SHOWNOTES
When I first started my business and was learning about Facebook ads, I was obsessed with Jon Loomer’s content. He is arguably the most knowledgeable Facebook ads person out there, but more importantly, he’s a great teacher.
He started his business in advanced Facebook advertising beginning in 2012. He experienced some bumps in the road over the past few years but listen to how he addresses these challenges…I think you’ll be inspired.
Jon shares some really powerful things with us:
How he started his business
His journey into TikTok
What’s new in Facebook ads
What his content creation process looks like behind the scenes
The importance of being scrappy and the value of seeking out mentors and advisers
The importance of staying focused and being transparent with clients and customers
The challenges of managing growth and scaling operations, and the role of innovation in a constantly changing market.
Don’t miss this episode and let me know your thoughts after you listen. I always love hearing from you. If you have any questions about this episode, comment below or DM me on Instagram @jen_lehner
RESOURCES
TRANSCRIPT
[00:01.610] - Gary Vee Hey, guys, it's Gary Vaynerchuck, and you're listening to the Front Row Entrepreneur podcast with our girl, Jen.
[00:09.890] - Jen Lehner Our guest today calls himself an accidental marketer. He found a niche in advanced Facebook advertising beginning in 2012. His experience with Facebook goes back to his years with the NBA when the league partnered with Facebook in 2007. He's a baseball fan and a stats nerd who shares his love of the game with his three boys. He's also one of the single greatest content creators that I have ever learned from online. Welcome to the show, Jon Loomer.
[00:38.890] - Jon Loomer Thank you so much, Jen.
Read more...
[00:41.310] - Jen Lehner Well, it's all true. When I first started my business ten years ago, you were early in your business too. And I turned to your podcast and your blog and your trainings to learn all about Facebook ads. And the fact of the matter is, my business wouldn't be anywhere close to where it is today without Facebook ads. So we can make a cogent argument and say that you are directly responsible for the success of my business. So I really am really super excited to have you here. And the reason that I say that you're one of the greatest content creators that I've ever met online is because you do everything that I love. So you're no BS. You get to the point. You write really clearly, you are a total giver. Honestly, the amount of free, valuable content that you have out there is mind blowing. You are a true expert and those experiments that you do are just completely like nobody else does that. So we're going to get to all of that because I have so many questions for you. But what I want to do first is just start at the very beginning.
[01:43.820] - Jen Lehner How did you start your business?
[01:46.930] - Jon Loomer Well, I had no idea what I was doing and I didn't know I was starting a business. I worked for the MBA from 2005 to 2008, end of 2005 to middle of 2008, and then left that because we couldn't live in New Jersey anymore. And I did a series of things over two and a half years and I was laid off twice. And when that happened, I first of all knew that I did not want to move my family again. I was also spoiled having worked for the NBA. Even the last job I had was actually it was a good gig. It was a fulfilling gig. It was doing some of the things I loved, working for American Cancer Society. I got to work remotely, but it was also bad time economy wise. I had been spoiled those past few years with really good jobs, so I just didn't want another job. And I didn't know I was going to start a business like I within. I might have bought the domain that same day after I was laid off. I don't even I'm not positive. But I launched the website eleven days later with no clear goals other than feeling like, okay, this is going to help me get my next job, I'm going to showcase what it is I can do.
[03:13.950] - Jon Loomer Because I've learned a lot of things marketing-wise over those last few years. Sure.
[03:22.900] - Jen Lehner When you were with the Cancer Society, did you do like fundraising and that sort of thing?
[03:28.560] - Jon Loomer So I had what was looking back, probably not ideal, kind of a new position, experimental position that was involved in all that stuff. Right. So utilizing social media online and other things in new and creative ways for ultimately fundraising and awareness. And it was for the Great West Division for American Cancer Study
[03:58.600] - Jen Lehner Because one of my first jobs out of college, which I stayed for years and moved up through the ranks, was with the Muscular Dystrophy Association. And the reason I ask is because I really feel like I learned and when I was working with them, like email had just come out. But I feel like when you work for a company where you have to be scrappy like that because they don't have a huge budget and you sort of have to wear so many hats, it teaches you so much. That's really where I learned. I didn't know I was learning marketing, you know what I mean? But I really feel like that's where I got most of my marketing skills. Anyway, please continue.
[04:31.000] - Jon Loomer No, it's a good point because yeah, I had to be scrappy there. That's really where I learned how to basics of creating a WordPress website and just a lot of the little things with Facebook pages and groups and things like that. When I worked for the NBA, that was so early, there weren't even Facebook pages yet. It was just Facebook groups and there weren't like truly brand groups. Right. You could just create a group for anything. Now there was an official NBA Facebook group. I was the admin of it, which was a really weird experience. It's interesting. So I had a lot of exposure to Facebook at that time. I fell in love with the platform mainly for personal reasons because I moved around a lot as a kid and being able to reconnect with all these people you thought you'd never hear from again was amazing. And then having that exposure with the American Cancer Society. Our oldest son is a cancer survivor, so that's why that also hit home. To get laid off, it really was being scrappy, right. Assembling this website and really looking back, it wasn't a very good website. I even did a lot of design myself and did everything as inexpensively as possible because I not only had no money or didn't have a lot of money, but I knew I was going to be burning through money, which I ultimately did.
