CREATE FACEBOOK VIDEO ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Create Facebook video ads that actually work with Adam Sand
- The ability of Facebook video ads to find people while they’re thinking about roofing before they’re actually Googling roofers is incredibly powerful.
- I learned how the Facebook ad platform works, how to measure and test your different ideas, and I learned that everything at all times is always a test.
- To sell your service or product with Facebook video ads there is a product script, a process script, a people script, there’s the thought reversal script, the caught doing it right script and the giving pledge script.
- Now they’re calling it “through play”, but essentially, can you get someone to stop and listen to you for 15 seconds?
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
CREATE FACEBOOK VIDEO ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
CREATE FACEBOOK VIDEO ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
The ability of Facebook to find people while they’re thinking about your product or service before they’re actually Googling it is incredibly powerful.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Doug Morneau: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today’s podcast is like every other podcast, it’s about marketing, but it’s about an industry that we haven’t talked about before. So, if you’re interested in having your sales reps have a closing rate of 60%, or if you could see yourself investing $20,000 in Facebook ads and generating $750 or $800,000 in sales, I think you’re really going to like what my guest has to say today. One of the things I want you to listen for later in the episode is what he calls “stop the thumb” with regards to your Facebook ads.
Doug Morneau: So, my guest is Adam Sand. He has the odd combination of being a tech nerd as well as a high-performance salesperson. He believes that organizational discipline combined with the entrepreneurial spirit is the great alchemy for performance. He and his company use video marketing and infographics to pre-sell roofing, and once the industry figured out what they were doing, he became a hot topic and an influencer in that space. So Adam’s going to share with you some of the strategies they use in Facebook, as Facebook videos and ads, and how they build their sales funnel out in an industry where Facebook has restricted their ability to target homeowners. So, I’d like to welcome Adam Sand to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today. Hey Adam, welcome to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today.
Adam Sand: Hey, thanks so much. I appreciate the invite. You have a really good show, so I’m excited to be here.
Doug Morneau: Hey, thanks so much. I had a chance to do a deep dive into your media, your social media, what you’re doing and what you’re producing for content. I know that’s one of the things we’re going to discuss and to say that I’m really impressed with the amount of detail and the information that you share that’s educational in your content that can really help people to make decisions and move forward.
Adam Sand: Thanks. I always say teach first, sell second. That’s my big message for anybody that’s trying to achieve anything, especially when they’re marketing their construction companies.
Doug Morneau: Well, I heard Frank Kern say once, he said, “What if we actually help somebody achieve the goal that we’re promising in our advertising? So what if we can actually help them in the ad to do something opposed to just telling them to click here?”
Adam Sand: Yeah, that’s actually really smart. I wish I’d heard that before, but thank you for sharing that.
Doug Morneau: Well, you’ve figured it out. So yeah, I guess we shouldn’t talk hockey, because we’re both Canadians of neighboring provinces and-
Adam Sand: I’ll go on all day.
Doug Morneau: That’s right. So onto the important stuff. So do you want to share a little bit of the background, how you got into this area where you’re creating really compelling content and then helping people clean up the backend mess to make sure that their business converts everything that comes into dollars?
Adam Sand: Yeah, so really the quick and dirty background is that I knew nothing about roofing when I opened a roofing company. What I did know is I understood business and I had a best friend who was a great roofer, and he just wanted to start his own business. He got sick and tired of working for someone else. Subcontracting just meant that you thought you owned a business, but really you kind of had just a pimp and they were just sending you to a job. You do the work, they put their sign out front. He wanted to actually build a brand. And my best friend and I decided that we would do it together and I learned about roofing that way. What I really learned throughout the process of trying to advertise a roofing company is it’s not a sexy industry.
Adam Sand: Nobody buys a roof early just because they want a different color roof. People only buy it when they need it. In Canada, we have some unique challenges with Facebook ads in that you can’t target homeowners directly even like you could in the States five years ago. In the process of learning how to use Facebook ads, I had to find out what would work and this is before video view ads. Many of the metrics and analytics that we have today and the features we have, we didn’t have any of that. Through the process I ended up paying some online gurus, for lack of a better term, to teach me and I learned how the Facebook ad platform works, how to measure and test your different ideas, and I learned that everything at all times is always a test.
Adam Sand: What worked last week doesn’t work next week. Over time we developed the content that we needed to make it work. Unlike a lot of other industries where you can give away a free tooth whitening to get a customer that might become a lifetime dental client, you don’t have that in roofing. The tooth whitening equivalent in construction, specifically the roofing industry was giving people that feeling that they are empowered to make a good decision when hiring a roofer because that’s the number one barrier to the purchase. They get three or four estimates. They all kind of look the same. They don’t really know how to pick one and they don’t feel educated. They get paralysis from analysis and many times they just pick the cheapest one or the middle one and end up with a bad experience.
