Social Media Update for 2020 – Interview with Eden Choubeta [Ep. 153]

If you are doing any form of Social Media Marketing, or trying to get people from Facebook, Instagram, or Google into  your offices, then this Episode is a must listen to, because the way we are approaching Social Media is all based off of really old knowledge, it is totally different and that’s where we’re going to be exposed today. 

Stay Tuned!

[0:53] Andrea: Hello Everyone! Welcome to another episode of the Profitable Practice Podcast, I am of course your host Andrea Maxim. We are basically going to get kind of down to the techie needy greedy yucky stuff; that maybe you don’t want to listen to, but it’s really important that you do. This is a really important episode because what I’m doing is, I’m bringing on my friend Eden Choubeta whom we’ve actually known each other for years, and only recently did he let me know that he’s totally involved in the tech space, but he’s going to be giving us a lot of really important ‘you need to know this information’ around where social media is going and how a lot of the old thoughts about differentiating demographics on Instagram, Facebook, and Google and all these things is actually old news. And where Social Media platforms are going now, you need to know about it, especially if you’re trying to use Social Media as the beginning point of getting people into your offices. So this is a little bit of lengthy interview it’s packed with tons and tons of information, so this is kind of a ‘re-listen to’ sort of interview and you’ll always get different notes, but the take home message is that the way we’re approaching Social Media is completely different now than even about what I thought. I’m about 75% of the way into where it is now but even what he mentioned about different demographics and what the Social Media platforms are looking for. Even I learned about this interview, so please listen to this if you’re planning on doing any form of Social Media Marketing, whether organic or paid. So let’s jump into that interview now.

[2:42] Andrea: Hey Eden! Thank you so much for coming on the Profitable Practice Podcast I am so excited to hear everything that you’re going to tell us about how we can start using, basically like your particular methodology to start growing our local businesses more than ever local businesses need support and that’s why I’m thrilled to have you here but before we jump into that conversation, why don’t you give our listeners a bit of insight into who you are and what brought you into this whole realm of helping with sales and marketing. 

[3:20] Eden: First off, thank you so much for having me and hello to everybody that is listening at home. I guess all of us are getting a lot more familiar with zoom, and it’s a great pleasure to be here. I’ve watched a few of your interviews before and it seems to be doing a lot of good in the community especially during this time. So I am a digital marketer, I am the digital marketing guy behind LeadSprout which is my digital marketing agency. I work with small to medium size businesses helping them improve their lead flow, build multiple streams of leads for the business so that they can grow and helping them with things like follow up process, close and stuff like that. So basically the thing is that beyond the generation is just more about sales generation and client generation. But for me, I’ve been doing this for about 5 years, lots of changes since I started; things that I learned way back when. The cool thing is that the fundamentals always stay true but there’s always these details that change seemingly every week on all the platforms. So I’ve been doing this for 5 years, work primarily in the health and fitness industry for the majority of that time and it was great because I got to learn few of my passions, so obviously I got a passion for marketing and sales and business but then I also have passion for medicine and health and fitness as well, so it was a nice mix to be able to mix those passion. I primarily started it there but then, since then after opening up LeadSprout I branched out into being able to work in the real estate industry, auto-sales industry, and a few others. I’ve always wanted to wear multiple hats in different industries and try different things and this is a great way to do that, so I’m very grateful. 

[5:11] Andrea: Just as a little ‘behind the scenes’ story, Eden is actually one of the very first people I interacted with at the Gym that I started working out at, and when it opened which was I guess it was about 5 years ago when that opened in that location. It’s been so wonderful that over that time I’ll see you at the Gym, you’re always the first one to say hello to me, you just totally stood out as one of the staff members there and here we are now, where you’re guess on my podcast, so why don’t you kick us off with, remember that the majority of people that are listening are Tech-Scared, like ‘technology is not our wheelhouse’ in the practitioner health and fitness industry. And so this whole idea of marketing online or using techniques to gain new patients other than the antiquated way that still works but is not necessarily great in this day and age with regards to time and getting in front of people like; In-person Seminars and things like that to get new leads. I would love to hear what you have been finding in these local businesses with regards to turning the tap on, what are those initial places that we can start. Just getting new leads, like that is the fundamental thing that we all are looking for including myself, I‘ve been 10 years out, the more we can keep that tap open and flowing the better of everything else is.

