He does Facebook ad marketing for some of the top people in the world. He has worked with people like Tony Robbins, Robin Sharma and a lot of other people that are veritable badasses.
He's going to dive deeper into the entire Facebook marketing strategy. It's going to go beyond Facebook and what happens when they land on your page. He opened my eyes to a couple of things. You're going to want to pay attention.
That being said, let me bring in Nicolas Kusmich. Nick, welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business. How are you?
I'm having a wonderful day. It could be a little bit better if I was in Southern California, specifically downtown San Diego, Westside. I'm making do here in Toronto.
Did you ever do the corporate life? Did you ever have the job?
I tried once or twice. I probably work harder and more now with my own stuff than that stuff. I wouldn't trade it for the world for sure.
I don't miss the days where you had like, “How many more vacation days can I take this year?” It's never a fun place to be.
You are not just the Facebook gangster. You are well known as the top strategist out there for lead generation, especially with Facebook. Do you dabble in any of the other channels besides Facebook or did you master that?
We took a risk to quadruple down on Facebook. We had a feeling that it was going the way it was. It was a bit of a gamble although Facebook was a big player. We just doubled and tripled down and said this is it and hopefully it works out. Fortunately, it did swing in our favors.
That is the only thing we do in terms of the platform we choose to operate our strategies and our principles on. We are looking bigger at direct response marketing on social platforms. Technically, it's applicable on any social platform.
How did you get into this? What's your back story of that?
It was a mistake, to be honest. Way back as far as I can remember in a land far away, I had an info product in the weight loss space that was written under a pen name. I was ashamed to attach my name to it.
Back then, it was popular. There was David DeAngelo instead of Eben Pagan and there were all these other guys doing their thing. Rich Jerk was out back then and no one knew who Kelly Felix was. All this stuff was going on.
I’m like, “I'm going to have a weight loss product and I'm going do it under a pen name.” No one knew it was associated with me. I was late to the internet marketing game. This is when Google was the 800-pound gorilla Google PPC was where it was at.
When I first heard about them, all I heard was they liked to slap people. I didn't know what that meant. I just heard all of these animal names and slaps. That's all I knew. Panda, penguin. Back then, I don't even remember what it was.
I heard these stories of people losing their businesses overnight because of some sort of algorithm change or they deciding that if you're not spending your gazillion dollars a month on Google PPC, then you couldn't play in that game.
I was like, “I'm not going to do this. What other alternatives do I have?” At that time, Facebook advertising had come out of beta. They had their little itty-bitty right-hand column ads.
At the same time, Plenty of Fish had released their advertising platform. They had collected all this user data from all the people who are registering to go on this dating site. We decided to jump two feet in into both and see which one would take us where we wanted to go.
I was looking for a place to buy true traffic, if you will, with advertising platforms that were highly targeted. Quickly, we saw Facebook go up into the right and we saw Plenty of Fish, from an advertising standpoint, go down into the right. That's when we said, “Facebook is where we're going to play.”
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Fortunately, we made some good decisions. We made some good contacts. Maybe the universe was swinging in our favor. We had first mover's advantage whatever it be, we were able to elevate our game pretty high on it and play with some key players.
Do you start off and just jumped into it? How quickly did you get into client work as opposed to just doing stuff?
It all started with our own stuff and putting our own money on the line. That led to conversations where we'd be talking with people. Everyone was like trying to jump on the Facebook bandwagon back then.
The conversation would go like this, “How are you? We've been trying out this Facebook thing and we can't crack the code.” I'm thinking on my side, “We're making it work.”
This is surprising to me. I thought everyone was making it work. I'd have conversation after conversation of people who were trying Facebook and not making it work. Meanwhile, here we are making it work.
At that point, we sold the assets of this information product to a larger weight loss company. I decided to move into the consulting space like everybody else.
I sold my first info product in the consulting space.
There you go, it’s the path. It’s the way to go.
God forbid you do something and get success and experience before you hold yourself out as a consultant, right?
That doesn't seem to be the path these days. Everybody's a coach and a consultant these days. I'm glad that I said I put my own money on the line and I figured this out for me before I did it for anybody else.
The info product turned into a consulting practice. The conversations turned into, “That seems too confusing for us to implement. Would you do it for us?” It birthed the agency side of things.
We moved into a 100% agency mode. Later on, we had a consultancy agency model where about 70% of the business is the agency and about 30% is the consultancy work that we do.
Tell me about the type of clients you typically work with? You are known as the master of lead generation. What kind of leads?
Have you found a sweet spot, whether it's working with other consultants, coaches, experts, knowledge workers, and professional services? Is it a little bit all over the road or do you try to keep it focused on one or two market segments?
I tried to stay where I was comfortable. In that space as a consultant and as a past like recovering information marketer, I figured that's a space I know. Let's start there.
Early on in the game, I'd say 80% or 90% of our business was built on the backs of thought leadership or as Brendon Burchard’s termed expert space. We built a lot of our business around the expert space and it fit our model well because we knew the space.
We were information workers at the time, we knew the game of lead generation, we knew how to reach people in that space. That's where it all started.
The whole Amazon selling machines and eCommerce started to take off and people started getting heavy into that space. Naturally, because people knew that we did some good work in the Facebook's world, they started coming to us.
