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Episode #53

Episode 053: The one with Perry Marshall and Tom Meloche

  • Perry and Tom talk about selling stuff and the business side of Facebook that most entrepreneurs miss
  • The difference between Google and Facebook Advertising
  • What you can do with Google that you can’t do with Facebook and vice versa
  • The number one thing that you must get about Facebook (you won’t want to miss this one)
  • How to use Google and Facebook in synergy
Transcript
Dean: I’m Dean Jackson, he’s Joe Polish and this is the I Love Marketing Podcast. Hey everybody, it’s Dean Jackson.

Joe: And the Joe Polish. The real one.

Joe: Yeah, the last episode I wasn’t on. We had a guest, Tim Paulson who actually is my co-author on my Nightingale-Conant Program who we do the Platinum 2.0 group with. And so I figured it would be smart for me to kind of back out on the last episode and just have Dean actually do a podcast with Tim.

And now here we are with two very special, very smart guests, Perry Marshall and Tom Meloche. And you guys can get all of Perry’s and Tom’s books on Amazon and we’ll talk about some of the stuff they do because they’re awesome. But Perry Marshall and Tom Meloche. So first off, welcome to an I Love Marketing episode, it’s great to have you guys with us and you’re both super sharp and we’re going to talk about things that I know our listeners are going to learn a lot about and it’s going to be fun, at least I hope it will be. I’m just kind of trying to set the stage here.

Dean: When is it ever not?

Joe: Yeah, yeah. I mean exactly. So let’s start with Perry and Tom. Who are you guys? I mean instead of me trying to describe your bios and all that sort of stuff, why don’t we just have you guys explain who are you, what do you do, what makes you so important?

Perry: Well most people know me as a Google AdWords guy. Google AdWords actually launched 10 years ago almost exactly and very shortly after it came out I started playing with it and it took me about two hours to go, “Holy crap, this is like the greatest invention in the history of the world and I’m not telling anybody about this. I’m just going to keep this to myself.”

But a year later, I got invited to speak at a seminar and now I’m the author of the best-selling book in the history of the world on the subject of Google AdWords which is called The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords, it’s on Amazon. And so I’ve been doing seminars and training programs and books and everything on pay per click marketing for a very long time. And within the last couple of years Facebook has now become a huge force in the world and Facebook also has a pay per click marketing and advertising program. And so of course it would be kind of logical for us to go teach people how to do that too.

But Facebook is a very, very different animal than Google. I mean it’s like a different planet. It’s like the women are from Venus, men are from Mars kind of thing, it’s that kind of different. So Tom has been a customer and a student of mine for a very long time, probably all the way since the beginning because I’ve been out doing what I do for about 10 years and Tom’s been with me almost from the beginning. And Tom built an entire software company on the back of almost exclusive Facebook Ads.

And in his particular situation Facebook was way easier to make work than Google Ads and one thing led to another and we ended up writing a book together on Facebook marketing. And so Tom is a true Facebook advertising genius and by the way when we talk about Facebook, we’re not really talking about what most people talk about social media and tweeting and liking and all this kind of stuff. We’re talking about direct response advertising that you can measure, that you can take to the bank.

We’re not really very interested in the social aspect. We’re interested in generating sales and actually marketing stuff. So Tom, he’s a genius, he’s built and sold five software companies and now we’ve actually turned this into a software company too, so that’s kind of who we are Joe.

Joe: Awesome, awesome. Well first off, that’s great and I want to make a comment before we kind of get into it about something you just said. Last Thursday, there was an I Love Marketing Meetup Group at my office, and I don’t attend all of the ones but whenever I’m obviously in town and can make them at my own office, I actually attend the I Love Marketing Meetup Groups. And Kevin Donahue, who runs the Meetup Groups in Tempe actually, we have a friend named Anthony Mink who is listening silently on the line as we actually do this call and he actually spoke during the Meetup Group about how to run Facebook Ads.

And one thing I actually mentioned it was interesting because there was probably about 25 people at this particular one and I said, “How many of you are running Facebook Ads currently?” And there were just maybe three or four people and the rest of them didn’t. And I said, well here’s the big difference. I mean if you were to spend 30 minutes doing what Anthony just showed you how to do versus how many of you spend 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, three hours on Facebook every day? We got a bunch of hands, almost everyone from the 30 minute mark all the way up to several people that spend over three hours a day on Facebook.

I said, if you were to use that time actually learning how to do this stuff. How to actually go out and make money, what do you think would do more for you? I mean you might have less friends and you might have less social interactions. You might be watching less videos and looking at less photos and talking about whatever, but from a financial standpoint if your motivation as a business owner is actually to make money, this is the side of Facebook that hardly anyone actually pays attention to compared to the vast numbers of people that are on it.

So what you just said, this is about direct response, this is about not tweeting and stuff. Very important distinction because I see a lot of people that spend a lot of time very busy, very active on the other side where they’re getting used by the Internet. They’re not using it to actually make money, and I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m just saying if you’re an entrepreneur and a business owner and certainly a listener of I Love Marketing, most people want to figure out how to sell products, deliver stuff that they want to deliver, get paid for what it is they do that sort of thing. And that’s why we’re doing an interview with you guys, so this is awesome.

Perry: If people want to be used and abused by the Internet, we have no objection but we’re going to make money off it.

Dean: Well there’s no shortage of things to do for sure you know?

