392: Screw Apple! Timeless Facebook Ad Strategies That Always Work With Jordan Menard

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You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. And today I have an amazing guest on the show, Jordan Menard. And Jordan is the founder of Motive Digital, where he specializes in digital advertising for famous influencers like Robert Kiyosaki, Tai Lopez, Dan Lok, and more. And in this episode, we’re gonna talk about an evergreen strategy to scale an e-commerce brand with paid advertising. But before we begin, I wanna thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode.

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Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-commerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Postscript specializes in text messages marketing for e-commerce and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution converts like crazy and you can try for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

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I also want thank Klaviyo who is also a sponsor of show. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store and it depends on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who is shopping in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy.

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Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers, depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there’s full revenue tracking on every single email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used. You can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And finally, I wanted to mention my other podcasts, which I released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast, where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast,

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covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m happy to have Jordan Menard on the show. Jordan is someone who I met at Nick Shackelford’s Geek Out Event in San Diego, and I was very impressed with his talk. He is the founder of Motive Digital, where he helps brands with their digital advertising, and he’s run paid advertising for people like Robert Kiyosaki, Tai Lopez, Dan Lok, and many more. And he’s probably spent over $100 million in the past couple years alone.

02:39
And today we’re gonna talk about scaling e-commerce brands with paid advertising. And I guess the interview would not be complete unless we talked a little bit about Apple iOS 14. And with that, welcome to show Jordan, how you doing today? Great man, thanks for having me, how you doing? I’m doing pretty well. Congratulations on your nuptials. Thank you, thank you. Just got married to a woman way out of my league. So obviously you know I’m a good marketer.

03:07
Yes, obviously. Yes, clearly. Yeah, I think your wife was a geek out, right? Yes, she was. Oh, yeah. You married up man. You married up. Yeah, 100%. The benefits of being good at advertising yourself. So Jordan, give us the background story real quick and tell us how you got started with advertising copyrighting in the first place. Yeah, my background story is pretty interesting. Actually.

03:32
I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. A lot of people, you know, when they’re kids, like they have that dream career or whatever. I most definitely did not have that. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I was good at arguing with people. So I figured I might as well go be a lawyer. And so, you know, about two years into junior college, when I was getting ready to transfer, I was actually on the speech and debate team and was pretty successful.

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And I had been offered a scholarship, a full ride to a couple schools, one being Southern Illinois University. And basically my whole life was like paved in front of me. Like I had a full like the path to law school and then placement after that was paved in front of me, but I hated it. Like I, I passionately like despised it. Like I just really did not like school. I’ve never liked school. I didn’t like what I was doing. I was good at it, but I didn’t like it.

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And while I was in junior college, one of the ways that I was paying the bills was I was working, it was like this real estate website technology company. And they were down in Pacific beach. And it was like the worst job you can imagine. Like it was, it was like waking up super early, making like 150 cold calls a day. No lead list given to us at all. I just had to find everything on Google and I would basically call people and be like, Hey, it’s Jordan from

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company, I noticed that the property search in your website wasn’t functioning. Are you aware of this? And I would just kind of weasel my way into pitching them either a home search widget or an actual website. And, know, at this point in my life, I was really aimless. I realized that I didn’t want to go be a lawyer and I realized I definitely didn’t want to keep doing what I was doing, but I always had a good work ethic. And, uh, my, dad taught me how to work hard for when I was a kid. And so one night I was at the office. It was late. I was the last person there.

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And I had made 120 cold calls that day and I hadn’t gotten a deal. I was continuing to dial and I was just looking for real estate agents on Google. And I was on page like four or five of the SERPs and I saw an ad at the top. for the first time I had this epiphany. I don’t click on those, but the reason I’m seeing it is because other people do. So I clicked on it and I went to this crummy black and green landing page and

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And then I realized as soon as I landed on the page, was like, oh my gosh, this guy’s doing exactly what I’m doing. But here I am like a schmuck crawling through page after page after page after page. And this guy’s just putting his stuff where everyone’s looking. And I was, I just had this moment where like, okay, I’m doing this, whatever this is, this is what I’m doing. And I, and from that moment kind of set out to really learn all my nads started with Google. Then I became an affiliate and

06:20
you know, was kind of the affiliate model was tough. didn’t have a lot of capital. I would have success and then things would go down. I’m doing some, some running some questionable offers that I eventually kind of was like, Hey, don’t, I’m ethically, I don’t want to do this. Like I want to, I want to find a way to do this in a way where I can tell my mom what I’m doing and you know, I bad. And,

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That’s when I kind of got into the agency life. I became the director of marketing for a company called FranConnect in Carlsbad, California. And from there, one of my friends tagged me in a post and it was like this weird quiz, like showing how much you knew about Facebook ads. And I filled it out and it ended up actually being from consulting.com and Sam Ovens. And that’s where I became the director of user acquisition at consulting.com, moved to New York.

