You're listening to Cubicle to CEO episode 234. Curious what it's like to bring your ads in house. Today's case study gives you an inside look at the numbers and ads management process of a non ads agency business, spending more than $1 million yearly on meta, aka Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns. Again, these are their own campaigns and dollars not ad spend for clients, after watching her cost per lead rise while her profit margin shrunk, Nicki Krawczyk, creator of the Circuit Sales System and founder of Nicki K Media decided it was time to let go of her ads agency and bring ads in house. Not only did this move reduce her monthly management fees by 80%, from $3,000, and agency service retainers to just $600 to run her own ads. But it also helped Nicki to understand her target audience faster and deeper than ever before. Find out if you're ready to run your ads internally with Nicki's four reflection questions. What type of ads are working best in 2024? And why adding a double opt in is an underrated sales strategy.
Welcome to Cubicle to CEO, the podcast where we ask successful founders and CEOs the business questions you can't google. I'm your host, Ellen Yin. Every Monday go behind the business and a case study style interview with the leading entrepreneur who shares one specific growth strategy they've tested in their own business exactly how they implemented it, and what the results and revenue worth. You'll also hear financially transparent insights from my own journey bootstrapping our media company from a $300 freelance project into millions in revenue.
Hey, everyone, welcome back to the show. I am very excited today to have Nicki Krawczyk. With us, Nicki is going to be sharing how she brought her ads in house and actually reduced her ad service cost by 80%. So that, as you can imagine, adds a ton to her bottom line to increasing her net profits. We'll get into the details in just a moment. But first, Nicki, I'd love to hear your Cubicle to CEO story. What brought you into the world of entrepreneurship?
Yes, absolutely. Thank you for having me, Ellen, super excited to be here. Years and years ago, I My background is in copywriting. and years and years ago, I had to teach some copywriting to some people and I thought, oh, you know, maybe this would be something that could be a course. And me little, little baby entrepreneur, I was like, Well, great. If I just put a course out into the world, people are going to buy it. And this is going to be so easy. And of course, that's not at all how it goes.
And so from really from from 2012 to 2016, people were buying a little bit and they were using it, they were having fantastic results. But I was treating it like a hobby. And it was really at the end of 2018 when I started to get really serious about the business and lean into what I knew, which was messaging and consumer psychology. And really set aside all of the stuff that everybody says you have to do. You know, you have to launch, you have to all of this, you have to have a free Facebook group, all of that stuff, I set it aside, I said I need it to be automated, I need to be able to step back, and I need it to support people in purchasing.
And so what I did was, I created a system to sell that course on autopilot. And then we also actually also have a course for freelancers. And then that core, that system that I created toward the end of 2022. I had some business friends say, hey, that way that you sell your courses, can you can you teach us how to do that? So I packaged that together? And now we also sell the circuit sales system to of course creators, program creators, all that kind of stuff. So we are a three brand company, which yes, I would not a lot necessarily recommend every day. Yes, but But it's a lot of fun. Yeah.
That's incredible. Well, I mean, honestly, that's a rude awakening that many of us have to go through when we enter the the one to many space where I think there's this narrative online that online courses are passive income. And that's actually one of the reasons that I've always staunchly chosen not to refer to online courses as passive because they're not they're not truly passive. They're residual income, Shore recurring income, but it's, it certainly takes as you lived an experience a lot of work upfront to get the automations and the sales system down and dialed in to be able to produce those more predictable sales, if you will.
But obviously, I mean, just based on this case study, you have done an amazing job of making that happen in your own business. So just for some background for our listeners, Nicki has created multi seven figures from her online courses and Like I referenced at the beginning of this episode, for many years, Nicki was spending about $750,000 a year in ads. So that's just ads budget for, you know, spending on like meta Facebook, Instagram, right what you're paying to have your ads shown. And then on top of that, spending about $80,000, a year on the ad agency, who would actually service and run these ads. So about four months ago, as of the time of this recording, at least, you chose to make a drastic change, and you let go of your agency, which then cut your service costs from about $3,000 a month, which is what you were paying your agency to $600 a month by bringing ads back in house to your internal team.
So when you made this cut, I understand that there was a series of questions that you kind of had to ask yourself to ensure that this was the right move for you. Would you mind walking our listeners through the questions that you asked yourself? Because I'm sure many of them apply to others who may be in a similar situation?
Absolutely, absolutely. And I do want to be very clear, I have nothing against our previous agency, they are fantastic. And I wholeheartedly recommend them. But as we were, we were looking at what was happening with our account, we saw our cost per lead increasing, we saw profit margin decreasing. And I knew that I wanted to get my hands on it years ago, I had run the ads myself, but again, you know, a three brand company it gets it gets busy. And don't get me wrong it is. But I wanted to get my hands on there and explore again and run experiments myself. But to your point, it's not a matter of like, okay, great. Well, we're bringing my house and I'm just going to add it on top of the stuff that I'm already doing.
And that's one of the first questions is, if you're thinking about either running ads yourself first, or you are thinking about bringing them back in house, the first question has to be Okay, what else you're going to take off of your plate, so that you can do the ads. Because just like course creation or selling courses is not passive income. There's nothing passive about ads, you are regularly actively testing, you're monitoring your metrics, all of those things. So what are you going to take off your plate to make room for the ads. And truly, I could probably easily spend like 20 hours a week on this stuff between coming up with new copy and all of the different tests, we could be running. And my schedule was already full. So I had to get real tough on myself there, what's going to come off my plate.
