality show stars, Shark Tank contestants and a lot more. I encourage you to pay close attention.

If at any time during this you want to get a hold of me, you want to email me any questions and go deeper on this or get a second opinion on what you're doing, reach out to me at AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com.

Without any further ado, Curt, welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure to have you on my show. I know I was on your show and it's been a lot of fun. I've enjoyed working with you and being friends with you for years. I'm excited to be able to share what we're doing together and some of these strategies that are so effective in Facebook marketing.

You’ve got a pretty interesting story. I don't want to necessarily bore everybody with your entire backstory and whatnot, but you've got a very interesting backstory as it pertains to Facebook in particular. Why don't you give us a little bit of that background and why it matters so much?

I'll give you the high-level view and we can dive into details if you'd like. In 2007, I was into real estate. In 2006, I was working at Microsoft doing some consulting, got out of that into self-employment investing in real estate when the market was crashing, which was great.

While the market was crashing, as I started to learn how to run some ads on Facebook, and within a short amount of time, the market completely crashed and I was soon running ads for just small local businesses. Quickly, that turned into a chance meeting.

Everything happens for a reason on our radio show with a mutual friend that we know, Mr. Mike Dillard, someone who had made millions of dollars online and I am like, “This is amazing.”

You’re like millions of dollars too, so you're like, “I like money. You like money.”

I'm like, “This is great.” I was not broke at that time. I was underfunded. I didn't have any money. I wasn't broken, I just didn't have any money. We developed a friendship and I started running ads for Mike Dillard, started creating my own little Facebook product. All of a sudden, fast forward a few years later, I'm working with the who’s who, speaking on stage, traveling all around the US speaking on very specific topics on Facebook and doing this Facebook guru thing.

I had an ad agency. I had thirteen employees downtown Austin, Texas on June 2nd, 2015 at 04:18 in the afternoon. I remember that time well. I received an email from Facebook that said, “This is what we call a cease and desist.” I'm like, “What is that?”

Instantly, my personal profile was shut down. All of my employees working at the time, their personal profiles were absolutely shut down. Our fan pages were gone, our ad accounts were gone, and all the clients that we were working with their ad accounts were still running, but we couldn't touch them. The legal letters I had twelve hours to respond because I had confidential information from Facebook and did not know what they were talking about.

I was not allowed to use a personal page, a fan page. I wasn't allowed to have any employees that would touch it or use a third-party tool. Pretty much I couldn't use things like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, I couldn’t use that because that was a Facebook property. I am on stage one day with internet training products and people from all over the world and seeing my content and the next day I am gone.

I spent 888 days in purgatory. I sat on the sidelines. I say this on-stage presentations, I was still written by in the Huffington Post as one of the top seven Facebook marketers to follow. I didn't even have a Facebook account at that time. I legally couldn't even touch Facebook and people wanted to work with me from the sidelines. I helped build businesses from the sidelines.

Long story short, you can go into some details if you are as much as you want, but what is it you did and it got you in such trouble unless you are under NDA?

Don't run these fake engage-like campaigns because it will simply hurt you, not help you. Click To Tweet

That's the very thing with Facebook. Facebook's like, “You're going to sign this disclosure to make sure that you don't do any of these things. You're going to go away. Are you eighteen years old? Yes. You're not represented by our law firm. No. You're a US citizen. Yes.

You promise you’ve read Terms of Use and since there is no financial compensation to breaking the Terms of Use, you will pay a $40,000 fine payable within seven days when we send you the invoice. Don’t do this again. Sign this.” I'm like, “You didn't say anything about not talking about it.” The big thing is I'll say this with a caveat.

Everything I'm going to tell you here is Facebook is open to their very own opinion. The interesting things that’s intellectual that we get in this conversation are whose opinion is right, because the thing is there are no case precedents with Facebook. If they want to remove me and wipe me off the planet, they can absolutely do that and I have no legal recourse.

It sounds like Alex Jones.

I'm never going to tell you anything that's immoral and unethical or anything else. I just got caught up on some of the political sides. Essentially, what ends up happening is November 2014, I had eighteen ad accounts shut down from eighteen different clients. Do the math. If each client pays me $4,000 to $5,000 a month, I have thirteen employees.

Employees expect to get paid every two weeks. Clients expect since they paid us that we should be able to run ads on Facebook and if we've spent millions of dollars for amazing people and customer service doesn't have a phone number, won't call you back, doesn't have an email, doesn't have a process. I went on a very specific mission to say, “I work with brilliant people in the world and I'm just looking for answers.”

We went to events with Facebook. We went anything that we could do to raise the aim we did and essentially what ends up happening is there's an employee inside of our office at the time says, “I know someone at Facebook.” They take this to Facebook. The Facebook rep says, “I'm going to get you a rep.” I've heard that for a long time.

