Host 0:04
Welcome to The Blogger Genius Podcast brought to you by MiloTree. here’s your host, Jillian Leslie.
Jillian Leslie 0:11
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the show. First, I want to say a shout-out to everybody who’s gone to iTunes, and rated us and left reviews. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.
If you’re enjoying the show, please head to iTunes and do the same. This way, other people can find us, and I can continue to get amazing guests.
So today, I’m excited because I think these two guests are amazing. Today, I’m interviewing Jessica Gleim and Amy Christie, and these are the co-founders of Flairst Creative Collective. These women are digital marketers, and they know their stuff.
In fact, David and I at MiloTree are using them to help us come up with our strategy, our ads, how we’re using Facebook, and Pinterest, and funnels, and we’re going to break it all down.
In today’s world, where as a blogger, as a creative entrepreneur, you need a strategy. I think this will help you come up with your own strategy and learn from these two smart women.
So without further ado, here is my interview with Jessica and Amy. Jess and Amy, welcome to the show. I’m so glad you’re on the podcast.
Jessica Gleim 1:29
Thank you so much for having us.
Jillian Leslie 1:31
Okay, so that’s Jess. And then…
Jessica Gleim 1:33
Yes.
Amy Christie 1:34
And then I’m going to say thank you for having us as well. And I’m Amy.
Jillian Leslie 1:38
And you’re Amy, great. Okay, so you guys are digital strategy experts and you do a lot of work in ads ,in Facebook ads and Pinterest ads.
So can you guys share with me… So we met at Alt Summit. And Jess, you were speaking about ads, and I was really blown away with… I just felt like you knew what you were doing, and I needed to work with you. And so I reached out to both of you.
Jessica Gleim 1:49
We do.
Jillian Leslie 2:05
And we’ve been doing some work with MiloTree which we can talk about. But before we do that, will you guys share your entrepreneurial journey and how you guys hooked up?
Jessica Gleim 2:14
Absolutely, we’d love to. Amy, is it okay if I dive right in?
Amy Christie 2:16
Sure thing.
Jessica Gleim 2:20
Sometimes I’m chattier one of the bunch, so you’ll usually hear my voice a little bit more.
So, quickly and briefly, Amy and I both have fine arts backgrounds. We both are creatives at heart. We both have BFAs and that’s what we went to college for and kind of what our dreams were, wanting to be artists and visual artists.
And through our own different roads of growing up and getting married and having children, Amy’s road kind of expanded into the photography, styling content, DIY side; and mine went more into the e-commerce, product side of the digital world.
It just naturally with the evolution of where things are and where people are living their lives, we kind of ended up moving into digital spaces individually of each other, and started building clients and doing digital strategy and execution and content for various clients.
And we both have kids. Amy has three and I have one. And after having my son a couple of years ago, I realized I don’t want to do this by myself, I need another Mom. You know, I specifically want another mom to work with that can be by my side.
And if I need to, you know, go run out and take my kid to the doctor’s appointment, I don’t want a client to miss out on something. So I really wanted to partner up with somebody and I’ve been thinking about that for a couple of years.
In the meantime, Amy kind of had the same thought process rolling around in her brain that she wanted to grow and expand and do more because her three kids are all in school. And so she has more time to invest into, you know, her profession and what makes her feel happy and excited.
And we met at Alt several different times but we never really connected. And at the Alt Summit 2018, we ended up being roommates, randomly roommates.
Amy Christie 4:15
We were roommates, but we did not know each other. So, you know, the thing with the Alt’s, at least my experience with Alt is like you can’t… the amount of money that you were going to spend on, you know, the tickets and your flight and the thing is they end up rooming with other people.
And this year, the 2018, I got a ticket last minute. And I was like, you know, I’m just going to go and ended up rooming with, you know, I knew one person and so she was like, “I have one more, you know, spot in my room and with two other people that I can introduce you to.” I’m like, “Okay.”
And it just happened to be one of those other two people that I didn’t know. And, you know, we chitchatted a little bit, getting to know each other. And then it turns out that she was doing the kind of work that I was, you know, interested in moving towards more.
And so then we spent like the day talking each other’s heads off, like we just were… I mean, it was love at first sight, honestly.
Jessica Gleim 5:07
Oh, it was.
Amy Christie 5:08
And then we were sitting outside next to the pool and, you know, we’re just chitchatting about, you know, again, ideas, because we just… One thing that we do really well together is just continually talk. We’ve done that to you before and we just talked about stuff. And and she leans over and she’s like, “Do you just want to do this together?” And I was like, “Yeah!” And then that’s what it became.