And then on top of that, too, was I willing to dig back in and learn what's happening in Facebook ads now? Because the last time I was actively in there was a good couple of years ago. And yes, obviously things have changed. But also there are new tactics that people are trying all the time. And that is a time suck to to stay on top of that and to digest that content, in addition to the fact that I'm the president of a multi seven figure per year business. So there's business information that I'm trying to constantly consume and stay on top of. And then to really for my background is in copywriting. Yes.
So if your background is not in copywriting a question has to be Do you have a really, really good copywriting resource? Or are you willing to learn how to craft messaging that is super duper insightful? And we'll get into to targeting and we'll get into messaging and why you can't rely on just messaging and you can't rely on just targeting that kind of thing. But that's a major consideration. It's not just, you know, back when I was first getting into business, it was like, you could just run ads for $10 a day and you're gonna have a multimillion dollar business. And it's, it's it is absolutely I don't think it ever was that. But that's absolutely not it. It really takes some some concerted efforts and thinking.
And then on top of that, to how well do you know your target audience? And also willing to get to know them even better? Because I think your average business owner would say, Well, yeah, I might I know them sure that you absolutely. I know who my target audience is. But you may have a sense of who they are. They think you know them really well, because you used to be your own target audience. But the your audience has evolved and you are a different person from where you were when you were having your problem solved, which means languages, language has changed, needs and wants and fears and all of that kind of stuff that change. You need to be able to talk to that through certainly throughout your sales cycle. But in your ads, especially if you really want to catch their attention. It is harder than ever before, to catch people's attention. But you need to be able to understand them so that you can message them so that you can catch their attention. Yeah.
Absolutely. And what would you say? Is your your favorite way to stay on top of making sure you really are dialed into your target audience. Are you conducting regular market research? Are there other tactics that you're employing either yourself or your team that's making it possible for you to really narrow in on? What's front of mind for them in that moment?
Absolutely. So on one side, yes, absolutely. We're regularly doing market research calls and not surveys, everybody wants to just send out a survey instead, because it's easier, but you don't get the right piece of information, you'll get the in depth information. That's one of the things we go into in the circuit Sale system is is teaching people how to get that insightful messaging. So yeah, we're doing calls and we're getting that. But then on the other side of that, you get a lot of information, just by running ads on meta. And by seeing, okay, I started this one with this line. And I started this one with this line. And interesting, people clicked through this one so much more often, and, or this one, I thought that was going to be the one and they just they didn't resonate with them. So it really kind of works in both directions.
Right. And I could not agree more that there is nothing that can replace that face to face, or even audio interaction where people can expand on a thought that a survey just simply doesn't cover. I think a survey is like maybe in my mind almost more of a great indicator form like a way for people to kind of self select yourself filter that they may have a certain interest or a certain problem or whatnot, but for the actual real answers that you want to incorporate in your copyright, that the call or the video chat is essential. So I agree with you 100% There, one of the questions, the reflective questions that you had submitted, in your case study pitch to us that also caught my attention was this question of, can you view the results objectively and utilizing that as a way to determine if you're ready to bring ads in house?
Can you share a little bit more about what you mean by that? And what are some of the guidelines, if you will, that you have implemented to ensure that you are staying objective and not allowing your emotions to rule your decisions around ads?
Absolutely. I mean, here's the thing is that fundamentally, when you're running your own ads, you're dealing with your own money, and increasing a spend, or decreasing a spend or testing something new every time you see, you know, you get the Facebook email saying like, yeah, we spent another $900 of your money. It's an imagine and we used to spend $750K, now we're closer to a million a year. So imagine how many of those I get my inbox, it is inherently going to be a little bit emotional, at least as you get started with it. So prepare yourself for that. But you also can't log in and be like, that's, that's $10 that I can't spend in a latte. That's it's, you do have to be able to say, alright, this is business.
And you have to to understand how much you're willing to, I don't want to say play with because it's not playing it is experimenting, this is the science, but how much you comfortable spending, how much can you put out without needing to get something back? And I know that a lot of people are gonna say, Well, I can't I can't put anything out without without getting something back. But I bet that that's not true. I bet that for most business owners, even if you are brand new to it, I bet you could probably spend 50 bucks every couple of days in order to get some results and you can start testing in that place. Just start testing to get a feel for what messaging is, is resonating, taking yourself out of it and putting on and putting on your CEO hat not wearing the the consumer the this is my this is my money hat.
Right.
It can be hard, but it has, it's something that you have to do. You have to look at the money not as something that's coming out of your pocket. But that is your business's money. And every it truly should be an investment. And I think that that can be a little bit confusing for our brains as we move away from being a consumer and we are in the CEO hat because when we spend money it's gone. Right? Right. But the goal with ads is that we spend money and more comes back to us and certainly that's not true. I've certainly I've had plenty of campaigns that I'm like this is gonna work great.
And then it just bombs but the learnings even if I didn't get a ton of leads from those the learnings are useful for the next ones that I spent, you know I spend truly it is amazing to know that we spend a million dollars a year on ads that is mind boggling. Especially as I think back to like little baby entrepreneur me. I give I give a million dollars away to a stranger. But I do it because we get so much more back and it is the most cost effective way to reach the kind of scale that we want to across our brands. You know we on our copywriting brand. We have sold the courses to more than 11,000 students.
Amazing.
It is amazing. And the only way that we could have gotten to those numbers is with a large scale advertising campaign or multiple campaigns.
