Facebook Ads For Thought Leaders with David Schloss

Facebook Ads are one of the most popular topics on this show. Today I'm interviewing, expert media buyer, David Schloss.

Over the years, he has helped hundreds of businesses improve their website traffic, customer acquisition, and revenue using social advertising.

His business, Convert ROI, enables businesses to succeed by taking complicated social ad plans and seamlessly turning them into easy-to-follow revenue-producing campaigns. He manages over $2.5mil per month in paid advertising via Facebook and Instagram.

He was been rated as one of the top “Experts to Watch” by Forbes Magazine, has been featured on Entrepreneur.com, Business Insider, The Huffington Post, and been interviewed on various podcasts and web shows around the topic of social advertising.

To learn more about David and how to turn complicated social ad plans into easy to follow revenue-producing campaigns, visit http://convertroi.com.

Some Topics We Discussed Include:

• The changing environment of social media marketing.
• The new way to promote webinars that works
• The “pillar content” process
• How David uses Instagram effectively
• Tease, Reveal Strategy, Case study combo

About The Guest: David Schloss

Consultant, speaker, and considered one of the top Social Advertising trainers, David Schloss has created training and consulted some of today's top entrepreneurs in Facebook advertising, Instagram advertising, authority marketing, social PR (social public relations), video marketing and professional branding strategies.

He began marketing in 2007 from his college apartment, and over the years has now helped hundreds of businesses improve their website traffic, customer acquisition, and revenue using social advertising.

Facebook Ads For Thought Leaders with David Schloss

If you have read this blog for any amount of time, you'll know a couple of things. Number one, I think of this as the single most selfish podcast on all of iTunes because you're about to hear conversations that I would be having anyway with people that I want to have these conversations with and learning things that are directly applicable in my business.

This is not a podcast simply to help tell touchy feely stories and talk about all of the emotional moments that I know a lot of podcasts do. I know that your time is valuable, my time is valuable and I want you, when you're done reading one of these episodes to be like, “I can't believe I didn't pay Brad for that.

That is insane. I’ve got more actionable value out of his show than I have out of multiple courses that I've purchased.” You always know that the questions I'm asking are the ones that I personally want to know the answer to.

That being said, sometimes if you're brand new at this whole thing of business and marketing and everything that goes into that, you may feel a little lost at some times because we don't always cover the most fundamental of concepts. That's okay because there are always ways that you can go learn the fundamentals and oftentimes some of the guests that I interview have more resources that you can explore.

This episode is going to be a higher-level conversation than you may be used to hearing about. We're going to talk about primarily Facebook advertising. It is always one of the most popular topics on my entire show because everybody wants to know how to get the monies from the Facebooks.

I want to introduce you to David Schloss. David and I have known each other for quite some time now through mutual friends. We've worked together in the past. I've just always been super impressed by his mastery of Facebook advertising.

You can talk to ten different Facebook media buyers and get ten completely different strategies. One of the things I know about David’s is that his stuff works. He's been doing this stuff since 2007.

It started in his college apartment and over the years, he's helped hundreds of businesses improve everything from their website traffic to their customer acquisition using social advertising. His business is called Convert ROI. It takes complicated social ad plans and turns them into easy to follow revenue-producing campaigns.

He is managing over $2.5 million a month in paid advertising via Facebook and Instagram. He is also rated as one of the Top Experts to Watch by Forbes and has been featured all over the place from Entrepreneur.com, Business Insider HuffPost and now on the show. David, welcome.

I appreciate it. Thanks for the awesome intro.

It was good to run into you when you came out to San Diego and we reconnected. It’s always good to hear from you. We see each other on Facebook all the time, which was cool. It makes you feel like you didn't lose contact with somebody.

One of the things I always love is you're always sharing on Facebook some of the cool stuff that's working. You're sharing what the Facebook ad reps are telling you and whatnot.

If anybody's been in this world of trying to buy ads and make stuff work on Facebook for any time, we've seen some dramatic changes over the past several years and it's always changing. It can be frustrating.

I know for myself because I'm not. When I'm working with myself, my own businesses and my clients, I set a higher-level strategy for the media buys. Tactically, I don't have the time and inclination to keep track of everything that's working.

What I wanted to talk to you about on this episode is what’s working? What can people walk away with and go, “I feel a little bit more enlightened that I spent the time on this show?”

When it comes to Facebook, you're very much right about it evolving and changing constantly. At one point and I'm sure you remember this years ago, Facebook would make algorithm changes or platform changes maybe once every quarter to make it aligned with whenever they would do their quarterly reports.

They would maybe do some platform change or maybe update some interests and things like that for a week out of the three months that things are going on. It was great because we would practically know exactly when things were going to occur. We knew when our results were going to be bad. We were able to forecast things.

Now, forget it. We have no idea when algorithm changes are taking place and if we do find it out, it's because a group of media buyers come together, analyze results of one another and go, “Something's wrong. Something doesn't make sense.”

