Building Authority and Visibility with Tony Rulli

In this episode, Charlotte welcomes Tony Rulli, CEO and Lead Growth Strategist at Intentional Spark, for a candid conversation about scaling online businesses, the realities of running ads, and building authority as a creator. Tony shares his journey from corporate banking to digital marketing, the lessons learned from launching a subscription spice box, and how those experiences shaped his approach to growth strategy.

Key topics include:
- The importance of testing offers organically before investing in ads
- Why a “growth partner” mindset goes beyond traditional ad management
- The value of group programmes for creators not yet ready for full agency support
- How to design funnels that attract leads who actually buy
- The difference between ad creative and organic content—and why “messy” video often wins
- Practical tips for tracking the right metrics and avoiding low-quality leads
- Why every business owner should understand the basics of ads, even if they plan to outsource

Tony’s advice is honest, actionable, and rooted in real-world experience—perfect for creators and business owners ready to scale with integrity.

tony@intentionalspark.com
www.intentionalspark.com/kaffeen

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Transcript

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hi and welcome to the Authority Builder Podcast. Today I'm so pleased to be talking to Tony Wooley, fresh from Portland, Oregon. Well, actually currently in Portland, Oregon. he's the CEO and Lead growth strategist over at Intentional Spark. Tony's obsessed with online growth strategies and helping creators profitably scale. He lives hikes and adventures in Portland, Oregon with his wife and co-founder, Meg. And, that might be my favorite bio ever. I'm living vicariously through your living, hiking, and adventuring in, in Portland, Oregon, which is where one of my best friends live, coincidentally. And, oh, love. Yeah. It makes me sad that I'm not there to go do all those things with her as well. But thank you for joining us today, Tony. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk. I mean, before we started, we actually dove in a bunch already on a bunch of topics, so I feel like we could talk about a lot of things. I feel like every time we talk, we go in a hundred directions about marketing and business growth, so I'm excited. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, this is, for the audience here, this is definitely not the first time we've spoken and I feel like absolutely there are loads of common themes here and it's super interesting to hear from a very, very human person who works in the ad space because that's not necessarily, you know, a given that somebody's gonna be down to earth and, yeah, like somebody that you can kind of really relate to when you're talking about this stuff. And I really appreciate that about you. So hopefully we can bring, some humanity to the world of meta ads for the audience here today. So do you wanna tell me a little bit more, first of all, about intentional spark? Like how you started, who you serve, what you do with those people? Yeah, I mean the Howie started story, I, I don't know how far back I should go 'cause it's a long winding story. but we work with, typically work with creators or businesses that serve creators. and so what that means is, businesses, influencers who sell all digital products, typically content, content like courses, maybe guides, cheat sheets as opt-ins, memberships, group programs, coaching, and then businesses that work with creators would just be, a lot of software companies that serve creators. but typically we only work with them if they're very big into creating their own content. So there's still content focused and lead driven and nurturing. Um, and where we specialize is really working on the whole funnel. So not just media buying and getting the cheapest lead, but actually working with clients to monitor, measure, and improve. Does that lead convert? And how can we get it to convert? and so that's our real focus. and we got started. I mean, I feel like so many people in the online space got started in roundabout ways, but I used to be in corporate banking. My wife Meg, who co-founded the business with me was a business management consultant. And we kind of just, I won't say hate, but as close as hate as you can to a job. We both did not like our jobs. She traveled all the time. and we ended up kind of making a decision to quit our jobs. We, because we're, we're dorks, we like really put a plan, like a business plan together for how to quit our jobs. So, you know, we spent two years saving up, quit our jobs, and then traveled for a year. Um, and while doing that, this was back in 2012, we really dove into social media marketing, which was pretty new. Um, mostly because we started a travel blog and found that we could get, you know, free guided tours and hotel stays just by reaching out. And so we started to grow our blog. we got up to like 20,000 visitors at our peak in that first year. Met a ton of other travelers who had blogs and built businesses out of them. Um, and then when we came home, we were just like, we have to do anything but go back to the cubicle life. And so we started freelancing, offering social media, content marketing, and I fell backwards into ad management because I decided to start a subscription spice business. I don't know if you remember this, but like those, those subscription box companies were like really big at the time. Yeah. Well, you know what? There was so many parallels in our story, the traveling, the travel blog. Yeah, the subscription business, I probably, anytime I meet someone who like travels the way we did or loves travel, it's like instant connection. Yeah. I, oh my goodness, I feel so bad for, for the people who gave me freebies in a way, because I don't feel like they necessarily got the return on their investment, but I gotta stay in some incredible places and had some incredible experiences because of that. yeah. And back when we did it, it was very much, do you have a website? Do you have an Instagram account or Facebook was it, and we'd be like, yes. And they didn't ask for numbers, we'd say, Hey, we'd write an, or an honest review if you'd let us stay. And then we'd stay in a suite at the Hyatt in Sydney, Australia. And it was like, yeah, I, I mean I would, I would take a friend who's a photographer with me and or a designer and they do some, they take some photos 'cause they have the artistic guy. To be honest, I'm a pretty good photographer as well. I'd like to think. But, and so we'd say, in return you get a blog post, you get some social media posts and you get a suite of photographs that you can use in your own. And we also had a media pack and it wasn't lying. Like it was literally what our reach was and they were happy with that. So I feel like overall it was very ethical, but it was, yeah, it was kind of unbelievable. Like it was, yeah. And well, and the trick was to reach out to places where they didn't have a very high cost, like a hotels cost on you staying there. Or like, we would do the guided hikes and it was like, didn't cost them really anything to Yeah, add us to a guided hike. so that was huge. But yeah, I mean that was, it was a great time. We learned a lot. But yeah, when we came back. I mean, the main reason we traveled and we travel now is probably to eat, maybe drink se. Secondly, we love wine, but like eat first. And so we thought it would be really cool to bring unique flavors and, the flavors of different cuisines in a subscription spice box. So I tried that. Uh, and we got up to like 50 non-family member customers, and