157: {Interview} The Evolution of Facebook Ads with Lisanne Murphy

In this conversation, Lisanne Murphy shares her entrepreneurial journey from childhood to becoming a successful business owner and marketing expert. She discusses the evolution of Facebook ads, the importance of data-driven strategies, and innovative approaches to client engagement, including contact marketing. The discussion highlights the changing landscape of digital marketing and the need for adaptability in advertising strategies.

takeaways

• Lisanne's entrepreneurial spirit began in childhood with unique money-making ventures.
• Her transition from corporate marketing to owning a business was driven by a desire for creativity.
• Facebook ads provided immediate feedback, revolutionizing how marketing effectiveness is measured.
• The landscape of Facebook advertising has changed significantly since its heyday.
• Diversifying marketing channels is crucial for business resilience.
• Contact marketing focuses on personalized outreach to build meaningful relationships.
• Data-driven advertising requires a mindset shift towards viewing ad spend as an investment in learning.
• Successful campaigns often involve testing and iterating based on data insights.
• High-ticket products perform better on Facebook ads than low-margin items.
• Building relationships is key in today's marketing environment.

Connect further with Lisanne on LinkedIn HERE or her website HERE

Transcript

Caroline Pennington (00:01.205)
Welcome to San.

Lisanne Murphy (00:03.121)
thank you so much, Caroline. I am seriously stoked to be here today.

Caroline Pennington (00:08.001)
Okay, so truth, I went down a LinkedIn rabbit hole about your professional life before this interview today, and I found out so much more about you that I learned, but I will start with an introduction. You used to work in corporate, now you own your own business, you're a serial entrepreneur, you're podcast host, all the things. So I wanna hear how you did it.

Lisanne Murphy (00:31.958)
Yeah, well, you know, I've always had the entrepreneurial lilt like even like as a kid, I was never one that wanted to, you know, bag groceries or flip burgers. And there's nothing against that. But like, I was always finding really unique ways to make money. Like, my very, very first job as a kid is I would take my allowance, I'd go to the gas station, buy candy, and then resell it to my friends at a higher price. And so I would make money by

reselling candy that I got for cheap. And then my next gig was when Titanic was a huge thing, right? I was in middle school at the time when Titanic was, you everyone was like swooning over Jack, right? I was getting into drawing and I would hand draw pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio's face and then sell them to my friends at school. And like all the girls were like...

They loved, know, they had a hand drawn picture of Leonardo DiCaprio. And then in high school, I taught private drum lessons. So my first love was music and percussion. And it was through music that I learned dedication and fundamentals and different things like that. And so I taught private drum lessons. And so all of my jobs growing up were like very like ingenuitive talent based type things. And what actually happened is

I got lost in the formalized Western trap, I guess. It was a trap for me. It's not a trap for everybody, but it was a trap for me. And so, you know, I did my due diligence. I went to college. I have multiple degrees. I went into corporate, but I always had this desire to break the ceiling and do something different. so I was...

at a marketing job in corporate, was doing events marketing for a publishing company. And I started doing Facebook ads just for fun on the side because all of our budget for the advertising for the publishing company was very traditional, like print type advertising, internal email marketing, things like that. And there wasn't a lot of client acquisition type stuff.

Lisanne Murphy (02:49.678)
Facebook ads was like just, it was really the heyday of Facebook ads. Honestly, this was like, like 2016, 2018. And I started dabbling in it and I was like just enamored because I could get immediate feedback about how our ad spend was working. We didn't have to wait till the end of the quarter or the end of the year to look at the PNL to like be like, did our marketing work or not? We were, I could know every minute. And so that just like, it literally like, it was a hook that just

stayed. And so I just dove into everything Facebook ads and worked on Facebook ads for the company I was working with and had an amazing success with that. And then also all of my, had a few friends that were starting to jump into the online world and do online courses and things like that. And I just asked them, said, can I share some of the things I'm learning with Facebook ads and just do it for free for you? And you can pay me on the profits if it works. And they were like, great. And so I just basically like use my friends money.