It may not be the most efficient way of doing things, but it still works in a sense where if I get together with 20 or 30 other media buyers and we're all seeing a downward trend, at least we could share it with our audience and say, “For all of you running ads, it might be time to slow things down a little bit.”

The old days of running ads, which old days can just go back as far as three years ago. It wasn't even that long. Just even a few years ago, we would be able to forecast when problems would occur, literally know exactly the day that things might go wrong and prepare for it. Now, you're in this waiting pattern for announcements from Facebook or something gets out to the general public like the Cambridge Analytica stuff that went on and for the average person that runs ads, it's not a huge deal.

When you look at the general public who are running ads at $20 a day, $50 a day and they're just trying to build some awareness around their brand, it can freak you out a lot. You constantly feel like you're behind or that Facebook's lying to you or that they're not giving you what you need in order to be successful.

It's an ever evolving and progressing ecosystem is the way that I look at it because Facebook knows they're not perfect. Even Google got their stuff together when they went through their whole issues a couple of years back. When they were shutting down accounts left and right and there was very little customer support. Now, I can literally call a number and be in contact with a rep in five minutes at Google. You couldn't do that years ago.

Luckily, Facebook does have reps now but it's still not. You have to be doing some good volume to get good service.

It’s definitely a volume game. They have different levels of representatives that can help you, but even the lowest of the low when it comes to their support reps don't truly understand the full makeup of the ad platform, which is a problem. Whereas when I talk to people at AdWords, they seem to understand the platform inside and out, even if it's someone who joined the team six months ago.

That seems to be an issue for a lot of advertisers where they have a rep and they think that this rep is going to give them the solution to solving the problem around the ads that aren't converting. Lo and behold, you try something out from those reps and nothing's changed.

When it comes to the Facebook world, it’s as cutthroat as it was five years ago in terms of the competition. You have to understand that it's a much of a learning game as it is for me as it is for them. I'm constantly learning. If the media buyer in me is learning something every single week, reading blogs every day and watching YouTube videos, you’ve got to think of the average business owner who doesn't realize that they need to do the same.

You brought up a great point there and to diverge a little bit because we both work with clients, we're both consultants. I tell a lot of my clients, “You're paying me as much for what I'm paying attention to that you're not.” The stuff that will affect you because you're running multiple aspects of your business, I'm paying attention to a lot of the big things, but I'm paying attention to a lot of the little stuff.

That's one of the reasons I do this show is so that I can pay attention to what's working and what's not working. You can start to do triage on a failing business and a failing campaign a lot quicker simply by paying attention to that stuff.

A lot of business owners don't have the time to manage the microscopic thing. That's why they pay people like yourself and like me retainers in order to help them navigate this area. Let me ask you this, on your aspect of the business, who would you say that the types of clients you work with are predominantly?

Granting we've got local businesses, we've got professional services and experts and thought leaders and course providers and coaches and consultants and eCommerce, do you do a little bit of everything or do you have a sweet spot?

All the ones you mentioned are 90% of my clients. I call them digital publishers. Essentially, they're putting out content to where maybe they're looking for coaching students, maybe they have books they promote or they speak on stage.

Maybe they teach something around certain subjects like how to get into real estate investing and how to get into eCommerce. They’re essentially educating the masses. I work with a lot of those types, not because it's an easy cash grab, like some people believe or that it's an easy industry to get into.

It's actually not easy at all, but it’s one of those things where I've just been in the space of helping people build businesses and educate the masses for many years. That's where I got my start. I was trying to become an influencer at eighteen years old teaching people how to build a business online. I stuck with my roots.

Naturally, over time I built up this network of individuals who teach others what they've done for the last several years. I work with a lot of people in let's say for example real estate. My first client ever was in the investing world of real estate.

Even to this day, I still call that person a digital publisher because a lot of real estate investors are showing other people how they do it and they're doing it through webinars and coaching. Maybe they do group coaching or mentorships style of educating. They're sending people to webinars or getting people on the phone and trying to close them into becoming a client or customer.

Let’s dive deeper into this now. Let's talk about a couple of the things that maybe were working and there are some things that aren't working. I think if anybody who has been buying ads knows that Facebook has taken away some of the partner categories and some of the ability to do that.

Are there any other big things that a lot of people were doing and that maybe in the past six months or so just have not been working so well?

There's obviously going to be some people who are still experiencing the amazing side of doing all these things I'm going to mention. You’ve got to look at it from your own personal results. For example, in my own world, we’ve constantly sent people direct to auto webinars for years. Straight to a registration page, get on the webinar, buy it, yes or no and that's it.

Nowadays, there's more depth to it. You find that retargeting sequences are far lengthier. Sometimes it takes someone as long as 45 days before they buy your $1,000 course. Before, I used to just send a ton of traffic to a registration page, 1,000 people sign up for this auto webinar, 500 show up and view it and then maybe 20, 30 or 50 people buy.

