1586 – Social Media Support with Rohaan Khan

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0:58with us right now Rohan Khan Rohan you are the CEO and founder of Orange Trail Media you're found on the web at orangetrail.io and I'm excited to have this conversation because initially when I went to your website I'm like okay they looks like they do paid ads but it's a little bit unique it's a little bit different Rohan thank you so much for being here Josh pleasure thank you so much for having me. All right, go ahead and explain what Orange Trail does. Yeah, indeed. Like yourself and many others, they misinterpret exactly what we do. And that's just because we solve a very acute pain point in the advertising industry, which is all surrounding bans, restrictions, and disapprovals.

1:41If anyone has run social media ads out there, they understand that you can get restricted for absolutely no reason whatsoever. There's different styles there's different styles of bands um for example it might be a false positive band what is that well the platform might just be having a bad day and you just launch an ad it goes into the approval process and you just maybe launch a few more and then the whole account just goes down this is a false positive you may not have necessarily done something wrong but it's just because the algorithm had a bad day that's just one style of band there's so many others as well and there's such little information out there on how to prevent it, how to get around, follow the policy.

2:20So that's where we kind of come in. You know, the biggest thing for me is just, you know, when I think about particularly platforms like Facebook, it's just the lack of support. It's the lack of communication. And, you know, that's most frustrating to me. So let's say that, you know, something does go screwy. There's nothing I can do. That's, you know, there's no one to talk to. There's no one to help. And so I would imagine that that's one area. Do you mind going through, I suppose, access to better communication, I would imagine is part of that, or at least some better recourse. But would you mind kind of going through all of the, you know, kind of the primary features and benefits?

3:01Of course. Yeah, absolutely. So you kind of nailed it right there, Josh. One of the other main reasons that clients actually come to us is because they're frustrated, they've reached out to support. They're not getting an answer back for a week or two. And during this downtime, it's the opportunity loss, right? It's the opportunity cost. They're not running ads. They're not getting traffic and sales on their website. So that is another huge pain point that we saw with our agency ad accounts. They're kind of like a premium level higher tier ad account. We also give priority access to reps. I'm talking getting a response within 24 hours from someone who actually understands what they're talking about and not someone in an outsourced call center just following a script because unfortunately that's what a lot of these platforms are actually doing bless you um there's a lot of these platforms you know you reach out to the support and it's probably somewhere in the philippines or india and you know god bless them they're actually just following a script and they don't really understand the nuances of advertising or why they may have got restricted they're just giving you a scripted response and usually that response our decision is final sorry can't help you oh yeah in that case you know and that's where we kind of come in we understand advertising because, you know, this is, I've been in the industry for six, seven years myself.

4:15I've had multiple e-commerce brands myself. I've spent millions on ads myself. So when I understand those pains because I felt them, we know how to then provide the support around that. Yeah. And where did, where did this come around? I mean, how did Orange Trail come to be? Yeah, great question. So in 2021, I exited a brand of mine. I had a e-commerce brand and it was, very big brand, multi-seven figures. And I sold it to a VC in Canada. After that, I had a bunch of time, a bunch of money. And I just figured next business, I want something to solve a pain point in the industry. Because I always say you get paid in proportion to the level of problems you solve.

4:57The bigger the problem, the more you get paid. So I had a bunch of time. I was living in Bali. And during this time, I tried to reverse engineer a solution based on a problem. And when I saw in all of these Facebook groups and communities and chats that I was in regularly, people say, ah, I just got restricted. I just got banned. Anyone have a solution? Anyone have a business manager? You know, I saw it as such a prevalent pain point and I tried to reverse engineer. Okay. What are the solutions here? Um, meta and a lot of these platforms have a number of authorized sales partners and, um, you know, agencies that are partnered with them to provide this whitelisted special advertising account.

5:35These are not standard accounts. Everyone can go to your homepage on Facebook, go to the ads manager, and you can run ads. Totally fine. Everyone has access to that. These accounts have a lot more benefits, and I'll go into them. So a standard account will have spend limits. You might be able to spend 20 a day, then 50 a day. It's limited with the daily spend limits until you go weeks, and then it goes unlocked. With agency accounts, there's unlimited spend limits from day one. Not only that, you have a lower risk of ban with agency accounts because they're kind of vetted from the platforms. And remember what I said about the opportunity cost.

6:09Every single day, hour that you are down, you're not running traffic and you're not on the website and not converting. So it's like the opportunity cost there. And then aside from that, as I mentioned already, the support is one of the biggest ones because look at the metal layoffs recently 11 ,000 round one then the second round of course is going to be stretched out in now so huge problem in the industry yeah um how about is there anything that you can do um I had a uh Instagram account and it was shut down uh and they said that there was some funny business going on I still to this day I still don't know what it is no one's ever told me what it is.

6:51And I had 42 ,000 followers on that account and it's gone now. It's been over a year. So, I mean, I've tried, like I, you know, sent all the messages in, you know, did everything they told me and just could never get it back. So it's, that's pretty frustrating because, you know, to them, it's nothing to me, you know, that was, I worked really hard to build up that following on Instagram and it's gone. Is there anything like, can you help with recourse on situations like that? Yeah. So a great question. I'm sorry to hear about that. This is actually really frequent occurrence. So just imagine that's on Instagram, you know, and it's happening across pretty much all platforms.

7:30You know, even our TikTok reps, sometimes accounts go down. Yeah, of course we can. The reason is that we have, you know, contacts at Meta, TikTok, Google, and these are inside reps that are you know working for meta and they're partnered through an ASP with us which means that they can provide you know help in situations like this and what they'll do is they'll escalate your appeal to a higher up they'll ask you to review it as long as there was no shady business you weren't trying to like fraud people out of money or anything oh my gosh no like anyone who's listened to this podcast for any length of time like yeah no josh She's a pretty good guy.

