What I Learned From Spending Over $1.5M On Facebook Ads
I'm going to share what I've learned from spending over 1.5 million on Facebook ads, probably closer to 2 million. And it's not going to be technical. If you're looking for a technical information structure, that's not what this is going to be.
I'm going to talk to you about the stuff below the surface, the iceberg, right? The technical stuff is just the top monkey that could do the technical stuff, but you've got to understand how to match the messaging with the tool market. And if you do that, then regardless if it's Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or whatever new platforms, digital platforms are coming online, or whether it's old school mail or calling or door knocking or sending out flyers, you'll be able to crush your business.
Let me start by framing it like this for you, where most people miss it when it comes to their marketing. And their outreach is they don't understand their market, their market. Some people call this a niche. Some people call this an avatar. All these things are representations of humans, human beings with a heart with emotions that have needs, desires, fears, and dreams. When you're building your business, you have to have absolute clarity on who your people are and who you're going after.
I'll give you an example. Let's say that you're in the yoga business, whether you're selling yoga stuff or selling yoga services. Yoga coaching or life extension through yoga flexibility through yoga sex through yoga or who knows whatever, it doesn't matter. But I want you to think in terms of it.
I'm going to use two sides of polarity, right north and south, on and off. I'm going to make it very clear. And I'm going to say, hey, imagine that you're marketing to an older married Christian man for yoga, and compare that with marketing to a young, divorced atheist woman for yoga. Two entirely different messages. There are two entirely different frames of reference, worldviews, different languages, different music, different TV shows, different preferences, different cultures, and different experiences. Everything is different even though both of those people could sell yoga products or services, so think about that.
For a minute, this is where most people miss it. This is where so many people fail because they don't have clarity on this. They're focusing on 27 other things, and they're missing the main thing. Your marketing is a function of your communication.
You communicate differently with your parents than your child. Jesus was an excellent communicator, and you can see him and Paul as well. You can see these guys in their excellent communication. And we have to do the same thing. We have to do the same thing in our business. Otherwise, it's game over.
Why do you think most businesses fail? Part of it is because they can't get customers. And part of that is because they don't know how to communicate. So you've got to understand who your market is. And then within that market, there's a sub-market of your ideal customer. And the easiest initial takes you no more than five minutes, probably three minutes. The easiest way to do that is to take a little yellow sticky note and just think about who are the people you enjoy hanging out with the most. Who are the people that you enjoy hanging out with the most? Men, women, older, younger Democrat, Republican, Christian, atheist, parents, non-parents, right? And just start to jot down and make a log of some of these different criteria. Then, what are some of the things that you love to talk about when hanging out with your friends, sports, entertainment, movies, the Bible, parenting, marriage, whatever it is, doesn't matter.
That is who you should target with your marketing. That is who you should target with your marketing. I've worked with entrepreneurs for years now, close to a decade and a half. And it never ever works. Your business can never work long-term if you are not working with people you enjoy working with.
Do not chase a trend absent further thought about who the trend is and what customer the trend represents. Because I promise you, you'll wake up one morning and you'll hate your business. How do I know that happened to me?
We built a very successful medical marketing practice. And I woke up one morning and I realized I did not enjoy the clients. Again, nothing wrong with them. But, you know, they, it was next to impossible to get him on the phone. They didn't really have any good foundational business background, they were just technicians doing their thing. And it was like pulling teeth to get them to understand what we're doing. And because they didn't have business awareness, we could generate the best leads on planet Earth. But if the person answering the phone wasn't able to convert those leads, then it made us look bad and they didn't understand it. And I just woke up one day and I'm like this stinks. And so I made some plans and I crashed out of that business.
So I'm sharing with you a way to prevent yourself from having a lot of time hassle. Wake up. I hate these... hate’s a strong word, but I don't prefer these people. versus if you properly architect your business, you can wake up and be really excited about who you're working with. And that's important because business is about resiliency, you're going to have up days and down days, and you got to have power, to carry through the power to persevere to have that grit. And if you enjoy the people you're working with and serving. It fuels you in an entirely different way than if you don't, it's like working on eight cylinders instead of four.
So whatever business you're in, or if you don't know, schedule a free discovery call, and we'll help you, we'll get that sell fast. But make sure that you have clarity on who within that market are your people. And again, who do you like hanging out with? Great, what do you guys like talking about? Get an understanding, because you're going to talk to and present that yoga product or service to the older married Christian man. A lot different than the younger divorced atheist woman.