Adam Sand: In fact, Better Business Bureau, some over 40% of all complaints ever registered ever, I think it’s 44%, is roofing related.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
CREATE FACEBOOK VIDEO ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
CREATE FACEBOOK VIDEO ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
The ability of Facebook to find people while they’re thinking about your product or service before they’re actually Googling it is incredibly powerful.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Doug Morneau: Wow, that’s funny that out of all the renovations and home improvements you could do, that would be the one that would stand out.
Adam Sand: It is literally the one where people, at the end of the day, if you have a bad experience, yes, the onus is on the contractor to be a good person. The fact is, this is a job that people who can be doctors don’t go roofing, right?
Doug Morneau: Yep.
Adam Sand: A lot of people are roofers because they have to be, not because they choose to be. They ended, the cream rises to the top in this industry and consumers don’t know how to qualify a proper roofing contractor. They have a lot of misconceptions as to what’s right and what’s wrong.
Adam Sand: They also don’t understand how big the consequences can be for hiring a bad roofer until after the fact. They’ll think, “Oh well it might leak”, but they don’t realize how easy and how bad a leak really can be. That’s just the start of it. So through our content, we started to educate consumers about the different pre-owned products and processes and systems and things that they needed to know about. That has evolved over time into videos. Now there are six veins, that I call it, that you need to basically tap into to humanize your roofing corporation. The amazing thing and you as a Canadian will actually kind of appreciate this. We in Canada don’t have the same thing where in America there’s this like deep-rooted dislike for corporations. We have it a bit in Canada too.
Adam Sand: At the end of the day, consumers only have two choices. Either there’s a corporation or the state owns it. I don’t know why they’re so against the corporation. At least with the corporation, they get a choice. The reason they hate the corporation is that it’s this faceless, nameless, big boot in the sky that isn’t human and doesn’t make them feel comfortable. They miss being able to buy their meat from a butcher instead of a big nationwide grocery chain. They miss that human connection, the feeling that they know who they’re buying, what they’re supporting and what kind of quality they should be able to expect. Those six veins humanize your corporate, your roofing company or your corporation. This works for other people. I mean I have friends and family that I’ve given the same tips to and they use it from hairdressing to selling dog toys.
Doug Morneau: What I’m thinking, is it would probably work across the board for anybody that’s in the construction or that type of industry. Like you said, you can’t give a sample. I think of a landscaper I was using who is really good and we had to fall some trees. He said, “I’m bringing in a follower”. The first thing he went and did is he went and talked to the guy when he got out of his truck and asked him for his business license and insurance, which I wouldn’t have thought of as a homeowner. He sent the guy away. I said, “Why did you send him away?” He said, “He doesn’t have the right insurance”.
Adam Sand: Yep.
Doug Morneau: What does a mistake costs when someone drops a tree on your house and then you find out, Hey, he doesn’t have insurance. He’s sorry, but he doesn’t have insurance.
Adam Sand: Oh. It goes even crazier. There’ll be people who think that the no-tax deal is a good deal and that the contractor saved them some money. If the contractor is willing to rip off the government, and I mean the government’s got a giant foot in the sky, it’ll crush you. If they’re so daring as to rip off the government, what do you think they’re going to do to you? Same thing with deductibles. Roofers will say, “Oh yeah, we’ll include your deductible”. That’s illegal. That’s insurance fraud. If they’re willing to piss on the insurance company’s rules, what do you think they would do? Do you really think that you, the uneducated consumer, do you really think you’re going to get, you’re going to see how they’re screwing you? Just because you don’t know how they screwed you doesn’t mean you won’t find out.
Adam Sand: With roofing it takes five, 10 years. They’re long gone at a time that you actually find out what happened. That’s the incredibly challenging thing for contractors. They’ll quite often go, you’ll see them all the time. They’ll post on their Instagram’s and their Facebook’s, these little memes that are kind of like, they had a bad day and some customers didn’t value their time that day cause they’ll post an Instagram thing. It’s like “If you think it’s highly expensive hiring a good roofer, try hiring a bad one” and they’ll have like some pictures of some totally butchered roof or it’ll be like “If your customer says to you, ‘I know people who will do it for less’, I say to them, I know people who will pay more” and what it is, is a passive-aggressive stab at the universe because they’re not having their time valued.
