Dylan (02:40):

All right, everybody, we're back in business with a final podcast of the year. I'm amped for this one good way to conclude 2020 with such a crazy year, but we have an absolute rock star in the game today. Of course, you got your hosts, me Dylan Carpenter in the house, but we have the one and only Nao Kazeem he's over at ad pros. These guys manage 1.5 million a month and focus on direct to consumer businesses. And they want to scale all their accounts to 1 million a month. Now, with who they're working with right now, they are heavy hitters and doing wonders in the D to C realm. So this one's going to be super juicy. So now let's I did

Nehal (03:18):

What's up, man? How are you doing good?

Dylan (03:20):

Just, you know, dealing with some thunderstorms here in Austin. Apparently it's going to snow tomorrow at 70 degrees right now. So who knows,

Nehal (03:29):

But

Dylan (03:29):

Yeah, man, give everybody an idea of kind of who you are, what you're getting into these days. So they have some context.

Nehal (03:34):

Yeah. I'm the founder of ad pros. We have a Facebook ads, agency, growth agency. I live out of a mini in Columbia. So I'm here. The team is, uh, you know, in five different, uh, countries and, uh, we primarily market to the U S audience, but, uh, we work primarily with direct to consumer products. And our main focus is how do we build companies to a million a month in revenue? Uh, profitably. Heck yeah. How long have you been doing this? Uh, I start doing Facebook ads, maybe like seven, eight years ago.

Dylan (04:06):

And so you're one of the original founders of the gold rush man,

Nehal (04:10):

A sexy,

Dylan (04:12):

He mentioned five continents. How big is y'all's team currently?

Nehal (04:15):

Uh, we have about 20 people, so eight on the agency side and the rest on the creative side

Dylan (04:22):

When it comes to 2020. Was that a pretty good year for growth for you all?

Nehal (04:26):

Yeah. Yeah. Phenomenal. And, um, mostly because a lot of people like kind of freaked out and chilled and uh, wanted to let COVID, you know, relax and slow down. And, uh, as soon as March 15th or so happened, we went very aggressive and we saw that as an opportunity while people were kind of slowing budgets down and waiting. Uh, we were pushing, so did y'all

Dylan (04:49):

See some black Friday numbers during those times?

Nehal (04:51):

Not right away. We saw blood on the streets. It was, it was chaos. It was, it was really bad initially. Um, but, um, you know, everyone saw the eventual, uh, pop in like may and June, but what we were able to do is save companies and uh, really save revenue and profitability while everyone was freaking out. So that was like the real main thing. And, um, you could see who's in it and who's on it versus who who's ready to check out or just waiting. So,

Dylan (05:22):

Oh yeah. And I mean, if any media buyers or, you know, agencies, like we know what's going to happen this year, complete BS. I mean, everybody was kind of adapting and wrong with the punches there, but it was, it was interesting for sure. Now did Delbert add on the creative side of things this year or has that been around?

Nehal (05:37):

No, we did that this year and, uh, I was trying to figure out what is like a big move for us, um, internally as well as like client facing and public facing. And, uh, we decided to do that. And, um, we were, we had a small team in house, but the major thing that worked for us over and over again was the creatives. And so we built that out and we have, uh, eight people on that side as well. And um, yeah, so that's all this year,

Dylan (06:04):

Man. How many creatives y'all burn and churn for y'all is, you know, in house accounts fine.

Nehal (06:08):

And we, we do like 10 to 20 unique concepts per month, depending on the volume of their spending on the very low end, maybe like four, uh, and each one of those have like four variations. So on the low end, I guess that would be like 16 on the higher end, like 50, 60 per month.

Dylan (06:23):

Yeah. Well, Hey, it's what moves the needle so you can always be testing. Yeah.