Okay, next is super important. What problem do you solve? The bigger the problem, the bigger the solution, the bigger the ability to slice through all the market clutter. Again, I've learned these things in investing over 1,000,005 close to 2 million on Facebook ads. Right? The structure inside of Facebook or whatever marketing platform you choose to use online-offline doesn't matter. That is so unimportant compared to lining up your market with the submarket, who in the market you love with the problem yourself. If I had a cure for cancer legitimately, I could write it out on a sticky note and start stapling them to telephone poles. And I would have a billion-dollar business. Right? Again, legitimately, if that was, legitimately there was a cure for cancer that I figured out, or that you figured out a pill. The marketing medium wouldn't even matter at all. Right? It's about the problem that you solve. The bigger the problem, the bigger the ability to cut through the market clutter, in a long-term business. And if you study business, any long-term businesses are always built on solving big problems with excellence.
And here's the good news. You don't have to know how to actually solve the problem. In some cases, you may know, part, or maybe even none of how to solve the problem. But what you want to do is, you want to become a student of your market, a student of your niche, a student of your avatar. We're taught to be students all our life, well, this is the same thing you have to do. You have to become a student of that idea.
Who are the customers that you want to serve? What are their pain points? What is that older married Christian man yoga? Is it time? Is it flexibility? Is it energy? Is it A, knowing what to do, I don't know. But as you have clarity on what they're struggling with that will allow you to serve them with excellence, and then have a fierce marketing message. Right?
So don't worry if you know how to solve the problem or not. Most people limit themselves by their own thinking, and that's the last thing you want to do. Right? Why would you want to limit yourself by your own thinking? God's thinking is so far beyond our thinking.
God's a problem solver, he's a server, right? He solves big problems with excellence. And so that's what we want to be doing in our business. So that's why you have to look at this market. You've chosen the person within the market, you've chosen to serve in specific. Find out what their problems are. And it might not be what you think they are, in most cases, it's not. In most cases, we have our blinders on. And there are these blind spots that we can't see, as it relates to the problems. So you need to just go in and become a researcher and take a look and study what those problems are.
And then don't even worry about how you're going to solve them at the beginning. Because someone may have figured out how to solve part of the problem. Right? Like, let's say, your problem has, the problem you've identified has four components. Maybe Person A has figured out how to solve component one with excellence. And maybe Person B has figured out how to solve components with excellence. And so maybe you can assemble a solution that's better than anything out there. Or maybe you can hire somebody to find out how to solve the problem. Or maybe you can figure it out. And then what you do is you assemble a cleaner, leaner, faster.
And that's what I've done with my business. In the business incubator, I've structured it so that most people can generate the first $5,000 within four to six weeks. And in some cases, even less time. No one else on the market has that. And so, but that's a function of me studying and studying, and identifying and going through this process.
We had a restaurant locally that has turned over three, three different times so far. And the first time they went in there, we went in there, and the food was really great one day and then really not great the next time and then really great the time after that, and then really not great the next time. And so, these business owners must have realized that there was a problem and we shared with them like we were very truthful with them because they were good guys, we'd like them. And what they did is they decided to solve their problem by going ahead and remodeling renaming and revamping their whole business. The entire rebuild must have cost them 50 hundred grand. I don't even know. So we're all excited. We couldn't wait.
It was a six-month project, right? These guys, you know, they lost all the revenue for the six months in, no money, and while they're remodeling, they invested all this money out to build this thing up opening day, and we were so excited.
We went in there and the food was amazing. Came back, and the food was not amazing. Came back again, and the food was amazing. Came back again, and the food was not amazing. And we ended up just not going there anymore. Well, they ended up going out of business as all businesses do that don't solve problems with excellence. And a new business came in, and they had an existing presence, a locally owned business with like six or eight chains, and they've been doing fine in that same spot. same place, the same access to people, and they're profitable. They're healthy, good to go, and very consistent.
Now, I said that because, my wife and I were talking about this actually over the weekend, and I was thinking about it. I asked her, you know, what, what one decision could those owners have had? What one principle could they have had, that would have prevented them from going out of business and wasting all that money and time? And we were talking through it. And it really comes down to a very simple principle of putting your customers first.
Put your customers first. Right? That's a biblical principle. If there's ever one, the golden rule, you know if you want to be the servant. And so if that business that restaurant would have simply had a feedback mechanism, to where they could have kept their pulse on their customers' needs, been a researcher, a student of the customer, but then also a hadn't had a feedback mechanism on how their customer was experiencing their service, which in this case was food. They would have been able to identify that hole.
This is where we're glitching. out. This is where we're under, over-promising and under-delivering, right? And it should always be the opposite. It should be, under-promise and over-deliver.
So if they just would have simply had a feedback mechanism. First of all, they would have a principle like a customer's first period. And then they would have had a way to monitor that they could have identified oh my goodness, people love our food, but it's inconsistent. How do we fix this? Well, it is really simple, we create some standard operating procedures so that there's more consistency in the kitchen.
