Hunt A Killer Facebook Ads Case Study

yeah thank you thanks for coming all right that is for you thank you always forgot yeah talk to you soon thank you all right what i'll uh what i'll do now is i'll introduce our next guests and i'll just switch this over um and this one as well that guy looks like a knee all right okay so um i'll just unmute this so our next two speakers have you'll see that we've

got some funny faces on the screens um these two blokes have been um nice enough to join us from the us where eric is currently emptying his entire house to move to another state um and david is just like a boss now i'll introduce these two gentlemen these are the co-founders of the sweatpants agency can you hear me okay there fellas yep awesome thank you and i'll just send you put that

down for a sec yeah i t came in and fixed this it's all good um so a quick rundown of eric eric is the online marketer responsible for three of the fastest growing brands in their spaces uh hunter killer bomb tech golf and jin and jar he's the founder of 10x factory which is a slack community with over 1300 entrepreneurs and growing um he's managed over 100 million dollars in advertising and

generating roi on budgets as large as 4 million a month by internet radio and tv and also until recently held a guinness world record which i'm sure he'll bring up and then we have david tendrick who again an online marketer responsible for nearly 100 million in martial arts and fitness studio sales founding partner of reliable psd a coding company with 40 employees across the us and europe and co-creator of email machine

an autoresponder product that has generated hundreds of thousands of fitness and martial arts members across hundreds of studios for the past eight years now um eric and david have joined us today to talk through a case study that we linked on the facebook page the other day about a campaign that they've done on facebook for a product called hunter killer now this is entirely q a so hopefully we'll get a few

more questions with this one i'll start us off just to get the ball rolling but this is a unique opportunity to ask questions on a very large scale campaign eric and david got sheryl sandberg sent you a nice gift or something i believe so we might be able to talk about that as well i'll just sort of can you look at the room all right now we're going to try and do

this without lots of people ryan i think you hit the mute button yeah yeah there you go that was cool though to see the audience for a second yeah is it possible to is it possible so we can look at each other yeah we're just floating ads hey guys all right now i'm gonna have to ride the mute and the volume here a bit so we'll be okay um what am i

uh what i'd like to start off with is can you just explain a bit about what hunter killer actually is because it sounds like something that police do might be good to just explain the product first yeah happily um so honey killer is a um to give you a little bit of context so honeykiller was actually started originally as a live event and it was an event where a bunch of people

went around and they tried to solve a murder mystery and the live event did okay but it wasn't incredible uh so the founder of the business had approached me to do digital marketing for him uh and try subscription box model so every month you get a box in the mail and the box in the middle has correspondence with a serial killer it has like characters it has sometimes clues that are interactive

that you can go online or you call in a phone number um sometimes maps different objects and things like that and the goal is basically to figure out you know who's the suspect who murdered who and uh really it's a game that just people love uh it kind of makes us a little bit of a tabletop gaming with rpg plus a little bit of a storage line and that is um it's

kind of the way it started um and to give it a little context and maybe it's going a little far the company was kind of bootstrapped strap from basically i think it was 5k seed investment and we took it to eight figures the first year and i ran into a big bottleneck around month six and i tried to find the best copywriter that i could find on the planet and it so

happened they joined 10x factory and i brought in david and david uh helped me increase uh conversion over there as well as the aov and that was really the secret to us getting the eight figures in our first year um me and david left to do our own things for about a year and then we came back and we can talk specifically about the case study whenever somebody wants but that was

when we went ahead and we doubled their subscriber base 34 days it says in the facebook case study 60 but it was actually 34.

okay so um when the the recent campaign kicked off that was company was already at eight figures and um it was a seasonal campaign running into christmas i believe so what was sort of the the brief for this particular campaign and and the starting point for that well so uh they i are they still eight figures so they they hit a bit of a a snag in 2018 that's actually why they

they came back to us and me and eric were busy with with a lot of other things but uh ryan the founder took eric out to i think six steak dinners thank you so he could come back um and he and he and eric are are very good friends um finally eric was like all right all right i'll do it but uh we'll you know let me talk to david about it

so we chatted we decided we decided to do it so we had so yeah we did have um it was going into black friday cyber monday which um i'm sure you guys uh i'm not sure if australia has that too or something comparable but i'm sure you've seen the videos of america where it's basically a stampede of shoppers um trying to get the best deals they can uh online it's become huge

so we had that was our first task was uh black friday cyber monday but we had to fix all the fundamentals of the marketing because um in that year that we were gone six other agencies came in and basically uh did not nice things to a lot of our work so a lot of it was repairing the fundamentals of the marketing and uh for cash flow to launching this black friday cyber

monday christmas uh holiday campaign yeah i i really want to touch upon those fundamentals and and this is kind of the way that me and david approach marketing and you know if you guys are looking at like facebook advertising or looking at adwords advertising it doesn't matter what advertising when it comes down to it if you fix the foundation of a business from a marketing fundamental standpoint you're always going to win