The say, “Can you help us?” My early answer was, “I don't know but I'm willing to try if you are.” We started getting into a little bit of the eCom physical product space. I would say about maybe 25% of our clientele would fit into that category and slowly growing.
We're probably best known in the thought leadership/information/expert space with a slow-growing contingent in the eCom space.
You've worked with some influential big businesses, big thought leaders. I'm on your website and I see Tony Robbins, Joe Polish, Robin Sharma, Dean Graziosi and folks that are household names to a lot of people. How did you leapfrog up to the top of the game with some of the top clients?
At some point in my life, I had been studying high-ticket. A mentor, I use that term loosely because it was probably a conversation in passing with someone I respected, said it requires just as much time, energy, and effort to sell a $10,000 product than it would a $100 product.
The approach might be slightly different, but the time, energy and effort is the same. At that time, that didn't quite connect in my brain. I couldn't make sense of what that meant. I figured if that's true then I might be leaving a whole bunch of stuff on the table.
I don't know where I pick this up, but I teach it. I believe that if you're going to move into a market, there should be two things about that market that should be upfront and clear.
One is that it's an underserved segment of the market. Rather than serving an entire market, if you could serve an underserved segment of it, that the twenty percenters if you will, you're going to be better off.
That underserved segment, that's the high-end, the people who pay the most or do you have another example for those?
Facebook Lead Generation: Rather than serving an entire market, if you could serve an underserved segment of it, you're going to be better off.
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That would be the second criterion, an affluent segment of that market. A good example of this is a friend of mine that I know was an SEO practitioner. I don't know if anyone even remembers what SEO, it’s Search Engine Optimization.
When he was looking at it, he's like, “I need to find an underserved yet affluent segment of the marketplace so that I could charge more fees for doing the same amount of work and getting even better results.”
That's another thing we found working with higher-end folks. You can get better results with less effort, less work and less headache.
In this case, he said, “I'm great at SEO. Let me see who I can serve.” Long story short, he ended up serving cosmetic surgeons in the West Coast. He goes, “I'm going to pick every major city on the California coast there. I'm going to go into each city, go after all of the cosmetic surgeons in that space.”
“I'm going to strike one deal with one person, charge them $10,000 or $15,000 a month for my services.” He closed ten people in his first month at it and he had a million-dollar business in 30 days or so.
When I'm thinking underserved and affluent is just people where there's not much competition. I'm a big advocate of the Blue Ocean Strategy. I don't know if you’ve read the book.
It's easier to go into uncontested space than competing in a red ocean where you're competing against everybody. In my scenario, I looked into the marketplace and I saw a lot of these big-name speakers.
They were old school, original guys. They didn't have much of a social presence. They did a lot of traditional media buying on newspapers and magazines. Dean was famous for infomercials, for example.
It was clearly underserved in the social Facebook space. Plus, in my second criterion, in that they were affluent. They were folks that weren't going to penny pinch and we were going to make that happen.
I said, “How do I get to them? How do I go from small time to big time? How can I make an offer they couldn't refuse?”
This was essentially my offer. I made this list of everybody that I want to work with. I pinpoint in a few that I thought I could have a second or a third-degree separation from, that someone might be able to make an intro for me.
I made them an offer they couldn't refuse. The offer was this, “This is what I could do for you, this is my cost to do it, but you only have to pay me after you get results.”
That's an important offer because some people are like, Let me do something for free for you. If it works, give me a great testimonial.”
I think that's cool, but it's undervaluing your actual effort. I think there's more respect when you say, “I charge a lot of money for what I do, but you don't have to pay me until it's worth every penny and more.”
When you say, “Here's what I do and here's what it costs to do it,” were you framing that as, “Here's what it normally costs to do it,” or “These are my costs to do it for you”?
This is like, “This is what it's going to cost you to have me do it for you.”
You took that away, you said, “I'll get you the leads using Facebook. I charge $10,000.” Instead of that, “You're only going to pay me after I get results?”
It’s like, “I'm going to generate leads for you on Facebook. We're going to fill the top of your funnel with that. My fees are $10,000 a month to do. Let's do this for 30 days but you don't pay me at the beginning. You'll pay me at the end after you've gotten the results that I'm saying that I can get for you.”
Fortunately, that worked in my favor. Two of the five people that I reached out who said yes to that offer. The second step is producing the results. We hit some home runs for people, grand slams for certain people. It became this wild, wild west of them telling everybody.
Referrals from people like that are huge.
At that level, what we realized is there's no amount of marketing that's going to get you into the front door of any one of these organizations. These organizations operate strictly on associations.
“Do you know someone who can help me with this?” If they know, that's where my name continues to come up over and over again. It put us in a good place.
I want to get down to some nitty-gritty details that people and by people. I know that I always like to take action on the advice that my guests give me.
I love how you take ownership of certain names like contextual congruence. You got a trademark on that. From a marketing standpoint, virtual fist bump to you. As well as the others like preeminent positioning profile, ascension accelerator, and micro-market maximizer.
I know exactly what you’re doing, but I want you to explain what some of these are. What is contextual congruence? What is preeminent positioning profile? How can we use them?
