Social Media Ad Genius just hit me with this sidebar ad on Facebook. Figured I’d cruise through their funnel real quick and share my two pennies. First, though, if it’s leads you’re interested in and you’d just as soon get ’em for free, watch this entertaining case study:
Anyhoo, Black Box Social Media (BBSM, LLC), the actual business running this ad, took me to a squeeze page that looked like so:
I liked how they showed social proof and used Frank Kern in the subhead to build credibility and even curiosity (like what are they doing that’s “unbelievable, ridiculous, so brilliant,” right?). So they earned my email; and after submitting it I get taken to the on-demand training I was promised:
So far so good. I press play and up pops Curt Maly, drippin’ in Black Box Social Media swag, excited to show me how, exactly, he was able to get 92,233 leads in just three weeks for only 55 cents per lead.
Curt assures me there’s nothing for sale; he just wants to give value and build a relationship. He promises he’ll walk me through their proprietary “BELT Method,” which is apparently their proprietary marketing strategy for generating leads and sales at a fraction of the cost. The video then cuts to a rather old-looking Mike Dillard, who hypes Curt up, claiming he and his BBSM squad run all of his ads. Which is funny ’cause I swear I’ve seen Mike do this for at least two other “ad ninjas” in the past two years. (If they’re all so good, why’s he constantly switching?)
Mike then throws it back to Curt, who explains how he co-founded Black Box Social Media back in 2010 and later joined forces with his brother’s ad agency, Maly Marketing, where they’ve supposedly worked with the who’s who of gurupreneurs over the years.
After a few more minutes of humble bragging, Curt begins breaking down the BELT method. B.E.L.T., of course, is an acronym that, when implemented correctly, will allow you to take a person from stranger to buyer using Facebook ads. Here’s a quick summary of each phase:
- Belief: help the audience believe that they have a need and realize that your business can potentially fulfill that need.
- Engage: help the audience to evaluate why your offer is best positioned to give them the solution they need.
- Lead: help the audience to a clear next stop by leading them to your solution or by offering them something of value.
- Transact: help the audience to do business with you through offers and retargeting.
From here, I gotta hand it to him. Curt honestly does go really in-depth and give lots of examples of ads he’s ran in the past, along with numbers, creatives, glimpses of his actual targeting… everything. And I must say, his strategy is pretty futuristic. I would guess very few marketers are running ads this way.
Basically, instead of running ads trying to get people to click over to your squeeze page and opt-in, he’s dripping lots of great content on ’em (namely, videos of different lengths, with campaign goals of “video views”), and then running more content and offers at those audiences who have watched the majority of those videos, thus moving them closer and closer to a sale, without annoying them and without paying a premium.
Here’s the downside: you’d have to be a content creating machine and devote all day, every day to organizing, testing and tracking all of the different content pieces and ad campaigns… and do it all at a very high level… to get anywhere near the kind of results that Curt Maly and clients of Social Media Ad Genius are getting. If you’re cool with that and serious about scaling Facebook ads, it’s probably worth checking out.
Or, do what we do. Free traffic from Google. That’s how you got here. And I didn’t have to create 15 new video ads and 10 long-copy retargeting ads and risk hundreds or even thousands of dollars to pull it off. And, because you came here looking for a review of Social Media Ad Genius and/or more information on Curt Maly and his Black Box Social Media brand, guess what? It doesn’t get more targeted than that. So maybe you should take a gander at what we do before ya leave:
