537: Paid Advertising Mindset, Troubleshooting, Strategy, and Success with Joe Kashurba

Unknown Speaker 0:00 Marketer of the Day episode 537, paid advertising mindset,

Unknown Speaker 0:04 troubleshooting, strategy and success with

Robert Plank 0:07 Joe kashurba. Hey everyone. We're back with the marketer of the day podcast, and we're back also with Joe kashurba. He's back for a second appearance. If you're curious about the previous episode with him, that's at marketer of the day.com, forward, slash 272, we talked on that episode about how Joe loves to use AdWords, cold emails and direct mail. And today what we're going to talk about is sort of what kind of results to Expect When You're getting a marketing campaign going as far as testing and optimizing and sort of that ad mindset. And Joe's gonna tell us about the nitty gritty of actually getting a campaign to profitability on either AdWords or Facebook or whatever channel you're using. So Joe, glad to have you back. How have things been

Joe Kashurba 0:50 doing? Great. Thanks so much for having me back.

Robert Plank 0:53 Super cool. So since, since last time, I mean, whatever you went up to in your business last few months, oh,

Joe Kashurba 0:59 let's see couple things working on, you know, we have the the training business, where we help web designers and, you know, digital agencies grow their businesses, as well as the, the actual digital agency that I originally started in high school, and so we're moving forward with both of them. We've been, you know, adding lots more people into the the training program. Actually, just today found out that WP Engine, which is a big WordPress hosting company, chose our training program as their recommended business training program for WordPress freelancers. So it was pretty cool. And so we're working on that. And then on the agency side, we've been sort of switching gears a little bit and focusing on working with some really big companies, and sort of trying to be a little bit more boutique in our approach, and work on some really big projects and really big marketing campaigns for some really big companies, as I'm trying to figure out how to manage my time between these two different businesses,

Robert Plank 1:57 awesome. So lots of new challenges that come with moving up in the

Joe Kashurba 2:02 world, absolutely. And I as, as most entrepreneurial minded people, I wouldn't have it any other way, right? I mean,

Robert Plank 2:09 yeah, amen to that. I mean, who wants things to be without problems? You want problems so that way you can get the money and then tackle even bigger problems. And so, so, so, yeah, so, as far as so, you know, people out there, they have, you know, businesses, they have websites, but they say, I don't have as much traffic as like to get to those websites. So what are your thoughts on that? Like, like, where should people start? What should people be looking at, as far as getting some eyeballs on their sites? Well,

Joe Kashurba 2:35 I think the, I think the biggest thing, one of the biggest mistakes that people see people make, is that they they try to do a bunch of different things, and I think the first step is to decide what marketing channel you're gonna use, you know, and that's a you know, that you could have a whole conversation about that, whether you should do AdWords or Facebook or direct email or contacting people on LinkedIn, but You have to pick one and then really commit to making that marketing channel work. I think that's the first step.

Robert Plank 3:08 Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Don't have all of your activities spread super thin, so you're spending 10 minutes on LinkedIn, 10 minutes on Facebook, 10 minutes on an AdWords campaign, and then wondering why, why you're not getting anywhere because you're not devoting the time you need to to go deep

Joe Kashurba 3:23 because, because, honestly, and this might surprise a lot of people, is any marketing channel that you're going to pick, probably the first thing you try isn't going to work, right? Like, even, even, you know, I don't know if I'm necessarily a marketing expert, but I've had some some success with marketing. And even if I go whether it's whether it's a Facebook campaign or whether it's an AdWords campaign or whether it's a direct email I'm sending out, even me, there's a large chance that that that first thing I try isn't going to work, and I'm going to need to do some testing and experimenting and change things up and that kind of thing. And so I see people so often they'll just sort of take these, keep taking these random shots in the dark, never realizing that the first shot is probably not going to work. They just need to stick to it.

Robert Plank 4:10 Yeah, I agree completely that. And maybe even the second, third, fourth one is not going to work. But then sometimes I wonder, especially like when I play with, you know, Facebook ads or things like that. I'm sometimes like, Okay, well, this, this ad didn't work, and then I'm not never, sometimes sure if I should just, like, throw the whole thing out and start over, or just tweak or how much is enough, how much I've put into it, and it's when it's time to call it quits. Does that make sense?

Joe Kashurba 4:36 Yeah, that's, that's a that's a great question. That's a great that's a great question and a great challenge. I think that the the one of the big breakthroughs for me was to to break it down into separate steps and go through a series of tests where, when on that initial test, I wasn't even trying to get a client. I wasn't even trying to get a sale. I was just kind of trying to get the first thing to happen. So let's see. Let's use Facebook as an example. Say you're sending, you're doing Facebook ads, and then you're sending people to a landing page, and then they enter their email address and they watch a sales video, and then they buy something, or they don't say that's your funnel, if, if I was launching that on Facebook when I first launched that I'm not even trying to make a sale. I don't even care if I make a sale. I just want to make sure that, first off, the ads actually run and I get impressions, right? So I'm going to give it a couple days and see if that happens. Then I'm going to give assuming I do get impressions, then I'm going to give it a few more days and see, can I get some opt ins? And again, I don't even care whether I make any sales. I'm just trying to go step by step. Okay, I got impressions now. I got some clicks on my landing page, and few people actually converted and watched that sales video. And so I don't, you know, it's that's my approach. I go step by step, but only I only start caring about is that sales video converting. Are people actually buying once I know for sure that the ads are, you know, the ads are getting impressions, the ads are getting clicks, the landing page is getting conversions. And then I start working, working on a sales video. So I do step by step, and I actually, you know, I it's almost like, you know, if I was launching that campaign, I would just put something quick together for that sales, that sales video, because I don't even care about that. I just want to get the first few steps taken care of first?

Robert Plank 6:43 Yeah, that makes perfect sense, and that makes it a lot more manageable, as opposed to trying to. I mean, it kind of relates to what we were talking about before, where people are trying to get 10 different things to work at the same time, as far as all these different platforms that they're running their ads on. But then even if they focus on one platform, then they might be bringing the same problem with them of trying to get 10 different elements of the final working. And so what you're saying is to pull back a little bit and say, well, all I'm all I'm worried about right now is just to get some impressions on the ad. Doesn't even matter if the landing page is just something you threw together really quick. Doesn't matter if it sucks, just something really simple. All you're focused on is just getting their impressions. But then once you solve that, when you saw problem number one, then you move on to focusing all your energy on the next problem, which is to get those opt ins. And then And then again, like, who even cares if the the download page or whatever's on the other end is like a YouTube video you put on the page or something just now, you're only focused on getting that conversion rate improved. And so that makes a lot of sense, as far as not trying to solve 10 problems at once,

Joe Kashurba 7:48 exactly it's, I think about it like, you know, in some movie where somebody's picking a lock, where they're, you know, they're listening to the the combination lock, and they hear it click when they get the first number right. And so they got the first number right, and then they keep going until they hear click, and they get the second number right. And you go through until you've gotten all the numbers right, and you have a working funnel, as opposed to just choosing a bunch of random numbers that didn't work and then choosing a bunch of new random numbers. You know, because that that funnel, we always, I think sometimes people think of their funnel is one thing, but really it's a series of variables. It's the ad, it's the landing page, it's the video, it's the offer, it's all these things. And, you know, like I said at the, you know, the very beginning, what's the likelihood that you're going to get all of those things right at the beginning? It's, it's, it's pretty small. We got to just make sure. We got to get one thing right at a time?

