 people who are not rolling with the punches and learning how to adapt just won't have a successful campaign long-term. And if you're gonna do any marketing, if you're gonna spend any money on marketing, don't just dabble it for a few months, do it for an extended period of time. Welcome to the Interance Agents Think Tank Show I'm your host, Todd McClain, and this is a podcast all about how to build and scale your agency. Today's topic is Facebook advertising. So why the topic's really hot right now and it's been hot for quite a while, as you've been, I'm sure most of you people who are following the Interance Agents Think Tank on Facebook are group. By the way, if you're not a part of the group, make sure you join the group. It's, I mean, we're on Facebook, right, Vlad? So we're constantly always thinking about, well, I'm on this social media network. How do I generate leads? You know, if I'm browsing social media, how do I generate leads from the billions of people that are browsing every single day? So with that being said, my guest today is Vlad Cherchenko. Hopefully I didn't hurt that. That's exactly right, Vlad Cherchenko. Okay, cool. So remember to turn into the show on YouTube so you can see screens that we're gonna share today on the show or go to www.agentsthinktank.com to see all the episodes. But again, thank you for being on the show, Vlad. Can you tell the audience about yourself? Absolutely. Thanks for having me on this podcast, Todd. My quick background, a little over six years ago, I was recruited to be a state firm agent. And I was close to signing the contract and opening up my insurance agency. And I was coming from a completely different industry and I didn't know anything about insurance. But one of the things that I'm really glad looking back that I did was I talked to a lot of newer agents to get some perspective on what the first few years looked like for them. And the same thing was said over and over again where the first year they lost a lot of money, they went to major debt, second year, they broke even third year, they started making some money. And what was that? It's not easy. Yeah, not easy. And I thought, geez, there has to be a better way to structure an agency, build a sales and marketing system so that you can at least break even or make a little bit of a profit in your first year. So I thought the only way that I could run a successful agency is if I come into it with the proven sales process and a proven marketing process, neither of which I had. And I didn't know of anybody that had those two things in place. All the agents that I talked to were just giving some pointers and ideas but no one really had a real plan that I could just buy or pay for a sub-program. Anyways, I said, look, I'm going to be a team member. I'm going to work in an agent's office for 18 months and try to figure out a sales and marketing process so that I could personally write 100 policies a month, individually as one producer, month after month after month. So it's not something that just happens on accident one month and then it goes back to like 15 some policies. I wanted to stay at 100 or more consecutively, month after month. We call that a unicorn. Yeah, not a month where you do well or someone who does. Yeah, if an agent can hire a producer that does 100 a month, they are my unicorns. Yeah, yeah, people like that are rare. It's like one in a thousand probably producers. Yeah, super, super rare. So I didn't know of anybody who wrote 100 policies but I thought there are people that are doing 50, 60, how much harder could it be to go from 50, 60 to 100? So what I did was I was calling old leads. We had a lot of old leads like EverQuote, Hometown Quote leads that were just sitting in the database collecting dust. People who were quoted six months ago, a year ago but nobody was calling them because you know how calling those leads goes. You call them, they're not interested. They already have insurance. But for me, I looked at it as an opportunity where nobody's calling those leads. So I'm not competing with anybody. So if I can just have the right message, say the right things in the right order, then guess what, I could probably get someone to switch their insurance to our agency. And that's what happened. The script didn't just all come into place in one day or one month or a short period of time. It took me six months of making a few hundred calls a day where I pretty much systematized the sales conversation where I could call you Todd and you were say with Geico and I would get you to switch your home owners in auto to our agency in the first call. And you know how it is to be in a captive environment where you can't run a quote with 10 different carriers. You only have one price. So our price wasn't less expensive most of the time. So I had to figure out a way to get people to switch over even if our price was more expensive, which was the case most of the time. How do you sell? What was that? How do you sell 101, right? 100%. Yeah, so it took me six months to come up with the sales process. And then finally when I had this process dialed in, I wrote a hundred policies or apps as we called it in one month and that was on my sixth month. And I felt pretty good about myself. I felt like, okay, I know if I make this many phone calls, I'll get this many answers. So 50 phone calls equated to five answers, which equated to four quotes. And then one of them would buy in the first call. And that was the whole idea, get people to buy in the first call. And then another person would buy through follow up. But throughout those six months, I was building out a referral partnership with realtors, lenders, department conflicts managers, my past clients, and people started sending me referrals. And it was kind of like the snowball effect where you get a little bit of traction, then you get more and more and more and more. And that's what happened between my sixth and ninth month, where I just started getting a lot more referrals from my, especially predominantly from my past clients, where I just started getting so many incoming calls that I didn't have to make outbound calls anymore. So on my ninth month, I wrote 152 policies and I just continued to stay there month after month after month at 150 or more. That's when agents in our area took notice and they're like, flag, can I come to your office and record you do the sales pitch that you do to your prospects? So they did that, it record the conversation, come back to their agency, transcribe it, and then use that same script. And they too would get results. So I'd get these messages all the time of people saying, hey, thanks for allowing me to sit in your office. Your sales script works. I'm like, what sales script? This is, isn't this like obvious what we do here? But yeah, so I decided to do a local workshop. First in our area and then I traveled to Seattle, LA. I wanted to see if this works in other parts of the country. And sure enough, the results were the same everywhere I did these workshops. So I started doing workshops all across the country and it wasn't just the company that I was with, but it was other companies as well. And the same thing kept coming up over and over and over again. This is about 2016-ish where people were coming up, agents would come up and say, Vlad, if you could figure out how to run ads on Facebook so that we could generate leads on our own, that people would pay a lot of money for. And I would pay a lot of money for that, they would say. So since I didn't know anything about Facebook, I decided to buy courses. I went on this like one year journey where I bought every course that I thought was good. I attended every conference, every events, every meetup, hired a few coaches to teach me how to run Facebook ads. So I went all in on that, Facebook, Instagram and just online marketing in general. And I would take, versus it was just insurance agents, then it was real estate agents, lenders and other small businesses. And I would just run their Facebook ads. And because I had so many different agents in so many different parts of the country that I was doing this for, I was able to experiment a lot of things at the same