Salome Schillack is an online marketing and Facebook ad strategist. She helps online course creators launch scale and grow their courses and membership programs faster with clever Facebook and Instagram ad strategies that work. She’s the head of Shine and Succeed. It’s an agency that helps multis six figure online course creators and membership owners scale and get to seven figures faster. She’s also the creator of the Launch Lounge, a membership experience where new online course creators come together to learn how to build their audience and create their first profitable launch. Salome is also the host of The Shine Show podcast.
Podcast Highlights
How has Facebook Ads Changed?
Salome Schillack: [00:08:35] You know, back in the day when we did start, we used Facebook ads for one thing and that was for conversions. Why it was so easy to build audiences on social media that we could build mega audiences without putting a single dollar on Facebook at all on a Facebook ad. So so then when it did come time to launch something or sell something, that’s when we would go, OK, I’m going to put some money on Facebook ads because for every dollar I put in, I’m directly linking it to a sale that will get me two dollars out.
And that worked for a while until Facebook started running out of inventory because there are more advertisers than there are space in the news feed and until Facebook started getting competition.
Salome Schillack: [00:09:56] But what I think, what Mark Zuckerberg noticed…thing is the days are over of us just being at the mercy of whatever Facebook gives us. Facebook realized that they need to step up their game in terms of keeping people on the platform. And what people don’t want is marketing. What they do want is relationship. What they do want is to have connected relationships with the people they love when they come to social media.
Now, if you think about the algorithm, the algorithm is basically a very smart artificial intelligence (AI). And how would an algorithm know when a relationship has occurred? The only indication that the algorithm has is engagement. So they then made all of the organic algorithm, the organic algorithm basically died. Right. It died for everyone who just..you can’t just post and expect people to see it.
“Facebook realized that if engagement is the currency of social media, if engagement is the thing that keeps people coming back, then we need to hold advertisers accountable for engagement as well.”
If you’re not getting engagement on your social media, your social media is going to die and or it’s going to feel like you’re walking through mud trying to build an audience on social media. But that also counts for ads. Facebook realized that if engagement is the currency of, you know, of social media, if engagement is the thing that keeps people coming back, then we need to hold advertisers accountable for engagement as well. And we need to create content in the news feed that people want to engage with, not just stuff that says ‘download’ my thing or ‘buy’ my thing.
And so now what we’re seeing, what we’ve seen in the last three years in the news feed, in the ads, in the ads industry, is that Facebook is rewarding the accounts that have engagement on it. So the more engagement you can build on your ad account, the better it is for you. And long term, Facebook actually brings down the cost of your conversions because now you’re giving Facebook what Facebook wants and then they reward you by putting your ads in the news feed because it’s deemed quality.
“Facebook is rewarding the accounts that have engagement on it”
Salome Schillack: [00:12:36] So we can talk about the different content types and we can talk about the different the value of different stats or a different data points from a data perspective, a share is always going to have the most like it’s that’s the most valuable thing. If you can get someone to share your ad, then that is like that is like the best thing ever, because that indicates to Facebook this is share-worthy comment content. This is something that people are going, wow, this is so good I have to give it to other people.
Facebook Engagement Hierarchy
- Share
- Comment
- Like
- Click or 3-second Video View
And then lower down from a Share is a Comment. Lower down from a Comment is a Like and then lower down from there is just a click or a three second view, a 15-second view or ThruPlay would be in there as well. But I think I always tell people to think of engagement as like a continuum of the highest level of action you can get people to take. Right.
If I’m sitting watching TV and something comes up on my news feed and I watch three seconds of that video and then I keep scrolling versus I’m scrolling through and I see something and it makes me laugh and I click like and I share it with a friend. I have been way more actively engaged than the passive engagement when I watched a video.
So a lot of people often say, well, I’m just going to run a few video view ads and get some cheap video views, which has a place. But it’s not. If you’re wanting to build engagement on your account, there’s video views or passive engagement. And I want people to go after the active engagement and that comes back to content.