[06:08.550] - Jon Loomer Luckily we had savings, but any savings we had would disappear over the next few months. I had to be scrappy eventually. Just started writing about stuff I knew, that was usually social media focused in the beginning, then marketing-related, I think, because I've realized really around three months later that I was at least creating, I don't want to say brand, but I'm building something, I don't know what it is. I didn't see myself as starting a business. I started creating enough tutorials and whatnot. They started to focus on Facebook marketing in February. So what was that, like six months later or so? And I started getting good traffic. I leveraged that. We're still in the very beginning here. I don't think that I know how to start a business. So creating my own product isn't really a consideration. What I know is I need money, my family needs money, I'm getting traffic. So what I did was, first of all, I started an email list. And then as far as affiliate marketing goes, look, I'm not a natural sales person, so I'm not going to sell you stuff. But essentially it was a matter of, hey, this is a tool that I use to create my website.
[07:37.300] - Jon Loomer It was essentially it. I mean, there were four or five tools, like what was the theme, my WordPress theme, right? Or what are the social media tools, third party tools that I use, or something along those lines. And I started getting some really good traffic and to the point where some of these companies also wanted to buy ad space on my website. So over time that improved, right? But it got to the point where it's like, man, this traffic is so good and this real estate on my website is so valuable to the these other companies, it could also be valuable to me. I wonder if I should start a product, if I should launch a product. And it started with the most ridiculous idea that wasn't scalable, but it was something. And that was the key to everything that entrepreneur does. I think you just have to try.
[08:42.550] - Jon Loomer Instead of worrying about it. So I created this product that was a Facebook page review where basically all I did was I sent me an email and I don't know, I might have had 2000 or so people on my list at the time. And there was a PayPal link and that was it. That was the extent of a landing page or anything. I think I was linked to that PayPal within a blog post said, hey, if you want me to review your Facebook page, I'll do that, sign up. And that was it. And that was my first product. Within, I don't know, a few months or so, I launched my first training. And that's really when everything exploded. Because that was you may remember Power Editor. Yes, that's old school. And that's basically back then it was known if you were serious about Facebook ads, you were using Power Editor. That said it was extremely buggy, difficult to use, and confusing, which was perfect. I didn't even realize this at the time, but my God, those are the perfect characteristics of a good product. I mean, not only is it advanced advertisers where these are the people who want to spend more, but there's a lot of confusion around it.
[10:03.720] - Jon Loomer People want to learn how to use it. And that's when my business has just exploded and never used affiliate marketing or anything ever since then, because I could just focus on selling my own stuff.
[10:19.350] - Jen Lehner And then the rest is history because you really just doubled down on all things Facebook ads and really became like, you don't have any peers in this space. I mean, I don't know anybody who goes as deep as you do. And I love that you said it was the perfect product because of the fact that it was complicated and there was a demand for people to understand it, and there were people who are willing to pay for that advanced knowledge. But also, you do have a talent for breaking down complicated things and making them consumable by most people. We don't have to be stat geeks in order to understand you, which is why I gravitated to your stuff. But let me ask you this. People still want to know about Facebook ads. There's probably more confusion than ever because of everything with iOS and all of that. How has that changed your business? What new challenges have popped up as your business has matured?
[11:25.930] - Jon Loomer Well, what's obvious with my business and probably any business where you're trying to educate people on how to do something is the minute that everything is easy and everyone knows how to do it, it's bad for you. So I need change and need there to be some sort of disruption where people are confused and they need me to explain it for them. So, yeah, the iOS stuff was a big deal. I mean, that impacted everybody no matter what. Even if you didn't have customers who are on iOS because of the changes that impacted everyone. So attribution changes and things like that. So that was the biggest thing. And now it's a matter of a year and a half later, we're starting to get some of that back. But I think we went from kind of this Wild West era of, wow, the results that you can get from Facebook ads are absolutely insane. It doesn't even feel right, too. These results must be inflated, was often the claim. Right? Because a 28-day click, the one day view, everything combined with that. Two, then we get to the point of iOS and you're like, where did the conversions go?
[12:40.640] - Jon Loomer Why isn't this working? And you're trying to connect the dots and find some verification that these ads actually are leading to conversions because especially for anyone where they're selling a more expensive product, that it may take longer than seven days to make that final decision. After clicking your ad, you were no longer seeing those conversions. It didn't matter what device you were on. So it created a lot of uncertainty, a lot of confusion, but we're starting to get some of that back. But there's just so many changes in terms of privacy and browser settings. I don't know, we'll see where this goes.
