Ep 246: Turn Facebook Clicks Into Clients Faster with Neil Shoney

SHOWNOTES

Neil Shoney’s origin story is the kind that makes you sit up straight: six months into launching a major fitness exhibition, he had sold less than 50 tickets, while already committed to over 200,000 pounds of outgoings at 21 years old. Facebook ads were a last-ditch roll of the dice, but after spending around 110 pounds and seeing ticket sales come in, everything clicked. “So if I keep putting that money back in. I can almost choose how many people I want to to be at the show.” This episode is a practical, confidence-building look at ads that actually lead somewhere.

Neil Shoney is a Facebook and Instagram ads strategist who has worked with just short of 3000 service-based businesses. He focuses on building repeatable ad frameworks that get people into a system designed to turn a click into a client, rather than chasing vanity metrics.

WE ALSO TALKED ABOUT

• Why the most important part of ads is where you send people after they click, and whether your system can convert that click into a client.
• Neil’s standard for a system: he is not interested if it cannot take a stranger to a client in under seven days.
• Why small businesses do not need to spend money on brand awareness like major consumer brands.
• Using lead magnets to collect name, email address, and phone number, with the goal of getting clients and also growing the list as a by-product.
• The thank-you page approach that can convert between 23% and 26% into booked calls.
• Why clear offer naming and simple messaging tends to outperform complex wording and puns on Facebook and Instagram.
• Using Facebook lead forms to reduce friction, and why you do not need a fancy landing page to start.
• A follower campaign approach: boost a simple direct-ask video, then message new followers with a short yes-or-no question to open a conversation.

If you have been avoiding ads because they feel risky or confusing, this episode will give you a simpler way to think about them: build the path first, then amplify it.

Get regular access to tips, techniques and advice from experts about growing your business: https://onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter/

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Neil on Instagram: Neil Shoney Mac
• Neil’s course/workshop recordings: adsandfunnels.com/course

My newsletter is for people who need a way to make money from home so they can build a better life for themselves and their families:
👉 https://onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter

_____________

Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

Affiliate Disclaimer: If you click on links on this page and then make a purchase, I may earn a commission (at no extra cost to you).  I am a proud affiliate of these resources because I use them in my own life and business.

TRANSCRIPT FOR:

Episode 246: Turn Facebook Clicks Into Clients Faster with Neil Shoney

[00:00:00] 

Trudy Rankin: I want you to picture being 21 years old and realizing that you spent over £200,000 on expenses, but you’ve sold less than 50 tickets to the event that you’re trying to put together and that you’re committed to doing. That was Neil Shoney’s reality when he was trying to launch Scotland’s biggest ever health and fitness exhibition.

And he basically went, well, nothing else is working, so let’s keep rolling the dice. So he spent about £110 on Facebook ads and actually sold a handful of tickets. And he realized that if he kept putting that money back in into ads, he could almost choose how many people he wanted to be at the show.

And honestly, if you have ever looked at ads and thought, “Nope, too scary, too hard, too expensive,” then this episode is for you. So in this conversation, Neil and I talk about why most people obsess over the ad and ignore the one thing that actually makes it work, how to [00:01:00] make targeting and messaging simpler and better, what to run if you don’t yet have a consistent lead flow, and the difference between running ads and having a system that turns strangers into clients without waiting nine months for quote, brand awareness to kick in. Now, Neil is an ad strategist who’s helped thousands of service-based businesses use Facebook and Instagram and other ads in a way that’s actually sustainable and doesn’t require you to become a full-time ads nerd. He’s practical, direct, and he’s got the real world numbers and battle scars to back it up.

Trudy Rankin: Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m Trudy Rankin and I help people who need a flexible work from home option start and grow the online side of their business so that they can earn more, stress less and have greater [00:02:00] freedom in how they live.

And today I’ve got Neil Shoney with me. And Neil is an ad strategist and he likes to, gets, I’m assuming, gets great joy from helping coaches and consultants set up repeatable frameworks for using ads as a way to bring in leads. Now, I know from past experience and from working with people that ads, especially Facebook ads are something that most people start out being very skeptical about. They think it’s going to be too much money. It’s going to be a waste of money. And then they get to the point where they think, well, maybe I should try it. And they look at it and they go, no, it’s too scary.

And then, once they do try it and they go, no, it’s too hard. And then a lot of people go after they’ve tried it, they go, it didn’t work. So Neil’s going to talk with us today a little bit about ads, especially Facebook ads and how to make sure that you can get past the too hard, too scary bit, but also how to not end up saying, no, it [00:03:00] didn’t work.

You want to get to the place where it goes, actually, those ads were worth every penny I spent. So Neil, thank you for being on the podcast and welcome. 

Neil Shoney: Thank you so much. Really appreciate it and excited to chat through Facebook ads. 