Nehal (06:28):

Yeah. I mean that, that's a huge factor in terms of just maintaining CPMs as well as just like, you know, supporting the Facebook algorithm because people have ads that work for months and months. We don't believe in that we don't believe in post IDs either. Like it can work, but for most of our clients, we do dynamic creatives and, um, it has zero social proof. So, you know, people still believe that you need social proof to make Facebook ads work and that it's not the truth. Um, dynamic creatives have literally zero likes, zero comments, zero views, every single time you launch a new creative. Uh, and so that works for us.

Dylan (07:03):

Um, I'm a big dynamic creative guy here. Now this is going to be off topic of course, but how are you optimizing that these days I'm just straight up duplicating finding the poor performing, you know, variables, removing those and launching those bad boys kind of same or different.

Nehal (07:15):

I wish we had the better data and better ways to make those decisions. Uh, I'm sure you've tried looking at those, you know, the, the stuff that works, pulling it out and make doing that and doing the logic logical common sense thing. And that doesn't really work. Um, so we basically have to keep feeding the algorithm and like eventually we find good ads and the way that we do it, we do it with marginal and radical tests. So for us marginal means like changing colors, changing headlines, doing some sort of variation and then radical for us means like more bigger, different concepts or completely different types of creatives because most people do the same type of creatives over and over again.

Dylan (07:55):

Oh man. Yeah. And yeah, the creativity, they're crazy. So many ad hacks bids out there, but creative is what scales, you know? So, I mean, I love that concept. Yeah.

Nehal (08:05):

Yeah. I mean, for a lot of people, like there's so much emphasis on the technical side of Facebook advertising. I think that's really important once you're actually mastering that and you've exhausted, you know, five, six, eight different types of setups that you can do in your account. Then you're like, all right, now, what do I do? Because whatever I'm doing in the account, isn't working anymore, you have to pull a different lever. And so we have scaling levers and profit levers in our business and our client's businesses

Dylan (08:32):

Actually attack those goals, man. Hell yeah. So go into the podcast here. We love to dive into what's working good for you right now. So what's your rich out out here these days? [inaudible]

Nehal (08:47):

Yeah. So from an ad standpoint, though, one of the biggest breakthroughs we've had recently has been a branded content ads. And one of our clients has a, they are crazy about influencer marketing and, uh, they have a incredible robust system that the way that they're doing it and, um, you know, just doing branded concept VCA ads with their existing influencers, uh, has been huge once for us. We've tried different types of ads, of course, that aren't, uh, BCA and that works fine for them, but with branded content, for whatever reason, for series of reasons, um, that's the thing that's actually making the biggest difference for us and in June and July, that was such a massive deal for them because of the way branded content was getting served as well as, you know, COVID times and everything's popping, but it stopped working. And so right now, um, BCA is one of those things that is working phenomenal for us

Dylan (09:44):

Now with the branded content. Is that where you flip it at the actual ad level, this brand is in partner with this brand? Or is it more okay? Yeah. How that works. Yeah. Maybe it's not too much. I've done it to be honest. So, but yeah, I'd love to learn one that yes.

Nehal (10:00):

So these guys work with a thousand influencers a month, so they have a system like super manual, uh, and a lot of effort to actually make that happen. We're just on the ad side. So they have a dedicated team for that. We get a specific type of assets that are eventually allowed to be, uh, used for branded content. And on top of that, we're able to get some cases, deeper level of access to their Facebook pages and, uh, great lookalike audiences and market to their audiences directly beyond the initial posts.

Dylan (10:32):

And how much do y'all usually put behind the brand and content, you know, if you're spending, you know, a hundred K a month, hypothetically, what kind of percent or ratio do y'all kind of stick behind that to play safe?

Nehal (10:40):

Yeah. So for us, we have our way of like how we test creatives and then how we scale them in that same account and as well as in additional accounts. So something differently that we do is for a lot of our clients, we actually have like four to seven ad accounts per client. And the reason we do that and you'll see that most agencies or most brands don't do this, the reason we're doing that is because we're optimizing for delivery. We're optimizing for stability because what happens is if you have one or two main accounts that are working and everything is fine, we've seen even if we have four or seven accounts, a one or two might go down, but the other still run, even though it's the same Facebook pay, same pixel, same ads, same everything. So from a, just from a, you know, risk mitigation, like we want that.