[6:44] Eden: It is actually very true regardless of whether you’re 10 years in, 20 years in, you just started last week. The primary issue for most businesses is; you’re in the business for the bottom line and you only do that with increased sales and more customers’ better retention. And the best way that I see it working these days would be online advertising. Just because of the degree of control that you have and the return on your investment. Traditional forms of advertising like TV, Magazine, other forms of Print Media, they have their place. It’s just that, this is actually funny, this is actually what I do when I first meet with a potential client, sort of describe the differences between Traditional and Online Advertising. So with Traditional Advertising you can do certain things to control your exposure, you can try to display your product, your service, your content to the right kinds of people, that would be you’re trying to select if you’re doing TV, select the right show, select the right time-slot, and that’s pretty much it right? And then if you’re doing a billboard they’re going to stale your impressions, we have 30,000 people passing this every week or something. But you know, you possibly may have, if you’re having a Gender-Based product it might be the wrong gender, if you have an age related product it may be the wrong age, if you have a professional product, it might not be the right profession you’re explaining your ad to. But you’re paying for all of that. With online advertising you get to select exactly who you’re displaying your content or your product to, and then from there you get to, we’re going to get into that in a little bit, but you just further segment your audience based off of how engaged they may be or how much value they might bring to the table in terms of being a client for your business. So the degree of control, the degree of follow up, the degree of systematization that you can create with your online advertising, in my opinion; it blows traditional advertising out of the water. 

[8:52] Andrea: And that’s not even the conversation we need to even have, like any time of course my reception is, she must be in her 60’s she constantly saying “We got to get into the newspaper, we got to get into like a street sign” and I’m like prove to me that’s even going to work, I just won’t put my dollars towards that. So the first red flag, like alarm, anxiety-provoking thing that you said is online marketing and everyone is thinking now of Facebook ads, and you said what’s the best to turn your dollar or your best ROI, and most people are going to be like ‘It doesn’t work for me’ like I know supposedly it does, but it isn’t working for me. So why don’t you walk us through, what the most beneficial Online Marketing Platforms are to start with and what kind of evolved from there.
[9:42] Eden: So when you start advertising online, doing what you’re talking about right now is very important, you do have to select the right platform for your product. There are cases where you might, everybody talks about Facebook, there might be a case where Facebook advertising isn’t for you, I can tell you right now for the majority of the people that are listening to this right now. Facebook is the right place for them, Facebook is the best bank for your book, Instagram is the best bank for your book. I haven’t heard recently but in the past, I used to hear Instagram having a younger audience and may not be the right kind of people that you want to advertise to. In all the industries that I operated in Facebook and Instagram gives you the best return for your dollar. The only other real competition, again inside the niches that I operated in would be Google, so that encompasses Search display and the partner websites as well as Youtube. And that’s actually where I would draw the line, there are places that you want to go, but if you’re talking about initial steps then the first most accessible step would be Facebook and Instagram and I would leave Google off just because it might be an easier interface to use if you’re using Facebook and Instagram.

[11:09] Andrea: So we will move on to Facebook and Instagram but I just want to close this little gap with regards to Google, so you’re talking Google ads or SEO. 

[11:18] Eden: Google ads, so if I’m talking advertising I mean paying traffic like you’re actually putting dollars in to display your advertising whether it’s in search or display or one of the numbers of the placements that they have.

[11:30] Andrea: So again just to finally close this, cause I get this question a lot, so I’m just going to ask it to you, a lot of people say ‘Well what should I do, should I do SEO? Should I do Google ads’ or they’re putting all their time in SEO, is that even something that you have an answer to, or is that something that you would recommend or not recommend?

[11:54] Eden: My recommendation is actually both, at some point because I’m assuming that people who are listening right now are busy trying to run their business and wearing multiple hats. You’ll have to outsource your advertising; obviously, you may think that you need to take what I say with the grain of salt but I’m telling you now you will go to the point where you need to outsource it to give it to the professionals to give you a better return. They can focus all of their time and attention on that while you do more profitable things for your business. And at that point it would be best to just have that advertiser advertising for you and you can handle the SEO stuff yourself or maybe able to outsource that as well. But SEO and SEM, so that’s Search Engine Marketing vs. the SEO which is organic. Those two complement each other, so if you take a step back in all forms of advertising, all forms of communication, there’s always been this debate between organic and paid. And so it is the same thing it’s just when people are talking about Google and SEO vs. Paid traffic, so Organic traffic or Organic communication vs. Paid; they complement each other in the way that with genuine relevant actionable content you are building that thing that everybody talks about and no like trust factor. You’re letting people know who you are, you’re giving them actionable info for free, you’re developing that relationship with them and the reason why it benefits your business of course people will come, people will visit, but when you start advertising, your convergence are going to be higher, your cost per click, your cost per lead, the amount of money that you’re spending for somebody taking action will drop. And that’s because, let me talk directly to you Andrea, when I see your ad or even an organic post and I see another persons’ because I have a relationship with you through your content and am much more willing to interact with you than with somebody else. And so with all of my clients, at some point we have a conversation where I tell them “Please don’t just, I mean you’re going to get benefit from me with or without the content but I promise you if you put in the efforts of producing good content, you will see a better return for what I’m doing for you, and then you’re getting your own returns on this side.” So my advice to the practitioner that are listening, if you can’t do it, get somebody to do the organic posting on your blog, take a look at the website to make everything working the best way to the best banking, and then keep in mind because especially now with all the things that are happening in our environment, you can put a lot of topical content on your blog or your Social Media that will, if you’re linking it in the right way, boost the rankings of your website.

