The Trouble with Gurus

To succeed with social media advertisements, we have to learn and develop all the time.

To learn and solve our problems we need teachers.

And here come gurus into the picture.

We see their ads on Facebook, read those, click through to their website, and hope not to get disillusioned, manipulated, or even misled this time.

Unfortunately, the name guru was quite abused in the past few years. The original meaning of a guru is a personal religious teacher and spiritual guide. A management guru is an influential teacher or popular expert. Now everyone wants to be called a guru.

Most advertisement gurus fall into one (sometimes two) of the following categories:

Hack-based gurus:

Most often we see big, bold, largely unsupported claims. And of course a long copy or a long landing page to convince us about their truth.

They have found the Holy Grail. Using it you can easily turn around our business and make 7-figures income. With a single hack or trick.

Not all hacks or tricks are useless or illegal. They could be useful in the past, but moderately or not at all nowadays.

An example is laser-sharp targeting with hidden interests. It might have worked in the past, but doesn’t make sense now. The reasons:

• You don’t need to pay for software to reveal those “hidden” targets.
• These targets are usually small. Small audiences come with a prohibiting CPM.
• Anyway, Facebook knows much more about the behavior of users than the things they might be interested in.

Of course, there are worse claims only naïve people believe.

Marketing-based gurus:

The benefits associated with their claims are not always obvious. The landing page is super long, flashy, and squeezing. Plays well with emotions and rationality. The page is with a lot of praises from customers, who might even be real.

And at the end, there comes the smashing offer. With all the fantastic bonuses, it is a $12.347 value, and you pay only $24.95 for packaging & postage. You can’t go wrong. And later, you have the chance to participate in a $995 training course, too.

The reasons I rarely take such offers are that:

• I hate squeezing landing pages.
• I don’t want to spend an hour reading a single landing page.
• I know that the real value would come from the premium product. Perhaps.
• I never buy anything important during a single visit to a website.

Money-based gurus:

They have spent millions and millions of clients’ dollars on ads. However, it is rarely stated how successful those campaigns were. It is neither clear if those campaigns were managed at least partly by the guru, or always by their colleagues.

Sometimes these gurus are authors of good books, too, so I would not disregard them.

However, often I have the feeling that I can’t learn everything from a big-budget guy. The reason is exactly the big budget. I have to squeeze every dollar from my ad budget experimenting a lot with creatives, interests, behaviors, demographics, and so on. Parallelly, everything has to be done to nudge prospects deeper and deeper in the funnel, changing delivery optimization objectives a couple of times to have enough conversions to jump to goals deeper in the funnel, until I can set the Purchase goal (even though I never wait till 50 purchases a week).

With a large budget, everything is simpler. Knowing how smart the Facebook algorithm (artificial intelligence) is to find customers, almost everything is irrelevant for large budget advertisers, other than creatives. Often enough conversions are generated from past customers and the Purchase goal can be set early enough. In the worst case, I few thousand dollars are burnt but then the Facebook algorithm will deliver results systematically and profitably.

Expertise-based gurus:

That’s what I prefer. People, who learned and experimented a lot and developed real expertise in relevant fields. They often share a large part of their know-how for free in their blog post, videos, and/or newsletters. Of course, sooner or later we shall see their offer but that is quite natural.

On their website, we can familiarize ourselves not only with their knowledge, and their offer but their personality, too. They don’t claim that they are gurus, but in a sense they are.

However, as I have said at the beginning some gurus may fall into more than one category.

It is not always easy to distinguish real gurus, who earned their title, from self-proclaimed false gurus.

When in doubt, I try to look for pieces of evidence:

• Is the content they provide for free valuable, in harmony with my existing knowledge, but pushes it even further?
• Are there comments on their blog posts or their YouTube videos?
• Is the person credible? What has he achieved in life? Check their website and google if in doubt.
• Are the newsletters sent keep a good ratio of additional value and sales message?
• Find REAL social proof. For example lots of unsolicited, mainly positive comments on the product pages or their Facebook page by people you can at least partly identify and trace.
• If they have a book available on Amazon, what are the comments of readers? Sometimes I buy the book straight away and judge the quality of the content myself.

When we are talking about the product or service of gurus themselves, of course, there are other things to look for (enough information, money-back guarantee, free trial whenever it is possible, etc.)

When it comes to Facebook advertising what we do is invest in ads, and we expect a good return.

I am firmly convinced that we cannot be successful with tricks and hacks. The Facebook advertising platform is sophisticated and difficult to master. You need to have your ads management system. And that has to be based on measurement. Better yet, a measuring system.

After a few years with Google Ads (AdWords at that time), I started to advertise on Facebook in 2017. The first thing I had done is to set up my measurement system. That included a series of interlinked Excel files, which have brought all important data together, finally to a single page packed with KPIs. Some of the sources I have pulled data from:

• Facebook Ads
• Google Analytics
• Google Ads
• Woocommerce (webshop)
• Billing software

Of course, a measurement system is more than that. For example, finding the best metrics to concentrate on is crucial.

It took only a few months that I achieved a ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) of around 10, which I could maintain for years. That was with a physical product (premium quality healthy shoes). See the screenshot on the page describing my measurement experience throughout my carrier.

By the way, I used a “trick” to be profitable early. For about a month I advertised to a broad target. After that, I narrowed it down to those age groups and counties, which were the most profitable. For almost a year I was learning, experimenting, and testing a lot until my ads management system improved. After that, I could return to the broad target and achieve the same profitability I had with the narrowed-down target. Of course now, with a new product the learning cycle is MUCH shorter.

I am not saying it was easy to be that profitable. I neither say it can be achieved in a crowded, highly competitive market. What I am saying is that my success was largely due to doing measurement right.

Read more about Facebook Ads measurement (there is also a free White Paper to download about the concept) and our related offer. Put Facebook advertising on steroids (the good ones).