Let's use that in a case like for me I am sitting down across from you and I'm a prospective client. You're telling me, “Nick, what makes you different? What would you bring to the table and I can't just go hire Joe Schmo Facebook advertiser out there for?”
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There are a couple of ways I would approach that. If we're going to stay consistent with the theme of some of these things that I've named, what I would essentially say is what we're the best in the world that is direct response marketing on a social platform.
That is in fact an oxymoron to a certain degree. Here's where the idea of contextual congruence came up. It's this idea that you want to remain congruent with the context of the platform that you're playing on.
I like to tell via a story. It's half-true and then I mix my own little jazz into it. What I have people do is I have them picture a family barbecue.
You're in Southern California and it's a nice evening. You have your family over, catching up on the latest gossip, and you’ve got the burgers on the grill. You're going through this experience and you're just catching up. It's a great time. You're drinking your Matcha Green tea.
All of a sudden, someone like blasts through the backyard door. He walks over to the hamburger grill, grabs a burger, dresses it then comes into this semicircle that you have where you're catching up with your cousins and best friends and joins the conversation.
As if that weren't bad enough, he then turns around. He opens up his bag and tries to sell you a vacuum cleaner. You're thinking, “What are you doing?” You'd be pissed off. I would be and everybody would be pissed off, but the question is why would you be pissed off.
It's because of three reasons. Number one, he wasn't invited. Number two, you don't need a vacuum cleaner and he's trying to sell you something you don't need.
Thirdly, let's say you did need it, let's say you were the one in 10,000 people who at that moment did need a vacuum cleaner, the reality is that wasn't the time nor the place to sell me one.
If I was at a trade show or a convention or some sort of a flea market whatever going on, maybe there but here was not the time nor the place.
The people hear the story and they’re like, “That's absolutely ridiculous, I would never do that. The reality is like the Facebook newsfeed is essentially the backyard barbecue.
We go onto news of newsfeeds to see what's going on with our friends, to catch up on the latest gossip, to see what's kind of trending in the world that's where we get our news, etc.
All of a sudden, some bloody marketer who has no idea who I am, who has no realization that I don't want what they have comes into my newsfeed with an ad trying to sell me something right off the spot.
Eessentially what we were creating with entrepreneurs and direct response marketers on a social platform that is, is the kind of like the vacuum cleaner sales guy.
The point of contextual congruence is, “If I were to go onto eBay this morning or Amazon this afternoon, I am going there with a buyer's intent and that is a commerce-based platform so for you to try to sell me something on those platforms makes absolute sense.
There's no reason why you shouldn't but nobody that I know wakes up in the morning, credit card in hand, logs onto Facebook and saying I wonder what I could buy, that's a past thought.
The idea behind contextual congruence is here or maybe worded another way like the number one fatal flaw that a lot of people make on Facebook as an advertiser is they try to sell first or they try to be the vacuum cleaner sales guy without realizing that Facebook is not a commerce driven platform.
It is a social platform, unless you understand social behavior, why people are on the platform, everything that's going on from a user experience when they're on Facebook, things you could get into a whole heap of trouble trying to sell something first.
The idea behind contextual congruence is simply this, understand the context of the platform that you are on and stay congruent to the user behavior on that platform and then it's hard to go wrong.
If you break that rule, you're probably going to get into some trouble in some way shape or form to various degrees of severity.
Give me a real-world example. If you consult, are you an expert? What is contextual? Do you go straight to a webinar? The ad to the landing page, how that might feel under your guidance?
There are a couple of ways to look at it but I think the simplest way is realizing that the straight line is not always a straight line.
A great example of this and what I mean by that is like if I'm trying to fill an event because I'm a marketer and I do marketing events. The straight line approach would be, let's do an ad about the event to try and fill the event because that seems like it's the shortest path.
On Facebook, I will always say that there should be an intermediary step in between your final destination. I'll give you a real-life example, one of my clients are good friends, amazing business coach, a guy by the name of Taki Moore, a coach marketing machine out in Australia.
He was in a scenario where we won't mention any names but before he met me and before we hang out, he had hired another Facebook advertising agency to fill these events for him in order because at the events is where he sells his big-ticket items.
He hired them on, they went for the straight line approach and they promoted the event and in short they ended up spending $80,000 in approximately 30 days to try and fill these events. They did do their best.
When I say fill, we're talking about between 50 and 100 people, we're not talking about thousands. They’ve got about 50 people or so. Long story short it took about a year or so and they can't even track it back to the ads to try and recover the costs that were involved in that ads then.
It’s not funny, he was pissed. This was a well-known name in the Facebook space. He wrote the book on Facebook advertising and it just made Taki like a little bit gun shy, a little bit upset, a little bit jaded about the space.
Facebook Lead Generation: The number one fatal flaw that a lot of people make on Facebook as an advertiser is they try to sell first without realizing that Facebook is not a commerce-driven platform.
When he came to me, he's like look I know I should be utilizing Facebook but I'm like not comfortable with what happened. Can we take this slow and think through a process that'll work for me?
These are the process that we walk through. I said well definitely we're not going to promote your event on Facebook that's going to get you dismal results because that straight line approach that's trying to sell something right off the bat.
Instead, let's look at your target audience and let's discover through a process what are the greatest pain points or the greatest aspirations of your clients that we can help solve and then how can we take an asset of yours that is unique to you and present that to the audience in order to build rapport.