Brad, I'm going to ask you this question before I go on with my story. If you know somebody who spent $8 million on helicopters, do you think someone would call them and say, “I noticed that you spent $8 million in helicopters? How about an airplane?”

What can you name that you could spend $8 million on and no one would call you? I was looking for customer service because they didn't have any and they have all these unwritten rules that were being judged by and my income was being held by. It's not about the money. I just want to do the right thing.

Facebook on the other side as if we tell you how to do the right thing, that means you can circumvent and do the wrong thing. I met a girl internally at Facebook and Facebook said after 90 days that we had a relationship that violated the confidentiality. Facebook never said what that was. They never said what she gave us or anything.

I was sat on the sidelines for two-and-a-half years and I ended up dealing directly with the Facebook lawyer where every ten days we would write an emotional email.

It’s not about, “I'm right.” It's, “I love what Facebook's doing. I've been sitting on the sidelines. It's now been a couple of years. I'd like to be able to restart my business. Here's an article,” and I would appeal on an emotional basis until Facebook finally said and literally wrap up this story.

The lawyers were like, “Curt, don’t ever do this again. You didn't do anything that's wrong, just don't.” I go, “What did we do specifically?”

The lawyer goes, “Here's the deal. You were asking a lot of questions before they had customer service.” Facebook feels that you are profiting from selling your courses on sites that were illegal black hat sites. I go, “To be clear, people steal my digital programs and sell them on black hat sites. I never taught anything that's against the Terms of Use ever.”

The Facebook guy says it's fine. The interesting thing is the way that I was turned off. It took a month-and-a-half for him to figure out to find a different engineer and different people because all the people that turned me off and walked away, walked away from a process that's not used.

Now, I am back fully on Facebook. You will find me on my own personal profile. You will find me with that logo behind me a lot. You will see my videos everywhere, which we will talk about here.

Because of all that, you are probably the whitest hat, cleanest Facebook marketer on the planet because you don't want to pay $40,000.

The interesting thing is we've been selling them our digital product for a few years, but when you open it up, people take the training now. They're like, “The screens are a little different, but does the strategy work?” 100% because it's not one of those weird tricks.

Facebook's like, “You just got to be careful.” I'm like, “Be careful. Did you look at any of my stuff? Before I never violated anything. I'm not in trouble because my program violated something. It's because I talked to somebody in internal. Facebook, did you look at my stuff?” They're like, “No. Anyway, we'll talk to you later.” That was in two-and-a-half years that I was sitting in solitary confinement.

 

I want to digress over to another topic and this is right before we get into the strategies that people should do. Let’s talk about what people should not do because I do know that you have a hot sports opinion on a strategy. That some people are out there trying to convince other Facebook marketers and how to get social proof and get thousands of likes in a very short period of time to their website using various strategies.

I know you and I have talked about this before and you've railed against it, trying not to name any names, not trying that hard. Let’s talk about one of these strategies that are being heavily promoted out there and some of the harm that it's doing to people, namely these Facebook-like campaigns.

Here’s the deal. I am a pretty opinionated person not because I know that I'm always right. At the end of the day, you’ve been doing this for a long time. I have knowledge and insight from lots of great industry leaders directly from Facebook, lots of different funnels and stuff like that. There are a lot of good people in the world doing some good things.

One of the things that I love to do is to help people with a great message do some great things in the world. With that being said, there are people out there that like to sell things to make money in unethical ways. That's cool, they can do whatever they want. Some people just go out there and they scam people.

When they scam people, I'm not one of these conspiracy theorists that are jamming from the top of the mountain talking about, “This is a conspiracy theory.” When I see something that's wrong and I have the power to help change it and then influence others, I'm happy to raise my hand and be like, “Don't ever do this.” The interesting thing, specifically where Brad's referring to, is I went out to a very high-end event and I gave this speech and this video that said, “Don't ever do this.”

I realized that the person who I was talking about was at the event speaking at the event. It made it a little awkward.

Did you talk about that on stage telling people not to do this strategy?

I did a Facebook Live before I went on stage because I saw a post that said, “Learn how to get 10,000 fans in 72 hours.” Every time I say it, I throw up in my mouth a little bit because it's such a horrible strategy. What happens is I talk about this horrible, what I like to call Bernie Madoff strategy.

To be clear, if you ever see an ad that says, “Learn how to get 10,000 fans in 72 hours,” please remember the following. One, this is a scam. Your brain should immediately say this is a scam. Number two, you should immediately think why in the hell would I want 10,000 fans in 72 hours that are completely unqualified.