every quarter I was like boxing these boxes myself. Uh, it took, honestly by the end, 50 boxes was taking me 10 hours to pack every quarter, 12 hours in this garage. And it was a mess. And I, I'm not a design person, but I would, Mo I would try, I had to make these boxes look pretty. So I was tying, I had beautiful packaging and I was tying bows and it was a mess. It wasn't for me, but it was really fun. But through that, I did everything I could to try and find customers. So I did a lot of blogging and guest posting and. Ads. Yeah. And by the end of it I was answering more questions about ads in different forms I was in online than I was selling to customers. Yeah. And my wife one day when I was I was what do I do now this to make this subscription Spice Box work, we'd have to scale to 10,000 customers. Yeah. To have the math work and that doesn't seem feasible or interesting. that seemed a brutal way to do it. Uh, and she said, well, you love coaching people and people seem to really be desperate for help with ads. Why don't you start doing that? So I switched to freelancing on ads, ad management, ad coaching. And then, six months later we basically joined forces 'cause she was doing organic social media management. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And I had, um, a flower subscription business, cut flower subscription business. Yeah. That's painful because. It's not unlike spices. There is not a long shelf life, so you've really gotta get your numbers right. And then Brexit happened right in the middle of it, and we were importing from ne the Netherlands and the Euro and the pound, oh yeah. Completely flipped. And all of our costs were out and oh man, the, the whole thing was a, to be honest, a bit of a nightmare, but a really steep learning curve. And I think, you know, looking back on it, I have a tendency to think, well, I exited in the sense that I sold the, the company and the brand, the packaging and everything. 'cause we had invested a lot of time and energy into it. And I come from brand design background, so it looked beautiful. Um, but it was, I mean, it was massively a, a loss leader in terms of the amount of energy I'd spent and time and, and personal investment in terms of finance. Yeah. But however, looking back, you raise a really good point. It's the first time I've thought about it like that, it's. It is such a steep learning curve in terms of all the marketing activities. 'cause you have to wear, and I often talk to small business owners about this. You're wearing all the hats in when you're running a small business, but in a subscription based small business, you're wearing all the marketing hats. So you kind of have to become a semi specialist and all these dis different disciplines and understand really quickly what works, what doesn't, what to focus on. so yeah, I can see how it's, it is a bit of a baptism of fire, isn't it, in terms of Yeah. Understanding all the marketing things and you know, when you've got skin in the game because you are the business owner and it's your money, you bring a different attitude to it. You know, I'd spent nearly 10 years, in kind of leading marketing, a new business role for agencies up until that point. And I did know my stuff and I would, but it wasn't my budget and it's a completely different kettle of fish. So I think There's an asset that you bring that you probably appreciate, I've never really thought too, too hard about, but is important, which is that when you've gone through that experience and it's been with your money, it means something else to the people that you're selling to. Yeah. Because you've actually been there. You're not just, you're not been on payroll. Yeah. And I'm not sure if it was, you know, my business background in corporate banking, but I, or not. But I do think starting like learning ads and starting that process focused on growing my business did make me hyper-focused on not just getting email subscribers and leads, but being like, so what? Like so what? I got a hundred leads today, did will any of them buy? And so I think that definitely shaped how I view things. Um, yeah. Yeah. So for them, spice Box, it was really, I mean, it was fun. I learned a lot. My big thing was I picked that because I've, I figured out that I could these spice companies for not too much would either give me their product for free. 'cause for them it was advertising or at cost. 'cause I would, I would let them add a discounted insert, right? Like a 10% off coupon plus their product. So I was able to get the product for like, at cost or free. mm-hmm. And so I really thought it would be a good way to, make that work. 'cause it was advertising for them. But yeah, it was too much. But that led to ads and then my wife and I joined forces and then the ad side of our business really grew a lot more because we could work with bigger companies and with ads you can actually show at direct attribution to leads and sales, whereas mm-hmm. It's, it's not impossible, but it's often more difficult to prove, at least immediately, you know, organic social's worth, you know, it's hard to convince someone people do it, it works, but you have to really believe that it's a long-term plan to grow and engage on organic social. It's hard to say like. This last month of investment led to this many sales and future sales, whereas ads, you can straight have the numbers. and so that took over the business and my wife became the COO, I'm CEO. And so she's much more now focused on the operations of the business, but mm-hmm. We could talk about travel forever, probably. I know everyone's, everyone's signing up to listen to growth and Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So we can talk forever about travel. What made you reframe from ads agency to growth partner and, and how do, how have your clients responded to that shift? Yeah, it's for like active clients, it hasn't really been a shift. It's really been more of a, how we're starting to outwardly brand ourselves and talk about ourselves. Uh, mostly because I realized a lot of our clients and prospects would talk to other agencies and ad teams, and were looking at us and then, as media buyers. And what we do is a little deeper. Some media buyers do this, but we really work with clients on their marketing funnel, their marketing strategy. I turn away most prospect calls 'cause I advise them, to test all of their funnels organically first. Yeah. They need to have numbers that we can then apply to ads to give real projections of what might work. And so a lot of our time with clients is spent reviewing landing pages, sales pages, checkout pages, email funnels, 'cause all of that is what really drives ad success. there's a ton of hacks and strategies that that help. But on the ad side, but really, your own, your offer and your marketing flow is what determines if you're gonna have a profitable ad strategy or not. And so because of all of that focus, we really do more than just media buying. And so. Now we're starting to talk about ourselves as more of a growth partner. 'cause that's, that's what we've always been. So for existing clients, they don't notice anything different. but it's more in how we kind of are talking about ourselves now and, and where we spend more time and energy, in our own marketing, which we're just starting to do, but, which is one of the reasons you and I started talking. 