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And that was the first time I scaled a Facebook ad account to like, you know, 30, 40, 50, 60,000 a day profitably. Um, and that’s kind of where I fell in love with scaling ads. And, uh, now, you know, now I run my own agency motif digital and the rest is history, as I said. Nice. So, you know, Jordan, I actually really enjoyed your talk at geek out mainly because you had a great answer for how to create effective ads. And specifically there were three words that you said on stage.

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that I will never forget. Do you happen to remember what those three words were? No, I said there were so many words I said. It’s to narrow down to three. I’m sure everyone has had got different takeaways, but mine was thinking angles. Yes. And it’s actually something that’s really fundamentally changed the way I think about just advertising. So I want to kind of start by talking about that statement. First off, can you elaborate what it means and what your process is like for

08:12
Producing a creative. Yeah, man. I love that this is where the conversation’s going. I love angle creation. So let’s start with what an angle actually is. Sure. In my opinion, and I think a lot of people have different definitions for this, but in my opinion, an angle is a high level approach to a product or service centered around one pain point or one solution. So let’s say like for consulting.com, for example,

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One of the angles that I came up with was how to become financially independent in 90 days. So the angle would be financial independence, right? And then the rest of the ad went around that. The angle is like a high level approach. So one of our clients, Vessi Footwear, incredible brand, one of the strongest brands I think in the marketplace right now in regards to e-comm, they have amazing shoes and they’re waterproof shoes.

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So we’ll write ads about them being waterproof, but at one point we wanted to make an angle about how the shoes are vegan friendly. So the vegan friendly element became the angle. It’s the high level approach. So now not only are you buying shoes, but you’re buying shoes that are good for the world.

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And that’s what an angle does. Angles have the power to make the purchase more than just the purchase of a good or a service and turn it into something bigger, something more meaningful. And so when I say think in angles and how I encourage all of our copywriters, all of our media buyers, really our whole team is come up with those high level approaches to the product. Because if you come up with good angles, the rest of the work is going to be going downhill.

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So I teach a class on e-commerce and one thing that a lot of my students have problems with is coming up with these angles. So for example, I have a student that sells jewelry. So what is your process for coming up with different angles or even just the whole brainstorming process? Yeah, for sure. So it’s funny that we’re having this conversation today because yesterday I was literally just kind of reworking this process for our internal team. Perfect. All right. So

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I think that there’s a few ways to do it. I think that the best marketers, they steal like artists, right? They don’t just sit there and what I call wait for rain, right? They don’t just sit there and be like, all right, I’m gonna come up with a great idea. That leads to a creative fatigue and it leads to a roadblock. Nine times out of 10, if you’re just being like, all right, I’m gonna go be creative. The pressure to be creative will mess with your head so intensely.

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that you’re not going to get anything done. So what I encourage my people to do is steal like an artist, right? So one of the ways that we do that is we’ll go to, you know, go to Amazon and find your five biggest competitors. Okay. Right. People who are selling the, your same product and go look at their reviews, go to the five star reviews and go to the one star reviews. So first let’s start with the five star reviews. So,

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In an ideal world, you’re gonna find three competitors, you’re gonna go to the five star reviews, you’re gonna copy five to seven five star reviews from each one of your three competitors. You’re gonna take all of them and go to like a word cloud generator and paste all of those five star reviews into the word cloud generator and generate a word cloud. And then look at some of the biggest words that come up.

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And that’s a really good way to kind of figure out, what does my market want in regards to this type of product base? It takes out the guesswork and then do the same thing for the one-star reviews, where the five-star reviews are going to talk about the positive side of the angle. The one-star reviews are going to talk about the negative side of the angle, things that the product is not, things that the product defeats, things that your product is better than.

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compared to the market. And so from there, you’re kind of going to get those springboards where you can kind of launch into whatever angle creation based around those word clouds. think the other thing to do is really, really stock Facebook ad library. Find your competitors. Love it. Yeah. See ads that are running and then kind of steal it and make it your own. Take those exact things, but do it your own way.

