Full Transcript

Sari
Welcome to your Food Business Success. This podcast is for early stage entrepreneurs in the packaged food industry ready to finally turn that delicious idea into reality. I'm your host Sari Kimbell, I have guided hundreds of food brand founders to success as an industry expert and business coach. And it's gotta be fun. In this podcast, I share with you mindset tools to become a true entrepreneur and run your business like a boss, interviews with industry experts to help you understand the business you are actually in, and food founder journey so you can learn what worked and didn't work, and not feel so alone in your own journey. Now, let's jump in!

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. Oh, my gosh, I am coming off. I'm recording this the day after we did our Uplevel Your Farmers Market workshop. And it was so awesome. Somebody actually wrote me during the workshop, put it private message me and said, I have been following you for a long time and part of your world. And this was the best workshop you have ever put on. And much thanks to Danny of Peak State Coffee representing his side as a brand. And some of the concepts in there were just like mind blowing. People got so much value from this workshop. And I am just so proud of the work that we did. And you know, it was a $97 workshop. And when people came away with so much more value, you will be able to make that in sales in a weekend, if not more. There is no reason why you couldn't take the concepts from this workshop and turn it into $500 more every market. And we announced a bonus training coming up with Danny in April about hiring and training. Because he has done 300 events in a season. And also taken time off, he will be doing 11 markets in a week, every week during market season, which I know some of you go year round. But in Colorado, it's a little bit different here. But he can't be at all of those physically. So he has come up with so many strategies. And he's going to give you his process on how he hires and trains so he can take time off and doesn't have to be at every market. But you're only going to be able to access that by going and getting this first workshop and it's going to be inside Food Business Success. So you can still go get the workshop. It's at foodbizsuccess.com/uplevel. And seriously, it will uplevel your farmers market sales or we'll give you your money back. So what do you have to lose? So I thought it would be great for today's podcast to kind of continue with this sales stuff. But actually, we're going to focus now on online, and how to get leads better, cheaper, faster, by using a tools inside social media, specifically Facebook and Instagram. And I actually recorded this episode, I'm a little bit embarrassed. Thank you, Zack for your patience. But we recorded this back in January. And it seems so timely then and I was really excited to get it out. But then things came up and workshops and things that I wanted to focus on. So I have been wanting to bring you this episode because it is so good. So much information. And it just wasn't the right time. But now it is. So here we are, it's March, end of March. But it's all still relevant. None of the things have changed in online advertising or any of that. And I want to let you know that there is an incredible lead ads course that I actually taught inside Fuel, the membership, as a VIP course and I walk you through it. So Zach's going to give you all the high level and how everything works, but if you want more support, you can get it inside Fuel, and Zach also has a great course, it's 25 bucks. I'll put the link for that in the show notes too. And Zack also said he would be willing to come in and be a guest inside Fuel VIP as well. The links of how you can get inside are all going to be in the show notes below. But without further ado, let's get to my interview with Zach Spuckler. Today I am welcoming Zach Spuckler and he is the founder of Heart, Soul, and Hustle. He also has a podcast called Not Your Average Online Marketing podcasts, which I love. And he basically figured all this stuff out about creating leads and working with advertising in social media platforms. And he created courses to teach you how to do it. And he's created millions of dollars in his own business. And he helps you figure it all out, which is amazing. And I love following him. I've been in his membership and all that good stuff before. Welcome, Zach. I'm so glad you're here with me today.

Zach
Hey, Sari, thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Sari
I got connected with you. Let's see. That was, I think it was fall of 22 when I found out about you and lead ads and from a mutual friend, Judith, and just fell in love with you. And what was so funny is, you told me you're like, actually, I looked at your stuff. So you, even though you have a focus on supporting course creators and coaches and things like that, it's really fun that you have a little bit of a dabble in your own product business as well.

Zach
Yeah, so I love Facebook ads. And we do focus mostly on digital products. But we had a candle business that we built and actually sold, ended up selling that business. We've worked with physical products, we worked with people who sell, it was actually really fun. We worked somebody who sells kind of like infinity scarves for dogs, which was a really fun sprint that we had with that company. And then they brought stuff in house. We've worked with people who sell wax melts and bath bombs and all kinds of things, like I love the physical product side of things. It's not where our focus is public facing. So if you go Google me and be like, What is this guy talking about, but in my spare time, and with choice clients that I like to hand pick and work with, that have really fun businesses, we've done some really cool physical product stuff too.

Sari
You know, the world of social media, for many of folks listening is this scary enigma that is always changing. And you're just one of the go to people, at least in my world that I've learned so much from and kind of you make it fun. So thank you.

Zach
I try.

Sari
The best we can. So I'd love to start out with just kind of the general landscape of social media. I mean, and what's working, right, as we head into the new year, because I feel like and you might say this as well, that the days of just like putting up a post and lots of people engaging with it, are probably gone. So how do we make the most of social media?