Trudy Rankin: So let’s go ahead and if you could start by sharing with people a little bit about you, your background, and how you got to the place where you are an expert with Facebook ads.

Neil Shoney: Oh, good. Well, I mean, it started for me about 14 years ago, I think it was. I came out of university. I didn’t study marketing or business or anything like that. I actually studied sport and exercise science. Nothing to do with what I do today. But I decided when I came out of university, I wanted to start Scotland’s biggest ever health and fitness exhibition.

The idea was once a year, a full weekend, we needed 8,000 people in the room to make it viable, but I just thought, this is a great idea. Everybody will buy it. I didn’t even think about, you know, it’s got the highest diabetes in the world, in the country. Surely [00:04:00] 8,000 people still would give up their weekend to immerse themselves in fitness.

But it didn’t work out very well. So after about six months of trying to promote it all the way that new businesses tried to promote, so hammering social media, if I post more often, will I start to get traction? Will I start emailing people? Will I send dms to people and try and get traction that way?

I was doing all the manual stuff that you can think of, but about six months in, we’d sold less than 50 tickets. At £12.50 I might add as well, but I had already committed to over £200,000 of outgoings to make the business actually run. So I was in a very sticky situation, 21 years old, and about four and a half or five months left until the show was going to take place.

And literally Facebook ads was just roll of the dice. It was like nothing else is working. I need to try something else. So I just looked at some blogs, followed some steps that I found, a little bit of [00:05:00] intuition, I guess, but it was guesswork. It wasn’t me being clever. It just happened to work well. And I think I spent something like, I think it was like £110 or something.

But I had sold something like 15 tickets at £12.50, and I was like, oh man, I’ve got a return here and I’ve made more money than the tickets that I’ve sold. So if I keep putting that money back in. I can almost choose how many people I want to be at the show. That was my sort of big aha moment.

And so I took every penny. If I sold an exhibition stand, I took that money and I put it all into Facebook ads, and we ended up that four and a half months later. With thousands of people in the room. It was a really big success. We sold out all the exhibition stands, which we started selling through Facebook ads as well, through application funnels, and we ended up growing that over four years before it was acquired by the biggest events company in Scotland.

And it all grew from Facebook ads, not the traditional exhibition way, which is tv, [00:06:00] radio, and all those expensive things. I just use Facebook ads and word of mouth ended up in people exhibitors telling other people, “Hey, this guy runs this event. All he does is Facebook ads.” The phone rang one day and it was one of my exhibitors friends, and he said, “Johnny told me to call you.”

I said, “Johnny who?” And he said, “Johnny, from Anytime Fitness, I’ve got a gym that’s opening.” And he said, “You should run my Facebook ad campaign to launch my business.” And I said I actually said no. I originally, because I was happy to risk my own money, but nobody else’s. And then I changed my mind and I thought, let’s dive in here.

I spent £4,000 on ads for him. We returned £297,866 of gym membership sales before the doors opened. And it just, the last 12 years or 11 years or something has just been a snowball effect from that one client and results just creating word of mouth. So that’s my origin story, if you [00:07:00] will.

Trudy Rankin: It was a pretty impressive origin story. And just immediately it popped into my head because I played around with Facebook ads a bit and I’ve also played around with Google search ads and looked at others and stuff. And it’s interesting to me that you picked Facebook because of desperate need, but why was it Facebook and not Google? And I’ll ask that one first and then I’ve got another question follow up. 

Neil Shoney: Well, the reason I went to Facebook was because I, before I left university, I actually ran club nights when I was there as well. So I was a little bit entrepreneurial in university and started up some club nights and I had to promote it.

And the deal was the event venue takes all the money on the bar. I take all the money on the door, but I need to do all the advertising. And the way that we did the advertising was pretty much through Facebook back then. So it wasn’t really Instagram or anything back then. It was all Facebook. And I was aware of Facebook ads.

I think I might have even [00:08:00] dabbled in a few boosted posts back then. So it was just something that was in front of me. And I decided to take it for a spin. I saw it was £3 a day that you could start from. I thought that was pretty low risk and nothing else was working. And so I took it for a spin and it paid off.

Trudy Rankin: That’s interesting. Interesting. I’m curious as to your thoughts because obviously you had, it sounds like you were familiar with Facebook, so that would’ve been an automatic thing that you would turn to. But in your opinion, based on the numbers of people that you’ve worked with and with your own experience do certain people with certain personalities have certain bents towards different platforms and their ads?

Neil Shoney: To an extent. Yeah. So I mean, at this stage I’ve worked with just short of 3000 service-based businesses. And we’ve taken 13, well more than 13 coaches and consultants, but 13 different niches from below seven figures to over seven figures a year, and including the agency, it’s at 21. We’ve got a lot [00:09:00] of experience across so many different types of audiences that people are trying to attract. And a lot of people will come to me and say things like, well, I only want to attract wealthy business owners into my private boutique gym, for instance, or coaching business, whatever it may be, because my coaching package is expensive, so I should go on LinkedIn. Surely that’s where I should run my advertising. But what we tend to find is that they might say, my people are not on Facebook. My people are not on Instagram, but they are. They’re on there. They’re just not the type of people that are posting three times a day and liking and commenting on everything, but they’re on the platforms.

