MD13: How to do Great Facebook Ads With Valerie Shoopman

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Great Facebook ads have a very specific anatomy. It’s a science that if you are trying to figure out all by yourself can take you a very long time to get right.

Instead, listen to what experts like Valerie Shoopman have to say and teach about creating effective Facebook ads.

Don’t beat your head over why your ads aren’t converting or why you are spending so much money for such lousy results. Valerie is the person behind John Lee Dumas’ original Facebook ad campaigns for his webinars.

Things like having the right image for your ad, the right copy, the right call to action and description can really go the long way for helping you succeed with creating great facebook ads.

I also mention about how I use them for my website personalization campaigns, by targeting certain cultures and creating tailored ads based on what cross-cultural marketing research  says you should consider for different audiences from different cultural backgrounds. I know this can be an advanced topic that even some of the top digital marketers don’t use, but if you are gonna do it, you might as well do it right…

After you know who you are targeting with your Facebook ads, you start creating the ad itself and using what you learn on this episode you can shape it to be a successful ad.

You can learn more about Valerie by connecting with her at her Facebook page.

Resources For Your Great Facebook Ads

Valerie recommends you use photos taken with your own phone or camera but if you want to use stock photos you can check these out.

Transcript

Borja: FaceBook ads is easy traffic; that’s what we’re going talk about today with Valerie Shoopman. Episode 13, let’s do it! Welcome to the Money Diver Podcast. I am Borja Obeso, and every week I bring you step by step actionable online marketing strategies that you can implement in your business to see results fast. So let the diving begin.

Borja: Hey what’s up, divers. Welcome back to this show. Thank you so much for your time, thank you so much for your interest. And I want to thank everyone who has left a review. I have been reading through the reviews lately on iTunes, and really, thank you so much. Reading those reviews motivates me so much to keep going, working hard on the podcast. I’m so glad that it’s helping out so many people. I truly couldn’t be happier about that and more grateful. So I had a pretty busy week last week. I got engaged to my beautiful girlfriend, now fiancée. That’s another motive to keep working hard on my business. I released a new theme on SmartDuu.com. People are loving it. You should go check it out at SmartDuu.com/ThemesShowroom. Today’s episode is all about what I’m doing to drive more traffic to SmartDuu with FaceBook ads. Now, I remember the first time I used FaceBook ads, back in 2011 I think it was, for a sales speech. I think it was a sales speech. I don’t remember; it was so long ago. The difference between FaceBook ads and any other type of advertising or any other type of traffic strategy is that you can control, you have the power of who is going to be seeing your content. Who is going to be going to your website, and almost any advertising network allows you to target people of course, but the thing with FaceBook is that it allows you to create segments that are so targeted that if you know your audience, if you know who you are speaking to, you can’t go wrong with that. If you know what you have to say and who is going to be seeing those ads, who is going to be going to those websites, you can’t go wrong with FaceBook ads. You just have to figure out your budget, you just have to figure out your avatar, and you know, get it down to a science. That’s what we’re speaking toady, on this episode with Valerie Shoopman, from ValerieShoopman.com, and amazing person that I am so grateful to have on this show who is going to drop a ton of information value bombs for you. So let’s go hand out with Val.

Borja: Thank you for coming, I really appreciate it.

Valerie Shoopman: Oh, thank you Borja.

Borja: Okay Valerie to get started, would you mind telling us a little bit about your business and your background with FaceBook advertising?

Valerie Shoopman: Sure. No problem. I’ve been actually doing FaceBook ads since 2009, so the early days for FaceBook ads, I had experience doing Google adwords before that, so I just brought that experience into FaceBook ads. And you know, I was already doing FaceBook marketing and just adding the ads onto that as a service really allowed me to service my clients better and learn FaceBook ads and go really deep with FaceBook ads. What I’ve discovered is, over the course of the last few years, FaceBook there’s not another platform that can touch it right now as far as being able to very granularly very focus on who your ideal target audience is and reach them with your message, your offer.

Borja: Oh, I agree. So for someone who would like to get started with FaceBook ads, what is the first step they have to take?

