Ep #84: How a "Real" Facebook Marketing Ninja Generated Over 50,000 Leads and $100 Million in Sales for His Real Estate and Mortgage Clients

In today's highly competitive mortgage industry, building profitable relationships with the real estate agents is essential for success. However, finding effective ways to secure agent relationships can be a challenge. With so many mortgage loan originators vying for the attention of real estate agents, it can be difficult to stand out and establish meaningful connections. Our new case study featuring loan officer Chris Cogill is a must-read. Chris has closed a remarkable 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals. And in this case study, he shares his proven strategies for building strong relationships with real estate agents and leveraging those relationships to drive more business. To get your hands on this resource, head over to LOKestudy.com and download your free copy of the case study today. You'll find actionable insights and practical tips that Chris used to close 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals and how you can too. Don't miss out. Go check it out right now, visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. Welcome to Mortgage Marketing Radio. And brought to you by the Mortgage Marketing Institute, your number one source for truth in mortgage marketing. Hey listeners, you know what it is? It's Jeff Zimfer, your host, your humble host. Man, oh man, I have been on a roll when it comes to these podcasts. I hope you are feeling it. I hope you are getting the love. I hope you're getting the content, the education, the value, the reason why you keep tuning in and coming back to these podcasts. That's what it's all about. It's all about you and educating you and helping you grow your business, get more effective, become a modern mortgage originator, increase your sales and conversions, get more real to referral partners, and dog gonna just have fun doing it, right? Isn't that why we're here? Okay. This week's episode, man, I'm just digging it. This was every time I do these, it's an education for myself. So my special guest this week is Facebook Marketing Strategist, Coach and Consultant Travis Tom. Travis Tom might be the best kept secret in the mortgage real estate space, pretty well known in the real estate industry, not so well known perhaps, but that's about to change because of this episode in the mortgage industry. I was introduced or heard about Travis at a conference I was attending and I heard them talk about this guy Travis and him doing all these incredible things when it comes to Facebook, building audiences and leads and really having a deeper understanding of online consumer psychology, building this is gonna get crazy, right? But hang with me here, psychographic campaigns, buyer posts, personas, right? To really be able to craft an architect, the right campaigns with the right messaging to the right audience. And in this conversation with Travis, I've talked to a number of people, some on this podcast whom you've heard already, who are known for Facebook and running ads. But on this episode, I literally took, can you hear it right here, can you hear this? I took two pages at least of notes, two pages of notes. This was an incredible deep dive education into things that I didn't know about Facebook that I thought I knew. So if you're into, hey man, how do I succeed on Facebook? I want to get started. I want to start running my own ads, building some consumer direct business. I want to increase my presence, my brand online. I want to not rely on realtors so much. This is for you. We're going to dive into lots of different things in here from ad creation to creating many seller and buyer funnels, understanding the audience and demographics, custom audiences. It Travis tells me more about the Facebook algorithm I think than I've ever heard, right? In an way that I actually understand it. Then we start diving into the optimization strategies that go into really having a successful Facebook ad campaign. And again, this comes back to the copy, the intent of the offer. And then what does that funnel process look like? So you optimize your conversion. We talk about budgeting, how long you should expect to wait for Facebook ad to even perform and start to give you an idea of if this ad is going to work for you or not. A little bit about automating some workflows. And we talk about the changes with the Facebook targeting options that have since been taken away since the whole Cambridge Analytica debacle and the hearings that Mark Zuckerberg had to appear. And some of the changes that have happened to Facebook, but why? It's actually ultimately kind of a good thing and how Travis is seeing that and spending that into a positive. What's really cool about this is we get into the methodology, right? A priming and reminding and retargeting is one of the things Travis believes in. Priming, reminding and retargeting. So you hear that alone and that's worth your time in listening to this podcast and all the other things that we unpack on this call here today. So there's going to be links in the show notes to Travis and his company and his services. He's got a variety of different things he's doing out there, which includes something called leads to listing, which is part of his company called elevated REM. These are like single property websites. For example, if you're interested in and you don't have access to single property websites at your company and you'd want to learn more about those, how do you maybe offer those to your realtor partners, learn more about those at leads to listing.com. Again, all these things are in the show notes. Travis has a complete Facebook coaching group on Facebook. He just does so many different things. He's got his own ad agency where he's running ads for lots of big companies and then individual people and spending tens of thousands of dollars per month on Facebook specifically for real estate. So he gets to see a really broad spectrum of what's working, what's not working, the types of campaigns that are generating results and as I said, really, how do you optimize it so that you don't burn a lot of time, burn a lot of money and making sure you have your expectations set correctly from the get go. So how's that for a set up? Huge fan of Travis's dig into this episode, take notes, contact him in his company for more information. If you want to go to his direct personal website, that's Travis Tom.com, that's T-R-A-V-I-S-T-H-O-M. Again, all