It was very easy math. You would just know for every dollar you put in, you'll make three or four back, sometimes even six back and it was easy. You send as many people as you can.

Now, the marketplace is evolved in a sense where they understand what's going on. They know when it's an auto webinar, they know when it's live and they know when you're faking that it's live. They also know that in an automated webinar, sometimes the player controls are there, sometimes they're not and the ones that have a player control, they're going to skip to the end and look up what the offer is. It's all the stuff that we used to hide.

Especially if you're selling any kinds of things to marketers or business people who get it. If you're in a totally separate niche where you're selling knitting or whatever, it might be a little different. Anybody is tech savvy, “I know how to figure this out. Get to the point. I'm tired of making you feel as though it's not live. It's evergreen. It's a video on demand.”

You’re right. For some of my clients, I noticed a big drop off in that working, which is sending traffic to a registration page, automated webinar and have one or two little retargeting ads and it worked for a while. It stopped working.

It’s not necessarily not working, it's just it has to be more in depth. Meaning your retargeting might have to be that the first fourteen days that someone's on a retargeting list, they're getting success story videos from some of your best students.

From day 15 through 30, they're getting objection videos from you where you're answering questions around what may be stopping them from buying. On day 31 through 45, they're getting another set of success stories, but this time from people who are starting their first business. Now, you're having to manipulate the process of getting someone to fully trust you.

Before, it used to be that if you delivered an ad to someone on Facebook and they clicked it, there was an assumed level of trust already. I trust you enough to click on your ad and watch your webinar.

Now, most people look at ads and go, “I don't trust this person.” From the very beginning, they don't trust you. You have to establish that trust in a much slower fashion. The ones who already trust you, maybe they've seen your content in the past and they've seen that you've been educating first before selling.

They naturally will go through the progression of at least listening to your webinar, but there's a more assumed risk. There's more assumed dishonesty. There's a lot more convincing that goes into the webinar world than even six to twelve months ago.

Let’s talk about the campaign. Let's talk about what to do. I want people to walk out of here with a sore hand or reminding themselves like, “I've got to go listen to this three or four more times because David knows what he's talking about.”

Let’s map out an ideal at least a top-level strategy for what you would do, you’re a thought leader and you've got a product or service you're selling, whether it's a digital course or coaching or something of that nature. You’re a consultant and you are trying to establish your presence and do this in a way that does ROI. Let's talk about what that might look like tactically.

The process I'm going to outline here is for the people who actually want to do the work. There's no shortcut here. This is the real way of doing this if you want your first ever webinar promotion to actually work instead of having to do it over and over, or any promotion.

It could be getting people on the phone. What I find is working now is creating content that is micro. Micro being 60 seconds or less. If let's say you're doing something that's Instagram, short-form Facebook video, maybe something that you want to post on YouTube as well.

It's the tip of the day type of thing. The reason why I say that is because you want to create three to five of those videos that become your pillar content, your content that you’re going to be well-known for. That if you piece it altogether, it might come up to one core strategy that might be involved in let's say in my case, Five Tips to Promote a Webinar so it's Successful From Day One.

Instead of just launching one video that's five minutes long, I'm going to do it as five one-minute videos. It’s easier to consume. You could take people down one video after another. People who watch 25% or 50% of video one, show them video two and you keep them going down the line.

The reason why you want to do that is that what you're doing is you're developing trust within the marketplace. Like any other ad, you could always split test your content. You can create 30 pieces of content at a minute a piece and then find the five most popular and use those as your pillar pieces of content that you would promote to the masses.

The goal here is that you have five micro pieces that you eventually are going to be using to develop video audiences.

Let me interject here. Let’s say there are five videos, five pieces of pillar content. Are you saying only to show the primary piece of content and then show video two to the people who watched only 25% to 50% of video one or to put all five of them out there?

Assuming that these videos are not necessarily sequential that they have to see them or put all of them out there and let them all start to build an audience as well so that somebody might see video one, they may see video four the next day, then they see video two. Which one of those?

If you’re going to go the route of creating multiple pieces, if it's just five, you're going to have to show them all. You're going to put all five out there, one a day or one every other day, and you're going to see which one is getting the most response. The reason for that is because the one that ends up getting the most response in this case, if you only created five, is that that ends up becoming your viral piece or the one that you become known for.

That one tip that you're delivering might be something that people have never heard of before or they never thought of before and naturally get shared and commented and liked quite a bit. Because of that, it builds up one heck of an audience.

People who watch 50%, 75% or 100% of the video, you're getting all the engagers, the like, comments and shares. You're getting all those people created into a custom audience because your whole goal here is that you're creating a list of people that when you decide to launch a webinar or you decide to do an application to phone call model, these are going to be the first people that you advertise to because they like what you're creating.

If you only create five pieces, there's nothing sequential about it, but at least you want to make it to where each content makes sense to go along with each other. If I'm going to be talking about Facebook ads, I want to make sure that all five of those pieces focus on a different piece of the Facebook ad environment. I don't want one video to be about Facebook, one about YouTube, one about Twitter unless my goal is to see what my audience is most responsive to.

