Facebook ad campaigns can have minor issues and things don’t work out perfect the first time. The solution? Troubleshoot marketing by testing your ads continuously.
Hey everybody, Jesse here. Today I want to talk to you about troubleshooting your marketing and how important that is. I’ve said this before, and I’m starting to believe it more and more and more and more. There is no such thing as an expert marketer. There are only expert testers. That’s all we can do. You have a great idea. You test it. If it works, it was a great idea. If it wasn’t, it was an also-ran. Even ideas that work, things change. They stopped working. You need to retest. You have a control, which is the winning advertisement or the winning piece of marketing that gets a result. Run it until it doesn’t work anymore. But at one point it probably won’t, or it will slow down. That becomes the control piece that you’re trying to beat with better ideas, but you don’t get rid of it until you can prove that another one will beat it. So that’s the lesson. We got that out of the way.
Now, a couple of stories here, and by the way, if you want to know how to get leads for your business and you want us to do it for you, I’ve got a really cool a free video that explains exactly how we’re doing it right now, especially in the real estate industry. If you’re a real estate agent or broker, you’re going to want to go to GetLeadsFirst.com. Go there because it’s free. There’s nothing to opt in for. You don’t even have to put your email address in or anything. You can get to watch exactly what we’re doing right now to produce a seller leads for real estate agents. It’s a great example. If you’re not in the real estate, it actually will still educate you on the overall theory of how it works. You’re welcome to use that in your own business. Take it and try it yourself. If you want our help, we’ll at the end of the video we explain how we do that as well.
All right, so getting back into the story today, I was working with my team on our, our Facebook ad campaigns and I received a report and then I put it together with some of my information and we take that and we write it all up nice and neat and we send it to the clients. It’s cool. This week I sent one to my real estate agents that today, both of them early in the morning and, there are minor issues that we’re dealing with. Surprise, surprise, things don’t work out perfect the first time. So here’s, here’s just an example and a lesson, a word of warning. If you have a good ad for let’s say, and it’s locally based, right? Like it’s geography based. So Geo-targeting like you know, for example, I have a client who’s in one city, Bellingham, Washington and she wants all the leads to be right there. Now she’s willing to go out a little bit, but only so far because you don’t only want to drive so far and deal with that. Now as a marketer though, to make my life easier, I want it to be vast as the whole state, right? So there’s a compromise.
So we try to get it as narrow as we can. Here’s the problem. The population in some of these little towns up there close to Canadian borders is pretty small. So it’s really easy to oversaturate the market. We can run an ad and haven’t seen too much, and it becomes less relevant. Remember, Facebook, Google, relevancy engines, they’re in the business of showing stuff that people want to look at and click on. If people don’t look at it and click on it and engage with it, Facebook don’t like it. That means people are going to spend less time on their platform. They want a lot of engagement. The more engagement, the lower the prices to you, the cost per click goes down. If you can get a lower price, that means you’re able to show your ad. Either you’re saving money, or for the same amount, your ad’s going to be seen by more people.
So when you oversaturate an ad, which is easy to do, by the way, that’s why you have to start with small budgets and gradually work up. Then the cost per click goes up. Well, my cost per click, I’m trying to keep this puppy low. Twenty bucks, ten bucks. We get it lower, sometimes seven, which is fantastic by the way. It’s ridiculous. I mean, there are other people out there paying 200. So, you know, our costs are amazingly low. Our secret sauce, is we’ve got better data, we’ve got better targeting, and we have a better funnel. But that’s a topic for another video. We’re just talking about the danger of overselling saturation. The cost per click creeps up. That means there’s going to be fewer leads, which means there’s going to be fewer closes, which means I’m going to get hurt. And so as my client, she doesn’t want fewer leads. Now you could say when were they better qualified, the better area, whole different topic. We’re assuming if all is equal, the number does count, the number of leads and the cost per click influences that.
So what do we had to do? We had to pick out a few more towns and sub-niche into different neighborhoods. So you might think, oh well she doesn’t want to have, you know, leads coming from far away. Well, we didn’t have to do that, sneaky little trick, because some bigger cities can be like Bellingham divided into different neighborhoods. Those different ads can have a slightly different target, and because of the ad copy calling out to the neighborhood, people are going to engage it more on it, who live in that neighborhood, who were interested in buying in that neighborhood. Therefore without having to go too broad, we were able lower our cost per click by niching down further within the area, but still giving it a different name in the ad because we can use a neighborhood rather than just the whole city. There’s a trick lesson for the day. Also, we also are branching out outside of the city to get the higher population because again, that’s a problem either way and it’s a good compromise, and I think we’re going to be okay. We’re going to be good.
The second thing that happened is we need more pictures. We required more photos that were real life pictures, and you want to get vertical pictures, not horizontal for real estate ads most of the time and timelines. Now most of the images that professionals take our horizontal and fancy and you might have to crop them, but just good old cell phone pictures end up working better. Who would have to think it? Right? Just better click-through rate. So that’s important for lead generation when it comes to a real estate agent. Watch that over-saturation and get them pictures of the front of houses, people like that.