Zach
This is such a good question. And I'm going to be biased and say, we'll talk about this, I'm sure a little later. But, you know, leveraging advertising on top of what you're already doing organically is going to be pretty much vital I think in 2024, especially if you're going to be using traditional wealth. So funny to say that like traditional platforms now, we think of like Facebook, Instagram, you kno. If you're not using newer platforms like Tiktok, or who knows what will be out by the time 2024 ends, but you know, with things like TikTok it is, you know, we see this with with most social media platforms. I have been around for the creation and even believe it or not, like the death of some really big social media platforms. And you know, things like, you know, Facebook and Instagram, when they first start is ridiculously easy for content to be seen. And that's for two reasons. One is when the platform is kind of born, there's more consumers than creators. That's just the nature of this as more people want to consume than they want to create. And we typically see that skew more towards the consumer side of things, when a platform kind of comes out, like even threads, right? We watched that happen with threads, like people were writing threads, which is like, I think that hasn't really died off too. But some people don't, I do. But like we watched threads kind of explode. And people were like, my posts are getting, you know, hundreds or thousands or have hundreds of thousands of followers. And then, you know, as time progresses, people will stop consuming as much and people start producing more and more producers come on the scene. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that as platforms grow. And this is kind of nerdy, but like the infrastructure grows, right? So like the Facebook of 20, whenever it came out 2012 I think it was maybe even earlier than that. I should know that fact, but I don't, late 2000s, late, early 2000s. When Facebook came out, it was like a few people running, right? And now it's like teams of hundreds of employees like managing different elements and infrastructure and testing and outreach. And now they have an Instagram division. It's like that requires cost. And so the way that these platforms offset those costs is they advertise, right? And so if it's just as easy to reach people for free as it is to advertise, there's no incentive to advertise. And so the algorithm starts to favor content that is high performing for the platform, and it skews towards organic content reaching less people, right? It's just the nature of the game. So knowing those two things, I think there's things that we can be aware of. Number one, and I think this is true of, especially Facebook and Instagram, but most social media platforms is when they roll out a new feature, test it out. A lot of times these platforms like reels were huge when they first started. We had a reel reach like a million people, it was the dumbest thing I ever did. It was a lip sync to a Beyonce audio, not the song. It was something she said, which I was like, This is hilarious. I love it. Had nothing to do with my business went totally viral. 1.3 million views 25,000 likes, like that. And I put no thought or effort into it, right? Now, what was it two or three years after reels have come out, like reels don't just go viral, right? It doesn't happen quite as easily. So we see that trend kind of playing out. The other thing you can think about is really engaging content that keeps people on the platform. So all platforms, I can say pretty, pretty wholeheartedly, like they want people to stay on them, right? So when we create content, a lot of times we're like, how do I leverage my business? How do I grow my business? And so you want to look at it through the lens of the social platform and be asking, what gets people to like, comment and engage with this post? So what you'll notice is like, even some of the bigger like unbranded or like meme pages or like, even some of the pages that just like ask a general question. We all see them on Facebook or Instagram, it's like, would you pick A or B, like those posts go viral. Why? Because people comment, like, share and engage on them, which tells Facebook and Instagram like, oh, people are staying on platform, they're doing what we want with this content. So I'm not saying don't link to your website. I'm not saying don't link to your content every once in a while, but sometimes create content for the sake of creating content. The other thing is disrupt content with social content, right? So this is a perfect example. And I don't necessarily know that this is like, wildly applicable to everybody. But I think it's important we think about it is people start to associate certain things with certain brands. And sometimes just disrupting that content helps your content reach more people. So I'll give you a really specific example. I was telling you before we started, I've been sick for the last three weeks. So about a week before I got sick, I took up crocheting, like plushies, I didn't even know you could do like, of course, I was like this is so fun. So I've been crocheting little plushies, I made an elephant for my niece, I made a Snoopy, I was like, this is so fun. So I've been in bed for three weeks like and I have nothing to do but watch TV and like, very hard for me to sit on my hands as a as an entrepreneur, like we want to be doing things. So I've been crocheting stuff, and I posted a picture on Facebook stories and Instagram stories. And they're like, this is your most viral story of the last eight