I was introduced to Jennifer Sheahan by Frank Kern over a year ago. Since then, this humble, super-passionate, knowledgeable and caring person continues to impress everybody. As you’ll learn, she’s worked her way up from knowing nothing, to a “guru” status in just a few years. She delivers very real results to her many top clients, focusing on Facebook campaign management, consulting and training.
She spends her time in the USA and Australia, and today – she shares some of her best kept secrets with all of us.
Her sharing & caring is deeply rooted in her personality (as you’ll soon find out). She is all about “how can I help you?”.
We are fortunate to have the founder of FBAdsLab on the phone with us today.
Let’s get started with the Facebook online lead generation and business strategies interview.
Hello everybody and welcome to another Executive Interview Series, that is the fancy name for interviewing some of the top, hot, best experts in the industry when it comes to on line marketing, the internet game essentially and I’m Jon, your host. Today we’re going to talk to Jennifer Sheahan, she’s with FB Ads Labs and that is a full service agency specializing in Facebook ads, Facebook pay per click. She has worked with some of the best of the best in the industry, you’ll know them by name and she’s going to break this down for us today so without further ado let’s welcome Jennifer Sheahan.
Hey, we are live with Jennifer Sheahan. Did I pronounce that right?
Jennifer: You sure did, good job.
Jon: I’ve been thinking about the best way to say that and I made it. Well it’s a pleasure to have you on this call. I know we had a chance to briefly, almost, work together last year and then we meet at Tray Smiths software seminar?
Jennifer: Yes, that’s right.
Jon: I’m very excited to speak to you because of course this audience deals with a lot of the on line stuff which is internet marketing and traffic and conversion and of course social media and Facebook is a huge deal now with 900,000,000+ members, pretty large and growing still. One of the things, I think, that I was very curious about, I heard a little bit about it the event, but if we could start with some of the basics. If you could share with me a little bit about your background, how you became this master Facebook strategist and tactician.
Jennifer: Well, basically I love paid traffic. I just love how spontaneous, how instant it is that you can have an offer or a landing page or a headline or something you want to test and you can set it up and within minutes you got people, you know eye balls on your site. I just love it, instant. SEO is fantastic but paid traffic I just can’t beat it.
So it started my love affair, if you will, with Facebook started in 2008. I wrote an eBook about what I know. I am a child psychologist and so what I know is kids, preschool kids and I wrote a book, really simple eBook, about all the questions parents used to ask us about their kids. My daughter does this, is that normal? How can I do this? I just wrote it up with all the answers we would give parents and I sold it for $17.00 and people bought it. So I setup this crappy little website and put a paypal button on it and people bought it. I wanted to get more traffic to that. That’s how I found google ad words and Perry Marshall and I learned all about google ad words, how to optimize my ad words account. Then I stumbled onto a forum that talked all about paid traffic and Facebook was one of those options. So I learned how to use Facebook ads to target my customers and it was so much better for me than google ad words because not that many people were. I had maxed out all the keywords that I was targeting and I used wanted to have more social context and Facebook was perfect for it.
I knew I could target moms who lived in America, who had children, who liked certain things and very quickly it was clear that Facebook had so much traffic and so much volume that I became enamored with it and started helping other people advertising their businesses. I kind of kept it underground for awhile. I didn’t really come out of the closet, if you will, until 2010. So a couple of years, I was just running a lot of traffic on my own, affiliate offers and CPA offers and a lot of things like Netflix memberships and stuff like that. In 2010 I started helping a few local businesses and then word spread very very quickly. Now we have a full blown advertising agency called FB Ads Lab, were we run thousands of dollars of Facebook ad traffic every single day for companies large and small across the globe.
Jon: That’s an incredible breakdown. You mentioned something that catches my ear, which is the passion for it. You were obviously learning as you went, but you had a drive and I see that a lot. The idea if something does work, well I’m going to give up now. In your case you probably hit a lot of sort of failure points and stepping stones to your success but you didn’t give up.