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You know what’s great about this is I actually went through this exercise with a student in my class who sells soap, and it’s men’s soap, and then I found Dr. Squatch. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that brand. Oh yes, legendary. But their ads really focused on the sex appeal aspect, which is something that she wasn’t doing. She was talking about, you know, she uses organic ingredients, it smells good and whatnot, but then Dr. Squatch, you watch one of those ads, and it’s all about like how your significant other, you know,

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It’s basically sex appeal, which is like a much deeper thing than what she was trying to 100%. So one of one of the angles we came up with for that for Vessi that same brand, the headline was shoes so vegan, they wouldn’t hurt a fly. Nice. And that whole angle was about how when you buy sustainable clothing, you’re helping the world. And

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We took something that is very innocuous, the purchase of a shoe and turn it into, hey, this helps the world. You’re contributing to making the world a better place. In the same way that Dr. Squatch takes soap and turns it into your love life will be more successful. That’s the power of the angle. I remember seeing some of those. I think I’ve seen some of them before. So the fact that they’re waterproof, I think maybe you displayed this ad on there, but

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It was just like you just slapped on like all this dirt grime and food and then you just took like a watering can and the shoes instantly became new. Totally. So that angle compared to the vegan angle, like that part worked better on me than the vegan angle, I guess. So do you try to tackle different angles in one ad? No, never. So we’re very, I’m very, very big on this and it’s something that I’m talking with my copywriters about all the time.

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You can talk about multiple benefits of the product, I guess, but I’m a really, really big believer in the angle is all about one thing. One single thing. If it’s waterproof, it’s all about how it’s waterproof. If it’s vegan, it’s all about how it’s vegan and helps the world be a better place. Save the animals. Whatever the angle is should focus on one single thing because I don’t believe that the audience really has that broad of an attention span.

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You only have a chance to communicate one idea. And if you convolute it, the impact is way less. That makes sense. That makes sense. I guess it just also appeals to different people, right? Like certain people such as myself might not even care about the vegan aspect, but I care about the utility more. A hundred percent, right? And that’s what angles do, right? Angles that not everybody has the same angle, right? Angles are for specific people.

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But that’s the point of it. It’s to go after a specific person. when we were running, so shout out to Nick Fisher, good buddy of mine. And now he runs a JEC, an agency as well. And we have a lot of collaborations together. He’s actually the guy that hired me at consulting.com. And so one of the things that we were doing at consulting.com is, know, scaling beyond 30 or 40,000 a day on Facebook’s pretty tricky.

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Right. It’s one thing to get to five or 10 K a day. And then it’s another to get to 30 and then getting beyond 30 is quite hard. so we were, you know, questioning, okay, how do we solve this problem? How do we continue to scale when it feels like we’re maxing out? And one of the things that we started to look into was scaling globally. And we came across some research about cultural clusters and cultural clusters are the idea in psychology.

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that different areas of the world will have different underlying values that they primarily value compared to somewhere else, right? Basically, different areas of the world care about different things. Makes sense. And so one of the things that we decided to do is like, okay, let’s test these angles, but let’s group these areas by these cultural clusters and see how they work. And wouldn’t you know it, different angles work better for different clusters, right? Different areas.

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resonated better with different angles. And so to your point, like you said, you care about the utility most definitely, but maybe someone else cares about the vegan angle. And I want both those sales, right? I want both those sales. And so that’s what angles allow you to do. It allows you to speak directly to an audience and capture both parties. Whereas a general approach or a general ad would only get

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you know, maybe even lose both. Would those different angles necessarily have to target different audiences though? So yes and no, right? Like they’re not mutually exclusive. You can have one angle that targets multiple audiences, but I would say, you know, you, you want to write angles that go out, that solve one specific problem. So multiple people could resonate with it. Uh, but you still want to address that one specific problem. If that makes sense. Sure.

18:08
I mean, since we’ve been talking about Bessie, like what are some of the angles that you use to market those waterproof shoes? So you mentioned doing the word cloud first and then you took the word cloud and you came up with different angles. I’m just kind of curious, like the process by which you came up with the angles from the keyword cloud. Sure. So things like sustainability, things like we’ll have an angle about quality, right? Like not even going after the waterproof element is hard, just going after the fact that they’re really high quality shoes. off, going off to the fact that they’re waterproof, that they’re

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you know, really that’s that they lead the market in being the water, the waterproof shoe going after the fact that they’re really stylish, right? All of these, you know, people commenting how they love the styles, they love the colors, they love the flexibility, the breathability. All of these things are different angles that you can take when advertising your product. And then you factor in the green element as well, the vegan element as well. And that’s, you know, like five different angles. And then you can have multiple iterations of those angles.