months. And I was like, of course it is because it has nothing to do with anything. But the lesson we can take from that is like, how often are we being repetitious, right? If you especially for CPG, it's like, we share our product and our process a lot. And it's like sharing something different really does make you stand out. And so in consumer products or packaged goods, like that could be, you know, showing your face, showing the company, showing the process during a reel of all the places or stores your product has been in, right? It's like, how often are we really looking at our content going, wow, this looks like, you know, this is very vanilla, when it's like the things that really people like is chocolate, right? It's like, it's just playing that game a little bit. And then the last major trend, then I'll be quiet for a second is that the last major trend that I'm seeing is amplification with advertising. And I touched on that briefly. But when we find something works okay, or we know it's leading to sales, growth, engagement, will amplify it with with ads. And so traditionally, what a lot of users do is they hit the boost button, right? And we've all done it, especially on Instagram, you're like, oh, this post is doing great, I'm gonna boost it. And there's nothing wrong with that there are much more effective ways to boost a post, in my opinion, where you're essentially doing the same thing. But through the Facebook advertising, backend ads manager that like really lets you push things out. But like, what we've done is we are just constantly advertising 24/7. And it doesn't have to be a massive budget, it doesn't have to be a ton of money. But really, it's like, I tell people, you know, and this is not mine, I remember I learned this from a girl, her name is Melanie Duncan, and she learned it from somebody else. She says that, and I can't remember who it is. But basically, there's only three ways to grow your business, right? You can double your customers, you can increase your prices, or you can increase what a customer spends every time they're a customer, right? So you can have more customers more initial money or more average order value, right? And for some CPG that can even include like subscription model, upsells, downsells, cross sells type of thing, but those are the only ways to grow your business, right? And so my thing is like look, I can always be especially in physical products, I can always be working on my average order value. I can always be playing around with the prices of my products but at the end of the day, especially and I said this but especially in CPG it's like you're going to hit a cap on the market right? If you sell you know salad dressing you can't charge for be $5 for a bottle of salad, you could try. But you're going to hit a market cap, right? In the world that I come from people love to arbitrarily throw prices on things. But it's like in consumer market, you have to look at, you have to do competitor analysis, average order value comes down to your product suite, right? How many can I sell at a time? How many will people buy at a time? And I argue that even that at some point is going to hit a capacity, you're going to, you're going to edge out users by having too many upsells or too many offers, or going too high of a price on an order, right? So you're going to hit capacity there. So for me, the only way that I can increase at some point, right, we always want to be working on those other things. But at some point, I have to be getting new customers. And so the only way to get new customers is for people to see my brand. And the only way for people to see my brand is for me to put my brand in front of other people. And so we think about things like well, I'll post on social media, and it's like, yes, and what if you're sick tomorrow, and you don't want to post or you don't know what to post, or it's Christmas week, and you're busy and you forget to post, right? These are things that big companies don't think about because they have a social media person. But as the founder, creator, you know, operator of our business, and often the Social Media Manager, you know, with that hat on, we have to be thinking, how am I making sure my my product is being seen every day? And so for me, that's 24/7 advertising, an amplification of what I'm already doing with advertising. Because if I'm making sure 5, 10, 20, 30 whatever you can afford, I think 5 to 10 is like a good baseline to start dollars a day just to put your content in front of the right people and say, you need to buy this thing, it's going to dramatically increase your business. And so I can honestly say I pulled it up. Before we before we started, I can honestly say that like our highest expense every year is advertising. I pulled up my QuickBooks when when our interviews kicking off, because I wanted to look at it, it's like, we've done about 3.35 in sales over the last 9-10 years. And we've spent about 550,000 on advertising. So like 20%, maybe a little less, I might be doing the math a lot. It's probably like 18, but like 80 to 20% of what we spend is just putting our content in front of people. And that is frankly, because I don't like being on social media 24/7 I don't like posting 24/7. I know for CPG it's a little more important. But like my thing is like, if I just want my content to be seen, because that's ultimately what I'm trying to do is grow that lever of people that see my business, spend a few bucks to do it, because it's going to be the cheapest, most efficient employee you have that guarantees your content gets seen by people.

