Brian Kurtz 13:51
Now you’re now, you’re talking my language, Hernan, and you weren’t even born then.
Hernan Vazquez 13:57
I know. was like, probably, yeah, two, three years old at this time.
Brian Kurtz 14:02
But, yeah, football phone, that’s good.
Hernan Vazquez 14:06
Yeah, totally, totally. So anyways, this is how, you know, things get recycled a lot, and again, now we’re seeing a renaissance of the acquisition funnel. But, you know, acquisition funnels have been around forever, and I found this today, and I thought it would be awesome to just share it with you, because this was a really, really, really cool promotion that Sports Illustrated did to sell their subscription, right? You will get a free football phone, and they will, you know, people will get the subscriptions just to get the football phone. So it was, it was super cool. So anyways, this is how the breakdown of the campaign that we run for an acquisition funnel that we run from apps, right? So this is for a client that we put together. He’s a coach. He’s an ex-military, and he applies everything that he learned at a high level military career to coaching. So he’s a mindset coach. So we have, as you can see here, we send traffic from Meta mostly. We do run some traffic from YouTube to these types of funnels, but the cost to acquire customers generally on Meta is lower than on YouTube, so it just makes the economic work a little bit better. So we run traffic to generally these pages are long form sales letter type of pages, right? In this case, we’re selling a $17 course that has an auto bump for five bucks is the audio version. He has a little guy with a couple bonuses, and then he has the audio version of the guide that we sell for five bucks. And then, of course, we have abandoned card sequences. We have all of those things that happen in the background. Now, when somebody buys this, they get presented with an offer, generally, depending on the niche we’re seeing on the business niche. We’re seeing 197 to 297 price points for these upsells, generally, some more in depth core, some more in depth program. If they say no to that, they get presented with a payment plan. And then the second, the next call to action that they see on that funnel is generally a book an appointment, because this coach is also selling high ticket, high ticket, you know, five, 6k, plus 8k, plus. So we prompt people to book an appointment. But then I put a little arrow here. There’s also this amount of entrepreneurs nowadays that are doing some sort of recurring model, right? So they might do a $97 a month community, or $147 a month community. This sells really, really well, as second upsells in our funnels. We generally do that a second upsells. So when you can throw in a recurring offer here, they tend to work really well. And then, of course, we call everyone that comes in and they buy the front end product, they get a phone call. Okay? That’s how most of the sales calls happen on the back end. Some people will self book an appointment and share with you some of the metrics that we’re looking at from these acquisition funnels that we run apps to. Now let’s talk about maximization funnels, or monetization funnels. We’re talking about the front end, right? We talk about these campaigns that we run to these funnels to generate volume. Now let’s talk about what happens after we get a buyer, especially from advertising. How do we turn these people that spend five bucks, seven bucks, 12 bucks, 17 bucks, up to 37 bucks into a $5,000, $6,000 sometimes $10,000 buyer. How do we do that? We do that through this mechanism, which is what we call a short VSL funnel. Okay, in this case, we have a five minute VSL, a short video sales letter. Sometimes our video sales letters will go up to 20 to 30 minutes long. Anything over that, we’re noticing that the attention span of people have been going down as well. So we’re noticing that anything over than that, at least in our experiments, has diminishing returns. So in this case, we launch it with a five minute VSL that the client already had. We’re still testing that. But generally, the sweet spot on these types of funnels that we’re noticing is up to 30 minutes. That’s kind of our sweet spot. And our process for a video sales letter has to do with qualifying the person showing results, and then, you know, disqualifying them as well. That’s why we have an application. You know, it’s a five minute VSL with an application embedded on that same page. If people are qualified to move forward, they move in to book a call, and they can book an appointment right here. And this is as we come through that front end funnel. Okay, we will run ads to this, but it’s warm traffic. So cold traffic will run to our acquisition funnel. Warm traffic will run to some sort of high ticket VSL capital funnel with the purpose of getting those back end buyers. Now, something else that happens, and you probably are aware of this, is that on advertising, especially, you know, these past couple years, what we’re noticing is that our cost to advertise is going up. But this will also happen when we are scaling our ads right. Initially, on Meta, for example, we will launch a