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Is It Just Me Or….is there a ton of disinformation out there regarding running Facebook ads in 2019?

The answer is a resounding yes. It seems everyone is a guru these days. They have the lates schemes, conrtions, hacks and tactics to try to “beat” the Facebook algorithm. Let me tell you…as in casinos, you never beat the house. It’s a game for losers.

Do you want the absolute number one secret for successful advertising on Facebook? Well, here it is. Just give people the content that they want to see that will allow them to like and trust you. Build your brand!

There it is. The secret is out. The mystery solved! Don’t believe me? Then maybe you’ll believe this guy.

Notice what he didn’t say. Nowhere in any article in the Facebook newsroom will you see any mention stating that your ROAS comes first!

When you finish reading this you’ll know how to truly understand what Facebook is looking for you to do with your advertising.

This might take you 20 minutes or so to get through, so grab a cup of coffee and a power bar…and grab a seat!

Before we begin, please check out this video that might give you some much needed background as to how Facebook works. I believe that every advertiser on Facebook should watch this video 2 or 3 times to see how important it is to start Facebook ads with the right frame of mind.

That video was eye-opening wasn’t it? C’mon, you have to be honest with yourself. Now on to the detail behind all of this.

What You’re Going To Learn In This Facebook Gameplan Articourse: I bet you’re wondering what the heck an “articourse” is. Well, it’s a term we here in the office made up that describes what we will be doing in regards to educating our readers.

Instead of creating some huge course no one will ever use, we are going to be creating “articles that are courses”.

Jam packed articles which can be easily consumed, contain valid, valuable, and actionable information, at a fraction of the cost of guru courses. And in true buffet style, take what you want, and leave what you don’t.

We know that not everyone has a direct line to an experienced Facebook rep as we do. This causes people to take the advice of people who really aren’t working in the manner that Facebook approves of. We don’t work that way.

After going through all of the pitfalls, we learned that it’s better in the long term to do what Facebook wants us to do, rather than trying to constantly find some hack to get around being compliant.

Who Is This For: Any marketer, at any level who is finding their cost per conversion rising and is tired of having their campaigns not perform.

In this Articourse, you’re going to learn how to begin your campaigns in a 2019 Facebook world. As we all know, Facebook changes often.

As a result, we will update this with any and all info we get from Facebook.

So let’s get started.

Lately we’ve been posting in some of the Facebook groups we belong to and over the course of the last…probably six months…we have seen many, many people looking for the secret recipe or hack to make ads perform better.

Everyone’s looking for the magic pill and seemingly everyone in the group has an answer.

But there’s only one answer and that answer is compliance. And unfortunately, a lot of people don’t like that answer.

A lot of people don’t seem to want to do what Facebook specifically says to do. And because of that, they end up having ads that don’t perform or they end up getting their account banned.

We see the “my account got banned for no reason” whine over and over in the groups. And yes, there is always a reason. Guess what that reason ALWAYS is?

Lack of compliance!

You see most of the strategies and hacks we read about are completely against how Facebook wants ads run.

By deploying these guruspeak strategies, we are intentionally violating compliance.

Let me ask you a question. When we talk in these groups about hacks and schemes, do you not realize that Facebook can see what we’re talking about?

Of course they can. I believe that’s one of the reasons for so many changes to the ads platform.

They are not going to simply sit by and watch people come up with hacks and then see legions of people deploying these hacks.

Let’s get something straight right from the beginning. YOU mean NOTHING to Facebook. Sorry if that makes you feel uncomfortable but it’s 150% true.

Facebook’s number one priority is it’s users.

They don’t care if you aren’t seeing conversions because the hack you tried isn’t working.

Here’s a hint: If you’re doing something they don’t advise/like/approve of…your days are numbered. PERIOD!

Compliance doesn’t mean you just roll over and do what Facebook says.

Compliance means seeing what Facebook wants, testing to make sure you can make it work and then making sure that you can scale while simultaneously making you’re aligned with that ideology. But first you have to understand the ideology.

Facebook cares more about its users than it does about you. That’s a hard pill for many people to swallow and understand.

So many marketers spend thousands of dollars on courses, thousands of dollars on hacks, and thousands of dollars on masterminds trying to find out what works instead of simply trying what Facebook is telling you to do.

So what is Facebook telling you to do?

