198 - The Marketer's Playbook: Launching a Full Ad Funnel with AI with Matthew Mellinger

0:00It's crazy. It's like two hours and a thousand dollars you could launch a business. This feels like it should be illegal. To quote Aladdin, open my mind to a whole new world.

0:13Matthew, you have an agency, local SEO, SaaS product, analytics, a newsletter, Cookville-based newsletter, correct? Yes. And we are going to build something in the next 30 minutes. We are going to build a landing page and ad creative with AI in the next 30 minutes to show everybody how they can do the same thing. Yeah, let's do it. It'll be fun. All right. So the three things that we're doing, ad creative, ad images, and the landing page. Basically, what we're going to do is we're going to take a company and say, hey, we have a summer sale. So let's throw up the landing page and let's figure out how we can get traffic to convert once it goes to that landing page.

0:51Yep. All right, dude. If we want to really go down the rabbit hole, see if we can get a working call to action button, like a Stripe checkout or a... I actually, what I want to do is kind of have a calculator as part of a landing page. So I got some ideas already. All right. Fingers crossed. Let's just remind the people, are you a developer? Is that your background? Zero. Like I can work in WordPress. We know very little in terms of like developing apps and stuff like that. I am just a marketer and an SEO. So he's a vibe developer now. He's a viber. I guess. I don't even know if I could consider that.

1:22I tinker around. Okay. So what's the first tool we're going to use? What are we going to build first? All right. So let's jump share a screen. So let's start this clock. I'm still a big fan of Claude. One of the cool things that you can even do is create projects. And so if you have a business, I would create, I have a document, a Google doc that I allow it. So I can come in here and for my software company, this is a live document that I can update and it pools information. This is really helpful if you're working with the same company to use projects. But for today - Projects are amazing, Claude.

1:54Yes. But for today, let's say we're going to do a lawn care business doing a summer sale. And I'll say my hometown, Cookville, Tennessee. So I'm going to actually start by just giving it an overview of kind of what we're doing. So I'm going to say, hey, I'm creating a landing page and ad creative for my lawn care business in Cookville, Tennessee. see the I'm going to need you to help me build ad creatives and prompts for mid journey and help me outline the landing page for lovable the big thing and again thinking of it as a marketer as well not just being a dummy. Like I'm going to say like the big thing I'm pushing is the summer is hot.

2:48You'd rather be sipping tea or spending time with your family rather than out in the heat. Again, thinking of it as a user, it's just general marketing principles. So we'll start with this. Okay. So what you've done in this prompt was you said, this is the business. This is what I want to do add copy and creative these are the tools i want to use lovable and mid-journey and this is kind of what i'm trying to convey yes and now claude is going to spit out in those formats that you're hoping to for the tools that you're hoping to use yeah and again it's going to take some back and forth so it's going to start with marking materials so it's going to start with headline variations again yeah i love these three already because this is again going the first one while What is this egg reading?

3:35Yeah. So number one, I don't like, but number two, stay cool this summer. We've got your lawn covered. Again, peace of mind. It's that whole, again, we're looking for emotional. It's with ad copies, specifically Instagram, Facebook. Why was the number one? Why didn't you like number one? I don't like we'll tame your yard. That's not like, it's making you think that your yard's out of, out of, it just doesn't fit with the marketing general emotion that we're going for. But stay cool this summer, which again, goes to the problem, which is heat. We've got your lawn covered. Peace of mind. Too hot to mow.

4:06Again, problem. We thrive in the heat. It's kind of general. But again, with an image creative, that will make sense. And then I really like this one. Family time is better than yard time this summer. Again, that's great. And we can even target in the creative parents, like dads, fathers, because that's who you're going to be really targeting. So that would be the headline on the landing page? No. So this would be the little things in Facebook when you scroll. that would be the little ad creative title okay got it so here's a and then you can have a little like in the copy summers are brutal why spend your precious weekends sweating over lawn care when you could be relaxing your porch with your family our experience crew i would put our licensed experience crew our whatever handles your heat so you don't have to professional lawn care that keeps your yard pristine while you stay comfortable summer saturday should be for barbecues not battling the blazing sun with a lawnmower.