'cause everything you talk about with, how to go from just referral to actually growing, an actual client list is what we're starting to actively do. So, yeah, absolutely. And being an authority in your space. And, the, I think being a growth partner and taking active interest in every part of the funnel is so different from the majority of ads. People that I come across, they're kind of like, just go sort all of those things out and then come back. When you're ready to scale. And, um, I'm just kind of curious though, when you're talking through that and you're saying you, you turn away a lot of prospects and you encourage them to go test everything out organically first, does that mean there needs to be a certain amount of organic traffic before you're willing to do ads with the client? Uh, typically what I always say is you either have the time and energy to go test your offers yourself, or you have the money and the, patience to test it with ads. Yeah. Because if you're bringing a new offer with a new marketing funnel to ads, there are so many variables. Uh, we've run, we've had clients who want to test with ads first, but then they test that offer to their own organic audience after. And it doesn't sell. Mm. And so it's very rare if your audience, if your ideal audience is not going to, take your free offer or buy your, paid offer, it's very rare then for ads to do better. Yeah. the only time I see that work is if you're trying to switch audiences. you're moving from one discreet audience to another and you just don't have that audience, then maybe you can start with ads. But otherwise, if you can test organically first, just to get some level of data on what percentage of traffic converts to a lead, how many of those leads, buy, how do they engage? 'cause then you have a benchmark to measure against ads. Yeah. Versus just, is it the ad? Is it the audience? Is it the ad creative? Is it the sales page? Is it the checkout page? what is causing people not to buy? There's a lot of questions if you don't have any benchmark data. Yeah, absolutely. And I know a big thing for you, since we've known each other has been, has been a shift from just working like one-to-one, doing work on behalf of clients and moving into more of a group delivery. why did you decide that was necessary and what is the advantage to your clients? Yeah, so we still do one-to-one, but for a long time I've wanted to do more, offer more one to many offers. Yeah. 'cause I think a big, a lot of times we'll talk to people and I either don't think, even if they're interested, I just don't think it makes sense for them to pay our ad management fees on top of their ad spend because they're not ready. and so I wanted to offer, but there's a lot we can do to help those people. It's just in a one-to-one. We're very custom. We, we integrate pretty deeply with the teams we work with. It's just not really feasible, you know? Yeah, yeah. For lower spend. But there's a lot we can do to help people. Uh, we actually, one of my, one of my biggest business regrets is in 2019, right before kind of COVID shut everything down in 2020, we've beta tested a group program. We had 15 people in. It went really well. but then in 2020 and 2021, our business really exploded with a lot of creators who were seeing success and needed help with ad management. And I just, I couldn't balance both. Yeah. And so we really just focused on the one-to-one. and so last year, did you regret that? I wish I had stayed focused more on, building our own. Brand and 'cause I think with a group program and with those offers, it's a little, I can then balance marketing ourselves and growing that, and that feels more long term. Whereas, and I mean, client growth, you can too, but I am not necessarily interested in building, like a giant agency. Mm-hmm. and so, and that's what I realized is I really love coaching, advising, working closely, on strategy at higher levels of spend, but then really working with a lot of creators where I know we can pretty quickly demonstrate some big wins for them with ads, in a group setting. And so we've been focused on that this last year and really this last quarter or six months focused on finally, you know, marketing ourselves and trying to get out there. Um, and that's why I love, I love your offers and the way you discuss it. 'cause that's exactly how we've been thinking about shifting from referral to, our own marketing is really, it, I'm tired of people referring us and saying we're a best kept secret. that phrase, it's very nice. But also after a while it feels like an indictment of my own marketing skill. and so I've been, I've been a little more focused on really trying to, educate, get content out there to teach people so that we can, demonstrate authority and expertise and, and help more people. Yeah, it's always an interesting one 'cause I know, I know exactly what feeling you mean, but at the same time, there is no better new business than referral. I I, no, it's the best sales call you can have. They, they're already ready to sign. It's very good. So yeah, I don't hate that. And it's also such an incredible sign, and I don't think everybody who has grown their business through referral necessarily appreciates this. But I think it's the biggest testimonial that you can receive. And it's not necessarily something that you can put on your website, Oh, I don't know. Maybe you can, 78% of our customers come from test from referral. That's true. Yeah. I actually think that would be the most persuasive thing that I could see on somebody's website. And I don't see that. No, it's true. I'm very grateful for every referral. We still take referrals. I'm not, I'm not gonna say we don't. Oh, no, no. Sure. Of course. If anybody wants to refer us, we're wide open. but we are much more intentionally now trying to stay. we work very closely with our one-to-one clients, on the full ad management and growth side. And so, we're taking on fewer of those and really trying to commit, we're committing to doing our own marketing and building up our own email list and audience so that we can then. have one-off offers to help them, group programs to help them. and so that's really a big focus kind of end of this year heading into, next year. So in terms of, you've spoken about shifting, so you're doing more of your own marketing. What does that look like for you right now and in terms of what you're actually doing and, and what do you plan to do moving forward in that area? So we've been spending a lot of time really, it's the kind of work we do with clients on the growth side, where we work with them pretty closely to either take content they have and figure out ways it can be repurposed into a marketing funnel. I'm also, I'm trying to come up with a better word than funnel. I think sometimes funnel is overused, but I don't know if you have a better word for it, but it is, whatever we want to call it. The ability to bring awareness to your ideal audience, convert them to a lead, right? And then con and then demonstrate that. You have content to buy, right? Like to work them through a marketing funnel. That's the basic idea. Yeah. And stuff. I feel like it's, it's like no, like, and trust multiplied by the passage of time. I need to work on a more concise, yeah. Kind of a acronym or something for that. But yeah, it's hard. Funnel has so many negative connotations, but I think, in terms of the literal shape, I think it kind of tells you everything that you need to know. You need to, you need to look, think about, I love kind of thinking about marketing in the sense of literally being in the marketplace. Somebody shouting what price they have oranges at the people who want oranges are gonna gravitate towards him, test the softness of the oranges, and then potentially purchase them. The number of people who come to the store, the number of people who purchase gradually gets less. It is a funnel, right? Like there's no other way of looking at it. And that is a a is most basic level what marketing is. So. Yeah, I don't think it's a dirty word. I think it's just overused. Yeah. And I think people get sick of it. And I think, you said something at the beginning about, we're, I forget exactly what you said. Like we bring humanity to ad management and growth marketing or something like that. Yeah. And I think a that is, I appreciate you saying that. It actually is something we really try to strive for is a, you know, the, the personal level on the work we do with our clients. Um, and honesty and integrity, I feel like. Yes. And a high level of communication and understanding that many clients, even at very large sizes, don't have a deep, full understanding of fun, you know, marketing metrics, ad metrics. And so we're always working to not just throw jargon at them, but explain like why this is important. Here's what this is telling us. Right. So, yeah. 