They use it for their own thing, and if you can target them, you can get in front of people at a very low cost. And that’s the most important part of Facebook and Instagram as a choice. And I’m not just saying it because I run Facebook ads and Instagram ads for people. I also run LinkedIn ads for people.

I run YouTube ads for people. Google ads for people. Facebook and Instagram is best for most [00:10:00] service-based businesses especially coaches and consultants because it’s so low cost to get in front of people. So if your targeting is right and your messaging is right, it’s an opportunity to get leads at an extremely low cost.

Who are your right people? And you’re probably familiar with the term CPM, which is cost per 1000 views. So how much does it cost to get in front of a thousand people? And when you compare Facebook and Instagram ads to LinkedIn ads and YouTube and Google Ads, which are the same platform, it’s astronomically different to get in front of a thousand people on any of those other platforms because they’re trying to sell, I don’t want to put it in a bad way, like a dream, but LinkedIn is like, you’re paying more because of quality. Google and YouTube, you’re paying more because you can be in front of people who are searching for a specific thing. And so like that’s their reasoning for charging you more to get in front of people. But if you nail Facebook and Instagram ads and [00:11:00] you get the targeting right, so you’re still in front of the same people and you get the messaging right, so people see your ad and they action want to take action, it is very difficult to beat because they’ve got more people than any other platform, and it’s a lower cost to get in front of people. 

Trudy Rankin: So are you saying that Facebook, maybe Facebook and Instagram combined, do they have a bigger platform in terms of number of people than YouTube? 

Neil Shoney: Not necessarily YouTube or Google, actually.

But with regards to like LinkedIn ads, other social media platforms, it’s like night and day. 

Trudy Rankin: Interesting. So what I heard you say was service-based businesses, and which of course coaches and consultants are are, it’s a good place for them to be because people lurk. They may not be active, but they’re there lurking.

It’s always kind of interesting. I have to confess that Facebook is not my platform of choice and I tend not to use it for personal things, but I am therefore business reasons. So I guess, people can be there for whatever reason, [00:12:00] and it might be very different than what you think it might be.

I do have a sort of a follow up question. You were saying and this is true of anything that you do, right? You said either you gotta get your targeting right, and you got to get your messaging right. Can you just share a few tips for people who are listening about how you might go about actually getting those two parts of this whole ad equation right? Because I know from my own experience, that’s where it’s easy to fall down and make mistakes. 

Neil Shoney: It definitely is. The first thing with the targeting in 2026, it’s a little bit easier than it ever has been. As long as your messaging is right, Facebook’s actually pretty good at finding the people and albeit that Facebook does say now you don’t need to be specific about who your ads go in front of. We’ll just go and find the people for you, it’s a little bit like a politician. You have to take those things with a pinch of salt. What’s your reasoning for saying that you should have complete control over our ads moving [00:13:00] forward? And with every client that we work with now in the agency, we set up what we call the Shoney Two by Five Method, which is a warm campaign and a cold campaign. We set up a campaign for each of them on a low spend the way that Facebook tells us to now. It’s always the underperformer. But it is getting better and it’s like all Facebook updates. It’s terrible at the start.

It gets better and better and better, and then it becomes the norm. What I can tell you about targeting now is you still do want to test different audiences, so don’t just rely on your intuition to say, “I know my perfect audience.” Test some different audiences to find winners and losers. But you now just have to nudge Facebook in the right direction.

It’s not about perfect pinpoint positioning to an audience that only has five and a half thousand people in it. It’s about nudging them towards the thing. So if it was, you know, if it was a fitness coach that helps people lose weight, they would probably say, interested [00:14:00] in physical fitness, or interested in weight loss, or something like that, rather than being like, okay, I only want to work with lawyers between the ages of, 35 and 45. So job title equals lawyer and you know, it’s a tiny audience in a small location. So it is very much nudging Facebook in the right direction. So that’s audience side. Messaging side, this is another bit of good news for your audience here, which is people just overcomplicate it and they try to be really clever.

They try to wow people with, complex wording and, you know, fluffy wording and all of these things. The more does what it says on the tin, the better your results will be. So short, sharp, and to the point. Super easy to understand. And so when people come to me in the coaching and consulting space, and they want to do a lead magnet, or they want to do a five day challenge, or they want to sell a product.

And they [00:15:00] use puns and they put the name of their coaching product into the name of the challenge. I’m like, nobody’s going to know what this is on Facebook and Instagram. We have very small amount of time to grab their attention and tell them if this is for them or not, or they scroll straight on. So that’s the benefit of Google Ads, is that people are actually searching for things.

