#434 WP-Tonic Show With Special Guest Mojca Marš

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Adrian: Hello everyone and welcome to the WP Tonic podcast. I have a lovely, lovely guest with me today. Her name is Mojca.

Mojca: Yeah Mojca, that was close.

Adrian: I was close. She is a Facebook ads expert and she’s really gone through some Epic restructuring the last year. She was actually on this podcast almost a year ago today where she started to make those big changes. And now we’re going to follow up with her and see how those changes worked out. And what you could possibly learn from them in order to grow your own course business, your membership site, whenever you’re using Facebook ads. So welcome to the podcast. Please introduce yourself.

Mojca: Yeah, so as you already said, my name is Mojca. I’m actually from Slovenia and I’m a Facebook ads expert. That wasn’t always the case though. Previously I was at an advertising agency. Then I got fired. So that’s the long story short, I got fired. I started doing social media strategies, so I did social media strategies for different businesses. I did Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, everything altogether. And then a couple of years later I actually decided to niche down and do Facebook ads only.

Adrian: Awesome. We’re going to talk about that in a second and we’re going to go deep down. But before we do that, I’d just like to thank our actual sponsor for this episode. I’d like to thank Kinsta for sponsoring this episode. Kinsta is an awesome WordPress hosting company. They offer some of the barn on best support around for the WordPress community. WordPress has a bad reputation for being super big, bloated software with a bunch of stuff that can go wrong. You know, if you’re a small business and you’re running your business, your Facebook ads and your membership site and you’re managing WordPress all at the same time, it can often be a big hassle. Especially if you’re on crummy hosting that doesn’t provide the support that you need, that doesn’t make it an easy experience and provides you with that.

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And it’s also relatively inexpensive at plans starting at just $30 a month. So if you’re looking to drop whatever hosting company has now, because you’re unhappy, you’re experiencing those problems that I laid out. And you want to go to a company that’s just going to take care of you and it’s just going to work and you’re not going to have to worry about it. Go check out Kinsta and let them know that you heard about them from WP tonic. Thank you. Alright, so now I’m gonna jump back in and let’s talk about, how you actually got into this entire whole Facebook ads thing. You were talking about, you got fired from a copywriting position and that kind of started this whole thing.

Mojca: Yeah. So I was working at a traditional advertising agency and we did billboards, TV ads, radio ads and so on. And I started noticing a deep need for social media management from our clients. And I actually put that out to my boss essentially. And I said to him that, you know, I have been talking to a couple of clients and they have been expressing this need. And they want someone to do their Facebook, not just Facebook ads for them, but Pinterest and Instagram and everything else. And I was really pushing for this. They didn’t want to hear that. They thought that social media is just a fad that’s going to go away in a couple of years.

Adrian: And how long ago was this?

Mojca: I would say nine years ago.

Adrian: 9 years ago, social media was hardy a fad nine years ago.

Mojca: I know, I know it’s been around for a while.

Adrian: It`s a bit shortsighted.

Mojca: Absolutely. And I mean, obviously they’re not in business anymore.

Adrian: I mean, there you go.

Mojca: Because they always stayed like within the confines of traditional advertising. They didn’t want to do anything digitally.

Adrian: Stick with what you know, right. Learning new things can’t possibly be a good idea.

Mojca: Yeah. And look what that got them. But like I went into a totally different direction after getting fired. I decided to go what I know better than them, so I’m going to start doing social media management. It actually proved to be a very, very good decision. I mean looked at me like nine years after I’m still doing the same thing.

Adrian: So the last time you were on the show, you had actually made a big change in your business. So you were a, and you still run, it’s called spicy, what’s it called?

Mojca: Super Spice Media.

Adrian: Super Spice Media. Thank you for reminding me. And last time we were on the show, you just made a big change. Tell us a little bit about what that was and what the result is.

Mojca: Yeah, again, a very long story. However.

Adrian: We got time:

Mojca: About a year and a half ago, I actually experienced a burnout, so I lost any will to work. I didn’t find joy in my work. I was just tired all the time. My jaw hurt because I was clenching it 24/7 essentially. So I decided to take a week off, completely off, off everything.

Adrian: Where did you go?

Mojca: And I went to Croatia actually. So Dubrovnik in Croatia. And I went there in February, which was off season. So I was able to like walk alongside the beach by myself, no one around. I was able to think. So that was really, really cool. And after that week, I realized that I don’t want to do client work anymore. So my business was all about client work. That’s how I essentially got to the point where I am, however, it just kind of sucked. So I decided.

Adrian: Especially if you don’t have the right clients. If it’s not a perfect fit, it can get tricky.

Mojca: I mean, for me, to be honest, it was a perfect fit with each and every one of them. Because I cherry picked all of my clients, but still it didn’t.

