E48: The Three Step Formula for Profitable Meta Ads Without Hiring an Agency featuring: Matt Hagberg

Some of you know me, and you know that I'm a teacher at heart, and I am the type of teacher that if you don't participate, I will come out and call on you. I brought a mic for it just to fulfill my threats. Okay. Okay, so we're going to practice on the real quick because I'm also kind of needy.

So I need some interaction. If you're in here and you have at least one arm that you can raise, let me see you raise it. There's a lot of people with no arms out here. All right, let's try that one more time.

If you have an arm that you can raise. Raise it. Yes, I love it. Okay, this is interactive, all right?

That's the only way I know how to do this. So I wanted to talk to you guys today about how to stop losing money on ads. Because I feel like there's a lot of people out here that you probably have tried it yourself. Raise your hand if you try to.

Yourself. How many of you keep your hand up? If you tried it yourself and it didn't turn out the way you were hoping it would? More hands went up.

All right. That's sad. Raise your hand if you hired an agency and that didn't work out for you. Yeah.

Yeah, I've seen that. Okay. So what I want to do today is I actually want to show you how to do this by yourself, without needing an agency, and to do it quickly. As a matter of fact, I could.

You could actually walk through this with me right now. If you had access to a Facebook ads account and your angle, high level. If you can't, that's exactly what the program is for. And those implementation sessions that are in the program, this is going to be exactly what those are for.

So get into those as well. So that's my goal here today. So for those of you who don't know me, this is where I have to convince you to listen to me, okay. These are some of the companies that I've worked with.

I have spent I have spent overseeing, consulted with whatever. Over $100 million in ad spend across, pretty much every ad platform that exists. Including things like Hulu and all of those types of things. I've done everything from launched brick and mortar business.

I had a pest control company for a while. I've, had an e-commerce business, women's activewear, you name it. I've probably dabbled in it at at some scale. And so thankfully, it's given me a breadth of knowledge to be able to help you guys, to be able to do whatever to meet you where you're at in your industry and understand how to actually run profitable ads.

Okay. Now there's a lot of ad platforms out there, and the goal here right now is to be as simple as possible. I want you to be able to take this and actually launch ads for right now or tonight and see progress. So I'm going to do this in three steps.

I'm going to tell you the three things that you need to make sure are happening for you to have profitable ads. We're good with that. You guys want to profitable ads? Yeah.

As a note here, because I want to make sure you guys all know everything you've seen here with organic, social and all of those things. Those are all important. However, what you're also going to find is that paid advertising is your most controllable and scalable way to grow your business. If you want more leads and more sales, you ratchet up the ad spend.

If you want less, you turn it back down. So paid ads, even if it's not something you're ready for now, is probably something you're going to want to understand as you move forward, because there's so many different platforms. The easiest one to start with tends to be meta. By the way, meta is just Facebook and Instagram.

So that's what we're going to do. We're going to focus on launching on meta because it's probably the platform that has the majority of your ideal avatars on it, and it's one of the easier ones to actually manage. I'm going to put this down because you all participated well, but I will pick it back up if you don't participate. Step one I need you to tell me what you want, and don't get distracted with the bells and whistles, by the way.

This is going to be the simplest, probably the simplest, presentation you see this entire time. I like to keep it as simple as possible. This is pretty much as complicated as we get. Okay, so for a lot of people, when you jump into meta ads, you probably have seen raise your hand.

If you've seen this screen before. That's not a lot of hands. There you go. Okay.

So for a lot of people, they see the screen and immediately they freeze up. They have no idea what to do with meta ads. Okay. There are two things every business needs.

Leads in sales. That's it. Okay. So what should you tell meta to get you?

There you go. Leads in sales. Okay. So either you're telling meta to send it to a website where someone gives you their email address, or send them to a website where they're giving you money.

Those are the two things you want. Okay. Maybe a phone call or something like that. But that's semantics.

So on this screen, all you're going to do is say I want leads emails or I want money sales on the next screen, depending on if you chose leads or sales. Meta is asking you, where do you want these leads and sales to happen? Well we talked go high level, talked about, funnels and landing pages. We had a whole session about it yesterday about funnels.

You just want them to go to your website. Hey, meta. Send sales to my website or send leads to my website. Okay.

That's it. I'm done teaching. You matter at. Home.

Okay. Now you're you're probably. This is one of the issues I have with a lot of marketing agencies. They tend to overcomplicate it.

So you pay them to do the thing. That's not complicated. They will tell you all of these other things that need to happen. They don't.

Okay. One of the biggest ones is things about targeting how to understand who to target within meta and how to get them, and blah blah blah. Here's the secret for you. You ready?

Targeting doesn't matter. Wow. Okay. So you can start off with, like, lookalike audiences interest audiences if you're not sure what those are.