Let me save you the $297 product that this person spends, which you do specifically. Brad, this is going to be great. You have lots of different businesses that you invest in. I like that. If you don't mind, can I talk about one of your businesses, the beer business?

Go for it.

You’ve got this beer brewing business. I’m interested in beer brewing. I may be interested because you're interested in it. Maybe it's called an affinity audience. It's a friend ends up in that circle. I know the people that you're doing business with. I'm interested in that. It’s an affinity audience. I may like that stuff.

If you're targeting beer brewers, “These are people who definitely like it.” Brad, how many people have joined your circle or bought any of your products which are fourteen years old from the Philippines?

None.

How about eighteen years old from Indonesia? How about a 22-year-old from Albania? It doesn't matter. What this person does is they say, “If you can get 10,000 fans in 72 hours, you're going to have the social proof for people to do business with you.”

Number one, big data says no such thing. Social proof does not lead to ROI. It doesn't. We as silly monkey humans feel that somebody engaged with our stuff is going to make us money. No, it's a shiny object.

Lots of likes and shares don't lead to a big ROI. Click To Tweet

Social proof is a very real thing in marketing, legit social proof but ultimately, I think that social proof makes us feel better and it gives us those warm feelings as opposed to giving it to the prospective customer.

We leverage a 27,000 or 38,000-year old technique. What we are doing now, people reading our blog, we're building a rapport with them scientifically with the chemicals in their brain. We are building a rapport just doing this. I don't need a hook or I don't need someone.

You made a perfect example. If someone goes and takes a look at your show right now, your top ten shows that are on Apple, they don't know if there are a million views or 100,000 views. You just have no idea.

It doesn't matter if you have a million views and no one listens to it. If you have a hundred views and they listened to the entire hour that we're talking about, now we're building some relationships. That has nothing to do with social proof.

Let me ask you this. The strategy that this person, these people are telling us they’re teaching people to run Facebook ads to content in all these foreign countries to people that are a lot cheaper to get?

It’s what I was going over to the analogy here to people all over the country by it, because what happens is they say, “Brad, you have this website for beer brewing or this fan page for beer brewing. The first thing you want to do is get a bunch of social proof.” You're like, “Okay.”

To get that social proof, what you're going to do is you're going to go ahead and write a motivational statement like, “I love puppies.” That's it. What you're going to do is you're going to target worldwide 18 to 65-plus for 24 hours, and all of a sudden you are literally going to get likes for pennies and you shut it down after a day.

Now what you're going to do is you're going to do a second motivational post or a like campaign and you're going to run that in the top ten countries or twenty countries or whatever. All of a sudden, now you're not getting likes for a penny. You're getting likes for $0.10, but all of a sudden you have 8,000 likes.

Brad, what you do is you now target California people who are interested in beer brewing because you have 20,000 likes on your page or 10,000 likes on your page, so you should have some social momentum to help target those local. To be clear and I know we'll move on, when you start out your situation with a lie, that's where I get frustrated.

The Better Business Bureau will do this. They'll call you and say, “Brad, someone was looking up your business and you don't seem to be listed.” “Specifically, what business were they looking up?” The Better Business Bureau doesn't know and they weren't telling you they're lying.

They’re a for-profit organization that starts out as a lie, so when you started out your fan page is a lie to do business for social proof. I get a little angry and upset with it, especially for people who exploit it and sell programs on it. It’s the wrong thing to do. It ruins all of your online work.

Let me ask you and then we'll move on about the damage it does. You might even be able to enlighten me on some of that stuff. Let's say somebody goes out there and runs one of these campaigns and now they've got 10,000 likes in 72 hours and these are not targeted likes at all.

They may be from India, Philippines or even just around the country of people who aren't interested in your stuff. What's the real damage? What’s the harm? Because I do know you rail against this and you've talked to Facebook and told them about this, they're like, “That's crazy.” Is it harmful?

I’m going to give you two examples, very easy. This is one of the hottest talked about topics that I have for Facebook Lives and stuff. People are like, “Wait a minute.” The first part of it is when this is done to the page, I want you to think of this as a pond. It's your ecosystem.

Facebook has all of these analytics to know who reads what, looks at what, leaves what, whatever. It's a perfect pond. If someone poops in the right-hand side of your pond, do you still want to swim in the pond? You could, but you cannot swim in one area, the water still is going to be icky. What ends up happening is this, is when I'm targeting people, I'm targeting people mid-funnel, meaning people have already engaged with me.

If someone's liked my page in an ethical, moral way and they've done it the right way, I can create great lookalike audiences. I can't do that if the page is polluted with a bunch of people who don't like this. I couldn't segment people out.