so when we went in we did everything from heat mapping to look to see where there's ui issues we surveyed the customers we surveyed the non-customers we asked them what attracted you this brand why um you know if you were describing this to a friend how would you describe it uh was there any concerns that you had before you bought it and by getting all those things we were able to kind

of make marketing message that made sense but where it really drove home and this is again like foundations the reason that we were able to do so well is that we hopped on the phone when i say we actually mean david david hopped on the phone and was talking to customers and i'm gonna have him share what he actually discovered and how important that was for this because it changed us from

having a positioning where people that just loved serial killers were buying to being a business that can easily blow up into a business that's touching nine figures in a few years here and it was really a revolution that he had by being in touch with customers so one of the things that we always try to do and i encourage everybody in this audience if you're a business owner you're in marketing the

one thing you always have to do is be as close to your customer as possible if you do that you always win you know you look at netflix they beat everybody out because the video stores were going away and it was the biggest painful point of them and they were closest to the customers you look at companies like drift closest to the customers so i'll have david tell you about um kind

of his phone interview and then how that turned into a big revelation that then allowed us to scale this massive marquee campaign yeah so um uh our our philosophy with marketing is very much um hold a mirror to the audience hold the mirror to the market and the way we do that is we um we try to learn who this market is and what their needs are better than maybe even they

know themselves um and so uh what i found the biggest shortcut to doing that is just getting on the phone with people i i always think of marketing as like a a test but you're allowed to go up to the teacher and ask for the answers um you're allowed to ask your customers things like why did you buy this like you have a lot of choices why did you buy this um

you're allowed to do that you're about to just literally ask them for the answers and the cool thing is what they tell you a lot of times your job is to then get out of the way don't butcher their words but you talk to enough customers and you see patterns in the words the patterns become they start yelling at you because after to be honest you've talked about five of your best

customers by the fifth customer you're going to be able to predict what they say um when you get to that point you take those time you take their language you get out of the way and you put that in ads and it works wonders in this specific case um what really allowed us to scale i know eric's gave me a lot of credit here but honestly without his uh so there's two

sides of this and this is one of the reasons that um eric and i work so well together eric has processed down hat better than anybody i've ever met and probably ever will be what i mean by that is eric understands the flow customers have to go through he understands on facebook about um the uh the technicals of what you need who you need to target how to find targeting um i

i kind of fill in the blanks of all of that with messaging that i learn from from the market um so uh uh but the messaging which eric was able to amplify so incredibly well was i got on the phone with uh with a guy who had bought the box and he he said something to me where the light bulb went off but what he said to me was you know um

because i asked him one of the questions i asked i always like to ask is how do you use the product so for haunted killer i'd ask well hey how do you actually play the game like when you play the game what does that look like um and he said well uh he says my wife and i play together he said usually we uh you know usually we get home after a

long day of work we're both very tired and um uh we kind of just put on netflix and we're sitting next to each other but we're just we just put on netflix and ignore each other neither of us has energy to to to really interact but with hunter killer we're really engaged with each other we're really spending quality time together um when i heard that whole story what i heard in there

i heard so many things in there that meant so many marketing fundamentals i heard so there's a concept i like called the hero tale and a hero tale is a tale of customer takes is going from what the problem is they're facing to the end solution and the in between step is the product so the pain point they were at would you have a relationship where you had two people who love

each other but their lives are making it hard for them to spend good time together you have the end result which is them spending their time together the thing that took them there was hunting killer in this case um and uh when i heard that i knew we needed to put that in and out so i i i get on the phone i tell eric he gets used we both got marketing

marketing chills we put it in an ad we paired it with an image of a couple a user so this was a this is an important piece too is that we found that uh photos that your users send you your customers send you on facebook works so much better than polished photos um uh polished professional stock photography photos so we paired it with a couple holding up their haunted killer box they

were smiling or they might have had like this like shock expression um the ad blew up and it blew up because uh we had sort of saturated the market of people who like there was a i don't know if you guys got this too but in america we went through a serial killer frenzy a couple years ago and where all these podcasts came out with these fascinating stories the detective stories and

er no one could get enough of it so if you put out something that just had the word serial filler on it people would buy it but we we saturated that market with hunter killer now though we were with this ad we started reaching an audience a very broad large audience who had a universal pain point where they didn't care about the serial killer part what they cared about was its puzzles

its codes to crack it's fun and games it's together time um and that's what we were selling these ads as a vehicle for together time um so that um that scale once once we hit that angle things started to scale uh uh very fast because it really took off yeah the the thing about that is um and to be clear like it expanded the audience right like originally the hook for honey

killer and the ads said you know what if this hero killer in order to pack your doorstep each month which is a great pattern interrupt and if you're not familiar with pattern rubs or just things that kind of stop you you know they stop you from the regular processing that you have day-to-day things that stop being in your newsfeed and that audience was only so limited but the moment that we turned

