In this episode, we’ll talk with Facebook Ad Expert Jon Loomer about Facebook Ads and TikTok Ads
Ken: Hey everybody, this is Ken Tucker and welcome to this episode of The Marketing Guides for Small Businesses Podcast. Today I’m joined by Ian and Paul. Jen could not make it today, but she says hello to everybody and we have a special guest that we’re all really excited to talk to. And it’s somebody that Ian and I have trained.
And honestly, I think we were blown away by the stuff that, you know, and that you can talk about. And so we’re really honored Jon to have Jon Loomer on our show today, who I think is one of the foremost Facebook ad gurus on the planet. Welcome, John.
Jon: Thanks so much, Ken. No, I appreciate you guys having me today.
Ken: Yeah. Yeah. We’re excited to talk to you, especially with some of the new stuff that you’re getting into. So John, tell me a little bit about your background, how you got started doing this, and Yeah, just whatever you wanna share.
Jon: I think it’s a bit of a unique story, right? But also in a way, probably not all that unique, in terms of like how some people get into business. Cause I think I’m like a lot of people. Who wasn’t trained in what I’m doing? And but basically what happened was I had experience in Facebook, first of all, and that, that goes way back. That’s 15 years ago now. It’s crazy. I worked for the National Basketball Association and this was my first exposure to the platform.
As the league, we partnered with Facebook. , there were 50 million users on the platform. It just was just moving on beyond high school kids and college kids to us old folks. And I fell in love with the platform at the time, but we were using it for business reasons. So we partnered with Facebook to create an app before you could create your own.
There, there weren’t Facebook pages yet. I was the admin of the official MBA Facebook group before there were pages. Okay. And that’s just how early we’re talking. I got be between that and some other stuff I did after that. I was getting more and more comfortable, with what was becoming social media.
, left the N B A and would end up getting laid off twice in two and a half years. And at that point I was both spoiled in terms of some of the jobs I had, but also not wanting to move my family again. We had three at the time, young kids. And I didn’t know how to start a business at a philosophy. and I thought you were a fellow
Ken: philosophy man right?
Jon: Me too. . Awesome. And so pre-prepared for everything and nothing at the same time, basically. Exactly. But basically what I did, because of some of the things I, I learned pretty much starting with the N B A, although I’d say it even went beyond before that with fantasy basketball and fantasy sports in general, which was a world I was in at the.
I knew some things about websites, so I started john luer.com. Again, really just thinking I was going to use it as this is the, let me talk about the things I know how to do and so I can get a job and I just longer and longer, I didn’t have a job. I just kept writing cuz that’s all.
That’s all I had time to do. And I had some hits where all of a sudden I was driving a ton of traffic and I started writing more and more about Facebook marketing and Facebook advertising, and I started using that to build this, whatever this was, it wasn’t a business yet. And it got to a point where I was like, you know what?
I’m, I guess maybe I’m gonna create a product. And I started, selling training for Facebook advertising. In 2012 and been doing it ever since. It’s been a pretty unique adventure. It did pretty, it exploded pretty quickly from there. But, any kind of I think especially in the, in social media and just this, the way technical, the technology is these days and things keep on evolving.
You have to keep evolving too. And that’s one area. I should have done more of. Cause I, I tried to keep my business, keep doing things the way I always was, and now I’ve gotta start adjusting and making changes. Yeah.
Ken: Yeah. I think that’s just the nature of being in the world of digital [00:04:00] marketing these days, regardless of what you’re working on, things change.
John, tell me a little bit about What you’ve seen happening, over the Facebook ad landscape over the last year or a couple of years. There have been some big changes with Apple and, their privacy changes and how that’s impacted advertising, but I’m sure there are a lot of other things that you’re seeing, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.
Jon: Really it’s, yeah, it’s been huge. When the iOS, when Apple came out with their changes the way I describe it is it, feta, Facebook slash meadow. I don’t know what to call ’em. So, Yeah. Flatfooted cuz th that’s one of the few times they’ve been, they have not been in control o of the situation.
And so they were clearly not very well prepared for it. And so basically what happened was anyone opening the Facebook app, Instagram app, any of those apps are really, most apps from an I iOS device, you’d have. Decide whether or not you wanted to allow tracking that could ultimately be used for things like advertising.
And so that would hurt Facebook in their ultimately for attribution. So determining whether or not, someone clicking or senior ad led to a conversion but also building audiences for retargeting and all sorts of things. Facebook had to make a bunch of changes. I think in some ways they may have overreacted and taken an ultra-conservative route in the things that they took away.
But ultimately , it hurt advertisers. The number of reported conversions went down for advertisers pretty drastically. I think it very likely impacted Facebook’s ability to optimize to, to get you good results. And broadly it’s I mean we’ve seen it meta’s reporting drop, drops in advertising, drop, drops of revenue.
And this is, this was a big issue now within the last month or so. What’s been very curious and, maybe ask about the timing cuz we’re hitting the the holidays is suddenly they’re bringing some of this stuff back that they got rid of. So a big one that advertisers need to know about is, 28 day click attribution.
