Mateo: 00:02 – Hey it’s Mateo of Two-Brain Marketing. On this edition of—
Mike: 00:04 – Mateo. Excuse me, sorry. Sorry to interrupt. Mateo, it’s Mike. I just wanna ask you a couple of quick personal questions. How old are you?
Mateo: 00:11 – Mike, I’m 29, but—
Mike: 00:17 – That’s perfect. You live where?
Mateo: 00:20 – I live in New York City, but I really don’t see what this has to do with—
Mike: 00:23 – Just work with me here. I know you’re a marketing expert and you are right or left handed?
Mateo: 00:28 – I’m right handed.
Mike: 00:30 – OK. Now what I’m looking for is I’m trying to get a marketing expert on our podcast. So I was going to run a Facebook ad and I was going to target it at 29-year-old marketing experts in New York City. And I was really going to hope that, you know, it served you that ad and you got it and you click through. Is that gonna work for me?
Mateo: 00:47 – I gotta be honest, like I don’t think that ad is going to get served up to me in the way that you want it to.
Mateo: 00:54 – But I targeted it so carefully.
Mateo: 00:55 – It’s true. You know a lot of details about me, but I gotta be honest, I don’t think that’s gonna work.
Mike: 01:01 – I’m a little disheartened, but how about this? How about I take over your show and what we’ll do is you’ll be the guest. I’ll ask some questions about targeting and you can teach me and the rest of the people out there how to properly target instead of going for an audience of one. How do you feel?
Mateo: 01:15 – OK, that sounds good.
Mike: 01:15 – All right. This week on Two-Brain Radio Mateo Lopez goes from host to guest. I’m Mike Warkentin of Two-Brain Media and Mateo’s going to teach me all about audience targeting with digital marketing. We will be back right after this.
Announcer: 01:27 – Two-Brain Radio is brought to you by Two-Brain Business. We make gyms profitable. We’re going to bring you the very best tips, tactics interviews in the business world each week. To find out how we can help you create your Perfect Day, book a free call with a mentor at twobrainbusiness.com.
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Mike: 02:27 – OK. And we’re back with Mateo Lopez of Two-Brain Marketing. Mateo, when it comes to targeting your ads, a ton of people are casting a wide net and hoping to get just any fish at all. Others are researching the lake, studying the fish, using the right bait in the right place at the right time. You’ve seen all the approaches narrow and broad, which one is better?
Mateo: 02:46 – Well, yeah, Mike. It depends honestly, it really just depends. I think if you’re dealing with a local business, a business that’s kind of stuck with a fixed location where your clientele is going to come basically from their surrounding area, from your town, you’re gonna want to cast a wider net. You’re gonna need to be a little bit more broad in your approach. Now if you’re doing something that’s a little bit more, I guess if you’re targeting—if your service can reach people all over the country, all over the world, let’s say you’re doing nutrition coaching or if you’re doing some kind of online training, then yeah, that’s where you’re gonna see some more detailed targeting, some different approaches and getting a little bit more focused. Because you’re going to be targeting people all over. So you need to make sure that you’re narrowing your scope of who in the world you want to reach.
Mike: 03:48 – So a big qualifier of this is your market. Where are you and what are you selling? Correct?
Mateo: 03:54 – Yeah. The qualifier is what kind of a business do you have? What is your service and is it something where you can only service people locally or globally?
Mike: 04:03 – Yeah. Let’s assume most of our gyms are serving people locally. There are probably a few that are getting into online coaching and nutrition and things like that. But we’ll say, let’s just say most of the gyms that are listening are doing that local stuff. So if they’re doing that, they’re going to be better doing which approach? At least to start?
Mateo: 04:16 – Yeah, you’re going to want to cast a broad—a wide net. Keep your targeting pretty broad. And the reason is because you know, you’re limited in your audience size based on where you live, right? So if you’re in a town of 30,000 people and you start doing some interest-based targeting or maybe you want to build a lookalike audience from your newsletter list, you’re gonna cut that list down, that available pool of 30,000, you’re going to cut it down a lot. You’re going to cut it down a lot and so the way in which your ads are going to be launched, like to compete at that price, it’s just going to be really hard.