Come find me later. You can start with that if you want to. To helmet along the way. But there's this really cool invention that's happened.

Has anybody here heard of artificial intelligence? If if you did raise your hand, why are you here? Artificial intelligence. While we speak at the AI for business conference, is taking over everything.

As a matter of fact. Zuckerberg, I believe. Don't quote me on this. Has already spent about 70 over $70 billion this year alone for AI integration into meta.

Now, the interesting thing is, because a lot of people are focused on his glasses and all that kind of stuff. That's not his main money driver. His main money driver is you guys running ads on his platform, and he knows that if you're not making money with those ads, you're not going to advertise anymore. As a matter of fact, he's had a conversation at one point where he wants to get to the point this isn't yet, but he wants to get to the point where all you have to do is tell him who you want to sell to and the website address you want to send them.

And he wants his platform to do targeting, to do ad creative, to do everything else for you. That's how much he's devoted to AI in the the actual ad platform. Now he's not there yet, but the first steps have been in targeting, so we're finding more and more that targeting doesn't matter. But there's a caveat.

There's a reason why targeting doesn't matter. Your ad creative does. Now you saw some presentations already where ad creative was explained to you how to create ads. I mean, you saw a teenager create video ads.

I mean, it wasn't. She's really good at it, by the way. So your ad creative does matter, but I want you to put a pin in that. I'm going to open, open a loop for you.

This is a marketing ploy, by the way. I'm going to open this loop, and I'm not going to close it till later. So you got to pay attention. Okay.

You guys ready for step two? You guys ready for step two? Okay. I've been to a lot of these things, and I know that toward the end of the day, you guys start getting tired, so I'm going to need to hear the energy from you.

Step two. Your landing page is the problem. I can't tell you how many times I've had people come to me and say, hey, we need to make more money. Can you run our ads and magically make us more money?

And then I go to their landing page and I look at their landing page and or their conversion percentages from their landing page, and I say, no, I can't, because this sucks. Okay. I'm sorry if I'm being harsh. The the truth of the matter is when you run ads.

So if you run warm traffic to your landing page and then run cold traffic, which is ads, that cold traffic is only going to convert at about 30% of your warm traffic. So if you're sending warm traffic to a landing page and it's only barely converting, then cold traffic like ads is never going to convert. It's just not going to work. Your landing page is the problem.

There's three things that your landing page needs. You ready for this? This slide is going to be super important okay. This is probably the most complicated slide I actually have.

Number one, I need to know that I'm the type of person that you're talking to. You need to identify me clearly so I know I'm in the right place. Number two, you need to identify the pain point that I am feeling at that moment. And number three, you need to identify that you have a solution that is simple for me to implement.

Okay. I don't want a 700 page PDF that I have to read through to find the solution. Don't sell me that. Okay.

All of these things have to be above the fold. For those of you don't know what above the fold is when you go to a website on your phone. I don't want you building websites based on laptops anymore, because that's nobody goes there on your phone where 85 or more percent of all of your web traffic will come from. Everything on this slide needs to be accessible and visible without me having to scroll.

The only thing not on here is an actual call to action of like click here, give me your email, whatever that needs to be there to. That's it. You make sure those are above the fold. All right.

So do you want me to give you an example of what I think is a really good landing page? Okay. Does this slide look familiar? But I was doing a little test on you guys this whole time.

Okay. Stop losing money on ads. I already identified you. You're someone who spent money on ads.

Number two, stop losing money on ads. I identified your pain. You're losing money on ads. Who here loves losing money?

Exactly. And number three profitable ads in just three steps. I made you a promise that I can show you in three steps how to make profitable ads. Okay.

All of this can fit above a fold on a mobile device. As a matter of fact, I could take my eye. My wife thinks pretty face off of that, and it would probably be just as effective. All right.

Now, I actually wanted to use this as a case study to explain conversion rate optimization. So with a landing page, you have a few different, goals with the landing page. Now this case study is a little different because this isn't a website where, you know, at an event and I'm speaking to you guys. So we're going to kind of tweak it a little bit.

So there's really two calls to action that I would have with this particular slide slash landing page call to action. Number one would be I just want you guys to pay attention. I want to pique your interest. So that way you listen to me more.

All right. Raise your hand if you've heard anything I've said between the first slide. In this slide. Well, that's not very many people.

Any. There you go. That's more. Okay.

Now, raise the second call to action is you see down here which says let's connect and has all of my socials and everything. Raise your hand in here. If any of you looked me up on social media since I put this slide up at the beginning. Yeah, there's a few of you.

So conversion rate optimization. Okay. I was able to convince most of you to continue to listen to me. When you have a landing page, you want to convince almost every visitor with your above the fold to continue to listen, to continue to read.

