140. Steady growth without spending a fortune on ads with Danny Young

Want to become the obvious choice to the right crowd & attract more clients on video? Check out my Mic Drop Moments program – You meet for just one hour each month, via remote video interview, and you get a month of short form video done for you.

Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of The Standout Business Show!

If you loved this episode and you’re loving The Standout Business Show series, there’s one thing that I would love for you to do:

Tell one friend.

Transcript

Brad Powell: 0:02

Particularly when it comes to video. The less produced they are, the better they perform. If they’re shot on somebody’s iPhone and they look like they’re just part of the feed rather than looking like an ad. Within Instagram and Facebook, people want to see what’s normal to them in their feed rather than click on ads.

Danny Young: 0:21

These kinds of people. They’re not really looking for highly polished video that has got multiple angles and looks very, very professionally edited and put together. They want to connect with people. They want to connect with humans and this is a great way to get across tone of voice, personality, passion. For all of those reasons, if you’re looking to build a brand, online video is a really, really powerful way to do that, because it’s the next best thing to being in the same room or across the table with somebody.

Brad Powell: 0:50

Welcome to the Standout Business Show. I’m Brad Powell and I’m your guide to making a bigger difference by doing business differently. Today we’re talking about one of the biggest challenges that’s facing every single service business, and this is true whether you’re a consultant or a coach or an online course creator. Your biggest challenge often is maintaining that steady stream of new clients. So typically you’ll experience this great month with lots of new business, and then you and your team will jump in and you’ll get busy doing great work for your clients. But then, as that work comes to a close, you take a look over at your pipeline for attracting new clients and it’s all dry and dusty from neglect. And so you end up going through this long dry period of kind of scrambling for new business and not knowing where your next client is going to come from. What if there was a way for you to invest a modest amount of your marketing budget into an automated system that can run in the background and would provide you with a constant flow of right fit clients? And if you set this up properly, we’d have people coming to you who know they’re actually a perfect fit for the offer that you make.

Brad Powell: 2:13

Well, this week’s guest, danny Young, and he’s going to share how you can use Facebook ads and Instagram ads to build an engaged audience, to automate your lead generation and to create epic experiences for your customers. Danny’s the founder of a boutique Facebook ads and automation agency specializing in audience growth and keeping your brand front of mind to your dream clients. If you want a steady flow of qualified, high quality leads and sales for your business, stay tuned. And with that let’s start the show. All right, danny Young, welcome back to the show.

Danny Young: 3:01

Hey Brad, it’s great to be here. I love the little ripple of applause that I get when my image appears in that video as well.

Brad Powell: 3:08

I know the crowd just loves it. Like here you are and they’re like, yeah, he’s back, that’s so great, all right. Well, I am excited to talk about this because we did chat before about Facebook ads and my impression and I go through like this is true for me to a certain degree in the business world, especially for people who have a small marketing agency or any kind of service that they’re providing as a consultancy they’re pretty skittish when it comes to investing in paid traffic and particularly when they think over to Facebook, they’re going well. I spent all my time on LinkedIn Like I left Facebook years ago.

Brad Powell: 3:54

That’s for my parents, it’s not for me, and Instagram seems like it’s for a bunch of young people who are a lot younger than I am. They’re in the middle here somewhere and they’re going. This doesn’t necessarily feel like a great fit and I’ve heard horror stories of people shoveling money into the Facebook furnace and it just gets burned up and blows away and nothing ever happens, and they may have even had their own experience of trying doing Facebook ads and not doing particularly well. However, you’re someone who’s absolutely proven that using these methods completely does work well and, in fact, doesn’t necessarily require large amounts of money or even a large amount of time and effort on the part of an entrepreneur. So talk about these objections like stand them up like a straw dog and then knock them over.

Danny Young: 4:55

Sure, which one would you like me to start with?

Brad Powell: 4:58

Oh well, I would say just simply I think it’s going to take a lot of money to make ads work for my business.

Danny Young: 5:07

Yeah yeah, that is a very common misconception and in fact, I did an expert kind of guest expert slot for one of my business connections about an hour ago and this very topic came up because people do think that they seem to have this kind of I know mythical idea that you have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to run Facebook ads. But you absolutely don’t. There are strategies that you can use where you can get started with as little as $5, $10 a day, depending on what you want to achieve, and you can get really, really good results. We have clients in my agency that are probably spending. Some of them are spending maybe $15 to $20 a day doing something a little bit more sophisticated.