'cause they know their business best, so if we can give them. That level of understanding, they can also advise us more. Um, but I think the other reduces turn, right? Like you will have clients for a longer period of time if you are able to educate each other and you've got a reciprocal relationship. Yeah. And then they're also willing to, when, you know, ad results aren't as good or they're not seeing as much growth, uh, they don't, they're not as likely to just bail because they understand. Right. They understand what you've been doing and the strategy and what might be happening and really trust you. Um, but related to that is also the idea I think of that humanity part of marketing, which is I think funnel sometimes and personalizes what you're doing. And then I will talk to a lot of people where they start to. They're just grabbing other tactics that they see other people doing. Mm-hmm. And not applying that level of, for, you know, humanity to it, to be like, who is my ideal audience? what problem am I solving for them? Right. And really coming at it from, you know, an empathetic standpoint and not just, here's a seven step funnel that this other large business uses that I'm just copying and pasting. 'cause oftentimes what works for one business doesn't work for another. A lot of the funnels that people say, work for them, work for them now when they're a $10 million revenue business, but didn't work for them when they were a $500,000 business. So just taking tactics, and I think that's where sometimes funnel feels impersonal is not really, the concept is very true and it's important, but not starting at the first principle of like, what do they need? How can I lead them through some education and values to, have them. Then find my paid offers useful. so that's what we're doing for ourselves now. We're, we're kind of reverse engineering who we wanna work with, and creating some free offers that give a lot of value, get them set up for success with growth and ads, and, try to identify pretty early who is our ideal audience. So I, I know for you that's like a monthly webinar test, right? Do you wanna talk us to us a bit about how that's Yeah. So we've been testing to our own email list, monthly workshops related to ads and growth. just starting to understand like, what does our audience resonate with? you can measure it by just how many people sign up, right? Like, what problems do they have? How do they engage on the workshop? also it gets me more practice talking in public and on workshops and understanding. how to communicate to people in a way that then gets them excited to maybe join our group program. Mm-hmm. and so those webinars, those workshops are a really good way to just test different messaging and to see what people are engaged in. I almost always recommend that to our clients, you, they take time, right? So, it can be a lot, but it is a really good way if you're running ads or not, to consistently test new messaging, new value, new, free value add content, and to pitch your audience. Your audience does not get mad if they sign up for a webinar. You give them a ton of free value and then you pitch them your paid offer. And so I think not enough people keep selling to their audience. Yeah. They either sell too much with just email where it's they're just sending emails out to buy, buy, buy. And that doesn't really add value. Yeah. But a workshop or even just a, an ask me anything type of live q and a really is a great way to engage and, and keep selling your offer. Yeah, at the time of recording, we are going into a launch right now. it started yesterday, we're on Tuesday. It started, uh, on the 13th of October. And my sales coach has got me, sending an email every day and then sometimes more for three weeks, two to three live training for a relatively inexpensive service, one-to-one service, which I love doing, but I just feel so uncomfortable about it, even though it's my job, you know, like even though, and I have my own sales coach, even though I'm helping people with finding leads. So, I think the key thing here is not just, Sell to the people who've agreed to hear from us and have indicated that they want to buy from us at some point in the future, because that is what an opt-in is. But, also that we don't give them enough chance to actually listen in to the thing that we're giving that's of value. I think, you know, we could talk all day about the attention economy, but I think it's so easy. Like you, the, I am on your email list and I don't feel like I'm fully aware of the webinars and things that you've got coming up. And I wanna say to you, Tony, send more emails. Do you know what I mean? Because that's what I've been doing. Yeah. And that's what I've been experiencing. And I just think whatever you're doing, do more is kind of the, is the kind of the answer. And that doesn't necessarily mean you have to, Put loads more energy and effort into it. I like, as you mentioned, the more you do it, the more you become accustomed to it, whether it's presenting, whatever else it is, and the, there are economies of scale, but generally the rule of thumb is whatever you're doing, you need to be doing a lot more. my, my biggest lesson was very early in my marketing career where I worked for this creator, uh, who taught people how to write and sell their book. And I'll never forget, it was so simple and it seems insane from the outside. if this was your business, you'd be like, that's crazy. Every week, Wednesday, at one o'clock, he did a live workshop, same, same title, same topic, promoted it to his entire email list every week and was like, Hey, if you missed it last time, probably the email list or beyond that, we, he running ads as well. So like all new people were getting it, but then every week his whole list would get an invite and. But he sent other email that was value add if people si, but what, what he would find is people would sign up and not show up for the first one. They'd sign up, show up and leave after 10 minutes to the second one. Yeah. Sign up for the next two and never show up. Third one, they get halfway through and then on the sixth one, they show up again and they're like, this time I'm gonna watch it. And then they'd buy. And so he'd get buyers who watched for the first time, but he'd get buyers who he could go back and be like, they signed up for six of these and life got in the way a couple times and they, they weren't quite sure the second time. Yeah. I don't necessarily recommend doing that now. This was earlier on in e internet and email marketing, but I think it is a good lesson of you could probably, everyone could probably be doing more. Yeah. You don't have to get that creative. You could do the same thing a bunch of times. Yeah. And your audience. Won't be that. you could send the same email every week promoting a webinar, but just change the