• create compelling, engaging content
• provide Stellar customer service
• create compelling, engaging content
• create compelling, engaging content
• create compelling, engaging content

This may sound facetious but it’s actually true. You don’t need a whole lot of instruction or courses if you just simply understand what it is that Facebook wants.

Think about television for a moment. There would be ZERO commercials if there weren’t amazing content that people wanted to see.

No one is tuning into NBC to watch commercials. The eyeballs are on the content. The advertisers pay to be associated with the CONTENT.

Same thing with radio and print. So why do you expect Facebook to be any different?

To truly understand, look at some of the biggest brands on Facebook and look at what they’re doing.

Brands, for the most part, aren’t trying to find a way around Facebook’s algorithm.

They’re not trying to be sneaky or slimy or do all the tricks that we do, and yes I mean we, because I’ve done them as well.

In order to be a brand, which is what you need to be to succeed on Facebook, you have to act like a brand.

Viable brands don’t look to hack Facebook. They look to work with Facebook.

I say this with complete confidence having worked with some of the world’s biggest brands and sports teams.

So recently when I had a chance to speak in front of an audience of Realtors and digital marketers I asked them point-blank…”have you ever took the time to create content that appeals specifically to an audience.”

Second question…”have you ever used that content to drive engagement as your priority intro into your advertising.”

The sound of crickets permeated the room. You’d be surprised that most people don’t understand this simple concept.

They think they should always be going for the sale. I’m here to tell you that’s going down a long, long, hard road of non-performance and wasted money.

You see, when you’re pitching to cold audiences you are in direct conflict with that with the Facebook ideology. Despite your best efforts, your conversions are suffering, because no one knows who you are.

There’s no other way around it. Facebook frowns upon cold prospecting of products to its audience.

At this point, the Facebook ad inventory is basically maxed out. What they’re going back to is a content first ideology.

You’re not going to hear that from many gurus because it is a lot of work, and requires a modicum of skills to get it done correctly and efficiently.

Think to yourself why you never hear them talk about it. It’s easy to sell people on the dream of easy money riches. It’s harder to tell them they have to actually work to compete.

Facebook is looking to a content first ideology. There’s no way of getting around it.

Stop here if you’re not prepared to work on creating compelling content. It is the new  standard of advertising on Facebook.

When you’re pitching to a cold audience, you’re paying higher CPMs and obtaining unsustainable CPAs that are much higher than if you were pitching to a warm audience.

When you take the time to build a warm audience…which Facebook defines as a target group of people who like, comment, and share your content, you end up paying much less overall.

The problem is that almost all new (and even some established) marketers want to go for the sale immediately.

This strategy is not a good long-term tactic for brands that want to color between the lines on Facebook.

Sure, you can drive sales and make money, but eventually the well dries up and you have to keep trying to find the proverbial “winner”.

When you’re pitching cold you’re trying to find a needle in a haystack and what a lot of people are finding at this point is that interest targeting isn’t working.

Lookalikes aren’t working…and it’s something the other Barry said a long time ago. Nearly a year ago he told people that there might come a time when interest targeting wouldn’t be viable.

He asked, “what would you do if tomorrow there wasn’t any more availability for interest targeting. What would happen if lookalikes stopped working.”

People thought I was nuts in the groups, but sure enough, it seems like my thoughts are coming to fruition. And everything that my Facebook reps have been telling me are coming true.

The algo is becoming more important than anything. Facebook has developed their algorithm to the point where it will now determine who is best aligned with your brand or your product.

So how will the algo best decide who your best audiences are if you’re simply pushing out a cold ad?

Your relevancy will be diminished and in that regard, it will be harder for the algo to determine if people care about your content.

Which means you’ll pay more and your ads won’t perform as well.

Think I’m making this up? Then read what goes into effect on April 30th, 2019:

Now do you understand that the gurus are leading you to the slaughter? Your content won’t only be judged by it’s social proof, but it’s also going to be judged by the social proof of other competitors in the auction!!

So which ad is going to win? The ad with a ton of social proof baked in…or your crappy ad pushed out to a cold audience with no real engagement?

If you think your cold ad will win, you can stop reading now. You’re toast!

I’m betting there hasn’t been a lot of talk about what’s coming on April 30th in the groups you’re frequenting. (if you’re reading this after April 30th, 2019 you still need to adhere to this. We’ll let you know if anything changes)

So you have a choice to make. Do you listen to the chatter from cowboys in the groups, or do you want to be a long-term player and get in compliance with what’s coming with Facebook.