Sari
Like where I am, it's so amazing. So many good things to latch on there. I have a program that will be starting soon or have already started when this launches, but called Master Your Business. And we talk a lot about how to you leverage your time because you know, all the hats that you have to wear and like really stepping into becoming the CEO. And what I kind of heard in that last little bit is we can't do all the, you know, be on 24/7. Like trying to do all these things. And so committing to putting some advertising dollars, it is an investment and it's not going to be perfect at the beginning and things work for a while. And then they don't and, you know, but but there is a return on investment and and in CPG you know, when I was at Whole Foods Market. And in my experience about 20% is about right for as far as a marketing budget goes. So yeah, you're about spot on there. But the return on investment ROI, right, is big and, and I'm sure we'll get an email list, you know, but we talked about that with another guest I have on sometimes that like 40 to 1, you know, for every dollar you spend that 40% in return.

Zach
And I think that that's the big thing is like, right, your your time is just finite. And for me like this might sound kind of like tongue in cheek, but it is true. Like, I just don't want to work that much. You know, like, I love what I do. One of the reasons we sold our candle businesses we hand poured, hand top, hand labelled hand packed all of our candles, and like there's totally a better way. We have like, in retrospect there's definitely a better way but I was like this is exhausting. You know, I have a friend, her name is Denise Duffield Thomas and she talks a lot about money. She's like, there's always an easier way to make money. And I'm like, I totally resonate with that. And I think that there's also this duality of like, yes, there's always an easier make money, but it typically takes something to make money, right? Like it still takes time, energy focus, you know, mental bandwidth. But that's the way that I look at everything that I do. And if I was to do the candles again like this, that's how I would look at it. I'd be like, okay, if I'm spending all this time, you know, making where's that? Where's the remainder of the time coming from right and I was running two businesses at the time. That's a big part of why it was so exhausting. But I'm like, that's the way I like To think about things is like, sure I can go write an Instagram post, and I can create 30 days of Instagram content. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, like I, I know people who thrive organically on Instagram. But I'm like, for me, I'd rather cut out at 4pm and spend three to 4pm, like writing a Facebook ad and spending $25 that day. That's just that's just how I vibe and some people do and some people don't. And there's nothing wrong with it. And I think that there's benefit to both right. So like, I would be lying if I said in our business, we don't use any organic social media, right? Like I play this, like devil's advocate of like, Oh, we're all in on advertising. Like, we use organic social media, we use email marketing, we use all these things. And even our advertising is the linchpin of what we do. And if that resonates with you, and you're like, yeah, I'd love to just spend money and buy back my time, great. But there's a time and a place where it's like, you could spend more, and you can spend less, right? But I think that everybody who runs a CPG product business, should 100% be advertising 5 to $10 a day, if you do the math, it's about you know, $4,000 a year give or take, just to guarantee that your content gets seen. And it's like, if you honestly think you can find someone who guarantees you in organic Social Reach for less than $500 a month, like number one, send them my way, we would love to have somebody on our social team for that price point. And to just know, like, you're you're putting in the time now to yield the benefit later. And you kind of touched on that. When you said like, we have a person who does emails, like we're not just posting on social media or running ads that are like, I hope you like my content, I hope you like my product, I hope you buy my thing. It's like, we're also growing our email list. And so perfect example, we're doing a promotion this week right now. And my friend was like, oh, where's everyone going to come from? So we're just going to email our list when it's ready. Like, we're going to start advertising in the next few days, but to like, validate, and make sure everything works, we emailed our list. And so having that asset is a huge benefit. To give you a really specific example, we sent out this email for a promotion that we're doing, and somebody was like, hey, I just bought this and like, nothing's working. And I was like, oh, shoot, I forgot to toggle this little button on. But because I emailed my list, we caught it within 20 minutes. And it was someone who didn't care, they were like, this is no big deal. Like I'm sure it was just a fluke, I'm on your email list. I love you guys. Don't worry about it. And it's like, all of this stuff, all of the social media and email marketing and the advertising. Really what you're doing is building brand loyalty and authority. And it's like, that's the game that we want to play. Because well, everybody else is out here chasing. How do I get a 2x return on adspend on my ads? How do I grow my email list to 100,000? How do I do all these big pie in the sky things? It's like, they're not bad if you can do them, great. But for us, we're looking at brand loyalty. And it's like, we want people who are like shouting from the rooftops about how great we are. And so now, just to expand on that further, and then I'll be quiet again, Sari. But like for our promotion, we have people reaching out to us from these promotional emails saying this looks so good. Can I share this with my people? Can I share this with my friends? Can I now we're in a highly commission based business where people know they're going to get a commission on that. Sure. But there are referral programs for CPG as well. But it's like, that's what you want. You want to be building this brand loyalty where people are like, dang, not only do I like you, I want to tell other people about you. And so all of these things together create this really like, I call it internal virality. It's like, I'm not going to go viral on Tiktok, I'm probably never going to reach 25 million views on a video. And I'm okay with that. Because within my ecosystem, within my corner of the world, within my pocket of influence, people know my name, and people know who I am, people know my business. And maybe it's not your name in the case of a physical product, but it's like they know your brand, right? They know your brand. And that's what you're going for.

Sari
You were very kind when you said well, you know, you can boost your posts, if you want, but I say I have a photo of money on fire. And I say be like, if you like lighting money on fire thrown in a dumpster, boost a post. I think that, you know, again, sure if you want to, maybe it'll help but being very strategic about how you spend that 5 to $10 a day, you know that 150 to $300 for a month. That's the key, right? And ultimately, that's why you're here because you have that expertise. So I want to talk about you know, what are some of the high leverage uses because again, we can go boost a post and just light 300 bucks on fire and maybe get some likes. I also think people love to or like maybe they do ads or just boost a post trying to get likes or comments. But I don't even think that's the best way.

Zach
Yeah, this is a great question. In a consumer product brand like, for me, the most efficient use of ad spend is dollar return, right? So I'm going to be blunt and then I'm going to like break it down, right? So it's like, if you're not spending 500 to $1,000, don't even bother running ads to like sell your product, right? That's just the reality. Like, it's not because it's not possible, not because you can't but because there's a lot of testing and work that goes into getting an ad to convert.

Sari
To sell direct from social media to.