Joe: Right, exactly. And let me say also to our listeners out there, whenever me and Dean are just doing the episodes for I Love Marketing by ourselves we’re able to record into really into microphones and have it edited and everything. However, to get really sharp talent on the line, we can’t get everyone at different parts of the country into a studio easily and then deliver this very high priced paid podcast that everyone pays for which is free to everyone. So occasionally, we’ll have to substitute great quality recording for brilliant, useful, valuable knowledge.

And so whenever we have to do these over the phone, we’ll do the best we can to get you that but we’re only limited to the quality of the recording here. So I just wanted to say that because everyone’s loving the quality of the recordings on the episodes that me and Dean have been doing, so there you go. Dean, I’m going to start with some questions unless there’s anything you want to say because you know me, I’m just going to barrel through.

Dean: No, I’m really excited. I know that Perry’s going to talk about some of the differences between the pay per click on Google and the pay per click on Facebook because it really is fascinating. I’m excited to hear some of their insights.

Joe: Okay, so Tom and Perry, can you give the listeners a very brief history on Google AdWords and pay per click and just what that even means?

Perry: So back in probably 1999, this little tiny company called Goto said, well we’re going to sell links on a search engine under an auction and we’re going to sell the highest link for the most money and the second highest link for the number two money and so on. And as perverse as that seemed at the time, it’s now become probably a $60 billion industry and it’s how most of the Internet gets paid for.

And Goto didn’t do a particularly great job at that but they did a good enough job and it turned into like a billion-dollar business or so which has eventually become Bing in Yahoo to make a long story short. But Google showed up and they did it right. And they really did it right the first time. Their system was awesome from day one and it’s only become more awesome, and so on Google you search for red wagons and you’re going to see ads across the top in a kind of a stripe theory and ads running down the side and that’s Google AdWords and people bid on red wagon.

And when you click on red wagon, the advertiser gets billed by Google and then there’s also the content network or the display network which is you are on The New York Times website, or you’re on a blog, or you’re on an astronomy website or whatever and you see a little Google Ads and that’s called Google AdSense. And that’s an opportunity for you to advertise to people who aren’t searching for something right now, but they’re in a particular context or they’re reading an article about telescopes and you sell telescopes, so your ad could show up there.

And so that’s pay per click and Google has built a $30 billion business out of that. And I would imagine most people that are reasonably familiar with marketing know a thing or two about Google AdWords. And AdWords is like the world’s most advanced direct marketing machine. It’s got every bell and whistle that you can imagine and some advertisers are spending $10,000.00 a day buying clicks and it works and it’s profitable and it brings buyers. And it’s also a game for if you want to be a professional AdWords advertiser then you can buy a book and you can get trained and you can do it.

Well then there’s Facebook advertising and that’s really, it works basically the same way but it shows in people’s Facebook feeds and it doesn’t show up because people were searching for something. It shows up much more likely because of something they put in their profile or something Facebook knows about them based on what they like and what they’re interested in. And again it’s a bidding system and highest bidders prevail but also pay per click marketing is also a copywriter’s playground because the person who writes the best copy or puts the most appealing images and ads in front of people to get the most clicks get more clicks for less money. So I mean that’s just like a really brief explanation.

Joe: Well that’s awesome. So Dean, I have a million questions but I want to give you an opportunity to talk.

Dean: Well it’s so funny. I mean it’s hard to believe though that Goto was started, that was probably 12 or 13 years ago now and yeah, they basically created that category. I remember being able to buy, we started Stopyourdivorce.com on the back of Goto being able to allow us to bid on specific words and I remember getting, literally, getting traffic for a penny, those were the good old days.

Perry: And now a divorce click is probably $3.00.

Dean: Yeah, exactly and you have to be more stealth in selecting the right words, the ones that are going to convert.

Perry: Yeah, yeah. There’s a huge science to that.

Joe: You know what’s interesting about that term, “The good old days?” I mean I think when you’re a direct response marketer and you understand the psychology of using words to compel people to do things and then you look at all the new different delivery systems that are popping up all the time. I think there’s always the good old days that are happening if you actually.

Dean: It’s never been better. Let’s set that straight right now. It’s never been better for direct marketers than right now and getting better every day.

Perry: And right now is the good old days of, so I’ve been through all the cycles. I went through the good old days of Google. The good old days are always when you can get 160 acres of land for free and there are always cowboys and Indians and there’s always chaos and there’s things crashing and disasters going. And then slowly becomes more civilized and gets more expensive.

Right now, Facebook advertising is fairly uncivilized. If you’re the kind of person that likes the bleeding edge and the Wild West, Facebook is the place to be. Google is not the place to be if that’s the person you are, but Google is a much more proven, much more reliable thing. But Facebook, there’s huge opportunities on Facebook for people that are willing to do some of that pioneer work

Joe: Okay, well you’ve been talking about it so let’s go a little deeper with how does Facebook fit into the existing pay per click and online advertising puzzle?

Perry: Okay, so Google is about scratching the itch you have right now, okay? It’s the page you’re on, it’s the thing you just searched for, it’s usually like, scratch, I have an itch, somebody please scratch it and that’s what Google is all about. That’s not really what Facebook is about.

Facebook is about your identity and the tribes that you belong to, okay? That is a very different thing, so Google is the Yellow Pages, Facebook is a coffee shop. Can you sell things in the Yellow Pages? Of course you can. Can you sell things in a coffee shop? Of course you can. What kinds of things do they sell in a coffee shop? Do they sell brake pads in a coffee shop? No. They sell paintings and drinks and food and experiences and singer / songwriter night and political stuff and one of my coffee shops nearby has a Tuesday women’s stitch and bitch.