In other words, list building or a lead magnet type approach but again where you are much more positioning yourself as an expert authority and simultaneously providing value before going for the jugular.
In this case, we identified that he has this fantastic process that he calls The Triage Call and what most people in the coach consultants face is they try to get somebody on a 45-minute “strategy session” which is a hidden sales call to sell them into a higher tier program.
What he was found is he has a process called The Triage Call and just like if you go to the emergency room at a hospital, they are going to triage you first. They are going to take your vitals. Determine what's wrong with you and then decide the best course of action for you.
He implemented this thing that he calls The Triage Call, it’s nine minutes long, you hop on the call, and the calls to determine can I help you yes or no?
If the answer is yes, we're going to schedule that strategy session call. If it's no I'm going to either point you in another direction or let you know that I can't help you.
This way, I don't waste mine or my salespeople’s time. At the same time, I don't have to expect you to go through this long-complicated funnel before we end up getting on the phone.
Did he do a long questionnaire survey for him before The Triage Call?
Another long one but a short one, a handful of questions to provide some perspective around the call.
When I do these, I think like it’s my first call. I love that nine-minute triage aspect because at the end of the day, I can't help everybody. If I can't, I'm going to get off the phone not waste your time as well as you not waste mine. That's brilliant, so continue on so here's the triage call.
It‘s a brilliant win-win, I don't know anybody else in the industry who does it so I like this because it was “proprietary to him,” he's got a sexy name to it, he calls it The Triage Call.
This is a need because what The Triage Call has helped him to do and help his team to do is go to a 71% to 90% closing ratio on anyone who gets to the second call.
This is a true need in the marketplace if you're a coach consultant because usually you're wasting time with tire kickers, you're wasting time with objections, you're wasting time with all this other stuff on your typical strategy session call. He identified that to be an issue.
We're going to provide a solution, I said can you package this triage call, can you tell all the questions to ask in it, the right positioning to take into like a four or five-page downloadable PDF, he said absolutely. He said now we know what we're going to serve your marketplace with.
The long and short of it is, we ended up crafting together a campaign that offered this lead magnet which was called The Triage Call in exchange for a name and an email address and it put him in a simple funnel.
Here was a simple funnel number one, that download is then emailed to you but instead of delivering it to you on the Thank You page, what we do on the Thank You page is make what I call a godfather offer.
A godfather offer is an offer that you can't refuse and we're going to also at the same time an offer they can't refuse and also take it away from them to add even further urgency or scarcity to it.
This was it, they got The Triage Call offer, there was a video on the Thank You page that I scripted and there's like nine elements to this video that go into specific orders that set up the offer properly so it doesn't feel like two douchey or two vacuum cleaner sales guyish.
Long and short of it is, he made an offer for a discounted offer that was available only for 24 hours to join him at his next live event.
Here's how this whole thing played out, from this offer he generated 66 people to attend the live event that he did and that was his average. He expected between 50 and 100 so we got 66 not bad, but all this 66, it cost us $1,853 and some add cents I don't remember the exact number but $1853 and some add cents to get those 66 people into his live event.
A little bit better than 80,000?
Here's the clincher and here's the best part here's what I love to brag about and keep in mind, disclaimer here your results may not be the same and these are not typical, he got 66 people into the event.
All the 66 because he does such a killer job at doing this two-day event providing great value making an awesome offer, 32 people enrolled in his program.
The event you say cost how much to go?
It's a $200 thing and he made it available for $97 so that like an OTO (one-time offer) right there on the Thank You page, which gives that little bit of urgency and then we take it away and say look it's $97, we just met I don't know, you don't know me, let me meet you halfway.
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I'll buy half of your ticket. you buy the other half and I'll see you at the live event which is beautiful positioning by the way and we can delve deeper into that if we wanted to.
They bought the ticket for half price that price was only available for 24 hours, they showed up at the live event. 66 people showed up, 32 people were enrolled into his program. His program is an $18,000 coaching program so you do the math, it was $576,000 in revenue from an $1,853 ad spend.
All because the only major difference that we implemented between the last time where he spent 80k and this time where he spent 1800 was applying the idea of the contextual congruence concept where you're not going after the jugular right away.
You're offering a little bit of value just adding one intermediary micro commitment step in between that process.
There are some other things we layer on top of that but by adding that simple process in between exponentially change the results of what could have been again a nasty campaign. If we just went straight or you know the straight line approach.
The ad like you said for the Facebook it just goes to the download this nine-minute shortcut, the signs up eighth grade clients and it is called The Triage Call and you can get it for free?
This light offer, I mean again traditionally it’ s an opt-in offer, but again it's positioned in such a way where it's not taken as much as it is a give and as long as psychologically the person on the other end feels like they're getting the better end of the bargain.
It's a value place and they feel like they're getting something rather than giving something which is the perfect psychological set up for like Social Direct Selling.
That is contextually congruent is relevant and that I can see completely how that works I love the way how your expertise does not stop it, Facebook ads and targeting. It’s generally what happens throughout the entire ecosystem.
They're starting on Facebook, what's their mindset? What happens when they get to the page? Is it congruent with what they were doing before and then like you said you help them to script the video that frames, the offer in the right way so I can see that you are a man of more than one tool.