links in the show notes, more good stuff in there and I hope you enjoyed this week's episode just like I did. So let's get into this week's show. Hey, Travis, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you very much for having me, I really appreciate it. You bet. So, no, you're busy. You're doing a lot of things, a lot of irons in the fire as most of us are, my listeners as well. One of the have you here because you came across my radar at a recent mortgage conference I was attending, your name was brought up as one of the go to legit real deal guys when it comes to what's really working on Facebook specific to real estate and of course we're in the mortgage space and so I do the formula, as I said, everybody kind of heard the bio and who you are, what you do. But quick summary, one should give us your version of what you're all about, your agency and all that. Certainly. So I'm a Facebook marketing strategist and over the past several years we've generated over 75,000 leads from Facebook all from the real estate industry when campaigns internationally worldwide. So we're on Australia, Bundden, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico and throughout the U.S. Our advertising agency is focused on a full funnel type of approach. So we build campaigns with a methodology of top funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel kind of campaigns. Really dialing into the psychographic, demographic online and offline behaviors. So we use big data to really define exactly what consumers are doing and take them through a unique conversion process based on the actual behaviors that they take online and then retargeting them throughout the lifetime of the campaign as they are since texts and emails. With all of that data, we then love to teach. So we turn around and we actually teach people how to build those same campaigns. What's working right now. So we have a creative copywriter, operation manager, ad managers, graphic design team, funnel engineers, and myself as a strategist. And we're all inside of a Facebook coaching and training program where we walk people exactly through our methodologies, our steps, our processes. Some people are sharing and really being able to educate people so they can do it themselves if they can't hire us. Okay, very cool. So there's a lot of info in there and for some of the listeners, they might be saying, what does that all mean? I'm curious though, in terms of who you serve in the real estate space, are you dealing with individual agents, more teams or brokerages? What does that look like? We're pretty much all across the map. We have large companies that we work with, like Fidelity National Title. We work with other large companies that are, well, I can't say all of them, but just know that there's companies that are big teams. And then we have people that are typically our most typical client is going to be larger teams. Okay, so we work with AdSpin, anywhere from a couple of thousands a month, all the way up to 25 to 35,000 a month and a higher per campaign, it just depends on who the client is. We also work with individual agents and work with individual mortgage brokers. Those are typically inside of our training program, our Facebook coaching and training program. We send those, there's not necessarily resources to build blockages, campaigns that are put the scale on a national level. They're more of a local ones which are similar to my favorite because we get to see unique media results that are a little bit more tailored to the exact market area. So we're definitely all across the board. Okay, so thank you for that. So my listeners, loan officers, I want to try and cover a couple of bases in this conversation. One is I see a lot of loan officers trying to what I will say, trying to take a shortcut route and trying to circumvent the traditional method of growing their purchase referral business in pursuing relationships with realtors. I see loan officers trying to go, you know, the buzzword is consumer direct. And then I see them kind of chasing the elusive siren of, hey, man, Facebook, just run some ads and generate thousands of leads. What do you, if any, advice or roadblocks, landmines to look out for, traps, not the fall in, anything you want to bring to the surface for that person? I would, you know, Facebook is a wonderful place and it's for your advertisers and for the user experience, but it is a discovery platform. So a lot of these people are coming off of a search engine where they've done some searching individually and then they're on Facebook to escape maybe the world, whatever it is. The last thing that one is a direct offer that is too focused on the needs of the loan officer and or the realtor, right, whatever it might be. So we have to think in a different way, a little outside of the box on how do we really target these individuals that is based on their behavioral actions offline and online versus just a catch all where we're just sending a message out that may not resonate with those exact, exact people. So the consumer direct kind of thing, it's really based more on how do you tailor the message that has value and a strong offer to them and come more from an educational mindset. And when you get people information that's based on education, you're going to position yourself as the authority and expert, but you're also going to teach and enlighten them and hopefully in that same conversation, be able to then give them what are the opportunities. And I started that when I was early on in my career, I got into real estate. I was a real estate agent when I was 19 years old and then became a qualifying broker and I grew a team of my own company, I've managed over a hundred agents. But to get there, my first three years were extremely painful. I mean, it was not easy. I was 19. I was in a suit. No one was going to trust me, right? I'm going to trust this kid who hasn't even started shaving it with my largest asset. And it's not necessarily the best approach for me just to doorknoc and say, hey, I think about selling your home. And I did. I doorknoc over 2,000 homes my first 24 months in real estate, not a single one of them ended up in a direct sale. But I learned everyone's objections, I've learned how to actually clear the objections, and I learned what people really wanted to know. So I learned also, who do I resonate with, and what is my target prospect. And I was young, I was hanging out around the university, and I started to notice that parents would