Driving 100% Growth with Paid Social Campaigns

Speaker 1: 0:01

You're in the marketing world and you're looking for inspiration, or you're a business leader who wants to understand what good marketing looks like. You're busy. You don't have time to sit around listening to a rambling 3 hour podcast. We get it. This is the Remarkable Marketing Podcast, where we celebrate the marketing rock stars that deliver truly remarkable marketing, and you'll hear short interviews with marketing execs who share stories about the best marketing they've ever done, how it delivered a huge impact and how they overcame all the challenges to make it happen. If you aspire to be remarkable, you'll walk away with ideas on how to do truly epic marketing. Getting right to the content of what you need for busy professionals, this is the Remarkable. Marketing Podcast. Now your host, Eric Eden.

Speaker 2: 0:56

Welcome to the Remarkable Marketing Podcast. Our guest today is Paul Acasimus. Paul is a digital marketing expert with over seven years experience in the space. He has helped clients in the area of wake, love, media buying and specifically doing a lot of work for clients in the area of paid social, facebook, tiktok and other channels. Welcome to the show, paul.

Speaker 3: 1:25

What's going on, Eric? I appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 1:27

Thanks for spending some time with us today, and I think that you have a great story with us about one of the clients that you worked with and how you're able to win with them on some of the paid social channels.

Speaker 3: 1:40

Yeah, I love the story because it's a fantastic showcasing of what's the results, but also it covers us so much of what I think a lot of people miss when they're running paid ads both agencies and clients. What the situation was there's a tax relief company coming to us and they wanted more leads, like anybody, not just more leads but more sales. They want to make more money, like Go Figure. And then initially we were running ads for them on TikTok and Facebook. Now what we had done is segmented where those leads go so they can easily see this list of leads is on Facebook and this list came from TikTok. So the initial thing was we got an offer to a very specific type of person. In this case we'll say it was all to restaurant owners. So, restaurant owners, here's how we can help you with your taxes and do tax relief for you. Maybe owe a bit of tax debt, et cetera, et cetera. Now, from the marketing perspective and really anyone's perspective, going ahead with that, that makes sense. Say, we've got a target market. We're not saying, hey, everybody in the whole country, if you've got these problems, we can help you. It was going after a particular niche. We'd revelt ad copy, ad created specific for it. And well, it actually didn't work that well, and to the surprise of everybody, because we're like all right, this is awesome and you specialize in this particular industry. To help, now, why that didn't work? We eventually looked at it, kind of in hindsight, of course, as 2020. My take is that it was just an offer issue. The offer itself may not have resonated. I think the data supported that. So then we tweaked the offer and kind of tweaked the audience to hey, what we can reduce your tax liability or all this kind of technical stuff which, admittedly, I still don't know a ton about. Like, I don't know all the details of this industry, but what I do know really well is the psychological side of marketing, the common denominator of any marketing campaign in any industry, no matter how different is that human being on the other side. Fortunately, they're far less volatile than going from tax relief to, let's say, roofing industry or all these other industries that we work with. So we tweaked the offer and now we're running it more generally, but for a little bit different of a service that they provide. Leads are coming in, they're great, both TikTok and Facebook and then the next bottleneck is well, we're not getting a lot of these people booking calls and the people that do book. We have a high no show rate. And then the ones that show up. We also have a quality rate. So we're like, all right, leads aren't an issue because they're coming in. It's kind of on that next slide. So how do we optimize the landing page experience? How do we improve the messaging? With additional resources, videos, anything, to speak more to their pain points and their undesired goal to make a higher intent lead. So just take that same lead I'll say the $12 lead and make them not just opt in but want to. Hey, I really want to hop on a call with these guys because they can really help me. So just constantly chipping away at what that offer is and that messaging to that person and the pain points and benefits that it provides. After a bit of testing on the landing page side and also the ad copy, ad creative side, they started getting more book deployments and then it was an issue of all right. Well, we've got TikTok ads going in Facebook and they had a limited budget. Like, inherently, everybody's got a limited budget that they can use. So we were spending a hundred bucks a day on Facebook, a hundred on TikTok. Well, we found for a bit of time TikTok was working better in terms of quality leads, because we're analyzing not just lead data on the platform side but also what's the quality like when are you getting the most deployments? Let's shift more budgeting with that. And then that worked on TikTok until well it didn't, and we swab back to Facebook and then suddenly it's just kicking butt on Facebook. Throughout that time are also optimizing the follow up, the nurture, how we're booking people in, and it's really there's no like special sweet sauce to it other than drilling into the offer and that language to drive that high-intel lead. So we got that sweet spot in Facebook. Leads are coming in, book deployments, people are showing up, and then now we're scaling and we're trying to see how do we continue to scale this, to continue with the quality of lead without sort of breaking the algorithm. So that's a whole other challenge in itself. That could be a whole other compensation. But basically, just through each step of this process we were able to identify the right landing page process, from opt-in to appointment to close. We were able to identify the right channel for it, which did sort of fluctuate a little bit, but we've been sticking with Facebook for quite a bit of time. I think it was only a short bit where TikTok did outperform that and now it's just it's cruising Now. For a bit of time it was like cost at work. It was meetings with the client, tweaks, adjustments here, running tests, and now it's just working beautifully. The brilliant thing was these clients were fantastic and still hard to work with that level of patience and setting the right expectation at the beginning of hey, we're not gonna double your business in 30s, 60s, 90 days and we didn't even promise we'd double their business. They actually ended up doing so. Had they not stuck around within that first 30 to 45 days, when it was at the most critical, when the results weren't stellar, they never would have gotten this like incredibly predictable lead machine. So that's what I love about I get these guys in particular is that they were patient, we were collaborating, we ultimately found the right combination of everything to get them what they wanted, which was ultimately more revenue, and they've been able to grow their business considerably.