Let me ask on the calls to action on those. Are you doing some of those without calls to action and using those to build up a video view audience or do all of those videos suggest having a specific CTA?

If you're going to only create five, you're going to have a specific CTA at the end of each one. If you have more videos, let's say ten for this example. You have ten pieces and you know that one set of five is sequential to each other and the other set of five is sequential to each other, then you might not make a CTA until day three or video three.

In this case, if we're talking about the minimum viable product here, we're just creating five videos altogether, then you're going to have a CTA at the end of each one of them, but the CTA might shift. For example, on day one you might say, “If you'd like to learn more about this subject, I put together a free training.”

Demonstrate value when creating content. Click To Tweet

In day two you might say, “I put together a free session.” You're just changing the language. That's what you're doing. Once again, you could see whether or not for each session, for each training, for each webinar, you could split test your language in these videos too.

The funny thing that you could figure out is what that same language change that you're making at the end of each video, you could test that in your ads. If you noticed that more people are making it to the end of your videos and clicking through to the link, which the link could be straight to a webinar page, you can see which of those videos generated the most clicks at the very end.

You can also change up what call to action you asked for. Instead of sending over to a webinar registration page, you can do a lead gen ad, you can have them message you and there's a whole bunch of stuff that you can do with Messenger bots. I've done some other episodes on Messenger bots and I've used them pretty successfully in some areas.

I'll actually digress. I'll share a strategy that I've used here a few times and I've liked it. I've used it in coordination with Facebook ads as well, especially if trying to make a splash in a market where not everybody knows you as the expert. I bought a business and I didn't know anything about that business, but I found the most popular blog posts that had a checklist.

It was a useful blog like, “How to do this,” and there were twenty different steps and it was very detailed. I created a post and I laid them all out and I was like, “If you're wanting to do this, this is how I would do it. This is where you should start.” I would lay it all out and it was a 1,000 to 1,500-word post.

It was long but useful. I did sporadic bullet points just to make it a little bit more readable, but the entire goal that I was trying to put in the person's head was two things. Number one, this is good. This is useful. Number two, this is inconvenient to read on Facebook, “I want this. I want to read this.”

What I would do is I would tell people at the top and the bottom of the post like, “This post is longer than I thought. If you want a printable PDF of this post, just leave a comment and let me know.” By the way, you can also send them over to a squeeze page. I did the leave a comment, “Let me know,” because it fired up on ManyChat a Messenger bot and then it would say, “I saw your comment on that post.

Thanks. Let me know what's your email and I'll send it to you.” I wanted to build my Messenger bot, but what this allowed me to do in creating a rich post up front is a couple of things, psychologically is number one, I demonstrated the value. I wasn't saying, “Give me your email and then I'll give you something valuable.” It's like, “Here it is. I'm going to give you something very valuable, but somewhat inconvenient.”

You can also put like, “Do you want a PDF of this exact same thing? Just click here and I'll send a nice formatted pretty one.” It worked so well. I had so many comments and likes and shares on it. That's the other thing. You get a lot of shares because it's super useful. When you're starting to boost that and run ads to it, it works wonders. That’s one of the little strategies that I've been deploying here lately.

I'll even add to that, in terms of what you'd be giving away or making a part of this whole content, a portion of the strategy. One of my clients as an example, he creates micro content. He puts Instagram Story ads up. He puts up Instagram videos.

He puts up that same video on Facebook. It’s 60 seconds long. All of these micro pieces go to his lead magnet. What he is doing is delivering strategies from within that lead magnet because he breaks down somewhere like 30 different strategies.

He said to me when he was originally doing this like, “I'm basically going to do 30 videos with each one of the strategies in the lead magnet being used in each of these videos.” The person who watches the 27th video may have never watched the 15th video.

In doing that, he’s created 30 pieces of content. He hasn't created anything since then. He's just repurposed them for different platforms. On top of that, we are able to see which day is actually bringing in most of the leads based off which one we are advertising the most.

We’ve found there are certain days of this sequence that are producing somewhere in the range of 60% or 70% of all his leads. The great thing about that is when he puts his webinar training together, he focuses his bullet points on the most popular days that people are opting in.

The days that are most popular, the four or five strategies that are getting the most attention and the most leads, he uses those same headlines as the bullet points on his webinar training page because they're the most popular.

He’s also in a way, crafting what are the subject matters that people want to learn when I do a long-form training. It's basically unfolding all in front of him. I didn't tell him to create all this micro-content, he just woke up one day and decided, “I'm going to do it.” The great thing about it is the audiences we're creating from all of this content are phenomenal. We have Facebook engagement audiences.

We have Instagram engagement audiences. We have video view audiences. We have 25%, 50% all the way to 95% and then we're able to create lookalikes from everything. We're creating the most engaged audience as possible for his promotions.