[14:32] Andrea: Wow! That’s a lot! But I guess the point of the conversation really is you just can’t stop nor can you be lazy about it, like you have to think of marketing as a main driver to your business and it always will be that every time you’re doing something, it always has to have an intention. And that is something that I’m always trying to teach our Maximized Practitioner students is; don’t waste your time just because you feel like posting a blog or just putting out a post, it really does need to have some sort of an impact. So let’s now pivot back to Facebook and Instagram. Where should we get started, how should we approach those platforms, and I guess a follow up question to that is, is it the best idea to be linking the two so you get a two-for-one bank for your buck or how do you start engaging your clients, and again we’re predominantly focusing on local businesses driving those sales and leads.

[15:37] Eden: So very actionable or resourceful advertising or not so much the brand advertising which does have its place but more about dollar in and dollar out advertising, which is good because that’s what I specialize in. Now I would say after you take the step of deciding what platform to work off of which is Facebook and Instagram, for the majority of the listeners I believe. The next step is building a funnel, so this is it can be an incredible context, lengthy field of marketing but don’t let that overwhelm you it’s simply a mechanism that you use to graduate, like graduate a person from basically not knowing anything about your business all the way to the point where they’re raving fan and they’re bringing you referrals. There’s some sort of mechanism that has to happen to get them to that point, and so you have to sketch that out, we’ll have that sketched out for you before you start advertising because like you just said even with the post everything has to have an intention especially if you’re putting money behind it. So if you’re going out for example, I used to see this a lot, I still do especially if I’m doing an audit of a Facebook account, people because they’ve heard that they need to put some money behind a Facebook post for various reasons which is accurate, they just go and hit boost, they’ll just boost the post. And it seems like quite a few people would get some like, that is not what I mean, that is spending money with zero intention or maybe not the best intention. So if I were to corner that person after I did an audit on my book, I could explain the rationale behind people’s need to post, so I would kind of get a better feel to what you’re looking for. Like I thought it was supposed to, I wanted more people to see it, which is actually wrong like it would actually get people to see it but when I introduced them to what Facebook is capable of doing they realized that boosting  posts with zero intention behind it is equivalent to throwing money out of the window. It doesn’t do what you hope it would do for your business. So the funnel is something where again this is a mechanism where you graduate people through this process, so if you want I can dive a little bit deeper into that.

[18:02] Andrea: Yes I do want you to, but first I want you to answer this question; Should we be obsessing about the Social Media Vanity Matrix? 

[18:11] Eden: Like the likes, comments, and stuff? There’s a place for them but you shouldn’t obsess, the place in them is Social Proof, so there’s this weird psychological cork where we want to go like we mitigate our risk in making decisions by doing what the group is doing so that leads us to a whole bunch of things like monumentality. So if you see a post and the person is making a cling, not an outrageous cling, but let us say you have a chip on your shoulder which I encounter actually quite a bit, as soon as I say online marketer, people sort of like get there, so if you have something like a cling, like “Hey I’m going to make sure that your business grows.” If there’s one version of that post with zero engagement and another one of that post with thousands of likes and comments, obviously one with the engagement is actually going to perform better, and that’s the way to actually utilize that in my marketing, but people that would grow overly obsessed about getting the likes, comments and stuff. The only thing that the business owner should be obsessed about is what brings them more whatever goals they have, if they’re looking for more clients then that’s where they should focus on. I’ve seen plenty of posts and ads that got zero likes but it got them sales from the back end. So they could turn around to the business owner and say “Hey, did you like the 10 likes you got here? Or did you like the 10 sales? Which is your preference?” 

[19:35] Andrea: And that’s where I wanted to ask that question and you answered it for me as I find superficially we will look at our performance on social media and be like ‘it didn’t get any shares, it didn’t get any like, it only got an X number of X,Y, or Z’ but this is the conversation that we need to be having is; as a business owner we don’t care about the vanity matrix, yes it can support us and yes it can drop our ads but if you’re still putting in one and getting four back, it doesn’t matter right? How many followers, likes, whatever you have.

[20:10] Eden: And if you take a step back and think about it after what we just had on the top of the conversation where we describe the difference between traditional advertising and digital advertising. I’m sorry would you be looking for feedback for a newspaper ad? Like you wouldn’t be looking for that, you wouldn’t be looking for a feedback from a billboard, what is it about you operating a Social Media that makes you feel that you have to get likes and it’s typically because they heard that was very important and it used to be, but all of the Social Media Platforms have changed quite a bit since then so it’s no longer as important apart from the ways that I described earlier. 