100% And honestly, this is what really attracted me to your case study Nicki is that you are playing at such a high level of scale when it comes to ad spend. And I want to encourage our listeners that if you're hearing this and you're like, I can't even imagine like my business doesn't even make a million dollars a year, I couldn't imagine spending. What is that like the equivalent of $83,000? a month? Right on? Is that right? 83. I think that's right, anyways, 80k+, a month in ads, like if that's hard for you to fathom or wrap your mind around, I really do want to encourage you to still distill, like what Nicki is saying, on the mental or the mindset approach to ADS, even if the numbers don't match up in your business. And what I mean by that is, one of the pieces that I want to highlight of what Nicki shared that I absolutely agree with is so much of ads as far as investment is in buying data faster. That's the way I think about it, right?
It's like if you want to test a concept, maybe a piece of messaging, or an offer, or whatever it is, if you're putting something out there organically, it's going to take you quite a bit of time to gather enough feedback to determine one way or the other. If this is a go or a no. But with ads, because you are buying attention, essentially, you're able to so much more quickly filter through all of these decisions, which allows you to move more efficiently in your business. So I would encourage you even if you spend like $250, let's say and it doesn't result in a purchase, the data that you've bought with that $250 is still going to tell you something valuable. And that can then lead to profits down the line. So anyways, I think that's such an important piece. I'm really glad you brought that up.
Nicki, I do also want to get into kind of the numbers piece of the transition. So you know, I had mentioned that previously, you were spending about $3,000 a year on the agency side before you-
A month.
Internal or sorry, a month. Yes, yeah, 3000 a month.
And actually, I think it was 3500, which is actually not that expensive. Even there are plenty of agencies that are much more expensive. Yeah,
I would agree with that. There's lots of agencies that charge like upwards of $10,000 to run your ads, especially at a an ad budget size that Nicki was running at, you know, spending a million dollars a year on ads. But I didn't want to quickly clarify that number. Because even if we take 3500 I think at the very beginning of the case study, I had mentioned that previously, your service costs for ads, were around $80,000.30 500 times 12, doesn't quite equal $80,000.
So what was that differential between like the 36 to 40k, that you spent on the ad services side? What was the additional 40,000 you are spending?
The additional comes into the cost of hiring copywriters to work on our team to do that the ad spend to work with designers to do that to do additional work, and then to have video support. Do all the rest of it. Yeah, it's that agency that worked with was was terrific. But we wanted to we wanted to really focus on our own creative. Yeah.
Yeah. And that is something that I can attest to as well is sometimes an ad agency can be really great at the actual, I guess signs of running an ad but like the creative piece, like the graphics they use, the videos aren't always up to the standard that maybe you would want. And so bring it internal kind of does make sense there. When you let go of the agency, and you brought your service cost down to $600 a month, I understand that you're kind of in there running the actual ads, what is that $600 A month now account for in terms of labor costs?
That is now a designer? Yeah, right.
Designer.
Exactly. We have found that trying to do any kind of big production, trying to do anything flashy anything. It just does not perform. Nothing has been and will certainly keep testing, right. That's, that is the name of the game. But down dirty in terms of in terms of videos, absolutely. Very straightforward in terms of images, copy on images, some of our branding photos, with copy on images, those tend to perform best, the great thing is, is that on all of our brands, we have really compelling messaging. And as we lean into that compelling messaging, we find that we don't have to catch people's attention with gimmicks or that kind of thing.
Yeah, right. And I feel like as a consumer too, I tend to pause and watch an ad more anyways, when it feels a little bit more organic or native to whatever platform I'm seeing it on rather than a highly produced piece of creative. The only exception I would say to that is if the creative is so outstanding in its artistic direction, like the cinematography, the edits, like if it's so out of this world, then yes, that captures my attention. But so few ads really meet those metrics or that that standard and so I love that you've been able to drastically decrease those gaps. on the service side.
Yeah, it's been simplification and focusing on connecting with our audiences with messaging that they're most interested in and finding the right audiences too.
Right. 100%. And when you let go of your ads agency, so you were able to shift that work internally to yourself in terms of the actual ad management, versus someone who is thinking of doing the same and letting go their agency, but they may not be as well equipped themselves to run the ads. How would you have approached this? I guess, if you maybe didn't have the bandwidth or capacity to take it on yourself? Would you have trained a team member internally before you made this move? And would you have felt comfortable training them yourselves? Would you have paid maybe the agency even to train the team member or someone else? A consultant? Like, I'm just curious how you would have approached that that obstacle if it had been presented to you?
Yeah, absolutely. If I had not been familiar with ads myself, I do think that it's, again, the agents that we work with previously great people fantastic. So that definitely would have been something that I would have explored. If you have a resource who maybe you have not worked with them as an agency. But if they're willing to come in and train someone on your team, that's a fantastic resource. There are also all kinds of great training programs out there. Before we start recording, you and I were talking about one, which I'm sure you will share, I would say to that even if you're going to have someone on your team, running the ads for you, you should have an understanding of ads, because it's the same problem that we see business owners run into when they try to outsource something to an agency that they don't fundamentally understand.
It's really easy to and I'm not saying this, what happened with our agency, but I have seen it happen again. And again, it's really easy to set money on fire, because you're trusting someone else to do something that you don't fundamentally understand. So you can't even go into and say, Wait, why are the numbers looking like this? What is, if you don't understand it, then you are completely at the mercy of I don't know, the algorithms or the all that kind of thing.
