Facebook Marketing and Stand Up Comedy with Andrea Vahl

0:02Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the ideal destination for business professionals with great shows like Sales Evangelist. Today, we'll be breaking down Facebook marketing and stand-up comedy. To drop these value bombs, I have brought to Andrea Vall into EO Fire Studios. Andrea is a Facebook Instagram ads expert and is a co-founder of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies. She is also a stand-up comedian and produces a show called Moms Unhinged. In today's foundation, we'll talk about Instagram and Facebook ads, how they're always changing, so what's working right now.

0:38We're going to talk about using your areas of expertise in new fields and ways to adjust to the future advances of AI and tech, et cetera, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Andrea and our sponsors. Marketing Made Simple, hosted by my friend, Dr. JJ Peterson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly, make it work. A recent episode on whether vulnerability is a superpower in business is a must listen.

1:10Listen to Marketing Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. The new year is here and that means it's time to check out NetSuite, the number one cloud financial system, streamlining accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more. Right now, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance absolutely free at nestweets.com slash fire. Andrea, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. I don't know if most people disagree with this, but a lot of people do.

1:47It's that you have to work hard to be successful. Fire Nation, work hard to be successful. Is that even a thing, Andrea? What do you mean by this? This is something that I used to believe in. It kind of was definitely something ingrained in me. But over the many years of being an entrepreneur, I have realized that you really should not work that hard. You really need to let your intuition guide you a lot of times. And you also need to make sure and prioritize rest. I think a lot of people just get really burnt out. and you need to be investing in downtime and family time and things that help rejuvenate you so that you can do this marathon we call entrepreneurship.

2:40How about laughter? Does that help? Oh, yeah. And Fire Nation, that's why today we're talking all about Facebook marketing and stand-up comedy. Because let's be honest, Andrea, Facebook, Instagram, those ads are always changing the parameters behind the scenes. We know what we're talking about. We don't know what we're talking about. It's working. It's not working. Let's talk about what's working right now. A lot of things have been changing with Facebook and Instagram ads. And one of the things that Facebook is doing is really bringing in more AI, more machine learning, all that stuff, whatever you want to call it, all the things that are actually helping marketers reach the right people as Facebook does more tracking around the types of people who are doing things like clicking on ads or buying things.

3:36Facebook is learning better and better what types of people are doing the activity or doing the goal that you're looking for. So things that are working are really kind of wide targeting, making sure that you've got the pixel and conversion API set up correctly so that Facebook can do its job and serve the right ad to the right people. So it's actually even generating new ad content for you if you want and allowing that to be a part of your ad. So you're having different text and Facebook is serving that different text to different people and hopefully improving your results. Not always, but you always need to be watching that.

4:26But the good thing is that all of that AI is working to marketers benefit a lot of times. As specific as you're willing to get, share with us something that's been working for you. Like, what does that funnel look like? How's it working? Get a little more detailed. The other thing that's working really well right now is a lot of text and images. Like for a long time, like previously, Facebook didn't want text and images. And now that's working really well. So I have a lot of ads running that are just text only ads in the image themselves. And that's doing well. What else is working? Real ads are working really, really well.

5:12They weren't working quite as well before, but like, you know, short video reels. So give us an example, like what's an ad that you made and how's it working? Yeah. So the ads for clients that I'm running, it's just like a short video reel with images and other things popping in and out, really bright, bold captions in there, super fun movement that's happening, and about a minute long video. And with that, it's engaging the audience, bringing them in and getting them to click over. And with the machine learning that Facebook has and all the AI stuff, we're basically having wide open targeting with some of those ads where we're just saying some basic demographics like we're trying to reach women between 30 and 55.

6:01For example, there's a woman who does, she helps Christian women navigate relationship issues. And we have an ad with her talking about like this training that she's doing, this free training that she's doing. And we've got like little images with some of the handouts that she's delivering in the training. and we're optimizing around getting a lead into the training. And then at the end of the training, she's talking about a membership that she has. So that's kind of the structure. And then what we're doing for that membership is we're retargeting the people who have been to the website. We're doing kind of more broader retargeting.

6:50Anyone who's a warm audience for her, like people on her email list, people who have watched her videos, those people who have landed on our website, things like that. And we're retargeting that for the actual membership side of things. Now, I've known you for a while and you've always enjoyed making people laugh. So what made you decide to get more into stand-up comedy and start doing it on a more consistent basis? You know, after the pandemic, I was just really feeling this pull. I was really feeling drawn to doing this and we were selling out shows and I wasn't doing shows very often. And I thought, why am I not doing this more?

7:33It brings me joy. It brings the comedians joy and brings the audience joy. Why am I not, why I'm only, only doing these bigger shows like, you know, four times a year maybe. So I said, let's just, let's just do more. Let's just do more of this. And I started booking shows regularly at certain venues and started doing like every other month at a certain venue and then started saying, hey, we're still selling out the shows. Let's try every month at this venue. So now I'm just doing more and more shows. And it's been super fun. I've actually been using Facebook and Instagram ads to sell my shows.