Adrian: We’re going to have to talk about that in bonus content because that’s a struggle for a lot of people.

Mojca: essentially, like what I realized is that even having a perfect client and even cherry picking them, it didn’t create that freedom anymore, it wasn’t fulfilling anymore. So I decided to fire most of my clients.

Adrian: How many, just as a metric for our listeners, how many is most like gives us a percentage.

Mojca: It was 80%.

Adrian: 80%.

Mojca: Yeah. So I was working at 10 clients at the same time and I fired eight of them. And just decided to stick with two of them and essentially I fired even another one.

Adrian: And you worked solo, right? Like 10 people for like a solo person, that’s no small beans. Like that’s a big deal.

Mojca: It definitely is. And before that, like when I went on that vacation, on that time off I was actually working with one person. So one person was helping me, but when I came back, I was like, you know what, I just don’t feel good about this. So we actually separated our waste first and then I fired those eight plans and then a couple of months later I fired another one. So I just ended up working with one client and I still work with them to this point.

Adrian: Wow. So why exactly did you do that? You were burned out, but with all of the free time that you now have or that you created by removing the bulk of your client list, what were you able to then do that you now find, I’m assuming, fulfilling?

Mojca: Absolutely. So after that week off that I had, I kind of started rediscovering myself. And rediscovering that deep down I’m in fact a creator and I enjoy creating things. Previously, like a couple of years back, I wrote an e-book and I loved that process. I love the process of writing an e-book, creating it, putting it out to the world. And I missed that because of all the client work that I had. I missed that part of my business, like creating things. So then I fired most of my clients because I decided that I want to start earning my living by creating educational things. And educational products like eBooks, video courses, email courses, and so on.

Adrian: And that’s culminated, one of those words. That has this into a course, I’m assuming that you now provide, right?

Mojca: Correct. So even when I had clients, I was thinking of having a course. I always wanted to have a video course about Facebook ads and that never happened because I always postponed it. I mean, probably sounds familiar for a lot of people. I always postponed that because I had a lot of client work. And then I had to do this and that. So I decided, you know what, I never ever going to be able to put that course out into the wild if I don’t do something about it.

Adrian: There’s a rule, there’s like a universal law that in order to allow something into your life, you have to remove something out of it. You can’t just keep, like piling on and because you’re going to have future burnout. So in order to bring in this list of, or to bring in the creation of this course, you had to remove everything that was taking up all of your time.

Mojca: That’s right. And I did exactly that. So after I fired most of my clients. I actually went down to action and I started creating the outline of the video course. I put all of that together and essentially put the course out into the wild. I also took a very specific approach with that because I wanted to validate the idea before putting all that time and energy into creating a course. So what I did is I actually started pre-selling the course before recording even a single video and that went incredibly good. And later, like I had no excuse of not doing this.

Adrian: Time and time again people come on the show and they say, had I done it differently, I wish I had pre sold first. You know, time and time again. That’s one of the most valuable things you can do is before you spend, before you lock yourself in a closet and you spend two months recording all of your videos and whatnot, which by the way, don’t do that either. But a lot of people do that is pre-sale anything that you plan on selling to validate the market. And also, you know, allows you to generate a little of income to fund the damn thing.

Mojca: Yeah, correct.

Adrian: How many people signed up out of just curiosity?

Mojca: I made 10 K.

Adrian: Wow.

Mojca: With that prelaunch. And I only pre-launched it to my email list. So I decided I’m not even going to do any private Facebook ads or anything else. I’m just going to use my email list pre-launch there and see if there’s actually an interest in this kind of thing. If not, I can just, for example, if I were to make 2K maybe I probably wouldn’t pursue that at that moment. I would have took a different route. But since there was a lot of interest, I decided to just move forward with it.

Adrian: Well, you had to deliver on 10 k.

Mojca: Oh, absolutely. And we were all like, after I got it delivered, they were all very excited. So I decided, you know what, let’s open enrollment again. So yeah, everything else is history.

Adrian: That’s awesome. All right, we’re gonna pick this up in a moment, but we’re going to go for our break now. Thanks everyone for listening so far. I am here with Oh Mojca. I’m going to get that eventually. You see I’ve been hanging around with Jonathan too much. I’m inheriting his inability to pronounce names properly. Thanks everyone. And we’ll be back in a few moments.

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Adrian: And we’re back. I’m here with Mojca. We’re here talking about her transition into Facebook ads implementer and into her implementer of the course as well. We’re going to be transitioning now into. Let’s talk a little about this whole Facebook ads business. And why it may or may not be a good idea. If you are a business owner and you are listening to this podcast right now and you’re thinking, Hey listen, I came here to learn more about, about Facebook ads. Let’s talk about Facebook ads.

Mojca: Let’s do this.