this into a date night concept it really changed the amount of people that we could address our total addressable market and the other thing that was huge that we were able to do with this originally we had a little bit longer copy and that did very well but we were able to turn this into a pattern interrupt as well as something that's cheeky when i write facebook ads when facebook david writes

facebook ads you like to have a cheeky voice because one of the biggest hacks in facebook is giving comments right and if you can polarize a little bit if you can say something a little bit funny you're going to get a lot more reactions you're going to get a lot more love and i know for some people that makes them uncomfortable but like if you look at brands like spotty potty you

look at brands like um poo pourri and all these brands that just blew up out of nowhere a lot of them had a voice they said things that were a little crazy they did things they're a little crazy so we decided to be a little crazy too and the winning ad copy that we had was couples who put serial killers together stay together and then it said this date night honest here

killer and that was the big difference big game changers first in terms of audience size as well as our costs on facebook acquisition um i'll stop there yeah obviously we've been talking a while but um i want to answer any other questions so i guess the thing that comes out of that for me first of all is um there's you've spoken to the audience you've gathered some great data there i'm curious

how you went around the process of varying the creative how many variations you ran and perhaps a bit about the exact targeting that you used for each of those those creatives ryan i have a question for you real quick the people in the audience well what type of businesses do they typically have or are we talking about local business e-commerce national brands what are we talking about uh a really big mix

not fair so we've got some all right hang on let me let me turn this around and make this interactive for a sec uh who's from government who's from a figure i know technology good and stuff right um okay let's let's not shake that and make this hunting the blair witch killer uh so we had government all right how many people are from a sole trader type business how many people from

a small business medium all right large super large no um how many from an international company all right we've got a few okay so that should give you some context yeah absolutely um so you were asking about creative variations and and um and also the um target so i i i just want to kind of throw this out there so first of all with um uh with the creative uh david david's

really smart as you guys can tell and what he did is we actually had a facebook group and in the facebook group you would see these posts and propose and based on that engagement we started collecting different images and these were all user generated images and we like the user generate images because it's something that doesn't automatically put somebody on the defensive when they see an ad um and we were looking

for these things that were highly engaging that's where we source the content so we ran a lot of dynamic ads within facebook that's when you go ahead and put a lot of images together and facebook kind of figures out what's the best um in terms of the the headlines and the messaging i mean i don't know how many we went through i mean from the beginning of november to the end of

november we probably went for probably about 40 to 50 variations but here's the deal that a lot of people don't realize and that is is that when you find a great hook or a great ad copy it can last for millions of dollars in ads so the first eight figures or the first two years they're winning ad copy was that what if a serial killer delivers a package to your doorstep each

month the next iteration of that is still going today with you know anywhere between let's say 300 uh well gosh 300 000 is very low on their ad spend it's probably closer to about 400k to about 2 million dollars in ad spend depending on the month we're probably that's still our top performer is talking about date night so when you find that messaging that works it just works you run with it

for a while obviously sometimes you need to adjust you need to adjust for the market and that's what we did here but um we tested more of the creative we definitely tested a lot of copy but there's more about the angle and eric he asked about targeting too if i'm not mistaken um and you can answer better than me but you now like open targeting and let facebook optimize it right so

years ago you you would never hear me say that i mean in for anybody that has a very specific persona like if you're going after like let's say dental owners or something like that right i would almost recommend that you scrape data somewhere else and upload it to facebook you target those people but like let's say you're a local business and you are dentists and you have you know botox that you

offer a lot of times open targeting now in facebook is actually outperforming everything including lookalikes and including interest targets and it's a big shift that's happened over the last few years i think it's happened for a couple reasons so one the facebook algorithms really is what is way better at identifying people that will be your purchasers they also use data from your website and other contextual clues about who to actually target

and the other fact is that if you're too targeted in facebook especially for these types of national campaigns right if you're too targeted and you have a massive mass appeal product when you become too targeted you're going to have too much frequency happening where the ads are going to be seen by same people too much but in addition that you're going to be competing if everybody else that wants that same ad

inventory so with facebook it's an auction system and back in the day everybody would run a one percent look like who here knows what it look like is by the way all right awesome so what it look like is on facebook is when you take your existing customers or a data set and you uploaded the facebook and you say hey facebook i want you to find the top one percent of people

on facebook that look just like this right well one percent lookalikes were money for years and years around i would say a year ago you started seeing where one percent look like for being outperformed by three percent local x and it's not because the one percent is not more targeted is because the cost of that ad inventory and that one percent is higher because other people also probably have them in the

one percent look likes because those are the buyers right so because costs went up we go more and more open and that's one of the biggest shifts that's happened in facebook in the last year or so is open targeting is working across the board with honeykiller the third best ad set and the ad sets where you target the third best ad set is an open target the second best asset or the

second best data set is a 10 look like which is 20 million people in the united states the best performing onset is an interest buster where basically there's a bunch of interest targeting that i throw in there and interest can be you know pages that people like different things that they're interested in and that's like a 50 million person audience so you're seeing again these huge bigger and bigger audiences now again