So if you’ve got your ad set up correctly, you can at least be in front of them with the thing they’re searching for. On Facebook and Instagram, we are looking for them. So it’s the other way around. And so if you want to run a five day weight loss challenge, it should literally be called the Five Day Weight Loss Kickstarter for “demographic.”

If you want to do a lead magnet, it should be akin to that as well. My lead magnet is the Facebook Ads for Coaches Course 2026. It does what it says on the tin. So in terms of messaging, short, sharp, and to the point, don’t use fluffy language, just keep it simple and you’ll get much better [00:16:00] results. 

Trudy Rankin: I think that’s probably very appropriate for just about any kind of message out there, whether it’s ads or social media or whatever.

I’m curious, I’ve got a few questions around on what you’ve just said, but let’s just start with this, you talked about the targeting and messaging, so let’s just take a potential sort of case where somebody, a coach or consultants decided they want to look at ads and so they’ve heard what you said about gotta get the targeting right. You’ve gotta get the messaging right and what else do you have to get right? 

Neil Shoney: The most important piece of the puzzle, which is where you’re actually going to send them. Everybody thinks when it comes to Facebook ads, it’s about the perfect image.

It’s about the perfect video, it’s about the perfect piece of ad copy. It’s all about the target, and it’s all these bits and pieces around the ads themselves. The most important part is, are you actually going to send them to a place where they can, turn from a lead or a click into a client? Is that possible [00:17:00] with the system that you’ve put together?

And I’m basically not interested in it if it cannot take a stranger to a client in under seven days. I mean, we are not, you know, with the best of, nicest of intentions in the way that I’m saying this. Nobody listening to this, including myself, is Coca-Cola or Pepsi. We do not need to run advertising for brand awareness.

We do not need to put our logo out there and spend two grand a month on it, and we certainly do not need to get video views for the sake of optimizing for video views. What we do need is to find the people that we want to work with and we need to put ads in front of them in a way in which they can register their interest in some sort of a way, and we can take ’em through a process that’s capable of getting that person to want to work with you on the other side. And so just to throw a few simple examples at you. I mentioned a lead magnet. So we run an ad, people put name, email address, and phone number in. On the other side, we’re not just doing it to grow an email list. I hear that all the time.

I think people think I’m going to be impressed by it. Like they’re a long term thinker. Like, oh, [00:18:00] well, Neil, what I’m willing to do this month is put thousands of pounds behind growing my email list. And I’m like, well, how about we try and get some clients and then you get a bunch of email addresses for free because if you spend a thousand, you make 5,000 back and you end up with an extra, let’s say 700 people that are still unconverted, that have joined your email list, you’ve grown your email list by 700 people for free.

So let’s go down that route. A lead magnet, name, email address, and phone number. We give them something for free. On the thank you page, we can immediately give people an option to book a call. So most people don’t think about this with the lead magnet, but in that moment they’re thinking about solving their problem.

And so instead of giving them access to the lead magnet, you can say on the thank you page, the thing you just requested will be in your emails in the next 10 minutes. In the meantime, if you’re really serious about moving towards this goal book a 30 minute, in my case, 30 minute ad strategy building session below, and they answer a few [00:19:00] questions and then they get your calendar and then they book the call.

And that for me has somewhere between a 23 and 26% conversion rate on the thank you page. So about one in four people book a call rather than me going, I’m growing my email list and I’m going to send them emails for the next two years and hope that they book a call. At that point, they can book a call immediately.

So the lead magnet might be right for your business. For other people it might not be, and so a five day challenge might be right. A paid challenge might be right. A live masterclass might be right. It may just be sending people to a place where they can literally find out about your product. And register interest and you pick up the phone and call them.

Different service based businesses have different models that work and that’s why I’ve never pigeonholed, like we teach people how to do this one system. We’ve got 37 of them for a reason. So we can cherry pick the perfect one for the perfect coach, consultant, service provider. 

Trudy Rankin: So I’m going to ask a question that sort of matters to me personally because it’s an area that I’m just not [00:20:00] that great at. And that is, is that when people go through your ad, the ad job of the ad is to get people to click, right? People click, they go through to your thing, whatever it is. And how beautiful does it have to be? How beautifully designed does it have to be in order to be effective and continue that success rate of the click on the ad?

Neil Shoney: It’s super simple. Even if you are going to have a landing page you don’t even need one. So most of our clients that we work with, especially in the coaching consulting space, service providers in some cases, if they’re like home renovation and things like that, will very often use landing pages in that scenario.

But with coaches and consultants, lead magnets and things like that, we typically just use a Facebook lead form. Which is a form that is built during setting up the ad. It’s really simple. It’s literally like name, email, address, and phone number. Do you want to take any of these away? You say no, you take them.