time. So we were managing a budget, I don't even remember what it was, over $50,000 a month of agents who were roughly spending about $500 to $1,000 per month. So we had a lot of clients spending a lot of money in total. So what that did was it gave me a really good idea of what doesn't work when it comes to Facebook advertising and then what does work. And I systematized my marketing process. So long story short, I figured that man, this whole service business of running ads for business owners, like insurance agents, real estate agents is just taking time away from the thing that I love to do, which is working with insurance agents and teaching them how to sell. That was my passion. That's what I wanted to do. That's what I still do today. And what I did was I say again, I said, I fill you on that. Yeah, to me it's the, I feel like the most important thing that agents need to dial in is having a really good sales process. Because if you have a good sales process, then even if you give them crappy leads, they'll still close them if they know how to call those leads. So I just recorded a bunch of how-to tutorial videos, sent them out to the business owners that I was working with. And I said, just follow these videos and you can manage your own ads moving forward. But I basically closed down the digital marketing agency and I don't have a decline set of managed ads for right now. And I just went all in on coaching insurance agents on how to sell and agents and their team members. So that's what I do full time. Every now and then, I help agents set up their ads. And when you reached out not long ago, saying, why do you wanna do a podcast on how to set up a Facebook ad? I was all in on that. So I'm excited to show the viewers who are watching this on YouTube on how to go from start to finish and creating an ad. Awesome, thank you. So let's dive deep into, not deep deep, but Facebook advertising in general. Very first question I get a lot on this topic is should the agent themselves, because a lot of agents will start up a marketing campaign that's turnkey when they buy direct mail or buy internet leads, they just have to flip a switch and it starts. And they don't really have to do anything. So do you think when agents are getting their agency into Facebook marketing, they should be the ones controlling and owning that marketing campaign? Or is it better to hire a marketer who's the one who's always in charge of it because the agent might not have the time or needed to dedicate to it? What's the kind of setup that you would recommend in an agency? Yeah, I would always recommend that the agent understands how Facebook works and how just the basics work so they can speak that language and ask good questions so that when they do hire someone that they're able to be on the same page with what's going on in their ad accounts. But unless the agent is all in on learning how to be a online marketer, I wouldn't manage all the ads yourself. I would delegate it to someone who is all in. So let's say you have a team member who is willing to learn and you give them a training course or they do their own training and that person goes all in and learning how to run ads and they're staying up at night sitting through Facebook groups, reading chats of what's working, what's not working. If you can find someone like that, delegate it to that individual because as you know, Todd, things change all the time with Facebook advertising. We're experiencing a huge change right now as we're doing this podcast where Apple is changing the rules on what data Facebook has access to when it comes to apps and Facebook is freaking out. They are modifying all the advertisers from every different angle. They're sending out emails. They're posting notifications saying this is a big change that's coming. It's gonna affect you. So people who are not rolling with the punches and learning how to adapt just won't have a successful campaign long-term. And if you're gonna do any marketing, if you're gonna spend any money on marketing, don't just dabble it for a few months. Do it for an extended period of time. And I truly believe that Facebook is an amazing way to generate leads for your agency but it should never be the only way that you generate leads for your agency. You should have multiple different lead sources but so you answer your question just directly is that agents should understand how Facebook advertising works but don't manage your the ads yourself unless you're gonna go all in. 100% and that's something that I've seen happen too often especially in our last podcast when we talked about internet leads where if you're going to try any marketing tactic you have to be all in, right? And if you can't physically manage the time to maintain it or continue to strengthen the campaigns then you have to hire somebody to delegate that. You just have to, you're running a business, right? So there's no other excuse, I can't do it. It's you're running a business, you have to do it, right? So I love that answer. Now, how advanced do you think agents should get into leads? Should they use things like Pixel right off the bat and start conversion ads? Is it necessary to get really deep up front to start seeing success? 100% yes to building the foundations correctly right off the bat because if you spend a couple thousand dollars on Facebook ads without having a Pixel installed in your website, your landing pages well, that's a few thousand dollars that you wasted essentially where Facebook didn't collect any data on the people who visited your website. So you have to set up the, you have to install the Pixel into the landing page of the website so that it's capturing the data. Even if you're not using the Pixel to its maximum potential at least have it installed in the website have it installed on the landing page. You're not going to get all the foundational things set up correctly, but installing the Pixel right off the bat is important. Setting up your conversions is important. Setting up your audience groups is important. And that's where hiring someone to that knows what they're doing to help you set up the foundational things is really helpful. So how intimidating was that when you were getting through the year long journey of learning about Facebook advertising when you started actually learning about the topics did you feel like it was really overwhelming at first and then realized it's ABC kind of campaign event like people that feel really intimidated maybe they're not tech savvy like what advice would you give them diving into Facebook advertising? Yeah, I will admit and this is embarrassing to say maybe I'm low, but I'm seeing you here, try it out. I probably asked the same question of like, wait so what's a Pixel and like what's the difference between a Pixel and a conversion because they seem to be doing the same thing? Like so explain to me the difference between that. And I remember asking the same person three different times in three different ways and I still didn't get it. And then I asked another person it was like one of those things that I just couldn't comprehend kind of like the only other time that I remember it being that difficult for me to understand something was also has to do with insurance on when someone cancels their homeowner's insurance or we switch their homeowner's insurance with what to do with that check and sending it to escrow. When I just started selling insurance I wasn't a homeowner. I didn't know how escrow works, how mortgages work, none of that. You buy GameStop, right? What was that? You buy GameStop, right? That's what everybody's telling me. All in on that, yeah. So that was a hard concept for me to understand and then the Pixel conversion was also difficult to understand. But anyways, once I got that past that initial phase of just understanding the basics of how it works things started clicking and just jumping in and doing the work is where it all kind of made sense to me. When you just talk about advertising it's one thing, but when you start setting up the campaigns a whole new set of questions comes up and after you do it a few times it's like anything else. It just becomes second nature. Like think