[13:22.940] - Jen Lehner Well, I don't do my Facebook ads anymore. I have an expert handle that for me. But I remember in the glory days when I was doing my own ads and I could go in and I could say, all right, I want to show this to people who like Amy Porterfield, who make this much money, who drive this kind of car, who recently returned from the Caribbean, who are probably voted for so and so. And it was amazing. It was just so much fun, right? It was like fishing, sort of, I guess. I mean, I'm not a fisherman, but, you know, like, what lore is going to work and and it and it really was kind of fun. Is any of that kind of targeting still available?
[14:08.190] - Jon Loomer It is. Now beginning in January, and maybe even a little bit before that. They've gone through some rounds of removing interests, but there's always a question of the direction that Facebook is heading. Is that in reaction to the fact that you can't do a lot of these things anymore? Or is the fact that you can't do a lot of these things anymore? Partially in response to the fact that if you go broad, you get better results anyway, which is where Facebook is going. So it's interesting because, yeah, back in the day, look, I love all the levers and experimenting, and my favorite thing was micro targeting and focusing on the most engaged audience. People are most likely to get value out of what I'm offering and using to drive traffic, as well as build my list and whatnot. And so making this shift where Facebook really wants you to go broad. Right. So they really don't even want you to mess with those interests anymore. So anyone who runs a conversions campaign, especially if you use a lookalike audience, they automatically turn on look like expansion, which is now advantage lookalikes, which means, yes, you can start with that 1% lookalike.
[15:37.270] - Jon Loomer But if they want to, Facebook thinks they can get you more results. They can move beyond that percentage to a greater percentage. And if you're using a conversion campaign and you select an interest so, yeah, you select Amy Porterfield as an interest, which is I'm pretty sure if she's still there, that would be the starting targeting. But they have expansion on detailed targeting, expansion on for that as well, which is advantage detailed targeting. Now where that's the starting point, but if they want to, they can go beyond that. So they're forcing us to go broader than we're really used to. And the reality is, it seems, that Facebook's machine learning is getting better. Now, I would say that that is especially the case for ecom. And I have some doubts when you're like, you're just looking for things like driving traffic to your website or getting good engagement or something like that. But we're coming into that time where and this is kind of where TikTok seems to be going, and I think some other ad platforms, even Google as well, where it's like, you know what, I know you want us to hyper Target, but you should trust us.
[16:57.960] - Jon Loomer It's basically what the platform is saying. We can do a better job than you can by picking out these little interests, learning from how people are engaging and finding more people like them.
[17:11.610] - Jen Lehner Well, speaking of TikTok, I noticed that you got some TikTok action going over there. And I report the news every morning on this flash briefing that I do. So I'm well aware of like well, and also I spend a lot of time on TikTok, but I mean, in terms of what's available to advertisers, I talk about it a lot, but I haven't done any of it. And then I think it was a TikTok that you did where you talked about how you boosted a post or you promoted a post and you did it initially to get more followers because you wanted to experiment with TikTok live, and you have to have 1000 followers on TikTok to go live. So this morning I got one of my TikToks. I don't have that many, but I picked one. And when it came to choosing your audience, it's like, trust us, let us do it, or you can do it. But I wanted to see how micro I could get, which wasn't very it was like I could pick some hashtags that I could pick really some very broad topics. In fact, marketing and business and entrepreneurship wasn't even on there.
[18:24.190] - Jen Lehner But anyway, I don't know how it's going. I just did that this morning. But I want to talk about TikTok. Like, what do you think about it? Are you going to go all in? Are you going to pivot away from Facebook to TikTok? Like, tell us everything?
[18:37.810] - Jon Loomer No. So, man, there's so much we could talk about on this topic. So as early as probably September, I TikTok and just that overall format was a joke to me. And part of it was like, just super uncomfortable with that format. I don't like being in front of a camera. I don't like worrying about lighting and what I look like and sound like. And also just the I opened up the TikTok app for the first time and I don't know where to start. All the filters and everything, it's just insane to me. And it's also a matter of my old school way of thinking with videos, is that I got this question once I did start creating these videos all the time, what's the ROI of that? My inability to measure that because you really can't drive traffic organically especially. And oftentimes I would say you shouldn't try to get to that a little bit later. So the whole matter of, yeah, trust that you're doing this for a good reason was really hard for someone who normally has all this data. Like, oh, this is driving good traffic, which means people are joining my email list, which means they're going to get more revenue.
[20:03.130] - Jon Loomer Even if I can't direct do a direct line to revenue, if I can at least drive direct line to traffic, that's good. And now you're going to tell me, create videos which are really hard to drive traffic from, and really maybe you shouldn't even try to in most cases. That was really hard to swallow. And I know that a lot of people have thought the same thing when they consumed my videos. Okay, so my business has been on a bit of a decline in the past few years, and there are a lot of reasons for that. Some of it I would say, like when you create a business and you put together your processes, I guess I can only speak for myself. I wasn't preparing a business that's going to be around for 1020 years. You're just trying to like, how do we make this most efficient and effective right now? And so it's like, oh, so we follow these processes. My blog is my home base. Let's make sure everything is focused on my blog. And also I'm a dad and I was a baseball coach and like, I don't want to work a lot.