Mike: 05:02 – So, on the other side of it, you’ve got, if you go super broad, and we’re gonna talk about this in a later show, but there are lots of situations where people are getting cold leads that are just horrible, right? They’re not really interested or they’re the wrong kind of person. They’re never going to buy. So I’m guessing that in certain cases, some targeting and some narrowing will help with that if you’re maybe in a large area or something like that. Or when would you start to dial things in and make them narrower?
Mateo: 05:26 – Yeah. So here’s the thing, the Facebook algorithm is getting smarter and smarter every day.
Mike: 05:36 – Artificial intelligence.
Mateo: 05:37 – Yes. And the idea that you’re going to be able to do something that’s smarter than the computer is just not likely. And that’s why like they’re removing—well, there’s a couple reasons. They’re removing a lot of the things you used to be able to do in terms of targeting.
Mike: 05:57 – Like what?
Mateo: 05:57 – Well you used to be able to target by you know, there were certain—you could be a lot more specific. Let’s just put it that way. They removed a lot of that stuff because of some privacy issues and some like things in terms of like what is ethical and what is not, but also they’re removing a lot of what you can do because the computer, the algorithm, can just do it better for you now. In fact, they want to make it so that the marketers are not really able to mess with the machine, you know, they want to make it so that you can just put in your ad creative and let the algorithm do the work for you based on who’s clicking and who’s seeing it and who stopping as they’re scrolling.
Mike: 06:45 – Yeah. So I’m guessing that some marketing experts, you know, guys like you, can probably work the system pretty well, but a guy like me who’s fumbling around in the dark, Facebook would like to take some of the work off my shoulders and do it properly. Right?
Mateo: 06:55 – Well, yeah. And it behooves them to do that, right? Because if they can make the targeting easier and easier and easier for someone to figure out, then more and more people can use the ads platform and then more and more people can give them money to run ads. So they’re actually, you know, they’re incentivized to make it not rocket science. And I think that’s where we’ve gotten to at this point. So that’s just kind of like the broader story of where we’re at. But yeah, in terms of a local market, like I was saying before, you know, if you’re going to spend 10, $20 a day on your ads, but then you cut down your audience size that’s potentially 30,000 people and you cut it down to like five to get those specific 5,000 people, if you’re spending that little, it’s not going to work. You’re not going to be able to get that ad in front of the people for that price point. So that’s why we like to keep it broad for the local businesses.
Mike: 07:53 – So you’re going to have to deal with, if you do that broad, you’re going to have to deal with a few weirdos, right, that just clicked through as part of your wide net?
Mateo: 08:00 – 100%. Now it gets a little bit different when you’re talking about big metropolitan areas. So you mentioned, you know, the gym we used to run in New York and how we used to be a little bit more specific there. Yeah, for us that made more sense to target by zip code to target neighborhoods that were along the subway line that cuts through our gym. Yeah. So for that stuff, for sure. Because if we didn’t do that, if we just put a 10-mile radius around the gym, one, a lot of that would be in New Jersey and no one—that doesn’t make sense for where the gym was located. As the crow flies, it’s only 10 miles away.
Mike: 08:37 – Might as well be Mars?
Mateo: 08:37 – Yeah, to get from that place, a certain place in New Jersey, to the gym, you know, could take an hour. So for us that didn’t make sense. So to target by zip code and along certain subway lines and certain neighborhoods, for us that made sense. And on top of that too, like if we had done even a five-mile radius, you know, you’re going to get an audience size of a million people. So that’s that same thing, right. For doing $10 a day, you’re not reaching anywhere near close to the 2 million people, the 1 million people that are in that audience. So yeah, there is a little bit of narrowing we wanted to do there. But again, the targeting we’re talking about is really just geographical, some stuff about age and gender and that’s really it.