5:01Like these are, again, these are the things that, that people, that's the reason you want to hire a lawn guy. So let's start with ad creatives. Okay. So split screen. So mid journey prompts for ad visuals. Let's do this a little bit deeper. So it actually spit out the mid journey prompts and the lovable prompts. Yeah. So it's giving me a couple. So let's just, while we're here, let's paste these in. I'm going to see I think I can paste a couple of these basically what he's doing is he's going from the output in Claude which are the mid-journey prompts that Claude recommends and he's copying those, he's then going over to mid-journey and pasting them into mid-journey to see what it generates this is a really dumb question when you say ad copy that's what is going to be on Facebook so there's going to be that title and then there's going to be the ad copy and then we want them to click so that they then go to the landing page?

5:57Yeah, let me see. Okay. So if I pull this up, this allows you to search ads. So I'm going to just do lawn care. I'm sorry, come on and say what? Yeah, so you can search. You like copying other people's homework? Yeah, you can look. So if you use a certain brand, so let's say Nike, right? I'm a shoe store. I can click here. And this allows me to see all of Nike's meta ads right here. The freak? Are you serious? Yes. this is free in public. This feels like this should be illegal. Yeah. You can see everything. And so this is a great way for you to get inspiration for ads run through this. You can see that they're active when they started running.

6:34And again, if you go to the ones that have some of the older ones that have been around more, you will see that they're generally. So what website is this? I just typed in Facebook ad library. Oh my gosh. Okay. So Facebook ad library, whatever you clicked on it. Yep. It showed each one of the ads. My screen's too small to read it. Is it showing you like how long it's been running or like data to show how successful it's been started running on june 23rd and what platforms they're running on and i can click here see ad details and so now this is what the ad is and the reason i was pulling this up was to show you where things are going right so here's your ad creative this is your title your ad creative title okay the call to action button but then you will have a description here and so the ad copy that we're talking about is this the description the ad copy is this description here that they would read you can click to expand or whatever this is the ad image and this is the headline and then it would be learn more instead of shop now and so then that learn more takes us to the landing page correct that's what we're going to try and set up in the next 23 minutes so these obviously this top row is not what we're looking for why tell us why so the top row is a bunch of yes random looking people.

7:48It's random dudes has nothing to do really. Like it's showing up before and after of one, which it looks fantastic. It's funny. You could almost like, like this image where it's a family, a guy sitting on a lawnmower, like sad or upset and then happy, but it's just, it's going to take too much time. This is more of what I'm looking for. Cause this is the outcome that we're trying to present to our customer. You want to put me at a copy. I want the outcome. Yes, right. So this, you can see the lawn in the background looks nice. Kid has three legs currently, so probably would not want to use that ad.

8:27Is this in Chernobyl? Is that where this is? The ad's in person. So again, I would probably spend a little bit more time on making sure that those work, but for all intents and purposes, this one would work. It shows you're having fun out in the lawn. The lawn looks good. sunset. It's hot. It's all the things that we're conveying. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to save this image and I'm going to download. And then what I'm also going to do is this one is good. And so I'm going to create more variations subtly. So video is cool, but I have what scientists call a face for radio. And so it's even cooler is long form audio via my podcast and my newsletter, Nickonomicspod.com.

9:15Go there for free. Subscribe to my newsletter. It's one email per week. It's super tactical. And then go to my audio podcast. I do three to five episodes a week, depending on how curious I am. And it's stuff like this. It's all free. No sleazy sales pitches. Nickonomicspod.com. So for those of you listening, he's still in mid journey. What we're looking at is a family sitting on a porch. Their yard looks fantastic. And you picked this one because you were like, I want them to see the end state, not necessarily these guys looking dour and my lawn I don't want to take care of it it was no no no this is what you want to be doing you want to be spending time with your family and now he's like okay I like this one enough I'm gonna do a bunch of variations on it to see if it creates anything even better than this first iteration yeah and so it doesn't look too much better so the one I copied I'll be fine with for now and so now what I want to do is I'm going to go here and let's start working on the landing page because that takes some time.

10:09Let's see. Hero section, stay close somewhere and handle the heat. Yes, yes. Problem solution, services, what we do, local trust. I like it. Call to action. Only thing I want to add to lovable is a pricing to lovable landing page is a pricing calculator that adjusts say$100 per square acre. So they can know the pricing and it's showing a 40 % discount from our normal pricing. So this is going to give me a lovable prompt. I like that. So here's the updated outline. Cool. Yep, showing this. all right cool so i'm going to take this and we'll start here i'm just going to copy copy i'm going to go over to lovable and i'm just going to paste that prompt in i'm going to give you didn't say like make sure this is a lovable specific prompt no because lovable does a pretty good job i'm actually also going to come up here and i'm going to recopy my original prompt to give lovable some context on top of the outline so i'm going to do this hey i'm creating a landing page and I'll remove the ad creative.