Thus, he's actually been building up one heck of a Facebook page presence because he started out with 2,000, 3,000 likes on the page. Now, it's up to about 20,000 naturally not buying likes. It’s not buying likes in a sense of going to Fiverr or anything like that and getting likes. We target all the viewers to like his page.

Or doing the whole strategy where you post some success platitude and promote it to India and the Philippines and all the other places that are aren't your market and just get a bunch of irrelevant likes.

We don't do that at all. We basically spend $10 a day retargeting people to like his page from the video content he's already created. It's a great system because he's doing content marketing, but at scale. He's getting leads from it. These leads are signing up for his webinar and they're buying his course. He’s getting 30% to 40% of people to show up on a webinar, which is ridiculous these days because most people are only getting 10% to show up on a webinar.

When it comes to targeting in interest building, what do you start with? Typically, when I'm building a strategy, we'll start at the bottom of the funnel and say, “Let's go after the people who are closest to giving us cash.”

Everybody from abandoned carts to the most recent ones and then building it out from the bottom up. When it comes to building audiences for cold, people who haven't interacted with you, etc., is there anything you're doing these days in order to make that more efficient?

Not necessarily to make it more efficient. It's more along the lines of we have to create stuff that has a true purpose to what it is we're advertising because a lot of people are creating just content or different promotions that it's just more of a cash grab and it comes off that way.

It’s the way that it's being promoted, the way that it's being put out there. It’s like the trend of the moment or the hot thing of the moment and it has no value being brought to the marketplace or to their audience.

Thus, it’s a slow burn and at the same time it also doesn't last very long.

When you go into anything that you're going to be promoting or developing for your audience or the audience you want to generate, what's the true purpose behind it? Are you going to be promoting this thing for a long period of time or are you just trying to get a quick hit for 14 or 28 days?

I’m skipping around it because you gave me so many things to think about here so I'm just changing subjects here. You posted on Facebook. One of your updates says, “Direct From My Rep, Facebook in-stream video and new events sources for value-based to look-alike audiences.”

You said it looks like a video show and podcasts and maybe coming from these updates soon. I want to hear about that. I started to read it and I got a little lost in exactly what you're talking about, but you seemed a little excited about it. Tell me what this is. What's going on there?

For anyone who doesn't know, I have this series I called Direct From My Rep where I talked to my partner rep in Facebook and it used to be my agency rep. I still talk to both of them. That's different levels of support. My partner and agency rep both send me these updates that are going on from things that are evolving on Facebook.

It could be updates to the ad in the platform, it could be new opportunities that Facebook offers in terms of what they call beta opportunities of running different types of ad creative or ad placements that aren't open to the public yet.

All sorts of cool things that are delivered to me through my inbox without requesting it. I'm sent these updates sometimes three, four times in a week, and then sometimes once a week. This update that came out, it basically pertains to value look-alikes.

Let's say you have a bunch of customers that have paid $97 for something and you have a list of a thousand buyers. You can plug in obviously all those buyers, but with their value attached to it inside of Facebook.

That functionality has been around for a while, but they are expanding the type of value in whether or not you have an overall value of a customer, a value specific to a type of a product. They're trying to expand the options so that when you create this, especially for like an eCom store, I want to be able to create a lookalike based on the $17 buyers of a t-shirt.

Then I also want to be able to create a look-alike of all the people who bought a t-shirt and then bought a bundle pack that was $20 more. They’re trying to expand how they create value to creating lookalikes from those people so that way you can maximize your dollars for the people that you're targeting.

How is that different though than just uploading? If I integrated with my CRM or I just download and upload, how is that different than me just manually saying, “These are my $17 buyers. These are my $97 buyers. These are my $1,000 buyers and then run look-alikes to all those manually?” Is there anything different there that I'm missing?

On the surface, no but what they're working on is integrations between, let's say you have live real time sales coming in at that $17 level and like I mentioned, there are people who are buying bundles at $20.

They want to be able to integrate both the store and the audiences together so that in real time the custom audience and the look-alike audiences are being updated almost on a daily level so that they evolve simultaneously without you having to manually do it yourself. That's what they're working on.

Is that based on pixels or is that based with others?

They're trying to do it on the pixel level and then have it all integrated within Facebook and their custom audiences. You and I both know there is software out there that do this for you, but even Facebook has showcased that sometimes these software misreport things or sometimes they break.

When the market's closed, you have a choice. You can either go do research or you could do nothing. Click To Tweet

Facebook misreports like a mother too.

Yes, they do. When they talk crap about someone else's software, that person ends up going, “I'm going to keep building more stuff until you make it native into the platform,” which is how a lot of things came to be on Facebook in the first place. That was one of the updates. The other one was specific to a placement option called in-stream which are great for a video content primarily fifteen seconds long.

These are the ones that interrupt another video, is that right?

Yeah. It interrupts or comes after the initial video that you watched. I watched a 60-second video from BuzzFeed. The next video in the sequence is an in-stream ad even though it says the next video is about to start. The reason why they're updating that is that now instead of just making it only video available for that option, you can now use images as an in-stream and you can use that image to tease people to go watch the full-length video.