We really just dived in last year to fine-tune what we want to do, what we enjoy, and really what we do well at with our clients, and the ways that we can help them and we really just fine tuned that into this digital strategy business called Flairst. And that’s how we landed here.
Jillian Leslie 5:50
I love that. What a great story.
Jessica Gleim 5:56
It’s very serendipitous.
Jillian Leslie 5:57
Yes.
Amy Christie 5:57
And the weird thing is, is we keep finding these similarities. Like we’ll be texting random things and then we’ll both type the same thing. And then we like, one day I showed her this potted plant that I bought, and she goes, “Oh my gosh, I have that same pot and same plant.”
And we forgot to tell you that I live in Minnesota, she lives in Utah. And so we don’t even shop at the same stores or at the same time. And all of a sudden I sent her this picture of this new plant I got and she goes, “I have that same thing. And the pot and the plant were bought separately.” Like it wasn’t like they were one thing.
So we keep finding things like that, too. I I know that I feel super blessed to have found Jess. And again, serendipitous, like she said. And again, even though sometimes we have days where we’re like, “oh my gosh, what are we doing?” I am so thankful to have found her and to be doing this with her.
Jillian Leslie 6:51
And I will say working with both of you, it seems like you guys have known each other forever. It sounds like you were like college roommates or you grew up together.
Jessica Gleim 6:58
It’s funny, isn’t it?
Jillian Leslie 6:59
Yeah, like it’s amazing that you just put this together a year ago.
Jessica Gleim 7:03
Well, and to your of, and why we’ve kind of gotten into this, is I feel in my personal life, I feel like I do better when I have a team — meaning, you know, I have a family success team and that’s childcare provider, my husband, you know, obviously me, my mom, my sister-in-law. Right? And those people really help make sure that I feel like I can be an awesome mom.
And I’ve noticed that is really successful in all these areas of my life. And so professionally, I think it’s also important to have your team and, you know, you don’t have to go this alone, you just have to ask questions and find the right people and then you make a connection.
And then here we are, you know, that working together has been the right fit for MiloTree. And we really have grown wanting to be that resource and and help other people not feel alone or isolated in their entrepreneurial journey because being a digital entrepreneur can feel isolating, because you’re behind your computer all day.
Jillian Leslie 8:07
Totally.
Jessica Gleim 8:07
You know, you may or may not be in an office or not.
Jillian Leslie 8:11
Right. One of the hopes of the podcast is so people don’t feel alone.
Jessica Gleim 8:15
Exactly.
Jillian Leslie 8:17
You know, I’m bringing guests in, and hopefully, I’m your friend, and we can get through this together.
Amy Christie 8:24
The other part of the of this digital, you know, jobs that we have they’re not just like, you know, you’re just typing up blog posts, or you’re just pinning things on Pinterest. The jobs that you’re having to do in order to be successful is you’re doing absolutely everything from setting up your website to making those blog posts, to doing the social media part, to connecting with sponsors and things like that.
And so, the thing is, we know this — we know all these parts and we can see the benefit of having a group like us be beneficial and helpful in making concepts like digital ads more attainable, instead of you having to spend hours reading articles on how to do it. We’ve done that, we know how to do it, so we’re going to show you how we do it in an easy-to-follow quick way. Not quick, you know, just a bit of set up.
You don’t have to go searching for all the information. And we know that because we’ve done it. And that’s what I love about MiloTree, is the fact that you understand that part, that you’re going to go… you know, we don’t want to make this super complicated for people who use the MiloTree plugin.
That it’s like, we want to make it so that you do this and this, and it’s set because there are a million other things that you need to be thinking about. And that’s just in the business world, the business job.
And then you have your whole real life stuff, and there’s just a billion things in there. I don’t know. Because we’re thinking about the clients and what would be beneficial to them, I feel good about the things that we’re trying to create for them too.
All right, can I go with the why digital ads, because it makes me laugh. Because why are they so powerful? Because where are the people today? You know, we have those articles from all the scientists that are, like, we need to get off our phones and our digital devices. But that is where we all are.
Jillian Leslie 10:10
Absolutely. So let’s step back for a second and let’s just talk about the world of online advertising. I want to ask, one, why is it so powerful today; and two, if I’m the blogger, what kinds of online entrepreneurs should be advertising?
Amy Christie 10:48
And so being able to take advantage of putting ads and marketing to people who are on this platform, on the internet is why wouldn’t you do that. And what makes digital marketing so powerful is that we have never been able to micro-track people the way that we can with digital advertising.