if you're targeting dental owners this wouldn't work for you but if you have a product that can do massive feel at all and even if it's on a local market or international market open targeting really kills it yeah and also too um uh this this process of getting on the phone with your customers and hearing about their pain points um i i've repeated it and just about every type of business you

guys raise your hand about uh including actual government and um in we've done marketing for recreation centers for example counties um but even for except for martial arts for example just as a testament to what eric said when you get an angle it can last for a million dollars it can also last for years especially for small business uh i'll give a great example 10 years ago i wrote a piece of

copy selling kids martial arts and what i loved about the phone calls about getting on the calls with customers is they always tell you things you didn't expect uh now let me ask you let me see if you have guns uh if i told you kids martial arts how many of you would expect that parents would want their kids to learn self-defense shower pants okay like karate right chop okay how many

pairs how many people here would think that their kids uh would want to be protected from like bullies for example okay right that's very logical i went into these conversations expecting that um these parents poured their hearts out to me these conversations lasted upwards of 90 minutes to two hours not one person mentioned either of those no one mentioned self-defense or bullies what they told me were things like my child has

add and struggles in school my child is so smart but can't sit built martial arts like gave him the discipline to sit there and focus my daughter was floundering she just seemed this passion like nothing interested her in life martial arts lit this fire in her that gave her like this passion and this hunger for life i heard story of their story like this i realized just like with hunter killer the

the what you get in the mail is a vessel as a vehicle to solve the together time problem martial arts is a vehicle that parents use to solve other problems with their child and i stopped selling i didn't sell martial arts i sold that stuff i said i said the headline was amazing kid martial arts class not only teaches self-defense and the reason i mention self-defense is you have to meet people

where they're at logically right if people expect self-defense you still have to you can't bypass it i then below that the sub headline said but teaches them skills they need for success in life and in the copy i told four stories i told a story about a kid who had abd i told a story about a kid who was floundering um now top of my head i don't remember the other stories

but and i taught and i told the story of how martial arts helped them that coffee sold more kids martial arts than anything else in the history of that industry and it ran for it's actually a lot of schools are still using it to this day but it's been running for 10 years um it had a good eight year run before people even stop using it so when you hit on when

these cut there are some certain things that are universal um that when you get on the phone with your customers and you ask them questions very broad questions right it's actually it's all about the follow-up questions i start very broad i start saying hey how did you hear about x and then they'll say oh you know online i was searching i found the blog there's that i said oh cool it's a

little crazy like what about that what about an attractive user like what what about it what did you look at that made you go hey i gotta get this and you follow your nose right you follow anything that seems interesting it's all about in the whatever someone says saying like interesting what do you mean by that what do you mean by that and following and letting them just talk and talk and

talk um uh being quiet is a very important part once once they get talking you gotta even if they say something that excites you that you can relate to and you want to share you got to just bite your tongue you got to sit on your hands and just listen um and they literally will just give you all the answers uh um but i would never i i i will never the

thing is is that that that's half of it right now you also like i'll never know the ins and outs of facebook like eric does so i'm not i'm only half of a a puzzle there so you you use um you you take that and you you give that to people who do know how to disseminate a message who do you know how to amplify a message and it's it's a win-win

um uh now a lot something else that we do as well is we will start for um we will so we're called sweatpants agency because uh eric has this brilliant model for product market fit sort of a metaphor we call the sweatpants test slow pass test looks like this a product market fit is the most important thing um in marketing and that's basically having something people actually want um when uh the

way eric describes product market fit is absolutely genius what he says is imagine you show up to your first date you're wearing sweatpants a sweat stains dirty shirt your hair is not done you look like a mess you sit down at the table the person still falls in love with you right then and there in that state that's ideal product market fit right so basically quick and dirty marketing should produce results

if you need really dialed in marketing if you need perfect marketing like my dog i don't know if you guys hear that my dog is gonna beat my door down excuse me one second i'm gonna let it there's a lot of things that you can test and do without building out huge processes right because if something works it's just going to work and i'll give you a great example um david was

just talking about how there's things that you don't expect a lot of times when you start customers so for instance there was a brand that we grew to eight figures in a year another one that it was a brand that was selling wholesale pharmaceuticals to independent pharmacies right and we had all these conversations and we created a lead magnet which is just a little piece of content that somebody downloads and then

we offer them to join for free and buy products from us well we originally went in with like this whole uh thing of like the independent pharmacy buyers which makes sense right we want them to buy from us we're going to do this buying thing well we hop on the phone with them we suddenly realized that most of these people are concerned with their margins going away insurance reimbursements going away and

they're marketing they're actually worried about the market so what we did is instead of building each one of these lead magnets out we built a landing page for three different things right we built one for like a marketing lead magnet one about how to increase your insurance reimbursements and a third one right and we just let the marketing run against those and we looked at the cost per lead and the quality