Speaker 2: 7:29

So the impact of this was, via digital marketing, they were able to double their business.

Speaker 3: 7:37

Absolutely. I'm the guy behind the scenes doing a lot of this. I'm communicating with them, but there's also other people involved, so we're all collaborating on that. But when the co-owners calls me on my personal phone number and if anyone that works with clients I don't often take personal calls I'm happy to schedule a time with you. I'm gonna talk to this guy. We were just chit-chatting, kind of BSing a little bit and talking a little bit about the campaign. He's just like Evan. I've been hiring, I've doubled my sales team and I've doubled my business. So we just have this cool conversation and it's just was a cool unique thing where I just he was invested in it. I've invested in him. I believe in what he's doing. He's doing it for all the right reasons. Yeah, it was really fun and still is. We're still working with this guy.

Speaker 2: 8:24

So it's cool when it works, when you're able to perform and drive growth in a business like that for people. But I think one of your main points was that it's not easy, because there's all these variables. There's the channel, there's the landing pages, there's the messaging, there's the offer and there's a lot of testing that needs to be done across all these variables in order to find the right winning formula, and it doesn't always happen right out of the gate that you get the remarkable result just like that right, exactly. So, having the patience and the collaboration to do the testing and to work through all the variables and to get the formula just right, it's worth it at the end. But that's the real challenge with digital marketing is how do you get to that point right?

Speaker 3: 9:26

It is, and you've got to be able to look into your magic a-ball of what is going to happen and what expectations. And so if they're not properly set at the beginning, the client's going to lose faith in you, and rightfully so, because you should be able to tell them exactly what to expect. And just it'd be around me if I'm going on a little bit too much of a side tangent. I think the issue with a lot of the industry right now that we're at of marketing is that agencies are over-promising some of the most absurd offers out there and saying we guarantee a triple ROI or you don't pay. You know those kinds of things that we just can see constantly. And if a client expects that and then within a week or two it's not even close, well, they're going to get frustrated because you didn't fulfill on what you promised me. We can't fault the client for believing early. Now there are those clients that no one can help them. Hey, we told them everything from the beginning of what to expect and they're still losing patience. But I just think, like that level of communication and strategy and not necessarily telling them what they want to hear, what they need to hear, a little workout much better in the long run, versus if I told these guys from the beginning hey, we'll double your business in 30 days, it would never have gotten to this point. Now, I'm never going to say that, because that's I mean, there's a lot of comparisons like a man, it's basically like hey, you want to buy a lottery ticket. So that's what I equate. If it's subtle, it can double business in 30 days, it's guaranteed.