You know, they do stuff like that, okay? It’s a very different environment. And so that means that there are some businesses that are very Facebook compatible, some that aren’t. There are some businesses that are Google compatible and some that aren’t. And so you really need to understand how your whole business fits into do I have a really super Facebook compatible business or a kind of Facebook compatible business or not Facebook compatible business?

Tom: This by the way is really significant and it’s one of the reasons why right now is the golden age for Facebook advertising. Is people who are really good at pay per click advertising on Google or other search networks, when they come to Facebook, basically 99 maybe 97 out of 100 times, they just fail miserably because the interface looks the same and they used to even call what you were targeting keywords, they now changed it.

But even though they’ve changed the name, people treat it as if it’s a keyword and they don’t make the connection that fundamentally, the advertising engine in Facebook is behaving differently than it is in search and that it’s reaching people in a profoundly different way. And if you treat it like your search advertising, maybe one out of 100 people will get lucky and it’ll work but for everyone else, they’ll try it and they’ll say, “Yeah, I tried it.”

They’ll say either one or two things, “I tried it and it worked for a week or two and then it stopped working and so I gave up,” or, “I tried it and it didn’t work at all.” And clearly, there’s billions of dollars’ worth of advertising being done on Facebook. Some people have figured it out, have figured out what does it mean to sell in the coffee shop. Have figured out what does it mean to reach people based upon their passions and their groups? Not based upon what they just happened to type in the search right now.

It’s nice by the way advertising to people based upon what they just typed in the search. It’s what they’re actually looking for. It’s not really how advertising works in Facebook and if you try to make it work that way, you’re almost guaranteed to fail and miss the real opportunity.

Dean: It’s funny that Perry used the red wagon example because wherever I’m describing it to people, that’s exactly what I use. I’ll say, imagine you had a retail store and you had the opportunity that as somebody drives in to the parking lot, a little tag comes up that says what they’re looking for and you could quickly, if it said red wagons you could quickly reorient the store so that the first thing they see when they walk in is red wagons and they’re having a sale on red wagons today. With Facebook, you’re right, it’s not the same. It’s not that you’re solving something that they’re actually overtly looking for.

Tom: When we were teaching the class on Facebook advertising and Perry said something I just have to quote because it really captures it. “When people go to Google, they’re actually going to Google to think potentially and make a decision because they’re searching on red wagon. When people go to Facebook, they’re not going to Facebook to think. They’re going to Facebook to avoid thinking.”

Dean: Yeah. That’s true.

Tom: They’re going to Facebook to avoid making a decision.

Dean: That is what has happened to the entire world. You just summed it up. That is what the Internet has done to many.

Joe: Yeah, that’s actually a great, that is a great line.

Perry: Yeah, and that means the sales funnel you build on Facebook has to be designed with the fact that they started by trying to avoid making decisions.

Dean: Right.

Joe: Right.

Perry: And if you don’t do that, you’ll never sell them anything. And it’s also why by the way, every successful Facebook advertising campaign that we have ever tracked that is profitable for an extended period of time has an auto responder, without exception.

Joe: Wait, say that again.

Perry: Every single successful positive ROI Facebook advertising campaign that we have ever tracked has an auto responder.

Dean: So really the idea is not about getting them to come to a page and buy something right now. It’s about getting them to come to a page, opt-in so that you can get them to buy something later? Is that what you’re saying?

Perry: That’s correct.

Joe: Well the last thing he said, Dean before you started talking was no exception. That’s what I heard Perry, but basically, so no exception, Perry. That’s always the case with successful?

Perry: Tom, do you know of any exceptions?

Tom: No, none of our, so you can write a good landing page inside of Facebook where you can immediately monetize your return on investment in terms of your ad costs. But everyone who’s actually doing really well, yeah, is building a relationship and they’re building a relationship by capturing their name, capturing their email address and continuing to follow up, because frankly, people aren’t in Facebook to buy. You can sell, you can close the deal at the end but the people who are doing well literally, I can’t think of an exception for all the people we know who are doing well, all bring people in and continue to follow them up with an auto responder, yeah.

Dean: Very interesting.

Joe: Okay, so let’s, so to be clear, what can you not do with Google that you can do on Facebook and what is Google really about versus what is Facebook really about? You already said it but I just want to make sure we totally cover that.

Perry: Well, so Joe, let’s say that you want carpet cleaners because you’re a carpet cleaning guy, right?

Joe: Yup.

Perry: Let’s say I want to advertise to people who own carpet cleaning companies. Their Facebook profile very well may say that they own a carpet cleaning company. It may not but good chance it does, but you cannot go to Google and say, “Okay, I want these ads to show to people who are carpet cleaners.”

If they typed in carpet cleaner marketing or carpet cleaner business ideas or something like that, you could get those people who went looking for it which would only be a tiny percentage. Or maybe you could cause ads to show on the display network on sites that carpet cleaners go to but Google doesn’t slice the world that way.

Well similarly, on Facebook you could not only target carpet cleaners, you could say, “I want to target fans of Van Morrison or The Rolling Stones or people who liked Coal Miner’s Daughter with Sissy Spacek or who are fans of Star Wars.

Dean: Who are all of those things, right?

Perry: Or all of those things and so it’s like well if you’re, if you get to advertise in a coffee shop and you advertise Rolling Stones to Rolling Stones fans and AC/DC to AC/DC fans. Or you know what books people like or what movies they’re into, it actually tells you a lot about them and it gives you these clues about how to sell to them. And that’s where you really start to be able to make Facebook work.