Here’s what ends up happening in a second story that does the damage. This client doctor of mine comes to me, and this is very typical FYI for lots of people out there and says, “I have over a million fans on Facebook.” I'm like, “Did you ever buy those likes?” “Yeah, I did but we'll talk about that later. I'm available. My show broadcasts over 57 different stations all around the world.” “Really?” “Yes. I've got over a million people. I have syndication all the time. I get a lot of people coming to my side. I do Facebook Live once a week.”

 

The wife of the doctor would do a boost post worldwide and get all this engagement. What they would do is because they learned this program, they would get a bunch of engagement, but it would be from people in all these third world countries that were bad.

When we started running ads and doing boost posts, a million people didn't see their content. Less than 10,000 people did. They have all this social proof. They have all these likes and comments. They have all these people who are engaging, but the actual target audience they wanted to target was so small and so corrupted that they couldn't get past the noise that destroyed their page.

To interject here, is that because Facebook sees that, “This is crappy engagement as a percentage of everything else. We're going to start to show this to less and fewer people.”

It’s about relevance. Here's what ends up happening. I say the silly human monkeys. We are like, “I'm going to game the system.” There are 150,000 different equations in the algorithm. There are brain scientists to figure this out. I'm not any smarter because I get somebody from Indonesia to like my page. I don't need 100,000 people to like me.

You've been in this game for a long time. You know people that have emailed us over a million and you can't even get people to open the email. I just need a great relationship for a small number of people and that's what Facebook allows you to do. Gaming the system, why? We have the best targeting system, we'll talk about this with the Facebook Lives, but we have the world’s best targeting system.

You only need a couple of people. It's the worst strategy to run. You're gaming a system that doesn't need to be gamed. You're giving a bunch of information to something that's running on high-quality fuel. You're pooping in the fuel tank.

Bottom line is don't do that. Don't run these fake-engaged-like campaigns because it will simply just hurt you, not help you. There are ways to build social proof and to build likes and fans using legitimate content that you are putting out there.

Social Media Ad Genius, our fan page, has less than 1,500 people on it. We've made hundreds of thousands of dollars off the page. It's not social proof. It's the connections and relationships. That’s the point.

Let's get into some of the nitty-gritty and let's reward everybody who's sat through this, because this is the stuff that's working now. This is a unique method that is very effective, I've used them. You're using them. and there is a big paradigm shift and reframe that people need to do in order to understand the way this works.

I know when I did it and you explained this to me, I'm like, “That makes so much sense,” especially in a vastly changing marketplace where traditional Facebook ads to a landing page to cold traffic don't work anymore.

If they do work, they're getting much more expensive. I know in the past with some of my clients, I would just try to create highly-targeted interest-based and demographic-based audiences and send them to a webinar funnel.

I started to see the effectiveness go down and the costs up and sometimes have to turn things off just because it didn't work anymore. There are some things that are working and that's what we're going to talk about. Shift a couple of paradigms the way that only you can do.

A couple of things, we're far from a 10,000-foot view and then we can dive down. This is just a little bit more. First, what we have to talk about is please open your mind, be open to new ideas and new possibilities. When I say that, the reason I mean that is because we're going to change some belief systems.

It's interesting how many agents I get into. I'm arguing with clients on math and facts. We're arguing now on belief systems. It's what old beliefs that we think that we should do versus what's working right now. Number one, we discovered social proof is not related directly to ROI. It's okay to have social testimonials, but lots of likes and shares don't lead to big ROI. We got that one. That’s easy.

Let's do the second one. Click-through rate is not indicative of purchases, brand awareness or brand recall. Let me say that in layman's terms because remember, I have a Ph.D., which is a Public High School diploma. I’m going to make this very simple and easy.

What happens is this big data has shown us that if you have a higher click-through rate, many times Brad will run an ad will say, “The higher click-through rate means the more clicks, the more clicks means the more people to our a page, the more people to our page, the more leads that we're going to get. How do we get a higher click-through rate?”

Facebook big data says, “Higher click-through rates do not lead to brand recall. They don't lead to purchase intent and they don't lead the purchase.” That means that we're driving for a higher click-through rate, which Facebook says, “People who click are window shoppers and 90% of the people who buy don't click.”

Click-through rate is not indicative of purchases, brand awareness, or brand recall. Click To Tweet

Click-through rates don't matter and clicks don't matter. How does this whole thing work? People don't have to be clicking on anything right now when they're reading the blog. They're reading and they're consuming content. What we're talking about is a Facebook tracking issue.

Our silly, fun, human monkey minds are like, “We must get a lead now.” You saw costs going up because what everyone wants to do is I have a new funnel where I'm going to make twenty different ads to make sure the exact same person clicks on one of the ads, hopefully should work.

That goes to a landing page that hopefully, that should work with the same headline and everything else. Hopefully, the green button, yellow button, red button, that should work. Maybe they should not get.