Mike: 09:24 – Yeah. Like to give you some perspective, and I’m sure you worked with guys in my situation or cities about like, I don’t know, 750,000 something like that, we have a car city where people drive, but at the same time, once you get past like, I don’t know, about a 20, 25-minute drive, people are out, you know? So I looked at that and I did a little bit of focusing, I didn’t want to go super wide across the whole city. I kind of pulled it in just a little bit, but then I kind of over-thought things, I didn’t take your advice and I went the other way and I started agonizing over, you know, should I target like 20 to 55 or should it be 22 to 55 and I think at that point I’m probably shaving things a little too thin. Am I right?
Mateo: 09:57 – Yeah. I mean the only time you want to think about that is potentially like, oh, I’m getting a lot of students. I’m getting a lot of people who like, you know, can’t really afford the thing I’m trying to offer. So then yeah, you can bump the age range up a little bit. But beyond that, you’re sweating the small stuff.
Mike: 10:14 – You hit on an interesting point there, where you’ve got—you don’t want students, necessarily, if you’ve got a high price point, and again, there are some wealthy students, but by and large, you know, when I was a student, I didn’t have any money. You’re probably like—are you wise at that point to look into your current demographics, look at your ideal client and start saying, OK, my ideal client is a 30 to 55-year-old professional and maybe using some of that in a few places?
Mateo: 10:37 – Yeah, exactly right. So when we work with gym owners, we basically say, all right, look at your current, you know, client list, look at who’s in your gym right now and just take a couple of data points, right. So exactly what you were saying. Where do most of them live? Where are most of them coming from? What part of town? What’s the age range on average and do you have more men in your gym or more women? And then that’s really the three things you want to look at and then build your audience from there. So that’s kinda the first thing we ask and we tell people is look at who’s in your gym currently. And then the next piece really is like, you want to make a decision on whether you wanna target by zip code or postal code, or do you want to target by just, you know, a certain mile radius around your gym?
Mateo: 11:24 – And that’s really the next big decision you’ve got to make. And that’s going to depend on, you know, where your business is located. So for some people, I worked with a gym owner, a Two-Brain gym, and they said, yeah, if you go like a mile radius, a two-mile radius around our gym, you really don’t want to target people immediately surrounding our gym.
Mike: 11:47 – Industrial park?
Mateo: 11:47 – Yeah. But if you go right outside of that, you know, that’s where our ideal client really lives. And so yeah, putting a pin around your gym in that scenario would not work. You have to be a little bit more creative, you know, going in the surrounding areas. And that might be a situation where postal codes might be a little bit better or zip codes.
Mike: 12:10 – That’s fascinating.
Mateo: 12:10 – Some people, you know, their postal codes to do something like that, it’s just too diverse. It’s too much of a mixed bag. So, you know, there’s some things you can do to get a little bit creative with the targeting in the ads manager platform. But yeah, at that point you really need to start—that’s where you need to really do the research to see all right, where exactly, what part of town do I want to target? Where can I drop a pin? What zip codes work? Where should I exclude pieces of this part of a zip code? You know, but beyond that you really don’t want to start going into like the interests rabbit hole. It’s like they gotta be interested in CrossFit and rowing. They have to liked, you know, Again Faster and they had to have, you know, all those things—that’s not going to do much for you.
Mike: 13:01 – OK. I’m going to ask you two questions later on. I’m going to talk a little more about people and I want to talk a little bit more about zip codes. So we’re gonna ask about that men versus female thing, I’m going to do that right after this.
Ad spot: 13:10
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Mike: 14:00 – And we’re back with Mateo Lopez. This is Two-Brain Radio. I’ve taken over the show. It’s Mike Warkentin, and Mateo, you mentioned earlier men and women: you can do some targeting. Now, would you recommend people go super broad in the sense they’re going to get all males and all females, the whole thing, the entire audience, or would you recommend that they slice things up? Go 50/50, maybe tailor their content to males versus females or anything like that?