subject line and some of the email copy and that's enough to keep people engaged and then they'll be like, oh, I saw this workshop, but the email was really good. So a hundred percent agree. I think oftentimes that's a great way just to get data and to test and just keep selling. So do you feel like at this point in your monthly webinar test process, you've kind of landed on a winner? And if so, what was it? So, so far, yes, we have one that's jumped out to us both because it's something that we've recently noticed in the last couple months, our clients getting excited about and every time we talk about it in our weekly newsletter, we get more engagement. Um, it's, it's something we're building offers around, but it's actually, we've thought more about it and talking about like how we're building our own marketing. Um, we're not quite focusing on it, but what it is is a ad creative system, so it works for organic content too. but it's a process to systematically come up with, really social media creative, right. To, to sell your offers. So it could be organic, could be by selling, it even could be a lead offer. but to take a concept that would be interesting to your whole audience and then it breaks it apart into different, types of messaging depending on different pain points and benefits. And people get really stuck. I mean, we do too. Coming up with their own organic creative, how many times can I come up with a way to say like. If you're ready to do this, get this free offer. Right. and so we came up with this system that walks people through it and people get really excited about, I needed a blueprint for how can I make not just any content, right? But performance creative. So creative design to convert. and, you know, it works organically. It's just with ads, it works really well. And also you can scale it much faster with ads. So that's really jumped out to us if a lot of people are interested in that. And so we've been kind of leaning into that lately in some of our, you know, workshops. And do you, on that note, do you see there's a difference between the kind of creative that works with ads versus the kind of post slash creative that works generally? Honestly, there's always differences, but no, because the best ad creative. Is highly engaging, and attracts your ideal audience. I think the biggest difference, so we, we primarily just do conversion marketing, conversion ad campaigns, meaning we're not optimizing for engagement or awareness. We're optimizing for a lead or a purchase, or, yeah, someone who at least reaches the checkout page. And so if you take a piece of content that gets a ton of engagement on organic, sometimes it works to convert people, but sometimes it doesn't. And so that would be the biggest difference. But a lot of times with ads, we'll take something that got a ton of engagement. Maybe it's just a, a simple quote card where it's just a really good quote over. Yeah. And if it's related to the offer, whether it's a freely a lead magnet or a paid offer, if we use that, but optimize for ads, your ideal audience engages with it and then clicks to learn more button. Then a good sales page can still convince them. So oftentimes it, it can work well. Mm-hmm. and so I think, and that's where people get really hung up, I think with ad creative too. I love ad Creative that doesn't actually have a call to action. You all, if you're just starting out, you always want a call to action in anything you're doing, especially organic. 'cause it's harder to get people to go to your bio or click a link. Yeah. But a really engaging ad is gonna have a learn more button on it that people can click. And so just getting them to stop and engage with content that's related to your free or paid offer is often enough. Yeah. And, it's so interesting that I, I, my ads coach currently is Claire Pere, and I know you've been a co-coach in her program before. And Lead Coach. I love Claire. Claire's one of my early first online best friends. She's the best. And I, I, I mean, I got to know you through her recommendations and also the podcast episodes you recorded with her, and I'm very grateful that, yeah, I found you through that. she really encouraged me to do messy. Selfie video ads, which, yes, I have to say, regardless of what else we test, still always win. Uh, the only thing is I feel so uncomfortable then when a friend will send me a screenshot and be like, I saw your ad today, and it'd be the first time they've seen it. I'm oh, I, I'm fine with it until somebody I know sees it. But also your friends take screenshots and it's like the absolute worst thumbnail screen. Like it's the one moment where your eye, your eyes are closed, your mouth open. I know it's always, they don't, they don't pick a better frame, you know? It's always the one that's just ridiculous looking. And it's not mean. It's coming from a place of love, and I know they're proud, but has I instantly feel nauseous? But I have to say, it's so true. the things that don't look like ads in, in my experience, have been the things that have performed best in terms of, leads, opt-ins, conversions, cost per lead, all of those things. You know, they've, they've worked out the best. So if it feels. Not polished enough. It's probably gonna work well, in my experience, we, we, yeah. We work with clients who have big budgets, like both on their marketing team and with ad spend. Yeah. And the mistake oftentimes those teams make is they use their budget to produce the video. And highly produced videos can work. Highly edited videos can work. Yeah. We'll definitely work with our clients on creating those. But I always like people to start with some images and some straight to camera video. either, you know, sitting down, but I really like holding your phone vertical, doing a walk and talk. if you just go through your own feed, and this is dangerous now with the way reels and TikTok works 'cause all of our feeds are so different. So I don't know if your video's actually, but if you just go through enough people's feeds, the ones you stop and watch, those should be the inspiration for Oh, yes. Sometimes it's, it'll be like a three minute talking video. Yeah. But they said something in the beginning. There's a caption that's interesting and I'll just watch like a three minute video of someone talking to the camera. It can be highly engaging and so I really recommend that's where people start. You don't start with a three minute video, but definitely just make a bunch of videos where you're just walking and talking and have some mess ups. Being human in it is not bad. Yeah, it can be really engaging. Absolutely. And I feel like that is, kind of the moral of most of the conversations that I have with clients is seek completion and not perfection and just get the thing done, get it out there. Don't spend, like, as you said, all your budget on it, you could be focusing on something else. Whatever you're spending on producing a highly polished video, you're not spending on reaching people. Right. And if the intention was to find more clients, then why not have to be that, be the focus of where you're spending your budget and then you, you know, when you get those clients in, you can scale it from there. So kind of on that note, what signals tell you that a low cost per lead is the wrong audience? Because I know this is something I've fallen for in the past. Yes. It's very exciting to have a low cost per lead, and to grow your email list. And so that's where I see a lot of people kind of get going down sideways, the wrong paths. Right. And that's usually where they burn out with the team is like, we'll talk to people and they're like, you know, I ran ads for three months. The agency