Danny Young: 5:58

We have others, of course, that spend significantly more than that because they’ve got a lot of stuff going on, but you really, really don’t need a bottomless barrel of money and a hugely deep pockets to get started with Facebook ads at all. Some of the strategies that we use specifically I know we’re going to talk a bit about video in ads, but specifically around that, it’s a very, very cost effective way to get your brand out there in front of lots and lots of really, really targeted people at a pretty low cost and get the kind of exposure that you need so that people can start to build up a kind of virtual relationship with you all in readiness for them buying all of the good things that you have to sell. So can you spend lots of money on Facebook ads? Absolutely, but do you need to to get started? Absolutely not.

Brad Powell: 6:47

Yeah, okay, so let’s talk a little bit about ways to avoid that. I mean, I think the big takeaway has something to do with you can start on a small level and literally learn as you go, so that, as you are investing certain amounts of a budget allocated to it in a certain direction, you’re learning what works and then can be more confident in scaling a particular campaign and or leaning into something that is actually working for you. So describe your approach when it comes to beginning a campaign and kind of and then scaling up a little bit.

Danny Young: 7:30

Yeah, sure. So it very much depends on what the campaign objective is. What is it that we want to achieve? Because there’s lots that you can do. Right. There’s Facebook.

Danny Young: 7:39

Ads can deliver on so many different fronts, but if we keep this kind of focused on, let’s say, audience growth, so if you’re going to sell something online, then you have to have an audience of people to sell to. Generally speaking, it doesn’t really work if you just start to run ads to try and sell a product or service to an audience of people that have no familiarity with you or your brand, because it’s very unlikely that they’re going to. Unless you’ve got a very, very targeted product that solves a massive problem and the timing is right and everything else is dialed in, it’s highly unlikely. What normally happens is that you need to establish rapport, build a connection with people and build no like and trust. I talk a lot of people in the online marketing space will talk about those three words, but they are so fundamentally important. If you’re going to be building a business, you need that to underpin the credibility before people are going to be willing to kind of get out their credit cards and spend money with you. So if we’re thinking about building an audience. You have to have an audience of people to sell to so you can build that relationship with them. We might start with a campaign that’s going to get people to promote a lead magnet. So you’ll see these all over the internet where people will offer some kind of guide, checkbook, training, whatever certainly in the online entrepreneur space and they’ll get that two for free. Well, when I say free, they want your name and email address in exchange and then they’re going to start emailing you to start the process of building online relationship. So we might start doing that at a relatively low budget.

Danny Young: 9:18

We’ll test a few different things. We’ll look at all of the single components of both the ad and the funnel that we’re driving traffic into. So, just to be really clear on the terminology there, the ad is what we’re going to serve to people through Facebook or Instagram, which is going to speak of the benefits of the lead magnet that we’re promoting and give people a next step on how to get their hands on it. And then we will send them into a funnel, which is normally a landing page, which just says hey, here is the thing that I said you could get. Give me your name and email and hit the button and I’ll send it to you and then there’ll be a thank you page. As an agency we will look at all of that and make sure that it is as optimized as possible to get conversions.

Danny Young: 10:01

And with the ad specifically, we’ll want to test a few different things. We’ll probably test a few different images, maybe a couple of videos, depending on how the client wants to position themselves. We’ll test a couple of different versions of the copy in the ad. And again, I’m kind of coming at this from a starting point.

Danny Young: 10:18

You can test as much as you want to test, but certainly as a starting point we want to test a couple of different versions of the copy, some different headlines and those kinds of things, to find out which of those combinations of assets is going to get the best result in terms of the most clicks on that ad to the next part of the funnel which is visiting the landing page, and whether to type in their name and email.

Danny Young: 10:41

And then, once we’ve established the kind of winning combination or combinations, we will then start to slowly scale those up by adding a bit more ad spend into the winners, as we call them, so that we can start to get more results, and we’ll be keeping a very close eye on all of the metrics to make sure that we’re not scaling too quickly, which the algorithm can sometimes struggle with, but we’re doing this in a manageable way, over a defined period of time to get to the point where we’re achieving the results that the client wants to achieve. So we tend to start relatively small and scale up. Does that make sense and answer your question?

