How to Use Facebook Ads to Start Texting Your Ideal Customers w/ Ryan Fenn

UX Marketing

Blake: [00:00:00] welcome to the podcast. We have Ryan Fenn here today.

[00:00:02] Ryan: [00:00:02] He's a CEO of chirp

[00:00:04] Blake: [00:00:04] and I'm sure among other things as well, but Chirp is your main thing right now. Ryan, but before we get going, I want to get context on you. So first off, how are you doing?

[00:00:15] Ryan: [00:00:15] I'm doing great. Thanks.

[00:00:17] Blake: [00:00:17] I'm curious, before we start, just so people know what they're getting into here with this interview, what is your professional

[00:00:23] Ryan: [00:00:23] superpower?

[00:00:25] My professional superpower. Oh man. Which one? no, I'm just humility. Humility. No. I would say that our, if I was to sum it up, we're really good at, capturing Leeds and converting those leads are quickly connecting with those leads to push them through a sales process and turn them into a customer faster.

[00:00:46] And what other people generally can do.

[00:00:49] Blake: [00:00:49] Awesome. And we obviously want to touch on Facebook ads a little bit today. We want to touch on text messaging as a platform today. But before that, just curious if you could tell us kind of the elevator pitch version of what's the story of starting chirp, what all went into that?

[00:01:04] How did the idea come about? How did you get to this

[00:01:07] Ryan: [00:01:07] point? Sure. So, I've generally always been entrepreneurial. it wasn't, I don't have a tech background, but. my brother and I had started a business many years ago, 10, 12 years ago, where we, where are we? It was our first entrepreneurial venture.

[00:01:19] We fixed windshields and it fixed like little rock chips and windshields, man. And that was like our first venture we were doing it out of gas stations and our washes and dealerships were down in the trenches, right? And we started to hire people and it started to grow and it was a, it ended up being a really good business.

[00:01:40] And so we decided to, create a digital course on how to start your own windshield repair business. And so, I didn't know what to do there. I just kind of put together a WordPress website, builds up some videos on how to fix windshields and how to build the insurance companies, all that stuff. And then, I partnered with a friend of ours who does do digital marketing and we started selling this course.

[00:02:05] And, started to take off. And we started selling it by texting our leads as they would come in, we would run Facebook ads and when he was texting them, we'd get a much higher engagement rate than we weren't texting them. And we sold about $2 million worth of that course over a couple of years and all through text message.

[00:02:23] So at that point we said, Hey, the sales process of generating a lead in connecting with them through text messaging is really, really effective. Maybe it'll work for other businesses. So we started helping other businesses, real estate agents, mortgage, things like that, local businesses. and then at that point we went to an investor and said, Hey, this is really cool.

[00:02:42] Mmm. Ah, know, can you fund us so that we can start this, start this program? And, there it is. So, so we created chirp to be able to, so that other businesses could get to do what we were doing with this other platform. Or with this other business so that they could get in and do it

[00:03:00] Blake: [00:03:00] themselves. Awesome.

[00:03:03]can you do me a favor real quick? D is your phone on?

[00:03:05] Ryan: [00:03:05] Yeah, we just, we just fixed it.

[00:03:09] Blake: [00:03:09] Awesome. Awesome. So sounds like you're in the same boat, or you were in the same boat as many of the listeners here once upon a time, and now you're in the process

[00:03:19] Ryan: [00:03:19] of building this company,

[00:03:20] Blake: [00:03:20] and I'm guessing that Facebook.

[00:03:23] Based on your expertise. Facebook ads have been a good part of what's made you successful alongside the text messaging. So I do want to talk about Facebook and I really start her question for this is, is it Facebook dead?

[00:03:38] Ryan: [00:03:38] it's Facebook dead. No, it is far from dead. It's definitely, it definitely has its challenges.

[00:03:43]but the, I mean, the traffic is there. The targeting is really powerful. there's a ton of, of ways that people aren't utilizing it, as far as is how they can target and how they can collect a lead. It has some really cool tools that if you know what to do, you can be very successful with it. for me, my focus has always been let's capture a lead and get them away from Facebook as fast as we can and continue marketing to them.

[00:04:09]when I look at it, when, when generally when you ask that question, it kind of means, is Facebook dead as far as a, it was like the social media aspect of it. I looked at it. I look at Facebook as an advertising platform to get people's eyeballs on my, my, my information is all them away for social media, like where you're posting and doing things like that.

[00:04:29] I, that's, I don't do stuff like that. I'm just all it Facebook.

[00:04:34] Blake: [00:04:34] So you talked about some of the challenges that might be present currently with Facebook. What are those? What are they, I mean, what challenges do you see? What things do you

[00:04:43] Ryan: [00:04:43] see that people aren't using

[00:04:44] Blake: [00:04:44] that are actually available but people are totally

[00:04:46] Ryan: [00:04:46] avoiding?

[00:04:47] Sure. So generally speaking, because we're doing what's called disruptive advertising, eh, you're competing, you're competing with all, all different types of businesses. Right? Where if you're, if you're doing search advertising and somebody, let's say you're a dentist and you want to do, and you want to do ads for 'em teeth whitening, right?