Zach
Going direct from an ad to buy my thing like that is one of the most challenging ads to run. There's reasons people hire agencies and consulting people and US companies to photograph their product. Like there's so many elements that go into it product photography, targeting, awareness. There's a lot that goes into it. That's like my direct blunt like, don't even try it right. Now, if we like, backpedal just a little bit, it's like, don't not run those at all, right? Because the easiest ad you can run for most people is that you already have some traffic coming to your store, right? Maybe you don't have a ton. Maybe you have a small social media following. Maybe it's mostly friends and family. It doesn't matter, right? But what I would do is I would run what we call a DPA ad, a Dynamic Product Ad. And basically, it's very simple. If you're in Shopify, which I'm guessing you recommend. Yep, perfect. So if you're in Shopify, and you connect Shopify to Facebook, you can literally in like 5 or 10 button clicks be like, I want to run an ad for $2 a day for everyone that looked at a product on my website for the last three weeks. And I want to run out to them that says, use the coupon code, Facebook for 10% off, right? Two to $3 a day, if you have a smaller amount of traffic, it won't even spend that $2 to $3. If you a little more traffic, it'll probably spend that every day. But it's going to go after the people who are already looking at your product, right? We've all heard that old adage and there's arguments that it's even higher now. But like, it takes people seven times of seeing your product before they make the purchase, right? We've all heard that. There are some studies that say like, sometimes it's even like 30, 40, 50. With the invention of social media, frequently people interact with different products. But like, even like in that case, it's like it will just keep showing them the offer they've looked at, right? I call it the Amazon Shoe Ad because my audience is mostly women. But we've all done it. You look at a pair of shoes online, and then it follows you around the internet, right? Yeah, Amazon, it's the same thing. And so we can set that up on a small scale with a limited budget. So to me, that's number one, like set that up, you have any amount of traffic coming to your store right now, set that ad up, it's going to yield the highest return because you're going after people already interested in your product. Second ad that's going to yield a higher return is a product based engagement. So even though I said don't go directly for product sales, this would be an ad that creates engagement and awareness about your product that you're running for engagement. Now, we're limited on time and visuals, because it's a podcast, but like when you go into Facebook, and you click create new ad, one of your options is to literally choose engagement. I want people to engage with my posts on Facebook, Instagram, whatever. For me, especially in 2024, this would ideally be a product reel, it's something engaging, it grabs attention, it showcases your product, but it's not like buy my thing now. Really great examples would be like, I just have crochet on the brain. I know this is horrible. But like a lot of crocheter, they do like crochet along with me. And they'll like you literally watch them build a plushie from like, a piece of yarn to like the finished product and it takes like 15-30 seconds, I watch all of them, that'd be a great thing to run as an ad because it's like, let's say that person is telling you their patterns or the end product. I know I'm aware of it, it's building visibility for me, but it's also putting them right in front of me. Additionally, this is a little more advanced, but if somebody likes, comments, shares and engages, or watches more than 15 seconds of that reel, I can also retarget them with an ad later. So I can turn that reel into like this fully functioning like audience capturing system, right?

Sari
Maybe just to give people a couple of other ideas would be like, if you have a cookie mix that you would be like making the cookies from the mix all the way to the oven to like your family enjoying them. Or if you have a marinade, then it's like marinating the meat, putting it on the grill, right? It's like the engaging like the fullness.

Zach
Yeah, so and you can make those are those can be UGC, that can be user generated content as well, as long as you have express permission to use it in advertising. But yeah, I mean, these are just videos that are like, here's the product, here's how you use it. Here's what makes it so fun, enjoyable, different, unique, and you showcase that, right? The third type of ad that I would run like and this is just an order of priority. The retargeting $2 to $3 a day, the engagement $2 to $3 a day and then another $2 to $3 a day, I would do a list building ad. So typically, in the world that I come from just to give some context, we would run a list building out, it's like download this free you bought, we've all done it right, download this free PDF on how to X, Y and Z. And you give me your name and email, and I'll give it to you. That's not as prevalent in the product space. But there's lots of cool stuff that you can do to still generate names and emails. So when we had our candle business, one thing that we would do is about three weeks before Black Friday hit, we would showcase our products in an ad, whether it be video, I don't like video, because I'm really lazy, to be honest. So I don't do a lot of video content, even for the physical product was we did a lot of like really high quality product photography I used to be, I used to do food photography, and it translated really well to product photography. All of that to say, I would prefer a video for products but we would do images and they worked as well. But what we did is about three weeks out from Black Friday, we would like showcase a few different products and be like, these products are going to be on massive sale for Black Friday, like the best thing you can do for yourself is get on our waitlist and we would just grow a waitlist. Now you typically pay a little more to get somebody as a name and email on a waitlist because it's like, basically you're asking somebody to raise their hand to be marketed to invite your thing. But it grows your email list, right? There are a lot of other things you can do. And there are cases where like a PDF would be great. Like, let's say you sell like, you know, homemade pizza sauce, like a pizza recipe ebook that's like, by the way, sign up for this ebook get 30% off your first order at our store like those could coupled together really well. So it does sometimes require some out of the box thinking for a physical product. But like getting names and emails is really smart. As a side note, when you're doing those dynamic product ads and those engagement ads and you're linking to your products, you're saying check the link in my bio, or you're getting as a byproduct of what you're already doing traffic to your website, I highly recommend for physical products to have some sort of pop up, it doesn't have to be intrusive, it doesn't have to be repetitive, what we used was called popped in for Shopify, and we would set it to not show up for 15 seconds. So they had to be on our store for 15 seconds, it would pop up once and then it wouldn't pop up again for a week, right? Doesn't have to be invasive, but have that capture their name and email for a first time discount, or a special offer or something like that. Because all this work that you're doing, including this ad, we're growing your email list, on the back of this, you're going to put them into an email sequence, we talked a little about email marketing, that talks about your best selling products, that tells them why to come to your store. And so all of this work that you're doing is going to drive them back to your store. So super quick recap, number one, I would do a dynamic product ad, which is essentially, that ad that follows you around the internet with the product already looked at. The second one would be an engagement ad to a high quality piece of content that builds awareness and engagement. And then the third one would be just to grow a list, right? So that could be a list of potential buyers, a waitlist for a product. If you have a shop that does drops, I know that this may not necessarily apply to everybody. But if you have drops, those are really great way to build a list. If you're like we're doing our seasonal drop on, you know, October 31st for Halloween, we're opening the door like fantastic for that kind of stuff. So sell your products, engage your audience, grow your list, keep those all running 24/7 $2 to $3 a day a piece, should about six to $9, which is a little more than that 5 to 10 I said but right in that range, in that order of priority was really going to help you just grow your audience and list consistently and sales.