Joe: Yeah, because I mean you take Dean as an example. He’s like, his interests are so varied but he’s into spider monkeys, Justin Bieber and Led Zeppelin, and it’s like that’s the criteria that could be targeted on.

Dean: Not many marketers really get that about me. I mean if they would approach me that way.

Joe: Well no, so that makes total sense. Okay, so well then I guess what kinds of businesses can you target with Facebook? I mean are there any that it’s really hard to or? Talk about that.

Perry: Well so since Google is people are doing fact finding and stuff like that. People go to Facebook to emote. Businesses that are about tribes and experiences and events and passions and belief systems are very Facebook compatible, and businesses that are academic or factual or corporate are not very Facebook compatible.

So we felt this was so important, we actually made a website where people could get a score from 1 to 10 for free. They don’t have to opt in if they don’t want to or anything. You just go to isfbforme.com and you answer 10 questions. It takes you about 60 seconds. You don’t even have to think very hard about them, and it will give you a score from 0 to 10 of how Facebook compatible your business is.

So the company that I worked for before I left the Dilbert Cube, they sold this industrial software. They got like a three and a half.

Tom: That means don’t really try. Do not try Facebook if you’re scoring three and a half.

Perry: Yeah, like forget it. If you’re 5 or above, take it seriously. If you’re 7 or 8, definitely take it seriously. On the other hand, a yoga studio would probably be an 8. A restaurant be a 7 or an 8. A band or a movie probably be an 8 or a 9. Politics would be 8, 9, 10. Tom, why don’t you tell them about the election that we helped swing with the Facebook campaign?

Tom: It was one of our Planet Perry members was working in an election and they were helping Sam Quaker run for Mayor in what I believe is Rapid City, South Dakota. And it was really interesting because almost all the politicians right now are now on Facebook so everyone’s on Facebook and they’re running and ad.

Right, so if you were not really thinking about Facebook correctly, you might, in Rapid City, run an ad to all of Rapid City saying, “Hi, I’m running for Mayor.” Well Sam was trying to unseat the Mayor. He was trying to unseat the incumbent which is always hard. The incumbent was well liked and well-funded, and Sam fortunately for him hired somebody who trained under Perry Marshall and knew how to leverage Facebook. And instead of doing broad category ads, they did what we call hyper targeting.

And the way they described it and it’s so beautiful. It’s like they owned the conversation. The enemy was being hit by 30 arrows coming from 30 different directions and they never saw any of them coming. They didn’t see them coming because frankly, the people on the campaign probably weren’t targets of the ads.

So they had ads written in Native American languages to the Native American community. Maybe the first ad ever seen by the Native American community written in their language. In fact, they were surprised that Facebook accepted an ad they couldn’t read, but in speaking it was in Lakota and it said, “I hear you.” That was the thrust of the ad. The ad clicked through rate was over 50%.

Dean: Wow.

Tom: I don’t know if you know what a click through rate on Facebook is like. You’re often happy to get, you’re measuring in the tenths or hundreds of a percent. They had an ad targeted at firemen dealing specifically with fire issues. At labor dealing with labor issues. At parents dealing with issues, they hyper targeted. If a parent of a child of a certain age, you can target an ad to them talking about school issues. They targeted ads at people exactly 18 years old saying, “You just turned 18 this year. This is the first year you can vote. Let me tell you.”

Perry: They targeted churches that had 200 members in their congregation.

Dean: Wow.

Tom: And each time when somebody clicked, they went to a custom landing page with a custom message dealing with their interest, their tribe, their group and their passion. And the incumbent didn’t even really know this was going on because frankly you can’t see any of it. It’s unlike any other type of advertising. If you’ve targeted 500 people and your campaign staff isn’t in that group, they don’t even see that that ad went out. They don’t even see the landing page. They don’t see that you’re defining the conversation the way they couldn’t think of.

Dean: That’s an interesting distinction too because all your competitors are, if you’re doing something like that in AdWords, anybody can go and search on their keywords and see everybody who’s trying to market to those people. It’s really brilliant what you’re describing.

Tom: Yeah. And by the way this applies to lots of other businesses. It’s kind of easier to see in politics because we sort of understand the infinity in the groups but Perry is in marketing, right? Perry is in a business that helps small business deals with marketing and advertising. We advertise on Facebook to groups that you would never imagine we would advertise to and frankly, if you’re a competitor of Perry’s and you’re trying to figure out what he’s doing, you might have a hard time reverse engineering it because you simply can’t see that he’s targeting people who are interested in knitting and you might say, “Why on earth would you target people who are interested in knitting?”

Well there’s one reason, because you’ve somehow determined that people who are interested in knitting click on your ads and convert at a ratio that gives you a positive return.

Perry: Yeah, and we figured that out. We reverse engineered from what our fans are into. Knitting was actually, there was this disproportion of number of people who do knitting in our audience. Now who would ever guess that? Well you would only, you’d never figure that out in a million years any other way but Facebook, we created some software and we started analyzing it and Facebook made it easy.

Joe: I mean this is great. It’s interesting too, I went to hot yoga on not a Bikram but a different sort of hot yoga on Sunday morning. And I have a friend named Marco down here in Arizona that owns a yoga studio. And we went got together afterwards and just sat and went to a coffee shop. And I was sitting there, he came to our I Love Marketing event, he uses a lot of my marketing strategies, he’s got a consumer awareness guide for yoga and it’s hot yoga Pura vida; the Costa Rica term the best I can remember from. But anyway puravida.com is his site and he’s not doing any Facebook and I was like going over all the different, I mean he’s got a lot of really cool elements. Free reports and all kinds of things but he’s never actually put it into a, he’s not done any advertising on Facebook and I said, honestly, I think you would absolutely kill it if you started advertising on Facebook.