So before all the iOS changes the way a conversion was defined and the way an ad was given credit for a conversion was if somebody clicked on your ad and then ended up converting within 28 days that says a really wide window or saw your ad, didn’t click on it, but still converted within a day. All that stuff was possible cuz all the tracking that was going on they. Moved it to seven day click and eventually brought back the one day view after all the iOS stuff. So I, so first of all, I can contend that was the biggest impact to advertisers rather than all the opt-out stuff. Okay. Cause even with the opt-outs, you still would get enough data that would help you as an advertiser.
So anyway, that 28 day click attribution is back. I don’t know if all advertisers have it back yet, but it’s, Reported by default. So it’s still reported seven day click, one day be by default, but you can basically add a column to your reporting to show how many conversions happened within 28 day click.
That’s big because all of a sudden it can completely change your impressions of did this campaign work or not, right? Because there are all these conversions that happened. Did it have always have been happening, but we just haven’t known about for the last year and a half. And now we can see them again. And then previously we might have turned the campaign off, lowered budget, whatever, because we’re like, oh, that’s not working. And now you may see that there are 10% more conversions, 20 per whatever it is. Yeah. Honestly, any anyone with With a product that costs more or is, just a higher commitment level that’s gonna take longer to make a decision.
Those are the advertisers, the brands, they’re gonna see more of an impact from this. Yeah. And so that’s a big one. But they brought that back. They brought a tool’s closely related, one that allows you to compare the attribution windows so you can see how many conversions happen within one day within the one day click, within the seven day click, and now within the 28 day click. And previously after iOS happened, they got rid of that. So it was all thrown within one bucket, a bucket, which was really difficult because you could have stuff like if you’re, if you did remarketing, where you’re targeting people who are getting your email in the same day and they act on the email, didn’t act on your ad and maybe barely saw it, your ad would get.
And as long as you can compare windows and get some context of okay, 30% of these conversions were viewed through, yeah, then it’s okay. But once you have no context to that, you never really know if your numbers are inflated or whatnot. So that one’s back and there’s another one that’s a breakdown to see, okay, you could break down by placement, for example, and see how many conversions happened within each place.
That’s another item. It’s not just placement, but there are multiple breakdowns that came back. So a lot of changes have just happened within the last, really about a month. That made this interesting because up until now everything, since iOS seemed to be taken away, , and making things harder.
Ken: Do you, have you seen any trends in terms of ad span budgets then from Advertising?
Jon: So overall it’s been down. Now we’re reaching that point. The holidays were typically, so this is be an interesting time. Yeah. Typically ad budgets go up. But there, so there are a couple of things we’re seeing right now.
And the another sign of that is the CPM costs. So CPM is the cost per a thousand impressions. Usually the mo more advertisers you have in the system, the more money you have in the system, the more competition CPM costs go up. Cuz it’s an auction. And CPM costs have been down this year compared to last year, which again, is at least partially connected to overall AV advertiser spend and that being down It is also a resource that I use called Within, within Marketing Pulse.
It’s within.co. It’s, this is a free website. They have $500 million in clients in ad spend, and so they provide some data in what they’re doing. so you can get a sense of, how their ad spend compares for Facebook, Instagram and Google and their CPMs. And compared to last year it seems that overall the ad spend, at least for the last month, is pretty much on.
Par with last year, but once again, CPMs are down. But again the holidays are the weird part that you just, you don’t know what’s gonna happen Back in the day, really before the iOS stuff and before Covid and everything we would see CPMs triple and sometimes even quadruple during this time.
Yeah, I guess we’ll see. Yeah. Alright. So John, Hey, this is Paul. Hey, what are some of the biggest mistakes that businesses make when they do run Facebook ads? think they’re a couple. First it’s just looking at the wrong metrics or obsessing over the wrong metrics. So whether it’s a vanity metric or just, or metrics that we’re used to being important in other forms of advertising.
So whether it’s a click through rate or a cost per click, and sometimes even the CPMs like tho those things all matter. But they’re really a secondary metric. Cuz usually you have one ultimate goal whether it’s a conversion or something else. And that’s really what we should be tracking is like how many of that one thing ended up happening and what’s the overall spend and what’s the cost to get that action. So I think that’s part of. I think the beyond that just a misunderstanding of how optimization works can really, can lead to wasting a lot of money. So for example, if you wanna drive traffic to your website, you just gotta be ultra-careful with this. Because the way optimization works is you tell Facebook, Hey, here’s $50 a day.
Send me as much traffic as you can, and Facebook will try to get you as much traffic for the lowest cost possible. And to do that, there are weaknesses in the system to find you cheap clicks. And some of that’s gonna come from, basically from placements, right? So audience network is a cul the main culprit for this in your placements.