said I had an amazing cost per lead, but like I just didn't get buyers. and what's funny, I think a lot of people assume if I can get leads, I'll get buyers. Hmm. And so usually if you don't talk to them deeply about it, most people when they're starting are just like, oh, I want 500 leads a week, you know, at dollar 50 or $2 a lead. And that'll be, and it'll make me happy. But the reality is that won't make, work for them. They just think that we'll convert to sales because the truth is if we're talking all the ad platforms do this, but with meta, it's amazing at doing what you want. and I'm not sure how much of your audience has run ads or understands, but at the basic level, you can put pixels on your website, you can set up a conversion event. So for a lead you can say anybody who hits the thank you page is a lead. Meta can see that. And when if you optimize for leads instead of just traffic. Meta will actually start by looking at the audience you give it and then making that audience smaller and trying to find just the people in your audience who typically opt into things versus if it's a traffic campaign, it tries to find the people in the audience you give it who love to click things. And then as they take the action, as they opt in and convert to a lead, meta is learning what they look like and then they go find more of those people. And so that's how you, it's very powerful. But people who love to opt into free things are not always people who love to buy things. And so you can often get a mismatch of a ton of free leads who never buy. Yeah. And that's where a, knowing your benchmark numbers, if you could test your marketing funnel and your offers organically at least a little bit, you could know that I know for a fact organically 5% of people who opt into this lead buy the trip wire offer. I like a low free off, a low paid offer on my thank you page. And if you know that, then if 0% of people after a hundred leads or 200 leads have bought, you might start thinking like, something is wrong. My, my ad creative or my messaging. 'cause I know that the people that usually opt into this do buy. Um, and so that's where if you have any data on your funnel to start with, it can give you a baseline check of something seems off. Mm. the other things you can do if you are running ads is meta's Great. If I'm assuming most of this conversation is meta for the, is that Oh yeah, yeah, completely. And to answer your previous question, I think the majority of people listening don't use meta currently. They think maybe it's not for them. however, I think used correctly it is for the majority of my audience, which is why I was so keen to talk to you. Yeah. And I, I, we work on all the other social platforms and we do Google ads. But we're very specific about, what platform works best for which audience and which client. and I do think Meta is the one that most Google too, but Google can be much more difficult to dial in early. but for Meta it's the one that most universally works for everyone. we've worked with people who are my audience isn't on Meta. I work with C-Suite executives. I'm a coach for C-Suite executives. And it's well, so how old are they? They're 15 plus. They're C-suite executives. They're definitely on Instagram looking at grandkids pictures. The trick is engaging them when they're not in a business mindset, right? Yeah. And so that's where you don't want to be maybe selling to them. You want to have some kind of lead offer. Maybe it's training material that they forward to their team. And so with Meta, you just have to kind of think through and they put the human humanity back into marketing, right? Of just what would be valuable to that person at this time? and so, yeah, the other thing to look at, you ask how would, how do you know if your leads aren't quality? In meta, you can do a demographic breakdown to see who your leads are. And I would say in the last year we've been seeing this a lot when we do, growth audits is people's free lead campaigns are overwhelmingly driving free leads from the 55 and over and 65 and over age group. Yeah. Group tends to opt in and at a cheaper rate because they're not marketed to as much and it can work really well if that's what your buyers typically are. Mm-hmm. But then if we ask to see an age range of someone's buyers and they're younger than that, all of a sudden you're building an email list of people that aren't your typical buyers and so you start to get a mismatch. Yeah. I see that happen a lot. And so you can force. You can target lower age ranges. Sometimes it's just changing your messaging. But that's a big one too, is, is looking at does the underlying data match at least on a high level, like who your normal audience is. And that's in the audience settings. Right. Ask him for a friend. I'm gonna go do that now. Yeah. Always happy to help you too. Yeah. In your ads manager, you know, next to the columns where the reporting numbers are is the breakdown tab. Yeah. And in the breakdown tab you can break down by placement region, like country or state. Yeah. but you can also break down by age, gender, a bunch of different demographics. You can see if you're testing multiple pieces of ad copy, you can break it down by like the best performing ad copy. Yeah. but that's a big one. 'cause that definitely we've been, last year we've been seeing that pop up a lot more for, lead campaigns. Yeah. That's not the first time I've heard that. And it's interesting to, to hear you say it too. So can you, just thinking about, we kind of talked a bit about this already, but thinking about if somebody. Looking at their campaign, they're like, should I be putting more money in? What are the three funnel metrics that we'll predict whether ads will scale and how confident you should be around that? So this is where this actually ties into, you had asked, you know, what topic have we seen really get more engagement? And it's, it is the ad creative. Yeah. But we're actually working on right now, even though that's been getting a lot of creative, the one thing that people really, I think need, if they're gonna have long-term success, is a funnel designed to give them this data. And so, you know, I, we call it like the encore flow. So trip wire funnel. If people aren't familiar with that, right? The idea is someone opts in for a lead magnet, a free offer on the thank you page. You have some type of low priced offer. and then usually to make that profitable with ads, you also have an order bump and an upsell. But the value of that is. You can start seeing if your free leads are buying anything right away. So maybe you have a $2,000 offer. Maybe it's a coaching program, maybe it's a $59 a month membership. You don't offer that right away. It takes a lot more leads to get someone to buy that. Maybe more nurturing, but a low priced offer right there. You at least start to get data of do these leads buy anything from me? And at what rate? And if it works well, it'll pay back some or all of your ad spend. But that's where you can start finding. 