And it’s a step one, step two, step three, when somebody clicks the button on your [00:21:00] ad, instead of going to your website or a landing page or a funnel, it just opens up a form and your details are already filled in. So it makes it really easy for somebody to submit their details and to become a lead at a very low cost.

So it doesn’t need to be fancy. If you are going to do landing page, which that increased friction can sometimes increase quality. So there’s a time and a place for it for everybody. For instance, I’ve got a landing page for the free Facebook ads course. So the free Facebook ads course is literally headline, sub headline, form, nothing else.

There’s no images, there’s no videos, there’s no theatrics. It’s simple direct. It’s to the point, and it converts like crazy. 

Trudy Rankin: Well, that makes me feel better because just the whole effort that it takes to, mind you, AI helps these days, but to create and design, you know, well converting landing pages, it can actually take quite a lot of skill and effort.

And also. 

Neil Shoney: Yeah. 

Trudy Rankin: You know, [00:22:00] sometimes people have luck, but luck usually doesn’t come into it at all. It’s usually skill. So that’s interesting. So you’re talking about the Facebook form, letting it do the heavy lifting, and then you did talk, does that form include the bit around, hey, would you like to book a call with me or is that a different thank you page?

Neil Shoney: So that’s a different thank you page, but we do link to it on the final step of the form. So the form is three steps. First of all is them submitting their details. Second of all is privacy policy. And the third step is like the thank you screen after they’ve put their details in. And we can customize it.

But all you can customize is headline, sub headline, button. That’s it. There’s not much that you can play with there, so I just do success, next step, click the button below two, and then it’s just, to get the next steps or to get access or whatever. And then they click the button and they land on a page that says your course will be in your emails in the next eight minutes.

And I actually do put that delay in [00:23:00] place. In the meantime, if you’re serious about running Facebook ads to grow your service based business, book a call below. 

Trudy Rankin: Okay. Interesting. Interesting. I think it’s different to, it changes. Like, that’s one of the things that I’ve discovered is that the way that Facebook operates in terms of the ads has changed over the years.

And obviously for me personally, I haven’t played with it for a little while. So how do you keep up with the changes that do come through on a regular basis? 

Neil Shoney: I’ve been running ads now, so I think it’s like 13 or 14 years, something like that. And every time there’s like a change to the algorithm or somebody thinks that they’ve like figured something out that’s different, that’s a game changer, the one thing I’ll say is, is that it’s never that big of a change. Whenever there’s a new algorithm update, whatever it is, it’s small tweaks here and there. The biggest changes or the most frequent changes that happen with Facebook ads are usually on the dashboard. So it’s just [00:24:00] making things a little bit more confusing for you by, uh, putting something that used to be over here, up here.

You think it’s disappeared. There’s a few things that come in, but the changes are never that drastic. But I am in a very advantageous position, which is at any given time, I’m working with somewhere in the region of 300 to 500 businesses. And so when we’re seeing that volume of ad accounts across so many different styles of service-based businesses.

We can first of all put everything together and say, are you noticing that across all of our accounts images are starting to perform better than videos right now or vice versa? Or are you seeing that it’s costing more this month to get in front of a thousand people for all of the people that we’re running ads for?

So that would be a pattern and we can take that into account. But there’s also a really interesting thing that I love to do, and I feel like I’m like discovering gold whenever I do it, which is [00:25:00] looking at something that’s working for a business and then asking, is it possible that this could work for a completely different type of business that isn’t, that it’s not standard that could be used for.

So if there’s a strategy that we do for a home renovation company, it’s like in a roundabout way, could this work for an online fitness coach? Is there an angle here that nobody else is using in that space? It’s what’s allowed us to create so many different proven ad frameworks that we do cherry pick for the people that we work with.

Trudy Rankin: That’s really interesting because it’s a perfect setup unintentionally. I think for my next question and I’d like to just set like a scenario or maybe a case study where you’ve got somebody who has a business that’s focused around photography and, basically the sale of prints or digital images or artwork that comes from the images that they take.

How would somebody like that go [00:26:00] about experimenting, setting up and experimenting with a Facebook ad that would be able to quickly show, you said you wanted to get it from, click to sale in, sort of seven days. What would somebody need to do in that situation to actually try that out and have at least some chance of success?

Neil Shoney: Great. So with the photographer, are they selling like their own pictures as prints for $50 or is it I’ll come and do a photo shoot for you and your family and sell the prints on the other side. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, so it’s more, it’s a mix of high end wall prints from their images and plus a mix of digital images that they can get, which are much, much lower ticket.

Neil Shoney: Okay, great. Alright, so are we talking about like sub $100 and then much higher value prints that are maybe originals and things like that? 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, so we’re talking, for the high end prints, we are actually [00:27:00] talking sort of anywhere between $200 and $500 in terms of… 

Neil Shoney: Okay.

Trudy Rankin: Wall prints. 