Brad Powell: 11:17

Yeah, absolutely, and so one of the other things that I’ve heard from people is, when it comes to the actual creative, there’s this conception, this thought that it has to be super creative.

Brad Powell: 11:32

Like they have to be this amazing copywriter or the images have to be set up a certain way, and, particularly when it comes to video, that the videos have to be highly produced, which translates as quite expensive to make and my understanding, you can talk more about this. But especially when it comes to videos, in some ways, the less produced they are, the better they perform In terms of if they’re shot on somebody’s iPhone and they look like they’re just part of the feed rather than looking like an ad. That seems to work better. And so speak to that a little bit from the point of just dispelling this idea that everything has to be amazing and perfect the way you’d see in some Aussie magazine and the whole thing of that. Within Instagram and Facebook, people want to see what’s normal to them in their feed rather than click on ads.

Danny Young: 12:29

Yeah, very much. So I think it depends very much on what it is that you’re promoting. So let’s say you’re using video to promote a product that you want to sell, then you’re going to want to have fairly decent quality video, because a lot of it is going to be about how visually appealing the product is and making sure that people can very, very clearly see the specific aspects of that product that you want. But that doesn’t mean to say that you need to hire out some kind of full service video marketing agency to do that. Using your iPhone and the well-lit space is perfectly adequate if you can get the right shots and avoid the shadows and all of those kinds of things. But we tend not to operate too much in that space as an agency. We work more in the kind of knowledge-based business owner, the info product space where our clients are people that have experienced events in their lives or have lots of experience professionally that they’ve turned into products and programs and courses that they want to then sell to other people to help them enhance in that specific area of their life or business. And in our experience the kinds of people that they are working with are other consumers or solopreneurs and business owners and these kinds of people they’re not really looking for.

Danny Young: 13:45

You know, highly polished video that you know has got multiple angles and, you know, looks very, very professionally edited and put together. They want to connect with people, they want to connect with humans and while I’m not saying that you could, you know, just you should just run a grainy video. That’s very, very hard to kind of see what’s going on. That wouldn’t suffice. But again, absolutely, as you and I are speaking now, I’m looking at my laptop. It’s got its own built-in camera on at the top of the screen with a little green light that tells me where to look and, apart from the lighting, which might not be perfect for what we’re doing right now, you can quite clearly see who I am.

Danny Young: 14:20

The people that are watching this video can quite clearly see, clearly see who I am and this is a great way to get across, you know, tone of voice, personality, passion. You know I’m a big, big fan of video, love video. For all of those reasons, if you’re looking to build a brand, online video is a really, really powerful way to do that, because people can connect with it, because it’s the next best thing to being, you know, in the same room or across the table with somebody, and you really don’t need to have, like, like I said, highly produced Videos in order to succeed. I run videos myself Promoting my agency, and they are filmed pretty much in this location, where I’m now sitting here in my in my lovely kitchen, and you know I’ve got a mic here on the desktop and I will just talk about some stuff that’s relevant to my audience, that helps to solve a problem for them, and I’ll run that as ads just to get my brand out there. So, yeah, it really doesn’t need to be this, you know, studio-based, high-production environment at all.

Brad Powell: 15:21

Yeah, I think that’s the fair point around. I mean for for everyone who’s providing a service. The main thing that you want to be doing with your content marketing particularly if you’re starting to put money behind it and turn into an ad is you want to bring yourself into that Content, and so the more that you can showcase like I’m the person who does this. Like people, when they hire somebody, you know if they’re firing a Facebook ad agency Well, there’s I don’t know how many, there’s, there’s several hundred thousand people doing Facebook ad agencies like there’s a lot of competition and and so when someone hires an agency, what they’re really hiring are the people or the person who runs that agency. They want to have a connection with that person. They want to feel like you know, okay, I know you, I trust you enough, I feel like you know enough about what you’re talking about to help me out.

Brad Powell: 16:16

But even more than that is I Like your vibe. You’ve got an interesting accent, or you’re a tea drinker, I’m a tea drinker. Like whatever the thing that you have in common with the people who you’re connecting with this way. That is what seems to be at play in in Getting people to actually come to the door and say, okay, look, I’m now. I want to hire you, and so what I like to go from here is, given that that’s true, that Having you know if you have a service and mainly what you have is this sort of one main offer where, let’s say, you work one-on-one With clients, even if it’s a bespoke service, that’s your main offers. Like the main thing I want people to do is to hire me one-on-one, because that’s where I make the most money.