Valerie Shoopman: I think the number one first step is kind of a tie. First you need to know who your ideal target audience is, and that’s really true in business, but I still have people come to me and want to do FaceBook ads but they haven’t clearly defined who their target audience is. FaceBook is very powerful, you can really drill down but you’ve got to know that first. So I would say making sure you have that ideal target audience, clearly define who they are, what their age group is, their gender, what they like, where they hang out, those types of things, you really need to know that in depth information. And then the next thing would be what is your goal? What is your objective with this particular FaceBook ad campaign? Is it to get more likes to your fan page and have social proof? Is it to get people registered for your webinar? Is it to get people over to your website and get some eyeballs and traffic over there? Is it to increase your engagement on a particular post? Those are all types of things you need to know and then go into it because each ad campaign can only have one of those objectives. To have a successful ad campaign, you need to know what you’re after first, and then have a method in place to measure that to see if it was a success or not.

Borja: Beautiful. And let’s track down a successful ad.

Valerie Shoopman: Sure.

Borja: What is some tips you have for the title, for example?

Valerie Shoopman: Well, again, the title is going to depend what’s going on and how that relates to your audience. I want to step back from that because I think people get too hung up on that first. they’re like, okay just tell me what the title is, just tell me what the copy should be, just tell me what the image should be, and they want to skip over that other part that I was talking about with the ideal target audience. Also with that is your offer. What is your offer? How is that aligned and what is your landing page? If you’re taking them to a landing page. Again, what objective it is, is the first thing. For example, if you’re doing a like campaign, then click like if you love is a great copy and it might be love being an entrepreneur, click like if you love being an entrepreneur. That works really good for a like campaign. If it is, like I said, for registering for your webinar, for example, then you have to flip it around, what I call what’s in it for me? You don’t want to tell them you’re going to teach them 6 different things about x, y, z. you want to tell them what they’re going to learn or transform, how it’s going to affect them. You might say I’m going to teach you FaceBook ads so that you can build your list faster. So that, that’s a key word in there. You’re relating it back to them because you have to enter that conversation that’s going on in your target audience’s mind already.

Borja: Okay, what about the image? What are some tips for images? What are the best types of images that you’ve seen succeed on ads?

Valerie Shoopman: Sure, and I would say the image—targeting is number one, and then the image. Because the image is what is going to stop people. It’s kind of like the billboard along the highway and you’re flying by at 70 miles an hour. The ones that grab your attention, you get that little snippet of information from. Same thing in the newsfeed on the right side. As people are scrolling through their newsfeed, it’s going to be the image that attracts their attention, that gets them to stop and take a second to look further. And then beyond that, images that can convey the emotion of what you’re trying to tell or get people to do, those are the number one best thing. The other thing is, people are coming to FaceBook to interact with their friends and family. So if you’re showing stock photos, that’s not going to convert very well. You, with a smiling face. If you’re a speaker up on stage, or you’re teaching, actively teaching someone. Things like that are going to convert better than stock images. So smiling face, bright colors, images that convey that emotion of what you’re trying to get across or what you’re trying to get them to do, those would work the best.

Borja: Yeah, that’s actually a very interesting tip because I would think someone would jump right onto using stock images and getting it very wrong that way.

Valerie Shoopman: A lot of people actually do. I’ve done quite a bit of testing against one another and the one off images of you personally, especially if it’s you or the face of your business, of you personally smiling or you being in the picture just far surpasses stock images. It’s amazing the difference. And it comes back to that mindset of why people get on the FaceBook platform; they get on there to interact with their friends and families, not to follow brands. So that’s the key differentiator.

Borja: Right. And what about the description of the ad?

Valerie Shoopman: As far as the description, do you mean in the post above?

Borja: Yeah, the post above. Do you include a call to action or an actual description of what people are going to get, or a teaser, or…?