You don't have to use video across the board for that placement because there are quite a few placements on Facebook where it's video only and then it might be a limitation of fifteen seconds only. Now they’re like, “You can use images in this placement and as long as it runs only about fifteen seconds, you're good.” For some people that opens up a lot of opportunities because not everyone likes to jump on camera.

That’s tremendous because a lot of people don't and they're like, “I’ve got a great image and I can get a graphic designer to create something that they can click over.” What about Instagram? Are you doing a lot there?

I love Instagram. I get a lot of leads from Instagram for many clients, but the nurturing process for Instagrammers is very different from Facebook people. I know a lot of people who hear that are going to say, “Aren't they on both platforms?” Not necessarily. I get a lot of younger people on Instagram naturally, 18 to 35 primarily.

For a lot of products that I sell, most of the people are between 29 to 45. There’s a large piece that's not buying anything for the most part, which is that 18 to the 28-year old range. The cool thing is that they do buy very low-ticket items. If you're able to create, even if it's a digital product, the trip wire style of thing where it's $17, $7, $27, if you're able to create a “Millennial base” of customers in your email list.

People buying smaller $7, $27 type of items, you can nurture them their way up to buying something higher ticket. It just takes longer. That's what I'm finding with a lot of my clients.

In the fitness space, when we promote something that's already $27, we're getting tons of people on Instagram. It’s within their wheelhouse already. You’ve got to think, “If I'm trying to teach people how to do Facebook ads, I'm not going to get a lot of buyers that are 22 years old, but I can at least show them the importance of Facebook and how to use it from a content marketing standpoint.

I might be able to sell them a $7 guide or a $27 mini course, but I'm not going to sell them a $997 course. It's going to be a lot harder.”

For business thought leaders, consultants, professionals using Instagram, my take on that has always been that Facebook, LinkedIn is where you educate people and Instagram is more where you bond, inspire, motivate them. Let them have a window into your world as opposed to try to deliver a ton of value.

I know some people are using Instagram TV and they're using their stories. Although I’ve got to say this, I don't care who it is, there's not a single person that I go to Instagram to learn stuff from where I'm like, “I want to hear him talk about Facebook ads or I want to hear him talk about how to do X, Y and Z.”

I'm always just like, “Either entertain me, show me another side of you or make me think something a little different. Give me a little epiphany.” That’s how I use Instagram especially in the professional space. People aren't on Instagram to be like, “I want to learn today.”

You can create an audience that wants to learn. For example, the Gary Vee style of things, but that has to be nurtured into the audience. I don't post a lot on Instagram but when I post, there has a purpose to it.

When I put up a screenshot of something and I did this in an Instagram Story too. I did multiple stories to see what would happen. I did one where the first story was about a client who was getting fantastic results on Facebook around the narrative of ads are too expensive.

I created a story that said, “Ads are so expensive that I'm still getting $10 purchases for a $30 product.” I was debunking that really quick. Then I went into three strategies we used and I broke them down to fifteen seconds a piece. I got so many messages about, “How do I do this too?” It was all because it was quick and easy to consume.

That's the whole point right there. It's got to be quick and easy, if not like the long-winded things. I hate going on somebody’s Instagram Story and they're like, “I'm going to talk for five minutes here,” and they’ve got 50 different little Instagram Stories you have to click over. It's like, “You lost me. Give me a little something and then send me off to learn more.”

If I was giving something away, my last story would have been, “If you want the full detailed process, go here,” and it would have been a lead magnet. The point in doing that is I'm buttering up the audience to understand what my zone of genius is. I’m like, “This is what I do for a living. This is what I focus on every day. If you want to learn more about it, you can go here.”

That same thing can be done with your image content or the video content you're posting on Instagram natively where it's 60 seconds long. You have more time to break it down. If you're going to do a group of different pieces of content, you can make it a three-day thing. This is day one, day two and on day three, you reveal the last strategy and then you're going to tell them where they can get more.

It's like doing a miniseries on Facebook as a lead magnet, except you're giving away three strategies and if you want the seven others, you've got to go here and download it. Make sure you have to have a purpose.

What is it that you're going to be delivering? Is there a sequence to it? What are you going to deliver on day one, day two or day three? It works the same way on Facebook. You've seen how I post my case studies when I was doing them frequently.

I would tease about it, I would reveal a couple of strategies one day and then I would just drop the big bomb of the case study on people and I would have 200 or 300 people saying, “This is crazy. I can't believe you gave away all this stuff. I can't tell you how many clients I would get from that.”

What are some of your favorite tools that you're using right now? Whether it has to do with research, ad management or anything? I love tools.

From an ad standpoint, I'm using a software called Revealbot. It’s great for creating automation inside of Facebook. If you want to have things that automatically scale, turn off or turn on, basically any functionality, it’s a great software for that.