One of the questions I had about that is, I get this a lot in our community as well, I’m not technical and in your case you came from a child and psychology background, how did you get into the technical aspects of that? Did you have a background in sort of the technical areas?
Jennifer: No, I did not. I have no technical background at all. I had no idea how to build a web site. I remember very early on, it was so frustrating for me because somebody was telling me how to do something and they said “It’s easy. You just i-frame it up”. I don’t know what that means. So many times people said to me, that I was in the wrong place. The mommy bloggers are over there and you’re in the wrong place sweetheart. I knew I wasn’t in the wrong place; I just didn’t have the knowledge or the skills to do what I wanted to do yet. But the thing that got me through was the drive. I have a very very strong drive and I knew exactly what I wanted to do and that was I wanted to be able to replace my husband’s income and be able to support my family. So it was just dabbling. I was passionate and driven. I had to succeed.
So I think that having a burning desire and having something in your gut that makes you plow through any challenges makes it a lot easier. It doesn’t make the challenges go away but if you have a really really strong reason and you run up against somebody saying “well, just i-frame it up”, and that’s the only way through. Well then you need to learn how to i-frame it up. I still don’t know how to i-frame it up. I asked for somebody to help me and they did. I come across that kind of stuff all the time. Now things are becoming much easier on line and now you can create videos really easily and there’s just new software coming out every single day. Everything back in 2008 was quite a challenge but its easy now. So I think that has leveled the playing field a lot. Was that the question you asked?
Jon: Oh yes, that’s absolutely brilliant. It’s a mindset thing for sure. The passion, the drive and that failure is not an option kind of thing. Right?
Jennifer: Yes. You have got to find out what that is for you, you’ve just got to find it out. I find every single person that I know who’s successful has a reason. They have a reason they keep going and just to make some money is not enough because it’s much harder than that. I work a lot and I work long hours and I go through a lot of hard stuff to keep my dream alive. To make my vision become reality. I know we all do, you do and I do and everybody I know who is making any money on the internet is doing it because they have that drive. You’ve got to find that for yourself for those of you who are not sure what that is; find it.
Jon: Yes, that’s just brilliant advice and thanks for sharing that. So much of this get’s into that “yeah, give me some traffic today or by tomorrow and show me some of the technical stuff”, but in fact mindset is important. In fact, my next question is around the struggles and many are building out either businesses, basically mom and pop stores you know the kitchen table kind of idea, true entrepreneurs are building out from home. As you look at this over the last few years, was there a single best strategy that you could teach others? Or one thing or have you pretty much captured that there? Sometimes I get these questions myself, I hear it, I need to be positive, I need to have drive, need to have sort of a system in place. But is there one single, best strategy I guess?
Jennifer: Yes, I think so. Something that really helped me early on is that I ignored 99% of what I heard. I found one person, I actually found two people who I trusted and I listened to everything they said. I bought all their stuff, I followed all their blogs, I tweeted them on Twitter, I followed them on Facebook. I just followed those two people and that was it. Everybody else, I unsubscribed from all the crappy email lists and I just cleared out my inbox and I put my blinders on, if you will, like a horse. I just focused on those two people because they both resonated really well with me and who I was and where I wanted to go. I liked what they said and I liked what they taught. I bought everything they had and I’m still in one of their high end master mind programs now. I think that that helps because there are so many different strategies and so many different people talking at you all the time on line that if you can choice one or two people to listen to and tune everybody else out, I think you’ll do much much better.
Jon: Now that sounds just super smart. There is so much of this “look at me”, shinny object syndrome and frankly noise the signal to noise ratio, that whole thing. That’s brilliant, thanks for sharing that.
I wanted to ask a little bit about Facebook. Specifically we’re going to talk around advertising today, of couse we’ll touch on Facebook and some of the market place changes and things like that. What would you say when people ask you, I know Facebook has an advertising system but I am familiar with some of the more traditional, perhaps banner ads, google display network or content network as some would call it, and of course you have google ad words. How is Facebook different if you could summarize that for us.