tour the university with their kids, right, the students, and they would either rent or buy a home, right, those of those two options or live on campus. Well, there was about 29,000 students that were enrolled in my vocal university. And I figured out, well, after talking to a loan officer, who was always doorknocking on some of these the last 500 homes with me until he was kind of like, dude, there's got to be a better way. Yeah, please. Yeah. So he told me about a kiddy condo loan program, and I don't think it's around anymore, right? But in the early 2000s, it was called a kiddy condo loan where the FHA loan, the parent would coosign for their kid, right, utilize the leverage of the parent's credit. It was very little down, I think, almost 3% or something like that. And it would get them into a home really, really easily. All of the properties around the university appreciated about, we're at 4% to 5% a year because of the location. And I then created a guide based on that that was a website, a guide that basically went over it was how to make those four years very profitable, wasn't that fun. And I handed out these different pamphlets and then ran ads in the vocal university newspaper and ran some basic Google paper click ads over to that website. And well, the website was just educational material, it was basically, here's the loan program. Here's what the home is pretty around the university area. If you buy, imagine the equity that you'll have over the next four years, and then you can rent the home and or sell it, take the equity, pay off the student loans, but your kid's basically going to have this great investment or you're going to have this great investment, right? So I started doing that and started getting people. My first client was a girl that was headed to NASA. She was a very bright engineering student, and her parents co-assigned for it, got the property, and then I started getting more, and her friends heard about it, and then kind of just snowballed. I should be giving these people that were then interested in buying more condos. Well, the developer that had all these condos that I can bring these people to said, you know what, why don't you become our listing agent? Here's basically $5 million worth of condos for this building, if you can sell it out, we'll pay you more, if you can sell it for the first five months I did, and that led me to win another one, and then another one, and we just kept being able to use the same type of educational material to draw people in. Well, Facebook wasn't around at that time, you know, in 2006, when Facebook had platform really came out. I modeled all of my marketing off of that ever since then, which was based on an educational type of advertising. So, with the same type of ad format, the persuasion and psychology of being able to draw people in with enlightenment by saying, did you know about this VA loan, or do you know that you can buy a home with only zero down, right, whatever it might be? All those types of opportunities, right, there's hundreds of different types of loan programs. Each one can be packaged into its own ad, but it's really based on more of the educational process, right, giving reciprocity. If you think back to the stone ages, people in caves, you know, being able to tell a story, what were the key pillars, the psychological pillars that really pushed people through persuasion to get them to take some sort of action. And it's a process of, well, storytelling, and so that can be done through education. Social proof, which is, you know, if you have any type of testimonials, if you have any type of, and today's, you know, social-specific proof is the combination of things. It's that Facebook ad was shared 25 times and has, you know, 15 comments on it and over 250 people like it, that's its own type of social proof in a way. So there's different ways to really be able to take all of these core pillars, you know, untapped opportunities that people haven't heard about. And reciprocity is a really big one, reciprocity of giving them valuable information, where they feel like, well, you know, that person gave me this. So I should have been worked with them because they are the source, right, and it gave me a lot of this information as a gift, and then what can I do in return? So that's the methodology that we use most of our marketing and most Facebook advertisers, no matter what industry it is, there's always going to be various different types of methods and strategies, but one that works really well across all industries is education and reciprocity. Yeah, that's a nice setup and kind of a contextual, you know, background to education marketing and so I'm curious, then what you're seeing if there's certain types of educational offers that work well on Facebook, and so obviously a couple could be like, you know, e-books, right, the ultimate guide to buying a home or videos or whatever, but it sounds like what you're saying is on Facebook, don't look for the direct, quick hit, look for educating nurturing, perhaps putting people into a funnel, right, taking them off Facebook and taking them to your page, is that right? Yeah, there's a few different ways to do it. You can do, focus on audience building. So let's say you run a video that goes over the top seven mistakes homeowners make when trying to refinance their home, and that goes into like fear, guilt, greed, you know, fear missing out, all of those are deep emotional polls, that could be a video that you run to a group of homeowners, and, you know, anyone that washes, but say a 25 or 50% of that video, you can build a custom audience out of that, and you're not selling that video, right? You're just giving them information, right, the top, you know, deadly profit killing mistakes homeowners make when, you know, going through this process, whatever it might be, do it wash 50% of that, then show them a secondary ad that maybe a lead generation ad that is focused on some more content that is really showing them basically how, right, how to overcome those, and whatever kind of solution you can provide. So building an audience and then retargeting them with a very specific ad to give them to take a secondary action, you're going to see a lower cost per lead, you're going to see a basic lead that's been warmed up, and that's a warmer audience, they're educated, and so you're building this frequency illusion, where you're a little bit showing them everywhere, but it's based on their behavioural actions that they've taken