campaign, and we will have great results for the first, you know, week or two of running the ads, and then results start getting worse and worse and worse. Or as we scale, if we launch, let’s say at $100 a day, or $500 a day, our results will be x. But when we go up to spending $1,000, $2000, $5,000 a day on campaigns, of course, our profits of those campaigns go down. That’s one of the reasons why running ads directly to high ticket funnels tend to have diminishing returns of a lower ROIs, sorry that we used to have a couple years ago. So there’s always the scale and profit seesaw right? The more we scale the campaigns, the less profitable we are, especially on the front end. But, we compensate that with volume right, more buyers, more leads, you know, less more opportunities for sales calls, more opportunities for back end promotions and back end sales and all of that good stuff. And so in order to remediate that, in order to remediate the fact that the more we spend on ads, our costs will go up, we use these ad scaling ladder which are, you know, we launch our ads at $100 a day, and then we see what happens, right? We check the data on those funnels, and then we see, okay, how does it look like? Are we making our money back as fast as possible, or making our money back like in seven days or in two weeks or in 30 days? If that happens, then we move to the next level, which is $300 a day, and then we wait, we let the funnel stabilize right. And then we might need to tweak the funnel. We might need to optimize it, we might need to split test or change pricing. And then we’ll go to the next level, which is $500 a day, and then $1,000 a day. So scaling ads is not necessarily linear. Is something that we start spending more, and as we spend more, our cost to acquire customers will go up. So we need to always be optimizing the funnel at the same time that we are scaling the apps. So I wanted to go a little bit more in the weeds on how things are working for us, and what we need to have in mind this day and age, this is like super current if we talk about, you know, 30,000 foot overview of the campaigns and the funnels and the marketing strategies that are working for us right now. Now I’m going to go a little bit deeper into what’s really working, what’s really needed to scale and make an advertising campaign work really well. So the first thing is, tracking is key. Of course, we all know that we need to know our numbers. But after iOS 14, after the update of iOS 14, which was right around the middle of the pandemic, and the privacy things that Apple rolled out, the Facebook pixel and then Google pixels as well, to a lesser degree, but the Meta pixel went blind into many transactions, right? You know that Meta and Google, they have their own machine learning mechanisms, right? So you want to have tracking in place so that the data that happens, or the transactions that happens throughout the funnel, go back to feed that data back to the algorithm so that the algorithm can optimize. Well, that kind of went out the window with iOS 14, and we’ve seen decreases of data collection anywhere between 40 to 60% so what does that mean? That basically means that, you know, if we got 100 buyers, Facebook would only see 30 or 40 of those, right? If we got 100 booked appointments, Facebook would only see a handful of those. So that’s when third party tracking softwares became really popular. And for example, there’s some names here that I’m not affiliated with, but it’s always a good idea to check them out. For example, we have Hyros. I’ll expect your Hyros. We have Anytrack. Another really good tracking platform that many of our clients have implemented recently, Segmetrics. Again, I’m not affiliated to any of this, but people tell me, okay, when do we need to start implementing this? And at this point, I say, when you put $1 into Facebook, when you turn on your campaigns, you want to have some sort of tracking software, not only because this will feed data back into the Facebook algorithm, but also give you a second opinion. What happens is that when you’re running ads for some time, and this happens on every platform, by the way, they would attribute to their own as many purchases as possible. And you know how marketing is right? That people see an ad, they click on the ad, they leave you their email, then their dog barks, they need to go out, right and then come back, they forgot about you. Then you send them another email, you jump back in, right? And then they purchase. So what actually, you know, created that purchase? Was it the email? Was it the ad? Was it all of the above? So in order for you to actually attribute properly, you want a second opinion, because sometimes Facebook will tell you, Well, we got you 10 purchasers, but in reality, they got you five, and the other five were organic, right? So it’s not necessarily wrong the way Facebook thinks about attribution, but it’s good to have a second opinion to optimize your ads. And since we’re doing a lot of optimization for high ticket coaches, what happens is that with tracking, you want to see not only what are the front end implications of your ads, but also the back end