[20:46] Andrea: Okay, so now let’s dive into the funnel, and I’m so thankful that you’re also talking about this, and one of the things we really try to drive home with the students is making this funnel as simple as humanly possible because as entrepreneurs we love to make things really complicated and we have squirrel syndrome like worse than anybody else in the planet. So we’re sort of like “Oh well I have to make a new lead magnet today and then I’ll make a new lead magnet next week.” So I really hope that you help to dam it down for us and be like ‘This is all you need’ and often we get very uncomfortable in how simple things are because it is too “Easy”. So help us, make our lives easier and accept that simple is more often better than complex.

[21:28] Eden: Okay so, I will make it very simple but we’ll have to talk about it for a little bit because it is a methodology from which you can make things as complex as you like. So if you do it yourself obviously you want to keep that as easy as possible. So I am actually, there’s an in depth blog post, there’s going to be a link on the show notes and it goes in depth, so take your time to read it again and again, make it makes sense. But the simplest terms that I could put in is that your funnel is a mechanism, so just imagine a machine with multiple gears together and you want to have three things, so there’s a traction component, a destination component, and then the conversion goal. And so what you’re trying to do is just attract people, send them somewhere, get them to take an action and then get them to actually, that’s the conversion goal, take that action. So it could be an ad, a website taking that action and then it could be the appointment that they actually book for themselves. If that is the action that you wanted them to take, So it’s just 3 steps. 

[22:33] Andrea: So I’m going to interrupt you here because the 1st question that’s coming to my mind that I wanted you to clarify is; Can you or should you directly sell on Social Media?

[22:41] Eden: It depends, it really depends. I’m tempted to ask a little bit more about what you mean.

[22:51] Andrea: I guess what I’m saying is my respect for Social Media is that exactly you attract them to move off of Social Media and onto somewhere else where they take some sort of an action as supposed to posting directly like “Hey! This is what I have for sale, buy it!” right off the post or the video and I think sometimes you get a little bit too hasty on Social Media and we don’t treat it with the respect that it deserves.

[23:18] Eden: Part of this super simple funnel that I’m talking about is, and I usually save it for later, but it’s retargeting, and retargeting is a methodology that is a little bit more complex but it fits in with a little bit more funnel and that actually touches on to what you are talking about, you shouldn’t jump the gun with cold audience, something that doesn’t really know much of your business and just ask for a sale, you get a low quality lead, low quality sales. Meanwhile what you want to do is to develop relationships, build up people that want to be affiliated with your business, connected with your business, people that are interested in your business. And so those are repeat purchasers or long-term clients; that’s mainly why I’m in the business of getting. If I just brought people one off clients, my clients would be doing very well, but what I bring them are long term clients, if you do things into the graduated way where you attract, you send them into a destination, and they take an action and you have retargeting attached to that, then what you can do is basically we call warming up the audience, you can warm them up to the point where they’re willing to buy and then stay engaged and then continue to buy in the future. 

[24:50] Andrea: And what you’re talking about really is the future of Social Media and I’m so thankful that you are because this is going to be, this is something that I’ve been working on or have been exposed to over a year now and I’m still trying to work it out because of course I’m doing it on my own because I want to learn it myself first. But I really hope that the listeners are paying attention to this because it isn’t as simple now as just posting or boosting or creating one ad. There’s such this huge graduated pathway that everybody needs to go through and that’s what you’re talking about and can you also just clarify just in case people don’t know what a retargeting ad is.

[25:31] Eden: Yes, and I do want to get a little bit deeper but simply put retargeting as just delivering an ad to a person that’s already engaged with your business someway. So the fast example that comes to mind for most people is somebody that has visited your website or your landing page, and then from there they didn’t take the action that you wanted them to take and they just disappear. So when somebody visits your consultation page they don’t book an appointment and they leave because the kids are starting to cry or something happened. So what you do is deliver a specific ad to that person or a group of people that did the same thing and what it does is, it entices them to come back and complete what they were doing before which is to book an appointment.

[26:05] Andrea: It’s just like a nice kind of reminder and for people to visualize what you’re talking about, and I’m so sorry that I keep interrupting you but these questions pop into my head so I imagine they’re popping into other people is, when you go to Amazon you pop up on a product and you don’t buy it and all of a sudden in Facebook you see that ad popping up with the same product, that’s retargeting, this is how people have these like mind manipulation perceivably to know exactly what you’re doing in a different site and this is what we’re talking about here.

[26:41] Eden: I have another blogpost that’s exclusively about retargeting and it’s about taking this wider approach to it. So when your people get to the point or if they already are at the point where you need to be thinking about retargeting and adding that kind of addition to their basic funnel, it’ll help because it seems a bit outlandish the level of understanding Facebook or Google has advertising for us. You talk about a lamp and then you see lamps everywhere online, you don’t realize but Google’s monitoring your Emails, your searches and where you go and Facebook is doing similar things. So when they think of retargeting and other advertisers about retargeting it will go way beyond than just visiting a website now it is going to other things, it’s one of the reasons why I said earlier, Facebook, Instagram, Google are the powerhouses for advertises in the world right now. You should really consider getting there if you’re not there already.

