
What Are The Best Social Media Strategies To Promote Your Membership Website in 2025?
Jason Smith, The Founder of Spotlight Social Media Advertising
What Are The Best Social Media Strategies To Promote Your Membership Website in 2025?
Discover the top social media strategies to skyrocket your membership online business in 2025. Learn from experts and boost your success now.
Discover the most effective social media strategies for promoting your membership online business in 2025! This video delves into cutting-edge techniques and tools to elevate your online presence and attract more members. Learn about leveraging platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn to engage your audience effectively. Don’t miss out on these vital insights—watch the video now to transform your marketing approach.
#1 – Jason, can you give the audience a more detailed outline of how you got into the world of running a social media agency?
#2 – Jason, what are some of the best opportunities you see using social media for individuals trying to launch a membership-based online business in 2025?
#3 – Your agency seems to specialize in Facebook and Instagram marketing; what are some of the biggest misconceptions you see people regularly marking that stop them from succeeding on these platforms?
#4 – What strategies would you use if you were trying to launch a thriving online membership/community online business in 2025?
#5— What AI tools do you personally use to help you run your business?
#6—If you had your time machine (H. G. Wells) and could travel back to the beginning of your career, what advice would you give?
Jason Smith, The Founder of Spotlight Social Media Advertising
https://www.spotlightsocialadvertising.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-smith-spotlight
With Jonathan Denwood And Nicole Ouellette
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:01.830] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 106. We’ve got a great episode here for you, folks. We’ve got Jason Smith with us. He’s the founder of Spotlight Social Media Advertising. We will be talking about everything social media, including paid advertisement, but with an emphasis on trying to build some strategy in this crazy world of social media. I’ve also got my great co-host, Nico, with me. She’s up for it. She’s spicy. She’s got a cat soar around her. They’re making mayhem, but she takes it with ease. But it should be a great show. Jason, I’ll go with the ladies first. Nico, would you quickly like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:00:59.530] – Nicole Ouellette
Sure. I’ll do a little curtsy, a verbal curtsy. So my name is Nicole Ouellette, and I have had a marketing company for 17 years. And I’m happy to co-host this show and talk about all things marketing and membership building. So, thanks for having me.
[00:01:16.700] – Jonathan Denwood
You were after a couple of. You won’t be saying that, Diko. We got our great guest, Jason. So, Jason, can you give us a rapid intro? Then we will give you more time to go to the meat potatoes section of the show, Jason.
[00:01:33.230] – Jason Smith
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. First of all, I appreciate it. Yeah. My name is Jason Smith. I’m the owner and founder of Spotlight Social Media Consulting. We are a social media-only agency, so we only focus on paid ads on Meta, TikTok, and Pinterest. We do a little bit of Google, but our main thing is social media.
[00:01:59.430] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. As I said, as Jason said, we’re going to discuss everything around social media, trying to build some strategy in the crazy world of social media that might get you more students to your membership or community Focus website. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of the show, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. I want to point out that we’ve also got some great special offers from the show’s major sponsors, plus a list of the best WordPress plugins and services that can help you build a fabulous membership website at the beginning of 2025. You can get all these free goodies by going over to wp-tonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals. Mashed deals. What more could you ask for my beloved membership and community builders? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. I’m sorry to disappoint. I’ve made a career of it. Did you like that, Jason?
[00:03:16.580] – Jason Smith
That was great.
[00:03:17.530] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it looked like you were very impressed. You got very… I would be as the same. Don’t worry, Jason. It will get better, I promise. Let’s go straight into it, Jason. Jason. So how did… Because I’ll just give a quick bit of background for Jason. When I was doing my research on Jason, he was a police officer for a number of years in Los Angeles, and he looks very calm for somebody that did that job for a number of years. But how the hell did you get from the police into running a social media agency? Well, I say that I think they probably got very similarities in the madness, really.
[00:04:03.390] – Jason Smith
Yeah, in the madness, yeah, I guess. It’s a little different. I don’t have people shooting at me and getting in shootings and all that stuff. But clients definitely are shooting at us, right, Nicole, and giving us a hard time.
[00:04:18.700] – Nicole Ouellette
It’s been a rough couple of weeks in social media, folks.
[00:04:22.830] – Jason Smith
Yeah, Facebook’s doing some weird things right now. A little bit of background on me, gosh, how I get started. It was a story. I had a friend at the time who had just started a supplement company selling proteins and vitamins and stuff like that. He comes to me one day and says, Hey, I heard about this Facebook ads thing, and people are making money off of it. I was wondering if maybe you could, just as a friend, support me through this, help me. I’m like, Yeah, cool. I don’t know anything. I’m just a dumb cop running around on the streets of Los Angeles. But I’ll try. We ended up creating some ads. This was the early times of Facebook ads. He started making quite a bit of money off of Facebook ads. I was like, Man, this is pretty crazy. Then next thing you know, he’s making quite a bit of revenue. He’s at home, just working from home. His business is growing. I decided to take it upon myself to do a little bit more research on Facebook ads and how it works and all that stuff. So googled Facebook ads, and I stumbled across this training.