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If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

19:38
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

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And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now back to the show. Iterations meaning just different ways to tell the story of that particular angle. Exactly. Okay. Exactly. You know, what’s funny is I’ve been watching a lot of old Apple commercials recently. And one of the ones that I just literally watched like a couple of days ago was this one where they were trying to sell the iPad and

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You know, when I think of the iPad, like if I were to do this exercise as someone who doesn’t do this all the time, I was thinking, okay, great, an iPad lets you watch movies on the plane, it’s portable and all that stuff. But what Apple did is they created this really awesome commercial where it showed a bunch of parents, a set of parents using the iPad to keep their kids busy so they could do other things. But then, like the kids made this awesome movie for their grandparents. It was very touching. I actually started tearing up, which never happens.

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And that angle was just amazing. It was beyond what, I mean, it almost didn’t even need to be the iPad that they were selling at that point. Right, exactly. Exactly. And Apple is so skilled at this. Their Super Bowl ad, the 1984 one, are you familiar with that? Yes, of course. It’s a classic. It’s a classic, right? That kind of changed the advertising game.

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And if you look at that, you don’t even fully like, like to your point, you don’t even fully understand like, what is this selling? Like it’s not, it’s selling like a cultural shift or like it’s, it’s selling like independent thinking, breaking away from the cog of the machine. And I think that’s what good advertising really does. Like, so in my geek out presentation, I showed that Volkswagen ad.

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Yes. Was responsible for causing the creative revolution in Madison Avenue. Now that ad in a time where people in the 50s and 60s were really selling cars based off status. If you buy this car, you’ll feel rich and you’ll get the girl and you’ll make more money and all this stuff.

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And that was just the tried and true approach that was continually coming out of Madison Avenue to the point where people were actually starting to feel anxious about these ads. They’re like, man, I’ll never measure up to that, right? It was having an unintended consequence. And so when Bill Birnbach and his firm came up with this ad, it was so radically different than anything anyone had ever seen. It was just a picture of the bug, very small with an all gray background. And it said, think small.

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And that ad was so controversial that the creative that made it flew back to Germany the day it was going to be released to avoid the blowback. And that ad completely changed the game, completely changed the game to the point where kids were cutting it out of magazines and pinning it on their wall. Right. It changed culture and the whole, the whole angle was think small, completely the opposite of what everyone was doing.

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And I think that’s what really good angles do, right? Apple’s 1984 ad was about thinking independently. It was about thinking different, right? And that’s where their slogan comes from. And the Volkswagen ad in the sixties that started the creative revolution was about thinking small. It had nothing to do with the car, right? It was so much more than that. And I think that’s what really good ads do. Like you said, that Apple, that the iPad ad made you like emotional, right?

23:45
And like they say, like Eric Tauz at Shine On says, if you make them cry, you make them buy. So let me ask you this. mean, I guess it’s an art and a science, but how do you achieve that with your products? Like how would you achieve that same feeling with waterproof shoes, for example? Super difficult, right? Yeah. It’s super difficult. And I think one of the worst things that you can do is try to do that and execute it poorly.

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You know what I mean? If you try to be deep, you’ll come across as like an edgy 14 year old. Definitely not the angle that you want to take, right? But a good example would be like what we did with the vegan element of it, right? Or another example. So one of our clients sells belts. The angle was the belt that wears in, not out. What does that mean? The belt that wears in, not out. okay. We spoke to the quality of the product.

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But rather than saying this is a super high quality belt, it’ll last forever. We said it wears in, not out. It gets more comfortable as time goes on. Ah, got it. Right? So that’s coming from a high level approach. And that’s doing that think small type of thing, but understanding that it’s a belt, right? And so we stay true to the product. And I wish I had a better recipe for coming up with those clever headlines. All I can say is,

25:10
hire good people who are creative and encourage them to write a lot. And about less than 10 % of the time, they’re gonna come up with those great ideas. I guess what I’m trying to ask is how important is it to tap into the emotions as opposed to just like the benefits? I think that selling based off the benefits is the laziest thing that you can do, right? It’s the lowest hanging fruit.

25:39
Now, do we still talk about those benefits? Yeah, most definitely. But anything that we do, we want to try to tell a story and tap into the emotions. So for example, we sell, one of our clients sells shampoo and conditioner. Like the Dr. Squatch example, nothing really sexy about shampoo and conditioner. Now you can say, hey, this is the best shampoo all you want, but no one’s going to care about that. No one cares. They don’t care about the benefits of your product.