at the top of the funnel. Now that's one. Some of the others are focused more on, you know, see if you qualify, right, for this two or three, you know, K-Lone, whatever it might be, right, this rehab bone that's come up for BA's, you know, see if you qualify, take, you know, take the quiz, or, you know, take the brief survey, whatever it might be, it fell out. So getting them to take those actions and then send them through, and then you have an email, let's say, or some sort of lead capture at the very bottom of that questionnaire, they say, you know, enter your email to get the results, right, and that's where you start to kind of, you know, basically convert them into a leave. Now there's more simplex ways of doing it, which is, you know, having a list of homes would always be a benefit if you're working with a realtor, if you can kind of piggyback on some of their IDX systems in that way you guys are working in tandem in terms of the follow-up process, and you could use their list of homes, their IDX website, and run an ad that might say, see all the properties that qualify for first-time home buyers and special financing programs, some of these homes you can qualify for zero-down finance. Interesting. So obviously, then you're targeting the first-time home buyer niche. Exactly, right, then you're, and really that's what most of the successful campaigns boil down to is you're targeting a very specific niche, right, so if we're doing VA loans and that's really focused on, you know, veterans and for focused on first-time home buyer homes that qualify for almost zero-down, or it might be you, or special grants, then right, you're speaking directly to first-time home buyers. And there's lots of data that we use to boil down who that targeted audience is, but you're going to see that's going to resonate a lot more that a broad audience with a very broad message. Yeah, yeah, good stuff there. So a couple of questions then on that in terms of focusing on a niche audience like you and I talked about before we hit record is of course Facebook is changing some of the targeting interests to try and appear more, you know, public friendly. I'm curious, any comments you would have about the impact of that specific to real estate? I'm sure you know what the RF top of your head, I forget, right, does it income targeting? Is it thinking about buying a house? What are some of the others? Certainly, it's some of the major ones. So they're removing 1500 different interests. Wow. So partner categories is being removed, which is third-party data from axiom, experience, data logic, some of those larger companies that aggregate tons of data offline from, you know, pretty much everywhere. Facebook has its own first-party data, which is very precious and probably was valuable data at any time, type of advertising platform. But the party data sometimes was kind of hit or miss and sometimes it was used really well and sometimes it wasn't. But the key will affect real estate that they're removing are homeowners, renters, income, likely to move, and there's recent mortgage borrowers and recent home borrowers or home buyers. And there's a few that kind of cascade off of that. Now with that being removed, it presents, I think, a really large opportunity. And you can see that there's a lot of mortgage borrowers and real estate agents that are, well, I'm just using some of those, right? The targeting strategy was pretty simple. Sure. Well, it was easy, you know. It was easy. Yeah, right. You know, yeah, they were targeting strategy. It was really still hit those few things. Now, the issue that we're going to experience is that that's being removed on October 6th. So in October, all of those are being removed. Everything's hard cost to click. The results are definitely altered because they're removing them systematically right from Europe and Canada and the US. Now, what we've been doing is just that people use first-party data. And I'll give that just a little bit. But the opportunity here is that most people are going to be frustrated that they can't use some of those targeting, right? And you're going to have people that are going to complain and they're going to give up and their campaigns are going to struggle. Now, your opportunity is that if you really know how to do Facebook marketing well and you know different targeting strategies, you're going to be able to really dominate that space because you're going to have some people that are going to leave the advertising platform all together and throw up their hands because they say you've got way too complicated for me. I don't want to even try and want to think about how, right? I'm just going to find it a different avenue. Now, what we do is since March, since this was announced in March, and this is one of our gold standards, one of what Facebook considers a gold standard as well, is you take your past client list of homeowners or if you have a list of homeowners, whatever it might be, whatever your customer list that has a common denominator like homeowners or people that are just buyers, whatever it might be, you upload that list as a custom audience, you take that custom audience inside of your ad manager and you create what's called a look-alike audience. Now, a look-alike audience, so you're just uploading your customer list in the CSV file and you have some email, phone number, city, right, states, zip code, the more data you have on them, the better. Facebook is going to match that and say we've got a 70% match of all of people on your list to profiles and user IDs on Facebook. Now, with that custom audience, create a look-alike audience and so what Facebook will do is they'll find all the people in the entire United States that match, you're going to analyze and match the data of that list, you're going to find 2,000 different data points, 2,000 different key attributes about these people, life stage, income, homeowners, right, whatever it might be, the shop of Whole Foods, all of those key denominators, they're going to find other people that match those very similar profiles and then that is your list that you should run campaigns to. Now, that's one strategy out of about seven that we've deployed that have been really successful for us, not using any third-party data and look-alike audiences are really successful. We first started with e-commerce because let's say if you on the e-commerce store, you had a necklace for $300 that you were selling, you sold 1,000 of them in the past year. Well, what's the best