Jennifer: Facebook is completely different from google ad words, in that it is social context. With google ad words you can create an ad, you can bid on keywords. Like let’s say that you sell queen size mattresses in your town, well you could bid on “buy queen size mattress Chicago”, then your ad appears whenever anyone types in those keywords. So you pay every time somebody clicks on that ad but you know they have typed in those keywords for your ad to be shown. So that’s google ad words.
Inside Facebook, there aren’t keywords like that. The keywords are more about what people like, or what their interested in; social entertainment, political, educational, marital status that kind of stuff is what your bidding on. You can’t bid on “buy queen size mattress Chicago”. So what you have to do instead is figure out who buys, who is most likely to buy a queen size mattress in Chicago? Then you have to find out what else do they like to do, where else might they be, what else might they read on line and you can set your ad to appear on the pages of those people who fit that demographic profile.
Jon: I see, so that is different and a different thinking. I think I’ve heard the express, I think it’s actually Perry who talks about the right side marketing and his FB for me. The idea that not all businesses will fit on Facebook. Do you agree with that? Or the question really is this; are there any business that should not advertise on Facebook?
Jennifer: Well, when you say advertise on Facebook, ads can appeal to and be successful for most businesses. Whether you need to have a Facebook page is another story and whether Facebook will allow you to advertise is yet another story.
Let’s talk a little bit about those categories. So if you own any kind of business that is adult related, any sort of sex industry business, or something that you might not want your Great Aunt Jean from Florida to know about, then chances are that’s not going to be a huge success as a Facebook page. Another friend of mine said just this past weekend, that if you wouldn’t wear it on a tee shirt, like if your customers wouldn’t wear your business name on a tee shirt, then they’re probably not going to be hitting like on your Facebook page. It’s gotta be something that people are passionate about, interested in and enthusiastic about, that kind of stuff. So adult type related stuff is difficult. Anything financial is quite difficult; it’s kind of an uphill battle for a Facebook page. If you’re an accountant or a mortgage broker, somebody who deals with insurance, those kinds of industries are quite difficult to get a lot of traction on a Facebook page. Just because there’s not a whole lot to talk about. Unless you have, I was working with a client this weekend who has an insurance agency, but they have tons of community stuff, they’re very involved in their community and they have community events and BBQs, they sponsor a marathon, that kind of stuff. So that’s great, all they have to do is take their community stuff in the flesh and move that onto Facebook and start putting videos and photos and status updates from what they’re doing. But see, they’re not talking about their insurance on their Facebook page.
Jon: I see, that’s a useful and interesting distinction. Also, I guess in all of this, we’ll cover a little bit more about when we come into more of the tactical stuff here in a few minutes as testing is part of any on line or any marketing game for that matter. In this regard there’s Facebook of course and google and so many others, there’s services that come and go and of course there’s now a lot of talk about Pintrest, but for Facebook there’s been many changes. We have security and policies, the look and feel of timeline, application development, of course the ap directory, just features, Facebook ads and sells, the interface stuff. So, somebody who’s been watching this and perhaps dabbling a little bit and they’ve tried some things and they’re not ready to give up yet and they’re sort of moving forward, what would you say and I’m thinking and just pulling this a little bit out of my head right now, if somebody’s new to this and been trying and perhaps let’s say that they have a local day spa and they want to advertise on Facebook. What and how should they start out? What would be like 3, 4, 5 things that they must make sure that they do to be successful? And I guess finally in that, how do you determine success? Really thinking about impressions, CTRs and all that fancy stuff.
Jennifer: The very first thing you need to do is you need to have a reason for me to click your ad. If you own any sort of a local business, just advertising your business like a billboard is not going to be enough for your ad to be successful on Facebook. You want to make sure that people have a reason to click. By a reason I mean you want to have a special offer, a specific product, a limited time special, a video you want them to watch, a book you want them to download, a free offer or something. A trial or some type of date related thing.