to learn Facebook ads and get paid if it worked on the backend and it did work. Again, this was the heyday before when ads were just easy. game has changed quite a bit with Facebook advertising, but at the time it was kind of the holy grail. But the user interface, as you know, is so challenging to understand. So if you knew how to use Facebook ads, it was like you were God's gift to a business.

my agency was actually born on accident. It was just, just kind of like followed the breadcrumbs of like things that were interesting to me and like trying things with friends. And at first I was coaching my friends on how to do it. And then they were like, you know, this is so cool. This is brilliant. It actually makes sense to me for the first time, but like, can you do it? And I was like, I guess I sure. And so it's like, I mean, I guess we need a contract and like, I don't know, maybe you should.

Caroline Pennington (04:21.921)
you

Lisanne Murphy (04:44.706)
pay me if I'm going to do it. You know, I mean, it was like, was like super just kind of fell into it. And so the agency was, was, was born that way and it just grew from there. So like, first it was coaching, then it was agency work. Then the podcast came so I could talk about some of the methodologies that I was using with clients and then courses came and it just, you know, one, one iteration upon, upon another. but for me again, the power of ads or all direct response marketing channels,

is the direct feedback of is it working or not and the power of human behavioral dynamics and data analysis. And so that's kind of the story of like how I got into marketing, but there's always been an entrepreneurial theme through the story.

Caroline Pennington (05:31.977)
Okay, I love that story and I love, thank you for sharing about your different jobs that you had. I've been working since I was 15 years old too, so I understand and I've done everything under the sun, like wait tables, hostess, lifeguard, like you name it. I was always hustling and making money. Okay, so let's talk about, I like that you brought up the fact about how corporate marketing, they always refer to like,

print and those boring things. like, how do you know if your customer is even gonna look at it or if they're just throwing it in the trash, like when you walk out the door, like with digital ads, you can actually see like the click through rate, how much money they're spending, how many orders you get in all the things. And so how did you, okay, it sounds like you really got into it when Facebook ads were really coming out. What is Facebook ads? Like what's the difference between now and 2025 versus 2016?

Lisanne Murphy (06:20.93)
Yeah, really good question. So I think there's a couple major differences. One is in 2016, due to the Facebook pixel, which still exists, but due to the Facebook pixel, Facebook, you could track people's behavior on platform, on Facebook platform, but then also off platform when they came to your website, like super accurately. And so,

And really what you were doing is you were paying Facebook to allow you to take people off their platform. I mean, that's really what it was. like, I'll let you, if you pay me, I'll let you take them off my platform. Cause it, you know, it does Facebook good to keep people on their platform. So, and you could track everything from like how deep they've scrolled in a page, how long they stayed in a certain area of the page, did which buttons did they click? mean, there was just so much visibility that you could get.

And so, and the market wasn't as saturated, know, people, not as many people were advertising. And so even someone with a small budget could do some pretty good damage in terms of like a good damage, right? In terms of getting a really, really high ROAS. Like for example, there was an e-commerce company that I worked with for several years that an e-commerce now, like if you're getting like a

1.5 to 2 ROAS like you're 2.5 like you're doing pretty good. In the early days, like we were doing six to eight ROAS like very easily all day every day. And in 2020, there was a massive algorithmic shift and algorithmic update that really shifted everything. And it was that the visibility of tracking people post platform was erased for a lot of customers. And

what and talking to my e-comm client, they were like, oh man, if I knew that ROAS was going to go from like me being having like a six or an eight down to like a 1.5 to 2.5, he's like, I would have literally like gone bankrupt to take out loans to put millions into Facebook ads. mean, it was just, it was such a seismic shift. So now there's still a lot of behavioral tracking, but it's more predictive. And

Lisanne Murphy (08:43.02)
What's interesting about Metta currently, mean, so now people call it Metta and not Facebook, but they're really trying to, and I think they're in a developmental stage for, like they always are, but right now they're really trying to create, to make advertising easier for people, which is good. It makes it harder, like as an advertiser, like Facebook ads, getting them done by somebody else just isn't as valuable as it used to be because there's so much AI help and...