about the first time it was probably years ago when you were preparing the homeowners or auto quote it was difficult, right? There's so many questions that you had but after you did a few hundred of them you can do it in your sleep now. The same thing with Facebook advertising. So it's intimidating at first for sure because there's no like one way that works all the time. There's great processes that you could follow and systems that you could follow but you always have to experiment and see what's working at that exact moment. Well, and that brings us to, let's talk about the different ways that people have used social media in the past and kind of the pros and cons. I've seen groups out there that sell, I think the latest price was $6,000 for how to generate leads for mortgage brokers. And it kind of drives me nuts only because agents, especially new agents they think that that might be the holy grail type of method because we love mortgage brokers, we love building referrals we think we're giving them something of great value but if we generate leads from mortgage brokers and you're a brand new agent who's generating leads for the agency? You're hoping that this Facebook long ad form is going to be worked by a good person at the brokerage and the first couple of leads if they get them if they're crappy leads you just ruined a report building relationship instead of building out ads for yourself. So I mean there's all different types of ways that you can generate leads. Mortgage brokers were one, giveaway ads, niche marketing. So I mean, what are the, to you if you had to rank what a new agent should be doing day one when they get into social media ads where would you guide them? What would be your recommendation on where they should start? Yeah, in terms of generating leads for mortgage lenders I know that works because it like I personally know of agents that do that successfully but it's not something that will work with every lender in every situation. In other words, if you're giving great leads let's call them great leads to lender but the lender is not working those leads properly they're not going to see results. So there's that one extra layer of complexity where you as an insurance agency owner have to coach and guide the lender on how to work those leads and if you're willing to do that then by all means learn how to do that. However, my preference is to generate leads for the insurance agency because those are leads that I'm buying for myself that I can control from start to finish. I can see the quality based on the way the conversations are going with the team. So I'm not going to go out and say that one is significantly better than the other both have their own pros and cons. You just have to decide how much time do you want to spend on either routes. So I guess if you're thinking that you can just generate leads for lenders and they'll bring you a lot of business then that's a naive way to look at it. There's a few more layers of complexity there. So that's what I would say to that. Yeah, well, and it's really a matter of controlling what you can control because you can't control somebody referring your business and I might be sounding like I don't agree with the method which I know the method can work but what I want agents to understand is that just like I teach knowing your numbers like if you know percentages, your ROI, your cost per customer, if you know your numbers you can make anything work. What you can't control is if a lender has a good employee who's gonna work your leads. You can't control if they're gonna refer three other agents if you're a captive agent, not competitive in the area you're gonna get spanked every time. You know, there's a lot of other variables layers like you put it where I feel like the agent if you're generating leads for yourself you can really dial in to any complexity or issue that might come up like your employee is not working them properly, getting better sales tactics, generating leads online for yourself, getting better lower cost per click, right? So it's something that you can control and a skill set that's needed in the agency first and foremost before you go outside of that environment and working on like brokers. So what about niche marketing? Because I know we're gonna get into the show how to what kind of niche marketing would you say you've had the most success with recently? Yeah, and to go deeper on the niche marketing concept the most insurance, the most expensive keyword on Google to bid for is insurance. So there's no other word that's more expensive than the word insurance. In other words, if you go online and search in Google the word insurance, there are companies that are paying like $40, $50 in some cases more to have their ad come up first. The guy goes, the progressives, the state farms, all these big companies, they have billion dollar budgets. So they're trying to constantly outbid each other and what is their message usually Todd? Like what is the message that they have when it comes to insurance? Save money on auto insurance. Save money on auto insurance, only pay for what you need for, right? Yeah. And you see that on Google, you see that on Facebook, you see that on TV, everywhere sports arenas. There's no industry that's bombarded with more ads than who bombards people with more ads than the insurance industry. It's everywhere. So if you're gonna take that same approach and you're gonna go on Facebook and say, hey, get a quote on your car insurance, here's a link to putting your information, you're not going to get much traction. But if you can call people out by name and use unique strategies to niche down, as you say, then you can get more traction. Here's what I mean by that. There are carriers that we both know of that have affinity programs, whether you're a first responder, an educator, a police officer, a nurse, right? You get special discounts, right? So what if you called out that niche and said, hey, if you are an educator, then you could be saving a lot of money on your car insurance or homeowners insurance. So if I'm a teacher and I'm scrolling through Facebook, and I see an ad like that, it calls me out, says, hey, if you're an educator in Salt Lake City, Utah, well, that's me, I'm in Salt Lake City, Utah, I'm an educator, I'm a teacher, you could save money on your insurance, all right? Well, and then the ad says, if you feel like you're paying way too much for your insurance, then click this link, fill out this form, we'll call you give you a quote. Well, now you just spoke directly to me. Or if I'm a 45 year old dad who has two kids that are starting to drive, a 17 and a 16 year old, I'm like, dang, my insurance is too expensive. But I know that, so if I'm a dad who has kids and I go on Facebook and the ad says, hey, if you are a parents with kids that are starting to drive and they're on your insurance and you feel like you're paying way too much for your insurance, then we could help you, we could save a lot of money on your insurance. That's exactly what I'm experiencing right now. So I would click on that, right? And the cool thing about Facebook is that Facebook knows who those people are. And when you create an ad as an advertiser, you can say only show this to people who are in this geographic location who have kids that are between these ages. It's crazy how much data Facebook has. Or if you know that someone went to a certain school, right, they went to the University of Oregon. You can say, hey, if you graduated from, or if you're an alumni of the University of Oregon, or if they're an alumni from University of Oregon, what do we know? They have a degree and some companies give you a discount if you have a degree, right? A bachelor's, master's degree. So you can say, hey, if you're an alumni, we could save you a lot of money on your insurance. So if I'm a U of O alumni, I see that ad, I'm clicking on that, right? So that's what we mean by niching down. And there's more ways that we can niche down and create a perfect customer avatar, but that's just like a basic way to start niching down. And I've heard people say that, they've tried using certain niches and when I asked them what niche do they use, they said it worked for a little bit and then it stopped working. And so I think that's something that's really important that we goes back to the beginning of our conversation that if you're gonna get into Facebook advertising, then you gotta understand it's not something you just dabble in and try out and burnout is real, right? If tomorrow a thousand people try to target educators because of this podcast, you might have success, but it's you're gonna need to keep trying different niches that are really important around you, wouldn't you agree? 