[00:05:37.410] – Jason Smith
It was a seven-day intensive training in Austin, Texas at the time. That’s where the Facebook headquarters of ads is in Austin. Well, one of them anyways at the time. The whole pitch for them was like, Hey, we’re a bigger agency. If you join and come to our seven-day intensive course in Austin, we’ll give you a tour of Facebook. And I thought that was pretty cool. I’m like, Oh, cool. But it was really expensive. It was like $15,000 for this course. On a policeman salary in Los Angeles, I definitely did not have the money. I ended up calling the two founders of the agency that are doing this course, and I said, Hey, I can’t afford the course. I’m a policeman in LA, barely getting by as it is. I don’t know if you guys know, but it’s very expensive in LA as well just to live. Here I am working tons of overtime, and I was a gang cop at the time, so chasing after gang members all night when I was working. I said, Would you be willing to let me pay payments on this. This was a couple of weeks before the training was supposed to take place.
[00:06:50.870] – Jason Smith
So hung up with me and the founders both talked and said, You know what? Let’s give this guy a shot. I had a good feeling about it. I had no clue what I was doing or getting myself I actually ended up paying payments on that. I was the only one in the group that paid payments on it because I couldn’t afford it. Then went to the training, walked in, and there’s all these guys, these agency owners in there. I make 50 grand a month, 100 grand a month, all these agency owners. Here I am, I don’t know anything about Facebook ads, so I felt really out of place. But all I did was just went to the training every night. By the my way, I couldn’t afford a hotel, so I had to stay in this rundown Airbnb with bunk beds. I had five roommates in there. It was crazy. Ended up just applying the training every night after each day, I would go and study. They gave us the big book on how to run ads and what to do. I would study till 1: 00 or 2: 00 in the morning, get up, had to be there by 8: 00.
[00:07:54.230] – Jason Smith
I did that every single night. They’d all go out for drinks, and they were all doing all this stuff. I just went straight back to my room, and I would just study. Then all I did was just apply everything that they told me how to do in this training. I ended up making a couple of really good connections of guys in the group, and they actually gave me my first two clients. Two guys were like, Hey, I don’t want this client anymore. If you want it, I’ll make an intro, and you can run some ads for them. It’s just some simple lead generation stuff at the time. That’s how I got started. Then I got really good results for them. Next thing you know, I have 10, 15 clients and making about 20 grand a month, and I was freaking out. I’m like, Man, I can’t believe I’m actually doing this. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe I’m making $20,000 a month. I was like, This is crazy. Going from making 4,000 or 5,000 a month as a policeman to that. I’ll make a long story short, about six months, eight months later, things kept growing at the agency, so I walked in and resigned from the police department and haven’t looked back since.
[00:08:55.780] – Jonathan Denwood
There you go. From handcuffs to Facebook. There we go. Over to you, Nico.
[00:09:02.880] – Nicole Ouellette
It’s been a rough couple of weeks, Jason, as you know.
[00:09:07.080] – Jason Smith
I hear you.
[00:09:07.430] – Nicole Ouellette
In social media. What I’m wondering is, and obviously, you’re on the ground and you’re running a lot of different kinds of ads. Do you see… If you were thinking about the audience of this podcast, obviously, is membership-based people. Do you see, in light of the data that you’re seeing in the the last few weeks and where things are going, do you see yourself changing ad running strategies, changing platforms, things like that for, let’s say, a membership-based website that wanted to grow in 2025? Yeah So what kinds of things are you seeing that seem to be working well? Because you’re on the ground running. It sounds like a lot of ads right now, which is great because you’re getting a lot of data.
[00:09:55.240] – Jason Smith
Yeah. I mean, of course, the whole TikTok thing shocked us, right? It literally running Running ads, and we run a lot of ads on TikTok as well. And then it got taken down. I was really concerned, too, because I have friends and colleagues that have TikTok only agencies, right? All they do is TikTok ads. So it scared us a bit there. Luckily, that’s back up and running again. But I’ve always said, well, not always, probably the last five years, I’ve said that when you’re running ads, the tactics never change. It’s the segmentation that changes. The normal tactics of segmenting out audiences, what we do at our agency is we run top, middle, and bottom of funnel ads. We do a full funnel strategy, and we create copy and images and assets for each stage of the funnel. What I’m seeing is the AI is really becoming an issue with Facebook ads, for example, because they’re implementing all these cool AI features and people are using them and their ads look like crap because they haven’t figured it out yet. I would say one thing top of mind for us as an agency is not using all the AI stuff just yet on Facebook because it’s really making your ads look completely off of brand.
[00:11:18.320] – Jason Smith
They’re not good. The text option that they have, you can let Facebook formulate AI sentences and text for you for ad copy, and that’s horrible right now. So I would say probably more than anything, if you’re running your own ads, especially, do not check that box that says, let Facebook control everything inside of your ads and what you’re doing, because it’s becoming a big issue right now.
[00:11:48.520] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, I could see it probably needs more time to fully bake out.
[00:11:52.180] – Jason Smith
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:11:59.010] – Nicole Ouellette
And so in So it sounds like you mainly run Facebook and Instagram, but you mentioned other platforms, too. Do you see that people are having an interest in other platforms in light of what’s going on at Metta right now? And if so, how would you use a Pinterest or a Reddit or maybe another social media ads platform to run ads for, specifically, a membership-based website?