Sari
Love it, that's super helpful of like, where to spend it as a product based business. The third category is where I want to go to and spend a little bit more time because this is a lead ad, essentially, for the most part. So I want people, I use this term, you taught it to me, and I talk about it all the time. And I have helped clients, I mean, I've had really good success with my farmers market for one as well as my own business. Some of you listening probably came from a lead ad. And then, you know, I have taught it to some brands, and even taught a little class in Fuel as part of their VIP program. And I love them, and some of my clients have had really good success with them really amazing success. And so let's, I guess, just break down lead ads just a little bit more. And I'd love to give a couple of examples too of what we have tried, but maybe just kind of explain like why a lead ad is more effective than even just trying to get somebody over to your website, maybe to sign up for the optin.

Zach
Yes. So just to set the stage, a lead ad is like a term that we use, and that's what Facebook calls them. So it's not like this fancy term we made up. But it's called a lead ad. And basically, it's where people enter their name and email on the platform that they're using, whether it's Facebook or Instagram, rather than sending them to your website where like a pop up, or an opt in page, prompts them to give you their name and email. And so the reason I love these is number one, they're cheaper, they cost much less than driving somebody to your website, because remember I mentioned earlier, in kind of the trends we're going to see in 2024, that platforms reward you with your content for keeping people on platform. They're going to do the same thing with advertising, if you're going to keep them there, they're going to be like, oh, this person is gonna like make them leave Facebook to opt in, great. And so everything kind of happens within Facebook. Second thing is that because it's on Facebook, there's this level of borrowed authority and a level of automation, and that it will kind of in a lot of cases automatically give their best name and email, which is not always their Facebook login email. So a lot of people push back and go like, oh, I don't want to use lead forms because if it auto populates, what if it's a bad email, doesn't force them to use that email, and it actually uses the email that they're inputting into forms not necessarily the email that they're using to log in to Facebook. So that can be really effective too. And then finally, those two things together, the fact that it's a lower cost, and it's higher conversion rate, because you have borrowed authority, and autofilling means you pay less per lead. It lowers what we call your CPL, your cost per lead. So all of this happens on Facebook. Now, I love lead ads for those reasons. But I also like them because they're really easy to set up and they work really exceptionally well even if you just do like average work, I run a boot camp where I teach these and I tell people all the time, like, just shoot for a B Minus like 80%. Just get it done, just get it out there. And I would say 95% of the time that somebody publishes an ad they get leads, or they always at the most incredible cost. They always kill it out the gate. No, not necessarily. But you will get leads. Like I feel very confident that if you follow along, you can get leads, right. The other thing that I like to mention about lead ads is that you still have a thank you page where you can send people to your website. So with Facebook, the way it works is like they'll see a thank you page that says like, thank you so much, we've got your information, by the way, and then you get to input a custom message. So it's really cool with product based businesses as you can do some really cool stuff like, by the way, because you gave us your name and email and sign up for the waitlist, click the button below and we'll apply 20% off to your cart, and you can send them to a coupon link using Shopify. You could say shop our latest collection before anyone else, here's a secret page. You could say, come follow us on Instagram, if you're trying to grow your Instagram following like, to me that is the secret sauce button that it's like you can do whatever you want. And all of these ads that we talked about earlier kind of compound on that. So if you do send them to your website, and they look at a product, they're going to get retargeted to your dynamic product. Right? So it's also this very cyclical nature of advertising that really for us, especially in our business, the root of that is email list building. We spend at least $1,000 a month, typically more growing our email list every month is like a non negotiable for our business.

Sari
Oh my gosh, that's so good. I always get so much pushback from people kind of novice into this whole marketing world of like, I don't like I don't want to grow my email or you know, there's hesitation about whether it actually works but it does and I'm sorry, but if you're going to do, especially if you're going to do direct to consumer, this is just welcome to the world of marketing, we got to build an email list, and we want to use it really effectively. But I love that explanation and I hadn't thought about some of those, like at the end, those are really good. Those are, gold. What's like a good cost per lead that you would say like, you're like, yeah, this is performing well?

