Jody: Hello and welcome to this episode of Online Confidential, where I have got a special guest with us all the way from some secret location on a little island paradise. So we have Anneloes with us. She is one of our Elite Ad Manager graduates and she’s absolutely crushing it with a couple of offers that she has with people. I also love how she crosses international boundaries with her offers and services. So Anneloes, thank you for being here with us today.

So first of all, tell me, where is your secret little island paradise?

Anneloes: Thank you, Jody. I live on Lanzarote which located on the Canary Island, which is just between Spain and Morocco. I would say in the middle of nowhere really.

Jody: Love it! I just love how Facebook brings all these people together that we would absolutely never know in all these random places of the world.

Okay. Well, are you ready to dive in? I’ve got six questions for you.

Anneloes: Yep. I dare to take the challenge.

Jody: Tell us who you are and what type of clients that you run Facebook ads for, or who you support with Facebook?

Anneloes: Well, I can say immediately I don’t run ads for business owners. I actually help them with Facebook ads and I call myself actually a ‘marketing whisperer.’ That’s based on 25 years of accumulated experience and every time I say 25 years I feel so old, but it’s a bag of knowledge I bring to the table. And just the fact that I combine my marketing knowledge with my Facebook ads knowledge makes me a different person to talk to from any business owners.

I really focus on entrepreneurs with an online offer and I like it to be all kind of offers. I’m not really specialized with just webinars or that, because it makes it much more interesting for me. And with all the experience I have, I quickly can see what works and how they need to clean up their sales page.

Jody: Awesome. I love how you dive into Facebook ads, but I love how you’ve expanded. You still have that expertise and it’s getting in there in their accounts and actually helping them to see for themselves all this wealth of knowledge that you have so that they can better understand them. And it’s a much more scalable thing for you, right? It can help so many more people. So I absolutely love that.

Question number two. What do you like best about Facebook ads?

Anneloes: Good question. Do I like Facebook ads now? Kidding. I do. But I think what I like best about Facebook ads is that when you know what you do and when you’ve done the Elite Ad Manager course, it’s like almost turning on the magic.

If you know which which button to turn, which clicks to click, and if it doesn’t work most of the time, it’s not the ads that don’t work. And that’s what I like most about Facebook ads. If I take it from my perspective, looking at the business owners I work with, what I really love is the fact that I let them work in their zone of genius. I take away what they don’t know doing that and I stay in my zone of genius and that’s just a really good combination.

Jody: Absolutely your zone a genius. That is a great place to be. That’s what I always say to people. What’s your zone a genius!

Question number three. What do you find is the most frustrating thing about getting qualified leads from social media?

Anneloes:I think my biggest frustration is that people come to me and they say Facebook ads don’t work. I’ve tried Facebook ads and they don’t work. I want to try something else. And I have business owners come to me saying, can you help me get clients in another way? I don’t wanna try Facebook ads. I’ve done that. I burned a lot of money.

That’s a red flag and I even wrote a book about it. That’s a big frustration I have about that. I always ask them questions then, did the ads not work? Did the funnel not work? Did you get traffic to your landing page? Did you? And then they look at me like, well, you know, kind like, oh, well, and that’s exactly my point because you know what, Jody, 9/10 times in a conversation like this, the ads worked. It’s what lies behind the ads that didn’t do the work. That’s my biggest frustration. People saying that ads don’t work.

Jody: Absolutely agree. There’s so much more to it. Ads are just one piece of that marketing toolkit.

Question number four. What is the one significant insight that you would give business owners about Facebook ads

Anneloes: I would say don’t advertise before you’re ad ready. I have business owners come to me with the words, I’m not getting any customers and I want to advertise now, can you help? Because then I get customers, right. And that’s another red flag for me because I’m like, why are you not getting any customers?

I mean, of course it’s a legitimate question. I mean, can you help me get clients using Facebook ads? Normally the answer will be yes, but if they are not getting clients, just doing ads doesn’t necessarily mean they will get clients. We need to first also look at what their setup is. What does their sales base look like? What does their offer look like? And if they haven’t been getting any clients, the chances are something is not quite right there. So if a business owner is contemplating ads for the first time, I would, I would ask them to ensure they’re ad ready by just really ensuring they have a converting offer.

Does that make sense?

Jody: Absolutely. It does.

Question number five. What is one significant insight that you would give other people interested in running ads for clients?