[00:12:22.720] – Jason Smith
Yeah, I mean, Pinterest is actually a great platform to run a membership-based ads on because you’ve got people looking for all kinds of different things. They’re actually running a ton of ads on Pinterest as well. And Pinterest is like the silent killer right now. It is really good right now. There’s not a ton of advertisers on it. The ads actually look really cool. Their targeting is really good. You can actually target based off of keywords. If you have a membership-based offer that you’re trying to get out to people, what is your avatar What things are they doing? What are they looking for? And Pinterest really has a cool setup as far as audience targeting goes, and you can target tons of different keywords and interests and stuff on Pinterest. So Pinterest is actually a really good place for this type of offer for a membership-based because, again, you’re going to Pinterest to look for ideas on things. And it could be as simple as looking for ideas for your house or whatever wherever it is. We’re running ads for a truck bumper companies on Pinterest, and they’re killing it. Tool belt companies for blue collar workers, all the way to pet supplies and membership-based stuff as well.
[00:13:43.710] – Jason Smith
So Pinterest is actually growing quite a bit and becoming a really cool platform to diversify your ad spend, because you shouldn’t only be on meta, you shouldn’t only be on TikTok. You really need a diverse ad spend to be able to run people through your funnel, brand awareness, all that stuff. So I think Pinterest is great. Tiktok is good. It really just depends on the age of your audience. There’s not a ton of older-ish people on there. I don’t even have TikTok on my phone. So 48 plus or probably not on there. But yeah, I mean, Meta is our bread and butter. Pinterest is really growing and scaling at the agency. Tiktok, we’ve been doing for a long time as well. But I I think TikTok has its own niche people. Pinterest has a broader… You can reach a broader person or a broader avatar on Pinterest, like you can on Facebook.
[00:14:44.110] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah. Hey, Jonathan, I see there was a comment that came in. Do you want to bring that into the discussion?
[00:14:49.070] – Jonathan Denwood
I just show them to put you off, Nico and the guest, because they read them and I expect them to be able to answer a question and read it. But sure, there we go, Nico.
[00:15:01.540] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, no. And so this person has commented that the paid ads and the traffic didn’t seem to match in Google Analytics, and they think that maybe the platform was exaggerating the volume of ad clicks that were happening. Have you run into this problem? Never.
[00:15:17.340] – Jonathan Denwood
So how would you solve it? Never do that, Nico. What?
[00:15:23.690] – Jason Smith
Yeah, we constantly run into this issue. You got to remember, if you’re If you’re tracking, let’s say, Facebook or Pinterest ads with Google Analytics, Google Analytics is a Google product, right? And so if you’re not running Google Ads, what’s going to happen is not going to be as accurate as in platform for like Pinterest and Facebook. And as far as clicks go, clicks are actually usually pretty accurate. What’s not accurate is purchase conversion value is usually not accurate in Google Analytics because you have to understand, and what a lot of people don’t understand, and this is a great question, by the way, is you have to look at Google Analytics or GA as a holistic view and not the source of truth of where you’re getting your numbers from. Because there’s a customer journey that’s involved in every single ad platform. They’re going to see a Facebook ad today. If you’re running Google ads, they may see one of your Google ads tomorrow. So how does Google Analytics break that up and show a customer journey? Well, they really can’t, right? Because Google Analytics is a click-based analytics platform. So it’s going to really report off of last click and click-based where Facebook is taking a view through attribution, looking at it and going, okay, over the period of 30 days, this customer, this person saw an ad, then they went to your website, then they went back, then they googled you and and then maybe purchased off of a Google search, right?
[00:17:02.660] – Jason Smith
So Facebook is looking at that a little bit in a longer journey where Google Analytics is really only reporting on a last click attribution. So that’s why it’s not accurate most of the time. Nice.
[00:17:19.570] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. You want me to take over, Nico?
[00:17:21.660] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:17:22.770] – Jonathan Denwood
You do have to say, Over to you, Jonathan.
[00:17:25.110] – Nicole Ouellette
Oh, yes. Over to you, Jonathan.
[00:17:27.070] – Jonathan Denwood
There we go. Rob, I think it’s a good spot for us to go for our break. Then we got a number of other questions to ask Jason. Obviously, he’s an expert in this, and he deals with my English humor in the way it should be treated with the content that it should be. No, he seems a very warm guy. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back. We’ve had a A piece of knowledge from Jason Smith, the founder of Spotlight Social Media Advertising. We got some other great questions. Nicole seems to be up for it. We got the tools of interrogation on the table. But before we go further into this great discussion, I’ve got a great free resource for you, trying to build a membership website at the beginning of 2025, and that’s the Membership Machine Show Facebook Group. It’s totally free. It’s a mixture of WordPress professionals and people like you trying to build their first membership community-focused website. We love you to go over and join it. I try and post some unique content every day on it. I failed this week because I’ve been dealing with clients, but I normally do.
[00:18:50.890] – Jonathan Denwood
We love you to go over that. That’s the Membership Machine Facebook Group. So on we go. So, Jason, what’s like one or two What are the two misconceptions that you regularly get when you have clients approach you and you’re seeing if you’re a good fit with them? Like I say, what’s one or two misconceptions that a lot of people have when they’re thinking of using Facebook or print us with paid advertising or just getting a higher revenue for consultancy.
[00:19:22.840] – Jason Smith
Yeah, I would say a couple of the biggest misconceptions. One is they think that Facebook ads is just going to make them a ton of money right off the bat. They think, Oh, I’m going to put an ad up.
[00:19:35.680] – Jonathan Denwood
If it was that easy.