That is basically what an audience network is people mon or developers monetize their apps with a Facebook placement so that they can make money off their app that’s otherwise free. But oftentimes what happens is people will click on these ads by. . Or it could be just a way they place their ads, whatnot. But a click fraud happens there as people are trying to make money on their apps. Yeah. And so you get a ton of traffic and then you if you don’t dig further into your metrics you’ll think, oh, I’m doing great. I’m getting, 3 cents per click or something. I’m driving a ton of cla. and then you look at it and you’re like, these people, no one’s spending more than a couple seconds on the site.
No one’s converting, no one’s doing anything. No one’s coming back. So it’s just a matter of, first of all, understanding how optimization works in the first place. Some of the pitfalls of it, being able to. Double check some of these metrics and whether it’s Google Analytics or something else, seeing on the back end what’s happening as well, because you can get swept away by vanity metrics and kind of these surface level things that you put too much importance on.
Ian: Hey, John, Ian here. I got a question for you. Since your roots are in Facebook, and we’ve started off this conversation there what should a small business do to get the most out of Facebook ads? With all that’s been going on in the world of Facebook these days what could a small business do to get the most out of it?
Jon: It, first of all, depends on the small business, right? So if you’re a local business, I think a lot of the stuff that you could do is just simple location targeting. And so awareness especially the, you also have to decide okay, what kind of business is this? Is this something where people?
Might be like a restaurant, right? Where Oh yeah, that’s the kind of food I like. I’m gonna go into a restaurant and based on this deal or whatnot. Or is it a service where you’re only going to call me if you need me? . So making sure you have those things understood because getting a conversion ads for a local business, for a plumber, for example, will be very difficult because the vast majority of people you’re gonna reach don’t need you right now so you have to understand when you’re running any kind of ads as a service industry like that, is that your main goal is really more about awareness? So that when somebody needs you, they think of you. And then you have a lot of other market. Goals beyond that. You need to take care of seo, you need to do all these other stuff so they can, they find you.
But beyond that yeah if you’re a small business, understand with your budget how far it goes and how that algorithm works. If you’ve got, let’s say, a fifth, it starts with what is your goal, right? And so in determining a budget and what you’re gonna do with it. It’s basically Facebook needs 25 to 50 of these actions per week to properly optimize right per adset per week to properly optimize. Okay? Doesn’t mean you can’t good, good results if you don’t get it, but ti it’s basically the way the system works that they need that information to learn to properly show it to the right people.
So if you’re gonna optimize for things like sales, Need to have that in mind. Okay, how much is it gonna cost to get each sale? And then multiply that by 50, is that within your budget? And if it’s not, which in a lot of cases it’s not for a small business, we gotta think about, okay, what are some other things we can do to make an impact?
And so that could be. And first of all, like the, any kind of re retarget retargeting. So remarketing. So whether it’s hitting your email list or people have hit your website if you’ve got enough people to target who have maybe added to cart, didn’t convert, things like that, let’s hit those people. Those kind of low hanging fruit is what I refer it. . But otherwise, once again, it’s more of a, an awareness play, a brand building play, making sure you’re top of mind. But knowing then it’s, it’s much harder to measure your success. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah.
Ken: . So having said all of that do you see different forms of Facebook ads that are performing? right now for a lot of businesses, there are variety. There are video ads, there are carousel, there are lead a, lead forms and lead ads. What are your thoughts about that?
And and again, is that gonna be different from one type of business to the next?
Jon: Yeah, look I wouldn’t say there’s a format necessarily, it’s most effective. It’s just one of the many things. It helps determine whether or not something works, right? So a video ad, I don’t wanna keep messing with plumbers here, but a video ad for a plumber isn’t gonna do, have the same impact as a video ad for a sports franchise or something.
But I think, it’s less about the format. And more about, what the system was set up for most to work. And I do have some gripes of Facebook about this, but it’s really for E-com. And this is really where it’s been getting better and better is if you’ve got a category, excuse me, a catalog of products that fall within a certain category.
So let’s say you sell shoes. And Facebook has this whole catalog. Not only can they target ads, run ads based on people who have been to your website and whatnot, and based on the types of shoes they’re looking at, but there are other shoe retail companies out there as well, and they have their catalogs too.
And so they could say they looked at this very similarly. Different brand and they can use that information to promote your shoes, which is one of those really super smart things about if you’ve ever shot for shoes on the internet. I bring up this example cause I’ve experienced it personally.
It’s almost creepy. It’s like I was looking for a certain type. business casual ish, shoe, and next thing I know I’m getting all kinds of like different brands in my feed. It’s yeah, they knew I wasn’t just looking for shoes and it wasn’t even a certain brand, but it was a certain type, certain category, right? So that’s where it’s most powerful, honestly, is if you’ve. If you’re e-com and you’ve got a catalog, make sure Facebook has your catalog. And it work for you. It truly can. So yeah that’s my gripe though, is that’s where it stops in terms of all the really super smart stuff that the algorithm does.
Okay. They’re like, I’ve always, I keep pushing on Facebook on this one I was. I wanna drive engaged blog post readers, for example, or people who are gonna watch my videos and want to come back later. Not that they just watch it this one time, not that they read this blog. Not that they go to my website for five seconds and to see it and leave like it’s.