At the end of the day, the reality is and this is where a lot of people drop the ball on Facebook and this is not to my own horn but it's just to like show reality.
The reality is when you talk Facebook with anybody, to me if Facebook could be called any other thing it could be any other platform. To me it's the proverbial iceberg analogy 10% is above the surface, 90% is below, 90% is what matters, 10% is like the peripheral extra stuff.
To me, in the Facebook online lead generation world, the 10% above the surface is tactics. It is how do I bid? It is the proper campaign structure. It's like the ad copy and all that kind of stuff and I think that is uber important.
I'm not taking anything away from that but that's only important if it's falling on the shoulders of the other 90%.
If you don't have the other 90% in place and that's where we're talking about contextual congruence, that's we're talking about social psychology, that's understanding positioning and all that other stuff.
Once you have that in place and at 10% the little tweaks are going to matter but if you don't have that other stuff in place and you're just focusing on tactical stuff, you may get a few results but in my opinion you know tactics create sales strategies and build businesses.
We want to be kind of like honed in on the strategy before we deploy any of the tactics on whatever platform we choose to use at the current time.
When it comes to the ads and targeting, what is your experience been with the video ads, gen ads and some of the newer add even canvas ads and some of the new things that Facebook is made available have you done a lot with those? Have you seen one thing conclusively one way or another?
We have and I think the problem with the marketplace is A) Everyone is looking for the next shiny object. B) Everyone's looking for like the newest tip and trick and how that's all going to work. There are rules and there are exceptions to rules like the rules of thumb rather than rules like commandments.
Video ads, if you want to get great brand exposure, if you want to get virality, if you want to get cheap views and all that kind of stuff. Video ads are fantastic if they go head-to-head against a traditional kind of like image-based newsfeed ad for leech and purposes, they don't even come close, generally speaking.
What I found is most people aren't even good on video so if you're not good on video then hell like avoid the video ad.
A lot of people say, “Teach me how to do video. You might suck at video. We could do everything else the same way somebody doesn't like the way you look.
The whole other thing is if people ask me all the time, it is the webinar the best way to convert clients. If you like kick-ass on webinars, yes but if you suck, no. It's not only one way to go but here's the mentality that anyone needs to understand when they go into something.
Your cold prospect, we're not talking about warm prospects but someone who doesn't know who you are and can't separate you from Adam that person is looking, unfortunately, it's the world we live in. That person is looking for every reason to say no to you.
If your audio crackles in your video at the wrong point or you're wearing the wrong color shirt or your team that's being represented on the hat you're wearing is something that they hate or the background is like anything to say no, they're going to find that reason.
We're looking to like minimize resistance at all costs and oftentimes video ads cost resistance for all the things we mentioned. Lead ads, conceptually great idea, click one button opt-in.
To me what we're finding for lead ads is again is can you get cheaper leads a hundred percent because from a user resistance flow standpoint it's easier to operate on. Do those leads convert into sales? Traditionally, what we’ve seen and the answer is no.
Facebook Lead Generation: Lead ads are great if you're going after a mobile audience. You just need to watch the numbers to see if they’re converting into sales or just clicking buttons.
There's always this fine balance of well how do I get good qualified cheap leads but how do I make sure that those leads are most apt to convert rather than just building a list of nonsense group of people who don't want anything that I have to offer?
Video ads are cool if they're done right. I like to use it much more for branding or positioning or retargeting more than I do straight-up lead generation.
Lead ads are great if you're going after a mobile audience. You just want to watch the numbers to see are they converting into sales or do they just like clicking buttons.
Is Facebook changing anything in your experience with going straight from ad to squeeze page?
I hear that happen all the time and the answer is no as long as the landing page is compliant. That's a big “as long as”.
We're taught, in the internet marketing world, that a good high converting squeeze page is one that has like the least amount of things on it. It has a box to fill out information, a button and a headline.
Those traditionally in the past work well. On Facebook, you'll get banned tomorrow for doing that thing. Straight to lead pages, we run probably 80% of our traffic straight to lead pages or opt-in pages as long as they're compliant.
They work wonderfully and then about 20 or 30% of our traffic would go to some content piece first that we would then retarget.
Are you subscribing to that as well but getting the pixel is as important if not more important getting the email address?
The pixel is uber and important and the pixel allows you to mimic activities that you could do if you captured the actual email address, we can push someone through a funnel without ever getting their email address, which I think is cool.
From a lead gen standpoint what we've come up with and I got to come up with a better name because I'm on a track with some good names and this name just sucks, but it's like a crossbreed between a landing page and content.
I've been calling it now a value first landing page, but it's a piece of content that has tons of great value but embedded into the content are four distinct ways to capture a lead.
We're not just going for the pixel play, we are going for the lead gen play but we're doing it in a way where we're leading with the content rather than with the promise.
I found one, I may have to put this in the show notes or send it to you offline and I did a podcast about this. It was a native ad and it was amazing. I'm looking for it on the Google machine here on my website, I was like this is perfect, a great example and I will shoot this to you here in a moment.
What was great is it got you there to a page and there are so many things going on like different ways that they can either take you to capture your lead or just do something else with you.