26:07
because every brand out there tells you that their product’s great. We’re desensitized to it. We go numb to it. So instead, we had a mom talk about how the damage to her hair from the big brand shampoos and conditioners, which are filled with chemicals, had ruined her confidence to the point that she didn’t even want to go out on date night with her husband anymore because her hair looks so frizzy, dry, brittle, and damaged. Dude, I love this.

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once she found out about all natural shampoos and conditioners with things that can make their, know, restore the pH levels of their scalp, not only did her hair get better, but her confidence got better as well. And it, you know, the best part was her husband even noticed, man, your hair smells great. Right? And so we took a very basic product and instead of telling you about the benefits,

27:02
we showed you the benefits by telling a story of transformation. You know what’s funny about this story is like, since I was helping this student out, I was watching a lot of soap ads and a lot of the big brands like the Doves and what they don’t do a really good job of this at all. Yeah. And that’s, that’s, that’s the benefit of having a really, really strong brand. You don’t have to do as much work, but imagine if they did, right? Yeah. That’s what I was thinking.

27:31
Yeah. All right. So when you’re putting together an ad then, so we talked about, just mentioned that just focusing on the benefits, like is the lazy way to advertise when you’re thinking about angles though. Uh, so for that angle that you just said, uh, with, with the mom who didn’t want to go out anymore because her hair, she was ashamed to go out. That’s one angle, but that one angle can contain a lot of benefits encapsulated. Okay. are the primary emotions that you can tap into? So.

28:01
you know, really, I think like the life force eight kind of thinking pays off here. What is the life force eight for people listening who don’t know what that is? Yeah, so life force eight comes from cashvertising by Drew Whitman. And so I’ll just real quick go through them. Survival enjoyment of life life extension number one. Number two enjoyment of food and beverages. Number three, freedom from fear, pain, danger. Number four,

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You know, like the Dr. Squatch ads, sexual companionship. Number five, comfortable living conditions. Six, to be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses, kind of like those old car ads from the 50s we talked about. Seven, care and protection of loved ones. Eight, social approval. Okay. Wow. You just whipped those out off the top of your head. We go through them a lot. It’s almost like you live and breathe this stuff. Yeah. It’s almost like I do this full time and this is my…

29:02
Okay, so with every ad that you create, do you try to tap into these? So it’s a good question. I think so, whether consciously or unconsciously, I think we do. If I’m training someone, and they’re asking me how do I create angles, I’m going to go through how we steal like an artist, how you do because in my opinion, good angles come from research, the most creative people are the people that do the most research and steal like artists.

29:29
But after that, you still got to put the pen to the paper, right? You still got to come up with the angle. And so I think if you’re struggling with it, start there. Come up with those things and speak to those things. And it can be a useful tool. It’s kind of like a fundamental tool, right? Maybe some of my copywriters don’t use that directly, but they do use it subconsciously. Yeah. So I think when it comes to the Life Force 8, like that’s where like the truth

29:58
creativity comes. So if you’re talking about like a new brand who has no prior data, would you suggest, like if you’re just new to advertising and you’re not necessarily really good at this, would you just kind of start focusing on the benefits first before thinking about the Life Force 8? The reason I would start with Life Force 8 is because how do you know that people care about your benefits? You don’t. You have no idea. Right? Now maybe you care about your benefits.

30:28
but you are not your customer. And so I think kind of tailing it to like, hey, let’s start with what our customer cares about. Let’s start with the things our customer truly cares about. in, people don’t care. If you’re selling belts, for example, people really don’t care about belts. That’s not something that they’re like passionate about, But getting a high quality product or

30:57
you know, having something that’s keeping up with the Joneses, if you want to say, right? Like having better fashion than the guy next to you. People definitely care about that. Right. Okay. So it’s almost essential actually. Yeah, it is. And it goes to the things that make us human and the things that make us buy like impulsively. And that’s what you want to drive for, right? Whereas if you tell me the benefits of your product, I can just be like, okay, cool. Sounds great.

31:26
But if you tell me how your product will get me what I intuitively, innately want, I’m going to buy your product, not for the benefits, but because it gets me what I want. Right. Right. And I guess there’s just different gradations, depending on the product, like something kind of saturated, like belts or shoes. I think you need to tap into that much more. sure. Yeah. Okay. For sure. But if you know, and I think some people have the luxury of, you know, they just

31:55
It’s their product is the it’s the only one in the market like like Tesla, right? Tesla doesn’t have to come up with a bunch of angles to sell their car like we were talking about before. Gas is 550 in California. That’s going to motivate a lot of people. Yeah, especially. You know what I mean? Yeah. But, you know, if you are selling belts, you got to figure out a way to stand out and angles like the belt that wears in, not out.