I want them to give the same thought to optimizing for a purchase and like all the things that went into that, oh, they went, looked at all these other shoes to who is gonna be most likely actually care about my website and come back again. So it’s a roundabout way of answering a question and not cuz it works for some and in some cases it could work a lot better.
Ken: Yeah. Yeah. John, so you touched on this a little bit, on the surface, money, budgets all businesses have a budget and a lot of small businesses are on a really tight budget. And so how can they know, we’ve seen this in the past where they wanna run Facebook ads, but they only wanna spend $50 a month or whatever it is How can they determine what. and budget on Facebook should be?
Jon: Yeah. It’s really about, first of all, determining the goal and it’s having a realistic discussion with them too, right? So what is it they want to accomplish? And if they say and not only accomplish, but be able to measure. And if they say we wanna get more sales, it’s okay Facebook can measure that and they can show the relationship to it.
But in order to do. We’ll need to get 50 sales per week minimum. And in order to do that, it’s going to cost probably, realistically, like what I would usually say is whatever is the cost of the product. I would say cut that in half and say that would be maybe how much it’s gonna cost per sale.
So do we have that kind of. . And if we don’t, then we have to have that conversation. We’re not gonna be able to f focus on this, on these new customers to sell. Now we might be able to get some new customers. If you’ve if you have a hard budget of a hundred [00:21:00] dollars a month or whatever it is, we can run some ads.
Just know that You probably won’t even notice it as the brand. You probably won’t notice the impact. That doesn’t mean there won’t be. There are gonna be times where someone sees your ad and thinks of your brand because of the ad and comes and makes a purchase, but they’re not gonna come to the register and tell you, oh, yeah I’m here because of that ad.
And Facebook says, Facebook’s probably not gonna be to tell you that either. So you have to look at it once We’re talking about those super small budgets, it’s just part of marketing. Like some of it you just don’t. , like you have to spend some money to get in front of your potential customers and you’re not always gonna be able to connect the dots on how much of an impact that made.
Whether it’s that billboard you put up on the side of the road or commercial you’re in or whatnot. It’s just not always easy to connect those dots. But especially if you’re not willing to invest more than you. A couple hundred dollars a month or whatever that is. You just have to establish.
Some appropriate expectations. Yeah.
Ken: Yeah. So really it’s, it sounds you, you have, if they have a a, a ridiculously low budget, you have to set the expectations. Your best opportunity is maybe to get some awareness. with the ad budget that you’ve got. So put the pixel on your website remarket to people when they’re on Facebook and stay top of mind that way and that’s gonna get you some value out, out of a small budget. So there are definitely ways to take advantage of it, but for people to think that it’s gonna generate large sales
Jon: it’s not gonna happen. Yeah. And really the truth is yes, if you got a low budget, you can get like a video view. if you can look at actions that we can measure, yeah, you can get, a through play and it may be pennies or 50 cents or whatever per Perth, per through play. So you know that, oh yeah, this number of people actually watched it and that’s good. We don’t know what they did after that. And yes, that they can be added to a custom audience
You can remarket to them. And yeah I think that’s the approach to. Is to focus on those types of smaller actions and but it’s a long-term play as well. It’s it doesn’t mean that this is gonna all of a sudden drive in new customers that you never saw before this month, right?
Ken: Yeah. I think a lot of people, a lot of business owners think, Hey, social media’s free, Facebook advertising can’t be that expensive. It’s, they see it as a silver bullet. , like anything that you have to invest time and expertise and money into it to make it work for you.
Jon: Yeah. It’s got increasing. I think part of the problem is originally it was pretty cheap, . Yeah. And it’s gotten increasingly more expensive every year as more and more advertisers have gotten into it, because again, it’s an auction. Yeah. So the more advertisers are spending money, the more it’s gonna cost.
I think. , generally, it’s the job of the advertiser too, to educate the client. Help them understand what’s reasonable. Yeah. What’s realistic. And also that, if they don’t have anything in place, if they’ve got a Facebook page that they don’t manage, if they’ve got a website that they don’t update and it’s outdated, that makes the job of the advertiser infinitely more.
Or if they basically don’t really have an email list. So all these other things, all these other assets that a brand can have, can a, can absolutely improve the impact that br advertiser has. It’s oh, they already have this built-in audience that we can go ahead and target. Yeah. Yep, they can make the job easier or harder.
Awesome. John with you actually came into my life, as Ken said, during some training we were at , and that’s where my question’s coming from is talk to us a little bit about how in fact you’re one of the unique people I find in the industry. First of all your measured response, your strategic responses to some of these questions are pretty unique in the industry because you hear a lot of I can get you a million leads by tomorrow for a hundred bucks, and I was even watching a.
I’m in the Toronto area. I’m a Raptors fan. , I was watching a replay of the game the other night, and of course, a YouTube commercial comes on and it’s directed at me because I’m a digital marketer and it’s we can radically change your Facebook ads for, almost nothing, and you’ll get.