Adam Sand: The problem is they throw that out there in the world and feel justified. They don’t take any of the time and energy to actually learn how do you change the consumer psychology of your inbound marketing? How do you make it so that people are not only wanting you to give them an estimate but they’re like, “Honey! Honey! So I know all those other two roofers came by and left estimates in the mailbox. But Company X is coming by and I want you to be here because I know he has some questions. They’re going to be here at 3:30. Can you get your boss to let you off early so you can be here?” Then when you show up, they’re like, “Hey, how are you? Oh my God, it’s the movie star. Yeah, you’re the guy on Facebook”.
Adam Sand: How do you create that shopping experience as opposed to “Yeah, I called you and 14 other roofers. There’s a broken pool cue out on the front doorstep. You guys can stab each other and see who’s willing to bleed the most for the job. Now let me know when you guys figure it out. Okay, bye.”
Doug Morneau: The good news is out of the 14 that you call, only seven will show up and a couple will show up a few days later and the rest will no show.
Adam Sand: Exactly. Then you’re left going, “Well, none of these contractors are any good”. It’s because the contractor went and said, “Meh, I already know this is going to be alike, you’re going to work twice as hard for half as much and it’s going to be a nuisance customer”. It’s because customers don’t know how to buy a roof, just like they don’t know how to buy a car, you know what I mean?
Adam Sand: The things that they don’t know how to buy, they become adversarial, right? They’re insecure and they think that by just adding friction and showing up with their boxing gloves up, that they’re going to make a better choice. In most cases they end up with a worse situation because if you have that feeling that a cut, you know, when a customer’s called 14 other roofing contractors and they’re just like, they send a mass email to your info@roofingcompany dot com email address and it’s like a copy-pasted email that they sent to 38 other companies. You can just feel it like you’re not stupid, you know. The only people who really show up for that job are the people who are desperate. The three quotes you get are crappy, crappier and crappiest. You pick one in the middle, you still get crappier, you know what I mean?
Adam Sand: To stop that kind of cycle, big and small companies alike have to learn how to humanize themselves and empower their customers to not only make a good decision but to value the money that they’re going to have to spend to get the job done right and that’s through six very simple video scripts. There’s a product script, a process script, a people script, there’s the thought reversal script, the caught doing it right script and the giving pledge script. Those six scripts, or six veins, that you create by using the power of the platform, like the Facebook ads manager, you can dramatically change the type of customers that are coming in, the psychology that they have coming in. You can dramatically change the entire shopping and buying experience with just putting out the right content. The problem is a lot of guys, especially in the construction and the roofing world, they’re nervous in front of a camera.
Adam Sand: The toughest, hardest, meanest guys in the world; they can go stand on steep roofs, 40 feet in the air, but you put them in front of a camera and they crumble. One of the biggest things that I end up doing is actually going out to these guys and actually recording them on camera. I recorded thousands of videos. Every roofer starts his video the same way. “Hi, this is John from John’s Roofing in San Antonio, Texas, your family’s number one choice for roofing”. By that time, the person has already scrolled onto the next video.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
CREATE FACEBOOK VIDEO ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
CREATE FACEBOOK VIDEO ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
The ability of Facebook to find people while they’re thinking about your product or service before they’re actually Googling it is incredibly powerful.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Doug Morneau: They’ve tuned out. That’s a common theme. I’ve interviewed probably three or four people in the video marketing space and that’s all they do is video marketing. We’ve talked about that a whole, that big challenge is how do you get people in front of the camera. That’s a pretty natural fear for people for whatever reason. How do you move people from, Hey, this is what I’m doing now. If you’ve read the book, “The E Myth”, you know, I’m a roofer, I get tired of being a roofer, I get tired of doing all the work while my boss goes on vacation. So I’m going to start my own roofing company and then he starts his own roofing company, finds out, guess what? He’s still a roofer, but he has to do the books, he has to do the marketing and he’s making less money. So how do you move people out of that, into what you’re doing and say, Hey, here’s a process where you can run a business instead of being on the tools all day, you can actually run a business that you can go away and the money still comes in?
Adam Sand: That’s a very good question and I’m glad you asked it because roofers are very prone to that. In fact, the number of employees who come to work for me, like I own half a roofing company and the number of employees that I have come work for me learn their thing. They see me driving a nice truck and they go, “That’s my money that he’s driving” and then they quit. They go and open their own company. Two years later, they’re coming crawling back because they owe money to GST, they owe income tax, they can’t afford their insurance, they got an $8,000 bill with their supplier and they got two negative Google reviews and they’re lost and now they’re coming and going back to work again or subcontracting to some of the bigger companies. It’s because they don’t educate themselves with something like “The E Myth”. To be honest, 98% won’t ever get it and that’s just the nature of life.