And so like you’ve mentioned certain types of businesses that just do really well. I mean are there anything deeper you’d like to talk about there that that kind of businesses just hit it out of the park on Facebook?

Tom: Well there are some that are just so easy that if you’re in this industry, you should be on Facebook. Anything that’s entertainment related, so if you’re promoting a movie, you’re promoting music, you’re promoting a band, you’re promoting, talk about hitting it out of the park, you’re a local venue for bands or any sort of entertainment where people self-identify as liking that type of entertainment.

If you’re a theater or a local band venue and you’re not on Facebook, you’re the 1%. You would have success on Facebook not knowing what you’re doing at all.

Perry: Right. And independent films and maybe to a lesser extent fiction and authors. And I don’t mean like people that write The Wall Street Journal, I mean entertainment. Anything that speaks to your identity. I’m a member of daughters of the American revolution or I’m a Lutheran or I’m a Libertarian. I’m a blank, okay? Where people describe it that way, then that’s a good match for Facebook.

Also, events and event driven things. If you don’t have an event driven business, you can make it more event driven and it becomes more Facebook compatible.

Tom: And Facebook is good for, I like to describe it this way, for any local business that has a doorknob. If you’re a local business and people turn the doorknob to enter your business, there is probably a very real Facebook play for you and this is the thing. It may be the thing that caught me by surprise for this type of business. There’s a real play for you that’s literally revolutionary on Facebook and the cost is probably a $1.00 a day.

Dean: Yeah, this is big.

Joe: Well I don’t know if our listeners have that kind of money.

Perry: But yeah, tell them. Tom, tell them what you’re trying to describe.

Tom: So, yeah, we’ll go into it, so how this actually works because when I was doing a lot of the research for the book, I had launched my software company. It didn’t have a doorknob, right? It was a software company, I scored 8.6 on his Facebook. For me, I was selling home schooling software. So software for people who are homeschooling their kids.

I could easily target them and find them and then using Facebook research tips, I could find a lot more, but I didn’t have a doorknob. As I’m studying the Facebook engine and really getting into the depths of doing all sorts of experiments, I suddenly realize that the biggest opportunity in Facebook to just sort of revolutionize local business is I have a doorknob. If somebody comes into my place of business.

Now I can be anything. I could be a coffee shop, I could be a dentist, I could sell knitting supplies. Whatever it is, when the person is there physically in my place, have a little computer setup and ask them to like your business. Are you a restaurant, are you a store, are you a shop? Whatever you are, ask them to like them and give them something while they’re, give them free cupcakes. Bring in cookies and cupcakes.

Dean: You want a cookie? Yes. You want a cookie? Press this button. Yeah.

Tom: Press this button. Like me on Facebook. Now, over the course of a year, over the course of two years, we have a local deli in town so it’s just sort of, they’re world famous for great local food which is sort of ironic. They’re called Zingerman’s Delicatessen. They’ve managed to collect up just by people coming in the door and people who know them liking them 35,000 people locally who like their deli.

Well now, I can do something really powerful on Facebook. It’s just sort of a revolutionary new type of advertising. I can advertise just to those people who liked my business. I can get a reminder in front of everybody who’s come in my store. Who’s liked my business personally.

By the way, it still applies to online businesses. I can get a reminder of them of my specials. Of something that I’m doing this week and I’m paying right now per thousand impressions 15 cents.

Dean: Yeah, wow.

Tom: So literally, if I’m a little shop and I’ve gotten 2,000 people to like me, I’m spending maybe 30 to 50, 60 cents a day getting my brand in front of the local people who already know me and like me and reminding them of a special. And reminding them I have a special offer. And that’s one of the most powerful new forms of advertising that’s sort of emerging in Facebook.

It’s a game changer really for any business. I mean me and Perry we have a running daily budget of $2.00 a day where we run ads to everybody who’s already liked Perry. They’re not going to be on Facebook.

Dean: We have a daily budget, of $2.00 a day.

Tom: Right? You still want email, you still want auto responders. You’re still doing all of that but understand the difference between no matter how good your auto responder is, no matter how good your email is on any given day it might be an irritant to somebody. That’s why they unsubscribe.

But here’s this gentle little ad, the local pizza store. You know people have bought your pizza, you gave them some free slice of pizza to like your page one day or whatever you did. Maybe they just liked it out of their own personal passion. And there’s just a reminder every day from the 2000 people most likely to buy your pizza today that you’re in business and you’re offering, just to remind them of your name and you spend $1.00 to $2.00 to do it.

Perry: I want to jump on this because the theme is perverse because you go, well yeah I can post the status update for free. Well okay, there are two problems with that. First of all, a lot of people really don’t want to hear that you have pepperoni pizzas two for $10.00 right now in the middle of all the other escapism that they’re doing on Facebook right now.

They might think it’s a little annoying in your newsfeed and if they don’t always interact with you, your stuff will disappear from their newsfeed because Facebook does not show you everything all your friends are doing. It only shows you what the friends you interact with a lot are doing.