50 x, right? That’s the buzz out there that I think a lot of consumers and a lot of business owners are hearing. So I love your measured approach. I think it’s fantastic. And the thing you taught us on at that session, which was several years ago now, so you’ve probably even evolved it beyond this but you were talking about how most people think of ads of any kind as top of the funnel that you hit people with.
And then you’re trying to get them off the ad platform as quickly as possible into your own universe where you can nurture them. And one of the unique things you were talking about was that you can build on the platform and in specifically for Facebook, you were teaching us that you can build a funnel and you can retarget people through their buyer’s journey essentially of.
awareness, consideration, conversion in, because, most people who see an ad aren’t ready to convert all the time, especially if, as you said, it’s a bigger ticket item, right? These things take time. You need to be convinced that it’s the right solution. But maybe talk a little bit about how you can create content and targeting for a Facebook ad funnel and how this works.
Yeah, so I think that’s partly how, a brand or advertis. They need to look at what are, do they have just immediate goals or are these long-term goals? Do you want to develop long-term customers or do we want to generate as many quick sales as possible from people who may be running into you for the first time?
And in some cases, that could be fine. If it’s a certain need that people have, and it’s not so much an attachment to a brand you don’t really care quite as much about the long term investment in somebody. But I know for me personally I prefer a customer who has been on my email list for a while.
So they’ve read my stuff, they’ve been on my free webinar. , they know my style. They know what to expect, unlike someone who is fresh to my website for the first time. Never heard of me before, doesn’t know my style. They have a need. They sign up for training and they’re like, oh, this isn’t what I was expecting at all.
It’s not what you were expecting because you didn’t know what I was all about and you haven’t been exposed to me before. N not only is it. Good. For me, it’s more of this long term, long tail effect. It’s better for the customer because they know what they’re getting into . do prefer a little bit of a the top, middle, bottom approach where top of the funnel, you may actually spend the most money on the top right, exposing your brand to people.
This is where, and it every business is different as far as what Yeah. What you would be providing here and focusing on here. But it could be videos, it could be articles, it could be whatever that just ex it’s more of an awareness. and then, and for me, a lot of times it’s been blog posts and lately now it’s more videos and then you could remarket to those people to get them into your funnel.
So get ’em into your email list now that they’ve been exposed to you for the first time, get ’em into your email list. Because the thing is, I’ve found with the email list is that often does a better job of selling. , then an ad does Facebook, ad does. That doesn’t mean I don’t sell on fa and look every brand’s different, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sell on Facebook.
But the email does the best. So I wanna make sure I build that email list as well. And a lot of times I spend the absolute least on selling, but it’s also to that smallest audience. Those people who are already in that funnel who know what I’m all about. Again that’s not for everybody.
That approach. I think you can shorten that up with a lot of e-comm too in that Yeah. You’ve got an awareness play video about your product, those who or send ’em to your website or whatever. Then you have another ad for [00:29:00] people who have engaged with that in some way. and then, you could even have, eventually you got a discount or something to those people who went to the product page, added to cart and convert.
So you’ve got different funnels that’ll work for different types of brands. . And do you think that type of funnel approach works with I’m not thinking about plumbers this time as a service business, but I, we, one niche that we serve is dentists. Can that work in that type of service industry or are there is something usually better, like just an awareness play?
Yeah. I, cause I don’t think typically you’re gonna be, going to that dentist website I don’t think typically you’re going to care to be on their email list unless you are their customer, right? . So I think now there could be some remarketing, but basically based on. That engagement with them.
If you’ve been doing some awareness type of ads and brand building , you could still remarket to those people, but we’re not talking about sending ’em into this big funnel of send, people go to your website and on your email list build new because what are. Why would someone join a dentist email list?
Unless you’re a customer already , right? Just, yeah, not many. So you’re talking more about the circumstance where we may do some exposure ads related to how this dentist can do braces or dental implants, and if somebody shows interest in that, we could retarget with something related to that specific service.
And I think that’s one of those things where it’s okay how do we reach. Group of people we don’t know who has bad teeth. But you might know who’s a parent. And so if this is a situation of of need braces for your child I think what works for a situation like that too would be okay.
May, maybe they’re not gonna join your email list or go to your website, but. if you have kinda a product focused video of how, how a process works and things like that, it’s usually like a, just a messenger ad, right? So start a conversation with them about, what their needs are and cuz they’re gonna wanna know how much it costs and all that kind of stuff to at least get that conversation going to, to get them in. But ultimately, like the funnel’s going to be different for a group like that. For sure. Yep. Yeah. Cool.
Ken: All right. Let’s transition to TikTok . I know that this is something John, you’re you’re starting to e experiment in and play around with and develop a lot of expertise around.
And TikTok is on everybody’s mind right now. It’s just it’s a platform that you can’t ignore any longer, and I think a lot of businesses are like, Okay I ought to be on TikTok. They have no idea how to get on TikTok. They don’t know what they should be doing on TikTok, let alone how to advertise on TikTok can you just talk us through, what is a tick? How does a TikTok ad work, and how would you begin creating a TikTok ads? I
Jon: would worry less about how a TikTok ad works and worry more about how TikTok content works, because TikTok ads to stick out as. usually don’t work on TikTok.