of leads and then we actually built out the product now i don't recommend running something for a long time as a drive test but there's often a way that you can skip a lot of steps and prove that this is worth your time your company's time because at the end of the day a lot of people they get invested in ideas and next thing you know your departments skipped an entire quarter

and they did it on something that fails or you're growing a business and you don't know how to sell it yet you've been focusing on the product last year you you lose a year of your life so we try to figure out these sweatpants tests to ensure that that never happens as well as to get to a quicker result where your marketing is working for your business right so so one one

way we do that so for example with some of some of the brands we're working with right now um through phone calls we're uncovering these angles um what we'll do is uh we'll throw an angle into an ad if we see we ideally you want to see more sales of course and you want to see it cost less to generate more sales but sometimes an angle doesn't instantly generate more sales but

you'll notice maybe it costs a lot less to get people to click on the app maybe by dramatically by a dramatic difference that's clue that you're on the right track um that's a clue that could merit this angle needs further development and the way we develop the angle is developing a landing page specific to that angle that the ad sends traffic to and so if an ad proves to us that uh

if something about the ad seems to be getting traction that's our next step is okay let's change the website let's run a test on the website and make the language match the ad there's something we've uncovered uh called congruency which is which is an amplifier for results as well which is where when the message from ad all the way to the very end of until they they check out um is congruent

when the messaging is the same uh and repeats patterns um that's a that that's a little hack that these results so well so once an act once an angle proves to us it's worth developing we'll throw it on a landing page and we'll see uh we'll see then what kind of traction it gets and what kind of results and we'll let it we'll we'll make baby steps and throw it at the

market and let the market through these metrics tell us what's working and what isn't and then if it is working we'll take more baby steps throughout the market um and that way you get to see you get to track how what the difference each baby step makes so that way if suddenly something doesn't work we didn't just do this whole brand new thing where you changed a million things and you don't

know what was working and what wasn't we know what worked up to a certain point so when something doesn't work we can go back and analyze everything ryan what what questions do you or this lovely audience have well we'll turn it over to the audience in a sec which is kind of i've got a hand up there well you know well when she's finished tweeting lena will go up there and get

that sorted i have a question for you at the moment um um you've said a couple of times about budgets and you've thrown out some pretty big numbers there um but i thought it was um interesting in our previous discussions we've talked about the way that you scaled up to that budget or sort of grew into that budget can you just explain a bit about how you started off with the budget

and then the approach to campaign budget organizations and um optimizing around the customer acquisition cost sure sure can you give me a little bit more context are you talking about for this particular case study and the way that we did it we talked um mostly around this particular case study but in in general is it's fine too sure so um one feature was actually released on on facebook around the time that

we started to do this and it's called campaign budget optimization um and back in the day when you were scaling a facebook campaign like let's say you saw success and what i call success is when you have your acquisition level to a point that you're happy with that cost acquisition um for some people that means that you're making profit on your first sale for a lot of subscription boxes it means that

you're getting somewhere around what the revenue that you're getting in is or you're getting in more revenue than that so um when we look at that uh once we define that success tactic and we're all happy we try to stress test it and grow it and with facebook i would say like a year ago you would do stuff where you would duplicate ad sets you would essentially duplicate all the global campaigns

that you're doing uh or you would double uh or sorry you would increase your budget on an ad set at like 15 per day or the ad set would go crazy well facebook introduced this thing called campaign budget optimization and they took it from the ad set level which is where you usually define your audiences and stuff like that and they move the budget to the campaign level so you can have

multiple audiences all under this one budget and facebook is making decisions about where they're going to get the lowest cost per result for each one of these well when we hit this angle what was the most amazing thing and and i'll be completely candid at it was super easy to scale we just kept pouring more and more money on it we kept throwing more and more in like hoping that it wouldn't

go wrong i put in a bunch of rules uh in facebook you can do automated rules and make sure that we didn't like go bankrupt or do anything dumb or spend a ton of money and we just monitored it uh the whole way up and we just watched the cos acquisitions stay the same no matter what it's made scaling on facebook way easier now that being said listen when you're in uh

november and december one of the things that you're going to see is you're going to see often conversion rates on e-commerce just jump through the roof right they're between two three times higher when you see something like that you can probably scale the campaign to a million dollars a day and be fine like one of my biggest regrets actually wasn't spending more money i feel like we could have scaled it even

more and we could have done it profitably so the thing that um happens though is you'll see that conversion start dip down as you go into q1 and when that happens you do need to scale back your budget because you're not going to see the same cost per result at that same high level um you know as you go in the summer a lot of times you kind of get things to

even out a little bit because the cost of the inventory on facebook goes down but the conversion rate is still kind of a little bit lower and then when back to school starts to happen you start to see conversion rate go up start to see people priming for q4 and spending a bit more money on facebook so we kind of just ride the trends and we we monitor the cost of acquisition

on a daily basis we monitor on a weekly basis we put on rules to make sure that we don't spend you know a thousand dollars uh per acquisition and we go from there um it's uh i i i wish i could make it sound more complex but it's not when you have a great angle and you can see that there's a large audience and i guess that is one thing we had