Some of our members own coffee shops and restaurants and they only advertise one day a week. They chose one day out of the week, they set a five or ten dollar budget, they have their ad displayed just for that day and they only offer one thing that week and that it and then they turn their ad off. If you have a local business you don’t want your ad to be showing up every single day and just have it generic and just have your brand name or your picture or something like that out there, because it’s just not going to be a good use of your time or your money. People see that ad over and over again and they stop clicking it and it’s not very interesting. The one benefit about that is your brand name is getting out there, but it’s kind of an expensive way to your brand name out there. Once a week is enough to get your brand name out there, people will click it and they’re much more likely to take action on your site if they don’t see your ad all the time. One thing we’ve noticed, if I see your ad this week and I don’t click it and then it’s gone and then it reappears next week, oh there’s that ad again I was looking for that. I wanted to check out their French pastries or whatever it is. Then you click the ad and then you’re much more likely to take action because you knew that they took it away last week.
Jon: That’s a great point. I can see that sort of works to the psyche there.
Jennifer: Right, exactly and that ad may never show up again so you want to grab it while it’s there. That’s the kind of feeling you want, the community that’s what you want them to see or feel when they see your ad. Oh I got click that quick before it goes away. For a local business that will save you a ton of cash, rather than advertising every single day.
So that’s one thing, you want to have a reason for them to click. Like a special or a promotion, a free offer. A trail works very well for local businesses; come in and get a free appetizer with your main meal, or every Tuesday say this coupon code and you get a free cappuccino. Come in and meet Mary and Mary will give you a free eyebrow fax with every manicure.
Jon: That’s great. In fact you mentioned save bundles of cash, sort of rounding out some of the strategic angles here; in the Wall Street Journal May 16th to be exact, General Motors the head line said “GM Says Facebook Ads don’t Pay Off” and I’m just reading verbally here. They of course pulled millions of dollars back and their budget and of course GM is a huge organization, I saw that their US ad spending is about $1.8 billion. Just curious, why do you think GM pulled away from Facebook? 900 million people now and counting people on Facebook, is that too big to ignore? There’s a whole branding component but ultimately it feels like to me they pulled back because the ROI or the payback is not there. I realize this is a big step up from a coffee shop at $10 a day running an ad, but I just wanted to get this spectrum into our discussion.
Jennifer: I love talking about this, but I do need to say that it’s just my opinion and I certainly don’t want GM to be chasing me for my comments. It’s purely just my opinion. I have no affiliation with their advertising agency or whoever was running their Facebook ads. What I do know is that a lot of big companies take their billboard advertising mentality and bring it over to Facebook and it doesn’t work. A lot of these companies are used to having newspaper ads, TV ads, billboards on the freeway that there is no measurement or tracking of the success or failure of those campaigns. They just put up a gigantic billboard up on the freeway and they just hope that people will take action based on seeing those billboards.
If you try to do the same thing on Facebook you can track that and you can see how many people click your ad and you can see many people actually end up entering their email address or coming into your dealership to buy a car based on those ads because you can track it. You can’t track a billboard. I think the thing is that billboard advertising isn’t going to get direct response results. That’s what it all boils down to.
Jon: That’s a great come back because in truth we see a lot of this and the smaller entrepreneur in the marketing area probably, people like myself, take issue with some of that in terms of how big these budgets are and they are not doing the correct tracking and the billboard advertising concepts you mentioned. I appreciate that. In fact, it sort of rounds out the top level strategic.
I wanted to ask you just a few questions around the tactical / technical areas of Facebook. One right off the bat that I also get a lot in fact, what is the best bidding strategy, where you have the pay per click model were you pay for a click versus CPM based, or impression based. What would you say to that?
Jennifer: This is a very timely question because that’s just completely changed in the last 10 days. Facebook has just changed how you bid for ads and you no longer have a choice. If you’re sending traffic off Facebook to a website you bid cost per click and if you’re sending traffic to Facebook, either a Facebook page or a landing page on Facebook, you’re bidding CMP. You used to have many more options, and now you don’t. So the bidding has changed and now you can bid by objectives, basically do you want your ad to show up to people who are most likely to click your ad which is CPC or most likely to like your page which is CPM.