It looked like a blog page, it wasn't but it wasn't just a fake blog. It was with all the other little things were so strategically placed. This is brilliant. They are the big money.
Are you finding any certain targeting strategies that are working better than others? Targeting is probably the most complex and confusing part of Facebook advertising only because there are infinite ways to do it. It's almost like starting with a blank page.
This is what I hate I don't run a lot of my own Facebook ads so I'll. do some of the basics if I'm just testing some crap out done but I hate sitting there just like sitting in front of a blank piece of paper for sales copy, going where do I start the targeting stuff? What's your process there?
It's an interesting conversation because the beauty of Facebook it lets you like a micro target and we live in a world where we're gone past mass marketing into micro marketing and the idea of micro targeting or laser targeting is ideal, but we are in the business of doing is not just micro targeting.
We also have to figure out how to target but also how to scale and so the problem with micro targeting is let's say I'm going after like people who live in downtown San Diego who happened to be male between the ages of like 26 and 45, who just watched the last episode of Game of Thrones.
That is a good niche target and you could probably do some damage with it, but the problem is you're going to run out of that audience like that. How will you approach targeting and again, we can get specific?
There are a couple of different ways to do it. One great targeting strategy for example and this would be contingent upon, not even continued upon you having a list. I call it the reverse funnel strategy. It's not the only targeting we do, but it's a nice away to do it.
When you're originally starting out with any of a campaign, the success of that campaign is going to be heavily contingent upon your ad copy and your performance and your targeting, so you need to have that dialed in so you can start generating leads and start what we call seasoning your pixel.
Does that terminology make any sense to you?
Yes, it does.
We start seasoning your pixel with specific targeting lowest hanging fruit type targeting so we can train the pixel to get good and clear about understanding who it is that you're going after.
Once you start getting that pixel seasoned, you can open up your targeting and get broad and the goal is as soon as humanly possible to make your targeting as broad as possible. Meaning US men between the ages of 28 and 65 and then you rely on the seasoned pixel to do most of the heavy lifting for you.
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How can you do that in a way that kind of makes sense? There's a reverse funnel methodology that we can use and we start with targeting. We focus on the lowest hanging fruit. The identified some let's say influencers in your space.
We arrive and believe that no matter what industry you're in, there are people collecting in tribes and of course every tribe has a tribal leader or an influencer.
If I can identify who the influencers are in the spaces that I'm going after, we're going to start with them and their fanbase and then use a tool like audience insights for example to start expanding that out even further.
For the sake of this example, let's say Tony Robbins because we're in the personal development space and those are both kind of big spaces and household names that everyone can know.
We will create a lead magnet campaign similar to how I explained with Taki. We're going to identify what's your positioning, what kind of asset can you offer to the marketplace to bring them a unique solution.
We're going to run ad campaigns to start generating leads at that point into as big of a funnel like Tony Robbins is the audience within certain parameters.
Once that pixel has been seasoned to where we generate, let's say a thousand leads and I use that term thousand because it's not so little but it's big enough to get what we want done, we will take that and if we want to we’ll create a look-alike audience around the thousand leads and this now seasoned pixel.
We'll start running the same campaign but we're going to run it to this lookalike audience who is built off of our thousand leads. We're going to do that until we get a thousand customers.
Once we've got a thousand customers, we're going to do the exact same process again. We’ll create a look-alike audience and now these are buyers look-alikes rather than leads look-alikes.
We're going to open it up as broad as we can again and go after this bigger, but more specific audience that's going to end up continually generating greater leads at greater cost and higher conversions.
That's an example of what I call reverse funneling where we start broad, we generate a lookalike audience until we get a thousand leads and we're going for a thousand customers and we're going to do that whole same process again.
It allows us too to get some good results using a simple targeting strategy without pulling out our hair about who we're going to go after and how is it going to work and all that other stuff. Does that kind of make sense?
I talked to some other people who did it the exact opposite but I like what you're saying better and I think it makes more logical sense too.
I've heard it going broad and just letting Facebook, then tell you, “Who are the type of people clicking on this?” and then go after them. They would do the shotgun approach and then cherry-pick it.
They were saying that it's cheaper if you go wide because you're not using as many data points from Facebook but you're also wasting a bunch of time and money.
I wouldn't go broad until you have a little bit of data and the only reason why we talk about broad is because we want to talk about scaling like you want.
You want to have the ability to spend tons of money and generate tons of ROI for the next years to come rather than being stuck spending it for the next month and thinking I just ran out of my audience.
I know this has been one of the things I'm trying to tackle recently, nothing to do with coaching and strategy.
My wife and I have a national coffee brand via eCommerce. We sell on in our own Shopify store as well as an Amazon and it is a blue ocean. It's called Stiletto Coffee. It is the only coffee marketed towards women.
People say why is it marketed towards women do it like helped him lose weight? I said it's guaranteed to help them lose weight if the caffeine in their system wakes them up and then they decide to go to the gym and they decide eat healthy they will guarantee to lose weight.
It has been called the sexiest coffee brand in the country, sexy packaging. Nobody else is selling coffee to the demographic and the psychographic we are. Everybody else is selling their beans. We’re zigging, they’re zagging. We think we've got a first move or advantage there.