Or whatever they tell you, right, whatever, whatever filtered information they give you, you kind of have to accept as truth. And again, to your point, I mean, most agencies operate with integrity and, and would try to, to the best of their ability give you the full context and picture. But there are some, of course, that in an act of self preservation may be very selective. It's like, it's what's that? What is that that like debate of like, if you don't share the full information? Are you telling the full truth is telling the full truth meaning telling all details? Or can you be selective in what you share and still be telling the truth, right, so I do see the importance of at a very base level, at least being able to internally recognize what is considered a successful outcome versus not so that you can advocate for changes if you feel like those successful outcomes are not being met.
Exactly. If you don't understand something you need to know where you will have access to your Facebook data database, your dashboard, you have the ability to dig in there. But if you don't even know, then then you don't. So even if you're going to have someone on your own team, which we may explore, we may have someone on our team so I can offload some of the things that I'm working on. But you should at least have some understanding so that you don't completely take your hands off of it. Because that's no better than having an agency. Sure, it may be a little bit less expensive. But if you're completely, completely hands off, and you're in the dark about what's happening, and what the numbers mean, and all of that kind of thing, you're gonna get yourself into trouble real fast.
Yeah, 100%, especially because as CEOs, like our decisions really drive the vision of the company. So if you don't know what if you don't have the information or the input, you need to make the correct decisions, then yeah, you can quickly mislead or go down and go down the wrong path. And then to clarify, for our listeners, when Nicki and I were talking earlier about, you know, a program that could help you if you're wanting to learn ads, and especially if you want to learn how to bring it in house, both Nicki and I highly recommend Tara's Zirker's Successful Ads Accelerator. They're just an incredible program. And I say program because it's not a course it really is like a handheld done with you at least how they've structured it now going into 2024, for you to really learn how to run ads in house, either yourself or team member.
So if you want to learn more about their program, I'll drop a link to an email we sent last year about them. We just love, love Tara and her team, they really do care. And they're so committed to making sure that you have as much contextual knowledge as possible about being able to make those nuanced ad decisions. So anyways, that'll be a resource in the show notes if you would like to explore an option for that, because Nicki doesn't teach ads. And that's another thing that I am so grateful to you, for Nicki and all of our guests on the show is that Nicki is vulnerably coming on this show right and giving us a peek into her world of how she spends money in ads and how she's executing that on her team. And this is not her area of expertise that she's getting paid to teach on, so the fact that you're opening your doors to us and and letting us take that peek behind the curtain or under the hood, if you will, is really appreciate I just wanted to thank you.
Yeah, no, absolutely. It's this is what we're all curious about, right? What actually happens behind behind the scenes? What numbers we're actually working with, which is why I have been such a fan of your podcast for so long. Because you don't find this anywhere else.
Thank you. Oh, my gosh, do you even worked in our tagline? Asking questions that you can't google? That's, that's awesome. Or answering the questions you can't google. I wanted to also circle back to an earlier point you referenced about how one of the filter questions you ask yourself was, Do I have the capacity to move things off of my plate so that I can actually take on, you know, the ads management piece myself? What word Could you give us some examples of the things that you did offload to prepare for this internal shift?
Yeah, and those were some tough decisions, which, you know, the so much of business can be tough decision. But we had to put the brakes on some new programs that we were considering creating for various places and the brands, because usually, I am the prime content creator for our courses. And that takes up a whole lot. I mean, you know, it takes up a whole lot of my time, and a whole lot of my brain energy, I think I really only have maybe like, four to five good hours every day, I'm truly good work. And taking trying to fit the two of those trying to fit big projects in with also focusing on ads was just absolutely untenable, it couldn't be done.
So we had to put the brakes on those, there's still things that we they obviously were not must do is not immediate, required courses to create. But there's still definitely things that we're thinking about, and we'd like to do. But it's the tough decisions, what has to be the priority. And because so many of our leads come in through our meta ads that the vast majority do. And the cool thing about the way that our system works is that once the leads are in the door, it just it just they sell automatically. But we have to focus on those leads, we have to make sure that we have good quality leads coming in, and that the leads are at a cost per lead that works with the rest of the system.
So in terms of priority is wasn't even really a question when you actually looked at it in terms of right, these courses could be something down the line, but it's going to be a lot of time and energy investment upfront. Versus if we make some changes. If we dig in here, if we kind of I don't want to say right the boat, but really dig in to our messaging and really, really nail it. We're gonna see effects not just now. But the people we get in now. And in the future, it's then it's average lifetime value as well, you know, so it is an investment of time and energy and money. Yeah.
Absolutely. And those are some of the toughest calls to make honestly, as the leader at the helm, right, like driving this bow is what is going to get us the biggest long term gains. And this idea of significance, long term significance, not just like an urgent priority is so hard to wrestle with sometimes. And so I applaud you for being able to have long term foresight to say, okay, like, yes, these courses can make us money, but we really need to get this piece dialed in before we can even explore adding something else to the table. So kudos to you.
And speaking of learnings, I know you've learned a lot running ads, both internally and also just from observing over the years of spending at such a high scale of you know, a million dollars a year, I want to dig into some of those learnings that you've been able to see and observe of like the best ad practices over the last 12 months. Let's let's start with demographics. Because you've already kind of mentioned really understanding your your, your ideal customer and bringing in those quality leads. So yeah, from my understanding, you have a two prong approach you for your demographics ad so like you, you are running conversion ads. And then you're also running traffic ads that are leading to podcast episodes that showcase past students in your programs who are sharing their own case studies or their own testimonials. Right, which is great.