Nehal (11:23):

And so, uh, four to seven accounts, uh, per client, and what we do is our, normally our ad set budgets, whereas where we start with AVO, uh, outside budget campaigns, and what we're doing is, uh, doing one X CPA. So if you want to spend $50 or you're on your ad account right now, it's $50 CPA cost per acquisition. Uh, we set the budget at $50 and that's a great way for us to test. And so when we're doing branded content campaigns, basically we have this one creative that the published, but then we use that over and over again on a series of audiences, small bets to find winners. And then we scale from there

Dylan (12:02):

With these four to seven ad accounts, is it the same pixel being shared across?

Nehal (12:06):

Yup. Yup. And one of the myths is that people believe that it takes a very long time to actually set up a, an warmup, uh, additional ad accounts. But our warmup time, if you will, uh, is like two days or faster or like sometimes it's even starts off great. Um, that used to take a long time, but now that doesn't really affect, uh, you know, the warmup period at all, uh, it just works. And so, uh, for us, the reason we have that is we have something called cruise control campaigns where we have more of set and forget Stan stacks. And so we find a specific ad account, like setup that we like and campaign structure set up a thousand dollars a day and let that run. And it's almost always just like relatively stable, even if there are fluctuations, we know that that account, we don't want to touch it. We don't want to influence it's, you know, a delivery. And most of the actual activity happens in like a main testing and scaling account.

Dylan (12:59):

Yeah. And so I usually have control campaigns, but you have straight control ad accounts.

Nehal (13:04):

Yeah. Because what happens is when you're running ABO and CVO in the same campaign, so people who are listening, if there's the budgets are set at the ad set level or the campaign level, if you have those sometimes in the same account, they actually compete against each other and you'll see flip-flopping. So you'll see ABO work really well for a week. And then you go to the next week and CVS are working all the ads stop working, and that flip-flop keep tackling Aberdeen. And so for us, what we noticed is that if we pulled them out and if we had them in separate accounts, it works a lot better and that instability doesn't happen as much or at all. And so when we're doing manual bidding, we try to do them in separate accounts instead of the same accounts that are doing automated bidding mans. Are you

Dylan (13:45):

And the founder as well? Are you still doing the most media-buying or, yeah,

Nehal (13:49):

I'm on the strategic side now. Um, but we have two media buyers on the team. We have an account manager, we have a couple of support staff, but, uh, my responsibility is problem solving and, you know, support on strategy and systems and processes. And all of that

Dylan (14:03):

Background ads is helping a ton cause man, I'm loving this.

Nehal (14:06):

Yeah. Because I had to get really nerdy. And this is, this is the thing it's like for people who are listening, if you're the founder or you're not the media buyer, you have to figure out how to speak with them. Because even if you don't know every single nuance, like the media buyers on, on our team now, like should know more about the, you know, my new details way better than I should. But right now still, you know, my goal is how do I challenge their existing way of thinking and then change how we're making decisions as a team and then figure out opportunities that they might not see and vice versa. So

Dylan (14:38):

It's good to have multiple perspectives as well, because I mean, you know, it's tough teaching an old dog new tricks, but man, when you have that open-minded aspect to it, there's so much out there to really build up.

Nehal (14:48):

Yeah. The underlying thing that really gets us going and motivates us as we want to break records on records. So months on months and quarters on quarters. And so that mindset of like actually doing that, whether we actually break through or not, the focus is we want to do better than last month, whether it's a revenue goal ad spends for revenue goal or profitability goal, total margin collected, whatever the business is optimizing for, what, where usually the types of businesses we're working with, they want aggressive scale and they want it month on month. And so, um, you know, if they are doing 500,000 a month in revenue and they go down, like it's, our focus is what are the numbers that we're actually working through and how do we break through? But I think the main issue that I see and a lot of people who are having success as they slow down, or they think they're too successful, or this is too much, or this is way too much scale or, uh, something's going to break. And so they slow down. Cool man, the amount of nuggets in here did, I'm getting some notes.