The audience there is driven professional, classy, sassy women, typically probably into some personal development. They obviously love coffee and ideally premium coffee maybe they're into fashion because it's got that whole Stiletto Coffee.
Conceptually thinking, I have some ideas of who to go after so I've been going after women who like coffee but also like certain fashion brands but then women who like coffee.
Facebook Lead Generation: Remain as broad as possible because that gives you the ability to scale out and spend more and not worry about running out of people to reach.
You can even go towards the buyer profiles to say they are beverage coffee buyers. I don't know how effective that is. I've only dabbled in this so far, but I'll say they like them and they like all these various personal development gurus.
They like coffee, they like Marie Forleo, they like all these other people and I'm going into some other ones. I haven't gone much deeper than that and as I sit there I'm going this is so tedious that it drives me crazy but that's where people like you come in.
First of all, you think that based upon what I told you, the preliminary thing. The right thing to do is take little segments there and just see if I can start to get traffic.
I would even see if you can go even a slight bit broader, so just go after women who like coffee to start and just see what the Facebook data is going to tell you because once we run that for a little bit you're going to start to see reports.
Once you start seeing the reports, they’re going to say well this is the age group that's responding best to you and this is why and depending on what your acquisition cost. Let's say you can spend, I'm not sure how much that coffee cost?
Their margins are crap.
Let's say a bag of coffee costs $20 and your takeaway from that is whatever $10 or $5 or whatever be.
Let’s just call double.
Let's say it is $10 and so you can spend depending on if you have like a solid lifetime value process in the back of this. Let's say you could spend like 50% of that. Let's say acquisition is $5 just for the sake of easy numbers because I'm terrible at math.
What I would do is first start broad and see what my acquisition cost is going to be. If I can keep my acquisition cost under $5 with broad audiences i.e. coffee drinkers who are women, that means I can scale the hell out of this puppy and never have to think about it ever again.
Let's say just going broad like this and I'm noticing, “Wait a second, my acquisition cost is closer to $8 or $11. It means I need to tweak something.” That's where you might want to start either doing like the reverse funnel type thing we talked about.
That's where you might want to layer on other interests, that's where you may want to look at the reports and say well wait a second majority of these people who are buying the coffee are between the ages of 32 and 40.
You would set up a campaign specifically to them and then you'd figure out, “Those guys are winning. I'm going to let those be but the other pool here that's not winning, I'm going to figure out how do I layer audiences.”
“Whether they be Marie Forleo and coffee drinkers, or they read Entrepreneur Magazine and they’re coffee drinkers, or maybe it's more like they read Vanity Fair or Cosmo and they’re coffee drinkers, just to start tapping in to see who is going to be responding better than others.
You're not going super-duper hyper specific and narrow in the beginning, you're going somewhat specific then you're watching what they tell you then you're going narrow?
You're going narrow only if you see that you're not getting your acquisition cost. If you're getting your acquisition cost and you're happy with it then you can remain as broad as possible because again that gives you the ability to scale out and spend more and not worry about running out of people to reach.
This has been helpful. Like your team, like you’re a one-man show I don't think so because you have an agency aspect right? You do some done for you. What's it like to either work with you or learn from you?
From an agency model, we've been fortunate enough to get to this place where we will only take on done-for-you clients you come through one of two channels either as a strategic partner and that could be someone like yourself let's say or a current client of ours.
Referral from a current client.
We've ceased all marketing with regards to our done-for-you stuff either strategic partners or current clients are going to introduce us to people and we do have a bandwidth so in terms of we are a boutique and we only work with twenty clients at any given time and we make sure that they meet certain criteria, another criteria isn't like all that complicated.
We want to hit a home run for you in month one and the way that we can assure that to happen is if you have sales funnel or an up process that you know that is working, you just need to light this thing on fire and get some optimization and tweaking from someone like myself and our team
We'll take you on, we'll analyze your funnel, we'll analyze the situation, I'll give you an honest opinion of, “Yes, we can knock this out of the park for you,” or, “Yes, we could if these changes are made first,”
Or, “No way in hell we can make this work for you based on the expectations you're telling me, let me refer you to someone who you might have a better shot with.”
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Based on whichever three of those categories they fit into, we would end up working with them and doing a fully managed Facebook advertising done for you A to Z, don't lift the hand, we take care of the whole kit and caboodle.
Is there a sweet spot on the minimum amount that they're budgeting to spend per month?
The answer to that is no. I know a lot of agencies say like well and the reason why they say that honestly is because they're taking a percentage of ad spend.
Most agency models will charge you a percentage of ad spend, like you got to spend 25 grand a month so they're at least walking away with five grand or twenty five hundred or whatever they charge.
For us, I don't care how much you spend. What's more important is that you know your numbers so that we can “bake in and guarantee” but we can bake in and guarantee ROI because let's say you came to me and said Nick, if I can acquire customers for under $5.
You have Carte Blanche with my credit card. You could spend as much as you want because I know I'm going to be profitable every single day of the year.
All my job is to make sure that I'm acquiring customers under $5 for you, so for us it's never a matter of like I only have fifteen grand a month to spend, can we make that work? It's like look if you know your numbers, you tell me what your acquisition or your lead generation costs are.
We make sure we let you know if that's possible or not. If it is possible we'll do it at whatever budget you can afford. It doesn't even matter.