[27:29] Andrea: Okay great, so let’s go back to attract, destination, conversion. 

[27:32] Eden: Yes, okay so if I’m sketching out a new funnel for a person or a business and what I would recommend for the listeners to do is I would actually work backwards, so you don’t want to fit your products, I’m going to keep saying products but I mean services, goods or whatever it is. So you don’t want to fit the nature of your consultation to the messaging that you’re putting out there, you want to flip that, you want to fit the message that you’re putting out there to the final thing which is the consultation. Too many people start with the first phase of the funnel rather than working backwards from the final goal. So work backwards, you want an appointment, so that’s the conversion goal. Typically it is actually good that you told me consultation because sometimes I work with a person or business and they have multiple offers, so they have multiple things, let’s say a package of this many sessions for this or a consultation for this specific type of thing versus another thing. And so what they need to do is figure out what is the best conversion goal and what I recommend is using data, look into your own business practice, look into your own sales history and look at what people are most engaged with and what have you closed the most on. So that’s a big indication for this is what you should be focusing on. If you don’t have the data because of the new type of consultation and new business, then what you have to do is get that data before you commit to that offer and that is a little bit more in depth and I recommend working with an advertiser to figure that out, but they will test the waters out in the general public to see what people are most engaged with, so then if you take a step back from there to the destination, so with the destination is where you want people to be taking whatever action that you want them to be taking. So in this case, it’s booking that consultation. So that could be a landing page, and I say landing page with supreme intention, do not waste money unless you’re very sure with what you’re doing and most people aren’t. Do not send people over to your general website, please don’t do that because your website, if you’ve built it in a certain way, the typical way, usually it is not focused on one thing, right? It’s not focused on one call, the action has a several and it has a resection it has a booking section, it has a blog. So many different things to distract a person, when you’re advertising you want to remove all the choice. Right? They can either back out or take the action that you are intending them to take.

[30:17] Andrea: Right, Binary. Do or do not.

[30:19] Eden: Exactly.

[30:23] Eden: But if you want them to be doing that at that point is visiting a landing page. A lending page is a stripped down website, a single page that will take them, think of it as you speaking to a person however you approach a person in a potential sales situation, you want to just do that, there’s a lot that goes into developing the right type of lending page that I won’t touch on right now, but want you want to do is basically have a place for that person takes match into the control setting. Now, if you’re not using a landing page and you don’t have to, there are other options, so if you’re advertising on Facebook there’s things within Facebook that people can take action on. So, in forums for example, another one is messenger ads, right? So they were actually converting or taking action by messaging the business, right? So, those are different ways that they can take an action but all that to say the destination component of your funnel is basically where a person takes action.

[31:19] Andrea: Right. And it’s one action, very clear what that action is.

[31:23 ] Eden: Yes, exactly then so if you want to trace your way back one more step then you get to the attraction portion of your funnel and the attraction is all about, I’m biased so I say advertising but there are other ways of get bringing interests as well so it could be a traditional advertising, it could be podcast, it could be content like blog post videos all that kind of stuffs, it could talks right like you’re doing seminars with people, webinars, all of those are intakes or for traffic to go to that destination page where they take the action and then they convert, it’s all mechanisms, and each one of those components I touched on are gears that basically take a person from not knowing you all the way to the arriving fan.

[32:08] Andrea: So now let’s talk about simplicity over complexity, how long would you want to track this one funnel before you start adding to it or starting a new one or and I guess what I am really going to be asking is, again it’s so easy for us to be like well I’ve got that funnel going so if I put my lead magnet post out then it’s going to go down this way or if I put my podcast and it’s going to go down this way. Do you want all of your attraction devices to lead into one destination and that leaves into one conversion and then track like the metrics along the line or when can you start elaborating on different systems? 

[32:50] Eden: I’ll tell you what I do for myself. Okay?

[32:53] Andrea: 

[32:55] Eden: And I am, it was like my profession, I was like a professional marketer. This is what I do, I do not start a new funnel unless the funnel I’m working on is working to the best that it can. So, your funnel is never a thing that you can walk away from, even if you have at least skip a few stages and get to the best performing funnel, you’ve done all the things that you’re supposed to do and you optimized it and now it’s at the point where it’s doing amazing. You can’t improve it, possibly any better than it is right now, even if you branched off and created more, you should not ignore that other funnel, right? And so when you create a funnel what you need to do is you need to optimize it, you need to monitor it. So you need to give it some time, and I hate giving “it depends” answers but” depending on what it is that you want a person to do, so in our case we talk about booking a consultation and one of my client’s cases is purchasing a vehicle, right? So those are two very different funnels and require a very different level of engagement. If those two funnels differ in the amount of times to prove to me that is working, right? So if you’re booking a consultation you want to give a number of days, you want to give it a week or two to make sure that things are working because what you will find and this happens to everybody, you will launch your funnel and something’s broken. Right?