With the platforms we have, we can get very, very picky about who we want to show these ads, too. And the thing is, depending on where you’re setting up your ads, the ads aren’t just going to show up on a social media platform.
They’re going to follow you around, wherever you go. They’re going to go on the blog posts that you read, they’re going to go on the newspaper articles that you read. They’re going to go in on when you’re googling “What’s wrong with my child? What sickness do they have today?”
That’s going to show up there on the side bar and it’s going to be there all the time.
Jillian Leslie 11:42
Right. It’s creepy and also useful. I mean, as you’re saying this, I’m like, “oh my god, this is so creepy.” But then I will tell you that I’ll be on Facebook, let’s say, an ad will scroll by like a company I’ve never seen before of shoes, like new sneakers or something. And I love them.
And I’m like, how did they know that I would like this?” I’m weirdly happy that they know me so well, and it also creeps me out. So I feel of two minds. But if we were to take the judgment out of it, I agree with you, which is, it is really powerful.
Jessica Gleim 12:17
And because there’s so much data tracking, it makes advertising, digital advertising very inexpensive.
So thinking of ivarious ad platforms, and when we say an ad platform, Google is an ad platform, you may have heard the term, you know, Google cost-per-click advertising, like that’s the platform.
Pinterest has their own ad platform, Facebook has their own ad platform. And if you think about it, as a business owner, that these are tools in your toolbox of a way to reach people.
And so back in the day, we would reach people by, you know, billboards or radio ads.
Jillian Leslie 12:55
Or newspaper ads.
Jessica Gleim 12:56
Exactly. The Yellow Pages. Print ads, right? That’s what you did. Because those were our only options.
And now, we have so many more options that are right there at our fingertips that come with lots of, you know, ways to figure them out and things to test very inexpensively.
And that’s the other piece that makes it really, really valuable for business owners, is the amount of capabilities of tracking so you can really, like Amy said, make it really dial in and you could reach people in a specific area that make a certain amount of money that are interested in specific websites or specific topics.
Or, you know, they’re expecting a child or they just had one. They get detail-oriented.
And it is affordable. Anybody can do it. The base, the minimum ad spend on Facebook per day is $5. Okay, so a few bucks, you can send some pretty good traffic to your website.
Jillian Leslie 13:55
Now. Okay, well, here’s the thing. So I’m a blogger, and let’s break it down. I’m a food blogger, and I don’t sell anything. Is there a case to be made for me to be spending on ads? Because I’m never going to make that money back in traffic than I’m spending to get traffic. Does that make sense?
Amy Christie 14:18
And so my question to you is, if you’re not selling anything, how does a food blogger make money? And my experience is — well, I want you to answer too — but my experience is that you work with sponsors. Is that how?
Jillian Leslie 14:33
Right. And ads. So, sponsors and ads.
Amy Christie 14:38
So for those things, what sponsors and what ads want, is traffic. In order for you get paid more money per ad, you have to have more traffic on your site. And those sponsors want to work with people who have more traffic.
And so even though you’re not making money off of a sellable product on your page, that you’re routing people, you’re trying to get people to buy, if you are increasing your traffic, you’re making people more aware of your brand, then in the end, you’re going to have more money for the ads that you have on your site.
And you’ll have higher numbers, higher metrics to share with sponsors who are interested in working with you.
So again, the end product, that conversion is not to sell a product because you don’t have that. But the end product is that you’re going to have higher traffic, which will benefit you in ads that get payout and then sponsorships.
Jillian Leslie 15:31
Got it. Okay, now let’s say I sell a product, and let’s say I sell a cheap product. I sell an e-book for $6.99. Does it make sense for me to be running ads?
Jessica Gleim 15:42
Yes. Because ultimately, your goal is to figure out what your cost per conversion is. So in this case, remember, Amy had mentioned micro conversions versus the big conversion. And the big conversion, in this case, would be somebody buys that book for $6.99.
If you could get the entire process from start to finish for somebody to be introduced to the book, be interested in the book, sold on the idea of they want this book and then they download this book for, say, 75 cents or less, and then the rest of that would be profit, then you could just run those ads on their own, and you’d make that residual income.
And you don’t have to do anything else because the traffic would just continue. And you built this basic little funnel through the ads. And then you can figure out, again, what that overall cost per conversion, how much it would cost you in ads to convert one customer for that $6.99 product.
And if it makes sense, if you could do it for $1 or less and the rest of its profit, then you just let it go and you’ve just set it up. And then you’ve got residual income and new traffic’s coming all the time, and you don’t have to worry about it.