Brad Powell: 17:02

Mm-hmm and in order to get people to that place, I need to Basically create an intimate experience with them prior to them hiring me, so they have enough faith to pull the trigger and say, yes, okay, you’re hired. Yeah and so you develop this strategy of using Video and Facebook ads together that can create that kind of trust-building experience for people. Mm-hmm and so let’s, let’s go there and and describe how that strategy plays out.

Danny Young: 17:34

Sure, I’ve developed this strategy. It’s just part of the learning process that I’ve been on over the last ten years and the multiple courses and Memberships and everything else that I’ve been part of, where I just learn from here and there and then kind of pull things together and kind of come up with With things. So I’m you know I might not be the only person in the world that does this, but what I can tell you is that it absolutely works really, really well. So, as I said earlier, video is something that I am really passionate about and it’s why I love chatting to you, because I know that it’s a huge passion of yours as well. But I can talk about an experience I’ve had. I’ve had with a number of clients. I Once had a client come to me and they said, hey, I’ve been working with this marketing guru and they have time. We to create a VSL, a video sales letter, and we’re going to use that to promote a high ticket off. So I Was like, okay, let’s have a look at it. And they showed me the funnel, and the way that this funnel worked is that you had an ad and that took you to a page where you could opt in or to watch a Video, and the video was positioned as being of value and it would give you some. You know, if you watch this video you’re going to get some, some golden nuggets to take away and implement in your business. And then people would watch, sign up and they would watch the video and the video did give them golden nuggets. And then it transitioned into an offer. And then there was it was on a sales page and there was lots of information about what the offer consisted of and you know why they should buy it. And you the video was, I think, about 30, 35 minutes long and then people ideally would be clicking on buttons and then going into the buying process to check out and buy the program.

Danny Young: 19:19

The challenge with that and it’s quite interesting because I’m in the process of making some content that I’m gonna be sharing in a video in the format I’m about to explain to you but the challenge with that approach is that there is a huge amount of friction in that process. Okay, if you think about the micro steps that people have to take in order to get to the sale, there are a number of them and we’re asking people to make some quite big commitments. So, first of all the ad needs to work. Okay, the ad in the feed needs to capture their attention and they need to then click to come to the VSL page, right. Then they have to actually watch the video. And that is a massive stumbling block with these kinds of things, because people are, if you think about psychologically, people have got to this point and then they see a video on the screen and they can see it’s like 35, 40 minutes long and they’re like okay, I might have to come back to that because it’s a bit long and I thought this might be a quicker process. So lots of people drop out at that point of friction.

Danny Young: 20:21

Then in the video, if you think about how that video is structured, there’ll be a quick piece that’s an intro and then there’ll be the value piece and then they’ll transition into the sale. And what you would see with this kind of funnel is that when you transition to the sale, you get a massive drop off at that point because people are like, okay, I’ve got what I need, I don’t wanna hear the rest, because they’re not ready to buy. Now you can get, this does work, you can get sales. But the challenge with running ads like this is. It’s expensive because in order to get enough people to go through the entire process and buy, because of the amount of friction that’s in that funnel, it takes a lot of investment to work out if it is or isn’t working. So with video-based ads, you can approach this completely differently.

Danny Young: 21:05

If you think about the video itself I was describing on the VSL page, let’s say there were three golden nuggets of value that were delivered in the value part of that video. Well, with the approach that I take with video, you could take each one of those nuggets of value and turn them into a little mini three to five minute video of its own. Okay, and there is a structure to how you approach building these videos. So you wanna kinda start the video by speaking directly to the pain point that you’re gonna be addressing and then you wanna segue into delivering the content. You’ll probably give them a little bit of information about yourself, but what you’ll also do in this video is you will have some kind of giveaway that you can offer.

Danny Young: 21:52

So if I speak of an example of a video that I have created, because then I can completely relate to it I have a video that I’m running at the moment where I talk about how people can figure out how much they should spend on ads, because I get asked that question all of the time. So I know it’s a big pain point what should my budget be? I have no idea where to start, so I have a video that speaks about that. So I start off by saying, hey, if you have no idea what your budget should be for Facebook ads, stick around, because I’m gonna explain exactly how you can work that out so that you can run your ads with confidence. Quick intro on me and then I’ll go into the content. But why also offering that video when I’ve delivered the content?