I know you can do it natively in Facebook, but the way that Revealbot has it set up, it makes it very easy to set up rules and actually do it the right way. That’s why I love using that tool. In terms of CRM, I use Insightly. I love Insightly. It connects with a Google Gmail suite. If I want to track when I last had a conversation with someone via email, it has it all inside of that tool and it lets me know, “You connected with Brad fifteen days ago.

Make sure you a follow up with him.” It basically will allow me to set up more follow-up automation. I could put all my templates in there. I also can tell when someone has opened or not the email I sent them, it's like Yesware but instead of it being only that, it's also a CRM. I definitely love that platform. It's where I basically input all of my contacts from my phone to Facebook.

I'm no longer using Contactually, but I used to use that and I really liked it. I've been looking for some other stuff, so I'll check this out.

The great thing about Insightly is it integrates with this tool called Boomerang. I know you've heard of Boomerang before. I still use Boomerang and because Insightly and Boomerang can integrate together, I could set up all of my follow-up in advance with Boomerang.

When that follow-up goes out, it automatically inputs when the follow-up was sent out into Insightly based on the person I sent it to. I don't have to manually do it at all. It's like, “A message will be sent out in two days to Brad.”

It sends it out two days later. It puts a little note inside of your contact card that says, “You sent out this message on this day to Brad.” It will tell me whether or not you opened it. That's why when I follow up with all the prospects that I have, I set it up all automated. I'm not there at 6:00 in the morning trying to write everything.

The day or the time that someone logs in, it's the first email they see. I set that all up the day before and then I don't worry about it until it goes out.

Any other tools that you use, whether it's in general business or on Facebook?

I am testing out a couple of dashboards when it comes to reviewing data. One of the ones that I've been looking at is called UpHex. They're new, so I don't have a true review on them yet.

One of the great things that I've been looking at when it comes to ad dashboards, very similar to Geckoboard and all these other ones that break down your data is that I'm looking for dashboards that can give you a suggestions on that data too.

The great thing about UpHex is that when you connect your ad account to their dashboard and then it pulls all your data, it then analyzes all of your campaigns and gives you suggestions based on the campaign objective.

Let's say I'm running a conversion ad to a campaign and it's producing leads but it's not producing purchases, that dashboard will actually tell you what is wrong with the campaign and what they suggest doing.

If you don't set the hours, you will work all day every day and do nothing else. Click To Tweet

That’s all UpHex?

Yes, that's all built in there. They originally were just a data dashboard and then they start adding recommendations to like a recommendation engine. That’s going to become a lot smarter with their AI as more suggestions come through and more data is pulled.

You can only imagine in a way it's a crowdsourced solution for coming up with recommendations based on pulling more data. A year from now it could be even more powerful where it tells you exactly what to do.

I’m giving that some hope and allowing it to do its thing, but it connects with Facebook, it connects with ad words and I believe it also connects with Twitter ads.

Anything else that’s top of mind?

Those are pretty much the main tools. I'm in those every single day and Evernote for everything that I take notes on, but that’s commonplace now. Those are the main tools that I'm pretty much opening them all the time.

Speaking of tools, I did a 38-minute demo. I've been playing with Kartra. Have you played with that yet?

I have. There's so much going on in there.

It's super cool. I like it. I've used everything and some of them I liked and some of them I don't. I like how it all integrated it is. It keeps you in one system for everything.

What's a nut you're trying to crack right now in your business, in your life or something? This is where I can, myself or some of my listeners help you. The easy nuts are like, “I want more clients.”

That’s not what I'm talking about. Is there a skill you're trying to learn? Is there a person you're trying to meet, find or hire? Is there money you're trying to raise? Is there a challenge you're trying to figure out, “Why can't I figure this out?”

I'm actively working on this, but it's removing myself from every piece of the business. It’s essentially systems and hiring. I have said for the last three years that has been a core focus, but up until I realized I was completely half asking that whole thing.

I didn't start taking it seriously until earlier I went to the hospital from overworking myself, bad health and all sorts of things. It wasn't until then, in March of 2018, when I made the decision that I need to focus more on my systems because I'm in the hospital, I can't do anything. I don't know if my business is running.

That's a wake-up call and a half.

For sure, because the first thing that goes into your head is, “Am I going to be okay?” The second thing is, “What am I going to do with my business?”

Have you ever read John Warrillow’s book Built to Sell?

Yes.

I have interviewed him. I've always loved his book, especially as it relates to an agency, how do you get it? Using systems, using the team in order to remove yourself from that.

Another guest on my show who has been on the show two times is Mike Michalowicz. He wrote a book called Profit First, which I don't know if you've heard of that, but I recommend it to everybody. It's such an amazing way to think about your business, accounting and finances.

It's very simple but it's like, “It's forehead slappingly cool.” He just wrote a book called Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself.

I have not yet run it, but are our mutual friends, Matt Wolfe and Joe Fier are interviewing him on this and they got the book but I'm going to check that out. There are a couple of resources for you in that department.