[00:19:37.830] – Jason Smith
Yeah, exactly. It’s like, Oh, I’m going to spend… Well, how much do you want to spend? I only want to spend $500 this month. I’m like, Okay, well, you’re not really going to get much. That’s one big misconception. The other big misconception is I get a lot of people saying that no one’s reading ad copy anymore, and that’s definitely not true. Facebook actually has a software that can read your eyeballs, so it knows where you’re going. What it’ll do is it’ll tailor the ad experience to you and what you normally do. If you read headlines first, boom, it shows you the headline. Highlights that right away. But I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions. And along with that is, oh, I don’t need good ad copy. I can just wing something, and I’m still going to make a ton of money from from a Facebook. That’s another big one. Another big one as well is just letting faith, leaving it broad and letting Facebook… Because a Facebook will tell you, leave your targeting open and let Facebook deal with it. But I found that that doesn’t work as well as actually knowing your avatar and knowing who to target and why to target them.
[00:20:54.480] – Jason Smith
And I see Nicole smiling, so she knows.
[00:20:56.440] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wow. Facebook wants It’s me to broadly target people and spend more money.
[00:21:03.180] – Jason Smith
Well, of course.
[00:21:04.100] – Nicole Ouellette
Less effectively so that I run more ads. It’s a shocker, really.
[00:21:08.130] – Jonathan Denwood
Who would have thought that? Mark needs more money for the next luxury watch, doesn’t he?
[00:21:17.820] – Jason Smith
Exactly. Or how about the Ray band that cost $10,000? That’s what he needs.
[00:21:24.120] – Jonathan Denwood
Some of our audience thinks I’m the version of Ricky Avis. There you go. I think that’s a compliment, actually. Absolutely. Over to you, Nico.
[00:21:35.910] – Nicole Ouellette
Oh, yeah. So I think this is a interesting idea. It sounds like you just run ads, so you don’t do the organic content as part, like you don’t post to… How do you work with, whether it’s the company that does the organic posts or whether it’s another agency that’s doing it? How do you create ads that complement what they’re posting organically on their pages? Or do you even do that at all? And is the idea to be more disruptive, for lack of a better word?
[00:22:12.400] – Jason Smith
No, yeah. So we definitely, if a client of ours has a current organic agency or they’re doing organic in-house, let’s say, yeah, we work with them 100 %. What we normally do is we’ll create… So at our agency, we do all the ad copy, create all the assets. So we do image creation, video editing. We can also shoot video, all that good stuff. And so we normally take a look at what they have on the organic side and see if we can repurpose some of that on the paid side. But what I found is usually taking organic posts and let’s say an image or ad copy from organic, a lot of times doesn’t work super well on the paid side. However, usually when we take it on the paid side and give it to organic, it it usually works pretty well on the organic side as well, because we really try to write our ad copy as a story using pain points and different things. It’s not just, Hey, come by from us. We work with them at a very high level, share all of our assets with the organic side of the brand. We just don’t do organic because we’re really good at paid.
[00:23:24.220] – Jason Smith
Honestly, in my opinion, organic is a bit dead lately. In the last couple organic isn’t as good. We actually did organic for a few years, but we were just got so inundated with paid that we just put organic on the back burner. But I think it still works to a certain extent. Organic feeds paid, and paid feeds organic, so it definitely works, and it’s definitely needed for sure.
[00:23:51.730] – Nicole Ouellette
And now, are you finding… I feel like video was a really nice bit of creative to run ads to. Are you still seeing video performing better than static images, or is it client dependent, what you’re seeing out there?
[00:24:09.990] – Jason Smith
Yeah, great question. Totally client dependent in my mind. The truck bumper company that I mentioned, they don’t even run video. It’s all images, and they 10X their ads, which is pretty interesting because you just show the truck bumper on the truck and looks cool. But then we have, supplement companies need videos because why is tumeric good for you or why is fish oil good for you? A lot of times we have for our supplement companies we run ads for, we have doctors explaining why a certain supplement could work good. We’ve got a mixture of images and videos for supplement companies. I would say if your offer is over $500 and you want somebody to pay over $500 for something from an ad, then you need some type of video explaining why they should purchasing. Then again, we also run ads for a company that makes this machine that you put under your bed and it helps you sleep really good. They start at $2,000, and they hardly run any video and images do the trick for So to answer your question, a little bit of both really depends on the brand. It depends on the avatar, it depends on how much your offer is.
[00:25:22.950] – Jason Smith
So there’s a wide variety of variations that go into that for sure.
[00:25:29.000] – Nicole Ouellette
I have one more question before I pass it off to Jonathan, which is that if somebody is looking, I think the average person may be listening to this podcast, maybe they’re running some ads, but maybe they’re not at all, but there’s some component of why that may or may not be happening. So I mean, obviously they could fly to Austin and spend the money, right? But if you were going to send someone on a nice track to get started on ads, how would you advise them to do that in a way that’s as, I guess, moderately effective and economical. Obviously, asterisk can’t guarantee results.