Oh…and this is just ONE change coming down the pike. We’ll talk about the elimination of ad set budgets in our next installment with the advent of the Campaign Budget Optimization deployment.

CBO is the ultimate game changer, but you won’t even be in the game if you don’t get this “warm-up sequence” implemented.

If you insist on going the cold conversion route, you’re going to have to look to game the system with a ton of different offerings and angles. Expensive offerings and angles!

That’s because neither you, nor the algo, will know what kind of people to show your offer to.

Because you haven’t performed any warm-up sequencing, you are going to be behind the eight-ball. Even with the power of the existing Facebook algorithm you’re still going to have to spend a good amount of money to compete in the auction just for the algorithm to go out and find people to interact or buy your product.

And based upon the changes that are coming, if your audience isn’t warmed up…you will lose to your competitors in the auction.

Everyone in the groups is always talking about the need to warm up the pixel. Forget about that! You need to warm up the audience to your content or they may never even reach your website to trigger your pixel.

The algorithm needs to know that the audience seeing your ad even needs to be directed to your website.

When you push cold ads to an uninterested audience, you’re basically telling Facebook to kill your ad and go with a competitor.

You need to warm up your audience to your content to allow the algorithm to know who it’s supposed to be going after. And the way the algo is going to determine who to show your ad to is for the algorithm to know that you have killer engagement!

Of course every person engaging is not going to be a buyer.  However with Facebook’s other data points, your content will allow the algorithm to perform better.

If hundreds, or thousands, of people are truly interacting with your content, then it will make it easier for the algo to look at their other data signals and say that this person or these people, or people like these people, are more likely to be potential buyers of your product.

So as I’m putting this in my game plan analogy, this is what I call the Facebook warm-up and with this warm up.

What we’re going to do is just like you would do on a football field. We’re going to start our campaigns by doing some content calisthenics and we’re going to get our content warmed up so the algorithm sees we’re ready to be put into the game.

See you below after this quick word from our profit center!

So recently I had a post on Facebook and I was alluding to this strategy as I am outlining here in this Articourse.

Now, please understand,  I’m hoping that you’re not someone who needs to sell XYZ number of products to pay rent tomorrow and I hope you’re not someone who is looking to sell some scammy Alibaba crap that you have no intention of fulfilling.

If you’re in either one of those categories you can probably stop reading and just go on your merry way.

What I’m about to breakdown here is info for business owners. This is for people who actually are here for the long-term. That being said, if you’re here for the long-term, stop wasting money on cold conversion ads.

I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of gurus and a lot of people in groups who are going to  just hate that because they just want a quick sale. But let me ask you something.

Over the last couple of years, if you’ve been involved in Facebook advertising, how many people have you seen come and go through these groups?

I venture to say you probably personally know hundreds of people who have passed through these group taking a shot at ecommerce and quit because they simply couldn’t make Facebook ads work.

Or how many times have you heard of people getting their ad accounts banned?

Or how many times have you read in groups that costs go up at the end of the quarter because agencies are dumpling client’s money into Facebook?

Aren’t you tired of all of the excuses?

Over the last 5 years I’ve heard every excuse under the sun. And when I have dug just a tad deeper I have always found a simple reason for things not working. Yup…you guessed it…non-compliance with what Facebook wants.

As a marketer, I stopped with all of the hacks and crazy tactics and started doing what Facebook said to do:

• Push compelling content to an audience that wants said content
• Build up some serious engagement
• and then…and only then…market to them via retargeting.

That’s the Facebook Warm-Up in a nut shell. Sounds easy doesn’t it? Then why aren’t you doing it?

Right now, I’m running literally hundreds of PPE and brand awareness campaigns to various audiences.

I’ll take the same piece of content replicate the copy, change out the video,  change out the image, and run with the intro campaigns.

I make the content relative to the market I’m trying to reach. If I’m selling to a market of older women, then an older woman better be in the content. If it’s young people then the same thing applies. Think about it this way.

I want you to watch television tonight but tonight, pay attention to the commercials. Watch a couple different channels. Let me know if a any of the channels have a link where you can click on your television and go to the store and buy.

You see, the idea behind most marketing is to build a brand first and to use direct response to target the site visitors in secondary fashion.

I also want you to see the relation between the commercial and the show that you’re watching. You’ll find that you’ll see a commercial that relates to the audience watching the show. Notice that you’ll NEVER see a commercial for Depends on MTV.  But you may see a commercial for McDonald’s on both BET and CMT. Why might that be?