And so normally, status messages only get seen by like a fourth of the people anyway but if you advertise there’s zero irritation factors. Nobody’s going to get irritated that you’re advertising pepperoni pizzas on the corner of Facebook and it’s there when they’re looking at the grandma pictures. It’s there as often as you want it to be there and it’s really cheap. Like really cheap.

Joe: I love it. I love it. This is great. So the obvious question how does someone know if Facebook is for them? I mean is the best way of course to go to you guys’ website and plug that in?

Perry: Just go to isfbforme.com and plug in your answers. You’ll get an answer in 60 seconds, you’ll know and it’ll give you a score. And if you got more than a 5 then you should pay attention to Facebook and if you got a 7 or better, you should pay a lot of attention to Facebook. If you got like a 9 or a 10 then Facebook might be your number one marketing medium.

Joe: You see how sneaky they are Dean about this stealing all of our I Love Marketing listeners and just driving them over to their site like that?

Dean: I see what they’re up to.

Joe: You see these clever marketers? The way that they actually entice people

Dean: Offering valuable information. I mean it’s almost criminal really.

Tom: By the way surveys work great on Facebook, so advertising on Facebook to a question or through something like this, people are very naturally inclined to fill out a quick survey or answer some questions coming from Facebook because they’re used to interacting. They like to interact.

Joe: Well okay, so since you guys are direct response guys which is what we are and which is what we always constantly talk about at I Love Marketing because direct response is the most superior best intelligent smart way to market, promote and advertise your products or services online, offline. How is copywriting different on Google versus Facebook in the way that you write, the way that you promote, the way that you convey words, images, etcetera?

Perry: Okay, this is a very big deal so Google is about the conversation going on inside your customer’s head. You know, the old Robert Collier saying. Facebook is about the conversation going on in your customer’s heart, okay? And I’m dead serious about that. I’m not being cheeky or anything. Head and heart are like two different zones.

Joe: What the hell does cheeky mean? Richard Branson’s always saying cheeky. I mean when I’m with him.

Perry: It’s a British thing.

Dean: It’s like he says. It’s a British thing.

Joe: Yeah, I know it is but I sort of have an idea of what it is but I wanted just because you said it, Perry, what does that really mean? Cheeky?

Perry: It means there’s a hole in the side of your jeans and they see your butt cheek.

Dean: Now that’s cheeky.

Joe: I know what I’m going to get Dean for Christmas next year. So okay, so obviously, I hope that’s not what it means.

Tom: He’s being cheeky with that answer.

Joe: No, I got it. I got it totally.

Joe: So you’re not being cute here when you say that Google is for your head, Facebook is really about your heart. You’re being deadly serious right now?

Perry: Yes. Yes. And so the first thing I ever bought from Facebook was an album. I saw an ad, it said, “If you like Pink Floyd, Porcupine Tree or Nine Inch Nails, you’ll like this.” And I got this heart reaction because I love Pink Floyd and Porcupine Tree, and I go click and this guy’s making, he’s an independent artist, he’s making an album and he’s telling the story on his Facebook page and through his auto responder as he gets each track done and he’s giving you samples and I bought his first album. It was like a year, two years ago and I bought his second album last month.

Now you’d have a hard time ever getting that to work on Google at all but on Facebook if my profile says that I like Porcupine Tree, somebody can advertise to me very easily and this guy said, well if he likes those guys, they’ll also like this and he was right.

Tom: But by the way, 70,000 people in the United States liked Porcupine Tree on Facebook.

Dean: I was going to ask why, how small a group makes sense to target?

Perry: What do you think Tom?

Tom: I’ve targeted, I mean they’ve stopped letting you target down around a couple of hundred because they’re afraid you might be advertising to one person. I love to get about 300,000 people in my target before I run an ad because I don’t have a lot of time to do lots of little targets. But remember our politician running for Mayor was targeting down into the hundreds.

By the way, I didn’t even hit the punch line of that story. The Mayor was $156 million budget that they’re managing. It’s not a small thing. They spent on their Facebook ads less than $3,000.00 dollars. They won by a few hundred votes. How much do you want to bet that was the best money they ever spent on advertising. So by the way, I’m just sort of demonstrating the live real-time data you also get back from Facebook. If I target Pink Floyd, I got 4.6 million, so that ad that Perry saw probably because of the popularity of Pink Floyd and if they targeted them with hitting a large audience where if you like Pink Floyd, you’re going to love this album.

Perry: I’m going to guess he got the best ROI in the Porcupine Tree fans though because it’s a smaller group and it’s more pronounced. It stands out more and that’s very common.

Tom: Yeah, a higher click through and conversion rate with that smaller group.

Perry: Yup. So, but it was something that I have an emotional response to and it’s a form of escape. So if your business sells a form of escape, Facebook is really important. If you’re business sells brake pads, you’re not selling escape and Facebook probably isn’t going to be that big of a deal for you.

Tom: So in the copywriting, by the way because I just rewrote a landing page that Perry had on his website that was a little bit more tough because Perry writes, when he teaches on copywrite, he writes in all sorts of tones. But when I move the landing page to Facebook, I originally left the tough tone in and then I softened it to be a little because of who I was targeting; it was people who are multilevel marketers.

So I made it a much more friendly ad for those people I was targeting and I doubled my conversion rate on Facebook by trying to match a little bit more the psyche of somebody who’s in multilevel marketing, who happens to be on Facebook right now and trying to reach a tone that was a little bit more friendly or cheering. Because when you’re running, driving someone to a landing page from Google, you might have put together a combination of keywords where you could literally drive people to a certain type of tone and know you’re going to have success and you’re not going to get that sort of thing on Facebook.