way for you to find other people that are most likely going to buy that same necklace in that price range where you take your past list of people that bought, upload it, quit a look-alike audience and run ads to those individuals because Facebook is going to have that data. They have that data that they can predict who are the people that are most likely to purchase, who are the people that are most likely to travel, who are the people that are most likely to move and buy a house or be finance, whatever life stage they're entering into. It's a very powerful, so that's one key strategy out of Whole Foods. Okay, and regarding the look-alike audience, once you've got that data on Facebook, it's going to do a nationwide search and aggregation of that. Are you then, if a loan officer is only in a local area or a real estate agent, are you then adjusting that for targeting purposes or how do you narrow that to where you can actually serve? Exactly. We do what you call a geolocation and narrowing. You upload that custom audience inside of your ad campaign at the ad-set level when you're creating a campaign. Then you simply just type in the zip codes that you want to target or the exact city that you want to target or if you have a neighborhood, you just type in the actual property address and do 5 mile radius or 25 mile radius around that property address. And then, Facebook's just simply going to take that look-alike audience and narrow it down and specifically just a geolocation area that you are wanting to target. Okay, wow, that's good, man. Thank you for the free education and how to navigate the new world of Facebook there. Another question on that, though, is what do you suggest to people in terms of giving Facebook a long enough time for its algorithm to perform its duties? Because a lot of people are like, hey, I ran it for a day. I always love that one. I get people to say, so I have an open house this Saturday, right, Thursday, my man, come on, it's not going to, yeah. Your standard rule of thumb is you want to give the Facebook algorithm three days, or 72 hours to have that start to really optimize and go through the Facebook algorithm to find one, the blowing through that it can basically trigger the algorithm to say, find individuals that are going to take a specific action. But it really goes through what's called a learning phase. So the first three days, it's really going through a learning phase trying to find the best prospects in the audience that you've created to understand, okay, what have you trained us to do? How do you want us to perform? And those first three days, you're going to lose money. And that's, you know, it's not really kind of in the people that you're going to have. So, yeah, be prepared. I mean, really, you sit on your hands, or your handkerchief, or a straight jacket, whatever, three days. Don't touch the ad campaign, don't touch the ad copy, the targeting. You can make any changes for those first three days. It's a start and stop, right? It starts over the algorithm and it becomes a Frankenstein type of campaign. And it loses its data, loses its steam, and it's just not going to perform. Now, we look at the algorithm, and most campaigns really the algorithm stabilizes on these campaigns at 8,000 impressions. So, 8,000 impressions on that ad set, on that campaign. That's where it stabilizes. And then you can scale it or start to make any changes based on the data, right? That you want to look for. You'll look for key point indicators of the data if it's going upward, down. That's a big part of the Facebook campaign, right, is being able to read the data and understand what to do next to you. Leave it alone. Do you change the ad creative? Do you switch it to a manual bid, right? And get more. But yeah, the first three days, let it be, it's not going to, you know, it's not going to kill you. You know, hopefully you're spending a healthy amount of budget. You know, and budgetistic, well, the budget is a big part of it, too. Yeah. You know, I think a lot of people may be under bidding. And so they might see in the first five to seven days, no performance, or no real kind of action. And then you've got to go back and really look at, well, why is that? You know, we have an audience of 700,000 people, but we're bidding $5 a day. Well, you're not going to make a tenth in that audience with only 700,000 people in $5 a day. Facebook is a blind auction, right? It's an auction in bidding platform. So when you go into that auction, right, when you say I'm going to spend X amount of day, you're going into this auction and you're competing with maybe 50 or 250 other advertisers, going after the same audience and so on overlap of it. And the situation that takes place there then is Facebook is looking for who is bidding the highest that says we value this audience the most. And this is what we're going to bid to reach those individuals. And then from there, the Facebook algorithm says, all right, we'll feed that ad campaign out. But the user base has to also speak and tell us, is this the right ad that we should continue to serve to most of the individuals. So what they're looking for is the best consumer experience. And they have their own total value. We give each ad campaign, each ad a certain weighted value in the equation basically goes like this. It's called it's called bear. And that's what the Facebook algorithm is known as. They're a big, mean, grizzly bear. So bidding expected action and relevancy. So what are you bidding right to reach that audience? Then the expected action expected action kind of ties into what is the optimization or the objective of the campaign. If it's a Facebook lead ad, right, it features lead generation. Then what we're doing is the algorithm is saying, let's find people that are going to become leads and fill this form. So we're going to fund the most likely prospects. They're going to actually click on this ad, fill it out, or give their information, and then go over to the destination URL wherever you want to send them. If it's traffic, right, same kind of thing. Who's mostly going to click on this ad and then wait for a landing page or a website to load or face the messenger, right, all those kinds of things. That's called OCPM optimized cost per thousand mile impressions for some CPM. OCPM really taps into the algorithm. So if you get some brand awareness or reach, that's just CPM, cost per thousand impressions. It's basically just like billboards. It's not anything with a direct kind of