[21:11.450] - Jon Loomer Let me try to make this, in a way, this business, build this business around the fact that I want to be a baseball coach for my kids and watch them grow up and all that kind of stuff. So I started, you know, having these systems and processes set up for that. Not changing, not really evolving because, hey, this works. Working less and less and also resisting video and resisting those changes. And very slowly, I would say, especially once COVID hit, that also impacted me just in a way that I wasn't expecting. I think you already mentioned it. I don't like to sell. So if you're going to present me with a situation where I'm hearing from people who are getting laid off, their businesses are failing as a result of all this stuff that was going on and I'm supposed to sell to you, that was just a very hard block to overcome. My entire plans for that first year were pretty much scrapped. And once I created a product, it was like, it's not going to be a Facebook ads related product. It was more like, how do you get online live videos and things like that.
[22:26.370] - Jon Loomer And even then I saw it super cheap because I just didn't want to gouge people during that time. And so that really accelerated this descent for my business that I wasn't really prepared for. And I think everything kind of came together at the right time in that I needed to figure something out quick with my business. At the same time, I wrapped up my final season coaching baseball for my youngest son, because that was like a full time job travel ball. So that point where I was like, okay, what am I going to do? What am I going to do differently? What am I not doing right now? It's time to change and evolve. And I had to commit to video. So it was understanding that I'm going to create some really bad videos, and I had to be okay with that. That was the first thing, is to embrace that, knowing that kind of like with my own at the start of my website, my website looked like crap, the design wise and things like that. What was I doing? But you had to start somewhere. And so the video is like, no one's watching this video anyway.
[23:39.750] - Jen Lehner Yes. Wait, let's stop there for a minute because I just want to reiterate this because it really is so important for anybody who's afraid to jump on any platform when you first start, even though you have a huge following, when you went to TikTok, they weren't there because you weren't there. And so, I mean, they weren't looking for you. I mean, honestly, I would never think to look for Jon Loomer on TikTok. That's the truth. Now, I will, obviously, but I know that I just don't picture you there, right? So whatever. All of us have to start from zero. And when you start from zero, the beauty is nobody's looking, nobody's following you, so very few people are going to see you look dumb. And by the time you start to get viewers, you've gotten better. So please continue. But I really wanted to get the highlighter pin out on that.
[24:22.130] - Jon Loomer It's absolutely true. And really, those who are watching it care about you in your eyes. That's the thing. You have to approach it with a beginner's mind and understanding that every video you create has a purpose and you're going to learn from it. And also I started consuming the content, just kind of understanding what it was that I liked or didn't like about other people's videos, what made me stop and watch. I would ask them questions like, how did you do this? And that helped a lot. It was a learning process. It was an acceptance that it's going to be tough in the early going, but it's also understanding that there's a reason I need to do this. So once I started to get comfortable enough with what I was doing on TikTok, it became much bigger than TikTok for me. And this is why I recommend everybody gets into it if you're a small business. It's the format more than the platform. So once I created that video, I could take that same video, not with the watermark or anything. And I'd use it on Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, YouTube shorts. I'd even put it on a square canvas and send it to LinkedIn.
[25:46.130] - Jon Loomer And I'd even take if it wasn't a tutorial, I'd take that audio and throw it into a podcast template and create a podcast short. It's a nice quick podcast episode. So the point being is all of a sudden I'm everywhere. And so it's not just like all this effort worrying about building up my TikTok audience. Well, it's no longer just about TikTok. It's about these other places as well. And a crazy thing happened. Look, it was really hard in the early going into state, especially because I was really inefficient and I was starting to get burned out. There's a video I created like, oh my God, I'm trying to create three videos a day and it's taking 2 hours per video. It's got to get better than this and it's gotten better than that. So there was that, but then it's like not really seeing, okay, what's the impact of this initially? But then I started hearing from people. So on Facebook it's like, oh Jon. It was this really weird feeling when I get this kind of comment because it both made me feel good and depressed at the same time. It's like, Jon, you helped me so much with my business back in 2014, 2015, years ago.
[27:03.860] - Jon Loomer I haven't seen you for years. It's like, oh, that kind of dug deep. Right? I appreciate it. I'm glad I helped you, but oh my God, I haven't gone anywhere. It's just that I haven't been playing the game with video, right? But also with instagram. It gave me reason to focus on Instagram because I created my Instagram account years ago. Again, completely resistant to the idea of I'm going to upload images, what do I do? I can't really drive traffic. There's no reason for me to be there then would eventually convert it to a business profile just so that I'd have a placement that I could use an Ads manager. That was really it. I wasn't using instagram. I might have grown to like 4000 followers of people who are probably really disappointed that I wasn't creating content. But I started publishing these videos and all of a sudden now I'm getting all this engagement that I haven't seen on Instagram before. So I was seeing these signs and then it just hit me like all at once, where there were a series of four one on ones that I conducted in two days. So people paid for these one on one in each case.