Speaker 2: 10:51

Yeah, I think expectation management is key in marketing, because if you set the expectation that something is going to be so huge and then you still deliver something, that's really, really great and they're disappointed, it's really frustrating. So expectation management is important. But one of the points you mentioned earlier I just want to come back to you is that Having the patience to find the right formula. I think the second thing that's hard about that is people have to forward invest a little bit. You mentioned in this example that they were spending on Facebook and TikTok $100 a day on each channel when you guys were testing. So if you do the maths on that and you're thinking there's someone spending $200 a day across a month, they're spending $5,000,000 to test to see if they can get that formula right, and sometimes, to your point, maybe it takes more than a month. And so people are putting some chips down on the table saying, yeah, you know what, I'm going to put down $5,000,000 or $10,000 or $15,000,000 to get this formula right, because that's a marketing investment, not marketing spend, but marketing investment. Now, if I make this marketing investment and I can get the formula just right, then I can get a great result and hopefully that would be something like doubling their business. That would be worth the investment. I think it's really hard for people to get their head around the investment versus spend dynamic in a lot of these cases and I think it's just interesting, when you're talking about a specific case study, to think about it that way, because it is great when people are willing to think about that, they're willing to be a little bit patient when there's money at stake and you can drive this kind of great result for them right.

Speaker 3: 12:45

You said it perfectly and that's wording that I've been trying to associate more into how I speak. It is an investment, 100% of investment it's not. I think that's the best way to look at it, because if it is framed that way, it's easy to see through any kind of bogus offer. In what other industry can I say, hey, double your business, even in 60 days, without any risk at all? And any kind of other investment vehicle will be like well, that's obviously a scam, but for some reason in marketing it's not always seen that way. But yeah, it's an investment like anything. And the long term in marketing, especially in the payback side, a long term investment is, you could say, six months. So much can be done in six months. In the grand scheme of things that's a short term investment. I think in the marketing world that's sort of a more longer term one. But that should be a positive thing for both agencies and clients to think about of. Well, hey, instead of looking at it in a 30 day period, let's look at six months. Here's the input of an investment. But we know, even during that testing time the beginning leads you'll probably be closing deals. You might not be 100% profitable or the profit level that you want. The stuff is still coming yet.

Speaker 2: 14:00

The good news is, with marketing investments unlike investments and, say, stocks, where you don't even work at the company with marketing investments, all those variables are levers that we talked about that are in a program that you can pull to make it work. You can control your destiny on. Will it be a good investment or a great investment or a bad investment All of those are possible outcomes, but with marketing investments you have the ability to impact the investment. That's always the case. Sometimes the market just moves against you. That's what I like about marketing is that when you're making investments, you can actually do things that turn it into a remarkable result, like doubling the business. If you work all the variables, you can control your destiny. That's what I really like about the process of figuring out the formula that you share. It is that you're not just rolling dice and it's not a game of chance.

Speaker 3: 14:59

It's like taking a game of chance and with each roll of the dice your odds improve. That can't happen in an actual game or anywhere else, or in a lot of investments, but with marketing it's like all right, we roll the dice, then get our result. We're going to learn. Roll it again the second time we roll. Our odds are better than they were the previous roll, because we're using that data to improve each step that we take next.

Speaker 2: 15:23

Yeah, absolutely. I think that, Paul. You said you have a resource that some of the listeners could dive into if they're interested in following this process. You want to share a little bit about that?

Speaker 3: 15:37

Yeah, there's a link. There's two resources. One is what I call the Clive Retention Case Study. It outlines a lot of what I went through with this particular client of just how I'm analyzing things, how I'm communicating and how to make some optimizations. There's a lot more content in there as well. The second resource is what I call the Ultimate Guide to Media Buying. That's to help you or your in-house media buyer or freelancer who's actually pushing the buttons on the ads on Facebook and TikTok. It applies to both. It's just how to look at the data, how to analyze and communicate and what actions stuff to take. Those are a couple of free resources. One more that you can do on that same link if you've got an account that's running a Wee Generation campaign, you've got some questions. I'm happy that you can schedule a call with me, do a free audit and do a strategy to see. Hey, here's what I would do in the situation of this client campaign that you're currently running.

Speaker 2: 16:31

Awesome. Well, thanks for sharing your insights and your story with us today, Paul. I appreciate it. I'm sure the listeners appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1: 16:42

You've been listening to the Remarkable Marketing Podcast. Our passion is to bring you the marketing rock stars who share stories about the best marketing they've done, how it delivered and how they handled all the challenges that go along with it. And we do it all in 10 minutes. We only ask two things. First, visit the RemarkableMarketingio website for more great insights. Second, this podcast has been brought to you by the Next Generation Social Networking App. You can download and use the Workverse app for free to build your professional brand, become a paid expert advisor and discover the best business events to attend. Download the Workverse app today, see you next time on the Remarkable Marketing Podcast.