Anneloes: Well as an ad manager, I think you really know your stuff. I mean, if you have a lot of knowledge about running ads, and if you’re thinking about doing this for people you need to learn really how to do that. But once you are the expert, you shouldn’t be humble about the knowledge you have.

Sometimes we are a little bit too careful. We stay in our own lane, like, well, I know about this about ads, but you know, there is more knowledge because you also know a little bit about sales pages when they can deliver all the traffic in the world, but you want your clients to be successful.

So I think as a Facebook ad manager, it’s right to actually stand up with your knowledge and say, ‘hey, listen, I’m the expert.’ You should ask questions to your clients. If they come to you, saying listen I’m looking for a Facebook ad manager and I have this offer you.

Actually do we have time for this?

I have two things I would like to share that. First is, like I said, they should ask questions and the quickest way for a Facebook ad manager to check if somebody’s ready. Asking questions about conversions, past conversions. Do they have an offer that sells? Do they have something that is converting? Why are they looking for a new ad manager?

Because they need to dig. They need to dig deep into why this is a new client and these are normal questions. Sometimes somebody comes to you with a new offer or a new sales page. They’re completely new and then you need to check that sales page and you don’t need to be an expert about that.

I can give you three ways that are very important. If that’s in place, then you are a little bit further in helping your client getting leads. The first one, and I’m sure you agree Jody, is the headline. It really needs to be a strong headline and the headline makes people read further. It invites people to read the page. If that’s off, if it doesn’t match why they clicked they’re gone.

The second one is the pain points. Now I know pain points, when I say that sometimes people already kind of like turn their eyes like yeah, pain points. We know it. And it’s true. You hear it everywhere. You need to speak about your pain points, but the check you need to do here are the pain points on the sales page specific. Are they really specific? And an example I always use is of a personal trainer. You see them a lot. They always say like you know, lose weight for an example. But lose weight, lose weight how? That means something different for me, I do triathalons for a hobby and if I wanna lose weight it’s because I wanna get race ready. But if somebody else wants to lose weight, it’s a different reason. So be specific with the pain points.

The last one is frequently ask questions. Most of the time I see a sales page where they just threw on at the last moment with some questions. It’s the most imoprtant section of a sales page and it’s the perfect way to pick at the resistance of the clients you wanna get.

So the three things that Facebook ad manager can check is, is the headline strong? Pain points. Are they really specific? And then is there a substantial, frequently asked questions part of the site. If these three things arne’t there, they need to work with their clients and get them ad ready.

Jody: Love that. It’s not just about ads, right? Because this is where a lot of ad managers get caught up thinking, oh no, I’m no good. Things aren’t converting. They’re not getting sales. This is where ads help us get that data to say, well, actually here’s the bottleneck, you know? And  if they don’t have those three points over there on the sales page where you’re sending traffic to. They’re not going to convert. So people may be clicking on your ad, but not converting over here.

The chances are there’s issues with that page that you’re wanting to convert them on. So thank you for bringing that back into it all, because it’s not just all about the ads. Ads are just one part of that whole marketing and conversion strategy.

Last question and this is the most important question of all. Are you a dog or a cat person or neither?

Anneloes: Well, I think I have to whisper the answer because there’s a cat lying right behind me, but that doesn’t necessarily make me a cat person. I would say I’m both because I’ve got two dogs sleeping downstairs. So I think I’m both. Is that a good answer?

Jody: That is, that is a very safe answer. Thank you, Anneloes. Now you mentioned a book. So tell us more about the book. How can people learn about your book?

Anneloes: Well the book is basically about what I described are some pitfalls I see mostly solo entrepreneurs make with their marketing. It’s not just based on online. It’s not just based on Facebook ads, but I describe 20 pitfalls that solo entrepreneurs make in their journey to become a successful entrepreneurs and I’ve just finished it. It just needs to be published. For now it’s only available in Dutch because I am Dutch and I work with a lot of Dutch clients, but I will have it translated later this year and then I will be sure to tell you about it.

Jody: Okay, awesome. So in the meantime, where can people find?

Anneloes: They can find me at https://anneloeszuiderveen.com/

Jody: Awesome. Well, thank you so much from coming to us all the way from, as we would say in Australia, the Canary islands. Thank you for being here with us and for sharing your insights with us.

Thanks for listening and joining in, and we look forward to seeing you next time.