So you’re almost, although our ads often appealed on both the positive and negative tone and we go all over the place with tone for ads. On the landing page, you’re better to try to resonate with somebody’s heart on Facebook or their true anger. Right, so you could write a Rush Limbaugh style rant on Facebook and have it work well if you were targeting people who you identified as being in the Tea Party.

Joe: Right, right. No, no, this is actually good and you know what too for timing purposes. I want to actually recommend that people pick up your books which we’ll ask you guys at the end like which of your books do you recommend they read first if people want to go much deeper on all of these topics because I know you cover a lot of the psychology and the writing.

Plus, we’re always interviewing really brilliant copywriters and marketers including our good friend John Carlton. If people have not listened to the interview with Carlton on I Love Marketing about copywriting and that sort of stuff then listen to him because we’ve got some great ones on here with Dan Kennedy and peeps like that. Now, what is the number one thing that nobody really gets about Facebook yet that you guys can deliver the answer to?

Perry: It’s something that we call right angle targeting. So let me tell you a story. Joe, maybe you know this story. There’s this guy named Bob who was in planet Dan for a while and he had a Filipino mail-order bride service and that was aimed at Christian men.

Joe: I remember that guy.

Perry: And so he comes to Dan and Dan goes, so do your customers have any unusual things in common or certain professions or certain hobbies or anything? And he’s like, well, I don’t know. Let me go look. So he digs through his files and he comes back and he goes, dang, I’m glad you asked me that because 40% of our customers are truck drivers.

Dean: Really?

Perry: And like, hey, we never realized this.” While they had been advertising in places like USA Today. So now what do they do? Well it’s kind of obvious. You put a bunch of flyers between the cigarette machine and the condom machine by the men’s bathroom at the truck stop, right? And all of a sudden, he can target those kinds of people really precisely and much cheaper than USA Today and it worked, okay. Well so here’s the thing everybody’s customers, whoever you are, your customers have some things in common that you never expected or looked for.

Dean: Yeah, really.

Perry: It’s always true and it’s sort of like dogs that are born with the body of a pit bull also for some reason seem to have the personality of a pit bull. It’s like somehow those two things are linked together. You can’t separate them. It’s the same thing with people. I did a seminar a couple of years ago in Maui, Hawaii, it was this high end seminar and I said, “I want you to raise your hand if you’re brown belt or above in martial arts.” And eight out of 100 people in the audience raises their hand.

Now I could guarantee you there’s no way, if you walked down the street, there’s no way 8% of the population has brown belts in martial arts or black belts. There’s no way but in my audience, it’s 8%. Why? My audience is super competitive and they’re a little bit Zen like, and they’re very disciplined. And so martial arts people are much more likely to like Planet Perry than not.

Well I can use that information if I know it. There are all kinds of ways; I could advertise in martial arts magazines, I could advertise to martial arts guys on Facebook. Tom and I were advertising to people about knitting. There’s all these interesting ways that you can get people and I can talk to my customers in tough alpha male kind of language because they relate to it, okay?

If you find out through, if it’s through your Facebook analytics data that all your customers like fight movies then you’d talk to them in fight language. If you find out all your customers favorite movies are chick flicks, you talk to them in chick language, okay. And this is really important and up until now, what I’m describing was like in advanced PhD level sort of marketing thing. It is not anymore. It is something that even beginner marketer needs to understand because this is a new wave in what’s important for marketers and copywriters to know because your customers are like pit bulls. Or breeding dogs, it’s like there are certain traits that are always linked together and you have to recognize that because you sell to the whole person, not just the little bitty pieces of the person.

And this is so powerful and we’re finding these new ways to get customers and it’s really surprising and unexpected so we call that right angle targeting. Why? Because truck drivers doesn’t have anything obviously anything to do with mail-order brides, but if you stop and think of it, well they’re on the road all day. They probably don’t have really great social skills, truck isn’t exactly conducive to good staying at home and having good relationships so these guys have kind of chronic relationship problems. Of course it makes sense that they would be interested in this, but it’s only obvious in hindsight, and Facebook is a place where you can figure that out easy instead of hard.

Joe: Right. Yeah, that’s huge. I mean that’s such a huge, huge thing to get and understand. So how do you use Google and Facebook together in synergy?

Perry: Okay, so the way you use them together is you use right angle targeting to find out, let’s say you’re buying Google traffic and you’re getting people and they’re coming and opting in. You can add Facebook handshake buttons to your opt in and have them opt in that way instead. You can feed the data into a fanalytics database and you can find out, oh, I’ve got this disproportionate number of Rush Limbaugh fans in my audience even though what I sell doesn’t have anything to do with politics or whatever it might be.

And now what you do is you take that information and you add it a little bit to your opt-in pages and you message and it makes your opt-in rates go up and it makes your cost per acquisition go down. So like we did this with an astronomy website. We figured out that people who were at this astronomy website, liked the books Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

We added one line of text to the landing page and the opt-in rate went up 10% even though we didn’t change anything about where our ads were showing or who we were showing them to. And you would have never figured this out any other way.

And so now I can write a blog post about George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four and how much of its come true and a whole bunch of people in my audience they’ll be sitting there nodding their head going, “Yes, yes. Boy, this guy speaks my language,” and you can develop this almost psychic connection with people that you never even met.

And so you can feed this back into the Google ads and then you also have all these ideas of where to get traffic from Facebook and so it’s kind of this loop that you do.