100% and it also depends on the size of that market. So if you're going to target people in Salt Lake City, who are educators and you're willing to go out 50 miles out of your primary zip code, how many educators are you gonna target? Maybe 10,000. So once you've shown that ad 10 times to that group of people, well, you've already got the low hanging fruit of the people who are interested in that particular offer. And you're going to have this, you're gonna have diminishing returns over a period of time where you're not going to get the same cost per lead over a period of time. So that's where to your point, you have to be a student of the game and always experiment different things. In markets where you have millions of people where your audience is huge. One I'm thinking about is I worked with an accountant who was targeting people who sell products online. I remember setting up an ad for him one time like a year and a half ago and he's still running the same ad today. He hasn't changed anything. It's almost 18 months. It's the same exact ad and it's performing the same exact way now as it did then. He's getting like $3 leads and really good quality leads. But because his audience is just so huge, it's people who are selling products online. And because Facebook learned who those people are over a period of time, it's showing ads to the right people. But he's targeting a niche market by calling them e-commerce sellers, but that market is huge. That's why he's been able to run the same ad for 18 months. On the insurance side, if you're going to pick a niche and it's not a huge niche, don't expect your ads to perform the same way over a period of 18 months. Sometimes they'll perform a wealth for a month and then stop. Sometimes they'll perform well for 90 days or six months. You just have to maintain them week in, week out. And I would think that, I mean, if an agent's gonna get into this, they should probably start writing down the different niches that they should get into. And then as they start rolling through them over time, you're gonna build kind of like a library of things that worked, that didn't work. And you can go back to that niche in 12 months. And so agents need to be really cognizant of not just what's working today, right? But come back to it later and try it again, depending on what Facebook does or any changes that happen to the technology. But really keeping track of, and trying to plan out kind of like a plan of attack. And how long would you say a certain campaign on a niche would work for? Like what's the average timeframe? So people can maybe plan for three of them in the next quarter. Yeah, so I'll give a response in like three different ways. One is never just start with one niche, always start with, or never just do one campaign, always do at least three campaigns. So for instance, if we're going to target alumni's of University of Oregon, and I wanna build out a campaign for people who went to that school, don't just run an ad for people who went to U of O. Also create an ad for people who went to Oregon State University and also create an ad for people who went to PSU. So those are like the three big schools in Oregon because what you'll find is that when you launch those three campaigns, one of them will do exceptionally well. One of them is going to stink. And then one, it's like, it might do well, it might not do well. So if you do that, and after a week you look at the performance, you're like, okay, this one is clearly not doing well. I'm turning it off and this one's crushing it. I'm going to spend even more money on it. And the one in between, well, it's doing okay, but I'll just keep the budget the same. Whereas if you just started with one campaign and it just happened to be the one that wasn't going to turn out anyways, then you might be, you might feel like, okay, Facebook advertising doesn't work and stop running ads. So first thing is you, I like to set up three different campaigns up front. Secondly, I would never turn off the ad or make any changes to the ad until I've let it run for at least four days. So when you turn something on, when you turn an ad on, do not touch it, do not touch the budget, do not touch anything for four days. Because Facebook has to go through a learning phase of what's working, like who to target the ads to. And what I have found, and this happens so often where you turn an ad on, you're super excited, but then you check in in a day and there are no leads. You check in the following day and there are no leads and you've already spent a bunch of money. You're seeing a lot of clicks come through, but people are not opting in. And then day three, you start seeing some leads come in and then day four, boom, you get a ton of leads. So kind of- Facebook's really learning at that point, right? Yeah, yeah. So four days is like the minimum to give Facebook to optimize itself. And after four days, you can make changes. So that's the other part of the response. And then I would say the last part when it comes to niches, and this is kind of like the part where you just will only get this over time, is you can kind of, you can target multiple niches. Let me give you an example. You can target people who are parents with youthful drivers who are married as the main audience, but then you can call them out in two different ways. One ad you can say, hey, if you're married, that's your niche. And then from a different ad, you say, hey, if you have kids that are starting to drive, you're targeting the same group of people, but with two different messages. Does that make sense? So they might respond to one ad, the one that says, hey, if you're married, but not respond to the one that has to do with if you have kids who are starting to drive or vice versa. So you- Yeah, which call to action triggered them, right? Yeah. And that triggered the response to call and to opt in. Yeah, yeah. So it should, yeah, you should always target the same niche with the same message. You should switch up the messages. Yeah, and that, I think that brings up a topic when you said tried three different schools. A lot of people bring their own bias into marketing, right? Just because your college team lost to the other college doesn't mean you shouldn't run an ad for them, right? Like, get rid of your bias just because you think something, calling something out in an ad copy is gonna work. You still need to try something else because ABC testing is critical. I might run an ad for an Aggie. I don't know, like I'd have to get rid of you, but yeah, you gotta get rid of your biases and you've got to try different tactics in order to finding out what actually triggers people into opting in. So you're gonna, so for everybody who's listening on the podcast, you can still listen in, but we're going to share your screen and you're gonna actually take us through how to build your own niche campaign. So let's see what you got. Okay, so first I'll show an ad that is working today. This is a screenshot of an ad that's running right now as we speak. I just did a screenshot. So I'll first kind of walk you through the ad structure and then I'll show you a few other examples. So at the very top, we're asking a question. We're calling out the audience. We're saying, are you an OSU, Oklahoma State University alumni? If they raise, go ahead. Well, very specific, right? Yeah, it's a yes or no question. If you read that and you're like, yep, that's me, you're probably going to continue reading. So it says starting today, you may be eligible. Notice we're not saying you are eligible. You may be eligible to receive a significant discount on your car and home