[34:17] Andrea: But we don’t know about that.

[34:19] Eden: Exactly and you will have to troubleshoot. You’ll launch a funnel and things are not going the way that you expected. So there’s something that I want everybody to look up its called conversion rate optimization or just CRO and then you can have it and that entire branch of marketing is all about after establishing your funnel you now need to go into it and make sure every little thing is working correctly. So if we’re thinking of the funnel as tiers you’re the mechanic coming in and oiling up this thing and tinkering this over there and making sure everything works better so by that I mean if you’re looking at your attraction face of the funnel and you have put up this ads and things are not moving as fast as you like, so you’re hoping for tens of people to come through, hundreds of people to come through and you’re getting like one or two that might be an issue that you need to look at right? It doesn’t mean that everything is broken and you should not pursue this, it just means that maybe your approach has an issue and you need to address that. 

[35:22] Andrea: So yes, let’s elaborate on this so everybody understands what he is saying, Facebook advertising, Instagram advertising, it isn’t meant to make the conversion for you this is something that I had to learn in and correct me if I’m wrong but Facebook and Instagram advertising are only supposed to get people to your landing page, your lending page then sells them into the call of the action and then the call to the action is the conversion and the reason why I’m clarifying this is because so many people think that my Facebook ad failed, no one booked in off of my Facebook ad and so they blamed Facebook but there’s so many little gears from the copy, the picture, image whatever you’re talking about that you have to take personal responsibility for then social media does the thing then if your landing page sucks, well then no one’s going to take that call to action, right? So this is kind of what we are talking about here and I just wanted to make it very clear to people that if it hasn’t worked in the past for you, it’s probably because you did not understand how intricate this level of marketing actually is. And it’s not necessarily Facebook or Instagram’s fault, usually and rarely is it their fault it’s that something about your copy, your writing, your image, your lending page, whatever, that’s what needs to be improve. 

[36:52] Eden:  Yes, it’s definitely a cop-out when somebody blame’s Facebook because you have tangible proof whereas performing very well for other people. And it doesn’t mean that the person is inept or bad at what they do; it just means that there’s a learning curl that they need to adopt. What I’ll say about the advertising is you need to have intention in methodology, strategy behind the tactics and actions that you take. So you just write and copy is not enough, what is your intention and how did you do that. You, using creative is not enough, what is your intention behind that. right, and something that will touch on is depending on how complex you are in terms of marketing strategy and ability on Facebook advertising. You can actually do what you talked about which is trust your funnel, trust your landing page and just send people right over but Facebook can take the further step and actually search for people that will convert for you or will take it the step of going beyond, just send in people to your page, but just send In people that are most likely to get your page and then book your consultation, but how would you do that is based on data. Facebook aggregate this data and you would do the same. So you just jump in and tell Facebook hey I want sales and just the conversion go what you’re talking about right now. You could do a, I don’t want to get complex but my bill is on the advertisers. Right? So you could use this standard event like the lead standard events or your create a customer conversion on your actual lending page, let’s say anybody that reaches this page, so you take your page after booking a consultation they are a lead and what Facebook will do from there is look at every single person that has converted and go find some more people like that elsewhere, based on whatever filters that was set for your targeting. And so basically you’re telling Facebook those are the types of people that have converted go search for more, and so Facebook will do that. So this is a very powerful way to advertise but if you do it incorrectly it will not work, Facebook advertising is very much like trying to drive a high performance car, there’s a lot of stories people hoping into that high-end Ferrari and then like making this terrible noise come out of the engine and they’re stalling, you can’t blame the cars it’s the user. You just, learn, that’s all. It’s worth it from your business, so learn or simply outsource it. Right, so intention behind everything that you do to the funnels is going to help you get that. 

[39:09] Andrea: Awesome! And I think what you’re also referring to which is something I remind all of my students also is creating those custom audiences as well so that you’re starting to already give Facebook a pool of people to tap into. So let me ask you this then so we have our attraction device setup. Let’s call it a Podcast episode which brings them to the lending page and then the ideas for them book a consultation with me. Also explain what are the industry standards, and I know it depends but on average for the conversion from someone to see your Facebook thing, to go to your landing page from your landing page to actually opt-in and there for actually make the sale. Because this is also something else really important for people to understand because I have work with people whether like, well ten people raise their hand and said that they were going to buy my thing and only like four of them bought, I don’t know why the others six did not, and it’s because there’s an industry norms. So could you talk about too? 