called action that's going to tap into the algorithm. But what you're looking for is that's something you just can't control. The expected action is basically left up to Facebook and their data of prospects. The relevancy part is how relevant is the ad image, and the ad copy to that audience. And what Facebook is looking for is the optimal consumer experience for this. That ad is relevant to me, and I'm going to engage with it. Now how Facebook determines that is through a high click theory, and people are sharing and commenting on it and liking it. So shares, comments and likes in that order is what's prioritized within the Facebook algorithm. People clicking on the ad and actually going through and taking the actual steps, that the ad is optimized for, that is feeding back into the algorithm, called pixel fires. One of those pixels is sending the information back and saying, we've had 25 people take a specific action in the past seven days on this exact ad. So therefore, the user base is spoken, they enjoy it, and we're going to serve it up to more people based on the ad spent. Now, if people go up and they click on the right hand corner of that ad and say, hide this ad from me, which, you know, all of us do at some point, we've seen that too many times, or there's an ad that has a picture of baby boomers drinking cocktails in Florida, but it's being run to some millennials, right? You know, some 23 year old that says, I don't want to see that stuff for me, but I hide that ad. That create what's called a negative feedback score. That negative feedback score goes into tells your ad account, hey, people don't like this, right? We got a negative feedback. You have a negative feedback score in the positive feedback score. Positive is based on the click-through rate and interactions of people going through it. Negative feedback is people, there's one simple action, people hiding the ad. So what does that do? Negative feedback score limits your reach. So your relevant score, which is how relevant your ad is from a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being it's hyper relevant, it's really great. One being it's not, the higher the relevant score, the lower cost per click, the lower cost per lead. It is a direct correlation there. So that goes down, the reach goes down, the impressions go down, your cost per week goes up, your click-through rates start to take a dive and the campaign has the slow kind of tragic death. So simple kind of formula, just make sure that your targeting is on point, your ad copy and ad creative is speaking directly to the targeted audience, and you're bidding effectively in the audience. So an effective bid, standard rule of thumb is $10 a day per 100,000 people in the audience. That's what Facebook really kind of looks for. So I'll bid sometimes a little higher in the ad auction depending on the data that are received on past campaigns. So I might say, you know what, there's 300,000 people in this audience. So I'm going to bid a little bit higher. I'm going to bid $50 or $60 a day at first to really blow everybody out of the water, and let some leads come in and then I might start the dial it down back to something more appropriate like $25 a day and then just kind of a balance out. Everyone's bidding strategies a little bit different, but just kind of start off a standard rule of thumb is $10 a day per 100,000 people. Yeah, that's good, man. Very, very good. Holy crap. I'm taking the ton of notes and there's so many directions we could go, but one of the questions that popped up for me because I had talked to a loan officer who was looking at writing some Facebook ads with another firm out there, and basically, I don't know if you can answer this question or not, but I'll try it. Basically, it was coming back to him that his, if he was doing the math on the acquisition per, let's say, closed the loan, right, that that was going to cost him, I think, $500 or more for each one of those. And so I'm trying to figure out how do you decide, right, how much is the appropriator enough per transaction, and I know it varies based on the size, but we're talking real estate mortgage, so any thoughts there? Yeah, it really depends. I think for the mortgage industry, the CPA, the cost per acquisition, is to sub $500, right, is a deal. So $200 would be the target range, I think, for most, from our experience that we've seen. Sometimes you're going to get a home run and get one that might be on the $25 or $50 cost per acquisition, right, not cost per fee, but cost per acquisition. In fact, during that, for those that are listening, it's really kind of going, what am I paying in ad spend, and then what am I paying for Facebook ad management, right, if you're hiring a management team, right, a team of experts that do this for you, but if you go on a team of experts that you're paying to do it for you, then it's just that this is your ad spend and then whatever other dedicated resources, right, to try and convert that prospect. But with that, yeah, we've seen that with mortgage leads, you're typically hovering in between, you know, that $150 to $450 range, cost per acquisition. Just to clarify, by acquisition, do we mean a closed loan? Yeah, closed on that. Some of that actually converted, and the money is in the bank now, right. So, yeah, you're going to see on average those flux rate in between. Is it higher for real estate because they're making more on a sale of a house, right, they're going to make more than a loan officer's going to, so I'm wondering if the CPA is. Yeah, you're right. There's going to be a, I mean, it didn't get everyone's, you know, charging and internal fees and, you know, everything like that. But really, it's more of has to do with one yet, the profit margin. It's not like what Facebook is really kind of saying, oh, these people make more money on it, so they need to know that. I'm just thinking, right, when you think about, I'm sure you get this all the time from the real estate. Well, how much is it going to cost me per, you know, sale, right? I mean, that's what they want. Right. And it definitely ranges across the board. So, with real estate agents, you know, we're seeing, you know, average cost per lead, sometimes it's $2. Sometimes it's, you know, $17, right? It depends on what kind of, what kind of proofs we're going after. So sellers are notoriously more expensive. So, selling leads for us are much higher as a cost per lead because, well, they're a homeowner, and homeowners are attached to so