561: $300M Worth of Facebook Ads Advice in 45 Minutes | Jordan Menard

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0:39Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. The best ads are ones that are shot first person narrative on an iPhone. However, most people can't just open their phone and bust out an amazing ad off the top. So a really simple format for this, it's four steps. The first step is grab attention. Something that is directly going to break the ice and engage with the viewer to stop the scroll. The next step is, yeah, that's really clever. He's a master of performance marketing with over$300 million in profitable ad spend.

1:15Scaling brands to seven, eight, and nine figures. His name is Jordan Menard. If you want to target someone, the best way to do that is make creative that talks to that person. Once you have that angle, distill it through all three ad types. Make narrative ads, bumper ads, static ads talking about that angle. And if I only had a thousand dollars a day to spend on Facebook ads, half that would go to image ads. How do you work out if it is an offer problem or a creative problem? The best offers are the ones that make you feel stupid for not buying, where you see it and you're like, oh, that is such a good deal.

1:48How do I pass this up. But when you get further and further, further down the road, what you'll find is... Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan. You've spent conservatively over$300 million on Facebook ads specifically, profitably. What is the number one thing that people are missing when it comes to scaling Facebook ads? Yeah, I think that the number one thing is that they're looking to Facebook to scale their ads. They think that the scaling happens in the ads manager. Now it does, right?

2:37You increase budgets and that's its own art. And we can talk about that as we go. but so much stuff, the inputs that you put into Facebook are really what let you scale. And so I think if brands really want to scale on Facebook, they need to figure out what offer is going to give them an incredible conversion rate or an amazing CAC. They have to really understand their numbers, right? And not just numbers like on Facebook, but like overall numbers, right? Your blended CACs, your blended MERs, your CAC to LTV. Kind of those business numbers that really make the business tick. And then finally, you got to have great creative, right?

3:19It is a creative game. I remember the days of like Tim Bird's bully method, right? Like back in 2015, 2016, you could take an image ad and do a bid cap with, you know, 3X the CPA and that thing would just print money. It was so easy. Man, poor one out. I miss those days. Nowadays, the game has changed. dude. It's way more difficult, right? And creative is really what matters, right? Creative is going to be the big differentiator. So I'd say once you really get your business down, right? You understand what your KPIs are, you've created an offer that will give you a CAC that generates contribution margin for the business, but is also something that you can buy at scale, right?

4:06Like If you need a$14 CAC on Meta in 2025, you're probably not going to get it, right? It's probably not going to work. So I think once you get all of that part of the equation right, and then you get some amazing creative that's regularly being pumped into the account, then you get to the fun part, which is actually scaling the campaigns inside of Ads Manager. But the biggest stuff happens before that. Yeah. And when it comes to like the numbers and the unit economics, you need an AOV of what,$60 to$100 to be able to make anything meaningfully work, you would say? Yeah. I always like to tell people like, figure out how you can absorb at least a$50 CAC, right?

4:52Like at least a$50 CAC. AOV is a little bit different because I think there's a lot of different models that are going to allow you to have a lower AOV. For example, if you have a high continuity subscription program that has a 120 lifetime value in six months, you can pay a$60 CAC on the front, even if the front end offer has a$30 AOV, right? Because as long as you can cash flow it, you're going to make profit in six months. and so obviously cash flow is a very key thing there but I don't think the the AOV is as hard of a role as a lot of people say it is but if we're looking for something like that I would say figure out how you could absorb a$50 CAC all day every day at scale that's a great jumping off point yeah and you said that oftentimes some people come to you because they want to scale their ads, but what nobody talks about is changing up the offer.

5:55Can we talk through that? Because so many people, they look at Facebook ads and they go, yep, my Facebook ads aren't working. I need help. I need to know what is the tactic? What is the tweak? And you have a totally different approach. We don't do any advertising. I don't even have a website, to be honest. The reason people come to us, it's purely word of mouth, right? And so they're brands that are doing a million dollars a month who want to get to that nine figure run rate. And most of them think that they just need my help on Facebook ads. And there's, you know, we definitely have a great offer on Facebook ads.

6:31You know, my media buyers are really good. We live and breathe this stuff. Our track record speaks for itself. But more often than not, there's stuff that has to happen first in order for the ads to really scale. And that's mostly the offer. I think the offer is probably the most overlooked yet critical part of the acquisition equation. And you can find the biggest wins by testing it, right? And one good way to kind of look at this is like, a lot of image ads on Facebook are essentially a cool picture of the product and the offer 20 % off. buy one, get one free, free shipping, right? It's literally just the offer that's the ad.