Zach (15:48):

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Nehal (17:04):

Check it out@funneldash.com. So branded content ads is of course the rich had on this episode now we'd love to kind of dive into those, not so pretty scenarios. You know, that thing as a ton of what we do, not all tests, you know, work, I think maybe 20%, if that may be do so. I mean, something you thought would absolutely kill or crush it that just kind of bombed. Yeah. I mean how much time do you have? Um, so I guess for us, like the way that we look at it from an actual performance standpoint, we look at success ratios and campaigns and at the ad set level. And so if we're launching new campaigns and new assets, we want to, at at least 50%, if we're at 70%, like that's incredible. But you know, usually if things aren't really going that well, it's like 30, 40% of our tests are successful, but when it comes to more of the creative side, uh, we, one of the, I guess like the biggest bigger failures was that we have this one product in the, in the pet niche and the dog niche and for them, uh, there's all this positivity that most of the ads have.

Nehal (18:14):

So it really doesn't say much, it just has their main call to action, their unique selling proposition. And then it's like fill out this form here to get started. And that's basically it. What we wanted to do is we wanted to use this angle of like the laws are changing. And so laws are always changing. That doesn't actually mean anything. Um, and so the laws are changing sign up before time runs out. But like when does time run out? Like everything is ambiguous, you know? Um, but at the same point at the same time, this audience and this specific product, it's very sensitive and uh, they want to protect their dog and they want to take care of their dog. And there's a fine line between like managing excitement and importance and protection versus fear-mongering and kind of like pushing the wrong button. And so where we, what we change or what we launched was laws are changing.

Nehal (19:05):

And I thought it was going to be a home run. We found it, we found all these different types of images of like literally puppy, dog eyes and like, you know, sadness and not, not too sad because you can actually go above two too far and people get and the comments reflected. But, um, th there's a kind of like a finesse of finding dogs that are cute, but not too cute that it's positive. And then finding who are sad, who are sad, but not too sad that they're depressed. And so it's just like, how do you, how do you find that? And so we found like eight or 10 of those images and we use the same call to action with and without texts. And, um, it worked for like a brief moment, but it wasn't a home run and it wasn't consistent. And then it completely bombed. And we went back to the happy lovey Dubby ads that have a generic messaging to them. And so, uh, I was super excited about it, but it floats

Dylan (19:57):

The way she goes, man, how much do y'all kind of put behind it before you realized this is just not working?

Nehal (20:03):

So it depends on the, um, on the actual accounts over that specific account, we're spending about 20,000 to 25,000 per day. And so for that one, we have a lot more budget to test. Um, I couldn't tell you exactly how much we spent around that, but, uh, for, for that specific test, maybe around 10 to 15,000

Dylan (20:21):

Man, and the funniest part is you haven't even mentioned a brand, but I feel like I know exactly what product is. Is it a nighttime product? No, it isn't okay. I was like, is it something that glows around? You know, but yeah, I mean, I was doing some ads for a dog shelter down here and they only had, you know, 500 bucks to spend a month and it's a nonprofit. And what I've found is just adds a pit bulls. Even those people were just commenting all the engagement, whether negative or positive that it was just like, Hey, you know, we only have one dog it's working. Let's keep it going just because it was so controversial. That's interesting, man. So, so you kind of pushed to the buds a little too far for that for your mom or against essentially?

Nehal (21:02):

I think so. I think if I were to try it again, um, it would be like laws are changing and still use happy photos. We didn't actually try that. Um, so that's something to consider, but it there's a disconnect. Like I don't think that's actually like makes sense or is sexy. So, but

Dylan (21:18):

I've been wrong many times man. And how I was about to say, I was like, we get so many good ideas like this is going to fricking kill it. And then all of a sudden, like not killing it, not at all, not at all. Well, let's go ahead and take a quick one 80, you know, of course the name of the podcast. We'd love to kind of find the crossroads of marketing and the financial side of things. So based off your expertise, you know, your experience here, what kind of, you know, financial principle or tip, could you kind of share with the audience audience, whether it's personal or business related?