Adam Sand: 2% will. To be honest, that’s where I send them. I send them to “The E Myth” and I kind of just talk to them. I probably have a hundred conversations for every two that turn into clients. I tell them all, I have all this kind of stuff saved in notes, and I talk about it in some of my content online. I say you have to have an organizational chart. You have to understand all the different hats that have to be worn in business and if you’re not prepared to wear eight of those hats, work hard, drive a $6,000 truck and pay for someone else to come to work for you and watch them buy a brand new truck while you’re still driving the old one and allow that organization to grow, you’re not going to get there.
Adam Sand: I always recommend “Good to Great”, and “The E Myth” and “The Tipping Point”. It’s some of my favorite books to recommend. Then once they get there, then it’s all about “now I need more leads”. That’s when you start coaching them on the video and the Facebook video ads. Then invariably, the systems that they put together at the beginning are strapped together with duct tape sometimes over the course of a decade and then you jump their business 20-30% and it all falls apart and crumbles because it’s all strapped together with duct tape. There’s no synergy.
Doug Morneau: You mean a quote book isn’t a CRM? With the carbon between, that’s not the CRM?
Adam Sand: The carbon paper is CRM. Oh my God.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
CREATE FACEBOOK VIDEO ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
CREATE FACEBOOK VIDEO ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
The ability of Facebook to find people while they’re thinking about your product or service before they’re actually Googling it is incredibly powerful.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Doug Morneau: Here’s all the quotes I made last year. Yep.
Adam Sand: I’m telling you, there are $10 million roofing companies. The great thing about the roofing industry and in construction I guess in general, but especially roofing is that there’s no magic. It’s all taking everything that worked in the car industry, dental, marketing, e-commerce, all this stuff that’s working, real estate realtors… The amount of systems and processes that I’ve taken from realtors and adapted into the roofing industry is crazy. It’s just taking a lot of those things and just pushing it forward into an industry that’s still running off carbon paper. There are $10 million companies that are still drowning in filing cabinets, carbon paper, having to call into the office to ask questions. They’ve even got a CRM, one of these roofers CMs, but they pay a $1,500 integration fee and they’re a $10 million company. $1,500 integration fee.
Adam Sand: It’s like, yep, this is how you make it stay email and this is how you get it so your web form puts them into your CRM. Isn’t it magic?! That’s where it stops. There’s no automation or time-saving created and that’s typically where you find it. And then it’s like, “Oh well we got this app to solve this problem. Then we’ve got that system or that process to solve this problem. We hired this girl to kind of hold those three things together and then this girl to watch those four things”. Next thing you know they’ve got 12 or $15,000 in overhead in the office because they only spent $1,500 on their CRM.
Doug Morneau: And they’re not integrated.
Adam Sand: Yeah. You have to rebuild it from the ground up. That part of my job is honestly like performing open-heart surgery on a football team while they’re trying to win the super bowl.
Doug Morneau: You’re only the second person I’ve ever met or talked to that’s in a construction-related trade that has systems for running your business. My son worked for a company and the guy he worked for is brilliant. All their guys did window washing and pressure washing and roof de-mossing, but all their guys had iPads. The quotes were all done by somebody else. They showed up with the iPad, they knew the person’s name. The person’s kind of like the Uber. They knew the picture of the individual who is coming to the door. If they did add-ons, they could do add-ons. They could print the quote or print the invoice from the truck. The head office could see where every sales rep was based on tracking. They’re just really smart and they’ve done very, very well because they’ve made the investment to have a proper CRM, proper tools and tracking, taught their staff and their team how to use it and they’re just crushing it.
Adam Sand: You’re absolutely right. It blows my mind that construction companies are still so not digitally connected. You look at a McDonald’s or a Walmart, I mean McDonald’s is 3000 square feet, 10 people working within three feet of each other. They’ve got cameras, connectors, timers, integrated systems, things connected all over the place. A manager can see the entire store from one spot. Then you’ve got a Walmart. Walmart is, you know, 60,000 square feet. They’ve got security people, cameras, trackers, geotags and sensors everywhere and all this kind of stuff. Tons of managers, tons of people, everything all over the place. All these systems for scanning and barcodes and all kinds of stuff. Your construction company has square footage measured in miles radius. 60-mile radius, a hundred-mile radius. You’ve got people all over the place and they’re running around with clipboards? How do you expect to run and operate an efficient, productive business that delivers on a consistent experience for customers when your business is measured in miles of radius and you’re running everything off of a notepad. It doesn’t make sense.