That's the goal with above the fold. The second thing you want is you want probably about 20 to 30% of them, depending on the offer, price point, all that kind of stuff. You want them to then go check me out on one of my socials, or click the button or whatever the case may be. Me this was a perfect, case study for this is how a landing page works.

Almost all of you continue to listen to me, mostly because you have to. And and some of you, I think probably about 10%, maybe more, actually went and checked out one of my socials. This is how you handle a landing page. Done.

That's step two. Okay, you guys ready for step three? You guys ready for step three? There you go.

I still have the microphone up here. I will call on you. Step three come on. Button.

There you go. Your ad creative sucks. Okay, I'm being mean I know. Sorry.

Okay. I will simplify this as much as I can for you. Here's where you. I suggest you get your first ad creative.

You ready for this? You want. You want me to show you the perfect first ad for your perfect landing page? You ready?

Hey, look at that. I can literally turn this into a vertical. A square, horizontal, whatever. And run this as an ad.

And the perfect thing here is that I've identified who they are, their pain point, and the solution I want to give them. And this story that I'm telling continues to the landing page where I can then maybe add some stuff in of what they're going to get more detail, blah, blah, blah, whatever the case may be. So what I would do is I would start with this, and then I would take the words on this page, and then I would use AI to create more copy. By the way, Chris was just up here showing you a tool that could do that.

Exactly. Or you could use ChatGPT or whatever. If you use ChatGPT for whatever you want to do manually, I literally would just say, here's my landing page. Can you create ten effective ad hooks that will get people to click based on my web page, by my landing page.

Does it just come up with ten different versions because you want to test until you find the right words? Now here's something that some people might not agree with, but they can be wrong. It's fine. Don't complicate the imagery.

I have seen people make five and six figures. By doing this, they'll take a square that is some bright color, like pink. They'll put some words on it. And because the words were so emotionally triggering, they got sales from it.

Ugly ads and ugly funnels convert. Stop making everything pretty and make it effective. That's what matters here. Okay.

Stop worrying about whether or not it's perfect. And all you need to do is worry about whether it's emotionally triggering for those people to take an action. That's why don't complicate the imagery. You can go find some stock imagery that represents your ideal client.

You can ask AI to make it. You can create videos just like we saw yesterday. You can do any of those things, but it doesn't matter unless you get the words right. Okay.

The words in those videos need to make sense and trigger emotion for the people clicking. So you have to get the words right. Start there. Okay, everybody good?

Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna do a little recap for you. I told you this was going to be easy.

Actually, they bribed me. They said if I went short that I could, they were going to buy me drink, so. Yeah. All right.

Step one. Tell me what you want. Don't complicate it. What do you want?

What does every business want? That was horrible. Let's try this one more day. What does every business want?

There you go. And because you are here, you know that you want people to send people to a landing page because you understand that that's what works best. So just tell it. You want leads or sales on a website.

Done. There's no other set up that you need to worry about. Trust me. Just try it out.

All right. Number two, fix your landing page. Okay. They need to be emotionally triggered and know that you're there to help them without ever having to scroll.

If you. If I don't feel emotionally triggered by the first words that I read on your landing page, you failed. That's the most important part. Number three, you want to use words that drive clicks, pictures and videos and things like that.

They only accentuate the words if they are effective. So you need to find the effective words and then introduce images and videos that will empower those words. Okay. You guys want a little bonus tip?

This is a little bonus tip for what we call CRO conversion rate optimization. All right. When you build your landing page, by the way, do this for anything that you ever build that has a URL. All right.

Put heat mapping software on it like Hotjar Hotjar. Right down there. Hotjar. Okay.

There's other ones out there. This is just one that I've used forever. What this does is it gives you the ability to literally watch people as they are on your site. It's kind of creepy, but you do what you got to do for a successful business.

So you can see things like, if they're not scrolling past the fold, your words are not interesting enough to get them to continue to scroll, or if they're not clicking or whatever. There's some situations where you forgot to actually put a URL on the button and they're trying to click and nothing's happening and you don't know. You just assume it sucks. Put Hotjar on everything.

I would love for you guys to actually go run some ads today, because that's literally all you have to do, because you can build all you want. You have a lot of tools. We have new AI tools coming out every single day. You can build the thing all day long to your heart's content, but until you actually expose people to your offer, you don't know what's going to happen.

As a matter of fact, without sales and leads, you don't have a business. You just have a dream. So let's turn your dream into a business and actually start running some traffic to your offers. Okay.

You guys want to make money? There you go. That's a wrap for this episode of the AI for business podcast. If you enjoyed it, don't forget to hit subscribe and pass it along to a friend or colleague.

We appreciate you being here and we'll catch you in the next one.