[00:26:08.210] – Jason Smith
Yeah. I would say you have to know who you’re targeting inside and out before you put up your ads. Work backwards instead of, Hey, I’m going to write some ad copy and do that. I would say knowing who you’re targeting, what their language is, how you’re going to craft some copy, that’s probably where I would Start. Then at first, do what I just told you not to do and just keep it broad because that’s easier for the Facebook amateur, the Facebook 101 person who doesn’t know a ton about Facebook ads. Then don’t expect to get rich your first 30 days off ads. It’s a process. It’s hard. It’s not easy. That’s why agencies like us exist, because brands come to us when they reach a certain point where they’re either losing money or they just can’t make it work like it was before. That’s probably where I start. Also, I would say a Facebook course could also help as well, buying a Facebook course. We have a Facebook course. It’s not launched yet, but finding a good course can really help your ad experience and give you a little bit better knowledge of what you’re doing.
[00:27:25.330] – Jason Smith
A $100 course is probably not going to do it. Just FYI, usually in this industry, Nicole, you know you get what you pay for. If you’re buying a $100 course, it’s probably not going to be good for you. But that’s where I’d probably start is getting your avatar details figured out. A lot of people don’t put a lot of weight on that. We’ve even created avatars for clients that come to us and don’t have that information. I’m like, No, we’ve got to hone that in and make sure we know who we’re targeting first and then go from there.
[00:27:55.750] – Nicole Ouellette
John, over to you.
[00:27:57.750] – Jonathan Denwood
Thank you, Nico. Very professional Cool. It’s funny that you’ve mentioned your course, Jason. If you were launching a course, which you are, what has obviously been thinking about? You want it to be success because building a course isn’t a small endeavor. You must have been thinking about what your marketing strategy is going to be. Maybe you can give the audience an outline of what your thought process were and what strategy, what is your pre-launch, launch, three months in, six months in strategy to get students in this course, Jason?
[00:28:44.960] – Jason Smith
For me, really, I’m probably not going to run any ads for the course. I’m going to leave it more word of mouth because I’ve always been a proponent that courses usually don’t teach you everything you need to know. But what we’ve tried to do with our course is make it to where we dumb it down for people and we have videos explaining everything. It’s not just, Hey, do this, do that. It’s actual videos in the platform explaining what you need to do that you should and shouldn’t be doing. However, a Facebook course is hard because as Nicole, as you probably know, it changes monthly. It’s going to be tough to keep up with all the updates and everything going on. Luckily, we’re at the highest level of partnership with Facebook, so we have a dedicated partner manager that we work with, and she gives us all the latest and greatest. But really, for me, it’s just going to be, if you want to check out our course, here’s our information. I’m not going to push it super hard, and I’m actually not going to do a full launch and all that stuff on our course.
[00:29:53.590] – Jason Smith
Again, it’s going to be more of word of mouth. It’s going to be about $2,000 our courses. It’s going to be quite expensive, but it’s got a lot of value. It’s got over 150 videos in there and steps you through avatar information from setting up the ads, setting up audiences, why you should be doing what you’re doing, copywriting, image creation. It goes through everything and resources for all that stuff. Jonathan, sorry to not answer your question fully, but for me, it’s going to be more of, like I said, word of mouth. Hey, if you want a course-Is this your first call set on this level?
[00:30:31.360] – Jonathan Denwood
And is it an unofficial soft launch to see the response you’re going to get with it?
[00:30:38.960] – Jason Smith
Yeah, again, I’m not going to make a huge push on making money off this course. For me, I really love teaching and informing people about how Facebook ads can work, and that’s how I’m looking at it. I’m not looking at it as a money-making machine for our agency. I’m looking at it more of just helping, putting it out there and really helping people.
[00:31:00.030] – Jonathan Denwood
We got a good question. Do you find that when people invest in paid ads, they tend to take their foot off the gas when it comes to SEO? And should they?
[00:31:10.520] – Jason Smith
Yeah, they definitely do. You should not take your foot off of the SEO side of things because most of us know what SEO is and does. Paid ads feeds SEO, and SEO feeds paid ads. If they’re searching for something, you want to be up at the top. So you want to make your SEO is dialed in and good. You should definitely not take your foot off the gas on SEO for sure when you’re running paid ads.
[00:31:37.020] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. Over you, Nico.
[00:31:41.880] – Nicole Ouellette
It sounds like, too, that having this course is a nice way if you have a client approaches you and they’re not maybe a good fit or they don’t have the budget to run the ads, that this gives them a way to DIY. Is that part of why you developed it, too?
[00:31:56.750] – Jason Smith
Yeah, that’s exactly why, because a lot of clients either can’t afford us, or let’s say I really love the brand and I’m like, Man, I really wish we could work together. Why don’t you go through my course first? Take a stab at ads and doing different things in the ads world. Then once you get to a certain point, you can come back to us and maybe we can work together. But yeah, that’s exactly right. People I run into, you’d be surprised, we have a podcast as well, and it’s called The Truth About Social Ads. I basically just go over ad stuff and people book calls from the podcast or have heard about us or whatever. I direct them to the course if they can’t afford us or if they need to maybe train somebody at their company to run an in-house person. If they want to do ads in-house, they can purchase our course and do it that way, too.
[00:32:49.770] – Nicole Ouellette
Nice. I know at the beginning, we expressed some hesitancy about using Meta’s built-in AI tools to let it just do it themselves. But Do you use AI tools in your agency as part of making content or things like that? If so, do you have some tools that you think that maybe people haven’t really heard of or maybe some use cases for these tools that people haven’t thought of that would apply to our membership-based audience?