7:18And that kind of shows you that if you were to change what is being offered and just change that text, the exact same ads can convert way better, way better. So for example, with one brand that we worked on, it was subscription centric, right? So it was all about the subscription. and they were selling a starter kit for month one and you paid more for the starter kit and month two on the subscription, the price would go down. And so the first thing I did was I was like, hey, what if we switch this? What if the price is way lower on the front end and then it renews at a higher price? And the founder was like, but we have this starter kit.

8:06The cogs don't support that, right? We don't, we need to like cover the cost of those things. I'm like, it depends on what your goal is. If you want to try to squeak out a dollar on the first order, maybe, but if this increases your retention rate by 10%, then in six months, we're going to have a way more profitable business. And we're going to be at seven times the scale. So that's what we did. We changed the offer up front. We lowered the price of the welcome offer. And then it had the continuity at the same. And it completely changed everything. I mean, literally everything. The CAC was way different.

8:46Um, we actually, the CAC actually fell so much that even though we lowered the price, we actually had a better contribution margin. So we lowered the price on the, on the front end, but we actually had a better contribution margin because we lowered CAC more than we lowered the price. And that's the power of a good offer. So we're in a creative game when, if a new brand comes to you, so someone that's starting a new brand, let's just say they haven't even had their first sale, what should they be thinking about when it comes to that offer? So the first thing that I always say is like, make it irresistible.

9:31Rabah Raheel and I were talking about this, the CMO of Fermat. And And he said that the best offers are the ones that make you feel stupid for not buying. Where you see it and you're like, oh, dude, that is such a good deal. How do I pass this up? Right. And that's what the best offers do. How to create that. It's so dependent on what the brand is. But I would say like start experimenting with different offers that you find super compelling. If you look at a brand like Diff Eyewear, for example, Eyewear is probably one of the most competitive, crowded space filled with absolute goliaths, right?

10:18Massive brands with infinite marketing budgets, tough place to win. diff had a buy one get one free offer that literally turned them into an 80 million dollar brand in a few years right and they rode that offer um to win in a space that's really really tough all based off that that buy one get one and so what i would encourage people is find a way to craft something that has so much value in it that it's almost irresistible and test a few different offers, right? Test different stuff. Does buy one, get one convert better than 50 % off? They're functionally the same thing to the brand, but which one converts better?

11:02You know, is it, you know, buy two, save more? Is it a flat 20 % off? Is it free shipping? There's a bunch of things that you can do to kind of craft whatever you think is the most valuable thing. And then test it at low budgets. What we'll find is there's going to be one offer that just does way better than everything. Right. And it's usually very easy to notice this when it happens. And that's how you kind of found your hero offer. Once you find your hero offer, that's going to be your main acquisition arm. Right. Make a bunch of creative promoting that hero offer and then make sure you infuse the offer onto the PDP.

11:44When you talk about creative, once you've got that good offer, right? Talk to me about creative. Like you've said, the best performing ads don't look polished. They look homemade. Why do you think that is? A few reasons. Number one, we advertise on social media, right? Keyword social. So when we go to social media, we're anticipating seeing people in their environment. We're anticipating seeing real people doing real things. When we see something very polished, highly edited, really professional, I think especially younger generations, our brain just instantly turns off because we're like, oh, that's an ad.

12:29We instantly glaze it over. We rule it out as any type of authentic content that we can engage in. Now, I think there is some of this changing right now. I think in the future too, this could change a little bit because, you know, trends always change. But for the past couple of years, and I would say still right now, the best ads are ones that are shot first person narrative on an iPhone. It's a person talking to the phone, telling their real story about how, you know, they use the product and it was transformative, how it changed their life in any way, shape or form. I think those ad types we've seen typically end up being the best performers.

13:13And, you know, my agency, my creative team has a lot of like high film talent, right? We have incredibly expensive cameras that I bought a long time ago because I thought we would need them. And if anybody wants highly polished content to work well, it's me. I would, you know, I wish we did that. It would give us more of a moat. But at the end of the day, over and over and over, I can confidently say the stuff that works the best is just like influencer content of an influencer talking to the phone about the product or a founder ad where the founder is talking directly to the camera about the brand that they built.

13:53In either scenario, they're both that native homegrown iPhone feel. Are you hesitating to take the next step in your e-commerce journey? Founder Plus has you covered. With proven frameworks tailored to your business needs for fast results, a supportive community of over 30 ,000 like-minded entrepreneurs, and weekly live mentorship sessions, Founder Plus is your key to success. Try Founder Plus today for just$1 for seven days and start building your dream business with confidence. You can visit founder.com forward slash start dollar trial or click the link in the description to claim your trial.

14:26of course scripted can you talk us through the scripting or prompt and what you how you prompted yeah so with scripting is interesting right because i think for the most part you need something right you need some type of script most people can't just like open their phone and bust out an amazing ad off the top um most people can't do that so i recommend you know cooking up some type of script. However, you don't want it to feel scripted, right? So write the script in the way that you're going to talk. A really simple format for this is it's four steps, right? The first step is grab attention.