implications of your ads. So if you have a campaign that’s working really well, that’s getting you buyers for your desired KPI, right, for how much you want to pay per buyer. But then on the back end, that campaign is not generating a lot of booked appointments, you want to be able to take a look at that. So that’s what we call long term, deep funnel tracking, right? I want to see which of my front end campaigns are actually generating back end sales, which might happen 30 days or 60 days down the road, so I can scale those ads. So tracking is key, and it’s become, I would say, a pivotal part of running ads right now. The second thing that has changed, especially over the past year on Meta, is that targeting has become easier and easier and easier. A couple years ago, we needed to go and find those hidden audiences, right? There were a lot of tools that will tell you, Oh, find your hidden audience on Facebook or Meta and whatnot. Those deals are out there. But what we noticed is that the Meta Pixel has become smarter and smarter and smarter as people spend a lot of money on the platform. So now we’re pretty confident launching from scratch, really broad campaigns, which is something that we wouldn’t do a couple years ago, but now we are really broad campaigns, and then let Facebook figure out who’s responding to that message that we’re putting out there. Okay, there’s this thing called Advantage+ Audiences, that Facebook rolled out probably a year and a half ago, but right now, they’re viable. You know, Facebook does that, like Meta does that. They roll out a feature, and they let people play with it, and then they make it better, right? So most of the stuff that Meta launches initially doesn’t work, and then it becomes viable. However, here’s the other 50% right? When it comes to running ads, at this point, it’s like, if targeting is easy, if everyone can target everyone and they will win, hat separates you from your competitors, what separates your campaigns? What makes people click on your ad versus somebody else? It is the creative, right? The creative plays a huge role, and it will keep on playing a huge role in your campaigns. And nowadays, that has always been the case, of course, but nowadays it’s even more important, because everyone can target everyone. I can just create a campaign right now, targeting everyone in the US. But what’s going to really determine my targeting is what my creatives are saying, right? And that creates a huge opportunity for copywriters and people that are on the front lines of creating, you know of copy and creative, because I always say that creative system you’re targeting, because your creatives will determine who’s clicking on the ads versus who you’re repelling, right? So I think that this is something that’s really important, and also something else that happens on Meta right now is that Meta is really what we call creative-hungry. So we need, we are in a position right now that we need to be refreshing creatives weekly for our clients. So that means that we’ll launch a set of creatives right now and then a week from now, or maybe 10 days from now, we’ll need to refresh those creatives. There are several ways of refreshing creatives that I’m not going to go into those things right now, but that is part of our process when servicing, you know, serving clients. And then something else that we find on Facebook and on Meta is that we had bad versus good versus golden ads, right? Bad ads are 90% of the ads that we put out there, unfortunately. Good ads are going to be just a handful, let’s say that we launch 100 ads, 100 different creatives for a client, then maybe 80% of those. So 80 of those will, you know, don’t get clicks, they don’t get any love, they don’t get us where we want to be. 20 of those 100 ads that we launch for clients will be good ads. So those are ads that are giving us buyers and leads and booked appointments for what we want to pay for. But then from time to time, maybe one or two out in 100 will find a golden ad, and those are the ads that we can run for a long time. Those are the ads that we can run for a long, long time on Facebook and on Meta. We can run them for maybe a year, maybe two years. And the good news is that we can shut them off, and then, you know, six months later, we turn them back on, and they keep on producing right? You might have seen those ads. It’s those ads, they have hundreds of 1000s of shares and comments and whatnot, those are golden ads. And it’s hard to come by them. But, you know, it is possible. I’ve seen it happening. You just need to launch a lot of things to make it, you know, to make it happen there on Facebook and on Meta. So again, creative is the new creative target in this new Meta game.
Outro 30:08
Thanks for listening to the Timeless Marketing Podcast with Brian Kurtz. Visit BrianKurtz.net and click Podcast at the top of the page for a full transcript and show notes. If you are interested in working with Brian personally inside of Titans Xcelerator, go to briankurtz.net/help to see how Titans can help you grow and scale your business. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z [dot] net [forward slash] help.