Zach
if you're in a relatively, there's going to be such a loaded statement. But like, if you're in like a relatively unsaturated space, like under one or $2, little more saturated consider like two to $3 is really kind of where you want to play. It's also very subjective to like, who you're targeting, and where you're located, and where you ship. Like, there's a lot of factors. But I would say like one to $3 is like a safe zone to be shooting for, as of January 3 2024, I always give that context, if you're listening to this, two years from now, it could be cheaper, it can be less, we see ad costs fluctuate. But yeah, like one to $3 is a safe space to be what you really want to look at is like, are at least and this is called link click through rate is at least one to 2% of people who see the ad clicking on it. And then everything else is typically back end optimization, store optimization, offer optimization, freebie or list building, offer optimization, making sure it's something people want. But if people are clicking on it, and then something's happening, I always tell people, like, make sure the ad is working first, like that is the essential of advertising like are people clicking on the ad. But if they're clicking and you're not converting, then there's other things that you want to look at that may not even be influenced by the advertising. So look at cost per lead, but know that it's like, I don't want to say a vanity metric, because it does directly matter. But it's more like it's, I call it like a byproduct metric to byproduct of what you're paying for the ads to be seeing, how many people are clicking, how it's converting. And so you want to look at like all the numbers, not just cost per lead, but and cost per lead will tell you if those other numbers are performing well. So it's like this double edged sword. But that's my long answer that is like with the big asterisk disclaimer, but $1 to $3 is a safe space to be shooting for.

Sari
Okay, that's helpful. So some of the ones yes, like a PDF, that's a download, like get our, you know, I had a GAO was working with who has like a product for helping with sleep. So like the top 10 ways to get better sleep in 2024, kind of PDF. And it's not even necessarily about her product. I mean, it could like one of those things could be, but it's about finding people who are interested in sleep, right? And dialing in the audience and playing around to get people downloading that PDF, which then gets them on her email list. And oh, by the way, she has a product that will help with that, right? So something like that, like the recipe, you know, some kind of PDF download, which you know, you can create on Canva. This is not rocket science.

Zach
A hundred percent. Canva is bestfriend.

Sari
I have done a giveaways. And I think that there are you know, I know, there are some special language and things that you need to make sure you include when you're doing giveaways. But I think I told you earlier that I mean, I'm still running that same giveaway ad for the farmers market. And it's like, I don't know, 60 cents a lead. And we're getting hundreds of emails that we can share with them about the Winter Market and I had a client who does bars, and they had great, they've had great success with lead ads where they are doing a giveaway. But I mean, it was like 40 cents a lead or something. It was ridiculous. So giveaways can be really powerful. Now you got to manage it. And you got to like, there's some extra things you got to do with the giveaway. But those are usually I think the main things I see. But I could see like the product drop, like a special collections special season, something like that. Could be really cool. But yeah, lead ads are pretty, very powerful. And you got to be willing to put in the work not only for the lead ad, but all the backend stuff to support it.

Zach
And I think that that's really I'm glad you said that because the one thing I always like to tell people is like the ad like typically we work with people who say like, ads don't work for me. And when we dig deeper, it's like the ads are not even. They may not be working. But they're not working because often it's the backend. Right? And you know I always like to use Netflix as a really great example like Netflix. I think they have raised their price a few times. So the example is not as sexy as it used to be. But Netflix used to be like $10 a month, right? If you guys can remember that. But when Netflix went up to like $13.99 or $12.99, somewhere around there, they basically, in their, I forget what it's called. Now, I'm totally spacing, not a board meeting. But like their quarterly report, they did a quarterly report, which because they're a publicly traded company, like the notes come out from that, and they had basically said, like, we will spend $120, to get somebody to sign up for our two week free trial. And I don't know why that has stuck with me so long, but it continues to stick with me to this day, because it's all about the backend. It's all about recurring customers. It's it's so many people in physical products, digital products, subscription products, I don't care what are in this mentality of like, if I spent $500, today, I better make $1,000 tomorrow. And it's like, I'm not saying lose your shirt in the process, like Netflix obviously has a much deeper pocket to pull from that allows them to outpace the competition. But I had a coach once told me, this was two or three years ago, and I think it's still ridiculously true and this was like a year and things he was like, in 2022. But he said in 2022, the person who can spend the most to get a customer, the person who can generate the most revenue from a single customer will be the winner. And I just think that that all comes down to exactly what you're saying, just to bring it back is like, it's all about the back end. If you get the lead for $1. Do you have emails, automated going out to them? Do you have cart abandoned emails for the people who come to your store and don't buy from you? Do you have a process for the people who click on your link in your Instagram bio, like, this is why I love advertising. Because it's not just advertising. It's like advertising is great. Lead ads are great. And it's like, we have this other saying in our space. Everybody says the money is in your list, the money is in your list, grow your list, and you'll make money, money, money, money, list, list, list, and I always tell people, the potential for money is in your list. Because if you don't email if you don't automate, if you don't communicate, you will not make money, you'll have a big asset that's like, so what, right? So I love that you brought that up, I just wanted to touch on that as like, this is not like a pep talk of like, oh, you got to spend a lot of money to make a lot of money, right? Netflix can spend $120 on a free trial, we can't. We spend about $25 to $30 on a customer, where we lose money up front and make money in you know, 30 to 60 days, like that's our goal, right? But and when you get into advertising, have that mentality of like, I'm not looking to make $300 tomorrow, I'm looking to generate awareness, engagement, customers, potentially break even and be compounding. So we like to think of it as like this, then there's actually a book the compound effect is great book by the way. But it's like, that's what we're thinking is like, if I spent $3 this month, and I make 300 back, I have all that work I just did plus, I'm going to put 300 back in again. And maybe I make 400 this month, and then I put 400, and 500, and a 1000, right? It's like let it compound. But again, it will not compound if you don't think about the backend, right?