guidance now that like really anyone can run ads and do fairly well on their own. so it's just not as popular anymore in terms of like having someone run it, right? It's just kind of like been like super commoditized and easy to do. But you do have to have your margins. I mean, if you don't have margins in your products, like I find that like high ticket products do much better on Facebook ads.

then e-commerce, you are like an e-commerce, it needs to be like a lifestyle brand, right? Where there's like a, there's a mission behind it. Like just doing like selling tchotchkes, doing drop shipping, different things like that. Like that isn't as effective on Facebook ads as it used to be, unless there's a huge market dynamic. Like for example, like in 2020, before Facebook banned being able to,

advertised for face masks, people made millions on selling face masks for like during the COVID pandemic. And then, know, Facebook cracked down or the government cracked down on that and they didn't want, they felt like people were being duped and abused and so you couldn't sell them anymore. But it's just, just, it's just so, it's just tough. It's just a much tougher environment in terms of needing margins, but it's also easier in a way because Facebook is

taking away a lot of the manual controls and they're just like saying like, just trust us, just trust us. And so it's just, it's a funny game. I have a client right now where we've got, we go back and forth all the time between trusting the algorithm and then taking those controls off and manually setting up everything. And it's like some months, one does better, another month, another does better. It's just, it's kind of the wild west in terms of getting it to work. And so my philosophy again with my clients currently is

Lisanne Murphy (11:04.334)
to diversify more because I've had a few clients where every bit of dollars have gone directly into Facebook. And whenever there's a shift, it really disrupts their business. so diversifying into other channels is really, important for the health of any business.

Caroline Pennington (11:21.525)
So what channels do you like besides Facebook?

Lisanne Murphy (11:26.518)
Yeah, so I mean, and this is speaking to you. It depends on your audience, but LinkedIn is really powerful. mean, like, I mean, you were even blowing my mind when we had a conversation recently of just how few people are publishing on LinkedIn, right, currently. And so I think I think that that, you know, the the if your customer is on LinkedIn, like LinkedIn is a really powerful tool, I think more for organic than for paid. And

So, and I think that AI is also creating so many opportunities with finding contacts. Like cold email is a really, really powerful channel because there's so much information on people that can be scraped online and delivered. And so, but again, it really depends on the customer. Like you wouldn't use email for e-commerce, but if you're a service provider, then LinkedIn and email are really, really powerful channels. And so,

kind of how I'm working with my clients right now is I'm proving offers and getting a pipeline going with LinkedIn and email. And then once we have some things dialed in and we have some budget coming in, then we start to scale with Facebook. And so instead of going direct to Facebook, Facebook is a scaling strategy instead of a go-to-market strategy just because of the budgetary constraints.

Caroline Pennington (12:46.433)
Okay, I love that. And that's brilliant. If someone's listening to this podcast now and they're like, okay, I know I need to run a campaign or I know I need to start spending money on ads. I'm ready to do that. Where do you like, where do you start? Like how much money do they need? Like, what does that look like?

Lisanne Murphy (13:01.676)
Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good question. think honestly, the most important thing if you're going to run ads is you have to, you really have to change your mindset. People are really nervous about ads because they don't, they're like, I just, I, it needs to work, you know, and always like every sales call I ever have. I'm like, how much are you willing to spend on Facebook ads? They're like, if it works as much as, as much as I can, you know, and it's just like, and, and duh, right. That's like obvious. However, like

Facebook ads is about data. Like you have to be in the mindset of starting of like, am spending money to get rapid data. So I'll give you an example of this. So I was starting a business with a buddy and we were wanting to do a coaching business for helping e-commerce brands that were on Etsy only. And we wanted to introduce them to Shopify. And so that was kind of like our, what we wanted to do. Now we could have like,

posted organically on our social media and gotten some traction and gotten some interactions, but it would have taken months to get interactions with people and make sure that our message was lined up correctly. We decided to use Facebook ads to validate the idea, which most people don't do this. And I wouldn't necessarily recommend this unless you're confident that you're setting up your ads correctly, but just show, I'm sharing this story because it's about the importance of looking at Facebook ads for data.