Jillian Leslie 16:50
So it’s like a flywheel. Like it just keeps going.
Jessica Gleim 16:54
Exactly.
Jillian Leslie 16:54
Now, here’s the thing. Does it make sense if I’m selling you for $6.99 to spend $6 per conversion? Does that still make sense?
Jessica Gleim 17:06
Well, that’s an interesting question. It could. If your ultimate product is just a $6.99 e-book, probably not. If it took you $6 in ads to sell that, I don’t… that probably won’t make sense.
However, your $6.99 product might be your tripwire. Meaning like, that’s your initial cheap thing that you’ve got someone to buy something and now they’re interested in you, they bought your product, they’ve made it coming back to you by buying something.
And it’s to cost you $6 in ads to get that person interested in you. But maybe your ultimate goal is that you’re selling a $5,000, you know, course on your own lifestyle photography or some bigger thing that maybe it’s a step into your bigger book or your bigger plan or your bigger something. Maybe that does make sense.
Amy Christie 18:02
If it’s part of a microconversion where, again, the final conversion is a larger amount, then it would make sense. But if your major conversion is spending $6 to get someone to pay $6.50, there probably needs to be some modification to the funnel that you don’t have things optimized correctly. You don’t have the goal. The objective of the thing is not set up correctly.
Jillian Leslie 18:27
Okay. So what you’re saying, though, is like if you are selling a $6.99 product and you can figure out a way in ads to sell it for $6, it might make sense for you to be thinking about larger ticket items and using these people to think about your business, and how you might be able to create new things. If you are able to create an e-book, chances are, you create more and sell it for higher ticket price.
Jessica Gleim 18:55
Absolutely.
Amy Christie 18:56
But then like what I just said is, when you tell me that, what I want to do is go back and look at what the funnel was to begin with. And see if you have, like, again, because we have had ads before that the objective wasn’t quite right or the audience wasn’t quite right.
And so it was very expensive to get people to convert to do that conversion. And then we have, you know, gone back and going “oh,” if we just adjusted this just a little bit, then the price goes down.
So yes, there is the part of adding other things that do cost more. But then what I want to do is go back and look at that conversion funnel to see what you’ve done and things like that.
Jillian Leslie 19:25
Hey, are you a blogger or entrepreneur who loves their business but is a little overwhelmed with all that you have to do in a day? Well, you are not alone. We all feel this way.
So I want to share a pop-up tool that will increase your social media followers, grow your email list, build your traffic, and it is called MiloTree.
MiloTree is a pop-up app that my husband David built for our first site, Catch My Party. In the four years that we’ve been using the MiloTree pop-up on Catch My Party, our Pinterest account has grown exponentially to over 1.1 million followers, and our Instagram has grown to over 160,000 followers. And these social networks now drive millions of page views to our site every single month.
MiloTree works to grow followers on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. It’ll grow your sales on Shopify or Etsy. And it will even grow your email list. You can focus on growing one platform at a time or switch between several. The choice is yours.
MiloTree. It’s easy to install and you can do it in under three minutes. It’s completely optimized. Right now, you can get your first 30 days for free. Just go to Milotree.com to sign up for your free trial.
If you are not converting your site visitors into followers, subscribers and customers, you need to change your strategy.
So take the first step, head over to Milotree.com and start your free trial, there’s no risk. And you’ll be joining thousands of other professional bloggers who are already using MiloTree to grow their businesses.
As a bonus, once you sign up, I’ll send you valuable business tips each week to help you continue to accelerate your growth. You can’t be everywhere all the time, so let MiloTree work for you. It’s fast, it’s easy, and it gets results.
So what are you waiting for? Head to Milotree.com and start your free trial.
Okay, so here’s my next question. So much of digital advertising is just what you were saying, which is “I need to test this, I need to test that.” We can get into what we’ve done for MiloTree and how you found like an interesting realization in terms of targeting. How much do you need to spend to learn?
Jessica Gleim 22:08
Not a ton. So the way we work is, and we’re almost always working with people that are budget- conscious. And we have our own business and we’re budget conscious.
So the first thing to get started and where you’d want to start, is thinking about the top of your funnel, which is what we refer to as cold traffic, meaning if you’re trying to bring traffic into your website and you’re trying to guess who those people are and who you’d send your ads to, you can build a campaign, like I said, for $5 a day.
And you could try a couple of different audiences with a couple of different creatives and let that run for two or three weeks. And see. It’s different per project. But usually, in our case, if we can test out some cold traffic and it’s less than 70 cents a click, and we’ll let that run for about a week or two, we can learn enough to make a decision to move on to the next phase. And the next part of working with that budget.