Robert Plank 8:41 Yeah. I mean, this is, this is making a lot of sense here, and so it makes it simple for us to do and all that cool stuff. And so, so great. So just focus on that one thing at a time. And what I like about, sort of the topic that we're on today, is that we're not getting too much into the technical stuff, right? Because that seems to be frustrating. Will a lot of the learning curve with this paid ad stuff is it seems like as soon as you learn, as soon as you get the lay of the land with AdWords or with Facebook or something, and you figure out all their different kind of, you know, targeting options available for you, or different types of ads, then they kind of throw a monkey wrench in the mix. But it sounds like the once you figure out the strategy, and you figure out kind of the game you're playing, then you can just, like, apply the strategy to AdWords or to Facebook or whatever, and then just kind of figuring out the the details is just, it's just the small, easy part. Is that? Right?

Joe Kashurba 9:38 Yeah, absolutely. So a couple things on that. One thing is, you know, you're right. All these platforms, there's so many new features they're always coming out with and new things. And my recommendation to people on that is, stick with the basics and don't get distracted by all their new flashy stuff. You know, on face. Book. There's, you know, there's so many things you can do now on Facebook. There's these messenger bots and there's these, there's some new thing they just, I just saw to this week. It was, you can now have ads inside videos that are on Facebook. There's all these new things you can do, but it's, it's better just to ignore all that and stick to the basics. So, you know, we have clients that we manage multi million dollar Facebook advertising budgets for, and all we're doing is simple image ads with text on Facebook, and that's it. There's no video ads, there's no messenger bots, there's no anything crazy. It's just images and text ads. Super, super simple.

Robert Plank 10:40 Awesome. Yeah. And it seems like when a new type of ad or some new feature gets added on these platforms, it seems like it takes some while to get the bugs worked out. So it's like, if we jump on, like you said, the ads in the videos, or even like the what are the new ones on Facebook, like, where you're someone's on like their home screen on Messenger, and there's like, ads in between their private messages and things like that. And it's like, well, if you jumped on that, well, first of all, no one really knows what to do there, so you're just as blind as everyone else. And then as soon as you figure it out, then Facebook whoever, once they get it dialed in, and once that gels, then it'll change on you. So there. So it sounds like there's not really much sense in going after the cutting edge. Why not just keep it simple? Why not go with what works and so something that I've always been interested about, when I've seen people like create their ads and things like that, that seems like some people just spend, like, hours and hours a day just creating new ads or trying new things, or at the very least, kind of tending to it, like poking the fire a little bit every single day. So can you kind of talk to us about that, that mindset or that strategy, as far as, like, always creating the experiments, like always creating the test, is that, like, part of your like daily plan, or something like that?

Joe Kashurba 11:58 Yeah, that's a, that's a that's a good that's a good question. And I do think a lot of people and I, I am always tempted to do this, and I have to really fight myself on this, it's very tempting to go in and mess with things and worry about things. And there's probably been a million times that that I probably had an ad campaign that would have worked had I not just gone in there and messed with it, you know, because people run it for, you know, it gets two clicks, nobody converts, and then you start freaking out and you turn it off or something. So I always have very discrete experiments with a specific deadline or with, like, a specific timeline and a date attached to it, and a specific result that I'm trying to see or that I'm expecting to see, like a hypothesis. So for instance, if we were doing, you know, we were talking about Facebook, I said the first thing I want to do is get impressions. So in that case, what I'll do is, and I actually will keep track of this in a spreadsheet. So I have a spreadsheet for this Facebook advertising campaign, and I'll say, okay, my experiments gonna run until tomorrow. So it's only 24 hours, and the the expected result I'm gonna see is that I am going to get, you know, at least, you know, a few 100 impressions of my ad, right? So then I know that I can't touch it until tomorrow, when that experiment is done, and and then if I don't, if I don't get the expected result. Now, in a case like that, where you're just trying to get impressions, unless your ad is disapproved or something weird happens, you should get impressions. But if that's experiment successful, then I set up a new experiment. So I'll say, Okay, now I'm going to run it until the end of the week, and so maybe it's Monday, and I'm going to say, Okay, I'm going to run this till Friday. Friday's the deadline on this experiment, and my expected result is that I will get, you know, at least five conversions, you know, five opt ins during that time period. And so then I don't touch it. I stop myself from touching it until the end of that experiment, where I see, did I get the expected result, or did I not? And then, based on that, I either if I get the expected result, like I say, I get those opt ins, then maybe I'll do a longer experiment see if I can actually get a sale. If I don't, then I'll basically, I'll change something, I'll change the ad or change the landing page based on what went wrong, and then I'll run another experiment and see if I get that expected result the next time. But it's discrete experiments where I don't touch the ad in between that, you know, in between until that experiment is done. And I always have a clear, you know, a clear date for that, and a clear picture of a clear metric based way to say this worked or it didn't work.