a huge addressable audience right we were doing open targeting we were going 10 percent look like so when you see that huge addressable audience you're seeing a good cost of acquisition you know that you can probably fly that to the moon okay cool um writing my mute button um we had a question over here no my question oh okay i asked the question that the guest was gonna ask um question over

here yep now we'll see if you guys can hear this over the av and if you can't i'll repeat it back for you um well this was a question for eric um i just wondered if you could just expand a little bit on what you mean by open targeting so you said um basing on interest 10 look like and open targeting i wasn't familiar with that term just wondered if you could

explain that yep yep yep get that okay good um just wondering if you can explain the term open targeting a bit more and and what that meant yeah i mean what it actually means is it's very simple um we we don't have any targeting in facebook the only targeting that we do on facebook is locations so we'll say it's the united states um we do do things where it'll uh i think

we do 21 plus um and we just let it go ahead and optimize now when i say that too sometimes when we're doing testing we do do demographic splits so we might do a split where we have uh every demographic split out so women uh 25 to 34 35 to 44 45 to 54 and then uh i think it's 54 to or 55 64 and then 65 plus and we'll actually split

that up and see how it does um there's certain things too in the open targeting like if you're a local business again say you're selling botox you might realize that your demographic is women um and it might be a certain age range so it might be age range between say 25 and 50 right and you're just going after that target facebook is optimizing way better for that you might put in the

zip code or something else but it's not where you're telling facebook hey i want to target people that like uh barkbox or i want to target people that like health food or any of those things you're literally telling basically hey just go after this addressable audience and let's make it work and again that didn't used to work so well but i can tell you it works very well and i'm not the

only one seeing this so we have one of the cool things about 10x factory is we have all these entrepreneurs that share your information and it's like we're kind of cheating with each other because it's like hey how's your business from botox doing he's like oh you know i'm doing open targeting that's winning i have a friend that does solar where he's selling um solar installs he's like yeah open targeting's working

david you've worked with a ton of martial arts people they're moving more and more to open targeting too aren't they yeah absolutely i always um to be honest for them for for years i i think it probably works for local before it works for bigger brands um but for yeah i always tell them just it's location within i i asked them how far would people realistically drive to your studio it's in

five miles i go okay set location at plus five miles from your address um i said if you get more moms or data to sign and that's it don't put interests uh what happens is you just put out your angles your creative your your copy and your images as people click on it as people even as people just stop on their feet and read it facebook is watching all of this and

it's learning it's its machine learning algorithms are recognizing the patterns between different people and sending it to people that it feels record fit those patterns and machine learning has just come so far in the last few years that and facebook is one of the most advanced uh machine learning operations on the planet yeah yeah the only thing never be concerned about is again if you have a very tight persona that you're

going after facebook's gonna go after the lowest possible result so you might get a bunch of people that are going to be your wrong audience but for some odd reason they're still downloading the thing uh we saw that with like grandmas when we were going after like uh independent pharmacies we had like a bunch of like 65 plus year old women downloading this lead magnet and i was like they were complaining

about drugs costing too much you know pharmaceutical drugs and i was like oh all right i can't do open targeting there all right um have any other questions you around click down the front you accidentally needed it again right i think that's one sorry did i meet eric that was intense i'm not sure hey hang on one sec i've just uh we'll just go to this question you're gonna have to repeat

this one um it sounds like um talking to customers was pretty integral in how you guys thought about the copy and the content you're putting into your ads are you using anything else outside of having direct conversations with your customers to get feedback at i guess a scale and how would you use that what would you do yeah we do we we use a a lot of sources uh we use testimonials

in reviews uh we and we hunt for patterns in those uh we use uh surveys um and hunt for patterns and those um we use uh questions that come into like customer service for example so a lot so we look for uh pre-sale questions so questions that people need answered before they're willing to buy and we uncover those objections we work those objections and their answers into marketing um those are probably

the big ones npv.org yeah i mean what we do with that data in a couple tricks that we do with that data really help reveal patterns obviously we read as much as possible um but sometimes you have these huge data sets where you want to also find some patterns that stick out too so like one of the things that we sometimes do is we'll take all the five star reviews from a

company right and we'll go ahead and we'll throw it into a word map or a cloud word cloud and what it'll do is actually show largest words with the highest density and suddenly you start to see the reasons that people actually sign up might not be what you thought so like a great example of this is um you know we work with a brand that they're a geek box you know it's

uh comics and and funko dolls and all this other stuff and it turns out that a lot of people actually purchase it for t-shirts when we went through all these five-star reviews t-shirt was like one of the highest things mentioned in these reviews so it's sometimes the surprising things that happen and that'll help you identify the pattern another thing that we do in surveys that can sometimes help from the data side

is we ask a question it's often called the net promoter sport where we'll ask at the end of the survey how likely are you recommend this service to a friend one out of ten right you can immediately rank those now by the number for those responses and focus on the top customers there's reasons to actually focus on the lower end customers too but they're different than that first layer of marketing that