32:20
is a good way to kind of distinguish yourself in a competitive marketplace. Right. Okay. Gotcha. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. I know you probably have talked about iOS a bajillion times. I actually really liked your answer to that question when someone asked you about it. And your answer was, you know, if you have great creative, that kind of solves a lot of your problems. I also remember you saying that at the time, this is a while back, you said the ads were kind of sucking. Has it gotten better? Yeah. So

32:49
It is getting a little bit better. Let’s take a step back. think with iOS 14, I think a lot of people misunderstood what the actual problem is, right? A lot of people are like, oh, the attribution’s bad. The data is bad. Like, yeah, it is, but that’s not even the problem. That’s not even the real issue. The real issue is that there’s substantial signal loss.

33:17
from a very large portion of the user base and arguably the most valuable user base that is being pulled from Facebook. So Facebook has less data, less signals to go find buyers that are similar to the ones that already purchased your product than it used to. A simple way of saying this is the predictive element of the algorithm became much worse. The algorithm got dumber.

33:48
That’s the biggest problem. And the attribution and data issues are just layered on top of it. So I think that the attribution issues, there’s ways that you can kind of get around it. You can look at a last click analysis on Google Analytics. If you want to get like a pure last click idea of what Facebook is doing. And we do that all the time. We use Google Data Studio in every single account that we have.

34:17
But the predictive element of it has not been fixed. it getting better? Yeah, I think so. But anyone that says that they have a solution for it is lying. There really is no solution. Now there are things that you can do to mitigate the impact. The biggest thing that you can do is make really good creatives. Right? And that was what my point was, is that the most effective thing that you can do

34:43
to mitigate the iOS and now 15, which is gonna make it even worse, is to make new creative. New creative that really convinces people to buy without the extremely powerful predictive element of Facebook’s algorithm. I mean, you can mitigate the attribution angle so you can see how effective your ads are with third party tools, right? Does that imply then that you’re relying less on lookalikes?

35:12
and custom audiences? 100%. Okay. I can’t speak for everyone, but just speaking for myself, this is the worst I’ve seen lookalikes work. This is like the worst. We still try it and we still use it occasionally, but it’s the worst I’ve seen them. Remarketing sucks now. It’s nothing compared to what it used to. And I find myself majority,

35:40
you mostly running to broad, no targeting at all. Really? But for a brand new brand, you can’t really do that. Can you? I mean, I think you can. Interesting. know. I mean, you tell me obviously you’re the expert. I’m just so we when we no matter what we do, right? Like anytime we get an account, we’re going to test it on broad. No targeting, no age, no gender. Why open? Okay.

36:07
Yeah, you’re going to get the lowest CPMs possible. Any restriction you do will make a smaller audience and higher CPMs. But also you’re letting Facebook do the work. I’m of the opinion that targeting really happens at the ad level, not the ad set level. Most people will tell you that targeting happens by whatever you type into the audience bar on the ad set level.

36:37
that it does. Yeah, you can click interest. You can, you know, you can do all of those things. But really, I think targeting happens at the ad level. Would you run broad for something that was a little bit more specific? Like I can understand shoes, shampoo. I mean, that has really broad base appeal. So it makes sense to just run it broad. But let’s say like Teslas, for example, would you still run something like that broad? I guess cars are pretty broad already. I was going to say, yeah.

37:06
I would say that that’s massively broad. I mean, so like Robert Kiyosaki, right? Yes. We would, we will split test all the time. People who are interested in personal finance, people who are interested in real estate, people who are interested in investing and then no targeting at all. Now that’s an extremely niche offer, right? It was people that want to learn how to be, how to invest in real estate without being a landlord. That’s definitely a niche down offer.

37:36
Right? Yeah. And with that, we ran broad all the time. And what we found was that sometimes the interest in stuff like that would give us a little bit lower CPA. But if we could get broad working, there was the most scale, the most delivery. And as we scaled up, the CPA would actually come down. Whereas in those other audiences, as we scaled up, the CPA would go up.

38:05
No, mean, that makes sense. That makes sense. What about retargeting and custom audiences? Are you still running them even though they’re not as effective anymore? Yeah. Okay. Are you just putting less budget on it? I mean, yeah. So, I mean, we run them in everything that we do. And I’ve just noticed that it doesn’t work as well. And a lot of what we’re doing is we’ll cut down our remarketing budgets.