many different types of services, so them being targeted by other employees. Exactly. Insurance companies. I mean, all these different types of, because when you buy a home, we really, it gives thousands of people opportunities. On the list, man. Yeah. So, if you're a homeowner, then you're a value as a prospect, who's going to dreamy high to hundreds of different companies versus if you're a renter, or if you're, you know, a homeowner, but you're targeted maybe in a different way, which gets to be a little more advanced, sophisticated, but it's all about then the, well, what is the intent? And we have to go back then to what is the offer? Now, a cost per lead for a buyer to see a list of homes is going to be the rent for $4 or $6. At the most lower cost per lead than homeowner, because we have leverage. Home buyers want to see homes, right? And what's available under a certain price range? Homeowners, it's still sometimes a bit of a mystery to exactly what they specifically want at that point in time with their live stage. They're a bit more elusive. They're like that leopard snowcat, the USC once a year up on the mountain range. You got to know exactly where to be at the right moment with the right tools to actually, like, you know, see it from five miles away. So those type of campaigns are, are effective, but they can cost more if the targeting and then the ad copy and what we call a hook, right? What is the incentive? If the incentive is irresistible enough, then your click through rate is going to be low. And then the car, then let's say you're spending $10 a day, and you're only getting maybe one lead, you know, every three or five days. Well, then that's going to be, you know, a $40 to $60 a lead. And then the time to convert that prospect into an actual sale, you know, then it could be easily a three or $400 cost for acquisition. So it's also about, what is the intent? What is the actual hook? And it needs to be something that is well focused on on value and a benefit to them. Yeah. So it's intent to took its value, its benefit. And then of course, the relevancy that we talked about before where you have to have that offer that's relevant and the ad copy has to be relevant, the image has to be relevant, all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot of moving parts there. Yes. Couple more quick questions that just kind of popped in my head as we're talking here. Do you have any suggestions best practice on keeping people on Facebook versus sending them off, right, off to like a landing page or whatever? So, you know, Facebook does have some slight penalties inside the ad platform. Not penalties that are going to, you know, get your shut down or negatively affect you, but penalties to where your ad may not be shown to the right prospects for your reach, you know, is limited. So it might be not shown to the same amount of people that you would desire it to be shown to if you're taking people offline to a website. Now, there's about 27 different factors, a plan to that, but just the key main ones are, is the website globally optimized? Is it designed for mobile? Because about 90 percent of our campaigns, our leads, everything is mobile. That's where they're all generated. So if you're taking someone to a website that's not designed for mobile, then it's going to be bad user experience and then Facebook does not want to affect user experience in a negative way, right, on their platform. You want to keep people there as long as possible. So that's one part of it. Does the website have a privacy policy on it? If it doesn't have a privacy policy on it, then Facebook is going to penalize that and that's going to affect your campaign. It's real quick. So Facebook's going to look at this with their intelligence that they have. They're going to know what that destination page is and okay, cool. Yeah, basically, they're going to read through almost like Google speakers. Look for certain words to try and find your privacy policy. So if you don't have that installed, affect it, does the page take longer than three seconds to load? That's also going to affect the campaign, right? So Facebook is building more and more tools inside of the ad platform to where you sometimes you almost don't even need some people off until the very last moment. So, and that experience can be done with Facebook Canvas ads, which are basically many mobile websites and you can design those in the ad platform. Canvas ads are really a cool type of tool because it takes up the entire screen. It's mobile immersive. It pays a pickstakes of the entire phone. So you don't see any ads or anyone else, but your brand or whatever it might be. Every time spent on those is to pick about 35 to 40 seconds. That's how the Canvas ad. Can you put a video on those? Yeah, definitely. I put a video. I would put any kind of material there. Whatever the goal might be, right? If it's to build an audience, have a video so you can really suck them in. If it's to solicit some sort of offer, you're going to be clear and concise exactly what that is in the video. But what was cool about Canvas ads is that people that open them up, you can build a custom audience and retarget anybody that interacted with that Canvas ad. Websites at the landing pages still work really well. There's never going the way. Or just the experience that you want to make sure that the continuity from your ad to the website is very, very close and neat and similar. Yeah, branding, imaging, coloring, all that kind of stuff. It's got to be consistent. Continuity, like you said. Very cool, man. This has been a lot of good stuff. I'm just watching the time here. I want to close it out with just a couple of thoughts and then for those that might be interested in connecting more with you and learning from you. But to lead to that question to that next step, it's funny when I hear all this and I'm looking at the damn two pages of notes that I have and everything and I'm like, man, this is some complex stuff and you're going to know what you're doing. I'm curious what your thought would be on. We got the loan officers listening who may want to try and go at this at their own and running an ad. Here's the offer, whatever it is, that free relevant thing. The first question comes in my mind. Number one is, do you think that's doable? Should people kind of test the waters out? What do you think? Yes. I think that in today's world of technology and innovation, people wanted two camps. Those that want someone to do it for them because