8:04I don't know what the heck. So, but yeah, you know, that's, you know, to me, it's like, it just, it takes all the fun out of social media. You know, when I always have to, you know, kind of always be looking over my shoulder, I'm like, I'm not doing anything nefarious. And meanwhile, I see people that are doing shady stuff. I mean, so yeah, it's frustrating because sometimes it feels like there's no rhyme or reason to it. What does the model look like? like when people want to engage with you, how would, like, how is that model? Yeah. Good question. And also just to add to your last point, you know, that's your personal account, right?

8:4242K followers. I don't know if you were monetizing that or not. No, I wasn't. I was just sharing the same stuff I share on Facebook, mostly stuff about movies and music and fun. Oh, no, that one, I think we were sharing, you know, stuff about the podcast, promoting episodes and stuff. So I don't know. Clean all policy. Yeah, no, we weren't slinging cannabis or anything. So, you know, the point I was about to make is that, okay, imagine that's just a personal problem. Now think of brands who are on that for that's equity. That's, you know, an asset and that goes down and your entire business is going to crumble, especially when you're relying heavily on one traffic source.

9:21So yeah, huge problem in relation to how someone could work with us. So we do have an approval process so not everyone can work with us you know you need to have a complex we need to evaluate if someone is eligible and what is the eligibility criteria well first of all you need to be running something that's clean white hat we don't accept any shady advertisers nothing uh nothing shady um second of all we need to see how much you're actually spending because we don't really accept very small clients like our average is around minimum 10 000 per month and then we have others that are spending millions per month so there is quite a wide spectrum um and And then lastly, there are certain verticals.

9:57You just mentioned, you know, slinging weed. We do actually have a CBD brand that's$40 million. Oh, why is that? They're working with us because they cannot get running themselves. They need that compliance support, which we offer. So when Meta laid off those 11 ,000 employees, I told my team, go and find me one. Find me someone who knows what they're talking about. And we found one. This is a compliance manager, Julia. She really understands the compliance, how to run ads, you know, as clean as possible. So yeah, that$40 million brand now is working with us running ads with stability. So the process for us is quite simple.

10:30You can come to our website, orangetrail.io, have a call with our biz dev team. They'll find out, first of all, what's your business about? What are you trying to promote? How much you're spending? And what kind of issues you have? Then we'll tell you a little bit about our agency. And right now we have over 400 clients and just a year and a half old. And we have around 30 employees total full-time at the moment. So really growing really fast. and we'll send your url to the reps they'll say yes approved or no change this this and this so where else can you get that tailored feedback nowhere else because the other reps they won't really tell you that they'll follow the scripts so what we have is that we have dedicated compliance support where they'll tell you that headline needs to be changed this image needs to be removed you know before and after images stuff like that these regularly get ads disapproved but people don't know that because again, this is the reps giving you proper information as it should be.

11:25Yeah. So what does, like for someone that's listening to our conversation, like they just, they need to have a conversation, you know, either, you know, they don't want the risk of kind of going it alone or going with a really small agency who doesn't have the access, or maybe they're in a sensitive area, you know, like things like CBD or, you know, some of the financial stuff I know can be pretty touchy. But what's kind of that onboarding process? Yeah, good question. So again, the verticals would be CBD, melatonin, vape, sports betting, a lot of these. They're clean, but they're just too new for the platforms.

12:06The policy hasn't been updated yet. First step would be, they just come to our website, orange.com.au, book a call. Our team will have a call with you. And then from there, if your URL is approved, it's very seamless. We can open an account for you within 24 hours, get you into our Slack. Now, we have account managers around the world, which means that we can provide 24-5 support from Monday to Friday. We're the only agency that does that. In the Slack, within a few minutes, you can get an answer any time of day. And the process is quite simple. We need to sign an agreement with every single client because, remember, it's to protect them, but also us.

12:39No shady stuff. and then as soon as your account is ready an agency account it's it's quite interesting because it's part of a meta business manager yeah it's an authorized sales partner business manager it's not your bm the ad account is created up here so it's kind of decentralized and then we share it to your business manager so because of that if you get banned because it can happen on your personal level on your page level bm it has no impact on the ad account that's why these accounts are so strong. So approved, you know, and the fees, the fees are quite affordable as well. We just charge 500 bucks per month and 3 % of ad spend.

13:14And for this, you get peace of mind. You can have as many ad accounts as you want and 24-5 support. And then it's just a matter of topping up the accounts as well. So agency accounts don't have a card. You cannot put a card on there, can't attach your PayPal. They need it to be loaded up like a prepay model, like a phone credit. You put credit on your phone, spend it on data and calls. Same as an agency account, you put money on it, and then you can spend it on ads. And we have dashboards that show how much spend you've had historically, how much is remaining. You always know when you need to top up.

13:45So it's quite a different process to your standard advertising accounts, because you just put your card on it and go, boom, make me a millionaire. On agency accounts, you kind of have monitors and everything. But the benefit is this is the most stable way to run your ads. Yeah. All right. Rohan Khan, again, your website, Orange Trail. It's found on the web, orangetrail.io. And again, you're the founder, CEO. Fascinating. Again, when someone goes there, what should they click on? What do they do? They can schedule an appointment, get agency accounts. They can book a time on our Calendly, or you can also message on the WhatsApp, Instagram, Skype.

14:24We have a lot of more detailed communication. Yeah, I love it. All right, Rohan Khan, thank you so much. Founder, CEO of Orange Trail, found on the web at orangetrail.io. Thanks, Rohan. Cheers, Josh. Thanks for having me.

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