15:08Start with something that is going to break the scroll and stop people from glazing on by it, right? Now, it doesn't have to be something crazy over the top. It could even be something as like, hey guys, Jordan, co-founder of Instant Hydration here, but something that is directly going to break the ice and engage with the viewer to stop the scroll. The next step is kick the bruise. Make people feel the pain of the problem that your product solves, right? Now, however you want to do that, right? But say something along the lines that will make people aware and resonate with the pain that your product solves.

15:50The next step is build the bridge. Articulate how your product solves that problem. Explain a real world use case of how your product alleviates the pain of that problem. And then finally, call to action. And that's a great place to stay the offer, right? For limited time only, we're doing buy one, get one. Click somewhere around this video before we run out of inventory again. Right. And so that simple four step formula of grab attention, kick the bruise, build the bridge, call to action is a great starting point for someone who's never done this to kind of write a script that that follows that format.

16:31In regards to influencers, content creators, working with people like that, I don't recommend to script because one, it'll feel scripted, right? And content creators specifically don't like that. It's kind of like, you know, you're paying them based off their ability to make content, but then you're taking away their ability to make content. It's like, I just don't think it's a good practice. So we opt for a brief and a brief is, uh, it, it says that it, it importantly goes over the things that you can't say, right. Because legal or compliance, anything like that. And then it just kind of goes over the benefits and the general structure.

17:18Right. So on my briefs, I tell people like, um, you know, here are three strongest benefits, pick one of them and tell your story about how the product improved your life. And then from the rest of it, we let it totally up to them. They get to say whatever they want. And after a ton of trial and error, and I don't even know how much money lost on influencers, we've really had a lot of success with this format. It really, really works well. So, you know, for stuff that you're doing yourself, or let's say, you know, we use Backstage, the actor portal to find a lot of our like UGC. Don't use stuff like Bilio or stuff like that.

18:03It always comes out terrible. Use real actors. And in that context, we'll go with the script. If we're doing influencers, we're going to go with a brief. So that's kind of how we think of the creation element of it. Are there any other types of ad creatives or types that people should be using? Yeah, most definitely. So you'll hear this phrase thrown out a lot, creative diversity. And you want to make every type of ad type that Facebook can serve. So we break this down into three main ad types. We have narrative ads, which are the ads that we're talking about, longer form, someone talking to a camera, the narrator telling their story.

18:50And then we have a type called bumper ads. Bumper ads are short, three to 15 second videos, no central narration, product centric with motion graphics, text on screen. And then finally, image ads. And image ads are great. Don't sleep on those. Right. If you know, if I if I only had a thousand dollars a day to spend on Facebook ads, you know, probably half that would go to to image ads, maybe more. Image ads can get you some of the cheapest cost per conversions out there. They're really good at remarketing. And so for us, it is really important to make all of the ad types. Right. All three of those main ad types.

19:33We want to do all of them and then use different angles in every single one because Facebook's targeting is now your creative. I remember back in the day where you would make a bunch of ad set budgets targeting different audiences and find which one gave you the best CPA. That's out the window, right? The ad creative does the targeting. So if you want to target someone on Facebook, the best way to do that is make creative that talks to that person. Right. And then once you have that angle, distill it through all three ad types. Make narrative ads talking about that angle. Make bumper ads talking about that angle.

20:13Make static ads talking about that angle. Yeah, that's that's really clever. So how do you come up and find angles? I love AI for this. um you know going to a chat gpt um you definitely for this you really want to make sure that whatever ai you're using is capable of scroll uh crawling the internet um and you give it a link to your product and then you ask it um what are the top five pain points associated with this product or what are the top five pain points that this product can help alleviate and right there you It'll spit out a bunch. And typically, you'll find one or two that's really cool.

20:55I think another way, and this way is a little bit more abstract, but when you get further and further and further down the road, what you'll find is that your best ads, or you'll have really proven angles. That is, you'll have angles that you know for certain work well. let's say like uh it's a it's a product that um has gut health benefits right and you know that bloating is gonna work you know that bloating is gonna work um then you can start to play with like those fun angles that like savannah sanchez is commonly talking about right like myth versus truth right that's one that that always does well for us right like uh myth there's nothing you can do about bloating or myth, only your diet dictates bloating.

21:48Truth, probiotics can help reduce bloating instantly, right? You can create those kind of like really cool soundbite, easy to digest formulas, three reasons, right? Those types of, you know, easy to consume ad angles that are not angles in themselves. They're almost like styles and they touch on the big angle which is like in this case bloating um so yeah i think the other one and um this is one i think most people know but uh reviews um customer reviews right um they are a goldmine um they are a goldmine if you are a shopify store owner um and you're using like a review widget I highly recommend don't auto publish, make yourself go in there and click publish on all the reviews because it's going to force you to read them.