Nehal (21:46):

Yeah, I think for a specialty we're involved on the direct to consumer side, a lot of business and in profit actually comes from returning customers. And, but what happens is when people are doing advertising, they're not actually separating first-time customers to returning customers. And one of the metrics that we don't see get mentioned, uh, at all, is first-time revenue to, uh, ad spend. And so what that means is that saved, you're generating $10,000 a day in revenue. Um, half of that, or, you know, 30% of that could be first-time customers. And so, but you're seeing $7,000 in data. And so if you're spending a thousand dollars or 2000 or $3,000 per day, how well do you, how much of that spend is actually, you know, uh, converting into revenue into first time, new customers? Sure. You know, retargeting is part of it. Sure. Like people, even if you do have exclusions, you know, existing customers will come through, but how many new customers are you actually generating every single day? And so what we do is manually every day we track how many customers are first time revenue for some customers. And then we look at how much revenue is generated, how much money did we spend that specific day and divide those numbers and look at that as a, as a metric

Dylan (23:04):

Super interesting there. Now, when it comes to, you know, returning customers, do y'all have any specific ways to kind of boost LTV or, you know, specific kind of more specific things meant for the kind of returning customers versus first-timers. Yeah.

Nehal (23:17):

I mean, we're really not on that side. Um, but one of the things that we do is we do have retention campaigns just to kind of push people over the edge. Um, those are meant to be super high row as activity, low budget there's, you know, depending on how much you're spending for the client, that's spending like 20,000, 25,000 per day, they actually have a thousand dollar a day budget specifically on retention campaigns because they have so many, so much high volume in customers, and that's a super high Roaz activity they're gonna renew anyways for the most part. But we just want to make sure that from an education standpoint, uh, that's there. But yeah, that's, that's really the main lever that, that we can pull. Most of the retention stuff happens like via email and SMS and customers.

Dylan (24:00):

Or now with those, I would say, I guess, more retargeting as a whole, do you typically do percents off or is it, Hey, bundle and save to kind of boost the AOB since you've already wasted money on the kind of first touch kind of side of things. How do y'all incorporate that out of curiosity?

Nehal (24:17):

I actually do as many bundles on front end as possible because even if they're not going to buy the bundle, they're actually getting anchored on a price that's a lot higher. Uh, and then if they go to a lower price product, they will be more likely to buy that because they saw the higher price bundle. And that worked really well for one of our clients who had like a $200 bundle, theoretically, a $200 bundle, like on cold traffic to someone who's never heard of the brand is usually kind of tricky, especially for consumables. But then we noticed that the average order value is way lower than that actual product that bundle that we're selling, but the ROAS is still there and we know what the cost of goods sold are. And so, you know, we can make the numbers work. So if anyone who is listening to this, like if they have bundles and they're not running them on cold traffic, that's something to consider. We do that via ads that show the bundle in one ad, or we do a carousel ads and see if that makes a difference. But that, that's a, that's a big factor for one of the supplement brands,

Dylan (25:17):

Man, which bullets he knows best ad format over the past, shoot two quarters, three quarters for black Friday. And so I'm kind of curious what other guys are saying, you know? Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Nehal (25:27):

We do a lot of like our, our main ad that we're doing is primarily square, uh, like in Jif ads, super short. Um, I think a lot of people just ignore this format, uh, anything like 10 seconds or less, um, for us, the main reason for our creative stuff that we do as well is because we get like a product photo and that's basically it. And so the client isn't doing photo shoots, there's not like massive like video production or anything like that. It's like, cool, here's the product photo. And here's like some assets run with it. And so most of our brands are like that. And then we have some exceptions where, you know, they're doing a thousand influencers and they ha we have unlimited, uh, video testimonial content, you know, so that's, that's different. Um, but for most of our brands, we have to take a product photo and then build around it completely to get it, uh, to perform on cold traffic. And so, uh, what I've seen is most people neglect like that ten second or less format because they think it doesn't provide enough education or doesn't, you know, position the product well enough. But, um, depending on the copy and how you, you know, match that, we, we see that working all the time.