We have some people spending $5,000 a month. We have other people who are spending $90,000 a day. It's all over the board.
Did you say you get or maybe you didn't, you get paid than a flat fee or is it a percentage of results? Because it didn't sound like you get paid a percentage of ads spend.
We do get paid a flat fee for 99% of our clients. It seems to work best, we get paid, and they get paid, everybody's happy.
I've had people in the industry tell me well you should be charging a lot more or you should be doing a percentage model. At the end of the day, I don't want to penalize my clients for spending more.
If they want to spend more, it's the same amount of work for us so spend more, spend less we're not going to penalize you and pretend that it's more work because you're spending more money.
I've never liked that whole percentage of ad spend only because I know it's not creating necessarily much more work for you, just moving the budget up like let's duplicate this ad over here and put more money on it like should you get paid twice as much money?
The answer for the most part is no. Scaling is an art in and of itself like you can't approach $100,000 a day has been the same you would like a $5,000 a month ad spend but proportionally you're right.
I'm not going to charge that person 20% or 30% of ad spend just because they're spending more when I know from a bandwidth and an execution standpoint, it's going to require this much work of us.
So 90%, why is a 99% of the people fit into that category is because every month once a month we'll also take on a launch client so someone who has a hard start and stop date for a product that they're launching.
Will take on one of those and those clients we do a percentage of revenue share and that's because we know that it's going to be a home run and we're going to make money and they're going to make money.
It is also a lot of work.
Hell of a lot of work.
It is time-based, it's deadline-based like, “Go.” so launches love them and I hate them. They put several years of age on you.
By far for sure and it taxes our team heavily and that's why we can only do once a month for that. That's kind of done for you side.
I was going to say is that you also do live events and workshops, right? Like an intensive you call it implementation intensive.
Facebook Lead Generation: Scaling is an art in and of itself.
On the consulting side, that's three major streams. Major stream number one is usually where we like to get people to start and that's our two-day intensives and we call them a two-day intensive. I hate to use the word workshop or bootcamp because that's not what it is.
One of my biggest frustrations with the kind of the information space and the kind of live event space is you go, you get fire hosed with amazing information which is amazing but you leave with like this notebook full of notes of things you got to implement and the reality is you never implement them.
There's just too much stuff to do, you get caught up, you enjoyed the joys of meeting new people but the actual implementation side of it is a bloody mess.
What my promise to anyone who attends our event is this you show up with whatever you have and you leave with at least 90% of your entire Facebook marketing funnel done and completed by the time you walk out that door.
All you need to do is press the green go button, best-case scenario or worst case scenario a couple of touch-ups and little minor things here and there before you hit the green Go button, but the idea is you show up, you roll up your sleeves.
People hate me by the end of it but they love me because they've never worked so hot about their business.
I thought I was just coming here to learn and network.
To learn some and they're like, “I can't believe I got this all done.” They love me when it's all done because it's there and they press go and they see results in a matter of hours. That's a beautiful thing. Those are our two-day intensives
We have what we call like our one-off accelerator day. Companies will hire me to fly out to them, spend one entire day, that’s 6 hours with them to customize a lead generation approach and consult with them in the process and then we also have like a consulting program or an advisory program.
I'm not a coach by any means I think I make a terrible coach, but I think I make a pretty darn good advisor and so we have this ongoing approach where you know you can bring me on as like a pseudo CMO.
I don't like to use that word, but a marketing advisor where you get calls with me regularly, every month we go over your stuff. I work with your team to make sure that it's implemented properly and that's the consulting arm of it.
Are we looking to get more of one type of client? Realistically, if you had to give up all of those from the intensive to the done for you, accelerators whatever advisors, what would you love to have this more of? What would make your life to be awesome and easy?
From a delivery standpoint, result standpoint and scaling standpoint, the intensives are quite amazing. We can put and we limit it to sixteen to twenty people. We can put sixteen to twenty business people in a room and get them results instantly.
It also satisfies like my need and desire to teach and train and advise while simultaneously doing a little implementation at the same time. It is tons of fun and it allows me to leave Toronto and come to Southern California.
From on everything standpoint, if we could only do intensives and scale them up that would probably be something that we do but every element serves a different kind of person so they're all quite fun.
Where can people go to learn more about you, the master of Facebook lead generation, I got to see what else he's doing, so what is the place?
There are a couple of things like if you want to connect with me on a personal level Facebook is the easiest way to do that I am fortunately the only Nicholas Kusmich on the planet or at least on Facebook which to me is the planet.
I'm easy to find, you can find me, add me as a friend and we'll like definitely connect there. That is on a personal level if you want to know what we do from a business side NicholasKusmich.com.
You got to get a short one that forwards to that. Come to think about that. I've got like Brad Costanzo, first one is easy, second one always gets misspelled, but yours takes the cake.
I’ve got a call it something different but for now it's NicholasKusmich.com and that's like all things business there.
We have a fantastic free Facebook group called Facebook Marketing Mastery. It's got about 6,000 people in there, smart intelligent Facebook marketers and a great community of people who support.
I'll jump in there several times a day and lend a helping hand to anyone who's got issues or have questions. I got a free training called Behind Closed Doors Workshop, it's a 40-minute summarized training of stuff.
I typically offer