'cause oftentimes you'll see, if you looked at the age breakdown, you'll say, well, this age range is all the buyers, but they're only 30% of my leads. Maybe I should just focus on this age range. Or you'll find this audience I'm targeting is a more expensive lead, but a cheaper purchase. And so I should invest more in these more expensive leads. And so Bill, having a funnel intentionally designed I think I'm a big evangelist for this type of funnel. I think that thank you page for free offer is basically open real estate. Like you're not gonna lose the lead. You teach them, you sell things. And I often hear people with high priced offers say like, they don't want, they don't think it matches like having a low priced offer, but A, the data you get is so valuable and B, as long as you make that lower priced offer something that your high priced offer people would still find value in. You don't wanna have like a, if you're only targeting people, say over a million in revenue, you wouldn't want to have your low priced offer be how to start a business. Right. And that's where I think people start to find that low priced offer doesn't work, but maybe it's a, a projection spreadsheet. Like this is something we're gonna have, which is, here's a projection spreadsheet where you can put in your numbers and play around to figure out like, what metrics do I need to even have ads make sense, like at a basic level. and so that might, that's gonna be more interesting to someone who actually has metrics and numbers. But that funnel is really what we're focusing on because that is going to give them and give everyone real data on buyers, which is what we ultimately care about. but to answer your question, not everyone has that set up right away, right? I do like to have some kind of secondary action on the thank you page. So maybe it's schedule a call, join a wait list. we've had people who have a Facebook group and the group is really good. And so it'll be a button to join the Facebook group. You can make that an event and just monitor like how many people are taking that higher level action. How many people, what's the cost of that, you know, where is it going? And so those are slightly deeper metrics than just like cost per click. But those, I think the metrics that really matter. so just a question on that, that, so if it's an event and in order to be trackable, it couldn't just be a click on something. Like, for example, here's a podcast episode we think you'll like, based on what you've signed up for, you can make that an event. Mm. But you can make, you can make any click or any page visit an event. you can, yeah, I'm just thinking if you're sending them off to Apple Podcasts, but you'd need to do it on your own podcast. Yeah. And so you could do it, sometimes it's not Meta has a, in page events tool where you can set your page up and use meta to actually but it's perfect. It has to like read your webpage correctly. Yeah. Otherwise, if you're familiar, like we use Google Tag Manager primarily for event placement. So if someone's not familiar, there's a bunch of easy tutorials, but you know, in that you can set up, uh, link clicks and button clicks and fire an event on that action. Um, and so you could definitely do that. And then you can even do something where if you're getting enough volume, you could optimize for people who on your thank you page, click to go to your podcast, your lead costs will be higher. But if you think that, or if you know that that's a more valuable lead, yeah, you can tell meta like, forget about leads. Just optimize for people who opt in and then click to go to my podcast episode. Yeah. That's so interesting. Yeah. It's so interesting because I, we've talked about this before and yet somehow it's completely flown over my head, or at least I haven't remembered that the trip wire to use the term in the industry. Um, I don't love that term. That's why. Yeah, that's why I, we, we call it the encore flow just because it's like, it's not just the tripwire, it's like the whole series and the idea is, you know, your audience is actually be, if it done well, your audience is begging you to do more. Right? Yeah. Like an encore. It's not just, you're not just throwing offers in front of them. You're like leading them through the perfect offer for that next step. Yeah. Also, the word kind of suggests. Criminal or vermin, I feel likes. Yeah. Well and it's like a trip wire is like you trip on the trip wire and a bomb goes off, right? exactly. So I once had a friend try to coin the term like, welcome mat, which I think is a Oh, that's nice. I like that. A nicer term. Yeah. But I know that's why lately we've really been trying to, focusing on the term encore. 'cause like when it's done really well, your audience, it's a bunch of no-brainer offers where it's like, yeah, you give them this free offer and a great, a great model is you give them the free offer that teaches them how to do this thing. Mm-hmm. Like for example, how to build your own metrics tracking spreadsheet. And then they get to the thank you page and it's like, Hey, check your email. You can follow that one hour video. It'll show you exactly how to build your own spreadsheet or for nine bucks, just buy the finished spreadsheet yourself, right? Mm-hmm. And so a lot of people will be like, oh yeah, I don't, I'm not good at spreadsheets. All the formulas are done. I'll just buy that spreadsheet. yeah. And that's a ton of value. And they're like, yeah, that's definitely the thing I want now. And so that's the key to like a good funnel like that is really making it so it's just super easy. It helps them a ton and gives them value the whole way. Absolutely. It's not about the revenue you're gonna get from that. It's about the indication about how gonna fit this. This person is gonna be for your business and vice versa. Um, and allow, allowing you to prioritize more of those people, which I think is super smart. Um, so I, I mean, one final thing because I know we're, we've run outta time basically, but uh, I know it's not gonna be the last time we speak, but can you tell me, it's dangerous too. You and I end up talking forever about marketing strategy when we get together. Yeah, I mean, it's literally, it was gonna be not the last time we speak this week, but we've just pushed a meeting. So, um, but tell me, Tony, what is one practical way somebody listening in can fix, um, like using ads, ads and getting stuff out there without a big team and without additional support? Where would you recommend they start? Aside from, like if, imagine they've already tested with their organic audience, they've tested with their email list, and now, now they're like, now what? Where do we start? Yeah. Do they just call you? Yeah. Just talk to us. Well, I'm a big, there's two types of people. There's the person who is willing, and I would say excited is probably the wrong term. I'm probably only myself and other app vendors get excited about running ads, but likes the data and likes that kind of dopamine rush of trying something and seeing the results. And so for that person, I do suggest all creators, all business owners. Unless you're already at scale, learn ads yourself enough so that you can understand the basics, you know, how the basic things work, because that's also then how you can quickly judge anyone you hire later. too often you end up working with someone and you just don't know if they're good or if what they're saying is complete bs, and so if you can at least know the basics, try it yourself. Yep. there's tons of great content. our friend Claire has a great course. She does. absolutely FB ads. Really what I recommend it, and I would say the most complicated thing is just the setup, like just getting a pixel in place and getting the conversion pixel in place. But there's a ton of free content on that too. and just start with a lead campaign. I would not start with a sales campaign, and just try and get leads, you know, 20, $25 a day optimize for a free lead. Just start to get comfortable with it. You know, we offer group coaching and we offer group ad management. and so like if you've run ads a little bit, our group coaching's perfect for that. But I think doing it yourself is something I always recommend. Every business owner. Our best clients are clients that ran ads themselves at one point. we can talk quickly in jargon. They