And learn enough to figure out what audience is working and which type of creative people are responding to better. And a that’s not a terribly big or time… for us at least, like a time-consuming project setting up and thinking through just at least what one $5 cold traffic campaign would look like.
If it’s costing you more than $1 or $1.50 to send someone to your website, then like Amy said, it’s probably not set up correctly. But if you can get it below 70 or 60 cents just out of the gate, and let that go for a little while and see what happens, and if the price can fluctuate, then you can stop and reevaluate and make changes and move on to the next step in your funnel.
Jillian Leslie 24:06
Okay. And I just want to say to the audience that Jess and Amy are coming up with a course where they are going to walk you through how to set all this up so that you don’t necessarily have to hire them as consultants, but you can kind of DIY this with their guidance.
Jessica Gleim 24:26
Absolutely. Thank you for mentioning that.
Jillian Leslie 24:28
Because again, as you’re talking about this, I could see my audience getting excited on one hand and overwhelmed. On the other hand, going “I don’t even know how to do… What is this? What do you mean different audiences and testing different ads?”
And even me, I’m super happy that you guys are doing this for us. You know, we’re working together on this, but you guys are really the experts. And we’re following you in terms of going, “Yeah, that’s a good idea. Let’s test that.”
So if you are interested in this, you know, so listen to this talk, but know that they’re going to kind of break it down for you, if you’re wanting to go deeper in this.
Jessica Gleim 25:08
Yes. And hold your hand and kind of walk through each of these stages of what step. Like what you said, what’s that first decision, what’s the first thing that you should be doing with your ad, what’s the second thing you should be doing with your ad? What’s the third thing you should be doing with your ad?
Jillian Leslie 25:21
And also just like saying those things like, you know what, if you can get traffic for 60 to 70 cents, that’s good. You’re learning. If you’re paying $1.50, uh-uh, you need to adjust that. Because we’ve tried ads on our own, and that’s where we get it, we kind of set it up.
But then we’re like, “I don’t know. Is this working? Is it not working?” It’s like, you know, I need your eyes to say yes or no, or let’s go this way.
So let’s talk briefly about how you thought about MiloTree and how you started to set up Facebook Ads for us, and then how we might add Pinterest into the mix.
Jessica Gleim 25:59
Perfect. Amy, you want to talk about what you set up and then we can talk about what we learned?
Amy Christie 26:03
Yes. So, what we set up initially, was to send traffic to MiloTree.
Jillian Leslie 26:12
On Facebook.
Amy Christie 26:13
Through Facebook, yes. Sorry. So we started with Facebook campaigns. So we started with… and we’re setting up cold audiences and trying to figure out and send traffic to MiloTree so it can get pixeled.
Now, for those who don’t know, pixel is Facebook’s code that you can put on your website that then… traffic. So then it sends those statistics, like what Google Analytics is but it’s the Facebook version of Google Analytics.
So in sending traffic to MiloTree with the pixel in place, then we’re able to learn more about the audience and the type of people that are going to MiloTree, people who are interested in MiloTree.
And what I wanted to say a while ago was with learning, when we talk about learning, there’s two types of learning. There’s learning that we are doing as the people who are analyzing the statistics, but then there’s also the other part of Facebook learning about the audience and about their behavior.
So there’s two types of learning. Facebook has to do some, and then we, as humans, in this scenario, have to learn how to read the statistics.
Jessica Gleim 27:32
One of the things that can be tricky that we find hard for doing digital advertising is the lingo. I know when we’re talking about it, all this stuff makes so much sense to us and it’s kind of confusing, if you haven’t done it before.
And so within Facebook, the number one thing that people do wrong, is that they don’t optimize the ad correctly. And what that means is that they haven’t told Facebook exactly what they want the ad to be doing and the purpose of it. And that’s what this term means ‘objective’, when we say the objective.
And when you go to click ‘create an ad’ with Facebook and it walks you through this guided creation, it asks you in the beginning, what’s the purpose of what you’re doing and it gives you a bunch of different options. And one of them is awareness. One of them is traffic. There’s lots of options — catalog, sales, conversion, store visits, all kinds of things that are listed in there.
And when you choose that, when you choose that objective, you are telling Facebook, ‘okay, the goal of this campaign is that I want people to do this.’ And so if you choose the action awareness, we are telling Facebook, okay, the goal of this campaign with MiloTree is we just want people to hear about it, to come in contact with it some way.