And as far as content goes, what we want to create is where we want to create stuff that makes people feel things. There’s a reason why memes are so popular because they usually hit some kind of a nerve or show some kind of a truth that that we might not want to admit to or that we’ve already decided is a truth. But people aren’t actually saying it out loud or it’s showing us a moment in our life which when we see it as a meme, we go, yes, that that’s exactly what happens. And it makes you feel something. It makes you go funny, you know, laugh. It stirs an emotion.
And so from a content perspective, we want to create content in terms of engagement ads that makes people feel things associate like, identifies our ideal customer and helps them immediately associate with us and go, yes, this is my person, this is my tribe. This person has the answers for me. This person gets me. This person gets my struggles. This person gets my desires.
So you want to think about the content you create from the perspective of how can I make people feel something?
How do you create content that engages?
Chris Casale: [00:15:43] If you don’t have a background in content development or depending upon the type of audience that you’re trying to reach, what is the advice that you give to clients when they’re going through that sort of brainstorming process or trying to come up with content ideas that will strike that emotion or, you know, strike that level of nerve and create that engagement?
Salome Schillack: [00:16:04] That’s a great question. I think we need to let go of the idea that we’re ever going to arrive there. It’s a journey. It’s a journey to discovery, and it’s a journey that changes because as you change, your audience might change, the desires of your audience changes.
You discover you become better at meeting your audience where they’re at. You become better at identifying those desires and pain points of your audience. So I say to our clients, we start with what’s already working.
We look at your social media and we go, what is already getting engagement here? What are the qualities of those posts that are already engaged, getting engagement? Why is it hitting a nerve with your audience? What does it contain and how can we replicate that? And then we run what’s already working.
We start by running what’s already working as engagement ads, and we start by running it to their warm audiences. So people who are or have already engaged with them in the past, people are on their emails, people who’ve been to their websites because those people are more likely to comment and share.
Right, and then we run into a cold audience and see if our messaging and our marketing is still matching up and if it’s still hitting that nerve, if it’s still getting that reaction, and if it doesn’t, then we go back and we say, OK, we’re closer because this worked with the warm audience. But we need to tweak it a little bit for the cold audience and find out how we can create content that is going to resonate with our audience better. So that’s kind of where we start.
And then the beauty of having engagement ads that work on is you don’t have to create new ones all the time because you’re constantly running it to a cold audience.
Salome Schillack: [00:23:19] So when they see your engagement ad, because they have already had some contact with you, you’re already building that Know, Like and Trust factor, they’re more likely to engage with that post. And yes, you can totally create an ad from a post inside the ads manager.
You literally build it exactly like you would build any ad. But just when you’re selecting the creative part of the ad, you just say use an existing post and then you go and pick up that existing post from your Facebook page and you run the existing post as an ad.
Is there a specific Facebook Ad budget you recommend?
Salome Schillack: [00:24:01] Yeah, that is the beauty of this, is you can start doing this for $5 a day. And I recommend that it is the first five dollars you spend in your business because the payoff of spending that five dollars a day is going to be so big for you, because in the long run, you’re going to have all these audiences that are starting to warm up to you. Your social media is going to come alive.
Salome Schillack: [00:25:31] So I say you run it to your warm audience until you hit a frequency of four. So you have to keep an eye on your frequency with this one to see if you get to frequency of four. Now, if you’re just starting out and you have a really small audience, you don’t have a lot of people yet.
You might hit that frequency within a couple of days. And that’s okay. It just means everyone in your audience has seen it four times. Now it’s time to move on and then you can run it to a cold audience and a cold audience will usually identify through interest by targeting.
One Takeaway from Salome Schillack
Salome Schillack: [00:54:36] Oh, I think in terms of Facebook ads, I want to say start before you’re ready. Start before you’re ready. Because, again, it’s not a linear process. It takes, it requires figuring out. It requires winning and learning.
And you’re going to win and you’re going to learn and don’t be emotional about it. I think that’s the other thing is people get very emotional about their ads and about the ads manager and tech and Facebook shutting things down. And it’s a journey. It’s a beautiful journey. It’s filled with ups and downs. It is unexpected.
But when you get to a point where you have an engaged audience who shows up when you speak, who engages when you ask them to, and who buys when you’re selling, I tell you, it’s magic. It’s magic.
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