first layer of angles trust me non-buyers will give you answers too but that's where the real marketing magic for the first step happens yeah but those are um they don't conversation the direct conversations are better because to a review if there's an interesting line of review you can't ask it what do you mean by that i've tried it does not it's just embarrassing to talk to my computer screen trust me it's

a painful process sometimes doing this like david's an introvert i'm actually in for we get exhausted after the phone calls and like he um he'll do like you know five of these phone calls but we do it because it's so effective what we do in our business and we've done it you know again across small businesses big business doesn't really matter when you start talking to your customers you're getting closer at

a customer you always win that's how you stay ahead of everyone else because i tell you facebook's going to get more expensive adwords is going to get more expensive email deliverability is going to get more difficult all these things are going to happen but the person that understands their customer on the deep level is already overcoming all these things and just has a better product better messaging saying the words that they

want you're always going to win but you're doing it because you're doing the work nobody else is going to do i actually find that really interesting because when we do job interviews with new candidates we always ask a question about how you get to know an industry you don't know and no one ever says i'd ask the customer they basically find all these other things they can do online without talking to

anyone it's a way to solve the problem um we had a question off the back i think yeah hey hang on one sec david okay oh actually um i i've given this talk a few times and i where i asked people i didn't even remember what the setup was but basically the answer was that you know you just like how do you find how do you find out the exact thing your

your customers want and need and i open it up to the audience and i probably got a lot of the answers ryan that you've got in these in these job interviews and then i'd say well how about you just ask him and the room kind of goes sound for a second and then people laugh because when you it's like like you don't there's there's almost like in you know in acting there's

the idea of like the fourth wall people almost feel like there's this fourth wall but you can it doesn't really exist and honestly offer anybody a 25 amazon gift card and they will get on the phone with you for an hour um so that that's an easy it's easy there to do that yeah so oh yeah we turned that 25 into millions yes all right so we have the question up the

back i think one over here andrea run um my name's sarah and i'm just wondering is um is it available over here your game i just looked on your website and i saw that there's international rates for postage but i'm just wondering how much they are because i love a thriller so the question is can we buy hunter killer over here because i think well at least one person definitely wants to

buy it but a percentage of a percentage of the audience look interesting interested we do ship to australia we love our aussie neighbors well not really neighbors but our aussie friends um it does cost an arm and a leg it doesn't cost at least an hour it does cost a little bit more to shift but we i think we do have a 25 off deal running right now if you work again

is there another question yeah i think there was another question but everyone's laughing at david trying to get the dog sorted again there was one more up the back wasn't there no yes because we've got time for one more yep we've invented one at the back that's good um hi my name's laura firstly thank you so much guys that was amazing um what about some of the challenges like do you find

getting organic reach on your platforms challenges or what are some of the key challenges that you've found in social media marketing so the question there was what are the key challenges that you find um with what you're doing and there was also a question about organic reach and whether whether that's proving to be a challenge but i'm not sure that's something you guys are concerned about and so wait what are they

what do you mean by challenge um what are you talking about like the challenges in terms of like marketing challenges now would you overcome them are you talking about hiring challenges what what kind of challenges are you are you talking about yeah sorry you've got a microphone today um i just think when you tell these stories i think some of the um biggest learnings come from the challenges that you faced and

i'm sure to build up such an amazing business you guys have faced many challenges along the way so just keen to hear about some of the harder things and what the key learnings were and how you overcame them so yeah the um the challenges in running this particular campaign but why don't we uh if you've got any why don't you talk about a couple of screw-ups you had along the way as

well because i'm assuming that you you had one or two i so okay i'd say on the marketing side um i don't know if i'd say uh if we'd ever really call anything a screw-up because our philosophy because everything is data right like you you win or you learn um and and when you lose and you look at that and you go why you get some of your best theories that become

winners that said eric and i have had many screw-ups as far as uh interpersonally in dealing with clients um we can be kind of bulls in a china shop and what i mean by that is is eric eric and i are ready to iterate very rapidly based on what we hear from customers we to us the customers came nobody is more important we go hey guys your customers are saying is we

need to do this and and we'll get well that's not our brand that's and well no no and uh we have um made a lot of enemies also we move very fast too a lot of times and sometimes we break stuff or we were unorganized or we just kind of leave uh we blaze a trail and leave debris in our wake that um other people who work at the company are left

to clean but because we're just on this uh rampage to find results and that's because that's what we're hired for that's what they need from us we kind of take no prisoners do what it takes um so i would say some of our biggest growths have been in and and being so like tunnel vision in our process that we don't actually eric is much better than this than i am i am

i'm more i get so tunnel vision that it's like when someone tells me no or when someone tells me they don't want to do it like when it's a marketing thing and to me it's so clearly the right answer uh some of my students have been more interpersonally learning how to like hear their concerns out better um uh because i i kind of like i view it as like survival right business