Like you see the ad pop-up, you see a little thing, you see the thing about it, maybe you see the slideshow and then you move on to something else. But the goal is to just see, like, just touch somebody, like, “hey!” Right?
And that is something that can run really inexpensively and can often be a really great top of the funnel, meaning, the first time you’re trying to just nudge somebody.
Then the other objective was traffic, meaning we wanted to send people to your website. So we were telling Facebook, okay, hey, the goal of this is to now we want to send people to the website. That’s the action we want them to take.
And so that is a little bit more expensive. That’s where we started with MiloTree originally, and we were around 60-ish something cents per click for traffic. We wanted to see if that can get lower.
Personally, I think for a click over to your site, if you can get it to under 30, or 20 to 30 cents, I think is in a terrible place to be okay. So that would be like, say, our next goal.
And the way that I want to get there is go backwards again, start at the top. Did we make sure that people heard about us enough the first time that then they hear about us the second time with the traffic that they’re actually going to go click? And will that actually make that process become less expensive. Does that make sense?
Jillian Leslie 30:23
Interesting. Yeah, totally. But then you’re going to add the price of awareness with the price of the click, and you still think that can come in lower than just trying to get traffic to pay for traffic.
Jessica Gleim 30:23
Correct. That’s our long-term goal.
Jillian Leslie 30:39
What I love about working with you guys, is that you are breaking it down. So in the way that David and I think about it is, we’re like, okay, we should just set up ads to get conversions so people put their credit card in, and then they get that 30 days free, and boom.
And I like that you guys are like, “Uh-uh, no, no, no.” I just did a podcast yesterday. And we were talking about marketing, about marketing as dating. And that it is like the little glance across the room.
And then it is the kind of like, Hey, I’m going to move a little bit closer to you. And then I’m going to see if you’re talking to one of my friends, and I can come on over and just even during the conversation — and that you guys really think about it like that. I think David and I kind of rush to the, Hey, you want to go on a date or you want to get married?
Amy Christie 31:33
Because, again, the end goal is you, I mean, again, because you’re thinking about it’s not even just that you want people to buy things, you’re thinking about what the money that you’ve spent. Like I’ve spent all this money on this thing, and what I need people to do is to buy that thing so that I get money to cover those things.
And so we often think of like if we post an ad, people are going to see it and they’re going to want to buy it because they’re going to love it just as much as you. But they don’t know the blood, sweat and tears that you put into that product. They don’t love it like you do.
So it’s not going and going here.
Jessica Gleim 32:08
You have to court them.
Amy Christie 32:09
You have to court them. You have to say, “Oh my gosh, look at this. You know, aren’t aren’t our little icons cute? I mean, again, MiloTree’s icons are just a darling, I think.”
And then it’s like, “oh my gosh, this thing could make my life easier. Ooh,” and then you start seeing them and that ad keeps falling around, they’re thinking, gosh, it would be really nice if I had something that would help me convert my followers into social media. Exactly that kind of thing pertaining to MiloTree, obviously.
And then, you know, again, it’s going to follow them around. And then the next part is like, “Oh, my gosh, I can sign up for, you know, free 30 days.”
And so it’s like, oh, well, why wouldn’t I do that? I’m gonna test it out.”
And then after they try their product, your product, then they’re going to go, “oh my gosh, I really do need this in my life, it was so simple, it is converting things to me.”
But you had to have had all those other things in the funnel. It can’t just be, “oh my gosh, I’m going to sign up for this, and I’m going to spend my money right away.” You have to have all those other little steps.
Jillian Leslie 33:04
Yes. And I like that you guys think this way. And I like that you are holding us accountable in the way that you’re like, let’s just, you know, have them pull out their credit card.
Jessica Gleim 33:14
Well, and it’s like, I love the dating analogy so much because it makes total sense. You can’t ask someone out on a date and to marry you in the same night. We think we can because our product is so awesome, right?
Jillian Leslie 33:26
And we know ourselves like I’m so awesome. Like not only date me, but marry me!
Amy Christie 33:31
Exactly. Marry me forever.
Jessica Gleim 33:33
But, you do need to have that little glance from across the room and have that little heart flutter. And then you do need the next little micro conversion to be that somebody, the person comes over and talks to you and introduces themselves. Then you need the next little micro conversion to have the gotcha… you know what I mean? Like phone number and moving on to the very end.
And that’s A, the point of all these various objectives that Facebook offers. And B, the point of thinking through what this funnel looks like because it’s going to take you a little bit of money, and a couple of campaigns to learn about your users and your traffic.