[00:33:18.370] – Jason Smith
We use ChatGPT a lot for ad copy. We don’t let it write the ad copy completely. What we usually do is we’ll plug in the avatar details and ChatGPT, and it spits out a a lot of great ideas that we can use for hooks and headlines and different things. But honestly, at least on the ad side, there isn’t a ton of really cool tools that you can use. I’ve tested a lot of tools in the past, but what I found is being in your ad account, looking at your ads every single day is the best way and not letting it automate. You catch things, your ads fall off a cliff sometimes. Sometimes your ad account will get shut down or restricted or whatever. There’s not a lot tools that have come out for optimization and looking at your ads and being aware of what’s going on and letting AI for you. So mainly we use him for ad copy, but we still write our ad copy manually. Our director of creative writes all the ad copy manually, but he is using a little bit of ChatGPT to do that. But other than that, we don’t use a ton of AI, actually.
[00:34:26.930] – Jason Smith
It’s interesting.
[00:34:30.050] – Nicole Ouellette
I can understand that. It’s difficult to copyright things that are AI-built. Also, when you know your customer really well, it’s hard to pretend you don’t.
[00:34:39.230] – Jason Smith
Exactly. Like I said, even on the optimization, like daily optimization of your ads that are currently Running. There were tools that were launched a few years ago. I didn’t like any of them. A person being in there manually doing it every single day is what you need, not AI. Facebook have some tools, but they don’t work. Don’t use them.
[00:35:03.750] – Nicole Ouellette
I have a scenario for you. Let’s pretend that I have a membership community, and I’ve grown it to a certain point, and it’s plateaued. I’m not getting any new members. People are staying, but it’s plateaued. If you were going to use ads to get people beyond that plateau, what’s either a concept or something that you’ve seen? And maybe you’ve had, obviously, I know that you also work with B2C brands and things like that. Maybe who have reached a plateau. What are some things that people could try if they feel like their current marketing isn’t working and they’re looking to explore ads?
[00:35:46.860] – Jason Smith
Well, I mean, the easiest thing to do is to offer something like a flash sale or a discount or, hey, I’m doing this one time thing with a guest. That tends to work sometimes. Trying to get a guest who either the community knows or somebody knows a guest option is really good. We’ve seen that work really well. Even employing some influencers. Influencers actually work really good where you can get them to, Hey, come check this out, or We’re having this, this membership. If you’re really trying to grow your audience, honestly, if you’re not running ads and you want to take a stab at ads to grow your audience, it’ll probably grow running ads for sure. I would say the thing about running ads is if your offer is, let’s say, $500 and you only want to spend $100 on ads that’s not going to work. What you need to do is spend at least double what your offer is to bring people in and use ads as a tool to just reach people. Because if you’ve not run ads before, you’re going to reach people that you never thought possible. They’re going to see your ads, and so your membership community will grow right away if you haven’t used ads before.
[00:37:09.740] – Jason Smith
If you’re running ads and they’re not working, man, that’s a whole different. You could go down a rabbit hole with that, why things aren’t working and stuff. But just pay attention to your offer. Maybe even what I like to tell brands to do is put your offer out to your current warm audience, people who’s engaged with you. If you have a good response there, most likely putting it out to someone who doesn’t know you, it’ll probably work. That’d be my advice there.
[00:37:38.180] – Nicole Ouellette
Would you actively exclude, if you had a list of people in your membership platform, you would exclude that audience, probably, right?
[00:37:46.740] – Jason Smith
Yes, for sure. Keep it as cold as you possibly can up at the top. So you’re excluding purchasers, members, any customer lists or anything like that you want to exclude from your audience. You also want to exclude anybody who interacted with your Facebook or Instagram page or any of your pages, could be your pin page on Pinterest, any of that, because you want to keep it as cold as possible. The only way you’re going to grow is if new people see your stuff and not current people.
[00:38:16.420] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah. And I think a lot of times people don’t understand that ads can be inclusive of people, but you can also use them to exclude people, too. Not in a gross way, but in a making your ads more in a collective way.
[00:38:30.710] – Jason Smith
Yeah, exactly. Again, you want new members, you have to keep that ad, like I said, or that audience as cold as possible. I think it’s pretty common sense. Keeping it as cold as possible means that you don’t want people that you already have. Now, granted, Facebook only goes back 180 days on exclusions on these audiences. If someone interacted with you, it’s been five months, they may see your ad again, but in my opinion, they’re completely cold again. They haven’t interacted with you. They’re probably going to see maybe recognize you, but they’re not going to remember you completely. I mean, I don’t know about you guys. I don’t remember what ad I saw three months ago on Facebook. I don’t even remember a week ago, right?
[00:39:09.970] – Nicole Ouellette
But you could also, if you had their email address, which you probably do if they signed up for your membership, you could exclude an email list, right?
[00:39:16.240] – Jason Smith
Yeah, download that email list, or I should say, upload it to Facebook and make sure in every single one of your top of funnel audiences for cold people, that email list of current members are excluded in there. I mean, unless, again, maybe they haven’t If you’ve done anything in the group for, let’s say, a year, maybe you want to target them again at top of funnel. It really just depends on how you want to work things.
[00:39:38.150] – Nicole Ouellette
Sure. Jonathan, you got some- You mentioned Pincrest a few times.