Yes.
You mentioned in your original submission that the podcast ads were not necessarily a retargeting play that anybody could see those traffic ads alongside the conversion ad. So just to clarify these two types of ads are running concurrently. Is that-
Yeah.
Is that-
Currently to the same audience? And the reason again, sure, some people who have a little bit more Facebook understanding might say, Wow, but you could use that you could be retargeting them they didn't opt in or if it but here's the thing. You're gonna have some people that look at the conversion ads and then just opt in right away they go Oh, yes, this is what I want. Absolutely. You're gonna have some people that look at the conversion ads ago. I don't know I don't know, running the podcast ads to that particular demographic. With a story about that particular demographic, when they see that podcast ad, it will either if they haven't opted in, it may encourage them to go back and opt in.
And if they have opted in, it may just encourage them to make a purchase. So there's no reason for us not to show these ads to the wider audience. It only benefits us the more people that see it. And then on top of the back to that we are driving people to podcast ads. But it's a podcast page that is hosted on our site. We're not driving directly to Apple or Spotify, which I did test in the past. But unfortunately, because you're driving too soon, another site, all you knows what you're paying per click, you don't know what they're doing there. It's a little bit opaque. But because we're driving to the site, then yes, they can also listen to podcasts, or they can click off to Apple and Spotify, they have that opportunity. But then they can also explore on the site.
And we have the opportunity once they're there to say, Oh, if you like this podcast, listen to this other episode and listen to this other episode. Maybe you'd like to see this case study, here's a video for it. So it all just kind of gently brings them into the ecosystem. But there's from both sides, we want everybody to see all of it.
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This is well, first of all so smart. I have a question on the actual conversion ad piece I'm going to circle back to so please remind me if I lose my train of thought. But before this other thought leaves my head, I just want to highlight a very nuanced piece that you just mentioned for our listeners because I feel like it's so important to understand this.
So Nicki just mentioned that when driving, you know these traffic ads so traffic ads meaning like the the primary objective is to get someone to click on the ad and head to a website, right. She's driving them to the podcast episode embedded on her own landing pages on her own website. Reason for that if you're not familiar with ads at all, Facebook, or meta has a pixel that you can add to your website that tracks all the actions someone takes on your website from an ad. Whereas if you're sending to straight to Apple or straight to Spotify, because you don't own that website or that platform, you're kind of in a blind spot from there. Like Nicki said, you can't really see what they do beyond clicking over to the episode. The newest piece that I want to bring out here though, is this is why it's so important to understand I think your end objective with running an ad and what I mean by that is in Nicki's case, a successful ad outcome. There may be many steps someone takes to get here but at the end of the day, a successful outcome would be someone purchasing a program or joining a course of hers, right. So of course, she's going to want to send someone to her website so that they can do these other actions that she can then track.
For us as an example, when we run traffic ads to our podcast episodes, because we have a different business model, and we're treating our podcasts as the product, even though there is no price tag attached to consuming it for you guys, our success metric is measured differently. So for us, the end goal is to drive people to the podcast to subscribe and follow into listen to as many episodes as possible. That's a different goal than getting someone to buy a program. And so for us, it actually makes more sense most of the time to drive an ad directly to a podcast player, because the rate of adoption for someone to actually follow natively in the app is much higher than if we send them to our landing page. So I just wanted to add in that nuance, because I feel like it was it was just like a perfect opportunity to showcase why understanding your ads on a higher level actually, is so necessary.
Well, and we may test running ads, I mean, why wouldn't be, we might go back and test running ads directly to say to Apple podcasts on iOS devices, because the cool thing is you can target with that if someone listening is not familiar, and see what the cost per click is because it may be some placements, you can see the the URL that it's going to some it's a little harder to say. But on some placements, you can see the world's going to, it may be enough of a lift, it may encourage people that trust factor may encourage people to click through to Apple because they know when they trust Apple, they don't know yet and trust us yet. So we might find that we get a low enough cost per click as compared to the other version, that it's worth either running those instead or running those as well. Or there all kinds of fun things to play with.
Yeah. Oh, that's such a good point. I didn't even think about that the psychological piece of like, existing brand trust brand equity in Apple versus your own to your point if you're running to cold traffic. Yeah, great point. I love that. Circling back to my question about the conversion ads. Yes. So can you give us an example of like, what is your best performing conversion ad right now? Is it a straight like lead magnet style opt in where people are just giving you their email and entering your, your funnel or your email ecosystem that way? Or are you trying to send them to let's say, like a low ticket product and get that purchase right off the bat as the first conversion point?
Yeah. And actually, this kind of gets into the system that I built, but I won't get too deep into it. Don't worry.
I would love to hear please include how that works in your closed circuit Sale system. Yeah.
Yeah. So everybody goes to an initial video, and it is a free video, obviously. And it's an on demand video, which is part of the key because it gives people we find that most people split it up over a couple of days, because people have lives. And then after they opt in, we have emails that are encouraging them to go back and watch the video. And then there's the whole ecosystem. But we have found that sending them to a video. And it's not just your average webinar, there's some pretty significant changes to it that make it different and affect people differently. But the thing is, is that when people first encounter you, they are at the peak of excitement, right when they first opt in when they first follow you on social, any of those, they're at the peak of excitement, they've been looking for a solution, and you might have that solution. And the problem is the problem that unfortunately, so many of us have been taught to make is that everything that we do after that often just burns up all of that all of that motivation and excitement.