So we decided we dumped seven grand in a week into a Facebook ad campaign to fill up a webinar to pitch our thing. So it was a live webinar, right? So we ran ads for seven days, thousand dollars a day, filled this webinar, had attendees come and we pitched our idea. And when we pitched it, we realized that we were, we'd, our messaging was, it pulled in people that didn't actually have an active shop. They like wanted to do e-comm. So we were like, shoot. Like,

Our messaging pulled in people that were too early in our customer journey. It's like the right people, but too early in the journey. So we were like, okay, let's make an iteration. So we changed our copy. We put things like, who is this for? Who is this not for? More about what we're wanting to do with them instead of leaving it a little bit nebulous. We ran, and again, another seven grand. And so we spent 14 grand in two weeks. It was about 15 grand.

Lisanne Murphy (15:24.642)
because of like how the ad spend came out but Ran the second webinar and from the second webinar we had Eight people that joined our like little like mastermind and My business partner kind of took the took the business and ran with it and he had two people that he's still working with and is now equity partners within their e-commerce businesses and has scaled their business from like a little Etsy shop to like a close to eight figure e-commerce business

And so, mean, just, you know, when you think like 15 grand in two weeks, like that's insane, but we validated a concept that now like my buddy that went and like ran with that business, like he's done hundreds of thousands of dollars with this company. And then when they're, when they go to sell it, if they, if they decide to sell it, then I mean, you know, it'll be the ROI on that is just, it's just insane. And so you have to look at ads from a data gathering perspective, like

what message is working, what people are actually wanting to buy your stuff. And if you can do that, then you're in a good spot. To answer your question directly in terms of where you start, I think a good place, if you can, it also depends on if you're doing a national campaign or local. If you're doing a local campaign, you can get away with doing ad spend of like 10 to 50 bucks a day, which still adds up. And some people get really nervous about that.

If you're doing a national campaign, think kind of like the bare minimum is like 100 bucks a day. If you can do 100 bucks a day, which is three grand a month, which again, it is a lot, but you can get some really powerful data. And especially if you're a service provider and let's say you have a retainer that is like two grand or three grand a month, right? Like after a month or two, even if you close one, your money comes back really, really quickly, but you have to be...

Like whenever I'm selling Facebook ads to someone, tell, I say, have to be willing in your mind to like, just pretend that you're setting 10 grand on fire. Like if you can use to me 10 grand to play with and they're like, I'm like, okay, like, you know, like you're, might not be ready for Facebook ads. I'm going to do my very best to not set your money on fire, but like that you're going to be learning so much over that process. And when it clicks, I mean, it, really is. It's.

Lisanne Murphy (17:47.054)
you create an ATM for your life.

Caroline Pennington (17:50.626)
All right, talk to me about ads. Ads are the same to me as organic is the time you have. Like how much time do you need to give an ad to collect enough data to actually have ROI on your dollars?

Lisanne Murphy (18:05.132)
Yeah, that's a good question. you need to look at like, let's look at ad spend, like filling a bathtub, right? Like if you're, if you turn the faucet on, just a little bit and like, it's like trickling, dripping out, it's going to take a few hours to fill that bathtub. But if you crank the faucet all the way up, it's going to take you a few minutes to fill up that bathtub.

That's the way ad spend is in terms of gathering data. So the lower your ad spend is, the slower you gather data. The higher your ad spend is, the faster you gather data. And so if you want to gather data faster, because time is money in business, right? And so you have to find this balance of what is the comfort level of spend that I can do.

in order to learn fast enough to make decisions to make it worth my time and my money, especially if you're paying someone to run your ads, right? So like, and I like to run tests, like when I work with clients and it depends on the size of their offer, but I like to run tests in 500 to a thousand dollar increments. And I will typically do that over the course of a week. So a week or two for Facebook to truly optimize. I mean, if you're doing like, like Bible,

version Facebook ads, it's set a campaign and don't touch it for two weeks, which I think can like freak people out. I think you can get pretty significant data like within a week. The algorithm can do a lot of learning. But if you can like do like $500 to $1,000 in a week, you can tell either keep going with this or we need to make an iteration and try again.