[00:39:44.470] – Jonathan Denwood
What What results generally you’ve been getting with it? Is it the cost of conversion? Is it cheaper than Facebook? Is it at the same… It’s very difficult to quantify this when you’re dealing with a broad spectrum of different industries and clients. I’m not asking for percentage terms, but just your general feeling around this. Is the conversion rate similar to Facebook? What are the costs compared to Facebook or Instagram?
[00:40:15.310] – Jason Smith
I would say there’s not a ton of advertisers on Pinterest right now. Cost to reach somebody, like an impression and just a reach, is cheaper on Pinterest. Cost and conversion, that’s totally variable depending on what you’re selling and what you’re doing. But I would say we’re getting better results on Pinterest than we are on Facebook, to put it to you that way. Costs are cheaper. Cpms, which are basically the cost to reach a thousand people, that is cheaper as well on Pinterest because, again, it’s not as crowded as Facebook. Everybody knows what Facebook is not a ton of people are running ads or know what… Or that you can even run ads on Pinterest right now. It’s a great place to be right now. I would say in the next 2-3 years, it’s going to get really crowded. If you can get on Pinterest now because it is cheaper.
[00:41:17.630] – Jonathan Denwood
We’ve had a couple of questions, I won’t flash them up, around retargeting. What’s your views around retargeting? Because obviously, a A lot of the times when I’ve gone to a website and I go to Facebook, boom, there’s an advert for the thing that I’ve been looking at. What do you think people need to know and understand about retargeting?
[00:41:46.530] – Jason Smith
We’ve talked a lot about top of funnel, which is cold audiences, and I’m glad you brought this up because retargeting is a very important ecosystem that you should be applying in your ads. At the top of the show, I said that we do full funnel. That’s a middle of funnel and bottom of funnel. Super important. These are retargeting. Middle of funnel is going to be anybody who interacted with your Facebook or Instagram page. They could have liked a post, they could have commented, they could have shared it, and it could be Facebook, Instagram. You want to retarget those people. Then you also want to retarget people who have gone to your homepage and didn’t do anything else. They just landed on the homepage, didn’t advance anywhere else, didn’t look product, didn’t look at your offer and what you’re selling. And then so retarget those people. And it’s really easy to build those audiences in Facebook. You just click on the Audience tab, go to Instagram, and then you can build an audience based off of how they engaged and what they did. Normally, we do 180 days on that audience just to make that audience a little bit bigger.
[00:42:54.110] – Jason Smith
And then bottom of funnel is going to be anybody who viewed, if you’re an e-commerce store, let’s say a product or or a membership site, if they actually went to your offer and they didn’t purchase or didn’t go anywhere else. Then if they’ve added to cart or add payment info and didn’t purchase, you want to retarget those people as well. Now, the only caveat I’ll say to the two different retargeting audiences is you have to speak to them where they’re at. You’re not going to talk to someone who liked a post or commented on a post or shared a post the same as you would with somebody who added to cart that didn’t purchase. Usually on the bottom of funnel, the more higher intent, you want to say, Hey, here’s a 10% discount. Come back today, or, Come back today, and we promise you’ll love it, or, Give them a call to action. Come back today, and purchase funnel. On middle of funnel, it’s a little more broad because they know you, they’ve interacted with you a bit, but they don’t know you super well like a person who viewed your product or added to cart and didn’t purchase.
[00:43:58.430] – Jason Smith
Those are two very important categories to be retargeting. If your audience isn’t big enough, then just go back as many days as you possibly can. But you need to be running some traffic to be able to retarget those folks for sure.
[00:44:13.240] – Jonathan Denwood
What about look lookalikes audiences, when you actually upload a list to Facebook and you say, what’s been your general experience about the effectiveness of lookalikes?
[00:44:26.200] – Jason Smith
Yes, lookalikes work great if they’re high intent. What I mean by that is you don’t want to do a lookalike based off of video views, for example, because there’s a lot of people who watch videos who have no intention of purchasing your stuff. What we normally do is we do lookalikes based off of a customer list, so current customers or a purchase. If you have a purchase event firing in your pixel, you can take that event and actually build a lookalike audience based off of the purchase event, and that’s really high intent lookalikes. We usually only use those two lookalikes. Very high intent to make sure that Facebook is getting the signal from that seed audience and going out looking for the correct person the first time. Again, a lot of people I see doing lookalikes off of add to cart. Well, I mean, funny story. My daughter came to me and said, Dad, I can only add 50 things to my cart in Amazon. And I’m like, Dude, what are you doing, man? Well, I want to get all these things, right? And I’m like, delete all that stuff. But there are people who…
[00:45:39.430] – Jason Smith
Like professional add to cart people. I’m not even joking. They add to cart, they let it sit there. They have no intention of purchasing, but they want to see how much shipping is, or they want to see this. So I suggest not doing a lookalike based off of add to cart, customer lists, and purchase event. Those are the two that we use most often and that we’ve seen the best results with.
[00:46:00.580] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. What you were saying about AI, because I’ve got a little bit of dyslexia, and also, I mean, organic SEO is one of the main drivers to my boutique hosting company and another product I’ve got. But I think in general, I think in the world of online influence and that, it’s become very dominant because it’s effective. It’s effective affiliate marketing and building blogs, and they’ve been hit quite hard. But in general, I’ve been a bit disappointed, even though I utilize a lot of AI tools, but the one area where I think it might offer some promise to an agency like you is around… It hasn’t occurred yet, but you see the possibilities, and that’s around on video production because producing really a good video for a client is an expensive process.