Mateo: 14:25 – The second one, Mike. Definitely, at least for me, I like to separate and have images and copy that resonates a little bit more with women and target them with that. And then for men, I like to segment the ad set out and have copy and images that might relate a little bit better to men. So I split up my ad sets so that I do women in one and men in the other.
Mateo: 14:54 – And that’s super broad still. Right? You’re cutting down maybe in half, but you’re still getting super broad. But the point being that the image—I’ve seen one classic one, front squat guy, big beard, tattooed, front squat of 225 or something. That’s unlikely, I’m going to guess, to appeal to your average female. Some will, but many won’t because they want to see a different thing, probably a female in the picture, I’m guessing.
Mateo: 15:17 – Yeah. Yup. 100%. The one that’s worked really well for me with guys, I have this one of my gym, we did a strength competition, someone benching and there’s a guy spotting him and in the background, everyone’s cheering. That one’s worked really well with men.
Mike: 15:33 – We all like to bench.
Mateo: 15:33 – But yeah, women, I don’t know, that might not resonate as well. You know, some dude benching a ton of weight with people screaming at them. Maybe it will, but my guess was no. And so yeah, I separate my ad sets that way.
Mike: 15:55 – And we talked about this earlier about how creative works, you had recommended in that show, which you can find in our archives, testing, right? So you’re testing these things to see like, maybe bench press dude converts with females really well, in which case you want to run with it, but you’d have to have that data. And the question I really want to know is as we get into different things in the modern era with, you know, gender neutral things and different things, is Facebook working with that? Like, can you at some point, can you create ad copy or ads that will go for people who don’t subscribe to a certain gender? Is there something that’s coming?
Mateo: 16:26 – That I don’t know, but what I will say is something we talked about in the last episode, which was dynamic creative. So, you know, it may be something where you can create your ad set to everyone in your town, you know, just everyone, you know, within an age range. You don’t separate or specify the gender. And then you put in all of your ad creative. So the ones that you think might resonate with men a little bit more, stuff that you think might resonate with women a little bit more and then let Facebook figure it out for you. You know, based on who clicks on what, you can definitely do that. The reason why I separate them though is because I have found, at least in my town, women, I get cheaper leads and cheaper clicks. And with guys it’s a little bit more expensive. And so that’s why I like to separate mine out and I can kind of allocate my budget where I want it to go. So I’ll spend more on women cause I know I’m going to get more leads that way. A little bit less on the guys, or vice versa. I need more guys, so I need to allocate more money to that side because I know it’s gonna be more expensive. So I have found that, and I’ve seen that a lot in a lot of different gyms. It’s not universal, but I have seen that pattern. And so that’s another reason why we segmented the audiences that way.
Mike: 17:51 – Yeah, that’s fascinating. And one of the other things you mentioned earlier that I wanted to sweep back on is postal codes or zip codes. It’s interesting because a lot of the gyms that, I mean, not all of them, but some of the gyms that are in sort of the micro gym family, exist in industrial parks. And we’re seeing that change where we are getting some storefronts and we are getting some, you know, some in larger residential areas, things like that. But a lot of them are in these interesting industrial warehouse areas. So I think it would behoove them, as you said, to like take a close look at the area they’re in and then look at the postal codes or zip codes around that. Because for example, our downtown is not like other downtowns where we were slowly seeing people start to live there. But if you had a gym in the downtown area, you might not get a lot of people. And like you said, the demographics downtown, a lot of times it was low-income demographics and it was, you know, rental hotels and things like that. It would not convert you to traffic. However, in other urban centers where the downtown like Toronto, I look around, it’s just nothing but high rise, high rise, high rise. You probably would want to target around there. So you really need to look at your area in your particular situation.