Danny Young: 22:30

I say hey, and, by the way, if you wanna dive into this a bit deeper, I’ve created a free Facebook ads calculator. It’s a Google sheet and you can get your hands on it and just use it to figure out what your ad spend should be. Just comment below the video and I’ll send it to you. Okay, so that is it. That’s a three to five minute video, right? And if you go back to the VSL example, we could take the golden nuggets of value that are delivered in that VSL and create three videos like this.

Danny Young: 23:00

Now, what are we trying to achieve here? Well, there are two things that we’re trying to achieve primarily Now. If people comment and say, hey, I’d love you to give me that Google sheet Facebook ads calculator Brilliant, because then what I’ll do is I will reply and say, hey, I’m gonna DM it to you in Messenger. I’ll take that conversation off of the ad into Messenger and then I can start a conversation with them and I can figure out where they’re at, how I can help them. I have a structured approach to doing that and every now and again I’m gonna get somebody that I really connect with and say, hey, look, I’ve got something for you. It might be that they are looking for an agency to run their ads. It might be that they’re looking for a membership program where they can learn how to run their own ads, because they’re not quite ready for an agency. Or it might be that they just wanna jump on an hour paid consult or whatever it might be. But I can use the Messenger conversation to steer the conversation, hear where they’re at and then offer them something. So that’s really powerful.

Danny Young: 23:57

But that’s not the most powerful thing about this. The most powerful thing about this is that when we run ads this way, facebook is clever and it tracks how much of a video somebody is watching, so and I can then create audiences of people that have watched a certain percentage of videos. So if I’ve got a video that is five minutes long, I like to create audiences of people that have watched at least 25% of that video, because if you’ve hung around for a minute or more watching one of my videos, you’re generally quite interested. So 25% is the lowest percentage of viewers that I’d want to build an audience from. That’s going to give me a big pool of people. If I went for the 100%, like people who have watched a whole video, that’s going to be smaller, but they would be super hot because they’ve watched the whole thing. So this kind of video we have normally two or three of these running at any one time, and the idea is that we build up this big bucket of what I call a virtual audience where Facebook is kind of saying right, we’ve now got 3000 people that have watched at least 25% of this video.

Danny Young: 25:02

Great, because now I can retarget them with other stuff. So let’s say I wanted to run a campaign where I wanted to bring a couple of clients into my agency. I can have two or three of these videos running at the top of the funnel. So that’s the cold traffic Going back to the VSL analogy, where I pulled down those individual nuggets of value. But instead of asking somebody to sign up and sit through a whole 35 to 40 minute video, I’m just getting them to watch the really key content that they can consume in three to five minutes. Much less friction in that process.

Danny Young: 25:37

And then I can retarget people who’ve watched a quarter or more of that video with something else. So I can retarget them with an offer that says hey, if I could take away the pain of your Facebook ads and manage the entire process for you, making sure that we’re matching your budget and getting you the results that you need, is that something that you’d be interested in taking me up on? If so, you can apply to book a call here and we can have a strategy call where we can dive into exactly how we will get your ad campaigns up and running, et cetera, et cetera. Right, I’m trying to go through this relatively quickly in the interest of time, but the power of this is that you’re taking the friction out of the traditional VSL approach and people can be a bit more selective about the kind of content that they’re watching, because they’ve got a. You know it’s only a three to five minute video, and then you can layer retargeting ads on that to put offers to people.

Danny Young: 26:27

I could offer them, you know, like I said, to get on a call to work with me and my agency. I could get them to get onto the wait list for my five day challenge. There’s so many things that you can do and it is an approach that works really really well. The beautiful thing about this as well is that it’s cheap to run these ads. It does not cost a lot of money to get video views. It costs a lot more money to get somebody to sign up for a VSL. You can pay $15, $20 per lead for a VSL, whereas you can get someone to watch 25% of a video. If you’re getting that for less than a dollar, you’re doing really well. So the economies of scale are really really there with this approach.

Brad Powell: 27:06

Yeah, I really like that. Let me just review some of what you’ve said so I make sure I’m getting it right and people who are listening are going oh yeah, okay, now I get it. So what seems genius about this is that, instead of and we’ve all seen this, we’ve all seen and in fact, been sucked into I clicked on an ad and now I’m on the. I had to go to an opt-in page, so I had to give, like there was some promise. Watch this video and you’re going to get $50,000 rain down on you next week.