[28:21.730] - Jon Loomer These were people who had been on my list for years and years, but they hadn't bought anything for a while. And they told me specifically, I am here because of your videos. Right? So suddenly it's like, I don't know what the ROI of this is. I can't directly connect a specific video or my efforts generally beyond like, word of mouth. People told me this, but I keep hearing that and there's a reason, right? There are two main things there. It's like, first of all, yes, you're going to reach more people if you play that game of video, as opposed to hoping you're driving traffic and people see the link I share. But it's that personal connection that you can't get from the written word, or it's really hard to get from the written word. And I made a personal connection in the old days, before video was a huge thing, since people consumed content differently, I lost a lot of that. So I think that's the biggest thing with video is making that personal connection with people, where like, someone signed up last week and she said, I feel like I know you now, and that's why she signed up.
[29:39.240] - Jon Loomer And it's just lightbulb, but it's also a matter of what was I thinking? I was so stubborn for too long, but at least I'm here now.
[29:48.010] - Jen Lehner Well, the podcast did that for you as well. I know. As a listener, I felt like I knew you. Do you still have that podcast?
[29:56.840] - Jon Loomer I do. So the podcast, it's funny because it's a lot of the same challenges, really hard to measure, and occasionally I would hear from someone that, oh yeah, I listened to you, I first ran into you from the podcast, or I listened to you all the time. The numbers are just so hard. I've had over a million downloads over the ten years or so. But downloads are downloads. You don't know how many people are actually listening or listening to the end, what are they doing? But beyond that so I've been inconsistent with it over the years. And that's another thing I was realizing. And why I'm here today is I was losing that personal connection. First of all, I stopped interviewing people just because, you know, it's a lot of work. Someone's internet connection is not working, their mic is not working, they don't screw up on time, they want to reschedule all that stuff. So I stopped interviewing people and I just started doing solos. I stopped being on other people's episodes just because it's like it was a commitment, time commitment, so I could focus on all these other things, not really realizing how much it would impact me ultimately.
[31:08.050] - Jon Loomer So my podcast still exists, but I started finding ways to make it more efficient. I'd record solo episodes, which you lose a lot when you do solo episodes, you lose that back and forth. That's really important. And I started doing these shorts like about a year ago, where again, I was just like, how could I keep recording these? So at least I put stuff out that's valuable without all the production that goes behind it. So there'd be anywhere from like a two to ten minute episode. I started doing those again. So basically I've been taking lately because. So much of my effort is dedicated to video. I've been repurposing a lot of those videos into these podcast shorts that at least for now, I think it's pretty effective. But I think long term I'll probably get back to interviewing because I understand how valuable that is.
[32:02.890] - Jen Lehner WelHomel, since you said you're doing this content from two to ten minutes, I think you need to do a flash briefing because they show up on all smart devices. So Google Home, Apple's pod. If they even still have that. And then of course, A-L-E-X-A. I don't want to say her name, but I could tell you all about that later. But it's really just a matter of you getting another RSS feed and uploading all the content you're already doing. And it blows me away. The people who purchase stuff from me who tell me that they found me over there and they're not following me anywhere else. But that's a conversation for another day. Okay, so back to TikTok. What about TikTok Ads? Like, what are you going to do? What should we do?
[32:45.700] - Jon Loomer Well, the first thing is if anyone listening to ever run Facebook ads, you're going to wonder why you haven't run TikTok ads before. Because you hop into that. And I haven't heard this confirmed 100%, but I'm pretty sure that former Facebook Ads Manager designers are the ones that worked on TikTok because it's called TikTok Ads Manager. The terminology is exactly the same. So you hop in there, you'll feel completely at home if you're used to Facebook Ads Manager. They've even got audience insights, which is like the old Facebook audience insights before they scrapped it because of privacy concerns, strangely enough. But creating a campaign is many of the same things. Campaign what they call Ad group, and then add many of the same stuff. Now, the thing to remember, though, is that the platform is different. So what works on Facebook won't necessarily work on TikTok. But I do see, though, kind of like what you're explaining, what you're describing with your kind of experiment there. I haven't done anything beyond trying to build my audience and trying to get more people to watch my videos and things like that, which is always a mixed bag no matter what platform you're talking about because it's like your quality is probably not going to be great.
[34:05.680] - Jon Loomer It's really hard to isolate that quality even if you start using those interests and behaviors and hashtags and whatnot. I'll be curious to hear what you find. I found that just made my CPM go crazy. Like when I didn't go broad, the one thing I've seen with TikTok ads is CPM. If you go broad, it's like $2. If that for CPM, and then I was using it was a marketing and advertising interest, and I think I might have used the hashtags like Facebook ads or something, and my CPM went up to like $100.
[34:44.360] - Jen Lehner Wow.
[34:47.130] - Jon Loomer It's just really hard to get good results. Profitable. I don't say profitable, but results that are worthwhile even if it's quality when you start spending that high. But I've also compared some of my results like, okay, I'm looking these videos and compare watch time and follow rate and all that kind of stuff compared to when I use when I trust the algorithm with that automatic audience kind of crazy. And then I've compared that to when I've tried to slice and dice and use look like audiences and things like that. And it's really not a noticeable difference that I've seen in terms of quality. Right? So when you look at how long they're listening and things like that and no matter what, I feel like there is a numbers game here. It's kind of like the beginning, the early days of Facebook where the number of followers does matter, right? Because like you said, there's functionality. There's only available with a certain number of followers. But look, we'd be lying if we said when people look at your profile and it says 500 followers, they're not going to look you at you differently if you had 50,000 followers.