And with low ticket and this is certainly not across the board, I'm sure that some people can do very well. But generally what I have found, I don't want anybody coming after me. But the problem is, is that what happens when we offer them a low ticket offer, we burn up that excitement on something low ticket, and then they buy it. And for so many people, myself included. So many people the purchase feels like the hard thing for them. So as soon as they make the purchase, they're like, oh, okay, I'm done. I mean, how many times have you purchased a low ticket item, like a little course or an ebook or something? You're like, Oh, that's great. I'm gonna get back to it. And you forget you even bought it.
Right?
Right like that? Yes. Like, I feel like there's definitely one or two things that I bought a second time because I forgot that I bought it in the first place. The problem is, is that we burn off that excitement on a low ticket item. And then we're hoping the theory is like, Oh, they bought from us once, then they'll buy from us later. But unfortunate because we burned off all that excitement. And psychologically we close the loop, write the person purchase and that close the loop for them. So they are done with us. Their brains are saying I don't have to think about this anymore. So they're not then encouraged to keep enter. I mean, we try to keep winning the back but they're not encouraged to keep winning, to keep consuming our stuff, all of that stuff. Fundamentally learning and consuming our products is an energy drain.
Yes, and don't get me wrong learning is very important. But learning has come on the other side of them purchasing our main offer, if we're going to take them to the point of, oh, no, I have to get through this. And certainly there are ways to support them and going through that. But if we're going to take them to that point of, oh, no, I have to, we better have done that on a big ticket item versus a $27. Because then it is really, really hard to win the back. So when people enter into our circuit, they get the opportunity to purchase our best offer or our flagship program. And then for some reason, that's not right for them, then we can down sell, and of course, their upsells and all kinds of stuff. But we would take them at the moment of peak excitement, and offer them the perfect solution that they've been looking for as close to that moment of peak excitement as possible. Instead of you know, nurture them for five days, or whatever it is, you could nurture and sell at the same time.
Yes. Oh my gosh, okay. I just like that one sentence, please, like embed this in your heads everyone you can nurture and sell at the same time. They are not mutually exclusive things that is such a key takeaway, you know, I, Okay. So first of all, you know, because you listen to the show, Nicki, we welcome hot takes on the show. And the, I think the beauty of our show is that there is such a diversity in the point of views based on our own lived experiences, right, as entrepreneurs, running businesses of what works well, for one business versus next. So I can totally understand. And it's really interesting, the way you phrase it, I haven't really thought about it that way before of like, categorizing people's actions by like, what action drains someone's energy versus what action fills someone's Energy Tank. And so that alone is a very interesting approach that I am definitely gonna marinate on a little bit more.
There's so many of us being taught that we have to teach that that's what we have to do. We have to give away our best stuff we have to teach teachers to teach. And I understand why we think that's okay. Because first of all, that's what we're being taught to do. And also because it's easier, right? Because if of course creators are we're used to teaching things. But all we're doing when we, when we teach, teach teach is we're sucking that energy, we're taking that that energy down, whereas instead of teaching, you're creating breakthroughs that inspire people that give them back possibility, and hope. And oh, like, oh, this could be the solution to the problem that I've been having for so long. And I didn't think you could actually, it's teaching is not the way to get people to make a purchase teaching is how you give them the information after they make the purchase. Before they make the purchase is not the place for teaching.
Ah gold, gold. And I will say that, in relation to we saw that as truth, like back when we sold a coaching program. And we had like a more traditional webinar funnel for that. Our webinar was so focused on shifting beliefs, not on teaching instructional how tos, because to your point, instructional how tos, at least in my experience, and it seems like in yours, too, are not very great at converting, like they're great for adding value to people, but it's not creating the end outcome that you want.
I will say as my own aside, like, because we like to feature different perspectives here, we have actually seen a lot of a lot of success in the past in our own business, selling straight to a low ticket product, and then seeing that conversion from, you know, someone entering our ecosystem with like a $27 purchase, and maybe one week later buying like a $2,000 program.
So I think the reason I bring that up is because again, what we hope you get from our show and any case studies, and entrepreneurs like Nicki who are transparently sharing what's working their own business is not so much to copy paste what anyone is doing exactly in their business, but rather teaching you how to think about business and how to pull the pieces that make the most sense for you and your business and your specific situation, and be willing to test them and also get to test strategies that have been proven to work like Nicki's approach of leading in with that, you know, on demand video and then selling them the perfect like right out the gate, hitting them with that flagship offer in the email ecosystem. Like that is so cool. And I love that that's worked well for you.
I did want to ask, though, for the actual audience targeting bringing it back to like the ad blends, right? Demographics typically, when people hear that word, they're immediately thinking really surface level things like gender or location, age range. How do you test like when you're picking audiences? A, I would love to know just for your your group of people like, what is the winning audience that you found? And do you typically go by interest based audiences, pure demo based audiences or lookalike audiences like which of those three are you finding the most success with at least as far as those conversion ads go?
Yeah, exactly. glad that you mentioned this, because one of the things that I keep hearing right now is like, Oh, you don't even have to worry about audience anymore. You can just let if you ever really good message, you can just let Facebook do its thing. Just it truly it's like just let Facebook pick who your audience is going to be. And there are a lot of people saying this right now, and it is not good advice. So here's an example, right? For the Circuit Sale System, one of the ads that we run, it talks about how I 40x my yearly business revenue, again, a little over two years. Yeah, it was very happy person, and also really compelling message. But so our target audience on that brand is course graders and group program coaches. But when you go too broad, like for example, even if you target something like people who like HubSpot, or something like that, when you get that broad, and you have a message that is objectively it's a compelling message, I 40x my business in a little over two years, right? You're going to get all kinds of people who are not your target audience, but want to know what you did, right?