Robert Plank 14:52 I like that a lot. And that might sound simple at first, but that's so that's so powerful, and I imagine that a lot of people don't do that, just. Something as simple as and it sounds like getting it in writing is really important too, because it's easy to just say, Oh, I've got it in my head, but then your brain plays tricks on you. So when you say, I set up this ad, I'm gonna let it sit for 24 hours. That way I don't mess with it. And I want to get it to 200 impressions. Then you'll give it time to let it ride. But then it also won't be one of those things where you don't get back to it for a couple of weeks. You get back to it in a timely fashion, but then you also get back to it when you need to. You stay on top of it. And then you also can tell if you passed or failed, because you said, Well, my goal was to get a couple 100 impressions. So it's like you were very clear about your goals and your expectations there

Joe Kashurba 15:39 exactly. And it's the kind of thing where marketing is, you know, getting marketing to work like this is so much about just taking the taking the emotional side out of it, and doing it by the numbers. You know, it's sort of like if you're a day trader or if you're a professional gambler that goes into the casino and plays blackjack every day, and that's your main source of income. You know, the you know, those kind of people, they make their money and they make it work by being totally by the by the numbers. And they're not, you know, betting based on their emotions. They're not taking that trade and, you know, selling because they're afraid or they're emotional, it's all based on the numbers. And that's what we have to do as marketers, is go totally based on the numbers. Yeah,

Robert Plank 16:27 I love it. You're so right in that usually your emotions are going to betray you. Like, I mean, if you use the like, the stock market or the gambling mindset, it's like, well, if the if the stock goes down, or like, oh, I need to get out of this, when maybe you should hang on and vice versa, and so. So something that's maybe, like a little bit of, maybe a selfless question here is, as far as the Pay Per Click stuff, when me, my business partner, like, we'll run ads and things. And when we run ads for stuff that's not internet marketing and not WordPress, it seems to, we seem to have an easier time. And when we get into the internet marketer stuff. Like, you know, we look at like ads, other ads that are out there, and like we see, like, what they're targeting is, and we do our best to kind of duplicate what we see. But it seems like there, there are certain niches, and especially like, the internet marketing stuff is really tough with the paid ads. So is that, is that for everyone, or are we just doing something wrong? Or, like, what are your thoughts on that?

Joe Kashurba 17:21 I think there's a lot of truth to that. Yes, there's a lot of truth to the fact that in the internet marketing community, you know, the the level the level of sophistication you need with your funnel, or the level of sophistication you need in terms of just being really good at copywriting. I mean, you look at something like Ryan dices, like he has the machine program. And I've not gone through the program, but I've seen some of his graphics where, you know, you have this funnel where somebody gets in, and then there's this email sequence to sell them this thing, and then there's a 30 day sequence to sell them this other down, sell thing. And then, you know, it's a whole big, complex thing, right? That's the kind of stuff that, like in internet marketing world, you really need to be sharp and you really need to get it to work. What, what I found is that, if you get outside of that, and, you know, in some more traditional kinds of of industries, you know, even, like, a drop of that kind of sophistication just blows it out on the water, you know, and that's why we've had some so much success, working with some in our digital agency, working with some, you know, we've worked, you know, you know, working with manufacturing companies, working with really big construction companies. And we'll put together a campaign and a landing page and a funnel. That's that's honestly pretty basic compared to some of the stuff that's talked about in the internet marketing world, and it just blows it out of the water. So yeah, that's definitely, I think there's a lot of truth to that.