[40:10] Eden : So, I have learned the hard way a few times to not assume anything going into a business and setting up the final and assuming certain things about their conversion rates. So you are absolutely right that there are industry standard conversion rates and there are global ones as well. But happens in every business and every single campaign it may shift a little bit. So you can state your own benchmark, what I would encourage listeners and you, yourself to do would be just to assess traditionally how this funnel operates. So with any of your business, anytime that I create these different types of consultations this is about what I’m seeing for the conversion rate of them clicking over their lending page that is taking action, for them showing up to the appointment and then from you closing them. So you have those conversion rates throughout the funnel and then that’s your benchmark. So that optimization that I was talking to you about every time you make a tweak you want to give it some time so not like not a month which you want to give it a few days to see what happens, I will save the amount of time that you give a funnel is based on the amount of time of traffic flowing into that funnel. So if you’re a big level or like a high level advertiser, big business, and you have thousands, millions of people going through your page, a few hours is enough, few minutes is enough. If you are maybe getting ten people to your website then what you want to do is give it a few days to see what actually happens next and then if you see it, if you see up to the conversion rate in this specific thing then great if you don’t, change it back and try something else. And to be absolutely honest, I have not work with anybody in your specific industry so I would be hesitant to give an actual number in terms of what you can expect into the line but what I just describe you is a perfect way to actually find out what’s working in your business as it stands and in whether or not the next steps are worth it for.

[42:09] Andrea: And the point to the conversation really is don’t expect a hundred percent, you’re never going to get a hundred percent. If you get fifty percent, I would classify that as a high functioning conversion rate for at least our industry. But I would say we’re pretty much on par with the majority of the online marketers, so you will still be looking at twenty up to thirty percent from social media to a landing page and then lending page to a call to action can be. Sometimes as high as fifty percent but the point is for people to at least get that starting point to know it’s not going to be a hundred, it’s probably not going to be eighty percent, at least not when you’re getting things started that you have to acknowledge that you’re looking at ten, twenty, thirty percent of action being taken at any step of the way.

[42:53] Eden: And what I encourage them to do is again remember the bottom line, the only reason why you’re bothering tinkering around online is to get more business, so look at what your funnel is actually providing in terms of your internal investment, so after your add cost and then your return on like whatever it is the revenue that should be generating from each clients from those appointments and what you had expect the lifetime value of each of those clients to be when you factor that all in it is bringing you a huge net positive, even if you are not achieving those benchmarks that you stated, it’s huge incentive to still stay there and figure it out, just figure it out because if I know that I’m getting return of one hundred fifty percent of my investment why would not I stick around and figure things out and then pump it on to four hundred percent or even higher. Right, so it’s more. It’s always about the final bottom line, the whole reason why you’re advertising, it’s always about more clients, more sales growing, and so keep that in mind when you’re accessing for sure.

[43:53 ] Andrea: Great, so why don’t you dive a little bit deeper into the methodology piece, kind of like how we should be approaching this platform because if everyone was to start, I mean we want bookings so that’s an easy outcome, a lending page you can create pretty easily off of your website or landing page provider. But it’s the social media that really throws us for loops. I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about how we should be approaching our posts whether organic or paid and where the most common mistakes that you are seeing people make. 

[44:25] Eden: Okay, so advertising is fuel to a fire. It is not the fire right, it will not do things for you that you already are not doing. So if I come along and meet with one of your listeners, or meet with you or anybody else, I am simply able to squish a rock and get you as much juice as I possibly can but if there’s nothing of substance there, then you are not going to get really much out of it. So anytime you make a post whether it’s organic or a simple post on Facebook or it’s an advertisement, whatever it is you always have to start from a place of providing value and it has to be something that’s relatable, right. So it has to be relatable content that actually matters and it’s relevant to the people that are receiving it and I would hope that it is something of value. So it could be entertainment value, it could be actual advice for the business, it could be motivational, it could be a number of texts. Well there’s entire fields to vote it just that alone. But the whole approach to any of your communication has to be don’t hit him on over the head with a nod, like that’s not what it is, it’s all about connecting with something that matters to the person you’re talking to. So at some point along this graduation process of a very cold audience all the way to a hot audience. At some point there is a place where you do smilingly hit somebody over the head with a nod, sale, sale, sale, discount, discount if that’s the type of business that you are in or if you are adding more services  to a spar service in the beginning. Then that’s where you hit them with that. But the thing that you have to keep in your mind is that the person at that point will have already benefited from all of these points of contacts before it happens. So always try to rift them a place that matters and then what you do from there is something that you attached on earlier which was spilled on audiences, that’s it right. So you want to connect and then you want to have them to get to you as an audience. So by audience I mean developing an advertising audience on Facebook, so you could be tracking them, something called the Facebook pixel, or you can do it in other ways. So with the Facebook pixel you are going to be able to develop audiences based of what pages are they landing on, what they have gone, you can track what people have done on all of your assets online, on your websites, your landing pages whatever it is, apps if you have it and so with that you will be able to build audiences and that will help you keep track of how to approach if you have different personas, if you have different types of segments of your audience that you are trying to reach with different offers then that’s a good way to do that but then there are other ways that have nothing to do with advertising to build audiences like developing email list, which is something like everybody needs to do. If you are in business you should develop an email list, because you want to take people off of platforms that you don’t control. Alright, so as advertisers we have learned several times that Facebook, google at any moment can make a massive update and it disrupts everything and if you are a business owner you can’t afford to have that happened to you so you should have people as email subscribers and then that allows you to keep in touch of them however you see of it. And so with that what I said before which is bring intention to your post make sure that they’re relatable, actionable, relevant and it also develops audiences to keep track on how to engage with people with those two things in place you are going to do a lot better than most. And then the only thing that you need from there is fuel to the fire which is the advertising. 