Valerie Shoopman: Yeah, so I like to use what I call link share ads where the image, anywhere they click on the image, the headline, the copy, the call to action button, the URL, anywhere they click there, it takes them to the landing page. That’s my favorite type of ad because it converts the best. So within that, I’ll use the headline, the copy, the call to action. But in a post above that ad, anywhere they click in that post it’s not going to take them to the actual landing page. But in that post above the ad, I like to keep it very personal. I see this mistake being made all the time where people come to FaceBook and they try to be very stuffy and corporate like and traditional advertising. And that just does not work on FaceBook, again because people are there to interact with their friends and family. So if you come at it from a more personable copy, however you normally talk. Pretend that it is your friend that is your ideal target audience and talk to them in that same manner. Again, come at it in as what’s in it for me perspective, and not you as the seller, but your client, your ideal target audience. What is going to be important to them, what are they thinking, what problem do they need solved, and talk about that, and then a call to action. Sometimes I will put a link in the post above because that link, if you do the link with the http, then that will make it a clickable link, so it just gives them one more opportunity to get to that landing page. But again, the short of it is make it personable, don’t make it stuffy.

Borja: That’s a nice, and I mean, it makes perfect sense. What about mobile versus desktop?

Valerie Shoopman: Ah, that’s a good one. I still see so many people optimizing for desktop and never taking a look at their traffic and see what’s going on. In most niches, we’re approaching 60, 70, 80 percent of the traffic is mobile and that’s a huge difference for multiple reasons. One, when you create that ad, it looks much different on mobile than it does on desktop. It will truncate off that post that we were talking about, that copy in the post above the ad. Mobile will truncate that off, so you might lose your call to action or you might lose the most important part and not even realize it if you’re not paying attention. So very key to optimize it for each platform, and then I take a look at the reports. You can go into reports and look at placement, and it will show you which one is doing the best and where it’s being clicked on, being served to, etcetera, and you can make decisions from there. A lot of times I will split them out separately just to be able to effectively split desktop against mobile and have the copy be totally optimized for desktop versus totally optimized for mobile. The other thing I see happening is people are still not being aware of mobile, so they might do an ad for a mobile and they may even optimize the ad for mobile viewing but yet they don’t pay attention for their landing page, and it’s one of those, I know we’ve all experienced it on our phones. You go there and you’re like, really? I’ve got to zoom and pinch and squeeze then go all over the place just to find where I’m supposed to input? So if your landing page is not optimized for mobile and you’re running mobile traffic to it, you are greatly lowering your conversions and lowering the cost of those conversions. The other thing I see, people still talking about custom FaceBook tabs, and it’s kind of a pet peeve of mine because they talk about custom FaceBook tabs and being sure to do a custom FaceBook tab, but then they completely leave out the last part of it that mobile traffic will never see that custom FaceBook tab. In fact, it’ll go to an error tab. So if you are driving mobile traffic to a custom FaceBook tab, you are just throwing your money down the drain. You’ve got to be aware of those things as you’re driving traffic. One thing I always do. after I already have everything set up, so I have my landing page, I have my opt-in, I have my ad, I click through everything on every device I can, laptop, tablet, mobile, different browsers, to check it and make sure because before I start spending ad dollars I want to make sure I haven’t made a mistake or I haven’t optimized something that I could easily optimize and eliminate some of these issues I was just referring to.

Borja: What about newsfeed on the sidebar? Because I see a lot of people target the sidebar, and a lot of people just target the newsfeed.

Valerie Shoopman: Yeah, it makes a difference. Again, it comes back to strategy. I look at the right side or the side bar as a billboard advertisement. People expect advertisements over there and it’s okay if they see your ad over there multiple times. However, if they see your ad multiple times in the newsfeed, they get annoyed really quickly so you have to be aware of that. I like to use that right side if I’m doing branding for a company or for an event. It works really good for that. I also like to use it as a reminder, like remind people that their webinar is today, or remind people that they were interested in something and didn’t follow through. So that’s how I use the right side or the side bar and find it to be very effective. For the newsfeed, again, it’s much more personable. It’s less frequency. It’s in that language, like I’m talking to my friend. I just happen to have a solution for their problem.

Borja: Beautiful. What is your favorite type of landing page for FaceBook ads? Webinars, or something like that?