[36:01.790] - Jen Lehner True.
[36:03.330] - Jon Loomer And with Facebook, it's not really as much of a thing these days because that's so buried. Facebook intentionally buries that. But that's pretty front and center on TikTok right now. So there is that element to it. Now you obviously want quality followers though too, so you don't just want to blindly pay. But I'm still not yet using the ads to build leads or anything. I do use the organic opt-in option which basically with each video there's this little thing comes up, it's like I don't even know what it's called. Kingdom it's called anymore. This little thing comes up at the bottom. If you click it, you can sign up for my email list. That hasn't been crazy popular that people sign up for. But it's just one way I've used it. It's beyond just watch my video.
[36:54.290] - Jen Lehner That is so cool. Well, I'm in my TikTok right now and I was able to promote because there's a little like tab that says promote but I don't see Ads Manager. Where is that?
[37:05.510] - Jon Loomer So you're doing it from the app itself. So basically you don't even need to be a business I don't think.
[37:14.090] - Jen Lehner I have a business Account on TikTok or create your account. I don't know. I think creator account.
[37:19.440] - Jon Loomer But it's completely separate. It is completely separate because it's not like an ad account, it's an Ads Manager and you have to buy credits and stuff. Right, right. You don't have to do all that in the TikTok ads Manager.
[37:33.190] - Jen Lehner Oh, so you go that to the browser.
[37:37.510] - Jon Loomer Correct. It's completely different. You're not buying it's. Just like Facebook ads manager. And honestly, I don't think the two talk to each other. Like if you just hit the promote, I don't think it realizes you run ads from the TikTok ads manager.
[37:52.560] - Jen Lehner Oh, weird. Okay, when we get off this podcast, I'm going to go all over that. You did something like you gave yourself like a one month challenge or something, and you did a video a day. Is that what you did?
[38:10.010] - Jon Loomer I don't even know if I had a specific number I was saying I wanted to record. I had a goal of recording three every day, but basically publishing three every day. And so it started I can't remember, was it like October 3 or something like that? I recorded at least one, published at least one every day. I published 70 during the month of October.
[38:31.820] - Jen Lehner Oh, my gosh.
[38:33.180] - Jon Loomer And that sounds crazy, but then you break it down like, oh, yeah, it's two or three a day. And that sounds reasonable when you say two or three a day. It sounds less reasonable when you're saying 70.
[38:43.750] - Jen Lehner Were you batching like, ten on Mondays or were you literally, like, doing two a day or were you doing two a day?
[38:50.650] - Jon Loomer Batching was impossible because it took me 2 hours to create each video.
[38:55.240] - Jen Lehner Oh, right.
[38:56.730] - Jon Loomer So it was definitely on the fly. Now I've gotten better. The other thing is to understand there are different ways of recording videos, and that's the thing that I need to remind myself of over and over. Not every single one needs to be this 1 minute long tutorial where I'm screen sharing and I've got to do this. It's more of a production, and it's going to take about an hour to do all that. You can also do just a quick use it through the app, through the TikTok app. Record a quick thought. Sometimes that's all you need to do, and that's not going to take much time at all. So I think I need to get to the point where I understand that there are multiple ways of doing this.
{39:42.410] - Jen Lehner Okay, I have an experiment for you, Jon. Okay. I think this is what you need to do, and I'm doing this completely selfishly. I think you need to host a challenge for us. Right. We have to sign up for this TikTok challenge, right? You do preface it with, like, look, I'm the new kid on the block on TikTok, but I want to share with you what I've learned so far. And what I've learned is that you just have to do it and then we sign up for your challenge. And what we have to do is you're going to create, like, six different videos of TikTok and we have to pick one to duet. All right.
[40:15.090] - Jon Loomer I don't even completely understand duet.
[40:17.420] - Jen Lehner But, this is so good because you're going to get all these people duet in your videos, which of course are then going to get you to rise up in the algorithm. And also you're teaching us at the same time. I don't really completely understand duet either, but something like that. And really and truly, I would rather do a TikTok challenge with you, who we learn with you. Right. Like to learn with you. And it really could become this fun thing. I'm just saying because I've just been in the back of my mind for a long time. I really would like to challenge myself with a TikTok a day or two a day or whatever. But it would be way more fun if it was curated and something structured and organized. So I'm just putting that out there. Okay.
[41:02.200] - Jon Loomer I like it.
[41:03.190] - Jen Lehner Okay, good. Now, my listeners would kill me if we got all the way through this interview and I didn't ask you about what was new in Facebook ads. What do we need to know about what's new in Facebook ads? What do we need to pay attention to?