Doug Morneau: It’s super encouraging. I often hear people say, when we talk about automation, whether it’s CRM or any form of maybe digital marketing, “Oh well you can’t do that for my industry” as if their industry’s unique. You’ve proven time and time again that in the construction industry, who typically are not played well in this space, that you can leverage this. I looked at some of your stats and listened to some of the information that you were sharing in terms of closing and closing ratio. Why don’t you share a success story with our listeners? So they just get an idea of what’s possible because I’m sure many people are thinking, well, “Hey, it’s roofing”. You do two roofs a year. How can you possibly convince somebody digitally that you’re the best choice? I’ll just turn it to you and then you can share your example.
Adam Sand: It’s hard to pick an example simply because here’s the thing. Everything that works today doesn’t necessarily work tomorrow. I say everything is always testing and I guess you can’t really copy-paste this as much as I’m sure that’s what everybody wants to hear. The fundamentals are there. I guess the most recent one would be one of our sales reps. We recorded four videos for her. We did four videos, this is in my personal company, and we ran Facebook video ads to the tune of around $17,000 for running off of these videos, using them to educate and then retargeting them. Through those four videos we can trace where the leads come from and that alone generated over, I don’t have the finalized numbers, but it’s over $750,000 close to $800,000 in residential roofing sales. These are closed at an incredibly high rate in the 60% range.
Doug Morneau: Stop for a sec. So 60% close rate. For anyone who’s listening to us in the sales role, how would you like to be working for a company that helps you get a 60% close rate?
Adam Sand: I mean our percent… As a result, our company doesn’t pay out the high super crazy commission numbers that a lot of other roofing companies pay. They’re paying 10% of the price of the roof on a $20,000 roof. They’re paying a rep $2,000. We’re paying our sales reps $250 and they’re making $10,000 a month, happily. You pay for their car and their gas and their phone and their iPad and all that. They’re making a $10,000 income. We’re paying them $250 a roof. We can provide competitive pricing at a higher margin because what we’re doing is we’re creating a more motivated, more educated, more likely to close at the house where they go, “Oh yeah, you’re the girl in the video. I remember you talked about this and that thing”.
Adam Sand: “Yeah, that’s awesome. So we want to get the roof done and this is that, and that’s this and oh great. And what does it cost? Perfect. Okay, great, thanks.” It’s just done. It’s just like going into the store and the people don’t walk into the store and say, “Oh, I love that price tag. I wonder if I liked the dress”. They go, “Oh! I love that dress. I wonder if I can afford it”. That’s the problem with roofing is they go, “Oh well I’m just going to get four roofers, see which price I like and then determine if I like the roofer”. We use Facebook video ads to hit them before they… Facebook, I mean we could dive into that for an hour, but the ability of Facebook to find people while they’re thinking about roofing before they’re actually Googling roofers in Wisconsin is incredibly powerful.
Adam Sand: If everybody listening can kind of just kind of take that as a fact and take your skepticism out of it and just know that if you’re that afraid that they changed your election results, that you should probably be using it to sell more stuff. Yes, it can do that. If you can get out in front of homeowners while they’re thinking about roofing, while they’re Googling questions about roofing, while they’re researching roofing products and materials, but they haven’t necessarily gone “roofers near me” yet in Google, if you can get in front of those people early and be a part of that educational shopping experience and be that expert, well then all of a sudden they’re just going to figure out which dress they want to buy, not who they’re going to buy it from. They’ve already figured out the brand that they want to buy from.
Doug Morneau: You get to set the bar high. You know what makes your company special and you know you’ve put in the effort to set yourself aside so you’re different. It’s very difficult for a competitor to measure up to your marketing once you’ve educated the consumer.
Adam Sand: You’re not forced into competing. You’re not getting essentially judged on a comparison level with Chuck in a truck roofing who just says, “Oh well yeah I can do it for cheaper cause I got less overhead”. That’s their closing tool. We have all kinds of economies of scale and you can’t go into a homeowner’s house and wax poetic about all the ways that you save money and don’t make as many mistakes as Joe roofer operating out of his truck bed.
Adam Sand: That’s why you have to have a strategy for making people value you upfront so that you’re not posting that stupid Instagram meme every time some customer goes, “Meh, I found another roofer to do it for two grand less”. Then you get all butt hurt about it instead of doing something to help it. You just do some passive-aggressive behavior on Instagram to make yourself feel better. It’s about getting an education and improving your approach so that you can have people appreciate the time and the energy that you’ve gone into to building your company and being a quality craftsman in your chosen trade.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
CREATE FACEBOOK VIDEO ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
CREATE FACEBOOK VIDEO ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
The ability of Facebook to find people while they’re thinking about your product or service before they’re actually Googling it is incredibly powerful.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Doug Morneau: Let’s talk about timing and testing. So you said four Facebook video ad’s, $17,000 spent, $750,000 in sales, 60% close rate with your reps. What’s the timing from when you run the first ad until you get the first sale in the door, approximately?