[48:01] Andrea: Awesome! Is there any final take away points that you would say for our listeners to at least get started with and we have talked about so much this is definitely one of those episodes that you’re going to have to listen with again. But where are the initial stages or steps that people can take.

[48:18] Eden: If you’re just getting started with advertising and I’m going to soon need part from contacting right. So if you’re just getting started with advertising the best thing that you can do is go online and simply type in “How to start with Facebook advertising” like Facebook alone has a number of resources, they have an actual program that they offer for free and it’s a web based program that you can use to educate yourself on their advertising platform, you don’t have to, it could be very basic and they got more complex later on, as long as you keep in your mind that maybe you’re not the one that’s going to be doing the advertising itself but at least you can understand what the thinking behind is going to make you much more comfortable with the whole process. Both for free, because in their best interest to get people comfortable with their platform. So it’s made to cater towards people that are not in text savvy and it caters towards business owners. So you are in the right demographic, if you are just getting started. Apart from that there are a lot of marketing associations and organizations out there, a lot of agencies that pump out so much content on all the basics of advertising and it may give you the menu shell as well. So just read and watch YouTube videos, it’s a very quick way to understand what’s happening and of course reach out that you trust to give you some insights.

[49:42] Andrea: And we will be linking two of your blog posts, we will be linking to the one on methodology and I would like to add in the one we are targeting as well, if people wanted to reach out to you what is the best way?

[49:54 ] Eden: If you head over to my website https://leadsprout.ca/ and just tap on any of the buttons because that is a focus website where you are going to reach out to me or hit on, hit the button contact you are going to get hold of me, that’s my main platform right now. So visit https://leadsprout.ca/ and take a look around or just reach out and that’s how you can hold me.

[50:14] Andrea:  Awesome, thank you so much for coming on.

[50:16 – 50:18] Eden: Of course, yes it’s great this is fun. 

[50:19 ] Andrea: Good, well I hope everybody reaches out to you like I am going to talk to you as soon as we hit here because I want to learn more about what you can do for me. I’m so complicated.

[50:30] Eden: It can get complicated but just remember that intention, remember the simple steps, everybody is going to be fine. We’re all going to be okay.

[50:37] Andrea: Thanks.

[50:38] Eden: No worries.

[50:40] Andrea: Whoooo, so that was a lot of information and I think the biggest take away for you is going to be this, if that sounded like an awful lot and it certainly did for me and even as I was talking to Eden after the interview, I was just like man what is it cost, how can I will never do that a metrics or data analysis ever, that’s why I hire people to do this might be one of those things that if you have not delegated any of time away to, I would probably consider doing that, it doesn’t need to be Eden. It could be anybody you trust but when we are getting to actually monitoring every single gear of a mechanism, it took us tremendous amount of dedication to say this is all that I am going to do the next twelve months and we talked about this with Alicia Macpherson as well who has gone completely virtual and making six figures online and did that in one year, they should be monitoring every single step and be willing to tweak every single step and this is no different. So social media which is still the most profitable way to market is something that you’re thinking about doing. I encourage you to delegate that out, delegate that social media site out now. If you’re not necessarily ready to do that or you want to learn more, you want to at least understand the language that’s where the maximize practitioner program comes in to place and so if you are curious about our flagship program which is four-modules that walk you through every single step of our pillars of a maximize practitioner, that is something that I encourage you to check out and that is in the show notes, read the link to that. If you want to learn a little bit more about the program or how you can hire our team to do the social media posting for you, not the creations, we’re not going to make the videos but do the posting for you, create the lending pages, set up all of the pixels, create your custom audiences and just continue to do all of those back end needy greedy stuffs please book a game plan and call with me, it’s a 30-minute call. It just allows me to see where the areas of your business are that aren’t working so great which you’re really good at and of course the goal is for you to just show up with your business put your practitioner hat on to what you love to do which is help people and forget about the rest of it, that is what my team and I do. So please book that game plan call with me as I said the link is in the show notes, if you loved this episode or have any topics that you want to see me do, let me know in Instagram @Andrea Maxim MD, that is going to be a wrap for this episode then I will see you next week, I’m of course Andre Maxim and I’m out.