11:31The big thing I'm pushing for is the summer's hot. You'd rather be blah, blah, blah. And then here you go. Here's your hero section, problem solution, services, interactive pricing calculator. Cool. So the landing page has all of this stuff. It's you're building a separate website from the actual website of the company. So this is just an example. This company doesn't exist. This could be like, again, I could use this as a homepage. You have the ability up here to publish it directly from lovable and you can also add your own domains so you can do it straight from this because the thing is say you either have a like i would use cal.com to create a calendar link that they could schedule a free consultation for us to come out and make sure the yard is actually how big they say it is right or you can just do it straight into a stripe checkout if you want to be a little more risky and frictionless so while lovable is going i'm going to go back to this add creative because i feel like that's going to start working.

12:24And now we're going to kind of run two things in tandem. We are about 13, 12 minutes in and already there making some good progress. So we have that image and now let's say, okay, I like these three headline variations. Give me 10 more. I'm going to copy this, which is those three that we talked about. And the thing with meta ads is that you can give a bunch of different variations and meta will do the job of letting you know which one performs the best. Oh, really? Yes. And so that's a big thing with meta ads is the more you give them, the more opportunity for you to see exactly. That's how you win in meta ads is split testing.

13:08Now the ad creative copy options that it spit out for you. Did you say in the prompt, this is for meta or did it just spit it out? No, let me see. Nope. I just said ad creatives. yep so i didn't specify meta but obviously these are going to be a lot better than like this wouldn't be what i would use necessarily for like google ads okay so here are 10 headline variations beat the heat without lifting a finger why sweat when we love the summer sun keep your cool we handle the scorching work more porch time less yard time weekends are for family not lawn care spend summer making memories, not mowing.

13:48Tennessee, I really like this one. Tennessee heat got you down. We've got you covered. Hate summer yard work. We actually enjoy it. I don't know about that one, but skip the sweat, get the perfect lawn. Let us sweat so you don't have to. So there's, I would say, I like those first three a lot. So you would copy these into meta and meta would say like, oh, these are the two that really you should use. Or does it test them and then use real-time feedback? It tests them and then you get real time feedback on this ad creative with this title is 10 cents a lead, whereas this title is 70 cents a lead.

14:26And then you just start killing the bad ones and then you make iterations from there. Oh. So that's really how you want to be doing these ad creatives. And again, same thing with descriptions. You can create different descriptions and different images and say, hey, here's 10 images. Which one draws your attention the best? So I like those. Let's see. Beat the Heat. I like this one. More Porched Weekends for Family. Yeah, I like both these. So how many do you choose to split test? It totally depends. The nice thing is it's not hard to just create a lot of split tests. So I normally like split testing one thing at a time, whether it's titles or descriptions.

15:04So use the same description and 10 different titles. and then out of the top 10 titles, go to 10, keep the same title, try 10 descriptions. And then from there, try 10 ad copies. And each time it should be improving. How fast is the feedback loop? It depends on your ad spend, right? So if you spend$1 ,000 a day, you're going to get it in very quickly. You're going to have enough data to say, okay, that's good. Well, I was just going to say, could we test this in like 10 minutes from now, see which one's performing best or no? No, you have to get the ad creative. approved, which can take hours.

15:39Okay. And you have to have a Facebook page that's attached to it. So it needs to be done on a, yeah, done on an unofficial thing. But if you ever want to run down that during a real company, we can talk ad, ad Facebook meta ads on another one. You kind of just to quote Aladdin, open my mind to a whole new world. Yeah. So yeah, we're going to have to do this again. Yeah. Okay. So that's, that's a whole different beast and it's a lot of fun. All right. So you're picking all these to try and you're telling Claude which ones you wanted to try. Yeah. So I said, these are the winners. And actually, I'm going to keep these two as well.

16:14And I'm going to say, now write a meta ads description that I can use along with these title variations. So now it's going to write the description. The first thing I would start is we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, seven titles. So let's see, these are mounted ad descriptions. Yeah, these are all fine. So these are different. Going back to this, this is where you see the Nike says, get the gear that goes hard on and off the field. That is their whole description right there. There are some descriptions that are a lot longer. And let me see if I can find just a lawn care company.

16:55You know, what's really interesting is this reminds me a lot of what I do for YouTube videos. people are going to like start snoozing as I start talking about this, but whatever. When I do these and I record them and then I post them on YouTube, I have to make sure that the title is really good. Right. And I have a prompt that I put into chat GPT where I'm like, give me a title about this conversation that if a reader saw this out of context would get them to click and is 60 characters or less. So it's like, I give it the parameters, but there's kind of a algorithm to it or equation to it, if you will.