[41:17.690] - Jon Loomer Well, there's actually some good stuff happening. So much of the things that went away as a result of iOS is coming back. So for example, the 28 day click attribution used to be 28 day click one day view was a default attribution which meant in your reporting by default those who clicked your ad and converted within 28 days or viewed your ad without clicking and converted within a day will show as a conversion related to specific ad that was moved to seven day click. One day view. So you lost all that. You can now it's still seven day click one day view, but you can access the eight to 28 day click conversion attribution now, which is big, I think, especially during the holidays. Yes, you could tell. A client ads manager told me that we got 100 conversions, but they're actually another 15 that happened beyond seven day click. And that's kind of cool. It's good to know. So the feature that allows that is another one that went away, which is compare attribution. That was a big deal too, because an example would be like back in the days where our numbers inflated, for example.
[42:40.640] - Jon Loomer Well, you could compare attribution to see how many of those conversions happen within one day click, seven day click, 28 day click and one day view. Right. And so it's really good to have that tool. When it went away, I found the biggest impact of that was remarketing. I don't know about you, but remarketing campaigns, you always have to look a little skeptically at with results because you're reaching people that you're also emailing in a lot of cases. So they may see your ad, they don't click it. You email them that same day. I mean, they may not have really even seen it. It was just displayed to them. They get an email from you the same day, they click it, they convert. Your numbers are crazy on Facebook because you get credit for it. The problem during the last year and a half was you could no longer say, oh, okay, those numbers are big, but I know that 30% came from one day view. And these are people I remarketed to now. It was all thrown into the same bucket, and you had no idea how much of it was viewed through. So that came back, which is extremely helpful when I say it came back.
[43:50.410] - Jon Loomer Not everybody has it, unfortunately, but hopefully that's just the way every rollout is. And then the final thing was related to conversions. Again, you could break down your results by things like placement and geography and age and gender. So, for example, you could say you have one campaign running, but you want to know how did Facebook news Feed compared to Mobile News Feed compared to Instagram? And once you use a breakdown by placement, you could see, oh, this is how much was spent on each placement and also how many conversions happened in each place. Well, one of the changes that happened during iOS was you could still break down that information, but conversions would no longer appear. So you were just kind of guessing as far as how many conversions happened in each placement that is coming back as well.
[44:48.410] - Jen Lehner Thank goodness.
[44:49.780] - Jon Loomer To me, these are all signs. Why would they bring this stuff back if it's only going to get more and more difficult to track? Because of new laws, because of other browsers and devices starting to get more strict with privacy and whatnot and blocking and the pixel situation, everything else. So why would they bring these things back unless they felt like they had it under control, right? So whether it's their modeling, there's something that they must think, otherwise it's a complete waste of time and effort. Like, why did they bring it back? So I think that's a sign that things are about to get better in terms of Facebook advertising, attribution and reporting that hopefully it'll be a little bit closer to what we remember before all this happened.
[45:42.850] - Jen Lehner Well, that is very good news. Okay, this is my last question, and then I want to talk about how people can work with you because you are such a wealth of knowledge. But before we get there, I am super curious about what your content creation process looks like behind the scenes. Like, what does your work room look like? Do you have a team who does what? Because when I look at your blog, for example, you seem to be very consistent. You're prolific, and you have all these beautiful screenshots. It's like everything is meticulous. Again, like I said in the intro, everything is very clear, concise, well thought out. I know that you just can't whip those things out in five minutes. Please tell us what's behind the curtain.
[46:35.440] - Jon Loomer There's a lot there. Well, first of all, as far as consistency, that's something I'm bringing back because I have to stay on myself about that. It could be difficult. If you go back and look through the last few years again, you'll see a lack of consistency overall. Or there's one thing that I'm focusing most of my time on. That said, I run pretty lean. Now, I do have a team, but in this team, I've had the same team for like it's been about five years. So the team would be Tracy, who handles all customer support, and triage of who needs to answer this or how should this be addressed. She's amazing. Luke answers a lot of the questions that come in that are technical. And he also goes into like, our Facebook groups to answer some questions there to take the pressure off of me and have a tech team, Joel's team, who they handle all the website and all the things that I don't understand that's technical. So that's the thing, first of all. But beyond that, when it comes to content creation, that's entirely me. And, you know, I've kind of look, I wouldn't recommend it.
[47:55.370] - Jon Loomer It just depends on your vision for your brand, right? There were times when I took a lot of guest posts. I would have other people direct training and things like that. I think that those were also the times when my business started taking the wrong turn because I started relying on those people too much. And I also became, I think, less sharp as a result because I wasn't as needed. So when my brand is me, that becomes difficult when I start relying on other people to do content if I'm not keep holding myself accountable to make sure I'm still doing all the things I used to do. That said, as I just put together a little video on this too, of what my my routine is going to look like for next year. Because once I create a routine for the start of the year, it always becomes a mess by the end of the year, which is what happened this year. So I'm not even doing this right now, but I will start the year. I try to have a day that's for blogging a day. And it's going to to be have a day plus for video creation.