If all of that stuff doesn't matter, people can build a rapport. What happens if you don't even need opt-in pages anymore and we can just build a rapport by video?

We're going to talk about that more. Social proof doesn't matter. Click-through rates don't necessarily matter. We're going to talk a little bit more about social proof that will blow your mind because I believe most people are spending too much money on Facebook.

Here's this interesting paradox, the belief system change. ‘ve worked with tons of people over the last several years of doing this, so whether you want to believe me or not, it's fine. My phone will ring off the hook by some of the people that I know that read this show and they're going to be like, “This didn't make any sense.”

Brad asked me any questions for clarification because sometimes this is just so simple. It's like, “What?” Here's what ends up happening. What we're doing now is we are running a strategy called the hot seven strategy. What the hot seven is and we have training videos on this.

What we do is we're going to retarget people based on have they seen us in the last few days? What most people do, and this is going to be the brain science of it, they’re like, “I'm going to start running a webinar funnel for Brad's beer company. I'm going to start running twenty different ads. I'm going to test five different audiences. We're going to run to this one landing page,” and I'm going to make sure that the buttons are blue, green, yellow or red.”

The problem with us internet marketers is we're going to start and stop traffic all at that top of funnel. If it doesn't work right away or within a couple of days, we're going to shut it down. The problem is we don't know, was it our ad creative? Was it the blue button? Was it the green button? Was it the headline?

Maybe we didn't even check and see if it loads on mobile. That could be the reason, but we can think it's the button color. There are many variables. We just don't know. What people do is they're going to start testing out a bunch of ads, top of funnel. You may be doing this now. Most people I talked to say they're doing this right now.

You test out a bunch of ads, top of funnel, but as you know, let's just say you test out ten ads and up to four different audiences. Only one or two of those combinations are going to work. If 90% of your ads don't work at the top of funnel, most people set up retargeting ads and say, “10% off or opt-in again.” That's it. They're like, “I ran a bunch of ads. It didn't work. I ran into my website and didn't sell anything.” It's a little bit more complicated than that.

What we do is we start the bottom of funnel. The very bottom of funnel, someone's going to go buy your beer machine, your beer processor. Right at the sales page, we start thinking about what people want to see bottom of funnel? If they're right on the sales page, screw everything else. At this point, we're just talking about the very bottom.

They went to the sales page and they were looking at your sales page and they didn't buy it. What would they want to see? Most people want to do a 10% off coupon, but what I want to see is I want to see some social proof. When I go to Amazon, I'm going to look for some five-star reviews.

If I run some ads that are image ads that showcase testimonials and some five-star reviews, that's what people look for naturally on Amazon. What else are they looking for? It’s testimonials. Let's run some testimonials bottom of funnel.

I want to interject here for everybody else's sake and we're using terminology that some people may not understand. There is a concept called the top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. I'll take the liberty to explain it. Bottom of funnel, they come into the top, they're not aware of who you are or the problem with the solution and you're just trying to get awareness.

Middle of funnel is you're starting to build rapport, relationship, trust. It’s known, like and trust you. Bottom of funnel, they like you. They think that potentially they want to buy what you've got. They've come to your sales page. Maybe they've come to your order form and they're about ready to buy, but for some reason they just didn't squeeze out the very bottom of funnel.

You have to understand it's based upon their awareness, rapport and intent. Much like if you're a single guy, you walk into a bar, you see a beautiful woman. If she doesn't see you, that's top of funnel.

You got first to get her to see you and then you got to go walk over and talk to her. You’ve got to have a conversation and make her like you before you try and get her phone number or go on a date with her. I don't know why I always think of dating and relationships.

I was explaining this to David Gonzalez. It’s quite interesting. Here’s the best way to explain it. Imagine that you own Brad's grocery store. What happens is lots of people are always concerned with how do I get more people to the store? I'm always saying, “They're going to get to the store. What are they going to buy when you're at your store?” You're like, “Let's figure that out later.”

We should figure that out first. The best thing that you can do before we even figure out what you're going to sell, you already have people that come in the store, put something in the shopping cart, go into the checkout aisle to check out and they're like, “I forgot my wallet.”

Those are the easiest people to market to. It is like, “Brad, I’ll tell you what, you can just buy this on store credit. You already have everything in your checking cart.” We just got to figure out that last couple of seconds or that last step. What so many people do is they're like, “We just got to get more people into the store.” That's top of funnel.

You don't need more people into the store until you figure it out once they come into the store like Whole Foods, what are you first going to see? It doesn't matter what I'm going to buy. I'm going to go buy some beer and some cereal, that's way in the back of the store. I have to walk through all the different offers.