Sari
I mean, people will go to farmers markets. And first they don't collect emails at all. And then like, you got to collect emails, and then they get the emails, but then they're just on a piece of paper. And it's like, well, that's not doing you any good. Like, okay, I mean, get the emails first. But still, like, let's actually do something with them. Like you said, it's potential. So now that we've probably thoroughly overwhelmed some people, and that's okay. I want to bring on people are going to tell you how it is, I love that you're like, let me tell you the truth. But this is a very, it is very doable, and you do such a great job breaking it down. I know that your main niche is not necessarily product based businesses, but I certainly got a ton of value out of your boot camp and your membership and working with you and I have brought some of that into Fuel VIP. So I guess we're going to kind of like say, well, what now because we've maybe given you a lot of information, they're like, oh, my gosh. You know, I do have a lead ad class, that's just an hour long class inside Fuel VIP so people can grab that. But then you have an amazing bootcamp that I sent some people to last year and got a lot of value out of it. So I know you have a live version sometimes. And then you have what's called evergreen in the biz.

Zach
Yes. So we have a five day Facebook ads bootcamp, we do them live once a quarter. And then we have them available 24/7 on demand. So every time we do a live one, and basically it teaches you how to run those third set of ads that we were talking about the lead ads. So basically like how do you set up an ad? What copy do you write? What images do you make? How do you, what buttons do you physically click in the ads manager? How do you find audiences? Who should you run your ads to? How do you grow the list? Where did the emails go? Like ever everything that you need to basically go from, like, I've got a business to, I'm growing an email list, it takes about three days to get the ads up and running in about five days to see results. And so it is a time commitment, like no bones about it, you probably have to commit about an hour to two hours a day, if you do it live with us, if you do it on evergreen, take your time you got all the time in the world. But typically, we do it in about an hour to two hours a day, live with people over the course of a week. And then by the end, you're the lead generation ad running. And more importantly, what I like to tell people is like, yes, you will generate leads, yes, you will run a lead ad. But what we've seen people do, and this is what gets me so excited about the boot camp, is that we empower you with the information. And like, I think that you're just a wonderful example, Sari, because you're like, but yeah, like we took that, but now we're using it, you know, for some of our clients, and we're using it for our farmers market, and we're using it for our product business. And it's like, that's what we want. We want this information out there, we want people to feel like they can learn the fundamentals. Because there's nothing wrong with a template, or fill in the blank, we have them in our membership. But really arming people with this tools and the skills and not just saying like, this is a drill, it screws holes into the wall. But actually like, you can hang any picture in your home. Like that's what we're going for. And that's what gets me really excited about the bootcamp.

Sari
It's inexpensive, and I'll put the link in the show notes, so people can grab that easily, I highly recommend it. I learned a ton from that. And I'm going to put you on the spot. And it's okay, you can think about it. But this year in 2024, we are really focusing and in my membership about like getting an all, might beat myself out but getting done this year. And I almost wonder if we could maybe look at bringing in maybe someone from your staff to like really do some of the even the pre work before the lead ad. You know, I think people even get stuck on like, how do I create an audience? And what do I look for? And how do I even set up my business page and my, you know, the Facebook manager, ads manager and stuff like that, so maybe I can twist your arm and we could bring you or someone from your team.

Zach
That'd be awesome. Yes, we should set something up. It'd be super fun.

Sari
You guys, hopefully you can hear Zach and his team are super fun to work with. You know, there's lots of people out there doing all this work. But find people that are fun and love it make it as enjoyable as possible. Well, thank you so much for doing such a great download for us and laying all your knowledge, dropping the knowledge bomb on us.

Zach
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Sari
It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much, Zach, have a great rest of your day. All right. So that's what we have for you today. I hope you enjoyed this act so much fun to talk with, he's a lot of fun to follow, his five day boot camp is great. If you want to just dip your toes into those lead ads stuff, I definitely will be bringing him and to run a workshop, kind of mini workshop thing. But if you get anything out of this, I would just really caution you. Stop throwing away your money on boosting ads, and come and learn how to do lead ads with me or with Zack, and you will make such a bigger impact and make those dollars actually work for you to create long term, actual customers and not just people liking your posts because that doesn't necessarily mean sales. I want everybody to become more savvy and really put on our CEO hats and be more thoughtful and intentional about advertising on social media. I am sure you got lots of great takeaways from the episode today. Thank you again to Zach. And until next time, have an amazing week.

The smartest thing you can do as an entrepreneur is to invest in a who to help you with the how to speed up your journey and help you skip the line. When you are ready for more support and accountability to finally get this thing done, you can work with me in two ways. Get me all to yourself with one on one business coaching or join Food Business Success which includes membership inside Fuel, our community of food business founders that includes monthly live group coaching calls and so much more. It's one of my favorite places to hang out and I would love to see you there. Go to foodbizsuccess.com to start your journey towards your own Food Business Success.