Neil Shoney: Well, funnily enough, in that. Type of business. because I’ve worked with this type of business before as well, I would probably be actually running direct to website for that type of business. I would be using conversion based ads so that Facebook is going to look for the type of people who have buy in history and buy in behavior from Facebook ads.

And second of all, they’re going to optimize based upon the result of somebody purchasing, not visiting your website, because the first thing is when you set up a Facebook ad, it’s going to say, do you want to optimize for awareness? Do you want to optimize for traffic? Do you want to optimize for conversions or sales?

You would do sales in that scenario because it’s the type of thing that you can put in front of, first of all, everybody who already knows you as an artist. So you can create audiences of people that have visited your Instagram page in the last seven days, who follow you on Instagram, who have watched your videos, who have visited your website in the last 180 days, [00:28:00] people who are on your email list. You can hit those people and send them directly to your website. Perhaps having in your ad, it depends on if this is on brand or not, but you could have a pre-summer sale right now, you know, something along the lines of that. And you could have some sort of a 10% coupon code or something.

So in that type of scenario, I would be doing direct to website. They can surf around and see what they like and don’t like, and they can assess prices and they can buy things. And Facebook will optimize for purchases. And that’s including the higher end ones. If you were to say like 5,000, 10,000, I would probably be optimizing those ads for applications, so applications of interest. And so I would probably still send them to a website or a landing page, but I would have some sort of an application of interest where the artist then gets in touch with the person who’s interested in the print.

If you were to just cover all bases here to show how things can be a bit different, if it was the [00:29:00] photographer who was looking to, either do an in-person shoot or we did family photos in Jacksonville. And the photographer was doing back to back 30 minute sessions on the beach, um, in December.

It was really cool. And what she could do, for instance, is she could run ads within a 50 mile radius. I think we traveled from more than 50 miles, but anyway, a 50 mile radius, and it could literally be an ad that says, “This is happening. It’s a certain day, it’s 30 minutes, you get 25 prints perfect for, Christmas cards and family memories limited spaces available. Register your interest here.” And she could just use a Facebook lead form. Get name, email address, and phone number, and have a good system on the other side to turn that inquiry into a sale, whether she picks up the phone, sends them a text message and gets into a conversation, connects it to WhatsApp, and has a conversation there.

However [00:30:00] she wishes to sell. But that’s how you would do it more in the service space rather than in, you know, what’s kind of verging into e-comm, I guess. 

Trudy Rankin: Hmm. Yeah. Because there’s two fairly different things in terms of the approach. I’ve got a follow up question. You mentioned earlier on when you were talking about targeting about the need to nudge, you used the word nudging, Facebook towards the right audience, even though they’ve got this massively brilliant way of going out there and huge data sets about, and then finding the right people. If that nudging thing is necessary, let’s just take a slightly different use case then and just say, so in this same situation where it’s art prints on the wall, or, you know, really beautiful images of nature on the wall and the target audience would be commercial offices or premises, or could be doctors, lawyers, dentists, whatever, who are looking for something on the [00:31:00] wall that’s going to calm people down, maybe let’s say dentists, how about. Is there any different, how would you go about that nudging part of helping Facebook know who you actually wanted? 

Neil Shoney: I target dentists for the agency. So, so I’ll tell you exactly how to get in front of dentists.

So previously we would’ve just done job titles as what we were looking at. So we would’ve done job titles gone after people, um, based upon the job title that was in their bio. The restrictive side of this is that not everybody has their job title in their bio anyway. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. 

Neil Shoney: And the other thing is that Facebook previously wasn’t very good at finding the people that would be best converting. And whenever you allowed for Advantage Plus to be on, they would go outside your location, outside of the people you’re looking for, and you would be tearing your hair out, being like, there’s not a single dentist that’s come through.

I know you’re telling me that I’ve got a good cost per lead, but it’s about 400 people who have no interest in [00:32:00] dentistry and certainly don’t have a dentistry practice. Whereas now a really, really good hack with this is you do, first of all, job titles. So you do dentistry, orthopedics, all of those different things.

The second thing is you do fields of study. So you can do fields of study dentistry, and then you do two other audiences, which is you do those two things, but you turn on advantage detail targeting. So it allows Facebook to go outside of it again, if this was two or three years ago, it probably would’ve just spent all the money there on anybody that was willing to opt in just so that you have a good looking Facebook ads dashboard.

Now, it’s actually excellent at finding people, so it’s like nudge Facebook in the right direction of where to start, but then go and find me other people that don’t have dentist in their job title on Facebook, but are that type of person. Go and find me more like that. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s kind of interesting because this is purely a curiosity [00:33:00] question.

And that is, is that, would you focus on the dentist or would you focus on their practice manager? 

Neil Shoney: So I would, for the most part, well, we do focus on the dentist. The reason being is that, well for most of the people that we work with, even though they might have, a really busy practice or maybe even multiple practices, they’re still a decision maker and they’re still motivated by growth of their business.