You know, we document what we're doing, and then we make sure that we replicate it every time done. Don't have people who are willing to do that getting new people that are really simple. Can you imagine how much headache and hassle and time and dreams unfulfilled and stress in the relationships could have been solved by just having that one principle in play? And so that's why I suggest to you that before you spend a penny anywhere, you have clarity. Who's your market? And within that big broad market? Who is your sub-market? Those are the people that you like and want to serve. Then you have to find out how you are going to serve them with excellence. Serving with excellence is always a counterpart to finding a big problem.
You don't want to be dealing with commodities, you want to be dealing with things that move the needle, solving big problems, well, then you go, and you find, are there people that have solved part or all of this problem? If yes, how can I make it faster, simpler, better, more long-term, and more robust? in B, if there's not, then go find people that have solved part of it, or go hire somebody to solve it. Simple. And as long as you make those commitments, and then have a mechanism that as you're delivering your, your solution? You have feedback.
Okay. How are my people getting ready? Results with this thing. And that's what I've done for the last, however long I've been doing the incubator. Seven, eight years now, I guess if we've had a fanatical and maniacal focus on how can I help my students get results faster? How can I help them get results simpler? How can I help them get results, bigger results? And we took people from generating their first profit, which used to take four months, down to three months, then down to two months, and then I massively changed the whole model. And now we have it down to again, four to six weeks, in some cases, even less, and way more profit. Because that's what I think about.
I've chosen to serve married Christian dads, right, because I'm a married Christian dad. I love hanging out with guys that are married, Christian dads. It's fun. We stimulate each other. We have the same experiences with the same worldview. And, I figured out how to help people get results explosively quick, just because that's what I've been thinking about for 10 years, right because I had to figure it out for myself. I was a broke, frustrated, angry, married Christian dad. And, I solved the problem. And then I solved it again, and I solved it again, and I solved it again. I've had, you know, numerous businesses, 10 businesses, or whatever. And so when you do that when you have those ingredients, then you can spend money on Facebook or whatever platform you want. And it'll, it'll go bring friends back, you put a buck, and it'll come back with a buck 52 bucks, 10 bucks. And that, my friend, is what I've learned from spending that much money on Facebook ads, that the platform doesn't even really matter.
You could literally parachute me into a foreign country. And give me a week to reverse engineer the platform, just because I know what to look for. Right? When you're dealing with any marketing platform. You have a comparison. This structure did well; this structure did not do well. And once you start having different things, Then you can compare A versus B versus C. It's a simple comparison mechanism. And you can say, okay, A did well, what, what's involved with that? How can I do it better? Oh, my goodness B did horrible, let's not do B anymore. And C did right in the middle. So, you just learn how to win, you learn how to think clearly, then, and you have absolute clarity and boundaries on your product, your market, your service, your people, the problem, the solution, then you can just plug these different things into these different machine advertising algorithms. And the cream will just rise right to the top. And you say, Okay, this market likes this thing. This market does not like this other thing. Great, let's do more of this thing. And everything just becomes very clear and very clean.
As a culture, because we're so distracted. It's very difficult for us to have clear thinking, so as a Christian entrepreneur, you've got to fight for clarity. It's the most important thing. Absent that, it's basically game over. So you've got to do it and you can do it.
When we get these things moving in the right direction, the sky is the limit.
There are three critical things that I've learned over my twenty-plus years, evaluating over one hundred and fifty different business models as a Christian entrepreneur.
I've put together my observations and these three keys (I learned the hard way) into a Christian Entrepreneur Manifesto, along with some step-by-step walk-throughs and demonstrations.
There is no opt-in required.
It walks through my favorite model, the Finders model.
It might be interesting for a Christian looking to start something new or for the first time to escape the "business running them vs. them running their business" or the nine to five and not to have to work for themselves or someone else until the age of eighty.
Check it out here:
https://christianentrepreneurinc.com/go-video
I hope it helps!
Blessings,
Paul
PS: God is a big God.
He gives us above and beyond what we can ask or think.
We must ask big.
We must think big.
And if we don't, it's not His fault if we live limited.
Work hard, pray harder, and never ever ever ever quit.
You've got this!
PPS: Whenever You’re Ready... Here's How I Can Help You Generate An Additional $5 to $10k Per Month Or More:
- Check Out Our Christian Entrepreneurship Manifesto
Learn why some "make it" and others don't - Access More Articles Like This
Sharpen your Mindset, Model, and get Mentored - Watch Our Christian Business Incubator Training
Learn key lessons from analyzing over 150 different business models, launching ten virtual businesses in ten different markets with ten different models, and hitting six figures in four and seven figures - Schedule A Free Discovery Call
Make sure you read the Manifesto and review the Training first and then let's hop on a call and get all your questions answered about the Christian Startup Business Incubator