Whole Foods doesn't open up their doors and say, “Everybody come in,” and then they start putting food on display and stuff like that. They have all been laid out. The very last thing that they do is they build the store and they get everything lined up, then they'd bring in traffic.

You want to think about your traffic in the same way. You think about this bottom of funnel. People come into your store. They're ready to buy. What content do they see to push them up a little bit more?

 

What most people do is a 10% off coupon or that one testimonial and then they retarget it for a couple of days and that's it. Bad markers will retarget it permanently, if you didn't opt-in, they'd say, “Opt-in,” until you die. What we do is we change the whole thing. We change the entire paradigm.

Nobody goes to Facebook to buy anything and depending on where you're at in the country is you may be getting these magazines or these newspapers called The PennySaver. The PennySaver is something that comes out once a month that is full of ads, nothing else.

It's usually used as kitty litter in birdcages to clean up crap and maybe some people who like to clip coupons. If you only run ads to your offer, that's how people treat your offer. You'll turn your ads off and on. No one's going to be interested. You're not building a relationship.

They call it banner blindness. You just stop seeing the advertisements. You scroll right on by it.

It's like the people that you see stand out on the corner with signs that say, “Shop in my store.” There’s no other information. I don't know anything about you. Going out of business, that doesn't make me want to shop there any bit more, not at all.

What happens is Facebook has over 150,000 different equations in the algorithm. What that means is I don't have to figure out the perfect data. I don't even have to figure out the perfect copy. I don't even have to figure out the perfect audience. I just have to put out content.

For example, some people have dropped off, some people continue to want to read. Brad and I can talk about the math and science of what it takes to get people to read through our entire interview. Facebook’s already figured all this out. We want to harness the power of Facebook. I don't have to beat Facebook.

This is why I get so passionate about hacks, like the light hacks. All you have to do is some of the right things, which I'm going to tell you to do. I don't have to do all these hacks because Facebook's going to figure it all out. What Facebook wants to do is this, I live right next to the Austin American-Statesman, the newspaper. I want you to imagine this. This is going to help hone the whole thing.

In the newspaper, for example, they have a newspaper editor. You have an online manager and you have the offline editor. The offline editor has to take an educated guess on what headlines are going to work best, what pictures are going to work best.

That's their guess because they're paid to do that position or whatever. Hopefully, people will buy this stuff. The online editor is different where the writers write the story. The online editor spins the headlines over and over to get people to come to click to the site and read the content.

Newspapers are up in arms with Facebook saying, “Facebook, we're trying to get people that click on the ad or click on our website and come to our website.” Facebook’s saying, “You don't have to spin headlines, you don't have to spin any of this stuff. You don't have to make up stories. We have a 150,000-part algorithm. As long as you tell a good story, we'll figure it all out for you.”

For you as a producer, all you have to do is you just have to use that to produce good content. That's it. What ends up happening is what we do is we start running mid-funnel. What happens is this, most people are just going to go ahead and retarget back and forth to say, “Opt-in.”

Facebook has the world's best content or the best content searcher and targeting. What I'm going to do is two things. You don't have training on this. First of all, I'm going to retarget people every conceivable way I can in the last few days. We can set up.

People who visit our website, people who became a lead, people who became a sale, people who watched a video engaged with our fan page, went to our fan page, watched a video. There are all these different ways we're going to set it up, what we call our hot seven.

Our hot seven is literally anybody who lands into our spider web for the last few days are going to see our content. What content is that? Instead of me writing the perfect ad with the perfect hook just to see if they're going to want to see this one blog article like, “Brad, did I write the best blog article?”

What I'm going to do is I have twenty different videos. Their interviews, their Facebook Lives, they could be two-minute videos, they could be blog posts. I'm going to run twenty different posts regardless if their videos or written whatever, twenty a day at $1 a day. I run $1 a day, twenty different posts, I'm spending $1 a day.

I'm running to that hot seven audience. I want you to imagine that you see an offer of mine. They see an offer, they click, they go to my landing page and they don't opt-in. They're going to see an ad that says, “Opt-in again,” but now they're also going to see an ad at the perfect time, the perfect place.

You’ll see an interview with Brad and me for twelve minutes. It costs $0.22 to have someone spend. What do we see? What would you say? Was it seven minutes?

You got to the point where, and this is one of the things that Curt and I were talking about on the strategy that he's doing with me, where he interviewed me on his show. It was a twelve-minute interview then with a call to action elsewhere, but we ended up getting people to watch all twelve minutes.

This is the paradigm shift that I'm talking about, all twelve minutes of our interview, all twelve in the nowadays attention-starved economy for $0.50 a person. A lot of people would be thrilled just to have an email cost $0.50.