Adrian: So one of the things that most people, you kind of have your two segments of search. You got your two segments of PPC. You got your search ads, your Google, your Bing, your Yahoo ads. If you buy any of the second rate search engine ads, and then you have your social media ads, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera. And the two different streams that come along with that. You have disruptive marketing, which is attributed generally to social media. And then you have the direct marketing, which mostly attributed to search engine. So depending on your business, and I know this is a bit of a loaded question. But in which cases do Facebook ads really, really, really shine?

Mojca: I mean, I think that it’s best when these two work together. So for example, if you run Google ads, I mean making a decision into like, what are you going to do? It shouldn’t be based on the, should I do Google ads or should I do social media advertising? It should go hand in hand because for example, Google search is I know that like social media advertising sometimes is called disruptive. But is it really disruptive? For example, when it comes to Facebook, the level of targeting that you can set up surpasses Google in my opinion. Because let’s be completely honest. Facebook knows a lot about you.

Adrian: They know everything about you.

Mojca: Yeah. Like you can just go ahead and check. Like for example, if you go and see an ad and click like top rights, I think there’s an arrow and a, why am I seeing this ad? If you click on there, you’re going to find out a lot of interesting things about yourself that you maybe even don’t know. However like I said, those advertisers that advertise on Facebook, they know a lot about you as well. So if they’re able to show you and be disruptive.

Adrian: I guess if you’re looking for super highly targeted info, like you want to be able to tell a person’s age, you know, if they identify as male or female or X, I guess these days. Or if you want to identify country, location, and language, then you definitely want to go down the Facebook. None of that really matters to you and you want to go like direct to source or direct to search then Google would be a little bit more helpful in that way. Is that fair to say?

Mojca: Like when you’re trying to decide who to target,

Adrian: As you can tell I’m not a Facebook search ads expert.

Mojca: Yeah. So when you’re trying to figure out your target audience, you shouldn’t go to Google. You shouldn’t go to Facebook. What you should do, you should go to your customers. So you should ask them that question. For example, you should do customer interviews, you should find out more about them. Where do they hang out online? What publications do they read online? You can do that. For example, you can analyze the people who have liked your Facebook page. And you’re willing to learn a lot about them, about your actual audience. So it shouldn’t be a guessing game, but it should rather be an informed decision that you make after you talked to your existing customer. Like actual people.

Adrian: I think that is super insightful. Because you know, all too often companies will just, let’s start an advertising campaign. And they go to Facebook or they go to Google and then they later realize that none of their audience actually hangs out in those places.

Mojca: Absolutely. So doing it a different way that helps with Facebook and Google ads as well.

Adrian: Very brilliant, brilliant. So given that accompanying, they go to their customers and they’re like, wow, a lot of these people hang out on Facebook and in Facebook groups and all of that whatnot. Given that they validated that there is an audience for them to listen. What first steps should they take in order to start communicating with that audience through the Facebook advertising platform? What’s their first step?

Mojca: Yeah, let’s actually talk about the first mistake that people typically do. It is related to that first set because what a lot of people think is okay, now I’m investing real money into Facebook ads. I should be getting something back immediately. So immediately after I invest $10, I should be getting 20 back and it doesn’t work that way. You should look at it from.

Adrian: Before you do that. I just have a personal story about that. I invested almost $3,000 to start up my company into Facebook ads and never saw a return on that. So I probably won’t make the mistake. So I’m listening intently.

Mojca: Yeah. So you can imagine that if you’re seeing an ad, let’s say for a $20 product or a $50 product or a $100 course. And if you’re showing that ad to a cold audience, to people who don’t even know who you are, they don’t know what you do, you’re just guessing queer target audience is, and showing that ad to those people, it’s not going to work. It’s like knocking on a stranger’s door and asking them to buy something from you. It’s never going to happen or it’s really going to happen. And at the end it’s now going to be worth your time.

So instead you should look at from a different perspective and start creating first a report with your target audience. So for example, if you’re selling a course, you don’t want to, let’s say open enrollment to your course on 1st of October and start advertising on 1st of October. And advertise that course to a cold audience. What you should be thinking is how do I grow my authority and establish trust with my target audience? Before that with let’s say, giving them something of value. Sharing the valuable video with them. Sharing blog posts, advertising pap block. So how do you do that in order to, on 1st of October when you open enrollment to your course that you have like that really, really good quality audience?

Adrian: Give us an example of what might be.

Mojca: Like what might be?

Adrian: Like a piece of valuable content.

Mojca: For example. If I’m selling you a course about Facebook ads, which I am, my piece of valuable content would be let’s say solving a very, very specific yet common problem that people have with Facebook ads. So for example, how do I invest $10 into Facebook ads and get something tangible back? So I would advertise that blog post or I would record a video of myself talking about that thing and share it with that cold audience, advertise it to that cold audience. And then just retarget those people with an offer,

Adrian: So it’s not necessarily, you just go straight for the paid promotional product, but you haven’t tried something that actually doesn’t have any direct value back.