Dylan (26:36):

Yeah. Because, and I'm guilty of that, how you thought, you know, that's too quick of a video to kind of make something work there. And then I ended up seeing some stats, some other people at six seconds or under ads and they killing it and I've been incorporating some of those and they're killing it. So I'm like, you know, the things you think, you know, sometimes are really is, but yeah, well, man, this has been sick. So give everybody an idea and any kind of thing cool. Popping up in the next couple of months with y'all or 2021.

Nehal (27:01):

Yeah. The main thing is, you know, we, we started doing Facebook ads like a very long time ago, but like I did, you know, work with local businesses and coaches and uh, evergreen webinar funnels. And, uh, right now we're in like the direct to consumer space and that's been the, you know, the last like couple years. And, uh, what we've seen is that there are people who just want to grow their businesses super aggressively. And it's been very interesting being around companies who are doing a million a month or more, uh, and how they think, how they manage cashflow, how they look at growth, how they look at day-to-day decision-making. And I think one of the biggest things that we do differently is actually look at what's going on inside of Facebook versus what's going on in Shopify, in whatever, wherever you're actually collecting money and look at that on a daily basis, and then be able to make those decisions.

Nehal (27:49):

Uh, most agencies that speak to most business owners, I speak to, they just look at one or the other, we spent 5,000 or we spent a thousand and we made 3000 or 4,000 whatever. And so is that good or bad? It's like, there's no way to really know. And, um, for us that's like the real main thing that I think that has been very interesting, especially as we're on higher scale. Um, the thing I'm most interested in, in terms of going into 2021, we'll have to see what happens with iOS 14. Um, but you know, on our end, I really want to see how far I can take BCA, um, and take influencer campaigns because that's, that's a big factor for us. And the other major factor is a testimonial, uh, videos and putting video compilations. And that has, uh, one of the massive like Roaz effects, uh, across everything we do,

Dylan (28:38):

Man. So 2021 is the year of continent creative for you. It sounds like, man.

Nehal (28:42):

Yeah. For any agency or any, you know, marketer, who's not focusing on creative, like, uh, they're going to feel the ref, so

Dylan (28:50):

You're not wrong there. What was the best people, the best way for people to kind of get in touch with you if they have any kind of questions or, you know, want to want to have y'all worked together?

Nehal (28:58):

Yeah. So on our creative business, um, we have, uh, ad pros.com forward slash creative, uh, creatives, uh, plural. And, um, we have a series of ads that, you know, people who are running out of ideas or need new ideas, uh, at startup 49 bucks. But if they want to, if anyone wants to reach out to me, uh, very easy to, uh, with, uh, just, you know, searching on Facebook or Instagram face, uh, Danielle Kazim or nateHall@adpros.com,

Dylan (29:25):

When they all a man, this was an absolute pleasure, man. Thank you so much for jumping on. We're definitely going to have to get you back on to the next couple of months to hear about how 20, 21 for y'all. All right. Later, man later, thanks so much

Zach (29:43):

For listening to another episode of the rich dad pour at podcast. If you're like me and listen to podcasts on the go, go ahead and subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and rich ed [inaudible] dot com slash podcast. And if you absolutely love the show, go ahead and leave a review and a comment share with a friend. If you do take a copy screenshot of it, email me zach@funneldash.com. Show me you left a review and I'll give you a free copy of the rich add or add book to learn more about the book. Go to rich ed for a.com to leave a review that a rich ed or ed.com/review.

Dylan (30:17):

Thanks again.