Adam Sand: A week.
Doug Morneau: A week. Okay.
Adam Sand: I’ve literally had an estimate booked. It wasn’t off of any of those four videos, but I did a video last year where I booked an estimate. I was doing the video. My business partner was watching me recording the video on my phone doing like a selfie live Facebook thing and without even boosting it or doing any kind of Facebook ad money towards it, there was a customer watching it on his phone as I was recording it on mine and a customer asked for an estimate in the live.
Doug Morneau: I mean that’s amazing.
Adam Sand: I think it’s a safe number.
Doug Morneau: You said you test, so you’ve done this for a while. A week is pretty darn quick. Especially with the closing ratios that you’ve got. In terms of your testing metrics, what do you pay attention to most?
Adam Sand: I wish more people would ask that question because they all go to lead and they go, well what are you paying per lead? What’s your cost per lead? The industry kind of lends itself to that because everybody in the marketing industry, rather than teaching their clients, they just put up a sign or a Facebook video ads that says “$45 roofing leads”. A lead is not a lead is not a lead. Anybody in sales and marketing knows that not all leads are created equal.
Adam Sand: That’s a very good question because, in order to test and improve, you can’t just start at leads because there’s a lot of things that have to happen before you get to the point where you can try and convert, improve your conversion metrics. The first thing you’re doing is when you record a video, you put it up, you have to test thumb stop ability. There’s a lot of stuff going on on Facebook. Trump is saying something crazy every other day, you got cool car videos, you got funny cat videos, you’ve got pictures of your friends and your family and your ex-girlfriend, who she’s dating now. There are a hundred more interesting things to watch on Facebook than a roofing company.
Doug Morneau: Even on your roofing site, you’ve got Gary V on his first video talking about wine.
Adam Sand: That’s the top piece of content, is about that Gary V thing. A hundred things to pay attention to. You’re going to see all that kind of stuff. When your customer’s scrolling through the news feed, you have to find a way to stop their thumb. That’s the very first, forget lead.
Doug Morneau: How do you get it so that if a thousand people are exposed to the video that you did in one of those six veins, how do you get the stop the thumb?
Adam Sand: Once you stop the thumb because you’re going to get that, you’re going to see how many people were, it’s called a two-second video view where the screen was at least 50% or more in the frame at the time. That just shows you that you slowed the thumb down. Then you’re going to get metrics on ten-second video watches or 15-second video watches.
Adam Sand: Now they’re calling it “through play”, but essentially, can you get someone to stop and listen to you for 15 seconds? If you have bad audio or if you open it with, “Hi, I’m Joe from Joe’s roofing, the number one roofers in Arkansas”, they’re going to go “Meh, commercial” and they’re going to skip past it. If you open up with, “Do you have these on your roof and did you know they can save you thousands of dollars?” Well then if you run those two next to each other, you don’t need to be a marketing expert to know which one’s going to hold the attention of more homeowners.
Adam Sand: A certain percentage of homeowners are going to look at that and say, “I wonder if I do have those on my home”. It’s probably going to be a conscientious homeowner who believes in value in product and technology and they’re interested in making sure they have the right components and when they find out it’s a roofing thing, they might stick around for two minutes. If they thought it was a plumbing thing or a kitchen thing and they’re thinking of doing their kitchen or their bathroom, well, they’re not going to stick around once they hear it’s a roofing thing, but anybody who watches 50% of a four-minute video about a roof vent, they’re probably looking up at the roof noticing it’s old, contemplating in the near future they’re probably going to have to be saving up God knows how much for that roof.
Adam Sand: Those three metrics: first one’s thumb stop ability. Can you hold their attention for 15 seconds so they know if they should stick around or not and then who actually sticks around to watch it? You can use those three to dramatically improve your videos. I’ve taken videos from totally underperforming, same subject matter, same information, but just slightly changing the way that we talk on camera and what we talk about first, second and third with some scripting testing those results. I mean you can get 500% more people to watch your video to 50% just by making those changes. This is before we even get to leads.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
CREATE FACEBOOK VIDEO ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
CREATE FACEBOOK VIDEO ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
The ability of Facebook to find people while they’re thinking about your product or service before they’re actually Googling it is incredibly powerful.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Doug Morneau: That’s really funny because I’m thinking of all of the people I’ve had on my podcast that are video marketing guys and not one person has talked about, in not the way that you have, in terms of stopping people for the two seconds or slowing them down and moving them the 15 seconds.