understand exactly what's going on, and it helps us more. So that's definitely one. and also for like this type of funnel, I, I think I told you this, but people can go to intentional spark.com/caffeine. K-A-F-F-E-E-N two. F two E. That's correct. Two Fs. Two E. yeah. And that's a, that's, that's our lead magnet. It's a guide on building a landing page that converts not just leads, but attracts leads that we'll buy. and it's for organic or paid. So, you know, it's what we've learned running a lot of ad spend, to cold traffic. So it works even better from your own warm organic traffic. and that kind of, then if you go into that and you opt in, you'll kind of start learning more about our model for like the best ad funnel, the best organic funnel, to really attract leads that buy and get more of a vibe about what it's like to work with you as well, I imagine. Yes. Which is, as we started, you know, at the top of the podcast of more human perhaps Yes. Rather than humane experience of, of doing ads. But I think you raise a really good point. Just to finish off on that, I think, you know, I, our business model is. I need to find a more gender neutral way of saying this, but teach man to fish. And, and I do think on that note, it's super important. Even if you're starting with advice from somebody else or you know you're doing it the other way round, you are teaching yourself first, and then you're getting advice from somebody else. Is, is to know that at some point in the process you're gonna have to get your head around this and you cannot completely outsource it to somebody else. Um, I think that is key to the best return on investment you're gonna get in any kind of support in any area of marketing or pretty much anywhere else in your business. Yeah. And uh, some meta ads is something I did for a long time until we got our wonderful tech person, Hannah, in the business. Um, help me to implement the stuff that I'm learning from Claire and also from you and our conversations. But I, is she running? Is she running your ads? Uh, she does in the sense that I set things up, they go really badly and then she fixes it for me. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah, and it is funny 'cause a lot of creators work do that where they don't necessarily have an ads full-time person, but their operations person oftentimes VAs have some, some, yeah. Experience. 'cause we, we end up working with a lot of those in our group coaching program too. Or just the operations person for a team. Yeah, absolutely. I, I mean, Hannah is very specifically, um, tech focused. She's like the queen of just getting things done. She's phenomenal. But I wouldn't say she leads on strategy in terms of meta ads. I'm very much implementing the stuff I'm learning elsewhere and she has worked with a lot of other people who have done really well with ads. So probably I should lean into that more. But honestly, I'm getting so much advice at the moment in the coaching program I'm in and, and the budget, you know, is constrained in ways that mean that we can only test only things at once. But definitely having some understanding of it know what, knowing what people. Talking about when you're working through it, like feeling like you've got some element of control over it. Because, for example, it took me about a year to realize it wasn't about the cost per lead, which is something you've talked through today. You know, understanding like attribution and understanding what the average lifecycle was before somebody purchased time, you know, in audience before somebody purchased and, and understanding testing enough of the lead magnets to understand which was the most appealing. And that wasn't necessarily the same as it was for the organic audience, which is why I was curious about what you said. But you've got to know that it, it doesn't matter whether you're doing it yourself or you outsource it to somebody else. And definitely try it yourself first. It's gonna take time until you land on the right thing. So don't give up too soon because you'll hit the sweet spot at some point and it will not be about what somebody's recommended to you. It'll just be about, you'll go too far one way, too far the other way, and then you'll end up in that middle bit and then you just say, okay, we can just run that and forget about it for a while. Now until then, you get ambitious and you want to do something else with it. Um, which is kind of where I'm at now. But, um, yeah, that's so true. What you just said is so where sometimes, like you want, I always recommend test it on your own organic audience, test it with warm audiences. 'cause that gives you a baseline, but that also gives you your ceiling of like, this is probably the best 'cause to your point sometimes then you go test it with ads and it doesn't work. But you know that that offer does work. But maybe that free offer only works for your warm audience 'cause they already know enough about you, right? Yeah. They know what you're about. And so you might then you can at least have data to be like, I know people need these sales offers. But I, I need to solve a different problem for them than the one that my existing audience has. 'cause they've already self-identified. Right. And, and that's where you can really start. But you know, your paid offers are, are good and people want them. So then that's where you can really start testing. But that's very true, to constantly be testing. And so I always advise people, ads sometimes work with people and they turn ads on and it just prints money. And that's where you hear people talking about ads as like an ATM. But that is very rare. Most of the time you wanna launch, if you're launching like a lead magnet, you wanna launch a lead magnet and already have a second one in process to make for just the next step of like, we're gonna test this for a couple weeks and then we're gonna try this other one to see if it performs better. Yeah. That's a lot of the success of ads, bringing the boring truth to marketing you and I that's money are so few and far between. I feel like most of the time I'm just telling my clients this is a medium to long-term strategy and it's not what people necessarily wanna hear, but it would be if I was running a business. So just the people who tell you the truth. Yeah. It is such a Debbie Downer thing to say, but yeah, it's the hardest dollar you make is a passive dollar, because of all the work that goes into dialing that in. You know, everyone thinks of passive income is set it and forget it, but a, you usually gotta keep touching it and optimizing it, and B, it can take a lot of work to get to that passive income level from organic or ads. Absolutely. Well, you've already mentioned where people can go find you. Who should get in contact, Tony? if you already have, you know, paid offers in an organic audience that's converting on those paid offers, it's a perfect time to talk to us. if you're ready for ads or if you're curious, you know, but maybe not ready. We do growth audits, so we'll go in, look at your funnels email list, and you leave with like a full plan whether you're gonna do ads or not, but it comes with an ad plan too that you can then implement yourself. so any creator typically, you know, high six figures in revenue a year or more, usually seven figures for our full ad management, but if you're running ads yourself or spending less than 5,000 a month, or group programs are perfect. And that's really for like the a hundred thousand to $500,000 revenue creator. Very good. All right, well, we'll link up all the, places to go into the show notes and, I look forward to the next time we speak. Thanks so much for joining us, Tony. Same. Thanks Charlotte.