Caroline Pennington (19:56.994)
That's great advice. So what is lighting you up with some of the clients that you're working with right now?

Lisanne Murphy (20:01.614)
So will you ask that one more time?

Caroline Pennington (20:03.541)
What is lighting you up with some of the clients that you're working with right now?

Lisanne Murphy (20:06.07)
what is lighting me up? well, thing that I'm the most interested in right now, actually like, it isn't even Facebook ads. I, don't, like, when like something becomes like second nature to you, you're kind of like, okay, like what's like the next thing? Like there's this, there's the thing, this thing that I've learned about recently, it's called contact marketing. And it's basically like, like direct mail on steroids. And, I think that.

People are so inundated with just so much messages from an organic perspective, from an ads perspective. And so like, what does it take to cut through the noise? Like, what does it take to create a meaningful relationship? And also like with the business people, the business owners that I'm talking to, all of them are saying like, this, our business is relationship based, our business is relationship based. Like we need to build meaningful relationships, right?

And there's so much power in these mass channels such as organic or ads. But really, I'm looking for how do you really spend your time and money to cut through the noise? So there's a thing called contact marketing, which is basically it's a one-to-one campaign. So if you've ever read The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes, he introduces a concept called the Dream 100. And the Dream 100 is you

Pick who your most ideal customers are, the people that would absolutely change the trajectory of your business if you were to land a contract with them. That's your top 100 prospects. And you do research on them to understand who is this person, because you have a company you want to work with. You do research to figure out who's the person that I need to make a connection with in order to get this deal.

And then you create a very specialized campaign to reach out to that person. So it could be as unique as like understanding that this person is a huge fan of this particular sports team and you get them a customized jersey to send to them. Or it could be something like, let's say you're an author and you have a book and you find a passage in the book that you feel like would relate to them based on the research that you did on their company goals and their personal social media.

Lisanne Murphy (22:30.388)
and you write a note to them in the margins of that page, stick a bookmark and a letter to them in the page and mail in the book. So it's like a very personalized outreach. And the goal, the call to action is have a meeting with me, just have a meeting with me and let's just have a conversation. But the effort and the energy and the attention and the personalization that the campaign creates, creates these powerful connections and conversations with like top companies.

to cut through things where like cold email ads, organic, like just aren't gonna cut through. And so with my agency right now, I'm really leaning into this strategy with, I have one client that I'm in the middle of the process with and it's just fun. It's really, really fun. So I mean, it's a lot of energy because you're creating these one-to-one campaigns, but the ROI on it is massive. And it's not just like random, like there's a book by Stu Heinecke called,

how to get a meeting with anyone. And he's like scripted out like a time, script by script, how you reach out, what you say, how you say it, how you think about these outreach devices to reach out to people. And so I'm really wanting to lean into getting high quality meetings with top people that like,

just are not ever going to respond to like ads or organic. So that's, it's like very niche, but that's what I'm, that's what I'm into right now.

Caroline Pennington (24:04.737)
I love that. That almost is like taking marketing back like 20 years ago. Like what worked 20 years ago is what people are missing. And I agree with you. mean, people want the high touch, like the high personalization. Like they don't want just like the throw spaghetti at the wall because we all get that all the time. And so annoying.

Lisanne Murphy (24:23.436)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Caroline Pennington (24:27.105)
Okay, so as we wrap up, how can our listeners find you?

Lisanne Murphy (24:30.614)
Awesome, I love it. the best place right now, like with all the most current things is my LinkedIn. So pretty easy to find. There's not many, I don't know if there's any other Lisanne Murphy's. I've got a lucky name that way. And so finding me on LinkedIn, I do have my website, lisannemurphy.com. My website is focused a little bit more on the Facebook ad side stuff of what I do. What I just mentioned, if you were interested in that, that's more, you're gonna find more of that type of stuff on LinkedIn.

And so yeah, those are the best places to find me.

Caroline Pennington (25:03.465)
and I'll tag everything in the show notes. Thanks, Lisanne.

Lisanne Murphy (25:06.658)
Thank you.