[49:05.330] - Jen Lehner A day when I can be on people's podcasts or I can record podcasts, and a day when I'm doing meetings. So either it's team meetings or one on ones that people can book with me and things like that. And then also making sure that every day I've got these blocks of time that are for personal stuff. So it could be getting my day going and reading and meditating, and I have this whole coffee routine, retired espresso maker for me and my wife. And then I'm making sure I exercise every day. You have to build those things in. But part of it is just being focused as possible, like specializing it in those days. Look, my office is nothing amazing, like my equipment, my blogging. I'm lucky. I feel like I can sit down and write a blog post in under an hour. That's one of the things where it's really helped for my business. It's largely been around my blog, but I've also been writing for a long time. So in terms of processes, yeah, I think to be as focused as specialized in intentional, just really important.
[50:23.350] - Jen Lehner I love that. I love the idea that this is my audience knows that every single year I start the new year saying, all right, I'm going to batch, right? I'm going to batch and I'm going to be consistent. And I don't because what happens is if I do more than one podcast interview a day, I think Jon Loomer does like five a day or something more. I'm just exhausted after one. So there's no batch going to happen. But same with YouTube videos. They just seem to take forever. But whatever. I love the idea, right? For me, I was trying to pack it all in one day. But I like how you've done that. Like have a day for blogging, a day for video, a day for whatever. I think that's really smart. I might try to go that route.
[51:10.240] - Jon Loomer But even like the day for blogging, that sounds insane, but it's not really a day of blogging. It's just like, this is the day I'm going to write. So if I'm going to have two blog posts and look, it depends on how long it's going to take you, but I've got a block of 4 hours to write those two blog posts. And then early in the day, guess what? I needed more time to do videos. So early in the day, I'm going to have another couple of hours where I can do video. So yeah, I agree with you. I couldn't do like an entire day of recording videos or an entire day of interviewing people on a podcast. There's still breaks in there and there's still some variation. Like, okay, if I'm not a guest on someone's show, then I can record as well. So it kind of changes your frame of mind a bit.
[51:57.510] - Jen Lehner Yeah, that's a good point. And also for me, I think the way I'm going to go into it is that because it's not batching if I don't do more than one, but right now it's just one, because that seems to be what my stamina is. But I think if I make like the whole first week of the month, give myself the whole first week, I'm still going to be ahead of the game, if I batch in that way. Even if I just did video one week, right? Because then if I only release one a week, I've got one month worth of content. So I mean, I could do it. I need to do it. I just need to stop making excuses.
[52:34.940] - Jon Loomer All right, to interrupt real quick. I think big part of that is just like, I have a document where I come up with ideas, keep track of blog post ideas, video ideas, podcast ideas, so that I can then go to it when it's time for me to sit down and do it. And you're not trying to think something up on the fly either.
[52:57.480] - Jen Lehner Yeah. Such a good tip. Then you're not, like, staring at the blank page every time you try to create such a good tip. Okay, so I know people want more, and I know you're doing I'm going to make sure and get this published before you do this free master class. Can you tell us about that?
[53:17.470] - Jon Loomer Yeah, I did something a little different this year where I did a monthly free webinar. It's called Five Tips and largely focused on Facebook ads. Though, of course, now that I've experimented a little with TikTok, there's been a little TikTok in there as well. But basically it's just a quick 45 minutes or so webinar where I give you the five things that are relevant right now to help you with your advertising. So if you go to JonLoomer.com, assuming my webinar hasn't happened yet, when you hear this, there will be a banner at the very top to sign up for it's going to be on as we record this next Thursday, the 15th, I believe.
[54:00.080] - Jen Lehner December 15.
[54:01.300] - Jon Loomer December 15.
[54:03.310] - Jen Lehner Okay. And you know what? If anybody listens to this after the fact, if they end up on your website, jonloomer.com, it's a win. Because, you guys, I got to tell you, really, it's block some time out, carve out a little time when you go down there, be really intentional about it, because when you go to Johnloomer.com, you're just going to be blown away by all the great free resources that he has there. And then if you want to take it a step further, they can sign up for Power Hitters Club, right?
[54:32.660] - Jon Loomer Yeah. There are really two main ways to take that next step with me. Sometimes you may just want to sit down with me to talk about your ads. Right. If you're not a community type person, you can book one on one with me. Otherwise, I have my Power Hitters Club membership, which I've been running for the last nine years or so, and within my elite community. So there's a Facebook group, and we do strategy sessions every Tuesday. I have a weekly webinar to update them on everything that's happening every Wednesday, you get discounts on my one on ones. You get access to my entire training library. It's good stuff. So you can either find that on jonloomer.com, or if you go to Powerhittersclub.com, get that there, too.
[55:21.440] - Jen Lehner Yeah. And let's make sure everybody knows that you spell your name J O N. It's not J-O-H-N. So, Jonloomer.com, Jon, this has really been so great. It was a thrill for me because you are one of my early mentors and you still remain a guiding light. So I really appreciate the time that you spent with us today.
[55:41.840] - Jon Loomer I appreciate you, Jen. Thanks so much.
[55:43.920] - Jen Lehner Take care.