They’re just like, “If I could just get $0.50 leads,” and that's just an email.” As we all know, with squeeze pages and with a lot of the strategies out there, we offer this bribe that, “Get this free checklist.” They come over there, they enter their email.

Sometimes it's a fake email, but when it's just to get this checklist and they don't consume anything else. They flip through the checklist. We've all done this and we go, “Is it useful? Is it not? That's fine.”

At no point do I have a relationship with you. Even if that's a $0.01 lead, there's no real relationship there so it doesn't push you forward. To illustrate your point, we got somebody to watch twelve minutes of Curt and I bantering for $0.50 only.

Which means that if they watch both of us and they stayed in tune with us, do we think that we've got a better relationship with them for the next piece of content for the next offer? Yes. Did I explain that correctly, Curt?

Facebook has the world's best content searcher and targeting. Click To Tweet

100%, because the thing is what we do as humans are we're like, “Maybe we can write this long-form sales page with 5,000 words. I wish I could spell even five-letter words.” My spelling is horrible, but there's this scientific way that you can write emails or you can write sales letters or there are these colors on landing pages.

You can do all these different things. I've been studying that stuff for years, but I'm no expert like Frank Kern, I'm no copywriting aficionado like André Chaperon, but I can record a video and we can have a conversation. Whether you sell air conditioners or online dating or whatever, you have customers, they're humans. You talk to them to do business with them. We overcomplicate it online.

At the end of the day, if Facebook has this algorithm that finds the perfect person, people are like, “Curt, what do you mean you only spend $1 a day?” Because we're forcing Facebook to find the right person in that hot seven audience that Brad saw. You literally, “We had 60 people watching, it cost us $0.20. Would you rather spend $0.20 to have someone watch you for ten minutes?” That's not how you get back to your website.

I think that is the key, the shift because I can put out content. This does not matter if you're a SaaS, if you're a physical product company, if you're a coach or you’re a consultant, professional service provider, accountant, CPA, etc. We live in a time and age now where people want to know, like and trust the person, the company they're buying for.

The fact that we can capture their attention and build a brand that we've never been able to do by focusing on adding value and building a connection with people. It’s starting to think of how can I take my content, put it in front of them, and get them just to consume it?

Because the one thing we know is if they're consuming, they're building a bond, because if they don't like what I'm doing and what you're doing, they're going to go off. There are a million other distractions that people can go to. The fact that we've got somebody to watch twelve minutes of us is huge.

That’s a brand-new person who has never seen us before.

I love recapping your strategies here because it helps re-solidify it in my mind, which is we start at the bottom of funnel. We start with the people who have already been to the site, the page, the checkout page. We create ads for them.

It's the lowest hanging fruit that's closest to cash and that's probably the easiest of all the ads to set up. The next thing we do is we go middle of funnel as opposed to going for new people. We create that hot seven and once more we'll give people access to some extra training on this.

Are the folks who have engaged with an ad, engaged with our page, visit our page, sent us a message done all of these other engagement activities in the past few days, am I correct?

These are people who not only are paying attention, but they're paying it's recency as well. You’re getting attention to you and you continue to build this out. Let's say we've got twenty pieces of content running at $1 a day and they'll see some, they'll see others.

At any point, if I'm running an offer to them, I can run a quick little video with, “By the way, I'm doing a special training or special workshop. I've got this product. Do you want to buy it?” If I'm putting into that hyper-targeted group who keeps on seeing me everywhere, there is a direct correlation there between a highly-engaged audience and an ROI brand recall, etc. that you don't get with a simple click-through rate.

Am I summing up the Curt Maly framework pretty well?

Yeah. What's quite interesting when we started off the conversation is Facebook big data says that people don't have to click to buy. That means if they're not clicking on ads, what are they doing? They’re watching and consuming. People are watching and consuming what?

We don't know if they could scroll down a long post. Long posts are working great, but we can quantify consumption with a video that we've never been able to do before. We can look at literally the math, and I have a whole training on this, which is it's $1 to go to my website. When they go to my website, the average visit is 30 seconds, so I get $1 for 30 seconds on my website. For $1, someone will watch Brad and me for fifteen minutes.

Let’s do this. I know I'm not going to see website clicks, go back to my website. You will see some video of you who do that. You just know that, “This doesn't lead to a direct ROI, but wait a minute, they spent fifteen minutes with me. Now I'm going to be able to retarget those people.”

For example, now we're running a special to teach people how to do Messenger bots. Instead of me holding a webinar where I target a cold market, get as many opt-ins as possible, run over five days, do a webinar, send out the replay, try to see people pay $1,000 and then that doesn't work. If it does work, then just send regular emails.