17:27And that's what you're doing. He's like, you're going and looking at other ads that have been successful, which is what I do when I go and see other thumbnails and titles that have been successful on YouTube. And you're like, oh, how did they phrase it? How long was this? Oh, that's interesting. The way that they framed this. And then you're going back to Claude to then refine what you're working on. It's like, it's pretty cool to see the way you're using those tools. I wonder, is there a way for you to make that agentic where it's like, okay, now go to this website, look at comparable ad copy and make this better?

17:53Yes. So anything you do manually, I've come to the realization is you can pretty much make a Gentic with, I mean, whichever one you prefer, but it's just then building it out and then rinsing and repeating. I still do things a lot manually like we're doing here. So I went to this ad library with this and I don't know if these guys are the best, but it's showing that some of the things that they do in almost all of them is over 50 years of proven results, locally owned and operated 100 % satisfaction guarantee. So I'm going to say use a description close to this. And while we're going back to lovable, I kind of gave that prompt and it says I love this concept.

18:28It started to make the landing page, but then it said that there was a an issue. It's saying integrate a calculator in contact form. Let's see here I need to fix the impact error. So it's fixing it let's see if we can see it yet looks like it's still blank there we go well what the freak that image is pretty bad it's a bad image but holy crap is it's a website oh my gosh and here's your custom fully built website yep yeah and i and like so now we can take go back to lovable or even better yet what i would do is have a real photo of you because again people are going to call you're going to show up and so like taking a real image let me see if i can actually dude while you're looking for that i'm gonna have to like i feel like a neanderthal who just saw fire for the first time that hot fire make things good yeah but you've got mid journey running which is the visual you've got clod running which is helping you strategize everything you've got lovable running which is going to be the landing page and then you are also using clod to optimize the ad copy for Facebook because you're going to be running Facebook ads to this landing page.

19:46Yes. Yes. Hey, I don't know if you remember this, but when we started this podcast, we entered into a social contract. I would spend time, energy, and money producing this podcast, interviewing these individuals and giving you insights into how to build, buy, start, grow your business. And you would like, subscribe, and leave me five-star review. Now, out of that, we both get to talk to really cool people and hear really cool insights. We both get a ton of value, but I just want to help you keep your word. So would you do me a favor? Will you go leave a five-star review for me on Apple or Spotify?

20:20It would really help. And if you want, even share this with a friend. It's really cool. It's like soup to nuts. Like, okay, I want to increase sales for my lawn care business this summer. How do I do that? Okay. Well, I'm going to go acquire customers on Facebook. Yep. Check. Well, in order to do that, I've got to have the ad copy and the way that it looks yep and i gotta have the landing page yep and i gotta have a custom quote and i gotta have a way for people to pit yes i know everyone listening is like yeah nick that's what we've been talking about for the last 20 minutes but it's pretty freaking incredible to watch it happen in real time yeah and so i just downloaded an image that i'm gonna see if i can add this image as hero section image so i'm uploading this image was that an image you already had or is that from mid-dream?

21:04Yes, this is a real image. So I said, add this image as the hero section image. Is that this? So you have this like, stay cool this summer, we handle the heat, and there's a picture of a, I don't know, crappy yard next to it. Is that the hero image? So no, I uploaded, this is just a local company that I had an image of. And so like - I just meant, sorry, sorry. Like globally speaking, when you say hero image, is that that's the image you want right there at the front of the landing page? Okay. Yes, yeah. The hero section as a whole is this top banner, what we call above the fold. First thing that they land in C, they want to see something that, so you see that?

21:40It just popped it in. Yep. Right there. So now if I were to minimize this, so now what I'm going to do, a Tennessee summer reality check, what would be fun is adding a live, like I'm talking fun. Can we add a live heat temperature? What would be the right term? thermostat tracker thermostat tracker to the hero section with forecast highlighting how hot it is let's see if we can do this we're kind of pushing the boundaries so yeah stay cool this summer we handle the heat i would rather have a picture of a guy mowing the lawn right here again your own thing calculate my savings below or you just call right here i love the call to action You can change, obviously, this professional lawn care in Cookville, so you can enjoy what matters most, whether that's sipping tea on the porch or making memories with the family.