Valerie Shoopman: Definitely webinars. What I find is that one, back up a little bit. Using FaceBook to build your list, I think, is key. People try to do FaceBook ads directly to a sale and that doesn’t work so well. But what does work is FaceBook to building your list, and my favorite way to do that is through webinars for multiple reasons. One, you’re building list, but also you’re getting people to a webinar where they can hear you and if you’re doing it with a video, then they can see you as well. But you’re making that connection with them. You’re showing that you’re a real person. You’re also showing your knowledge, the depth of your knowledge, and how you can help them and why they should trust you. That like, know, and trust cycle shortens greatly on a webinar.

Borja: Yeah, it’s a great way to connect, to create that repertoire, that branding you want to create with an audience. Let them hear your voice, your personality, and relate to you, or hate you, or whatever needs to happen. Yeah, because if they’re going to hate you or not like you, it better happy sooner than later than waste time in creating that content, perhaps. So I think—

Valerie Shoopman: Yeah, that brings up a great point. This happens a lot when I’m teaching people or running ads, where people are like, don’t say that because then someone might not want to come or want to do things! And that’s what people don’t realize; you construct your ad and your landing page too to automatically weed people out. That’s why it’s so important to get crystal clear on your ideal audience. You want that copy to pull, attract people that are your perfect, ideal client, and then you also want that copy to eliminate people that are not.

Borja: Precisely, precisely. You want to embrace that connection, definitely. So Valerie, I want to ask you a question that I ask everyone here. My audience knows this is going to be. Who is your avatar? Your ideal customer? And what can you do to serve this person?

Valerie Shoopman: Sure. So my ideal avatar is entrepreneurs, specifically business coaches, authors, speakers. Those are who I focus on. And it’s also becoming a lot more in the health niche as well. And of course I help them with FaceBook advertising. That’s what I do, what I’m known for. And now I’m really transitioning to teaching and helping other learn how to do FaceBook ads as well as I’ve been able to do them for the past 5, 6 years.

Borja: Great, very precise. I like when people are very precise with this question because it means, it shows my audience how important it really is to know who you are going to be speaking, who you need in your business, who your avatar is, and narrow it down, that person to even give him a name like, well know you know, dogs, he calls him Jimmy. So Valerie, thank you so much for these insightful tips on FaceBook ads. I know my audience is going to love it. I loved it, there’s a lot of things I didn’t know about, your strategy. Where can people go to learn more about you?

Valerie Shoopman: Yeah, you can connect with me at ValsFanPage.com. That’s my FaceBook business page, so that would be a great place. Also, if you want to find out more how you can learn about FaceBook ads, you could go to FBAdsMastermind.com. That’s FBAdsMastermind.com

Borja: Beautiful. I’ll make sure to include that on the show notes. Any other resources to learn about FaceBook ads that you would recommend?

Valerie Shoopman: As far as, I mean if you go to ValsFanPage, there is a couple there that you could download as far as how to set up your business page for the best advertising and organic reach, even though organic is down a little bit now. It’s all about ads. And then I am working on several things coming up as far like a step by step FaceBook ads course, and then also just some starter videos and starter information for people just delving into it.

Borja: Perfect. Well, Val, once again thank you so much for coming. I really, really appreciate it, and I know my audience is going to appreciate it that as well. I hope to have you again in the future.

Valerie Shoopman: Okay, thank you so much Borja for having me on.

Borja: You’re welcome.

Borja: Okay guys, I hope you guys enjoyed the interview with Valerie. I hope you wrote down those notes and I hope you begin implementing FaceBook ads on your marketing strategies and your marketing campaigns. One way that I’m using FaceBook ads that is so powerful that excites me so much is that I target specific countries and I do research on those cultures, and I create using the personalization features on the cerebral WordPress framework, I create tailored versions of my website based on those cultural research, what colors those people from those countries react better to, what words, etcetera. And I’m writing a post and a guide on these discoveries that I learned and how I used FaceBook ads on personalization to increase conversions so much that I’m going to be releasing on rebelgrowth.com pretty soon. Once again guys, thank you so much for listening. If you have any recommendations, any comments about the episode or the show in general, you can do it over at twitter using the hashtag #MoneyDiver13 or you can head on over to rebelgrowth.com/Episode13. Leave a comment. You can also read the show notes right there. Go out, create a campaign, implement, and keep on diving.