Doug Morneau: If you can change that metric, then you can have a massive effect on everything behind that. If people are scrolling [crosstalk 00:28:47] Should we make the lead button blue or red? Should we use a two-step conditional form or do we want this? Are we using the pixel in the right way? Should we move? Do we want three feature and benefit points or four? Should there be a video on the landing page?
Adam Sand: It’s like no one’s watching the video. It doesn’t matter.
Doug Morneau: It’s like we’re not even getting anybody to watch the damn video, stupid. Once you have that and then it’s also about having a strategy of looking at it as two steps, right? Teach first, sell second. Once you put something in someone’s head and you know what they know and you can put them on a magical list called a custom audience on Facebook, which for those of you who don’t know, it’s basically telling Facebook, anybody who watched half this video, put them in a box.
Doug Morneau: I want to use them later. I want to show them something later. You don’t get to know anything about them other than that, and you don’t even get to know who they are. You just get to know that there are 1100 people, that watched half of your four-minute video about roof vent or whatever, dog toys. Doesn’t matter. Then you tell Facebook, “Hey, I want to show them a thing”. A roof fence is like a $16 component. You put 20 of them on your house. That’s a lot. That’s $200, 320 bucks. It’s not a huge amount of money. If you go to someone and say, “Hey, if you buy a roof from me, I’ll give you free roof vents”. They’re going to go, “Well, how much is a roof vent?” “Oh, 20 bucks? How many do you need?”
Doug Morneau: “20.” That’s like 400 bucks. That’s not that much. How much is my roof? 10 grand. That’s not that good of a deal, right? If you show someone, “Hey, vents over the lifetime of your roof are going to reduce your air conditioning bills, reduce your heating bills, improve the energy efficiency of your home, make your roof last five times longer, reduce attic rain, which is going to cause leaks inside your home, mold and that are going to damage your installation and ruin the R-value. You want to make sure you have these on your home. Well next week, if they see an ad that says “Free roof vents with any estimate done in April”, now you’ve priced anchored them to thousands of dollars of value over the course of the life of their roof. It’s not about how much does a roof vent cost anymore.
Adam Sand: That’s smart. It’s not about the vent, right? Yeah, absolutely.
Doug Morneau: So when you know that they watched 50% or 75% of a video about roof vents, you know what’s in their head. You know what they value.
Adam Sand: It’s funny because what came to mind to me when you’re saying the roof vent’s $10 but the values were tens of thousands of dollars. I thought of the last time I was watching someone launch their boat and they forgot to put the drain plug in. So how much does it drain plug worth? Well, in that case, it was worth about $25,000.
Doug Morneau: That’s an excellent analogy that I’m totally ripping off because that’s exactly it. People don’t necessarily talk about the price of the component, but if you use the value of a component to generate leads, you don’t necessarily have to give everything away.
Doug Morneau: It’s just about math. It’s just about getting a customer to see the value in something and then using that as an opportunity to stand out from the crowd. That’s what marketing is. It’s like when Mitsubishi or I think it was or Saturn or whatever, they did free gas for a year and it was like, that was when gas prices were crazy expensive and it was a big deal and everybody was talking about gas prices and you say free gas is free gas for a year. It’s a big deal. All it was is a $2,500 rebate, which is 200 bucks a month, which in the fourth cylinder car, that’s, I mean that’s all that is. It’s 200 bucks you’re spending on gas, they’re giving you 200 bucks a month for 12 months. It’s $2,500 rebate. It’s not a big deal.
Adam Sand: Those marketing people, holy smokes. They just repositioned that $2,500 rebate as meant free gas for a year has an anchor of value and waste in a customer’s mind and it’s just going to make them go, “Maybe we’ll look at Mitsubishi”. We use that same psychology in the sales process to try and drive massive, massive value behind the brand so that they know what dress they want to buy and where they want to buy it from. They just need to figure out what it costs and if they can justify it to themselves. From there, you’ve got all kinds of ways to make your company more efficient, offering financing… There’s a million ways to improve conversion metrics. But first, you’ve got to get them to want the dress.
Doug Morneau: You got to get him to watch the video. Let’s just change gears again. So when you’re out and about, we’re sitting at the hockey game, having some beers, watching the Flames play, what’s the bad advice that you hear about people that are in the construction industry in regards to marketing?
Adam Sand: Oh man, that’s a huge long list. You know a lot of them are…
Doug Morneau: Well pick the top one. You don’t have to name the person, but I’m sure there’s some really bad advice that you hear and you just want to go over there and slap him and go, “Hey, that’s wrong”. Slap.