Yeah. And , it’s funny because honestly, if we would’ve had this conversation two months ago, I would’ve laughed about TikTok as something I would never do. But it’s all part of this understanding of needing to evolve. And I’ve resisted video, short form video for the longest time and thinking I.
Survive with blog posts. That’s, my video has thrived. But this is really the way w where people are cons. We’re cons. People are consuming content. Now is, it’s not just TikTok, it’s short form video. Absolutely. So regardless of whether TikTok is where you go learning that. type of format, I think is more important than ever.
And look, I gotta tell you firsthand experience, part of the reason I was skeptical and laughed at it and everything else is I had no idea. Like it was overwhelming. Like the first time I opened up that TikTok app and tried to make a video, I had no idea what, where to start with it and or what a good video looked like or anything.
So what I would recommend, first of all, is just, whether it’s TikTok or Facebook reels or Instagram reels, also YouTube shorts. Just get on it. Start following people that are in that industry that you that you’re in, and get a sense of what’s working, what you like. That’s something I figured out pretty quickly is oh my gosh, get to the point and move to the next one.
That stuck with me as a user, cuz it’s cause I know that I am someone who rambles and rambles like, so it could get, it could be a while to get to the point that’s not gonna work here. So it helped me a lot in a lot of ways because but I, it helped me generate a process where, yes, I might sit down and record for three or four minutes, but then I edit it like crazy.
Like I get rid of all. my pauses. And like I take stuff where oh, that didn’t really make sense, and I delete it and I cut it down to a minute and making sure there’s some sort of hook at the very beginning. Not that it’s like there’s, you can be super salesy and cheesy, but just something so they know what’s coming to stick around for all these little things you, you learn over time.
And to be, informational, educational, entertaining in some. But you learn these things and really you don’t learn ’em without consuming it and just creating some really bad videos like . It wasn’t until I embraced that I am going to create some really bad videos. It wasn’t until that point that I felt more comfortable.
Like I didn’t feel, I wasn’t scared of creating bad stuff, cuz no one’s gonna see it anyway. Who cares? Because you don’t really have an audience in the beginning, , and so if you’re creating bad stuff, no one’s gonna watch it. It’s not like it’s gonna go viral because it’s terrible.
Like if it’s really terrible maybe, but it’s maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t know. . It’s just I’ve found that like we can hold ourselves back there because of this unknown Cause Jay, it is completely different. So yeah, consume. Create, it’s gonna be bad in the beginning. But in terms of the ads, if you’ve made any Facebook ads before, you will be comfortable with TikTok ads.
That’s the very first thing I realized when I jumped into TikTok Ads Manager. It’s called Ads Manager. Almost everything is labeled the same as it is in Facebook, ads Manager. There’s the learning curve is so short if you’ve already been in that environment , are gonna be some differences in terms of the types of things you should do there, which is again, why I think you should create and consume first, because it’s not gonna be the same like when it comes to driving traffic and all those things to your website, because that’s not really the way people consume content on TikTok.
I You can absolutely create conversions. Campaigns I still haven’t yet, like I’ve started with everything just from the ground. I, and that’s also part of how you may want to reframe this entire experiment if you get into TikTok, is and it was a really tough obstacle for me just getting into video.
Cause I realized like if they watch your video, a lot of times they’re not clicking anything like I want ’em on my website. And that, that kept me from doing it for years. But once you realize this is where they are. And you can gain a ton of trust from people and build your brand with people so that are thinking of you just by sharing good, valuable stuff.
And it may not be on your website, it may be on TikTok, it may be on Facebook or Instagram reels or something else. it’s, you can get personality across you, you can make an emotional connection So much easier with video Yeah. Than the written word. So I it’s just really valuable, but it does take a complete reframing and leaving some of your biases aside of what you normally.
Ken: I think you make a great point. I think it was IBM that said, you gotta fail fast. Because the nature of business is failure. Most of the time we fail. And we all have to recognize that sales is driven around failure. The best salespeople know how to deal with failure, move on, and close deals.
And so the same is true when you’re creating content. Sometimes you need to get started, like you said, you’ve gotta have that situational awareness of what is, what’s going on, what are other people doing? What are people consuming? How are people in your particular industry? operating on a particular platform.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. As a matter of fact imitation on in digital marketing actually is a really great strategy To a point. To a point. Yeah. And look, I compare what I’m doing now to the early days of my business where I didn’t know what I was doing and I just looked to people like.
Amy Porterfield, ma Smith, and like all these people who were in that same area of what they were doing and how they built it. And I emulated a lot of that. But eventually you have to have enough confidence to even just be like no one’s doing this. I’m gonna do this. But you shouldn’t necessarily start that way because if people don’t consume in a certain way it just may not work at all. But yeah it’s a lot. Like my early part of my business I created 70 videos in October. And it’s like when I started my business and I wrote blog posts every single day.