Jon: I see. This is probably an “it depends” answer but, because people like to feel in control, I can show my ads as much as I want and only get charged for a click or even though it’s recently changed, is there a model that tends to work better than others? Just in sort of general terms?
Jennifer: We recommend all of our new clients that you test everything, because some people do very very well keeping their traffic inside of Facebook. Other people do quite well taking their traffic off Facebook. It’s just going to depend on what your strategy is. For example, one high end strategy might be to take that traffic off Facebook and when you take them to that landing page you have a google remarketing code planted on that landing page. So when you pay for that traffic, you’re paying CPC, you take them there and make sure your landing page is very very very simple. Very simple, I mean plain like just a video and that’s all, no headlines and no opt in boxes, just a video with a giant play button. When they hit play, the opt in box appears at some point in that very short, maybe two minute, video, the opt in box appears or a register now button appears for a webinar and that’s it. You might want to have terms of service and a privacy policy down at the bottom of your landing page but other than that you don’t really need anything. The more simple it is the better your conversions will be.
Jon: That’s great. In fact, you mentioned remarketing, a friend of mine I was talking to uses perhaps a little sneak technique were he actually pays for ads in Facebook and sends it to another high traffic site that he has done some affiliate or partnerships with and asked them to put their remarketing code on there so his ad shows up everywhere based on a Facebook effort.
Jennifer: Right, exactly that way you’re paying for the click once but you can follow up with them even if they don’t opt in. Google remarketing in conjunction with Facebook is extremely powerful. So that’s one of the benefits of sending traffic off Facebook. But if you have a Facebook page and I highly recommend that everybody listening to this get a Facebook page quickly. The benefits just keep expanding as the days go by. There are so many fabulous options for Facebook pages and they are completely free. You can have somebody on your team, or you can update them with pictures and videos related to a topic, a general topic like if you like outdoors, yoga or your good at cooking or whatever it is you love, whatever it is your customers love, you can create a Facebook page about that topic. You can create it about your business or in your own name, your product name it’s really powerfully and then you grow those fans and then you can also advertise to those fans.
Jon: That’s great Jen and actually I talked to a friend today who was asking, and I think it was very timely, and I get this too. People are liking pages, right so a strategy that I have used and I think it still works today is where you could say, ok I have started out with nothing and now I have 5,000 likes to my page and I can use what’s basically called a connection targeting to were maybe initially those clicks were costing me more money and now I can for those 5,000 likes run a new campaign and just target those people at a much less cost. Is that still true?
Jennifer: That’s exactly what I’m talking about yes. You’re exactly right. So if you had ten of those pages, all about related topics related to your product or service or affiliate offer then you can advertise to those fans for a much cheaper rate and they don’t know that you’re advertising just to them. You know and from Facebooks perspective you have cultivated those fans so it’s cheaper, but they don’t have to know that it’s you.
Jon: That’s right and now our readers and listeners will know because we’re talking to Jen. That’s great. In fact this notion that you have to test on line and test everything you do, from your experience if you could summarize and I know this is hard because often campaigns can be unique and also different but if you were to draw some summary points from what you’ve seen, what type of headlines or copy or maybe even pictures tend to work the best?
Jennifer: Headlines with a question. Headlines with a question mark, a percentage or number work very well. Asking a question in the headline of a Facebook ad is very effective and sometimes I tag on a question mark even if it’s not really a question, just to increase the click through rate a little bit. You definitely want to test that. Of course, it’s going to depend on your own market, your own product and your own services. You want to test everything don’t just take my word for it, but we do thousands of dollars in traffic every single day and this is what’s working best for us.
Now ad copy you want short choppy sentences, like two or three work sentences. If you have big long sentences people don’t take the time to read it. With short sentences, people can read subconsciously, they just look at it and their brain automatically processes the information. We found that to be very effective, so the shorter your sentences are the more success you’ll have.