38:31
And we’re opting for what we call like full funnel campaigns, which is like a campaign with no exclusions, no buyers, no, you know, just wide open, completely wide open. And we’re seeing a little bit more success with that. But yeah, we’re marketing and custom audiences. We still run them, but we just don’t see that, that success like we used to. Interesting. You mentioned the next round of iOS is going to make things worse. What is Apple doing now?

38:59
besides like killing email marketing, I didn’t realize there was more changes to just the ad attribution. Yeah. So it’s really just like, uh, you know, killing, killing the email marketing. Um, and you know, just, uh, further restricting privacy, but, um, I don’t know enough about it to really go into it. Um, I just know that they’re, they’re continuing what they started in iOS 14. What are some things that you’re doing to improve just like the attribution and the data that you’re getting?

39:28
Yeah, so a lot of what we do is, it’s a few fold, right? we’ll set the, Nick Schalkleford always says that nobody goes broke going off last click attribution, right? So, you know, to find the worst case scenario, what we’ll do is like, we’ll dynamically pass ad set ID and ad ID with UTMs.

39:55
and then run a last click analysis in GA4 and then pull that into Data Studio. So we have a nice report to look at. And that gives us like actual last click sales to get like, okay, worst case scenario, here’s what Facebook’s traffic is doing. Worst case scenario. And then we’ll look at other things like media efficiency ratio. Okay, know, what are, are, MER, like what, what, what’s the total sales by spend?

40:26
And for a lot of omnichannel brands, they’re looking at that anyway. And so I think looking at those types of metrics combining with drill down reports of like last click analysis and GA4 can kind of give you, okay, this is the worst case scenario. This is the best case scenario. How does this compare to Facebook? Let’s balance our budgets accordingly.

40:49
I just wanted to let you know that tickets for the 2022 Seller Summit are now on sale over at SellersSummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker that I invite

41:16
is deep in the trenches of their own e-commerce business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year we cut out ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets will sell out fast and in fact we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year in revenue,

41:43
We are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 4th to May 6th. And as of right now, we’re almost already sold out of mastermind tickets and we’ll be raising the price every month leading up to the event after Cyber Monday. For more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s sellerssummit.com or just Google it. Now back to the show.

42:09
What about tools that allow you to track the whole thing? Like Wicked Reports, HiROS and those tools. Are you using those? Yeah, so we use, I find HiROS very useful for info products where let’s say somebody is gonna watch a webinar, book a call, make a purchase after, right? Something like that, I like HiROS. Ecom, not as big of a fan. Why is that actually? Just curious. I just don’t.

42:37
find that it has the advantage and the accuracy that it does with info products. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. think that we, you know, for, we can get it done with Google analytics for the most part for e-commerce. Because of that, we’ve just kind of leaned towards that. I think Hyros is really, really good for info. I don’t think there’s anything like it that’s as good for info.

43:05
But for you, I don’t see that use case as valuable. think it’s still valuable, but I just don’t see it as valuable as it is with info. And then we’re starting to look into Triple Whale. I know that that’s a pretty good platform, but for the most part, man, we just use Google Analytics and Data Studio to be 100 % honest with you. Okay. And then Google Analytics allows you to do different attributions, right? So are you just using last click or?

43:35
So we’ll mostly last click, but yeah, our director of data goes really hard and we’ll do like other attributions as well. Like if someone clicks from an ad and then they come back two days later directly to the URL and buys, we’ll look at different types of attribution, but a lot of last click right now to paint the worst case scenario and juxtapose that with Facebook data.

44:05
Okay, so let’s kind of wrap this up by just kind of summarizing everything we talked about, but let’s do it from the perspective of a new brand. So if you were launching like a new shoe company, for example, and you just, I’m just going to kind of put words in your mouth and you just correct me. You first look at the reviews of maybe just pick like your top competitors, maybe your top three, look at reviews, put in a keyword cloud tool, find out what people are complaining about and find out what people like about it. And then you want to tap into the

44:34
Life Force 8 and try to frame your product using the benefits and mix those in with some major benefit that will affect someone based on the Life Force 8. And then I guess the piece that I’m missing now is once you have all that ready to go, how do you start running your ads? Yeah. So I think a couple of caveats if you’re starting a new brand. Right now, I would say a big thing is start from day one on the channel, right? Set out

45:03
to be an omnichannel brand from day one. I think the iOS 14 reckoning has really made people kind of rethink their Facebook only strategy. And those that were truly Facebook only, you know, really kind of took a hard L there. And so I think from the get-go, you want to start off omnichannel. I think if you’re a D to C brand, start figuring out your UGC solution.