insurance if you meet the following criteria. So now I'm wondering, do I meet the following criteria or not? One is you have to live in Oklahoma, check, have an active car insurance policy, check, have less than three car accidents in the last three years. Yep, I don't have three car accidents last three years. So I meet this criteria and I'm an alumni. Okay, so what else? So if you meet that criteria and you want to save money on your car insurance, which I do, simply click the get quote button below to get a free quote. And then we have some urgency in here. This offer will expire soon. It will expire soon because this ad is not going to run indefinitely. We're going to turn it off. So this particular offer will be taken off and we have a little emoji that points it down. Click the get quote button below and we'll get in touch with you with the free no obligation quotes. It looks like there might be a grammar error. So you can go about this a couple of different ways. You can either place a link right in here and people can just click on it and be taken to a page, a landing page, or you can just set it up where they, where you don't have a link in there. And even if they just click on the picture or this get quote button, they'll be redirected to the landing page. And one thing I should have addressed sooner is that when people think of running ads on Facebook, oftentimes they think about posting something on their page and then boosting it. You know what I mean? Yeah, I used to do it all the time. Yeah, there's that blue boost button for Facebook. Tempsu says, hey, for $20 you can reach 10,000 people. And then once you put your credit card in there, it'll say, who do you want to target? And you're like, oh man, there's so many advanced options. I can play around with the audience, but that's like a really small, like it's not the best way to market. When you run ads on the page, you are so limited with what you could do. And I'll show in a couple of minutes on how to set up an ad through the ads manager. That's where you want to set up your campaigns. So we got that. And then what do you notice about this picture, Todd? What stands out about this picture to you? If you went to OSU, you're like feeling happy when you see the mascot, right? Brings in memories. Yeah, you're throwing your sign up for your school, right? But I definitely agree with the photo. It just catches your attention. And then even before that, when you were going through the ad itself, I really like how you're filtering out underwriting reasons why you wouldn't want somebody to click on, get quote, waste your team members time, have Facebook help you identify people that might qualify. Yeah, this is a perfect setup. Yeah, and we don't want more leads, Todd. We want higher quality leads. Absolutely. I'd rather pay a little more, but work with less leads. Okay, so you're spot on. This picture resonates with people who went there. And then we have a headline here that's the same as what we have up there. Are you an OSU Oklahoma State University alumni? And look at the engagement. How many likes, comments and shares do you see here? Absolutely, 223 likes and loves. They love their mascot, they love their school. They're gonna show that pride and give some love when they see it. Even if they don't click on the ad, they're probably still gonna give it love. Yeah, yeah. So the real leads, Todd, are people who click on this page, go to, or click on the ad, go to a page and fill out a form, which I'll show in just a second. But the other people to consider are the people who are in the comment section. I took a screenshot, put it here. This is from this particular ad. What are people saying here when they're commenting? Class of, I mean, everybody's just opting in with the class of where they graduated. Yeah. And again, showing their pride of, oh, too, that's my pride, right? It's, they're engaging with you because they saw the mascot, so this is awesome. Yeah, yeah. And if you see right here, the agent who's running this ad, he likes or loves each one of these comments. So he's engaging with them. And every time your comments gets engagement, if someone likes it or replies to it, you get a notification. So Ruth Christensen, right? That must have 2000. The moments this agent liked that comments, she gets a notification. So she's probably gonna go back to that ad. Now, if you really wanna get good results, what you wanna do is click on this message button and send that person a direct message. Hey, Ruth, thanks so much for your comments. If you haven't already, click this link to get a quote from our insurance agency. And then- So I've never thought about somebody just responding to the ad with class of 2000, of sending them an actual message of the call to action. So I mean, they interacted with the ad, so that makes sense. I've just never tried it. So I mean, that's a really good tip right there. Everybody should be sending a message with the call to action, not just letting people send a message on your ad. Yeah, and the more personalized that it is, Todd, the better. So let's look at the landing page. This right here, Todd, is where people go to. Now, what do you notice between the ad and the landing page? It's like, I feel at home still. Like there's my mascot. This is a safe space. Yep, so same picture, so there's congruency. And then it says, attention, Oklahoma State University alumni, stop overpaying for your car insurance. It can say just insurance at the very top. And again, I'm calling out the niche. I'm reinforcing the message. It says, enter your information below to get a free quote from our local insurance agency. So notice that we're not putting in any testimonials here, any additional links. It's just a landing page. So I'm not taking people to a website where there's so much going on. I'm just taking them to a simple page where they have really one decision to make. Opt in or leave, right? So there's not much research to do here. They opt in and that's it. So there's a picture of the agent at the bottom right and the name of the agency to give it more credibility. But notice how much information we're asking for here. We're asking for the first name, last name, email, phone number, date of birth, street address, zip code, and then get a quote for auto home or auto renters or home only, auto only. So there's a dropdown where people can pick what it is that they want. And the moment someone opts that or puts that information in, guess what? That lead goes into their CRM, goes straight into agency MVP. And once it hits the CRM, a text and email goes out to that person saying, hey Vlad, thanks so much for requesting a insurance quote from our agency. Someone from our team will call you shortly. If you'd like to get a hold of us sooner, click this number and call us right now. And then we put in a trackable phone number so they can call in. Some people call in, usually it's within working hours, but if they opt in after five or six then they know that no one's at the agency so they don't call in. There are a few ways you can go about this. Some people like to ask one question at a time. I've experimented with both. Both have their pros and cons. For me, I like to, like this is where my personal bias comes in and I need to keep it out. I like to see all the fields that I'll need to fill out at first. I'm like, okay, I'm willing to give out this information. So I'm gonna put it in, submit and I'm done versus. And if you're on a phone, when you click first name, you can select on your iPhone or your phone to pre-fill all of it immediately with your contact info. So this way is just so easy for somebody to click a couple of buttons and you're done versus having to type all of that in. So I agree. I love this method versus like a survey method that takes you screen by screen. And so I got a question though. Why so much information? I've heard people say I don't want them to have to feel like they're giving away their life in order to get a quote from me. I just want maybe a piece, their name and a contact method, email or phone, why? Things like their date of birth. Yeah, great question. So all I ask is first name, email and phone number. I'm