[00:05:08] You're going to run ads on Google, you're going to, you're going to do, you're going to target those keywords, teeth whitening, right? And so you're only going to be competing with other businesses that are bidding on that keyword, right? So you're not going to be, you're not going to be competing with. Mmm.

[00:05:23] You know, custom home builder, all these different, you know, these different niches. and so you, you can get clicks based on the value of your product. With Facebook, the challenge is that you, let's say you sell, let's say you sell something for $5, you're going to be competing for impressions with the guy that sells something for $10,000.

[00:05:42] Like a solar guy that sells solar because it's all on one platform. It's all its base. You're not searching for that. And so the challenge is, is, you know, finding audiences that, that you can market too and still get a competitive rate on your, on your clicks. So that's kind of always that you face with Facebook because you're doing disruptive advertising.

[00:06:04] Now, the key, the, the thing that I've found to be very effective and a lot of people will push back on this. Mmm. Facebook has a platform called lead ads. Are you familiar with lead ads? I

[00:06:16] Blake: [00:06:16] haven't advertised on Facebook for awhile now.

[00:06:18] Ryan: [00:06:18] So focus inform us. So lead ads is a campaign objective. So you choose this at the campaign level.

[00:06:25] really cool because when you advertise using lead ads, your ad shows up just like it would any other ad that you create, like a click campaign where you're, where you're, you know, your traditional ad is, here's my ad, click here to go to my website and learn more. With this lead ads is when they click the learn more button or the sign up button or whatever you choose to be the the button, you know texts.

[00:06:49] When they click that, they don't actually leave website. The website, they don't leave Facebook, so a form pops up on their screen. With their information already filled out. And Facebook has really good data on us. It has good emails and good form. they've done a good job at that price to say so. Yes. and so when that form pops up and it's prepopulated with their email and their phone number and their name already there, there are only one more click away from submitting themselves as a lead.

[00:07:17] So you're removing, well, we call it friction, right? We're, we're trying to, we're trying to move them from, from. who are you to hear and take my money? Right? That's where we're, that's what we're trying to accomplish. And so the, the more friction we can remove from that process, from that funnel, the better.

[00:07:35] And so when they click on that and that form pops up, it's got their information already there. It's literally two clicks away and you've generated a lead. So you've collected their name, phone number, and email. Now, the reason I say that people will give us pushback on that is because a lot of people said, Oh, I tried lead ads.

[00:07:52] It didn't work. It doesn't work for me. The lead quality is crappy, you know, whatever. And that's where the secret, that's where I, I'm, I'm, I'm almost, I've almost been hesitant to share the secret, but now that we have platform and we help people use it, the idea is, yeah, those leads suck generally speaking because people are collecting their name and email and they hit submit and then they go into an email followup campaign and like 10% will actually read.

[00:08:19] No. Right. And so they go, Whoa, I bought a hundred leads and only 10 of them actually read the email. And only two of those even clicked my link. So I ended up getting like one visit to my website. So, so yeah, they have a bad reputation, but we kind of cracked the code. And instead of collecting email, we collect there phone number and we found that people are just as willing to give their phone numbers or emails.

[00:08:43] We're paying them at the same. Amount for a leaf but we're getting a much better piece of data, which is their phone number and the moment that they submit their information, our system can chick them a text message to start a conversation. So imagine you're scrolling through Facebook, you see an ad that you liked, you click the button, you click the button one more time, and now you're in a text message conversation.

[00:09:06] That's pretty magical. That works really well. Connect with upwards of 95% of our leads within 10 seconds. And because everybody reads their text messages, we get a really, really high read rate and we get a high engagement rate on those leads.

[00:09:21] Blake: [00:09:21] So Ted, taking a step back then and we'll get more into that for sure, cause it's super interesting.

[00:09:26] Taking a step back, just knowing there are probably a lot of people here that are looking to promote their product or service or try to promote their content even for brand awareness. How do you do this with a limited budget? Because. Oh, most of us are side hustlers. We're young. We don't have extra cash.

[00:09:41] What would you recommend if we're just starting out? We have very little to put into

[00:09:45] Ryan: [00:09:45] it. So obviously there's a lot of things you can do to, to promote yourself for free online, but those things aren't generally as scalable as a page. And so, if, if, if I was to give a piece of advice on starting out, I would say get ready.

[00:10:04] And prepare yourself to start paying me. Don't, don't try to avoid paid ads. Try to try to break into that as fast as you can and start getting data on your paid ads. very quickly. The cool thing about a platform like Facebook or LinkedIn or any of these other, a disruptive advertising platforms is you don't have to spend thousands of dollars to start promoting your business.

[00:10:28] You can have a budget of $5 a day and you can run that a couple of days a month or whatever it is to start gathering data and start learning what people will click on. Take some, you know, it takes, it takes some ads to figure out what message about your business is going to cause somebody to go, Oh, that interests me.

[00:10:44] And they click on it. And so I would say, you know, don't shy away from paid ads because that's where scalability is, in my opinion. If you're going , I'm going to do SEO and I'm going to build it up that way. It's going to take you months and months and months, and that's more cost...