And then it’s going to take you a little time to tweak it, but you should be able to figure out what your funnel looks like. And it might be five different ad campaigns.
And somebody moves from one step to the next step, the next step, and then they become not only a converted customer, but a loyal, happy customer who so enjoys MiloTree that they go tell all of their other influencers or share that as new information in their Facebook group for bloggers.
Jillian Leslie 34:37
Now here’s the thing. Can you see where then somebody is falling off? Like let’s say, okay, so it’s like the dating analogy, right? So I see this cute guy across the way and I give him like a little smile. And he smiles back and then I kind of move over a little bit. And he’s talking to one of my friends and I walk over.
And then somehow he like hears me open my mouth and he leaves. Right? Like I said something bad? Or who knows what. Or I had spinach in my teeth and he is gone. Like, can you see this in the funnel and go, “you know what, we got to remove the spinach.”
Amy Christie 35:12
That’s another bit of digital marketing is that, and again, it depends on your platform, it depends on the integration. But with the Facebook pixel, we are able to kind of keep track of, good Lord, Jess, what’s the word I’m looking for?
Jessica Gleim 35:30
Everybody basically in the funnel process. So Facebook calls them “events”. And once you set up your pixel correctly, and you set up your events that are specific to your website, you can track when people complete a purchase, when they fill out your opt in, for your lead magnet. We can see where people didn’t complete the registration.
Amy Christie 35:55
Say, you have an e-commerce store and you sell a bunch of products that people abandon their cart, if someone clicked on a product and left, if somebody interacted with that page more, if somebody viewed a video of yours for a couple of seconds or longer, these are all the types of things that the tracking codes track on us.
There also is this custom conversion thing, so we can watch people, as they click around your website, basically, we can see why they’re happening.
And so like, you know, e-commerce site, we can see that, you know, I’m going to use very round numbers. I see that 200 people got into the shopping cart, or even got into where they’re entering their their credit card information.
But then only 10 of those people made it into actually the checkout where they have put their credit card in, and they’ve purchased the thing. So we can see which again, that happens, there’s a large percentage of people who put things in shopping carts and then don’t buy them. I’m one of those people.
Jillian Leslie 36:55
I am too. I am too.
Amy Christie 36:56
Right. But then you can think about, you know, what could I do to improve that statistic. So you can think about abandoned cart sequences or, you know, reminding people that they did leave this here and that kind of stuff. Or even, you know, retargeting them with products that they had in their cart, so that follows them around and just like, “Oh my gosh, I need to buy this.”
Jillian Leslie 37:16
Okay, so what I will say is, hearing you guys, I feel like I need a PhD in this.
So in your course, or in your thing that you’re selling, will you really walk me through this so that I can set these up and know what I’m doing, and know how to see if it’s working because I can’t tell you how many people — and I am in this bucket — who have tried ads, gotten so frustrated, felt the money dripping through, and then said “screw this” and turn them all off.
Jessica Gleim 37:54
Right.
Jillian Leslie 37:54
And lost hundreds of dollars.
Jessica Gleim 38:00
There are kind of two sets of a way to look at it. There’s like understanding Facebook ads and cold traffic and basic retargeting. And then there are definitely some more complex strategies.
Our mission is to help people figure out how to accomplish like phase one, which is understanding all the objectives, understanding the base objectives, understanding the customer-buying cycle, which is the idea of a funnel, helping you figure out what your stages of your funnel should be, and how to build those campaigns within your Facebook manager.
A breakdown of all the lingo, a breakdown of like navigating around ads manager, a breakdown of how you can edit something, how you can check the comments that people have left for you on the ad, all those types of things.
So it’s everything minus dynamic ads, and dealing with product collections, which we’re going to eventually grow into something else.
But we want to hold your hand through that process. So we have chapter one is just about how to set everything up. So what do you first need to do? Well, you first need to have a business page on Facebook, because that gives you access to ads manager.
And then step two, and then you need a business manager, and you need to make sure your Google Analytics is set up. And you need to make all these things so that you can collect, you know, do all your data correctly. So making sure that you’re set up correctly is so important.
And then moving into understanding and learning who your current audiences are, what your current creative is, what you have to work with, how you can take all the awesome content you already have, and turn it into an ad funnel to meet the end big result, which is your big conversion.
And that can all be done on Facebook Ads Manager. And we are excited and feel really confident that as long as people learn the funnel steps and if people understand the objectives correctly, which we want to explain everything so detailed to you, you can pick the right one and it will be optimized correctly, and Facebook will send the right traffic to you that will take the right actions for the right stage of that funnel.