Adam Sand: Oh absolutely. This’ll seem counterintuitive, but it’s that referrals are the best business you can get. Referrals are still the number one source of leads and that might seem like crazy talk to anybody. Think about it. Can you control what a referral says? A lot of people will not pay for advertising because they think if you just do good work, you’ll get referrals and referrals and word of mouth is the best form of advertising. And they say it like it’s just a foregone conclusion. You can’t control what a referral says. If someone’s telling you, “Yeah, that guy Justin, he was the cheapest in town”. Well three years later, now you’ve got office employees, dump trailers. You don’t want that word of mouth.
Doug Morneau: Plus you don’t know how many people are going to tell.
Adam Sand: How’s the person get to it and when are they going to say it? Are they going to say it when you’ve got bills to pay?
Doug Morneau: Nope. How big is their circle of influence? Are they someone that everyone dismisses? Are they somebody who says, “Hey, I talked to Adam and used his roofing company, best guy ever”. And you get 20 phone calls the same day.
Adam Sand: You can’t control it. If you’re going to say the best form of advertising as a foregone conclusion, you have to think, well, how do you measure advertising? Can you target it? Is it specific? Is it relevant? Is it recent? Can you control what’s being said, who it’s being said to, how often it’s being said, where they go, how they find you, what kind of things that are in their head when they call? You can’t do any of that with word of mouth. The second worst thing is door knocking. That’s the second-worst. People are going around and people are looking at watching television, looking at their Facebook during the commercials or while there’s a lull in the show, and you think that the best way to get in front of them is to go kick their door in, in the middle of them enjoying two forms of media while spending time with their family at six o’clock on a Tuesday.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
CREATE FACEBOOK VIDEO ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
CREATE FACEBOOK VIDEO ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
The ability of Facebook to find people while they’re thinking about your product or service before they’re actually Googling it is incredibly powerful.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Doug Morneau: Yeah, probably not. Let’s wrap it up and ask you two questions. Number one question is who’s one guest you think I absolutely have to have on my podcast?
Adam Sand: I would say that if you’re in the digital marketing space, you have to talk to a guy named Casey Carol. I don’t know if you’ve spoken to him. He is hands down the best in the world when it comes to offline events and I don’t even know how to do it. When it comes to anybody in the offline business world using digital marketing, so much of what happens in your sales process is happening offline and his ability to set up and maximize the benefit of offline events makes it so that he can dramatically improve targeting. The stuff that he does is absolutely mind-blowing. Every time I talk to him it’s like I’m talking to Elon Musk. It’s like he’s on a different planet.
Doug Morneau: Cool. I will look him up. That’d be amazing. The last question, which should be a lot easier than that question, is where’s the best place for people to reach out and learn about what you’re doing Adam to help these companies grow?
Adam Sand: The easy one is going to roofingbusinesspartner.com. The slightly easier maybe or slightly harder is text me seven, eight, zero, eight, six, three, four, six, five, three. Eight, six, three, GOLD. Very easy.
Doug Morneau: It’s funny because you mentioned text and you know everybody thought text was dead and everyone thought email was dead. Now you see Gary V with his wine club, just crushing it with a simple text. Texting is coming back. Everything old is new.
Adam Sand: That’s the funny thing about it. Everything old is new.
Doug Morneau: Hey, I appreciate you taking the time. I really think it’s cool what you’ve done with Facebook video ads in an industry that traditionally like you said, has not embraced digital and helping people transform their business, which ultimately helps them transform their life.
Adam Sand: That’s really the magic to it. It’s just if you want a different life, you have to do different things.
Doug Morneau: There you go. Super good day. Thanks for tuning in, listeners. This I think was a really great case study and an example of all of you that sit back and say, well, you, I can’t apply that to my business. Here’s an example of an industry that doesn’t embrace digital and they’re applying it and Adam’s helping people crush it in the business. I mean, 60% closing rate. I’d be happy to see your comments, if any of you guys are doing better than that these days, regardless of your space. So I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you tuning in. Don’t be shy to subscribe to us and folks on iTunes. So thanks for listening and we look forward to serving you on our next episode.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
CREATE FACEBOOK VIDEO ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
CREATE FACEBOOK VIDEO ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
The ability of Facebook to find people while they’re thinking about your product or service before they’re actually Googling it is incredibly powerful.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Get in touch with Adam:
- Website – Roofing Business Partner
- Adam on LinkedIn
Find out more about Adam:
- Roofing Business Partner on Facebook
- Roofing Business Partner on Instagram
- Roofing Business Partner Podcast
Links to other related podcasts and or blog posts:
SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIES TO INCREASE PROFITABILITY
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING CREATES CHOCOLATE SUCCESS