45:33
Now, whether we use a platform called Incense, shout out to the Incense team, they’re really cool. Actually, I’m not familiar with that tool. What does it do? Yeah. So Incense is a platform that allows you to connect to content creators and have them make UGC for you. Oh, they’re, really cool. I’m, uh, yeah, I think it’s, uh, I N S E N S E dot pro. Okay. So you just send them product and they

46:03
together some content for you? Yep. And you can also white label influencers with them and everything like that. Okay. And so I think that that can be a really powerful tool, especially for a new brand looking to get some ads. And that kind of lets you rely on the content creators, right? You don’t have to do as much work upfront. And then, yeah, I would say that the next thing that you really want to do is make sure you understand your numbers, right?

46:31
What’s your margin? What are your cogs? What’s your lifetime value? What’s your AOV? If you’re a new brand, you may not know those things, but those are the numbers that you want to understand immediately because those are going to turn right back around and really dictate your budgets, what you can spend, your TCPAs, everything like that. And so I would say those things are the biggest things for a new brand. Start on the channel, look heavily into influencers and UGC.

47:01
Understand your numbers and then start making some ads and understand that your success rate on ads is probably going to be, if you’re good, like 7%, right? 93 % of the stuff that you make is going to fail. Anticipate that. Go into it expecting that things will fail. And yeah, off the top, that’s kind of what I’m thinking. Also look at Amazon.

47:30
Yeah, we fell on Amazon. Just to get a little bit more specific though, you recommend just doing some interest based ad sets or even running just wide open, right? Yeah. So, okay. Yeah. I prefer to start testing on broad, right? Okay. I prefer to start testing on broad. And then once we get an idea of what creative works, our next step is going to be, okay, let’s start testing different interests.

47:56
We’re going to take that winning creative and start testing different interests. And sometimes that’ll work great. Sometimes not so much. Sometimes broad works better. And anytime broad works better, we’re kind of stoked because it’s like, okay, the biggest audience works, you know, like let’s stay there. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Jordan, I know that you guys are hiring and if anyone out there is listening to this and you want to learn how to advertise or write copy better,

48:26
I can’t think of a better place to learn. So Jordan, you wanna just kind of talk about what you’re looking for? Yeah, most definitely. mean, Steve, you kind of touched on it, right? If you really wanna learn the game of advertising, if you really wanna learn how to be not just an effective media buyer or copywriter, but an effective advertiser, someone who knows how to sell products to people through a digital medium, Motif Digital is definitely the place for you.

48:55
Is it motive.digital? can’t remember the URL. Yeah. M-O-T-I-F, motif.digital. Okay. Motif.digital. You can go there and just right now it’s a simple page where we’re building a new website. We should have done pretty soon. Okay. But you can check us out on LinkedIn. Really right now we’re hiring media buyers, video editors, Amazon buyers, Amazon marketplace specialists.

49:21
digital content creators, really, if you’re a digital creative, if you’re a writer, if you’re a media buyer, we would love to talk to you. We have a really competitive salary option with benefits, a lot of really cool perks working here. we work with some of the biggest brands in the game. We have an incredible client roster and we’re an extremely creative firm. So if you’re looking to really expand your knowledge,

49:50
If you are currently in the space right now, you’re looking for a new opportunity, come check us out, www.motif.digital. And if you guys can’t tell, mean, Jordan’s kind of a geek in this. Anyone who can recite the Life Force Eight from memory without any hiccups is an ad geek in my book. Yeah, 100%. I genuinely love this game. Like I genuinely love this. like going back to where the interview started, you know, when I first found

50:16
you know what online advertising was like I remember like that I was like, I was so blown away by how cool what was happening or what I was looking at. I was blown away by how cool it was. And I think to this day, that hasn’t worn off. I still love what we do. I still love the game that we play. And, know, everyone in my company kind of shares that passion. Cool. Hey, well, Jordan, I really appreciate you come on the show, man. I know everyone learned a lot.

50:46
Thank you so much for having me, man. This is awesome. All right, take care.

50:51
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now it doesn’t matter what Facebook does or Apple does or any advertising platform, as long as you know how to create compelling creatives, the sales will always come. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 392. And once again, I want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot.

51:18
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now we’re talking about how I use these tools in my blog,

51:48
And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.