It’s one of those things where I figured, if I ever wanted to sell the business or if I at least wanted to make it where it's running in the background so I can go focus on other things. I needed to put more attention on that and up until that incident I was not putting any attention on systems whatsoever.

I have a team, don't get me wrong but I was still heavily involved in client communication and jumping on calls and talking about reports and all that other good stuff. Constantly I would hear from people like, “That twenty-minute call that you're making to talk about a report, you could easily get someone at $15 an hour to do that for you.”

You’ve got to educate them on how ads work so they can see they could be sophisticated enough to talk about it at a high level.

The client doesn't care. They want to know that if there's something wrong, you're going to step in and talk to them. If I'm talking to my rep and that rep is smart enough and they're telling me everything I want to know like, “This is working. Here’s what we're doing to fix what's not working.” I'm like, “All right.”

I don't always need to touch the robe of the guru. That’s good. I'm glad to hear that you're making that more of a priority. Anything else you're excited about going on in your world, whether it's business or personal?

It’s a combination of both, but I'm actually excited for the fact that I can get back into doing one of my passion projects which I used to day trade quite a bit when I was younger.

I used to do stock and options trading and up until the whole crypto phase, that actually reinvigorated me to look back into it just because I'm like, “All these people making crazy returns.” It reminds me of when I was eighteen tradings from my college apartment and people would go, “How do you make $3,000 in two hours?”

I would do that and I had not done it again since the age of 21. I hadn't traded for many years. Up until now, I started to get back into that world and it was almost tapping into that old part of the brain where it's like, “You still remember this stuff. You can still do this again.”

It's muscle memory for people and it is for me. I started to get back in that world and I forgot how much I enjoyed it because one, it's a finite period of time. The market's open. That's when you're working.

When the market's closed, you have a choice. You can either go do research or you could do nothing. The great thing about that is that's actually the first time where I felt like I was putting myself on a schedule again when I was trading, because when I run my agency like I am right now, and I still continue to run my agency.

If you don't set the hours, you will work all day every day and do nothing else. You’ll work 24 hours if you gave yourself the opportunity to.

When I started to tap back into doing the trading during the certain parts of the day, that's when I realized I was putting myself on a schedule. It felt awesome because then by the time the market was closed, it was as if I was able to go do whatever I want after that.

I hadn't felt that feeling in so long. To me, it was a great reintroduction into that world. At the same time, that is when I realized I had started working on systems again because you can't be taking twenty calls a day or eight calls a day and be trading at the same time.

You have to find time to be alone and focus. In order to fully allow myself to be re-immersed in that world, I've been focusing entirely on the systems part. It was a great eye-opening experience. I did it for a week and I was like, “I'm going to follow this schedule and do what I used to do.” It was great. I was like, “I definitely want to be doing this more.”

I've got some friends who are doing some big stuff in there and may make an introduction. I think you'd like them. David, this has been fantastic. For people who want to learn more about this, the first question, are you still taking clients?

Yes, I'm still taking clients. We have calls with everyone to make sure that they qualify for.

If they want to check you out more, if they want to see if they qualify, do they simply go to ConvertROI.com?

Yes. If you go to the website, there's a button to email me directly. Once you go ahead and fill in all those details, it comes straight to me so I could see what it is that you do and what you're looking for.

If you don't want to reach out to me on my website, but instead of wanting to have an immediate conversation, you can go to my personal profile at Facebook.com/schlossy. I get messages direct in my inbox. I answer. If you want to make an immediate discussion and get something done now you would go to my Facebook page and make that happen.

David, you definitely brought the heat and I appreciate it. I know all my readers do as well. Hopefully they learned some good stuff.

Reach out to David if you are looking to get your Facebook advertising managed by somebody who obviously knows what he's talking about. If you have any questions, if you are stuck, if you're not 100% sure what you should be doing, given a lot of the changes to grow your business, send me an email to AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com.

Tell me what's going on and I'll either invite you on the show or I'll see if I can answer it for you. If I don't have an answer, I'll see if I've got a resource for you. David, I look forward to hanging out with you again. For everybody else, I hope you stay tuned for the next episode. I’ll talk to you soon.

Important Links:

• Convert ROI
• Revealbot
• Insightly
• Yesware
• Contactually
• Boomerang
• UpHex
• Geckoboard
• Kartra
• John Warrillow – Previous episode
• Built to Sell
• Mike Michalowicz – Previous episode
• Profit First
• Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself
• Facebook.com/schlossy

About David Schloss

Consultant, speaker, and considered one of the top Social Advertising trainers, David Schloss has created training and consulted some of today's top entrepreneurs in Facebook advertising, Instagram advertising, authority marketing, social PR (social public relations), video marketing and professional branding strategies.

He began marketing in 2007 from his college apartment, and over the years has now helped hundreds of businesses improve their website traffic, customer acquisition, and revenue using social advertising.

 

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• Bacon Wrapped Business on Facebook
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• Brad Costanzo on Twitter