And so even if they’re going to tag the operations manager in their company or forward it to somebody, or they’re going to opt in and read the emails for themselves, but then as soon as they want action to be taken, they’re just going to send the booking link to somebody else that’s going to handle it from there.

We tend to find finding the decision maker, the motivated person to grow the business, that’s the person that you want to get in front of. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Fair enough. Just out of curiosity, could you share an example of someone or a business that you’ve worked with recently that would kind of demonstrate some of these things that [00:34:00] you’ve already talked about in terms of the targeting, the messaging, the nudging, and all of those sorts of things?

Neil Shoney: Yeah, well, for instance we’ve got tons of dog trainers that we work with right now which wasn’t even a thing for us until, I dunno, 18 months ago or something. And the first dog trainer came on board. We took him to over seven figures in his first year, and that created a spiral word of mouth thing.

But with the likes of Jacob and Ronnie, who’s also British pounds doing around 75k a month in the dog training space online, when we run ads for him the targeting is just people interested in dogs or people interested in dog training. That’s it. We might do a couple of bits and pieces out there so that we can test out some different audiences, but the very first audiences they’re going to be testing is as simple as that.

We’re not testing based upon finite things like them being interested in Alsatians, right? It’s not a specific dog. It’s [00:35:00] not, a specific dog food brand. It is they’re interested in dogs or they’re interested in dog training. It’s as simple as that. We go pretty broad these days.

We’ve got somebody who’s a fitness coach who only works with farmers. If I was working with him three years ago, which I wasn’t, I probably would’ve told him to use job titles and try and find anybody who had that or anything around that in their job title. Now, his highest performing his highest performing audience is people interested in agriculture, right?

So it is much, much broader and he’s just nudging them in the right direction. And this is crazy. He only works for farmers and almost entirely in Ireland, in the fitness space online. And he just did 265k British pounds collected. Which is bananas and I’m not going to sit here and be like, and by the way, that’s the average client I work with.

That’s not. And so [00:36:00] maybe that’s something to be said for Facebook ads. Maybe that’s something to be said for the power of nicheing down. But it’s a crazy one. 

Trudy Rankin: That is actually fascinating. So just out of curiosity, for somebody like that, or even just the standard type of business that you work with, what kind of things do they have to have in place before you start working with them or before you say yes to working with them because you know that those things have to be in place before the ads can be successful?

Neil Shoney: I love it when people come to me and they’ve already got clients. So if they’ve already been able to create an offer that somebody would be willing to pay for, they’ve managed to get somebody to exchange money for a service and hopefully they’ve got a few of those, so they’ve got 10 plus clients at least. And I love it when they tell me that the worst part of their business is their marketing and they’ve got amazing retention.

I’m like, this is going to be great then, because that’s the one thing that I’m good at, so that’s perfect for [00:37:00] me. We’ve got tons of examples of people that have come to us with completely brand new businesses. And we’ve helped them with building the offer, launching with waiting lists and different bits and pieces and doing those things, but the easiest people to work with, there’s just no two ways about it, people that already have proven products that aren’t running ads. So they’re doing all the manual stuff now and they’re doing it not too bad, and they’re getting by and they’re making sales. Let’s throw rocket fuel on the thing you’re already doing, and this is a key thing as well, is like a lot of people, they might come to me and say something like, oh, well I run five day challenges and I do them all organically and I have a few people there each time and I make a few sales and the business is growing slowly and all of those things. And sometimes when they come to me, I think they think that I’m going to tell them to flip the board upside down, and they have to do a completely different thing now because I know better than anybody else that you worked with before and dah, dah. That’s not the case. If you have a process for [00:38:00] turning a stranger into a client, the first thing I’m going to do is show you how to run ads to get people into that. Because it’s already a proven system for turning a stranger into a client.

If you don’t have that system, that’s where we can help you cherry pick it. But if you already got a system for generating clients, I just want to fuel that thing, and that’s the simplest way to grow. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s really, really interesting. So for somebody who doesn’t have a system yet, they have a product or an offering, but they don’t have, and I won’t say they don’t have clients, but they don’t have consistent clients, so that…

Neil Shoney: mm-hmm.

Trudy Rankin: That regular turn, the crank handle in it and you get out of a client isn’t there yet. What kinds of things would you suggest that they do to get themselves to the place where then that would make sense to start doing ads? 

Neil Shoney: Well, if they’ve already got some level of audience… 

Trudy Rankin: Can I, sorry, can I just rephrase the question just a little bit?

Neil Shoney: Yeah. 

Trudy Rankin: Does it make sense [00:39:00] for them to run a certain type of ad that would help them start to get that crank flywheel in place? Or is that not a sensible thing to do? 