So the curiosity like the nosiness, rather than the actual alignment of of need. Right?
Exactly. And I'm paying for those leads. I'm paying for it to be seen by all of these people, when it's only a certain group of people that I want to be seeing that. So certainly, test test everything right. But be very careful before you go into the it's whenever anybody says something, it's easy. It's almost never actually. Right. Yes. So just be very careful. And just think strategically, before you do it. We generally split between look alikes, and interest based audiences. Although I will say beyond that, I think that we are going to I think that is if I'm not the one who's doing it, I am going to start splitting out a little bit more we split out US versus International English speaking countries. And we do base our ad spend based on we're about across our brands, we're about 70% US 30%, I think on the Circuit Sale System might be 65%. us the rest are you know, Canada, England, New Zealand, Australia. And so the ad spend is it's not 50/50, certainly based on that, but also to we're looking at our demographics as people come in, and especially for circuit sales system, there's so many women in business, which is amazing, and very, very cool.
But Previously, I had not been breaking out audiences, we absolutely have men in our program, they are very welcome. But we had not been breaking it out. I was just suspending to the entire the entire like, say, for example, people who follow Amy Porterfield, that good example, right there, and that's probably that audience is largely female anyway. But I can break that out a little bit further, if I'm saying that 90% of the people that purchase from us are women, why don't I try breaking those two audiences out and test running ads to say, for example, people are interested in Amy Porterfield, women in that group, and people who follow Amy Porterfield men in that group and see how they perform exactly, you can get really granular and you know, you can we have on the copywriting brand, we have writing interests, and we have any interests in the US. And we have writing interests between the ages of 25 and 55. And then we're writing interest 18 to 24. And we have right, so you don't have to get this granular by any means I clearly I find this kind of fun, which is why I was comfortable doing it back in house.
Yeah.
But you can start at a relatively high level, and then kind of dig in and see where you can get more specific and, and really just get strategic with it. And as long as you treat it as an experiment.
Yeah.
And you're just you're just learning, it can have clearly have massive positive effects on your business.
That's incredible. And the interspace audience that has always, you know, been very interesting to me, because I feel like many of us in the online business space, use a similar group of interests, at least as like the starting test interests, right. I'm just curious, is there an interest? I mean, I don't know if you want to give away your best secrets. Granted, probably many of our listeners are not necessarily, you know, targeting the exact same demo or ideal client as you but I'm just curious for your own use case. Is there a particular audience interest that has performed exponentially? Well, that either you're surprised by or just that, you know, you've you've seen consistently outperform other interests?
I wouldn't say that there is anything that has been surprising, because you're right, that one of the frustrating things about Facebook is that it's very limited in the interest of someone has not tried Facebook ads out or try to interest is very limited in the groups that you can target. It used to be way back when, which I really missed these days. You used to be able to target based on like the pages that people liked, like, oh, they follow this page, because that was back when people follow up pages, but you know what I mean? And so you could be like, oh, I want to add this page in this way. There's so many really big companies and really big people that you're like, Oh, of course, like click funnels, of course I can follow I can get people like you can yes, you can use Russell Brunson the following but like, What do you mean? I can't target people who follow Click Funnels. It's just there's very rhyme or reason. I'm sorry Mark Zuckerberg. It's true.
100% By the way, no, it's like even like if you take like two of the top marketing podcasts in our online business space in particular, it's probably like Jenna Kutcher, Goal Digger. And of course, Amy Porterfield marketing made easy, but it's interesting, like, I believe, at least last that I looked an interest you can many people do use Amy's audience as an interest audience. But I believe you can't target Jenna's like Jenna doesn't show up as an option. Again, no rhyme or reason they have very similar sized audiences. So like, why one versus the other? So yeah. illustrating your point?
Yes, exactly. It is just absurd. So have I found anything that has done amazingly well, that has surprised me? No, but keep that keep that door open. I do see consistently though, that our lookalike audiences tend to perform even a little bit better than than our interests based off. Yeah. And as we you know, and that's the thing and look alikes, to purchasers, but you can you can run look alikes, to people who have subscribed to your email list, you can run look alikes, to people who have purchased, you can run look alikes, to people who have visited pages on your website, all of these, you can, like I said, you can get really, really granular.
But yeah, I don't think that there's anything that has surprised me, I think more than anything else, it will always be things that I think like, oh, this is gonna do so well. And then it's like, oh, okay, nobody, nobody clicked on that. Whether it's ads, or whether it's audience or but that's the importance of testing. Because, yeah, you put up two different ads, and you're like, alright, A is going to be the ad that really really does it. And he just has a terrible cost per lead. And for whatever reason, it's it's B, you know.
Yeah, I know, I find that my hunches are almost always wrong. When it comes to ADS, when I actually put the money behind it, I'm like, oh, okay, that's, that's really interesting. That's not what I would have picked as a winner. So again, probably a terrible better wouldn't do well and gambling. Great point, though. Great reminder, just one more kind of, I guess, detail oriented question around the audiences, in particular interest audiences? Do you always test in silos like first look like we're just going to continue using Amy as an example. If you're using Amy as an audience interest? Is she the only interest that you're putting there? Or are you stacking multiple interests? And if the latter, how many do you stack in one ad set?