they're too busy and they want to have the budget. And then those that like to learn and they're more tactile with their experience and they want to be able to listen to learn to fish and do it on their own again and again. So I fall into the camp of wanting to learn because I, especially are you figured this all out on your own? Well, yes, I think that people should, I would encourage them to definitely experiment and try. I think also, especially for things, one will have a deeper respect from the platform and understand the complexities and how it adds to truly is the scale of what is available and what you can do. But also, it's one of those where, if you know how to do it, and you're in there and be able to actually create a campaign and have success with it, there's some great empowerment behind that. There's this real skill set that is valuable, that if you can know how to do it and do it yourself, go for it, man. I mean, really, really be able to do it. If you don't want to and you say, you know what, I'm running a bigger team and an organization that, like, it's not worth my time to learn it, then you're much better off than hiring the experts that do know how versus stumbling around and trying to figure it out and, you know, the cost could be a little bit heavier. Awesome. I think there's great advice, great suggestion. Thank you for that. I guess last question is this is what maybe, you know, one to three questions that those listening, if they're considering an agency and outsourcing this, that they should ask to make sure the agency actually knows what they're doing, you know. That's, yeah, that's a great question. Well, you know, even when you call in or if anyone's ever talked to the actual Facebook marketing team that Facebook has, I love Facebook. I've been to the headquarters, you know, I've met with their core real estate team and actually I'm on their advisory board, but there's marketers that they have, you know, to call in and they say, you know, talk to an advanced expert marketer and so those people don't even really necessarily know the full debts. So don't fault some of the agency people that you talk to if they can't answer these questions, but I would really focus on, you know, what is your methodology? Because, you know, there's Facebook has no methodology of priming a reminding, which is basically what we've adopted. What was that again, say it again? Priming in reminding. Okay. So priming is basically having a top of funnel, top of advertisement, right, whatever it might be, instead of retargeting people based on their activity on that, right? So, you know, everyone has a different way of how they do it, but have them explain the algorithm in their best way. Can you explain how the algorithm operates to me so I'm so I can understand it and what that looks like? Okay. And from there, I would really kind of focus on their successes, you know, how many leads have you generated? You know, not necessarily how many clients they have because everyone's starting out in different ways, right? So, you know, all new. Right. So, you know, I would really ask them what's been successful for them, you know, more to the campaigns that are producing the best results, things like that. Right. And some, you know, some people are going to be, you know, kind of talking stuff like that. Right. They're ad copy, but I would, I would really kind of ask more about the targeting. And, you know, what do you find is the best method that that is working for you now? And then how are you handling the removal of those, those audiences that are, or the targeting that's being removed away? You'll get some interesting answers. And then you can you really kind of start to see where are they in the scope of, you know, as far as being an advanced marketer, or they begin or intermediate in what they, you know, what they like to really focus on in terms of their methodology. So, it's right for you. That's good stuff, man. Great. Thank you very much. This is a crash course. And believe me, I've interviewed a number of people on Facebook, and I, this is the most notes I've ever taken. So, whatever that, hopefully that really conveys a lot. Really, it was awesome. All right. So, that leads me to great. For those that are listening, they're like, hey, you know what? I want to hire Travis and his team. I want to learn more. How do I get educated? You know, any places you want to send our listeners to connect with you? Certainly. Yeah. If you, if any of you are interested in learning how to run Facebook ad campaigns, you know, from the very basics 101, all the way up to the advanced, or if you just want a team to do it for you. But my, my website is TravisTom.com as Travis. Last time I spelled Tom THOM. So, TravisTom.com and Go Under Services. And you can see pretty much, well, everything that we offer there. There's also a blog on that website for some free training. And we've got a lot of great material there. Free training that you guys, I would suggest starting there, get your feet wet, start to understand how everything works, try it on your own, you know, and just test, right? Get out there and see what's, what's possible. Yeah. And then of course, follow you on Facebook and I'll put links to all this in the show notes because you do put out some nice content on your Facebook page as well. But thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah. You bet, man. So, no, I appreciate you. You're very busy. I know a lot going on. And thank you for coming here today and sharing your time and expertise with us. Good job. Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it. And I hope everyone gains some value of Golden Nuggets out of today. Definitely did, man. So I'm sure you're going to be getting some inquiries. So listeners, thank you for tuning in as always. We appreciate you. If you like today's episode, leave us a little thumbs up, a little positive review on the, you know, wherever you're listening, iTunes, Stitcher, wherever on the blog. Thanks again. And we'll see you on the next one. Bye for now. Hey, guys, what's up? Real quick. You've heard about the mortgage marketing pro membership before. And I just want to quickly remind you of that you're in a place in your business where you simply need more purchased loans. You need to fill your pipeline with purchase business. Let's just face it, agents are still a solid pillar of business and sources of purchase business for you. Well, good news. 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