Danny Young: 27:35

And I was like okay.

Brad Powell: 27:36

I want that, so I put it in my email. And now I’m confronted with this video that’s sitting there. Sometimes I can see that it’s going to go on for 45 minutes, sometimes I can’t. Sometimes it just starts playing and there’s no player control and it’s like I have no idea how long I’m going to have to sit through this thing. And I’m not even seeing the person, I’m just seeing words on the screen going at me. Forget it, I’m not watching this.

Danny Young: 28:01

Yeah, I totally agree with that, those videos where you don’t know how long they’re going to play for I do not know why people promote videos like that, because I will look at that and go, okay, I’m not sticking around, I don’t know how long you want, right.

Brad Powell: 28:12

I mean, you don’t have any control over stopping starting jumping ahead any of it. It’s like good grief, anyway. So we’ve all seen that kind of funnel and this cures a lot of the pain of being confronted with that kind of structure. Because now I’m seeing a video. It’s an ad, it’s short, it’s right off the bat promising oh, I have to, I can watch this for just a few minutes. And now I’m going to learn something really helpful and you’re building familiarity and trust by actually giving value, like if you actually turn around and give me something that is good for me. And then next time, the next thing I know, I’m seeing a retargeted ad which is your face again. It’s like, oh yeah, I remember this guy, danny. He’s the one who helped me last time, so maybe I’ll watch this one too.

Brad Powell: 29:07

And two or three of those kinds of experiences is very positive, where, yeah, I might just say, okay, now that I’ve learned these things, these things that help me get rid of the objections that I had to in this case, wanting to do Facebook ads or being afraid of doing Facebook ads and then seeing the light of oh, this isn’t as hard as I thought, it could be very simple. Now I’m much more encouraged to say yeah, why don’t we, you know, take me to the next step? Like, let’s, I have some questions, so I want to get on a call and ask you those questions, or whatever that next step wants to be. I’m much more inclined to do that, especially given that there’s more of an interactive thing. When it comes to the online world and especially large companies, there’s really not that much of that personal attention going on, and I think that this is a place where small businesses and the smaller the better.

Brad Powell: 30:08

In some cases, you can really personalize the experience with people where they’re sitting there going wow, danny Young is on here actually talking to me now he’s responding to me and this is great and I get to, you know, get it right from the horse’s mouth right in this moment.

Brad Powell: 30:27

And so, in all of that, like, talk a little bit about what you can expect, like, first of all, I really like that, and bonus video views is a very inexpensive way, a much more affordable way, to earn eyeballs on your content. So you’re building an audience. It’s not costing you very much to do it and out of that, you are getting a few leads who are now warmed up by your content, to be educated around who you are, what you offer and whether or not it’s something that they even want. So talk a little bit like give a case study or an example of and maybe even from your own experience of doing these kinds of ads how this has actually worked in terms of well, I spent this much it took me this time to figure out what was going on, and this is the result I got.

Danny Young: 31:20

Yeah, so for my business I have used this, as I said, to get people to book calls with me for my flagship kind of done for you ad service. So it works really really well for that, where we run different ads. So the ecosystem that we put into place was we had three ads running at the top of the funnel to cold traffic and those ads were talking about pain points that I knew people that were running ads would have, and I’m about to record a new one of those videos tomorrow which talks about. So if anybody that’s watching this who’s running ads, you will probably be familiar with having your business page inbox filled up with people who are saying your ad account is going to get shut down, your page is going to get shut down, you’re in violation of policy. It’s all nonsense. It’s just spam messages coming from people that are trying to get you to click links so that they can then hack into your systems and maybe take over your ad account or something else, which is just as painful. So there are steps that you can take to reduce massively the number of those messages that you’re getting, and I know personally because I get those messages all of the time. It’s just a pain. So I’m going to record a video tomorrow that I’m going to put out there. That’s going to say hey, here’s a step by step guide on how to do that, and I will offer to give away a really simple Google doc that kind of just breaks it down like a checklist Do this, do this, do this, do this.