You guessed it, they are diversifying their content for different target audiences.

Just think of every television commercial that you see as a PPE campaign or a brand awareness campaign they’re using 30 or 60 second spots and they are spending millions of dollars that you can use to compile actionable data that you can easily mimic.

The difference between our perspective here, is that our team has worked in both direct response and traditional media buying.

We’ve worked in major advertising agencies that do tens of millions of television commercials per year so we know specifically what brands do.

Are you aware of the term “unaided awareness“. Now I’m pretty sure that you won’t find any group on Facebook talking about an unaided awareness score.

Brand awareness tells you if people are familiar with your brand. But to really gauge how impressionable your brand is, to really know if they know who you are, then you want to build your unaided awareness.

What is unaided brand awareness? It’s the ability for the consumer to recall your brand without any prompting.

For instance, we all instantly know the iconic Coke, Pepsi, and Burger King brands. Their UA is 100%.

The UA of your store is probably ZERO. No one knows who you are. So in that regard, who has to work harder in their advertising…You or Pepsi?

Yes, that’s an absurd, loaded question, but you’re not competing with Pepsi. You’re competing with other ecommerce operators on Facebook who also have Zero UA.

You don’t have to have a higher UA score than Pepsi. You just have to have a higher UA then the people you’re competing with on Facebook.

Do you see where this is going?

Your content, your brand, only needs to be better than the other Shopify store you’re trying to beat in the auction.

If you’re pushing crappy content to a cold audience that’s ignoring your stuff and people keep scrolling, versus me who is pushing out content to people who recognize my store name, who do you think is going to win the auction.?

Yup…you lose.

That’s what’s happening on Facebook and in these groups every, single day.

The key to success in marketing whether it be on television or on Facebook is if people know and trust you.

Since we as marketers know that people are more apt to buy from someone they know and trust, then why are you out there slinging ads to a cold audience and expecting some kind of great result?

Advertising like that is pure lunacy in 2019.

That’s why if you’re running strong brand awareness or PPE campaigns and you’ve got a diverse audience that you’re pushing it to, Facebook is going to see who is reacting and engaging with your content.

And best of all…it’s really, really cheap advertising.

So if you got 20 pieces of content running to 20 different perspective audiences (segmented by age, location, or gender) building an engaged audience, you’re going to see a much higher ROAS on your retargeting.

We’re currently seeing 4-8x ROAS on behavioral/sequential retargeting. And it’s stable.

So this is the disconnect that we see so many people having with Facebook ads.

Gurus are telling you to spend 70% to 80% of your money on cold acquisition and then spend 25% to 30% on retargeting. That’s a lot of b*******.

Advertising that way is like going all-in on every hand in poker.

Yeah…you might win a pile of cash once in a while, but you’re not going to be a long term winning brand. Why?

Because Facebook doesn’t support that methodology.

Here’s the answer to all of this. But it’s only going to work if you commit to taking action.

Are you ready to put what you’ve learned today into action? If you are, we have a step-by-step video that will show you how to set up your campaign so that you can do exactly as we have outlined in this Articourse.

Unlike some high-priced course, access to this Facebook Gameplan video is probably less than the CPM you have already been paying on your current Facebook ads.

It’s certainly less than a few cups of java at Starbucks. Say no to the coffee this week and buy access to this Facebook Gameplan  video!

If you follow the instructions in this video, you will be warming up a viable audience to hit with your retargeting offer and you will separate yourself and your business from other stores competing in the same auction for the same audiences.

If you’re interested in learning specifically how to deploy this strategy simply click on the link below.

We’ve decided that we are not going to do real expensive courses.

Instead, what we’re going to do is put out actionable bite-size Facebook Gameplan training assets.

These assets are all going to be between $9.00 and $25.00.

With the price so cheap, why bother charging at all? Because we want to make sure people are serious. We also feel that we can help more people more often at this pricepoint.

We also believe that if you find value in what we offer, you’re more like to return for more of our Facebook Gameplan assets.

We hope that you’ll be able to find the value of this information and we can continue to interact.

We believe that our Facebook Gameplan training assets are going to change the way that you begin looking at how you utilize Facebook ads.

We can’t guarantee that you’ll be driving a Lambo in a few weeks, but we can guarantee that you when you apply this information you will see that this it’s going to be well worth your small investment.

Now it’s your turn to act. Please click the button below to access the training video that ties this all together.