is so important business pays the bills to put food on the table i don't see any time to mess around and i can get way too intense um i so some of my biggest groups have been just interpersonally learning to take a step back hear what people have to say even when i disagree with them um and navigate that better i honestly i don't know if there's such thing as a big

scrub like we live in a world now where like you make a mistake and you can adapt so quickly like it it you know everything for me is a process right you mentioned something about challenges like what's my biggest challenge and my co-founder of uh 10x he actually is the founder of big commerce and he taught me this framework where he always focuses on the top bottleneck in his business and that's

it he focuses on it sesame and we kind of take the same approach when we're focusing on getting customers we focus on cost acquisition we focus on a single goal we do these things but late whenever we run into challenges we always go back to a process right so if we were running a situation where our conversion is dipping right or our facebook ads aren't doing as well we actually usually go

towards the conversion and we start making phone calls again we start surveying people again so we have all these process when i make a mistake but years ago i used to send out email i don't do it anymore i hire people to send it david writes he doesn't send him either he hasn't hired me hire people to do it when somebody sends out the wrong email or they send out the bad

email you know a lot of people would flip out or get upset we look at it as like okay well can we send an email follow up that says oops or something along those lines that can make us more money but can we also teach this person that just sent this to implement a process that can avoid that mistake from happening in the future right so maybe their process is that they

have a checklist before every email sent they need to do these things so like we did have a couple of like i don't know if we had a couple of hiccups like there was a couple of days where like facebook for instance during like black friday they lost reporting entirely so i was flying blind essentially guessing what our ad spend was that day and looking at google analytics right you kind of

gotta adapt uh there was times where not in this particular brand but there's been times where i've had typos well i'm gonna tell you a big secret that's really really really funny because i was talking again like my friends would do facebook sometimes typos actually improve conversion why because all the people that are going to tell you that you spelled something wrong are making comments on your app facebook loves comments so

suddenly all these people that are hating on me are suddenly making my ad perform better for me thank you very much so like we sometimes do stuff like that didn't happen in this campaign we did have one thing that happened well two things i kind of regret on a postmortem right number one um we got we got spam during the holiday but it wasn't our fault so we were on a server

called klaviya and there's a share of that email our emails started only going to spam yep right you're not familiar with that terminology and clavio had us on the shared eye people and all these other people were sending enclavio's server itself not us their server got spamtrap by gmail so we lost all this momentum we probably could add another like 500 600k to our total revenue during that period of time but

we lost out on that because we had a 14 day spam trap we should have been in our dedicated so that is one regret but you don't know that going into it the other regret that i guess i have is that when you see momentum sometimes the best thing to do is just feed into it one of the things that um eddie from big commercial means like you know you look at

adwords back in the day it was so cheap he was paying something like 19 cents a click for these big keywords to get people to sign up for e-commerce platform today those same keywords would cost 19 so if he could go back in time he would go ahead and pour even more money on that and let it grow when i look at you know something like uh the holiday hunter killer where

i just saw i kept adding money and money money money to this most profitable profit i wish i spent more so two biggest regrets for me i don't know if there were mistakes because i now have you know hindsight i didn't have foresight were that i wish that we were on dedicated ip for our email sends and we didn't get messed up there and secondly i also wish that we spent more

money because when the gold rush is here when bitcoin goes from 10 000 to 20 000 you want to ride that wave and honestly you don't get a second chance a lot of times like you know we're going to have this next opportunity going into this next year but like how many more cycles do you think are going to be on facebook before it's going to become cost prohibitive for a lot

of e-commerce business um unless they're really good at their marketing really close to their customers i i i second that it's very easy i actually that's a screw up i have lived through myself many times where it's very easy when a tactic is working to get overconfident and suddenly the mind and this is this mindset though it's a pattern that we all go through where you go you think oh i'm good

i'm good for life this is never going to stop i'm getting results for life when really you have no idea when those results are going to stop and in those times like just like you said with eddie in some of my companies too i wish at the times where uh when when it was cheap to generate customers we had just poured gas on the fire because that gets you through the times

where and every business has these times where marketing dries up for whatever reason um or try something you have to adapt right like yeah exactly drying up means that means it's time to adapt but sometimes uh you don't get sometimes you can see the the downline and it's slow and you can adapt sometimes it's the next day conversion conversion is cut in half uh costs double overnight um and you don't have

time but in the time when it was good if you spent more you'd have this cushion of revenue for more customers to get you through that so that's that's um something else too is uh is is sort of the inverse of that is spending money on things that weren't that didn't justify hurting the spending um wasting money and then sending bad money after good or sending good money after that um when

something is improving uh if a tactic isn't working throwing more money at it usually doesn't make it work something else is going on don't send good money after that all right well thank you both very much for joining us i know it's it's getting pretty late there and i really appreciate you making time particularly when you're in the middle of moving and family and things eric so uh all right um really

appreciate your time i'll i'll follow up with both of you but um if we can thank eric and and david everyone