8:11And now I'm also helping other comedians sell their shows with Facebook and Instagram ads. Have you ever completely bombed on a stand-up comedic stage? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I bombed in Wichita. Let's hear it. Like, what does that look like? You get up on stage, you're like, hey, Topeka, how you doing? Like, tell me about it. Yeah. So this was for a event called World Series of Comedy. I was doing, and they have events all over the country. And by the way, Wichita's little school there, their college is called the Wichita State Shockers. And they hate when people make jokes about that. So just in case you ever go back.

8:56All right. Good to know. I don't think I'm ever going back. Okay. Let's hear it. Let's hear it. Yeah. Just saying. Wichita didn't enjoy my humor. No. So it was a later night show. Everyone's pretty drunk. And I do pretty clean comedy. Like, you know, I've got a lot of mom humor. And it was just, I just feel like drunk Wichita did not get my humor. And so I just bombed. It was really bad. It was awkward. And I had to stand up there and keep going for the whole seven minutes. And it just was, whew, that was rough. I mean, seven minutes can feel like a long time. It really can. It's surprising how long seven minutes can be.

9:40I mean, I keep telling that to Kate. She just doesn't believe me. All right, Fire Nation, we have a lot more to talk about when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Are you ready to start your year off with increased revenue, faster growth, and record-breaking performance? Well, a powerful sales platform can make it all happen. And for that, there's the all-new Sales Hub from HubSpot. Sales Hub is an all-on-one platform thoughtfully built with the tools and insights you need to communicate on a personal level with every lead, prospect, and customer. If you're looking for a better way to acquire customers, make smart data-driven decisions and increase visibility, productivity, and predictability at a great value, look no further than Sales Hub.

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12:49Andrew, we're back and listen, most standup comedians are literally and figuratively clueless when it comes to marketing, but not you. How are you using your marketing background to grow your standup brand? Yeah, so I am using some of the organic techniques like putting reels out there, comedy shorts on YouTube, and getting more and more views through that. But then mostly the way I'm growing my shows is through Facebook and Instagram ads. And we're using the Facebook pixel and the conversion API to make sure that we're tracking the sales very specifically. So I'm advertising for the different shows.

13:38We're optimizing around the purchase pixel. And we're just tracking. We can actually see what our return on ad spend is for each of the shows that I'm advertising. So I can make decisions on what ads are working or what shows aren't booking at a profitable level. And that just makes everything so much easier and it fills the shows. So that's a great thing. What would you say is the most specific example you can give about an ad that's working in the stand-up area? I'm basically targeting a very tight radius around the venue.

14:25When I was going to Vegas, I used both a square image and then also did a video and found that the video actually performed much better. It was just clips of the comedians, like really short clips of the comedians with some music and then really just kind of doing a lot of selling of the show and putting testimonials in the ad itself so that people knew that they were coming to a good show and they could see some of the reactions of past audiences for that. Artificial intelligence, I mean, it's changing the world in a lot of ways, as are a lot of other tech advances. I mean, the world's moving at a really fast pace.

15:13So what are you planning for the future of your comedy career, of your marketing career? I mean, what does that look like? What are you getting ready for? It's changing super fast. And so you do have to keep up with what, you know, what new marketing tactics are out there. They're coming up with easy ways to make videos now. Um, they're, you know, it's easy to create new images and I think you have to be willing to experiment and test some of those, some of those new developments and see if they're right for you. Um, but not, but also make sure that you're not like just switching everything up and throwing everything out that already is working.

15:58So just experiment a little bit with some of this and see if it's, it's going to work for you. just make sure that you're doing it very systematically. So Andrew, we've talked a lot about Facebook marketing, Instagram marketing, about comedy, about things that are working, things that aren't working. What is a message that you really wanna get through to Fire Nation today, to our listeners about the world that we live in? It's becoming overwhelming for a lot of people. I know a lot of people who are overwhelmed with AI and all the things that you have to do. And that was part of my message at the beginning was really do not try and do it all.

16:41Do not try and be in all places. Don't try and say that you've got to go out there on Google and TikTok and YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn, all those things. Really focus in and do a couple things well. And don't worry that you're falling behind or that you need to keep up with all the very, very hottest, latest trends. What you need to do is just really keep honoring what is working for you and listen to your intuition and make sure that you're taking some breaks and taking some downtime for you because I think this world can be a little bit overwhelming. Fire Nation, this world can be overwhelming.

17:29That's why you need to surround yourself with people you know, you like, you trust, because you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And Andrea, what do you want Fire Nation to have as a call to action from you so they can follow you, learn more from you? What's that call to action? Call to action is really, I would say, get out there and laugh. Get out there and find some fun comedians that make you laugh, that can help you see the lighter side of life and give you a little perspective. So that's my call to action to you. Fire Nation, as I just mentioned, you are the average.

18:14Of the five people you spend the most time with, and today you've been hanging out with AV and JLD today. So keep up the heat. for links to everything that we talked about, visit eofire.com. Just type Andrea in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. Andrea, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks, John. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation, successful entrepreneurs accomplish big goals. That is why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your goal in 100 days.

18:52And we're talking step-by-step. Visit thefreedomjournal.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Marketing Made Simple, hosted by my friend, Dr. JJ Peterson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly, make it work. A recent episode on whether vulnerability is a superpower in business is a must listen. Listen to Marketing Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. The new year is here, and that means it's time to check out NetSuite, the number one cloud financial system, streamlining accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more.

19:31Right now, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance, absolutely free at netsuite.com slash fire.