Mojca: It’s all like Facebook advertising is, and you probably heard this, but Facebook advertising is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. If you look at it from a sprint perspective, they’re going to invest $3,000 into Facebook ads and getting nothing tangible back. So that’s what happened.

Adrian: I got 500 likes on it.

Mojca: But what can you do? Exactly, exactly.

Adrian: Right. Brilliant. So you talked about a little bit about this remarketing thing and I’m sure many people are unaware, but can you just qualify that for anybody who’s currently listening and not aware of what remarketing is?

Mojca: Absolutely. So remarketing is re targeting or reaching on Facebook, your existing users. So it can be anything from uploading your email list to Facebook and advertising to your email list. It can be uploading a Facebook pixel to your webpage and showing your ads to people who visit your webpage. Or maybe even people who visit specific parts of your webpage, or maybe even people who sign up for a lead magnet. So it can be multiple things, but like when it gets down to the court, it’s showing your ads to people who already know who you are.

Adrian: And so it’s at that point that you can start marketing the stuff that actually costs something.

Mojca: So like that’s where the magic happens. If you advertise your pain product to a cold audience, nothing’s crickets, crickets. If you advertise your product to people who already know who you are, people who know that you’re an authority. And for example, Facebook advertising people who you’ve already given volume to, that’s where the magic happens. And that’s why again, you should look at it. Facebook advertising as a marathon and not a sprint

Adrian: So just for the sake of argument, I’m gonna use myself as a case because I already failed horribly at this. So I have a free plugin and what I did was I paid for that free plugin. That’s what I was promoting. I wasn’t promoting the paid thing. I was promoting the free plugin. But that you’re set but that’s still didn’t really connect. So is there a disconnect between like different types of value that you could provide or?

Mojca: Absolutely. Even with the free plugin, you should have something that comes before that. Even if you get downloads of that free plugin, if only that you advertise to a cold audience is a free plugin, you’ll probably going to end up with just not a good quality audience. Because people will only be interested in free. They will never purchase anything. But if you establish some sort of purpose. For example, I have a client the only kind that they have. They own a software business and they also have like a free version of their product or a free trial.

If we advertise that free trial to a cold audience, like it’s very, very hard to see some tangible results. However, what we do beforehand is we advertise a blog post, a blog post that kind of revolves around the problem that we are already trying to solve with the free trial. So we advertise that and then retarget people who read that blog post with the free trial.

Adrian: Are you for hire?

Mojca: Well actually I have one client where do you want a product? But my Facebook ads course is that we have a rule. I put everything in there as well. Yes.

Adrian: This has been lovely. We’re actually nearing the half hour mark. So we’re actually gonna start wrapping this up. So please tell us you have this awesome Facebook ads course. Tell us where people can go find more about you and what you do and how they can take that.

Mojca: Yeah. So my Facebook course can be found at thescienceoffacebookads.com. It’s a simple sales page with a waiting list. If you want to get yourself on a waiting list when the enrollment opens again. But other than that, I wrote right a lot of interesting, valuable blog posts on super spicy meta.com. So if you visit that, you’ll be able to learn more about Facebook ads. And if you get stuck at any point, if you’re struggling with a very, very specific problem that you have and you cannot solve you can always contact me at mojcaspicemedia.com.

Adrian: Thank you. And for those of you who don’t know, my name is Adrian, I’m Jonathan cohost. I am the CEO and founder of Groundhog. And we provide sales and marketing tools for businesses that use WordPress, email marketing, CRM, marketing automation and all of that cool stuff. So you’re interested in learning more about that free tool that you can go use and not through our Facebook ad program. You can go to groundhog.io to download that for absolutely free.

Don’t even need an email address. You can just install it in your site so you can go have that if you choose. And for the sake that Jonathan is not here today. Jonathan will be returning next weekend. I will be gone instead. Jonathan at WP Tonic is an expert in all things LMS and membership. If you are looking for a help in building out a membership site or an LMS learning site coupled with marketing automation, then you can contact Jonathan at WP Tonic to learn more about his service offerings. And how he can help you grow your business. Thank you. If you’re watching this live, you can stay on with us for some bonus content. If not, we will see everybody next week. Thank you everyone.

Every Friday at 8:30am PST we have a great and hard-hitting round-table show with a group of WordPress developers, online business owners and WordPress junkies where we discuss the latest and most interesting WordPress and online articles/stories of the week. You can also watch the show LIVE every Friday at 8:30am PST on our Facebook WP-Tonic Show page. https://www.facebook.com/wptonic/

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