Mateo: 18:55 – 100%. Yeah. And that’s where like—and that’s why I’ve never done a done-for-you agency because it would require me to research and really understand the lay of the land in a place I don’t live and don’t work for someone else. Right. You know, a done-for-you agency might work with a brand if you’re servicing, you know, the whole country or the whole world. But you know, if you’re dealing with local businesses, it’s going to be a little bit harder, especially with gyms because yeah, I wouldn’t know that about what you just said about your town. You would know that better than I would. And so for you to have to explain that to me and then I set the ads up for you and I might get it wrong or I might get the wrong, you know, the back and forth there, you know, that’s why I like to teach gym owners how to do this themselves because they know their surrounding area and where their business is and where people live and how people, if they walk, if they drive, way better than I would.
Mike: 19:50 – So shameless plug, I mean you teach people to do that in your marketing course, correct?
Mateo: 19:54 – I do. It’s in the Incubator.
Mike: 19:56 – Yeah, but that’s the thing like really, you know, we’ve talked about this a little bit with, you know, the whole point of Two-Brain is we’d rather teach people how to do stuff and take control of their business than you know, do it for them. In a lot of cases we can certainly do things for people, but like you said, there are drawbacks to doing that. So if you guys are interested in learning this stuff, Mateo does have an excellent course and you can get through that how?
Mateo: 20:18 – Gotta sign up for the Incubator, book a Free Help call with your mentor today.
Mike: 20:21 – Yeah, let’s do that. We’ll leave someone with a takeaway. What are people going to do here? If you were telling, and we’ll talk about the general person, right? Just a general person right now who’s listening and hasn’t done any Facebook advertising, how broad or how narrow do you want them to set their first audience? What would you advise them to do?
Mateo: 20:42 – I would say start out by just creating an audience for women. Kind of take a pulse of your gym, see, you know what the age range is. If it’s like 35 to 50, or if it’s 28 to 60 or whatever it is. It’s really the low end that you want to kind of, like where’s the youngest I want to go? The top end I really wouldn’t worry about, I would go to the max one as you could do like 65 or whatever is, yeah, I think it’s 65-plus is the max. You want to figure out where you want the youngest one, but then let the oldest, the highest, the oldest age, let that run up as high as you want. And then from there, you need to take a pulse and see where do most of your clients, your current clients, live. And then you want to target that area and you need to figure out whether it’s going to be with a kind of a pin, a radius, or if it’s going to be with postal codes or zip codes. And then see what it gives you, see what it spits back. You know, if it spits back a million, you’re gonna need to cut that down a little bit. If it spits back, you know, 5,000, you know, see if there’s a way you can open up the audience a little bit more. If you want to extend that younger age range a bit, if you want to widen the radius and then just keep working from there.
Mike: 22:01 – All right. Another question, hot spots and cold spots in local markets. What have you seen? What would you advise people?
Mateo: 22:08 – So, yeah, I mean there are some places where right now, ad costs are going to be lower than others, right. You know, depending on where you are. If there’s a location or part of town or city where there’s tons of microgyms everywhere, your ads are going to be more expensive to compete. It’s going to be harder. Especially because you are limited with your targeting, right? You’re limited to where you are. Versus some rural areas that we’ve seen some amazing results with you know, gyms kind of like, well not yours necessarily, but you know, gyms in some rural parts of Canada and rural parts of the US we’ve seen some amazing results. And that’s because competition is not as high.
Mike: 22:56 – It’s funny cause I would’ve thought that fishing in a smaller pond would be tougher, but it might be easier in some ways.
Mateo: 23:01 – Yeah. In some ways. So like I had a gym where their population was 10,000 people. And so they really couldn’t do much with their targeting. They wanted to get as many of those 10,000 as they could in the ad set. And they had amazing results because, you know, no one around them was really using Facebook to promote their business. So, you know, certain parts of the US where it’s not as many CrossFit gyms or not as many gyms in general, in Canada, same thing versus some cities, you know, Chicago is really tough. Denver’s really tough. New York hasn’t been as tough because there’s just so many people, like there’s tons of businesses, but there’s so many people that you can still have some pretty good results. Los Angeles is another tough one because where people live in and the income levels and the demographics, it’s so intermixed and intertwined.