gonna get a ton of leads. But if I'm asking for more information, I'm going to get less leads but I'm only going to get leads of people who are actually interested in getting a quote. So the reason I'm asking for these particular fields right here, date of birth, if I have that and I have their street address and I have their name, I can put that into the system. And a lot of times the system will tell me who they're insured with, right? Barriers do it differently. So I'm asking enough information just to be able to get this process started. So when we get on the phone, we're already past the initial phase of collecting information. So I don't ask for city or state. Did you notice that here? Yeah. It's just street address and zip code because if I have the zip code, then I have the city and state. So I'm not looking for more leads. I'm looking for higher quality leads. So how much do you think we're spending on this camp or how much do you think we're paying per lead or someone to fill out this entire form? I'd say the average exclusive lead is gonna, with that much information is gonna be somewhere between $15 and $20. Dang, you're pretty close, yeah. So for this particular campaign, so with this agent, I can pull up their campaigns to actually show you, but to keep it moving, the three campaigns that this agent ran, one of them stunk. It was like $30 some dollars per lead. So we turned it off. The other one was about $20, $22 a lead. And then this one is like $8 a lead. Oh, this one. Yeah, $8 to opt in. So when you, so he turned off the poor performing one and between the two that he's running right now, his average cost per lead, this is something I checked just recently. He was, I wanna say less than $15 a lead is what he's paying. So which is great. I mean, if you are the, yeah, if you're the only agent calling these leads, that's awesome. So let's just say you're paying, let's just say 20 bucks a lead to keep math simple. You get five leads that come through. So you spend a hundred bucks, you get five leads because you're spending 20 bucks a lead. If you have a good sales process, and this is key, Todd, you have to have a good sales process. You can give a really good lead to a salesperson and they won't close the lead because they don't know how to sell. And then you can give a crappy lead to a good salesperson, they'll close that lead. It's not the lead that matters. It's the sales conversation. I tell everybody that, like with even direct mail, like if you must have good people working good leads, like, or make your bad people good, right? Yeah, through teaching them how to sell. Exactly. If you are not willing to replace your team members and go through that process, then train the people that you have. Agents spend thousands of dollars a month on marketing, getting leads, but they don't train their team on how to call those leads. I often ask how, when was the last time you did a sales training with your team? When was the last time that you put them through a workshop or a training? Well, we do that once a year. Do you do that once a year? I mean, your people are calling leads every single day. You should be training every day. Anyways, besides the plan. So if we get five leads at 20 bucks a pop, if you're following a proven sales process, you should at the very least close one of those leads at the very least, right? So that would give you a 20% close rate. And if you're closing one out of five leads in one call, then your client acquisition costs, new client acquisition costs is a hundred bucks. So if you're making 200 bucks in commission, when you close a sale, well, you spent a hundred, you grossed 200, you netted 100, right? Plus renewals. Plus renewals. So a lot of agents are going to be willing to at least break even when they close a sale on the marketing. But if you're able to make a profit, then that's even better. You can continue to scale up. Nice. So that's the page. Any questions on the ad or the page here? No, let's show them like the overview of how to set it up and what you would recommend setting it up. Okay. So wait, there's more. Wait, there's more. What do you say with three different ads here? What's the big difference between these three ads? You're calling me out in different ways with your images. Yes. So the copy is exactly the same. Everything's identical. Everything above the picture and below the picture is exactly the same. The only thing that's different is the three pictures. So one quick pro tip here is never rely on one picture just because you love this particular picture with this mascot doesn't mean that it will perform the best. So I always like to run three different ads to that same market. Now, one last thing I'll show you is that we talked a lot about alumni ads but here are a few other options. One is there's a Spanish ad and I can share this video. This is in front of my Marilyn who lives here in my town. She's a real estate agent. I ran her ads and I called her one day. I said, hey, I need a video where you hold a gift card and you say, hey, if you feel like you're paying too much for your car insurance, then fill out the form below and we'll call you, give you a quote and as a bonus we'll give you this $10 gift card. And I need that video so I could share it with other agents so they don't have to record their team members or record themselves because they may not be comfortable with videos. So she gave me this video or I recorded this video so if anybody wants me to send it to them, I can do that and I'll give that contact information at the very end so that you can use this video in your ad. Does that make sense, Todd? Nice, yeah, I love it. So we wrote in Spanish and then it's translated here. Basically paying too much in your car insurance, see how much you can save in your car insurance. It says four things. This is a translation by Facebook. I hope that this is the proper way to write it in Spanish, but anyways. We'll hear from it soon. Yeah, yeah, this ad crushes it. Every time we rent the ad, it's performed really well. This one has to do with parents who have youthful drivers. You have kids who are on your car insurance policy and so you may be eligible to receive a significant discount and then- It's more underwriting. Yeah, have two or more vehicles, have less than two car accidents, have had insurance for more than six months and this one is a giveaway ad where you basically give away tickets to an event. One thing I will just warn you with the giveaway ads, you have to make it clear that the person has to get a quote from your agency before they enter the raffle. And the other thing to also know is that your team shouldn't just focus in the raffle when they call the lead, but focus on closing the sale. So these giveaway ads, they can't work, but again, if you have a good sales team that's trained on how to go through a good conversation, a closing conversation. So that's it as far as different ad variations that I wanted to show. You're ready to have me show you the full setup from beginning to end? Yeah, and I think I'll add on this, just as a disclosure, is where a podcast will be on live for a while, you definitely wanna make sure that as rules and regulations change, is a giveaway or is anything like that legal in your state, gift cards and whatnot. So just so we cover our butts, right? Yes. Yeah, let's check out. How do you start, create the ad? Kinda take us through the step by step. Step number one, make sure you have an ad manager account. So if you don't have an ad account, a Facebook ad account, I should say, then Google how to create a Facebook ad accounts. Once you have that, you'll have some of that looks like this without all of these demo ads, but you'll be able to click this button that says create with a little plus right here. Click on that. And I'm not going to explain every detail here, Todd, by all means stop me and ask questions if you have some, but I'll just give you like the general gist of every part of the ad version. So the first thing Facebook ad asks you is what do you want the outcome of this campaign to be? Do you want people to watch your video? Do you want people to click on a link? Or do you want people to