Joe: Wow. So what are some simple Facebook things that every business owner should do? So as we kind of wrap up our really awesome I Love Marketing episode on this topic, what are some things that everyone that’s listening would be well served to do?

Perry: I just want to underscore what Tom said that, that if you’re acquiring Facebook fans, you need to advertise to them and spend your $1.00 or $2.00 a day getting your stuff out there. If you’re having an event, that’s a really nice way to nudge people this event’s coming up. This event’s coming up. This even’s coming up and it could be a big event or it can just be something small like a tele-seminar but you will get more people and you get this extra bit of traction and it’s not very hard to set up.

Joe: Dean, is there any other questions that you have for these guys because I’m going to recommend that people actually pick up their books and start reading about this because there’s, we just opened up a new world for so many of our I Love Marketing listeners.

Dean: That’s what I was just going to say is I think it would probably be a good idea to give people and idea of what to do first. Like what’s the first step? How to really get started?

Tom: We’ve changed, at least I’ve changed even the last few months my definition of a first step because I’m a software guy so I’ve not built software to support this idea that I’m working with with Perry Marshall. And if you have a mailing list, if you have an existing mailing list and you’ve acquired 5, 10, 20,000 people or more on it, right now, we’ve set up through our software product we call Fanalytics. You could mail to that list right now, today a message.

Something that was compelling or interesting to them where you’re going to get them to click, and by this time tomorrow I can tell you that audience’s favorite musicians, what local businesses they like, what public figures they follow, what companies they’re interested in, what websites they visit, what movies they like, what books they read, what TV shows they watch. What are their fundamental interests?

I can tell you this tomorrow. I can tell you right now that because Perry mentioned Rush Limbaugh. That’s a very strong appeal to 5.2% of his audience. You can know this type of information this fast, and so before you go guessing and even trying to figure out how to target. If you’ve got an existing mailing list, and you want to just go after them and figure out what your existing customers already know, I would do that first.

Go out, leverage tools like we built called Fanalytics and within 24 hours, have a much deeper insight that, I mean I don’t know what you would have to pay for this level of insight in the past. You’d be hiring teams of market researchers and they’d be spending months trying to figure it out, and right now you can know it in 24 hours by leveraging Facebook.

Joe: That’s fantastic.

Perry: Yeah, see, I should’ve started Facebook a long time ago. What the hell was I thinking?

Dean: When you had the idea. I mean you had the idea.

Joe: Yeah, one more missed opportunity. I met Mark Zuckerberg at All Things Digital a few years ago and yeah, look at its become.

Perry: And they’re expected to reach $1 billion users in the next quarter.

Dean: Is that right? I was wondering when they’re going to get there.

Perry: Their users are on, on average 24 minutes a day and I like to point out we’re getting up to, I forget how many ad impressions, opportunities. It’s like 18 trillion. It’s like 18 times the number of stars in our galaxy. That’s how many ads they’re going to show this year alone.

So that’s why impressions are really very reasonable on Facebook. If you know how to write well and how to target well, you can really leverage the fact that Facebook has created this whole new industry for a whole new marketplace for ad impressions and they’re very, very reasonable.

Joe: Well, you know, what’s pretty astounding about all of this is that it is still the marketers that keep everything afloat because if it wasn’t for advertising and all the capitalism, none of these free services like Google and Facebook and all this other stuff would even exist because that’s what fuels it all.

And that’s why marketers are awesome and my favorite people on the entire planet of course. I’m a big proponent for of course ethical marketers that deliver immense value and move messages in the world because that’s what makes it happen. So guys, what are the best websites for you? Best books you recommend that our I Love Marketing listeners that are totally engaged in this read first so that it gives them the biggest advantage of success with what we’ve talked about.

And you know that I can talk to you guys for a week on all kinds of different topics and we may do a future interview which would be good depending on the feedback from all of our listeners. But we’re do you recommend if they want more from you guys, where do they go?

Perry: There’s the free evaluation, takes 60 seconds isfbforme.com just all spelled out and we have a book. It’s on Amazon and in the books stores. It’s called The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising by Perry Marshall and Tom Meloche and for less than $25.00 you get a really thorough explanation of how to use all of this and do it right and save your money from doing it wrong. Because you can blow a lot of money doing it wrong.

Joe: Yeah, totally. Great stuff. Dean, anything else you’d like to ask?

Dean: I’m excited to see what our listeners are going to do with this. I think we could get a really great comment stream going under this episode and start talking about some of the things that people are experimenting with. So I really appreciate you guys coming and sharing all this with us.

Perry: Thank you for having us. Joes like super famous in the marketing world and everybody knows who he is and Joe you don’t risk your reputation easily, so I’m really honored to be on your show and appreciate you fanning the flames of people who love marketing because you’re right. It’s the marketers that keep the boats afloat so Viva La Marketers.

Joe: Yes, yes. And thank you Perry. I mean it’s so funny, we’ve talked about doing an interview for the longest time because we’ve known each other for a long time and we finally did it so I’m very happy now. I really appreciate you guys sharing your knowledge and your insight. This was really, really good stuff and I’d like all of our listeners to comment on what you thought of this and use what Perry and Tom talked about today and go out there and do good stuff in the world. So thank you guys and Dean Jackson, the longer we do these, the more I cease to like you, I’m totally kidding, I love Dean he’s a gem of a human being and he never says anything bad about other people and so I have to take that role for him.

Dean: There we go, perfect, and we’ll leave it at that. Thanks guys.

Joe: All right, thanks everyone.

Perry: Thank you.

Joe: Have a great day.

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