And it wasn’t because every single piece of content was good. You tried to make it good, but you learn from every single time you do it of, okay, what resonated with people? , I’m also like, I was crazy and efficient creating these, like I was taking two, three hours to edit record and edit them and I can’t keep doing this.
I’m going to burn myself out. Like I’ve gotta find a better way to do this. So that’s all part of that process too. So seeing what works with your audience, seeing what works for you in terms of creation. And coming up with a system and a schedule and all this, you can’t just sit down and map it out without any idea of how it all works.
So just diving in, diving into the fire. Yeah. Yeah. I like what you said about understanding how the platform works and how content is consumed because the TikTok algorithm is unique. And how they determine what content is different from any other platform. ,and that’s something to understand.
With that being said, so does TikTok have custom audiences and how , if they do, how would you create them? Yeah, so I want to get to the first thing you said in terms of the algorithm: I think this is a benefit. And I’ve seen it as soon as I follow somebody, I suddenly see their stuff all over the place.
Like, I’ll see 30 videos in a day. So it doesn’t even matter when they created it. And that’s the big difference between TikTok and like a Facebook is like that recency really matters on Facebook or else it just disappears after a couple days, unless people keep sharing it. TikTok has nothing really to do with sharing.
They’ll keep, you’ll keep getting a surface to you if it’s been getting a lot of engagement. So that’s something that right away I realized oh this is another reason to create a lot of content, hopefully good content, and not be too worried about even like time of day and stuff like that.
Like it, people [00:40:00] follow you, they’re gonna see your stuff. But, so in terms of custom audiences, it’s very similar, but also the old, like very almost primitive Facebook custom audiences, right? So there are, I think, six different categories of custom audiences. So they basically, this is targeting people who have engaged with you or on your customer list, something like that.
So like their customer list, custom audience, on Facebook you upload your entire. It can have a whole bunch of different columns, their first name, last name, email address, phone number, and all this stuff. And Facebook matches it up with users on Facebook. And you can have a, depending on how complete your list is, you can have a reasonably good match rate because of that.
It could be, 50% or so we’ll match up to a user and you can target them. Right now on TikTok, the primary way to create a data file custom audience is based on idfa. Device identifiers that none of us are probably gonna have. That’s more of if you’ve got your own app that you might have that.
But in testing, and luckily I’m part of this test, you can upload a file [00:41:00] of email addresses or phone numbers. So it’s just like the way Facebook. Email custom audiences were in the beginning where it just had that one column of information. The result of that is it’s 10% as I’m getting for a match rate of the people on, because not everybody’s on TikTok either.
So 10% of the people on my list are on TikTok, which makes it really difficult. But between that like one of the, one of the custom audiences is based on engagement with your videos, but with your ads, it’s again different. So you can. on Facebook, create customized people, engage with your videos.
It doesn’t matter if they were paid or not. On TikTok the primary engagement custom audience, they ha you have to pick the ad set ad. They call it ad group. And if they engage with any of those videos, then they get added to your audience. But again, it has to be an ad, which is weird. And then they’ve got a website, custom Audience, but it’s virtually unusable because.
Unlike Facebook where it doesn’t matter where they came from, like they could have gone from a Google search to your website, and because they did that, you can retarget them when they go to Facebook. TikTok, they have to be referred from the TikTok app. And that’s a problem cause I, like I already mentioned, it’s like very, there’s very little traffic going from TikTok to websites generally Anyway.
And they’ve got a minimum audience size of a thousand in order to target people. So the typical business, small business is not gonna be generating a thousand referrals from TikTok to their website to be able to remarket them. So that, that was one of my biggest, it’s, it is interesting cuz like I’ve actually had the pixel, the pic TikTok pixel on my website for over a year or something, and it said that I had 400,000 events.
But. My custom audience size was four. I had four people on it, , cause that’s the number of people I’d referred, so I can’t even use it. But so it’s basically, if you’ve created these before on Facebook, it’ll be pretty [00:43:00] normal. Expect, except for your expectations should be different in terms of how you can use ’em.
You can create lookalike audiences as well. And , but, and that, honestly, that’s probably where most of us are gonna be using these audiences because the all those custom audiences have to be at least a thousand people anyway. Okay. Hey, John you talked a little bit before about your pivot to short form video and I think in there you had some guidance or at least you shared your experience in your journey on that.
What kind of tips do you have for small businesses where they’re trying to dip their toe in short form video on whichever platform? What kind of tips do you have? . think about, what is it that your target audience would care about and they would grab their attention within the first six seconds, ultimately is like the most critical time.
So that’s small business. It’s funny I don’t even know why it brought me to this, but it’s one of the, almost all the accounts I’m following are marketing related business. and one of ’em I’m following is this, all he is, he’s a dad and he is he’s probably 60 years old or something and he just records videos about how to do stuff right.
And this was important to me cuz I like, I don’t know how to change a tire. Like stuff like that, and like he has little things like that just really valuable. And so it’s okay, what’s, and I put that out. It’s like you have to have something of value. It’s not just. , Hey, I’m here recording stuff.