click on a link and actually opt in? So, or do you want people to download an app? Right here is where you tell Facebook what you want. What we would select is conversions right here. Conversions is where people click on a link and opt in and provide their information. So we're going to select that. And then what I like to do is just name my campaign, ad set and ad right off the bat. So I don't have to do that. And this is going to change when people watch the video because it always changes. Do you have a question, Todd? Well, no, you're just keeping it consistent through all the campaign, the ad set. What's the difference between a campaign and ad set and an ad? Yep, great question. So right here, if you see my screen, that's how far is the campaign. This is the ad set and this is the ad. So the ad right here is the last thing you do. That's where you create the actual image and the boards that people see. That's the ad level. The ad set is where you tell Facebook who to show the ad to and then where you want the ad placed. Is it Facebook? Is it Instagram? Is it desktop only or is it mobile only or desktop and mobile? You want it Spanish? Do you want it in English? Do you want to put it in articles? Like where do you want to place your ads? And then the campaign objective, that's where you tell Facebook what you want the outcome to be. So a lot of times people think about advertising as just the ad level, but there's so much more to it. Okay. So there's later to the onion because when I first got into Facebook advertising that confused the hell out of me. I thought a campaign was the same thing as an ad. Like, so if you just break down like you just did, if you didn't catch it, rewind, but it's really simple. The campaign, the ad set, we're replacing it and then the ad is the ad copy. Yeah. And you know what, if you notice here, where is Facebook prioritizing the actual ad itself? Last. Last. Yeah. First they ask you, what do you want the objective to be? Then they ask you, who do you want to show it to? Where do you want to place it? Once that's all down, like the foundational things, then they say, okay, now be creative with the creative part. You know what I mean? Because these two things can be constant at all times, but then with the creatives, you can test with pictures, different pictures, videos, different headlines. That's where you do all of the experimenting. So that's why they prioritize that or they set it up at the very end. Okay. Campaign budget optimization, I always like to do on. So I control the budget at this level, at the campaign level. Never run a campaign at less than 15 bucks per campaign. You're just not going to give Facebook enough money to work with and experiments. So that's not like a hard rule, but 15 bucks is a good start. Now what I want to do, 150 bucks? Not so hard. Not to start, you can do multiple ads at 15 bucks, which will end up being $150. That's one way to do it. And when it comes to scaling, let's say for four days, you run ads and you're getting leads for 10 bucks a lead. You're like, oh man, this is awesome. Let me make that $15 budget, $150 on day five. You know what's going to happen to your campaign? Your cost per lead may go up from $10 to $20, $30 per lead because you just rushed to scale. So sometimes you can increase the budget and it still keeps the same cost per lead there, but if you are going to scale, the general rule that I follow is every three days increased by 20%. So if after four days, you're like, okay, we're running at 15 bucks a day. It's going well, let's go up by 20% and then run it for three days. If it's still working well, up by 20%. So that's how you'd want to scale. Okay, ad set name, we got that conversion. Just do website, the Facebook pixel. By now you should have, we skipped this part, but you have to install a pixel in a landing page. Just Google or go on YouTube and type it, how to install a pixel. And there's a bunch of tutorials on how to do that. And then conversion events, you have to create a conversion. I'm not going to do that here because it's something that you want to set up before you start doing this. Right. That's another. And we're going to have how to set up landing pages, how to have a conversion event like creating a lead. So there'll be other tutorials. And by all means, everybody should join the agents think tank group and ask these questions live. We will not, like the other groups will ban you if you try to talk about Facebook ads because they sell the Facebook programs. In our place, ask as many questions as you can. We got tons of experts that will help you out. So. Cool. And I'm happy to do another podcast in the future with Q and A if there's enough interest on that. Okay. So budget and schedule. This is where you tell Facebook to run the ad indefinitely or put an end date to it. I just like to run it indefinitely. And then if I see that it's not going well, I just turn it off manually. Okay. So this is where the real magic happens, Todd. This is the audience section. So the audience section is super, super critical. The first thing we do is we narrow down our audience geographically. What's your potential reach that you see here on my screen? 230 million people. 230 million people in the US over the age of 18 that we can target. Now that's not what we want for this campaign. So what we're going to do here is we'll change that to, I'll just do ore, ore gun. You're not from Oregon. You'll call it ore gone. So now we're down to 3 million people. And I don't want to target 18 year olds for this campaign. I want to target people who are say 27 and older because in a school, by the way, we're setting up an alumni ad. I don't think I made that right. 27 year old. And let's go up to 59 years of age. So that's my target. And now we're down to 1.8 million people. Gender. I'm going to keep it all genders. Detail targeting. So this right here is where you can get super granular. What you can do here in your own time is just click this browse button and then look through the crazy targeting options that Facebook has here. Education level, financial level, life events. It knows if someone's birthday is coming up, if someone's anniversary is coming up, if someone just got married, all that information is in here. Here what we want to do is just type in University of Oregon. And if you look here, the first three results are exactly the same. University of Oregon, University of Oregon, University of Oregon. What separates them is if you look right here on the right-hand side, there's interests, employers, and schools. You have to select schools because that's where when you target people who actually went to that school. Employers are people who work at that school. Interest is people like me who like the docs. So yeah, that threw me off when I was building out ads at the beginning is people would tell me to use interests as part of the ad campaign. And so I could see if there's a almost a four and a half time multiple on that, how I could waste so much time and energy and money focused on the wrong people. Yeah, because if you select this by accident, University of Oregon and the interests, then you'll target someone like me who's a huge duck fan. But when I see the ad, it says, are you a University of Oregon alumni? And I'm not, I'm gonna skip to the ad. So you just wasted money on me. It was a cool ad, but I'm not gonna opt in because I don't think it speaks to me. So the size here is 415,000 people, right? That went to U of O. But when we click on that, it drops down to, and we have to uncheck this right here, Detailed Targeting Expansion. It's down to 49,000 people. The reason it went down from 419,000 to 49,000 is because we're targeting people who are in Oregon between the ages of 27, 59. Got it. So now in one quick note on that, if you're targeting audiences that are less than 10,000 people, it'll be difficult to run ads. If it's cold campaigns of people who have never seen your ads. If it's a retargeting campaign, different story. But for cold ads, 10,000 or more. Okay, this is another big mistake people make and that has to do with placements. Facebook by default wants you to show the ad everywhere. And that's