For images, it’s going to depend on what you’re offering. However, there are three things that I like to point out. Number one is happy smiling woman and that just means, really google happy smiling woman and look at the images; that’s exactly what I’m talking about you want a happy smiling woman looking directly into the camera. She can be applicable to just about any product or service on the market. People just love a happy smiling woman for all demographics and all ages, it’s a winner. If the happy smiling woman doesn’t fit your offering, you can use text as your image. So if you create a little text image 110×80 is the size, you can create an image with text in it. You could say “How to Market to Woman” or “How to Lose Weight” or “How to get a job” or whatever it is that you do. Use that image space as extra headline space. If you do that you want to make sure that the background is either black or orange or a dark deep color.
Jon: That’s very cool, in fact I’ve seen some of those pictures and I see people adding a green nasty looking border or red outline border, and that’s part of the testing I guess?
Jennifer: It is part of the testing. I recommend that people start with straight up photos first and find some that work for you and then you can add borders to extend the life of your ad. That’s one of our strategies inside our membership we talk about that. You start out finding five or six happy smiling woman that work and then when you want to extend the life of those ads, by adding a different color border that will give you an extra couple of days to run on that ad.
Jon: Oh that’s great, this is so awesome I just have a few more questions, I appreciate your time. The question is one that I grapple with a little bit to honest with you, how granular should you test? So here’s what I did, this is probably a ridiculous example but for the folks who are listening and reading, what I did I is I went to the US and I picked the city of Los Angeles, I picked gender men and for precise interests I pick horses for handicapped because that just came up and then age 30 to 60, of course you have the idea that you have advanced connection targeting, but I didn’t use that. That sort of break down or filtering yields about 20 people for about a dollar per click in the USA. That’s obviously very targeted and it’s 20 people. The question is this then; what is the recommended audience size? That’s the number that shows in the right hand side when you adjust parameters, 20 is low I know that but 100,000, 300,000? How do you think about and actually strategize and perform this targeting?
Jennifer: That’s such a great question. Aim for 200,000, that’s our sweet spot. 200,000 gives you enough volume to keep your ad alive for more than a couple of days. It gives you enough narrow targeting that you can know its working. So if your way over 200,000 then you’re just too broad and if your way under that you’re going to have to change your ad every five seconds, because it will be shown to often and people will get sick of it and the click through rates will drop. So 200,000 seems to be great a little sweet spot for us.
Jon: Now in that example which may not be super applicable, the horses for handicapped, let’s say that it’s very low then I sort of move it up and say it’s not just men it’s all, men and women, then I break out of LA and I go basically US broad country and then I realize I’m up to 5,000 or 10,000 which is not even close. Then I just start adding countries, Australia and Canada
Jennifer: Now I’m going to stop you there, Stop. That is not what you want to do, I would not recommend that. Is it okay to stop you?
Jon: Yes, that’s exactly my question; is that smart to do? So thank you for stopping me.
Jennifer: So I would not recommend that and here’s why; I highly believe that you should keep your country targeting completely separate. I was chatting with Armand Morin on the weekend and he and I agree passionately about this topic. We didn’t agree about a couple of other things, but we agreed about this.
Country targeting should be completely separate in a different campaign. So that’s a mistake that a lot of people make, they just throw all English speaking countries in together and the bidding is completely different for different countries. The time zones are completely different. If your targeting the UK and the US and Australia all in one campaign, I recommend you go and change it quickly. You’ll find that one of those countries gets a much lower cost per click and their probably a much higher click through rate than the others and your just dragging the others down. So separate that out.
Now in your case, if you really have to have horses for handicapped as your only targeting option, I would be looking at how we can expand on that. That’s just one keyword that you have found is applicable to your product or service, my guess is that there’s probably other related keywords that we just don’t know about. So my advice would be to go to Quancast.com, Alexa.com, Similarsites.com, places like that to find out what other blogs, authors, TV shows, health care companies, or what else is related to horses for handicapped topic. Who are these people and what else would they do? Where else would they go? Do they have other things that they are involved in? You very well may find that there are other similar topics inside Facebook that could help you expand your reach.