Danny Young: 32:45

So that’s the first thing is that we have these three videos running and they’re running separately, and then what we do is we have another layer of retargeting. But what we’re doing is we’re retargeting people who’ve watched video one with video two and video three, where we’re targeting people who’ve watched video two with video one and video three and so on, the idea being that they’re not just consuming one piece of content, but they’re ideally seeing two or three of my videos, thus building up my credibility even more. Now I spend five pounds a day on each video at the top of the funnel, so that’s 15 pounds In dollars, probably about $20 a day. I think you can run this. When I say five, I would, in dollars, just equate it to the same. You could run this for $5 a day. No problem is what I’m getting to with that, the retargeting layer. We just spend $2 a day on that, and then we simply had that layer, the top layer and the secondary in place, so that was spending 17,. I’ll speak in dollars because I think your audience is predominantly US based. $17 a day and then we retarget them for $5 a day with an ad that would basically say hey look, we’ve got an agency and we can help you out, and if you wanna work with us, then click the link below and it will take them directly to my application page. And I think I was getting booked calls for around about $85. I’d have to go back and double check that what the average booked call was. The great thing about this is that on the application there’s a lot of questions that will help me to understand whether or not this person’s a good fit. So I’m not spending all day, every day, on calls with people that probably aren’t their business, isn’t of the right size or shape to work with us. So this is a quite well honed funnel that works really, really well.

Danny Young: 34:31

But the video was the really powerful thing because I’ve run ads before to get people to book a call with my an application to work with us using case studies. So running ads that just promote a case study to cold traffic. So how does that work? You’ve got an ad that says, in a roundabout way, it says hey, we got these incredible results for this client, check out the case study. And then they can download that case study, which is a document like a really nicely presented document, like a lead magnet. But then they have to download and they have to read that and they have to click the link in it. They’ll also get an email sequence that basically I want them to book a call.

Danny Young: 35:10

But we were getting calls booked there for about four to $500 a time. So that was, although it was manageable, because I don’t wanna go too deep on this. But when you look at lifetime value of a customer, you understand how much I’m prepared. Am I prepared to pay for a lead in order for it to be viable for me to continue with that marketing strategy? Well, that was just about viable because of the way that our business is structured. But obviously when I can get those leads for like a fifth of the cost by just tweaking my strategy, I’m absolutely gonna go down that path. So that is one example. We’re doing this with lots of clients at the moment as well and I can’t really share specific details on clients, but we’ve got clients that are using this to book calls. We’ve got clients that are using this strategy to fill membership programs. I just love it. I’m really, really, really passionate about it.

Brad Powell: 36:03

Well, it seems like anytime you can get for an agency with a relatively high ticket offer and you’re getting leads for less than $100 per lead that are getting on a call with you, that’s terrific. I mean, I don’t know what your conversion rate in terms of if you’ve went out of four of those people actually signs with you, or even if it’s one out of 10, you’re still profitably attracting new clients.

Danny Young: 36:36

Yeah, it is really, really great. My close rate’s terrible. No, I’m kidding, my close rate isn’t too bad at all.

Danny Young: 36:43

But, I have to be really clear about this because I don’t wanna kind of try and pour the wall over anybody’s eyes. We tested lots and lots of different video content in order to get to that place. Sure, because what I found is that some of the messaging that I was putting out there would maybe lend itself better to somebody that might be just starting out with ads and not actually kind of running them for themselves. So you’ve got to really think about the start, the type of content you’re putting out, so that it’s meeting your ideal client where they are and there’s a bridge to take them to where you want them to go. So there was a lot of testing involved in that, but it’s well-honed now and because we are a we’re not an agency that works with hundreds of clients.

Danny Young: 37:25

We’re a small team of really highly skilled people and really selective about the clients we work with. I’ve been working with one of my clients for two years now and we have a brilliant relationship and that’s the kind of level that I really enjoy working with people on not so much a transactional three months and then you’re gone. That’s not really what we’re about. So we are very, very selective about who we work with because they’ve got to be a good fit and we’ve got to really believe that we can add value. So, in saying that, where I was going is that these ads are often not on because if the roster is full, then the roster is full. We don’t have space to work with anybody else. Yeah right, but occasionally opportunities arise, projects come to an end, things happen in life, whatever it is, and then when that happens, it’s just a case of switching that campaign back on and hoping that it performs, as I said did the last time, which is never guaranteed.

Brad Powell: 38:19

Well, I get it, and I think that’s the point I mean. For a lot of people who have more of a lifestyle service business, and it is relatively boutique in terms of size. They’re not interested in becoming the next giant in their industry. They’re doing fine. What they’re looking for is consistency.