Robert Plank 18:57 Okay, well, cool. So if, if some of us out there are maybe fighting an uphill battle or making things more complicated than they have to be, then maybe we need to look into getting in these other niches so that way we can have an easier time with our paid ads.

Joe Kashurba 19:10 Absolutely. I mean, the stuff that you the stuff that you would think is normal and everybody would know from an internet marketing standpoint, is pure wizardry to somebody outside the internet marketing world.

Robert Plank 19:24 Yeah, yeah. And what you're making me think of thinking of here is, like, for example, um, like, we sell like these WordPress plugins and things. And if we were to figure out a way to target like, a certain plugin to like a construction company or a mining company, like you're saying here, then we can, then we can make it about who it's for and not just that. It's for people with websites.

Joe Kashurba 19:46 I think that would be great. And I would even think about, you know, thinking about it from, say, going to that business and not advertising necessary as a plug in, you know, a WordPress thing. But. Advertising it as the functionality that they're going to get, or the benefit they're going to get. And, you know, you may even make sense to roll it into a service where you can buy that plug in, or we also have the service we get it all set up for you. I think something like that could work really, really well.

Robert Plank 20:18 Yeah, I love it. Like a like a dinner for you things, sort of thinking outside the box there, and so, so, yeah, that's really cool. And it's a really like, that's a really good example there of sort of, like thinking in in like, advertiser terms, right? Instead of being, and it seems like that's, that's kind of a thing, right? Instead of thinking in terms of, well, here's my website, let me figure out how to run ads to it. Your, your kind of mindset is, well, let me look at like, who, who I'm targeting, and then make a landing page based on what they would want to see, right? It's not necessarily of let me force them to get to my website

Joe Kashurba 20:51 exactly. I almost always recommend not sending paid traffic to to a website, or, you know, to your main website, because your website's probably not. It's not, it's not geared probably towards, you know, converting that that particular person. It's more of a hub where they can get information about a variety of different things, and they can see that you're legit and things like that. But it might, it's probably not super geared towards that particular ad, or that particular person that you're advertising to, and that kind of thing,

Robert Plank 21:26 right? So I mean, along those lines, as far as, like, the, I guess, like this, the, really, I don't know, like basic, fundamental things that we should be rethinking in our traffic, in our advertising, is there anything that maybe you've learned over the course of all your years of experience that you wish you knew when you started.

Joe Kashurba 21:46 I think the you know that one of the biggest ones, which always seems so obvious, is it took me a long time in business to just realize that if I wanted to get clients consistently, I needed to do marketing consistently, and I just sort of for a long time, just was sort of waiting for the phone to ring like waiting for somehow magically, I'm going to get a lot of great clients this year, instead of realizing that something needs to be happening in my business every single day to get in front of them. So now it's, you know that again, that could be direct email, that could be direct mail, or could be an advertising campaign running, but I just didn't connect up in my mind that I need to actually be proactive about causing something to happen to get these clients. I love it. It's

Robert Plank 22:31 not just going to come to you magically, and you're making me think back to when I wasn't like my like, late teenager, early 20s years, when I was playing around with websites at first, and I was doing just that. I was playing around, and that's it. I'd click the Refresh button, I check my stats, and be like, where's the traffic coming and where's the sales? And then I realized later that, oh yeah, I have to build a list. And not only that, but I have to be marketing to that list, and I have to always be looking for new places to get traffic to grow that list. And even on top of that, I need to be kind of putting out the even bigger feelers, like, for example, like hopping on, like, you hopping on this podcast is the way of just, like, getting just even more of those feelers out there. Because you never know when the traffic source is going to come through, and you need to have, you know, you need to kind of have the deck, the deck stacked in your favor. So that way it's not just a matter of, well, hey, I made a website. I hope someone finds it. So, I mean, you're so right, if you want to get clients consistently, you need to be marketing consistency. So, I mean, I love it. You've given us a lot to go on here and a lot to think about, and a lot to maybe consider when it comes to the future or business of everyone listening. And so can you fill us in on where people can find you these days on as far as, like, you know, websites, or any offers or links you want to drop here.