Then the other agent that I had who’s campaign just got started, Ryan, we also send a report to today. Both of them are getting a fantastic number of leads by the way. There’s nothing to complain about an excellent deal compared to any other option they have right now. So we’re proud of that, but we still want it to be better. We can always be better, constant and never-ending improvement. CANI, that’s a little Tony Robbins deal there.
So for him, we got the pictures, but he also gave us a great suggestion.
He noticed in our, autoresponders in text and email that we were saying things like “when’s a good time to call?” Then that would get people pushing back who didn’t want to call yet. You know they want to text, an email, we would later try something like, “do you have anything else you want to tell us about your home?” People say no. So Ryan had a great suggestion. He said instead of that, why don’t we have some more open-ended questions that are narrowing, like “is there anything that you can think of that might add more value?”, things that you think of that you have done to the home before the home that might have added more value to your home? Now, in case I didn’t make it clear, we’re talking to people who were running ads to people that want to know the valuation of their home, and they may be interested in selling with an agent because they want to list there with an agent because they want to sell their home. These kinds of questions are excellent. Now we’ve got to be careful.
Here’s another lesson. If we get too nosy on our initial outreach questions to somebody that fill out a form, then we tend to push them away a little bit sometimes or making them work too hard, and they just wanted to know how much their home was worth. So there’s always a balancing act. Plus we found that instead of doing that via text and email if you get out and make that phone call within the first minute. They already have their phone in their hand, your closing rate goes up 400%, and the engagement rate goes up because they got the phone in their hand and they’re thinking about it, and the chances are that pick up the phone. So if you can call them in the first minute, at least first five minutes, man, it’s a big, big deal. Big Deal. So do it if you’re getting leads and you’re doing lead generation, and if you can’t do it, get somebody who can call because you’ve got to get on the phone and talk to people and help them and be cool and give them good stuff. Be Helpful to them. You are not talking about like sinking your claws into them like some high tech, crazy killer salesperson. This is not coffee’s for closers stuff. It’s just being friendly and helpful and being there right then at that moment. The response rate goes up, and the close rate goes up. It’s incredible how that works. So we’re taking his suggestions, and we’re incorporating them, but we’re testing them carefully. Again, testing. There’s no such thing as an expert marketer, just an expert tester. So we’re going to test that messaging.
Does it work? Maybe, but we need another enough sampling to test it. Do more questions, different questions work. You got to test everything. So, back to the point. If you want to know more about how to get leads for your real estate business, then go to GetLeadsFirst.com.It’s getting leads first because you need first leads before your sales process can be of any value whatsoever. Second, you want to get to that lead before your competitors do. That’s what we do. And we can explain in a video they’re free, nothing to opt in for anything. Just sitting there ungated and all that. You can watch it. You can learn exactly what we’re doing and how we do it. See how you can apply it to your business and if you want help with it, we offer that at the end too. It’s getting leads first because you need first leads before your sales process can be of any value whatsoever. Second, you want to get to that lead before your competitors do. That’s what we do. And we can explain in a video they’re free, nothing to opt in for anything. Just sitting there ungated and all that. You can watch it. You can learn exactly what we’re doing and how we do it. See how you can apply it to your business and if you want help with it, we offer that at the end too.
We show you exactly how that works. It’s pretty good. It’s a good video. I would watch the whole thing from beginning to end. It’s an excellent video. I’m proud of it. Now, if you’re not in real estate and you want general information from us, go to StoddardAgency.com. Go to either domain, and you can find the same stuff.
So the recap on the lessons today:
1.) Testing. When it comes to your marketing. If you have a team doing it, make sure they’re testing and get the reports from them on their testing, so you know what’s working, what’s not. Don’t just blindly trust that they’re doing all that.
2.) Make sure that you don’t over saturate your market by increasing the ad budget too fast. If you’re geo-targeting, because the ad that’s shown too many burns out, not burns people out, they see it too much, but second, because of that, they’re not engaging in it as much. It’s going to drive up your cost per click and your cost per lead, which is a lousy deal. You’re not going to get as many leads, or you’re going to get to spend more money for the same number of leads either way.
3.) Getting excellent pictures. Real estate agents, of the front of houses. Not Quality like a pro, just volume, just photos of the front of houses vertical with your phone. Click, click, click. No big deal. Just do it. You need that for your ads.
4.) Then watch and test your followup system as well with your text messages and your emails. You are adding questions that are friendly and helpful but not too pushy because you can drive people away. Get on the phone with them. I guess that’s the last one is get on the phone within one minute to increase your closing percentage by nearly 400%.
If you want to know where that statistic comes from, it comes from a study that was done with an extensive sampling of people and it’s the facts. Just the facts. If you want that leave it in the comments. “Hey, send me that report” or somebody could put the link to the GetLeadsFirst.com in the comments because I didn’t do it. That’d be nice too. If you have any other questions, please leave them for me. I’d be happy to help.