Danny Young: 38:41

Yeah.

Brad Powell: 38:42

And so knowing, like creating a content strategy that allows you to literally just flip the switch and say, okay, I know we’re going to need some more clients in the third quarter, so we’re going to flip this on, starting in, let’s say, march, and during April, may and June it’s going to run and we’re going to develop some new business so that when the third quarter arrives, it’s going to be in place and being able to forecast that with certainty and confidence and saying, okay, this is fine, like this we’re going to be fine, and with your team and everybody around you like they’re all operating with confidence, it’s like, yeah, we have this thing and it totally works and anytime we need to, we can be doing this kind of outreach where we know what we’re going to get and, yeah, different kind of problem to have, like too many people are coming in the door.

Brad Powell: 39:40

Well, okay, fine, turn the tap off the faucet and just let it sit for a while and do your best work for your best clients. And it gets easier over time because if you are doing your best work for your best clients, they’re also going to help you out by bringing their friends.

Danny Young: 39:58

Yeah, that happens a lot. You know referrals are a big part of what we do. But also, you know, sometimes it’s nice to do what you say you know for yourself. I think you know. Prove and demonstrate that you know, you don’t just do it for others, you do it for yourself. So you know, I have no qualms about investing in ads to grow my business once. Well, I have no qualms at all. I do this a lot. We test a lot of different things and hey look, some of it doesn’t work right. Sometimes things don’t quite play out. That’s testing. That’s the nature of it. It’s something that works really well. It can be quite exciting to switch it back on and just see if it’s still going to deliver the same results.

Brad Powell: 40:35

That’s great, all right, well, this has been terrific conversation. Thanks so much for joining today, and I know that you have a membership coming up in the future.

Danny Young: 40:46

Yeah, spring.

Brad Powell: 40:47

So if we want to direct people to that like this is where and will you can explain it? You have a membership. Tell us what it is and how people can hook up with it.

Danny Young: 40:56

Yeah. So membership is really going to be designed at helping people who want to start working with, want to start using Facebook ads for their business, but maybe they’re not ready to work with an agency. You know, when you’re working with an agency, you’ve got your ad spend, you’ve got an agency fee. It’s not an insignificant amount of money. It’s a brilliant investment if you work with the right agency. But some people aren’t ready for that and you know, for a number of years, agency was the one that we did and I was speaking to people who you know they would book calls with me and we would have a chat and they would love to work with me, but they just weren’t ready to make that level of investment and I had nowhere to send them.

Danny Young: 41:32

So what I decided to create was a vehicle that gives people access to two key things. First is the knowledge to be able to understand how to create your own campaigns, your own Facebook campaigns, and I could have done that with a course. You know, hey, here’s a course that will give you all of the information. But the one thing that’s missing from courses and there are lots out there is support. So the membership is going to give people access to not just the knowledge but also the support from me and my agency team, so that, when you do start running ads for yourself and you follow the training you’re going to hit some bumps in the road and there are going to be some challenges that present themselves You’ll have somewhere to go in our support community where you can network with other people but ask the questions.

Danny Young: 42:15

Hey look, this campaign is not working. Here’s what I’m seeing. An ads manager can someone help me figure it out? My team will be on it and will give you the support and will guide you through so that you can come out of the other side getting the results that you want. So that’s what we’re going to be doing, and what I’m actually, or what I’d actually like to share is, as a precursor to that, I’m doing a free five day training series which is called the Fearless Facebook Ads Foundation’s Challenge. Now I have a QR code, brad, on my screen, which is literally just a QR code that people can scan and that will take them to the page where they can sign up. So I will try and share that now, if that’s okay with you, and it will literally just be a what’s the URL where they go?

Danny Young: 43:00

The URL where they go is HTTPS, and then it’s FFAFclub slash challenge.

Brad Powell: 43:12

FFAFclub slash challenge. That’s the one, and I’m going to say it again slowly FFAFclub slash challenge. And again, thanks so much for coming on today. This has been terrific.

Danny Young: 43:30

My pleasure, always good to chat.

Brad Powell: 43:35

This has been another episode of the Standout Business Show. If you want to go and grab the entire archive, just go to standoutbusinessshow. All of the resources are there all the audio, all the video, every extra little bit of do-die including the QR code to Danny’s Challenge and we go live every Thursday, 11am Eastern time. And until the next time, so long.