22:47And you're going to start finding things that your customers say that you didn't realize. Talk to me around like marketing psychology and how much that has played a part, especially around kind of creating desire and, you know, like really dialing in that piece of the puzzle? We don't create desire, right? The desire is innate in our customer. Now we can create demand, but that desire is innate in there. It's our job as marketers to bring that desire out and connect to it. And doing that creates demand for our product. And so I think the first thing is really understand who your customer is. why are people buying your product and once you start there you can kind of put yourself in your customer's shoes and figure out like well if if there's a problem that my product solves and they're buying it because they want to solve that problem what is what is life like living with this problem what are some of the things that they encounter um and figuring out how to connect with people where they are and harness that innate desire that's in them, that's marketing, right?

24:10That at its purest, highest form, that's marketing. I think that there's other things that you can, you know, there's a lot of data around some of this stuff, but like putting a let's say you put the the msrp in smaller text crossed out with a bigger price and it's like a green or slightly different color right next to it and it's been proven through studies that when people see that it communicates to their brain they're getting a good deal there it there's a higher conversion rate when price is modeled like that and so i think there's you know on a on a big macro scale there's that idea of how do we in how do we psychologically engage to harness the desires of our customer bring them out and generate that demand for our product and then on a more micro level those you know psychological kind of hacks like how our pricing is laid out, how our bundles are created, that can make a big difference.

25:20How do you work out if it is an offer problem or a creative problem? There's a few telltale signs. One are you'll scale to a certain point and you just can't get beyond that, right? You just cannot get beyond that point. Another thing would be you're consistently getting like an overwhelming majority of your ads that you will launch are way higher than you can afford to pay on a result basis, right? I think both of those things are going to give you a signal that you need to change the offer. And when you're changing the offer, I think there's a few different ways that you can do it, right? The first one is a discount.

26:06And that's the most popular one. It's the most widely known one. And that's great. But there are so many other things that you can do to really make the offer exciting. If you look at someone like Athletic Greens, right? The free gifts that they give away on the first purchase, right? Really just a huge value add. And why I like free gifts is, you know, going back to the psychology of it. free gifts when done right have a way higher perceived value to the customer than the actual realized cost to the brand. So what they perceive as the value of what they're getting is, you know, 10 to 15 times higher than what the actual cost is.

26:52And I think that right there, that concept of arbitraging perceived value versus real value or real cost is where you win with an offer, right? When you build up that perceived value while keeping the same or reducing natural cost to the brand is when you get that big unlock. And what we found is once you get the offer right, you'll notice it immediately. It's a day and night change in the ad account. and oftentimes ads that you were running that weren't working will all of a sudden start working. When that happens, that's how you know it's time to make a bunch of creative and get, you know, really get ready to start pumping it.

27:39So yeah, I think the tricky part about the offer and just speaking on it like very broadly is it is so product dependent, right? Some, you know, Offers are really dependent on what the person is selling. And how many times have you tried historically before you've got to rot? So many, dude. There's been times where we're on our seventh iteration of the offer and you just feel like you're smashing your face into the wall over and over and over. And it's like, you know, you're going through the seventh iteration of redesigning the PDP to refit the offer. And wouldn't you know it, the seventh one is the one that clicks.

28:27You know, we had that with an affiliate offer we were running where we did all. Only thing we did was we added an upsell for 50 percent off. You got another one of the same product you just bought for 50 percent off and as an upsell. and it completely changed the unit economics of the funnel gave us a few more dollars on the aob that allowed us to be profitable on first purchase and it was off to the races right but if we didn't go through those seven iterations we just never would have looked there um so yeah i think you know there's like a fine line of trying to make something work that can't work um that you kind to just have to know.

29:09But then on the flip side, you really only lose when you quit. So on the offer side, test. And what I like about offer testing is you know so quickly. Because you have your baseline, you launch a new offer, you're like, oh my gosh, the conversion rate is like 15 % higher on this offer. So instantly, it's going to give you those strong signals. It happens in a couple days. But yeah, it's, you know, I think if you talk to like affiliate networks, one of the biggest thing that they'll do when they onboard a new brand is they really go deep on the offer, right? What's the best offer that we can offer?

29:52And so, yeah, I think if you believe in the brand, you believe in the product, then it's, you know, don't be afraid to keep trying, right? Give it five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 tries, you know, as long as you're just, you know, you're being smart with it. But yeah, I, there's been a lot of, a lot of long nights and a lot of frustrating days trying to crack offers for sure. You said something interesting before that I have to pick up, which was around free shipping, right? Sometimes removing it, right? Can actually improve margins, but it's often seen as a no brainer. Talk me through kind of that offer economics piece.