[00:47:09.440] – Jason Smith
Yes, it can be.
[00:47:11.000] – Jonathan Denwood
There are short ways of reducing the cost, but I mean something that’s really quality that’s bestowed, it’s quite an expensive process. I see the possibility of using AI tools and that to reduce the cost so something that really can convert will be available to a more broader audience. What’s your thoughts about that, Jason?
[00:47:36.840] – Jason Smith
I will say that there is quite a few great AI tools for video. You can drop a raw video in a software, and it’ll actually produce some pretty decent-Decent, that’s the thing, isn’t it?
[00:47:52.280] – Jonathan Denwood
You can see it, but it’s not quite there, is it?
[00:47:54.950] – Jason Smith
Now, I will say there are a lot more companies coming out now where you can You can actually hire an influencer, for example, or just not even an influencer. You can hire somebody to do a UGC style video, pay them $100, and they’re literally at home walking through their house going, Hey, yeah, this supplement works awesome. There are a lot of those popping up now, and we’ve actually utilized quite a bit of that. We’ve sent clients to these different companies to use a lot of UGC style videos, and they actually come out really good. These creators are pretty good. They definitely know what they’re doing. You give them like, Hey, this is what I want you to talk about, and they just do it in their own words. People are making a pretty good living on that right now. It’s pretty crazy.
[00:48:41.890] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s fantastic. Over to you, Nico, for the last question.
[00:48:46.480] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah. I thought this was interesting. We’re talking about questions. Basically, if you could… I like this question from Jonathan. If you could travel back in time to the beginning of your career, what advice would you give somebody who… And it could be somebody who is running a membership website and wants to run ads or somebody who wants to start their own agency. What would you have done different? What advice would you give? What advice would you give? I guess we can’t do anything different, right? But what advice would you give?
[00:49:20.290] – Jason Smith
Yeah, I would probably say, if I’m talking about myself, for example, starting earlier, That would have been my advice because I think about if I would have started the agency in my early 20s and not waited till I was 30 something or almost 40 to start the agency and I had all those extra years, gosh, I would have been Would have been in a much better place. I would say probably starting earlier and having a passion and love what you’re doing, that’s a big deal for me. That’s my two things I would have told myself at the beginning.
[00:50:03.650] – Nicole Ouellette
Nice. Well, remember, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the second best time is today, right?
[00:50:08.410] – Jason Smith
Exactly, yes. It’s never too late, but you know. Yeah.
[00:50:12.310] – Jonathan Denwood
I got a quick follow-up for your question from that. You’re of almost 15 years in the police service. What were the couple of things you really learned from your experience there?
[00:50:27.630] – Jason Smith
Oh, gosh. Oh, Patience or cussing out your face. You can’t just suck them. No, you got to have some patience. I think I definitely learned patience. I also learned one of the biggest things I learned was just to deal with a huge, diverse culture and a diverse person. At the police department in Los Angeles, you have everything under the sun there. I think it taught me that. It also It taught me how to get along with people as well because you’re working with LEPs, 10,000 officers, and you have a partner, you’re working with different people. So patience and just how to work with somebody, how to work with the team. It also taught me how to be a leader as well. That I started the agency and how to appreciate things as well, because there were several times in the police department where I didn’t think I was coming home, and it makes you appreciate a lot more.
[00:51:27.140] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think that was a fabulous answer. I want to put this to you: that my uncle, who had almost 30 years as a police officer, had great skill, and I just wondered if you agree with this. It’s a skill to escalate in a situation. It’s easy to escalate a situation. Our culture, American culture, is not entirely to such a degree English culture. Still, I’ve noticed that in America, it’s all about escalation, which gets some results where people are in policing or the armed services. It’s the skill of de-escalating that they concentrate unless they’re the wrong type. Would you agree with that?
[00:52:23.720] – Jason Smith
Yeah, for sure. It goes back to what I said about patience. When someone’s yelling at you and cussing you out or going nuts, you can’t do the same thing. You have to de-escalate the situation. Yes, that’s a big one in the police world. You have to be good at that. If not, oh, man, you’re going to get in a lot of trouble.
[00:52:45.040] – Jonathan Denwood
You might be in the wrong business.
[00:52:47.140] – Jason Smith
Exactly.
[00:52:48.090] – Jonathan Denwood
Jason, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. What’s the best way for people to learn more about you, the agency, and some of your ideas, Jason?
[00:53:00.210] – Jason Smith
Yes, you could go to our website, spotlightsocialadvertising. Com, book a call, reach out to me there, or you can email me, Jason, @spotlightsociall.com, and get a hold of us.
[00:53:15.450] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fine. And Nico, what’s the best way for people to learn more about you?
[00:53:21.890] – Nicole Ouellette
My website is breakingevenink.com, and I am on social media platforms, but you can catch me more often on Blue Sky or YouTube.
[00:53:35.030] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. We’re going to either have some. Hopefully, some great guests will come up, or we will have some great topics, like Nico, me, and the cats. So, of course. I’ve always got to mention Nico’s cats. Where are they, Nico? If we get animals on the show, our ratings will accelerate. I can make a fortune just doing cat videos if I want to.
[00:53:59.460] – Nicole Ouellette
I’ll see if I can get them on the floor next time.
[00:54:01.550] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s all I watch, folks. We will be back next week, folks. Bye.
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