Mateo: 24:01 – You know, we had a gym in downtown Los Angeles and it’s, you know, you’ve got massive inequality there. You’ve got, you know, some people who can probably afford your most expensive PT package and then you’ve got people who are not going to be anywhere near that, all mixed within, you know, the three-mile radius of where that gym would be. So that’s going to be definitely a little bit tougher to, you know, get the results you want to target. So yeah, it just depends, and you’ll be surprised. You’ll think, yeah, I don’t know if this is gonna work. And then all of a sudden you make 20 grand in four weeks and then yeah, you may be in a city where you think you’ve got tons of people to choose from, but you’re also going to have a lot more competition.
Mike: 24:47 – So really what I’m hearing is the best thing that you can possibly do is experiment, track and revise each time.
Mateo: 24:53 – Yeah. And especially if you’re in a competitive market, if you’re in a city with a lot of gyms, a lot of things that people could do for fitness, you know, that’s where you want to also focus on your offer. You really want to see how can my offer stand out. I know I’m going to be going up against a dozen other CrossFit gyms or a dozen other functional-fitness gyms. I know I’ve got an Orangetheory. I know I’ve also got, you know, other franchises and maybe other people doing free six-week bait-and-switch type offers. That’s where you really got to figure out, all right, what am I going to be able to offer that’s going to be different than everyone else?
Mateo: 25:33 – Something I thought of, which someone can do this, I didn’t cause I chickened out, but if someone wants to do this—.
Mike: 25:40 – Let us know if you do it.
Mateo: 25:40 – I always had an idea where if you’re in an area where we’re seeing a lot of free 21-day or money-back guarantee or fat loss, you know, we’ll pay you to lose weight type of challenges, three, six week challenges, stuff like that. I always wanted to do an ad for the most expensive six-week challenge in New York City. I always wanted to do that. So that would be something where, you know, my vision was you do, this is the most expensive six-week program you’ll see. But then in the video you explain that really like you’re going to be paying money on any of these other ones if you opt in for that in general, so why don’t just come here and get awesome results.
Mike: 26:23 – If anyone does that, please let us know. And let’s be clear, for those of you who don’t know, the things that Mateo, that you’re talking about, those are kind of the bait-and-switch things where they, oh, you know, it’s free, but then they take a deposit and if you do anything wrong, they take your money anyways and they’re just finding an excuse to take your money.
Mateo: 26:37 – Yeah. It’s usually a $500 deposit. So I always thought like, we’ll make ours $501. And that way it’s the most expensive six-week challenge in New York or whatever it was going to be. So I dunno, I was too chicken to try it, but someone might and then stumble on a gold mine and then you can sell your marketing course to millions of people.
Mike: 26:58 – Yeah. I saw this actually done in a small town, the guy I actually worked with in radio back about 10 years ago, there was a restaurant called Barry’s, and so he opened up across the parking lot and his restaurant was Not Barry’s. That was the name. I don’t know who won that one, but it’s the same principle, right? You’re screening out people who don’t like that one, come to mine. And you teach this stuff. We talked about that earlier. Again, if the stuff is confusing to you guys, you can talk to us. We will tell you if working with a mentor is right for you and we’ll give you some advice. We want to teach you how to use Facebook to get leads into your gym. Mateo, where can they do that?
Mateo: 27:35 – Twobrainbusiness.com, book a free call and you can start talking to a mentor today, how to get started with the Incubator.
Mike: 27:44 – They will teach you how to do this stuff. It’s not that confusing when you have someone lead it lead you through it. This has been Mateo Lopez and Mike Warkentin on Two-Brain Radio. Thank you so much for listening. We would love a review and we want you to subscribe. We have got lots of great stuff coming, including tons of amazing content from Chris Cooper, the man himself. Please subscribe, leave us a review and we’ll be back next time on Two-Brain Radio. Thanks very much guys.
Announcer: 28:06 – Thank you for listening to Two-Brain Radio. Make sure to subscribe to receive the most up-to-date episodes wherever you get your podcasts from. To find out how we can help create your Perfect Day, book a free call with a mentor at twobrainbusiness.com.