Hi. It’s like you’ve gotta have something to offer. And with your business, it, it could be it’s depending on the industry, the subject matter. It’s just like blogging and anything that you create, it’s not always self promotional. It’s this in the, in this subject matter.
Here’s something that people really care about that might be really helpful to you. Or if we’re talking about something that’s like a restaurant, it could be as simple as, showing them the food, , showing them how things are made and introducing ’em to members of the staff and getting to know people and stuff like that.
But I think every business is going to be different. The primary thing that we should always be thinking about though, when we create content, it should be, what value can I add as opposed to, how can I get people to buy my stuff because the buy my stuff thing will come later. The first thing you need to do is make it an emotional connection.
Make it so people want to see your stuff. And need to see your stuff. Yeah.
Ken: All right. Awesome. Thanks John. This has been a blast. It’s it’s always. Learning from you. We’ve all learned so much from you over the years, and we really appreciate you taking time out.
Any other last thoughts or questions for Jon?
Jon:: Yeah I, it seems to me like from an advertising standpoint that TikTok is still primitive, . , do you see them ever really being a viable competitor in the advertising space to Facebook? Because they have the audience, that’s for sure.
But sounds like the way you advertise on TikTok is so different.
Jon: It is different. I would say that first of all, I’m not a foremost ex expert on TikTok advertising, but I would say most of what TikTok is probably going to do in that space, in that commerce space is similar to what Facebook’s been trying to do with Facebook shops and Instagram shops.
So it’s gonna be a lot of selling things within the app. So again, it’s changing your way of thinking about, oh, I’ve gotta send ’em to my stuff on this thing I own trying to sell things within the app. . So I honestly I do think that, this is the way it’s going. There’s a reason why Facebook, we should call ’em feta now.
How they, lots of cheese. I know. I want salad. A nice Greek salad. Is it, but there’s a reason why they’ve been pushing so hard to, to that short form video content is because TikTok is biting into. Their use and they know that they need to do that. That’s the direction this is going.
And the question’s gonna be what do [00:47:00] ads look down the road if everything is in that format. And I think that’s something that Facebook has to figure out too. Yeah. . Absolutely. I think now we have some questions about whether TikTok is gonna be here in the US in the future, but beyond that, if it gets over that hurdle it’s absolutely, it’s going to be a competitor, I think.
And that’s consistent with Google wants to keep you on their platform. Facebook wants to keep, and you’re right, I think. what you said about doing things within the app. I agree. I think that’s the direction a lot of these things are going. Yeah, it, look, it’s something that I resisted forever just because I so much, my business was built on my website and but I think we have to eventually come to the realization that people don’t want to go to your website sometimes.
Like you could still want them to go there. But if you try to force people to do things, they. used to doing, don’t really want to do, then you probably have to find a new way. And that’s okay what was it that I was [00:48:00] saying on my website that I want you to know about here? And you can still communicate that within the app.
Because if it’s always clickbait saying, oh, you can’t, you gotta read this thing. I said, you’re not gonna believe it. They’ve gotta go there to read it. People are gonna get tired of you. So Yeah, when they don’t want to go. . So we’ve gotta find ways to communicate these things of value while still, valuing our websites.
But I honestly, I think Google’s the way that we’re gonna drive a lot of our stuff to our websites, our email lists drive people to our websites, but if they’re in a certain app where they usually stay there, understand that and try to improve their browsing experience there and give ’em value while you can.
Ken: I was talking to one of the business partners that we work with, and he talked about, when you think about advertising, he referred to three S’s, social shopping and search. And which ultimately gets to the intent of the user and the platform they’re on.
And the nature of the platform. Certain platforms are much more oriented towards shopping, others are oriented towards search and others are, or oriented, you more towards social and engagement and things like that. So again, it all comes back to understanding your ideal customer, where they spend time online and what objectives you want to try to accomplish.
Jon: So indeed and I think this is a it’s reflective of, the struggles I’m facing right now, but also willing. to evolve and other things understand things change. Yeah, because Google isn’t necessarily going to be Google forever either. It looks like TikTok has actually taken a cut out of Google’s search.
So think about that. If more people are going to start searching for what you can help them with on TikTok, once again, that’s where a video will need to be the answer. Not necessarily a click this link to find the. So it’s just there’s, we have to, just constantly willing right now to adjust our [00:50:00] thinking and evolve with everything else.
Ken: Yeah, absolutely. So Jon, what’s the best way for people to learn more about you and maybe partake of more of your wisdom?
Jon: Start to ask, cuz I go to jonloomer.com right? Go to my website. But, and if you’re not on my website certainly. On TikTok at Jon Loomer Instagram at Jon Loomer Facebook, John Loomer Digital. I’ve also got a podcast, Podcast with John Loomer, and I try to be in as many places as I can, but that’s where you start. All
Ken: Alright. Awesome. Thanks so much, Jon. I really appreciate you taking the time.
Jon: Thanks so much, guys. Thanks. This has been great. Thank you.