Instead, what I do is I'm always running like Brad and I's interview, top of funnels. People have never seen us. They watch four or five minutes, they don't have to do anything. All of a sudden, they see my hot seven. They're going to see another interview with a friend of ours, Ron Lynch.

They're going to see another interview I did with David Gonzalez. They're going to see an interview I did with the CEO of Messenger Bot. I also have six other videos that are talking about Messenger Bots. I can turn off all the $1 a day videos that don't talk about Messenger bots. I have ten videos that are running to my hottest audience.

What do people see? They don't see, “Sign up for bots.” What they see is, “Curt’s been talking to a lot of people about bots. There’s a lot of information. I've been noticing he's been talking about this webinar. We should check out the webinars.”

It's not intrusive like, “Who is this person?” It’s, “I see lots of people talking about lots of subjects with Curt. It seems like they're talking about bots,” and then sending them into the webinar. We’re spending a lot less money and I showed you my ad stats and we have much bigger success.

 

That’s the whole thing. You only go to the top of funnel after you've built some engagement. You were mentioning when you showed what you are doing with our interview, you said, “I started off our little interview.

This was a little test. I started off at $5 a day. Boost it and we're going to see how many people we can get to watch it. We’re going to drop it down to $1 a day, get it in rotation, keep it to that middle of funnel audience.” Once we start to get this video that, “It is working. It's not a terrible video. People are watching this.”

You then take that out to the top of funnel. You take it out to the interest lists you build, people who like DigitalMarketer, Entrepreneur, etc. You’ve already proven it or disproven it in the middle of funnel. If you can't get a good piece of content to work in the middle of funnel for people who have already watched your stuff, there's a good chance that it's not going to work top of funnel too.

100% and here’s the big thing. Why do people split test ten different ad types? You don't even know if your offer is going to work yet. You’re split testing ten different offer types or ad types. You're split testing it to a page where you're trying to change the yellow button to the green button. You don't even know if it's going to work so you're constantly just retargeting test crap traffic.

One of the things I want to do, would you be willing to share some of the behind the scenes action?

I have PowerPoint presentations. We can talk about a couple of those. I can show you the ad account.

Before we do that, I want to change things up here for my audience. If you're just reading this, we're going to end the show in a moment, but it's going to be continued because I'm going to put a link. I don't know what that is yet, where you're going to be able to go deeper, but we're going to cut the interview off and I'm going to put the rest of it a little bit privately because we're going to go in, we're going to share some of the stuff that Curt is doing.

He's going to give you the behind the scenes, etc. I want you to click on that and you can continue to get the good stuff. For anybody who doesn't do that, let's do a temporary end. If people want just to say, “Screw this, I'm sold. I want to learn this.” How do they get more information from you personally?

Two ways, they can either reach out to me on the Facebooks correctly. They can message me. I check those every once in a while.

How do they buy your stuff?

The second thing is they go to SMAG2.com/live. When they go to /live, they're going to be taken to the Facebook Live product that I have. It’s $47. It talks about the exact video strategies we talked about. It talks about how I interviewed an infomercial expert who Brad has also interviewed, which is Ron Lynch. If you decide to pick it up for $47, we also give you access to our training program that gives you access to all of this stuff.

It's Social Media Ad Genius. You get free 30-day access. If you like it, we can give it to you for $47 a month. Usually, it's $97 a month but it's one of those things where you watch it, you're like, “This is great.” You use it, great. If you don't use it, you can cancel and do whatever you want. If you want to access and do exactly the thing that we were just talking about, I have it all set up.

That’s SMAG2.com/live. I personally have access to everything Curt's done. I can tell you that not only is it insanely good, cutting edge and he makes it very simple to understand. It is also insanely underpriced. Curt and I do a lot of work together.

I'm trying to get him to 10X his rates on what he's doing because this is so cutting edge, it's too cheap. I do highly recommend you go buy it before I teach him how to charge an arm and a leg for this stuff.

That being said, I want to encourage everybody to go do that. This is the time on the show where the part one is over and wherever the link is going to be, we're going to continue this inside. Say bye to everybody for this part or say see you on the other side.

Thanks. See you on the other side.

Important Links:

• Free Bonus For Listeners: https://smag2.com/bacon
• Black Box Social Media
• Social Media Ad Genius – Facebook
• SMAG2.com/live
• Ron Lynch – past episode

About Curt Maly

Curt Maly, is one of the world’s most sought after experts on Facebook, Social Media Marketing, and Paid Traffic Strategies.

His exclusive Austin-based digital marketing agency, Black Box Social Media (BBSM), has a client list reads like a VIP Red Carpet list made up of celebrities, reality TV stars, Shark Tank contestants, professional sports teams, speakers, New York Time best-selling authors and lots of small/medium-sized businesses.