22:34I love that. That's exactly what I'm looking for. Summer reality check. We saw the prompt. It's not like the prompt was overly intensive. It just generated this. Yes. Professional service that thrives in the heat, trained professionals, weather exports. I would probably change this with a different one because weather experts don't really matter to them. but complete lawn care. This is the different things that we can do. I would add pricing, customized service plans. And then this is cool. Okay. Whoa. Okay. So we have one acre. So this is a live calculator that shows you the savings. So it's normally 166 bucks.

23:16Your summer price is a hundred bucks. You save 66 bucks. Did you put pricing information in here or is this like just yes i said yeah regular price is this your summer prices this is what you save okay and it's already added the pricing heat here i love this it's like very hot freaking way so let's dude that's amazing make heat thermostat a daily and make it a long banner at the top not on the right. Now, how do you know if it's accurate? Like, how do you know if it was like actually that temperature? So that would be like something I would investigate of to see what it actually is. Okay. If it is accurate.

24:02So there's nowhere in the lovable code that it's like, oh, I'm pulling from this website. I'm pulling the... Yes, there actually is. So if we hit the code mode right here, we will be able to see where it's pulling from and how it's pulling these elements. This is again, for someone that knows, which you could pull this into Claude and say, Hey, where's this pulling from? If you don't know, but for the sake of speed, we're going to pretend that it, yeah, it works. Yeah. Perfectly accurate, which it's probably not to be honest, but, but the calculator works. And so you can say, how big is your acreage?

24:38I'm going to say three acres and see how the price is now live and it locks in this race. Your summer savings are going to be 4 ,000 bucks. Let's see. there you go boom there's your banner at the top with the heat temperature like it already does the too hot for yard work stay cool this summer let us handle the heat like this this is a real and then yeah so right off the bat it's flaring the heat it's red like it i didn't have to tell it to be red it's showing that it's hot showing the experience i would have like attach i would link to google business profile say make sure this is embedded in here our google reviews so we have three minutes left and I'm going to go ahead and call this a wrap for now.

25:17So what we would do from here is here are our seven ad copy titles that we would test. Here's my description right here, which is Cookville homeowners are ditching the summer sweat for professional lawn care that actually loves the heat. Transform your yard work while you relax in the AC with our proven local service. Proudly serving Cookville, 100 % satisfaction guarantee, 40 % off summer special. calculate your savings with a free quote today. Both maintain the proven structure. Yeah, so that's the end of it. So I like that. There's your description. And then our image, which I'll open up here.

25:55This would be the ad creative. Again, I would probably spend a little bit more time, but this will work for all intents and purposes. Here's your nice lawn care with the heat. You have your description, you have your ad creatives. I would then go into your meta and create your different ad variations like this. And again, test that for a week, make sure you get enough impressions. There are a lot of good resources on how to do meta ads really well, especially with that. And then I would send them to this landing page. So if I I'll hit open and preview in a new tab, and here's your page. If you want to publish it, you can come right in here.

26:31You hit publish. You can add your custom domain. Click right there. You do your DNS and you hit publish and you have a website. and again you would want to test these things so when i click calculate my savings it takes me to my calculator here i would probably make this a drop down not just i can't do because i can do 3.11111 which is kind of cool like but it's cool that you can come in and say like you can choose your own pricing probably serving cookville and surrounding areas what our neighbors say you'll want to come in and make sure it's actually accurate and then you would talk to level and say what happens when I get this quote?

27:09So you've basically in, I would say probably another 30 minutes of setting up meta ads and get setting up domain and everything, probably another hour, you would have a fully functional ad funnel for a summer special for this campaign. And it's not just that like, okay. Yeah. If you have an existing business, cool. You've got a fully functional landing page and ad funnel campaign. But what if I just wanted to test a business? What if I was like, oh, I wonder how many people are interested in this in my market, right? Like I'm starting a pickleball club at my tennis court in my backyard. I wonder if anybody's going to join.

27:48Like Chris did this recently, you know, on his podcast. And like, you could easily do that, easily test it. Go to Facebook, set up the ad copy and the description, put a thousand bucks behind it and just see, you know, direct people to a website and you just see. Get them signed up on a winning list. that's insane man yeah and that's all in an hour and a half like we spent maybe 30 minutes and oh there's my timer so yeah 30 minutes and like this is way more than enough like i've seen landing pages out of click funnels back in the day and even today some people use like atrocious landing pages it still work but like i land on this landing page i would probably have a couple critiques that again i would touch up a little bit but like i would have no issues with this testing this to see, can we get people to purchase lawn care?