Jillian Leslie 40:15
I love it. Okay, so how can people then learn more about you, sign up for this because as you say, like what I want to leave everybody with is, this is worth it. If you sell something, this is not something like me, who does and comes in who tries this and then goes, “screw it, I can’t do this.” This is worth learning and that you will hold my hand through this.
Jessica Gleim 40:47
So first off, one, you can find us at our website, which is Flairst.com.
Jillian Leslie 40:56
Spell it.
Jessica Gleim 40:59
F-L-A-I-R-S-T dot com. You can find everything we’re working on — courses, free resources, articles, etc. If you’re looking for more help from us, you can reach us there. Or just, you know, come say hi, follow us on Instagram.
But the other reason why we’re so passionate about digital advertising is the bigger picture of the internet and the digital age, what’s happening one. One, like Amy said, where’s everybody spending their time during the day? It’s on a computer. Whether it’s professionally and it’s on social media, and it’s reading articles, and everything’s digital.
Secondly, there’s so much content and so much competition now in almost every industry that it’s really hard to maintain your SEO, the amount of effort and time you have to put into it, into organic ranking.
And if you are coming into this with a new idea or a fresh take on something and you want to start a website, it’s really hard with the current algorithms of social media and with Google to show up.
And that’s why paid advertising is so important. And that’s why we are so passionate about it that we want entrepreneurs and business owners to feel comfortable and confident that they can convert customers themselves using these ad platforms successfully.
Because it’s just going to get harder and harder and harder to try to rank organically. And that’s just where everything is moving. And, is it sad that that’s we’ve got to pay for everything?
Amy Christie 42:40
Yes, yes, it is. Because I started with blogging. I mean, it is sad, right? The thing is, it’s not going to change. Like I started blogging when Pinterest worked for the content creators and Facebook worked for the content creators. And you know, I have that knowledge and I know what it was like, and I am sad that it doesn’t work like that anymore. But I can’t fix that and so then this is the next step.
You need to learn how to be able to use these tools that are here and how to use them effectively for you. Because it isn’t going to be like it was, it isn’t going to work that way anymore.
Jillian Leslie 43:14
And I will say, it’s not super expensive if you know what you’re doing. And that’s why we hired you guys because we don’t know what we’re doing. But you need to jump in and you need to learn.
And I am really excited to be learning along with you guys as my guide, as our tutors because we feel like we can’t just get sales by creating great content for SEO, you know, that we need that added piece to our business. So I want to thank you guys, and thank you for being on the show.
And I feel like for my audience, learn from these two because they know what they’re doing, and they’ll break it down for you. And they’re like nerdy smart about this. I say that as a nerdy smart person, you know.
Jessica Gleim 44:05
I love that.
Jillian Leslie 44:06
So trust them is what I would say. So you guys, will you come back to talk more ads, like how to do… we didn’t even get into Facebook and Pinterest and how to use them together because they’re all these cool ways that you can do stuff. So will you come back on the show?
Jessica Gleim 44:23
Oh, my gosh, we’d love to. As you can tell, we like to talk, and there’s a lot to talk about.
Jillian Leslie 44:29
I love it. Yes.
Jessica Gleim 44:31
We could talk about this for days on end, we would love to come back. Thank you so much for having us. We hope you and your audience learn something new, and hopefully get at least take one tidbit away from today’s episode.
Jillian Leslie 44:43
Yes! Okay, so reach out to these guys. And again, thanks, you guys. And we will be talking as we move forward on this journey.
Jessica Gleim 44:51
And we’ll show what kind of awesome campaign we’re doing with MiloTree!
Jillian Leslie 44:54
Perfect. Awesome. Thanks, you guys.
Jessica Gleim 44:57
Thank you!
Jillian Leslie 44:58
I hope you liked my interview with Jess and Amy.
Hey, if you are already using MiloTree and you like it, like most of our customers do, join our affiliate program and you can make some extra money. Go to Milotree.com, scroll down to the bottom of the page and you’ll see where you can join our program. We pay $20 per conversion. So shout it out, share with your friends, all that stuff, and make some extra spending money. And I will see you again here next week.
What Type of Online Entrepreneur is MiloTree Right For?
Are you serious about growing your online business (advanced beginner and above)? Have you got some traffic but you know you need more?
Let your MiloTree pop-ups help you get to that next level by converting your visitors into email subscribers and social media followers on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and YouTube. Sign up today!
Install your MiloTree pop-ups on your site in under two minutes.
Sign up for MiloTree now and get your first 30 DAYS FREE!