not what you want when you're starting off. You wanna select manual placements, even though it says recommended right there. And basically what this is is, you know how sometimes you're on Facebook and you're reading an article and they have the little ads that are in there. So in those ads, in article ads, you don't see the full ad. You just usually see the picture, maybe a headline. So you miss out on a lot of the, you don't get to see the full ad. What I like to do is I just turn all of these off with my cold ads, all of these options. And the only one I keep on is Facebook feed and Instagram feed. And when I'm running a retargeting ad then I can activate some of these other ones. But for starters, Facebook feed, and guess what? We're not just running a Facebook ad anymore. We're also running an Instagram ad. Okay, so we got that. For now you can skip this part and then click next. Now we get to the juicy part of creating the ad. So we got the campaign ad set and now we're doing the ad. Here Facebook will want you to identify the page. I'm gonna say just Oregon insurance. If I don't have an Instagram account created for this particular purpose, I'm just gonna select use page selected. So I don't need to have an Instagram account. So now we have that. Then Facebook says, how do you wanna create an ad? Do you want to create an ad? Use an existing post from your page or use their creative mockup. I'm gonna say create an ad from scratch. It'll ask, do you want an image video ad? Do you want a carousel? Where has two or more scrollable images? Or do you want a collection? For this purpose, I'm just going to say single image ad. And then I scroll down and then Facebook says, all right, let's start uploading pictures here. For my media, I'm gonna select add video or add image. In this case, I'm gonna do image. And since I already have some of the pictures in here, I'll just use them. If you don't, you just upload if new ones. Or you can always, Facebook gives you the option to use stock images and they're free. Well, not free, they charge you through the ad, but you don't pay for them separately. So if you don't have pictures, that's where you can get them. Okay, so what we have so far is the picture, right? Right. If I'm like, that's not the picture I wanted to pick, then I'll just select the other one and go back and change it. And this is something I want to point out. Notice how this is a square, but then my picture is horizontal. What I'm gonna do is select the square one by one option. Now I'm zoomed in on this and it makes a bigger ad. Right, now click done. Okay, we got our picture down. Now we have to pick the text that goes above the picture. So what I'll do here is I'll just type in R-U-A-U-R-B. And you're using basically the same context when you were looking at doing that Oklahoma University. 100% yeah. Writing and all that content. Yep, so I'm going to use, I'm gonna use this exact post, but for the sake of time, I'm not going to type it all out, but that's where that text would go. And then I would put a headline. The headline goes right here at the bottom and then description that goes underneath the headline. So pretty straightforward. And right here where it says website, we would give it the website URL. Where do you wanna send your traffic to? So that's where you put it. Yep, exactly right. You would put that website here. And then if you want to change the call to action button, which I highly recommend that you do, instead of learn more, tell them exactly what they're gonna do. They need to get a quote. So it gives you an option, apply now, book now, contact us, donate now, in this case, get quote. So if you look here, you can see the preview of this ad right here. That's the Facebook feed and this is the Instagram feed. So you know exactly what it looks like. Okay, so we have all that. And then it's telling us that we don't have the pixel installed. This is a demo account. So it'll remind you of that before you click publish. Once you click publish, you're done with the setup, but Facebook needs to review the campaign before they approve it. That could take anywhere between a couple of minutes to out usually a full day. And if it's a newer ad accounts, they may take a bit longer. In this case, I know for certain that they're going to deny this ad because the URL. Yeah, the test URL. Here's a pro tip and I'm not going to spend too much time on this but I'll just say it out loud. Once I click publish, the ad will come up over here. What I can do is then select the ad, click duplicates, and then just change the picture and then click duplicate one more time and change the third ad. So I'll have three ads running three different images to test which one gets the best response. Precisely. So we're using the same campaign. We don't change anything there. Same ad set. We're only changing the ad and we have three different ads. And I have found Todd, this to be something that I was reluctant in trying and I've heard people using that strategy but I never did it until a while back, I was a very early experiment and my cost per impression went down like crazy where it was costing me like I was running video ads. It was costing me about 30, 40 cents to run a video ad and it went down to like seven cents to run a video ad to have someone watch 15 seconds of it. So that's by just giving Facebook options. Facebook likes to have a variety of ads to run or to pick from. So nice. Was that helpful? Absolutely. And like you said, we're gonna have some Q and A later on. I think what really, that at least gets people started, right? So if you're intimidated by Facebook advertising, if you're intimidated on what tactic you should use, I think this was a perfect podcast or somebody to listen to our YouTube video to follow through and definitely we're here to help if they need any help. So I really appreciate, you're walking through the Facebook advertising but I know that's not actually what you do, right? So people shouldn't use you as just the Facebook resource guy. Can you kind of dive into how people can find what you actually do with the interest? Yeah, so yes. And thanks for giving me this opportunity and I just created a quick slide to make it easier on anyone. So if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see this. So my main thing that I do is I work with insurance agents and their staff and teach them how to close sales in the first call even if your price is more expensive. So I created a script. I called a six step script to the one call close. So very simple to follow. And I recorded a free webinar just like this, Todd, where I break down the script. It's not a sales pitch. It's there's no theory. It's kind of like this podcast where it was very practical, where we showed real substantive things that people can just apply. This webinar is exactly the same way where I'll show you the script and how it works. People are always blown away how much free stuff they get in this webinar. So it's about 90 minutes long and you get to see how the script works from beginning to end. And to see that webinar, just simply visit insurancetrainingwebinar.com and you can link it if you'd like when you post this video. And if someone wants to send me an email, bottom right-hand side, you'll see my email. That's the general inbox for the company, but I read every email it says info at insurancesaleslab.com. That's info at insurancesaleslab.com. If you like this podcast and you have follow up questions on any tactical things posted in the big tank group. But if you want me to send you like that video of Marilyn with a Spanish ad or if you want me to share the landing page that I use, I'd be happy to share those items for free so you can just import it into your ClickFunnels accounts. All you got to do is just send me an email and give me feedback on how you thought this podcast went. But the main message is that if you want your team members to close more sales and teach them how to sell, then make sure you watch the free training webinar. It'll be absolutely transformational for your agency. Beautiful. Well, hey, thank you Vlad. Thank you to everybody that's listening. I hope you have an amazing day. Thanks.