Neil Shoney: No, that absolutely can be for sure. So a really simple one that just about anybody can do is running a boosted post on Instagram to get followers and then get into conversations with your new followers.

Really, really simple. We’ve got a bit of a more advanced version that we call the 3X Reel Strategy, which has three videos instead of one. And we’re making it so that if somebody doesn’t follow you from the first video, they see the second video and then they see the third video. So there’s a bit of a pattern in there, but you can be successful by just taking one video and boosting it to broad demographic.

So again, a dog trainer could do this for people interested in dog training or dogs. As long as the video is half decent, it can be really [00:40:00] successful. And the simple video that you can do is just get your iPhone out, go for a walk, and literally just say, if you’re this type of person who’s looking for this type of result, then follow me for daily tips.

Hi, I’m Neil. I’ve helped nearly 3000 businesses grow with Facebook ads over the last decade, and every single week I’m sharing a ton of Facebook ad tips on how you can grow your coaching business. Click through, follow me now, da da da da. Simple as that, right? I call it a direct ask. So you just do that to your phone.

Don’t worry about how you look. Don’t worry about the weather. As long as they can half hear you. Honestly, like some of the best performing ones that people are running with me right now in that scenario. It’s like quite bad audio. It is like wet and windy. They’re up a hill. Like the more raw this is, it actually works better.

And as soon as a follower comes in, which, in Australian dollars for instance, so we’ve got a [00:41:00] Australian couple, the C-section Hub that we work with. They get followers. I think in Australian dollars it’s like 80 cents a follow or something like that.

So it’s a really low cost follower. But then once the follower comes in, you want to send them a message and open up the conversation. And so bear in mind with this type of ad, they can’t follow you by mistake, right? So they have to watch your video, hit visit profile, read your bio, probably absorb some other pieces of content that they see pinned at the top and things, and then actively choose to follow you.

So don’t be nervous about reaching out and thanking them for a follow and asking a really simple question, and that’s what you need to do in this situation. It’s not a really long message and a really complicated question. It’s a yes or no answer, for both answers are correct. So for me, it’s, “Hey whoever, thanks so much for the follow.

Are you running Facebook ads right now? Question mark.” If they say no, it’s the right [00:42:00] answer. If they say yes, it’s the right answer. And if anybody’s listening right now, you can see that i’ll literally send you that message if you follow me on IG. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s actually a really good example of trying to get engagement. That is interesting.

Neil, I’ve realized that we’ve actually been talking for a lot longer than I realized. It’s been… 

Neil Shoney: That’s happened every pod I’m on. 

Trudy Rankin: It’s been really, really interesting and I’ve really appreciated what you’ve had to share. If people wanted to either get in touch with you or follow you on the socials or actually reach out for some help, where’s the best place for them to go?

Neil Shoney: Well two ways. First of all, you can find me on Instagram. It’s neilshoneymac. It looks like Neil’s honey Mac, if you were to spell it out, but it’s N-E-I-L-S-H-O-N-E-Y-M-A-C. So neilshoneymac, all one word. And I share tips there every day. You can send me messages and there’s freebies and all sorts in the bio as well.

[00:43:00] Whenever I come onto a pod like this as well, I always share something that I don’t share anywhere else as well, which is I do a live three hour ads building workshop every three months, and I’ve taken all the recordings where we literally build real ads. It’s basically a Facebook ads course taking you from concept.

What is the right system for you and your business? What is the ad copy? We give you templates, we give you image templates we go through setting up the Shoney 2-5-5 Method. It’s all in a five video course. So all you need to do is go to adsandfunnels.com/course. And I can send that link to you as well if it’s helpful for the show notes.

Trudy Rankin: Yep, that’d be fantastic. Yeah, because I’ll put that in the show notes and make sure that it’s there. So once again, thank you so much for sharing. It’s much appreciated. And yeah, all the best. 

Neil Shoney: Appreciate you. Thanks so much.

Trudy Rankin: Well, that was a really great conversation, and if you’re listening right now thinking, okay, ads might not be the [00:44:00] enemy, then my work here is done. So here’s a few key points I want you to remember from what Neil shared, and that is that simple beats fancy, clear messaging and a clear offer are going to outperform clever wordplay almost every time.

And that ads work best when you already know where you’re sending people and what they’re meant to do next. And also if you don’t have a consistent flow of leads yet, start with something straightforward, like a simple follower strategy that opens real conversations. And most importantly, ads aren’t magic, but they are a brilliant amplifier.

When you’ve got a process that turns strangers into clients. So if you’ve enjoyed this episode, please subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. And if you’ve got 30 seconds, leaving a quick review is really massively helpful because it tells the podcast platforms, hey, this is worth sharing, and it helps the right people find the show.

And before you go, I also have a newsletter for people building the online side of their business. If you want regular tips and practical advice landing in your inbox, head to [00:45:00] onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter. That’s onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter. And thanks so much for listening.