That's a really good question. I test all of them. I have an ad group that has a bunch of the that kind of Amy ilk, the kind of course creator gurus, I have several that are group them in two or three. And then I also have ads audiences where it is each one individually. And the frustrating, fun, interesting thing is that it changes as soon as I refresh ad creative, it could be the group one does really, really well, and all the individual ones do poorly. Or I refresh creative again, because you have to be continually refreshed and creative, which again, helps that have that background in copywriting. But then sometimes it'll be the individual ones that will perform rather there is you always best foot forward. Right? But yes, exactly. Always have to be testing because there's there's no way to predict. Yeah.
How often do you refresh creative? Like if a if an ad is performing exceptionally well? Do you kind of just let it go until it until it changes and maybe starts plateauing or declining? Or do you kind of build in regular refreshes regardless of performance?
We are always developing new creative, right? We're always writing new stuff, we're always designing new ads, planning for new videos or recording new videos. But we only change up I only change up the ads when they start to get out of the cost per lead zone that I'm comfortable with. Because if it's not broke, don't fix it. Right? If it's if it's performing, let it go. That way back when when I used to run ads myself before I could let them run for like months and months and months. It is a little bit of a different animal now, but I check them daily, which usually takes a couple of minutes.
And a lot of them I can let run for a good several weeks getting into a month maybe sometimes up to six weeks. But as people start to get tired of seeing them, you have to switch them out. Yeah, but I I let the in a way let the audience dictate when it gets changed up versus I have on my schedule regular times to say right, do we need to what's in the pipeline? What's coming out what do I think is going to perform well? Is there anything seasonal we need to think about, you know, getting into the new year, the New Year New you have that kind of thing heading into summer and but beyond that, it really is we switch things out when it starts to take a dip in the metrics.
Yeah, no, that makes complete sense. And speaking of cost per lead, I feel like this is a great place to end our case study on you are you know, with these changes that you've made of bringing these ads internal and some of these things that we've been talking about the learnings from the last year, you're seeing leads kind of in that range of four to five dollars, which is about half of what you've seen on other campaigns for the particular CPL of four to five dollars. Is that for the on demand video is that the opt in that we're referring to and on the opt in note two, I know you have a strong stance on double opt in, so I'd love for you to shed a little light on that.
That four to five CPL is on the broken down demographics, and that's actually on the copywriting brand, who's the the copywriting brand is to people who are interested in writing is a broad, that's not the actual demographic, but just in concept. That's a broad audience. If you are if anybody's listening to this, and like I'm targeting course creators, too. If you are getting four to five dollars, please get in touch with me, I will hire you to run my ads. Very different based it's very different beast. Yeah, those you know, we're seeing and again, this is the double opt in which effectively is often going to mean it's usually like twice the cost. But we're seeing 20 to 25 CPLs, I would love to get them down again for double opt in.
But we have found consistently across all of our brands, that requiring people to do a double opt in gets better results in the long run. And it's it's very much anti everything else we learn in marketing about like, oh, no, it has to be frictionless. You have to make it super duper easy for them to. But we have found that when we require people to go in and take the action to say, Yes, I'm confirming to get the video that we get so much better engagement throughout the entire funnel and it can we keep retesting it in again and again, just in case because there might be the numbers in Facebook would make me so much happier.
I mean, we do don't get me wrong, the way our system works, we use drip. And what drip will let you do is it will let you collect everybody, even if they don't double opt in because they gave you their email address. So effectively, they did opt in. So we run an automation that if people don't do a double opt in, they don't complete it within, I want to say it's 24 hours, 24 to 48, somewhere in there, we send them through it anyway. Because look, I worked to get those leads whether or not they actually went back, maybe it went to their spam folder, God forbid, whatever. But we still find that people who take that double opt in are just more engaged and more likely to buy throughout the whole process. So adding a little bit of friction in that way actually makes them a better customer.
That's brilliant. I love that you get the best of both worlds because like you said, if if someone chooses not to opt in, it's not like they're missing out, they're still going to get the emails just a little delayed. But I love that theory, I guess that you've tested and it makes sense because they're essentially qualifying themselves further and also reminding themselves like what they signed up for. Because I feel like a lot of times people quickly, especially with autofill on Facebook or Instagram, right? It's like you click on something you autofill it and you forget what you even opted into. And then you forget you subscribe to this person and that's when you get like angry emails from people who are like, Why are you sending emails and it's like, well, you you chose to you elected.
Yeah.
You elected to join your ecosystem, but they forget you know, and so I feel like that double opt in does kind of solidify in their mind like a memory of at least you know agreeing to receive communication from you. So yeah, super smart. I think that's a great note to end on for case study tonight. Thank you so much Nicki for sharing transparently. This was so much fun to chat with you. I would love for you to share with our listeners where else they can connect with you beyond this episode.
Yeah, absolutely. If you are interested in learning about the system I created the automated selling you can follow us on Instagram or Facebook at circuitsalessystem.com And if you want to opt in if you want to see our video and see the circuit from the inside, you can go to circuitselling.com and opt in there yeah.
Oh so smart. I love a good observation. Opt in like when you just opt in you're like I receive all the emails and like see how they structure this like it's such a smart marketing hack, honestly, anyways, Nicki, thank you again and for everyone listening or watching all the links mentioned will be below in the show notes. So if you're not sure just check there and give Nicki a shout if you decide to utilize any of our tips. So we'll catch you guys in the next episode. Thank you.
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