Jon: Oh that’s great. Also that research that you said it’s interesting Quantcast and Alexa and perhaps also searching within google or Facebook for existing people and places that might exists. Do some research not just throw it out there.
Jennifer: Absolutely, I would be looking into it. I would also be careful about expanding to all of the US because there are a few states like California, Texas and New York are very good ad clicking states. So be really careful and see if your customers are really in the whole of the United States, well then that’s fine. But if you find out your customers come from predominately three, four or five states then narrow it down and only advertise in those states. It will save you a fortune on lost impressions in Idaho or Utah or Nevada or maybe places where people are not buying your stuff.
Jon: Yes, I think you mentioned that at the event that we were at, those are sort of hot click states. You mentioned international, if I was to run an international specific let’s say I’m doing one in Australia, I don’t want to bucket them like you said, keep them separate; is it cheaper to bid internationally? Can you get more traffic? In google, there are guys who are doing incredible stuff in google internationally and they don’t even focus on the US and get a lot of traffic. But some of targeting, perhaps some of the options may not be the best, but what’s the deal with Facebook these days on international traffic and bidding, etc?
Jennifer: International traffic is fantastic for Facebook. As long as you understand the culture that your advertising to. If all the other ads are in Spanish or French and yours are not, you really do need to understand what you’re getting yourself into. But clicks can be so much cheaper. I have several of my students who are advertising in south America and just doing so well and their clicks are costing two and three dollars. Sorry, two or three cents not dollars! Two or three cents per click and that’s just excellent. That sort of used to be common place awhile ago but now it’s really hard to find those cost per clicks. So if you have a worldwide product definitely investigate your options in the non-English speaking countries.
Jon: That’s a great tip and actually writes the ad in Spanish or mix it up some English and Spanish perhaps, trying to test different markets even internationally with langue.
Jennifer: Yes, absolutely I would have a native speaker translate your ad because they will get lingo, just slight changes. I’m sure you could image somebody who was not a native English speaker tried to write an English ad it would sound a bit choppy. So if you have a native speaker write your ad you would get little lingo or slang which would help get people’s attention too.
Jon: So just taking an English text and filtering it through translate.google.com is not so good.
Jennifer: Yeah, that doesn’t work.
Jon: Well I have one finale question as we come to a close here Jen. You deal with this, you eat, breath, sleep this stuff; I sense the passion which is so cool. What is the biggest trend or shift coming on the horizon perhaps in the next six to twelve months, especially we’re talking about Facebook here and not just Facebook advertising but broadly, their a public company now a lot of scrutiny here, a lot of discuss around is it really a value at $35, $20 or should it be more like ten bucks. They obviously have their sets of issues like frankly we all have. But what is Facebooks biggest worry and perhaps goal? One is perhaps a little more negative in terms of what their faced and the other is here are some great goals that we’re seeing for this business and for our business. Also I should say that’s for the small business owner and people to take leverage from as far as you see it?
Jennifer: The biggest thing now is Facebook pages are growing everyday and I think that’s a big opportunity. If people don’t understand how to get or use a Facebook page for their business they should definitely get in touch and I’ll point you in the right direction. I don’t build Facebook pages for people, my company doesn’t do that, we have people that we recommend to do that. Facebook pages are an immensely undervalued resource at this point. I think a lot of people are over looking it and it should be on your radar if it isn’t already. There are great strategies to generate a fabulous audience of raving fans. That’s what we are focusing on now with our members and our clients. That’s one of the biggest opportunities.
The other thing I wanted to say when you were asking me this question is; I think the future for Facebook lies in expanding their reach beyond the walls of Facebook. Similar to ad sense, google ads sense platform. I haven’t heard or seen anything official from Facebook on this topic. This is pure speculation on my part. However, Facebook has so much demographic data on all of us that it seems like it would be a tremendous waste if they didn’t create some sort of ad sense type platform, where we could have our Facebook ads showing on websites instead of ad sense. For advertisers and business owners that would be a tremendously powerful advertising option, because of the targeting options inside of Facebook that google just does not have. So we could target people by gender, marital status, how many kids they have, their likes and interests, the blogs they read and the other things they like on their Facebook. It’s amazingly powerful. What university they went to, where they work, or what their job title is, wow how powerful. You can tell I just excited about it. I just hope that that comes true. That would be so excellent.