Joe Kashurba 23:45 Yeah, absolutely I will. I won't say one other thing. I think it'd be real valuable to people. You know, we talked about Facebook ads and and that process. But this whole thing applies exactly the same to say direct email or contacting people on LinkedIn, and I either take the same approach, where I say, Okay, I'm gonna send 50 emails out, and I'm not trying to get a lead, I'm not trying to get a sale. I'm just gonna see do I get to get a few people to reply to my email, even if they say no, then I at least know that that people are opening it and reading my message and so and then if I send 50 out and they get some replies, then I'll send more out and see if I can get a lead. But this whole approach of just running these discrete experiments and going step by step, it applies to sort of any kind of marketing channel, even a, you know, not a paid advertising channel. So I just thought that was valuable. But in terms of

Robert Plank 24:35 what it's like, yeah, it's like you're figuring out your template in the same way with you getting your ads dial like, it's like you're getting your ads dialed in. But with the cold email or the LinkedIn stuff, there's still ads, in a way. They're just ads that you're sending one like 50 at a time, not necessarily paying money. You're just spending an hour on it. So, so yeah, I mean, that's, you're kind of blowing my mind here, and that the the paid ads and the cold emails and the LinkedIn invites and all those sorts of. Things, it kind of translates Exactly.

Joe Kashurba 25:03 And I was actually, you know, I said, we're working on getting some bigger clients, and focusing more on getting big, big digital, digital agency clients. I was just started a direct email campaign recently, you know, in the last week or two, and it was the same thing where, in what's funny about I sent out maybe 20 emails. I was going to send out 50 for my initial experiment. I just wanted to get a couple replies. And it was funny, like, I sent out 20, and I started to feel like, oh, like, nobody's responding, like, you know, like I knew better, but I still started to get this feeling like, Oh, this isn't working. But I stuck to the the initial 50 that I was supposed to send out with my experiment, and by the end of that 50, I'd gotten a lead, and I actually got a few replies. It worked really well, but yeah, had I not had that 50, I could have stopped and given up.

Robert Plank 25:51 Yeah, that's, that's pretty powerful. Yeah.

Joe Kashurba 25:55 So anyway, to answer your initial question, yeah, if you're, if you are interested in learning more about our done for you services. You can go to kashervawedesign.com and if you are somebody that is a freelancer or web designer, an agency owner and you're looking to learn more about growing your business, you can go to joecasherba.com and we have a 90 minute webinar that we do periodically. You can sign up for and get a lot of information there, and love to work with you.

Robert Plank 26:22 Awesome. So we'll see you there at those two websites, kasherba Web design.com and joecasherber.com so I hope that if you in your business, if you've ever thought about running ads, or you've had some of these kind of mental hang ups or mental blocks like Joe was talking about, where, you know, maybe you're sent a few emails and you stop too soon, or you ran some ads. And maybe it's time to rethink things. Maybe it's time to remove the emotion out of it and to make things simple and to cut it up into a few pieces and just solve one small at a time, keeping in mind that if your ads are sucking, maybe you just haven't run enough ads, or maybe you haven't run them long enough or with enough reach like like Joe just said he sent 20 emails. Didn't get much response, but kept through it and said, Well, I had my goals. I know what my numbers are. If I can get one out of 50, that'll be a pretty good ratio. But don't just necessarily stop, because your your brains or your emotion telling you to stop. Make sure to have this kind of ad creators mindset. And if, if the whole topic of the ad creation or expanding your business excites you and interests you, then check out those websites. Kasherba Web design.com and joecasherba.com and we'll see you there. And Thanks so much, Joe for making a return visit and for getting us straight on what we need to know about our advertising, so I appreciate it

Joe Kashurba 27:42 Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. If

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