On the down side, I guess I should have started with the down side, but having said all these great things and sensing how passionate I am about this there is a down side. That is Facebook is very immature. Every single day I deal with, well I won’t swear, but I deal with bad stuff. It’s frustrating because it’s hard to get an answer. We have a Facebook rep on the inside and it’s still difficult for us to some solutions, some things fixed or whatever. You can get an ad approved one day and submit an exact duplicate of that ad and it’s disapproved the next day and there is no explanation. You could have all of your ads in your whole account disapproved and they end up coming back to us a few days later and say “Oh, sorry that was a mistake”. It’s so frustrating.
I like to say Facebook is like a new born baby, it’s really cute and it’s really lovely, but it comes with a lot of sleepless nights. A lot of screaming and heartache, dirty diapers and stuff, but that baby is going to grow up and even faster than we can image. So the sooner you get on board and if you can deal with the sleepless nights you will be happy in the end. That’s the down side.
Jon: I like the order of that, the positive and a little bit on the down side. There are a lot of positives. I think this has been extremely positive, both the interview but also in terms of results, ideas and strategies that people can use. In fact, I know you mentioned FB Ad Labs, but where can we reach you, Jen, what are things you have in terms of urls and access points that we can get for our readers and visitors?
Jennifer: We can put up a link for people to come and find us. Our agency and company is called FB Ads Lab and we are also on Facebook as well, we share lots of cool case studies, questions and I like to quiz my readers now and again, which ad do you think is going to do better and everybody liked to guess. We keep everybody updated on what’s going on, that’s our fan page, which is likefblabads.com.
We have all kinds of services for people for all different budgets so if you want to run Facebook ads from the beginning, even if you’re an experienced marketer, FB Ads Lab has an insights program which is a monthly membership and training program where we have live calls just like this, every single month and videos every week about what’s going on and how you can optimize your stuff to make it successful on Facebook.
We also have an agency, it’s a complete done for you agency where we work with all kinds of companies big and small. You’ve heard about some of the people we work with, I really don’t like to go on and on about it, but we do thousands and thousands of dollars. Some of our clients are spending $7,000 to $8,000 a day with their Facebook ads. It’s pretty fun, pretty exciting stuff happening and we can help people from all walks of life.
Reach Jennifer Sheahan and her team here:
Visit https://www.fbadslab.com
Get trained – https://www.fbadslab.com/fb-insights/
Mastermind with Jennifer – https://www.fbadslab.com/faststart/
Facebook Advertising Ad Campaign Management – https://www.fbadslab.com/platinum-monthly/
Jon: That’s absolutely true. I can attest to that fact; you are the go to resource for me and I’m a member in the FB Ads Lab as well. It’s just a wealth of information and very timely updated. It’s nice, like you said at the beginning of the call, to pick one or two people, stay with them and stay focused. Be inspired and drive your passion even more so and stick with it. The resource for materials and education is ongoing, but you got to have the right information from the right people. Jennifer, you’re definitely one of those and the leader of the pack in this space. I really appreciate it here today that you have spent so much time with us and have answered all our questions. Any final comments or thoughts that you might have?
Jennifer: I think we’ve covered Facebook pages pretty thoroughly so that’s just the main thing that I want people to understand that there’s are really big opportunity for all of us right now.
I’d love to see some businesses taking the bull by the horns and getting out there and start connecting with their audiences and growing their audiences.
It’s a fabulous opportunity.
It’s been great chatting with you.
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Entrepreneur Magazine says Jon Rognerud is one of the most sought-after Digital Marketing Experts. His clients extend from high-end brands and middle-tier businesses in both B2B and B2C. His SEO website optimization book, "The Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your Website" from Entrepreneur Press is in bookstores now.