E69: Shelby Fowler

Richard Hill:
Hi, there. I'm Richard Hill, the host of eCom@One. Welcome to our 69th episode. In this episode, I speak with Shelby Fowler, founder of Fempire Ads Academy. Shelby used to run a Facebook and Instagram ads agency out in San Diego, but now focuses her time teaching coaches, course creators, and service providers how to scale their businesses with Facebook Ads.

Richard Hill:
We naturally talk all things Facebook Ads, digging into the certain areas of an ad account to understand the key leavers to improve diminishing returns, the old question of remarketing versus prospecting, where to focus on when. The quick hit round, Shelby gives us three key things to look at and crystal ball time and where ads are going and where you need to be focused to keep in front of the changes. If you enjoy this episode, please make sure you subscribe so you're always the first to know when a new episode is released.

Richard Hill:
Now, let's head over to this fantastic episode. How you doing, Shelby?

Shelby Fowler:
I'm great. Thank you for having me.

Richard Hill:
No problem at all. Thank you for being on the show. I'm really looking forward to this. We get a lot of questions in the agencies and on the podcast about Facebook Ads. Things seem to be changing up all the time. Lots of exciting developments, especially recently with the different updates and whatnot. But I think before we get into the nitty-gritty, it'd be good for you to sort of introduce yourself and tell our listeners where your passion for Facebook Ads came from and your passion for empowering female business owners as well.

Shelby Fowler:
Absolutely. Hello, everybody. Thank you for having me. I am the owner and founder of Fempire Media, and we are a Facebook and Instagram Ads agency. We really help multiple high six, seven, and eight figure businesses scale and automate with Facebook Ads. I started off actually kind of freelancing social media marketing, digital marketing for restaurants and a lot of brick and mortar businesses. And in late 2019, I came to this realization that people actually specialized in Instagram and Facebook Ads.

Shelby Fowler:
And I had been doing this for clients for a while and loved that part. I just had no idea that you could only do that. Once I figured that out, I kind of went all in on that. I really, really love the idea of... With social media marketing or organic marketing, it's a long game. And sometimes that means you are... It's about consistency and you don't always see the fruit of your labor for a while, right? With ads, we were able to really scale quickly, and I was able to see the fruit of my labor. I really enjoyed that part of it.

Shelby Fowler:
I kind of doubled down on that and only offered that in about like fall of 2019. And then when COVID hit, I still had several businesses that were brick and mortar, probably about half of my businesses were online businesses, so either coaches, eCommerce, or I had those brick and mortar businesses and we all kind of know what happened with that. I ended up losing those brick and mortar businesses because they couldn't open, right? And really trying to help them pivot to online, especially if they could shift into the eCommerce space or something.

Shelby Fowler:
That's kind of how I really doubled down again on online businesses, because when COVID hit, that was the world we lived in, right? That's kind of the short version of my story.

Richard Hill:
Most of your customers are ladies then, female entrepreneurs, female business owners?

Shelby Fowler:
I would say right now it's probably about 20/80, 80% being female business owners.

Richard Hill:
Brilliant. Brilliant. You're an eCommerce store. Most of our listeners are eCom stores. They are probably running ads. But for those that may be doing some big money on Google and some of the other platforms, but how would you say an eCom store should determine or how can they determine whether they should be running Facebook Ads or not?

Shelby Fowler:
My recommendation is always if you... Everyone listening, you're running a profitable eCom store. I think once you're profitable and you know your numbers, I think it's a wise decision to move into advertising. Knowing that card abandoned rate, knowing your average order value, all of those things are super important because then you can kind of determine how much you're willing to spend to acquire a new customer.

Shelby Fowler:
If you're having luck with Google Ads, for instance, I would give it a shot to try Facebook and Instagram Ads, because there's no other platform that has the level of targeting and customization that Facebook has. Facebook owns Instagram, so your ads are going to automatically be on both platforms. I have a client who they did really well on Google Ads and we shifted over to Facebook Ads. They still do Google Ads, but now we're competing pretty evenly with their Google Ads that were performing super well.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. I mean, we find the same. If you're running Google Ads, you should be running Facebook Ads. A bit of a bold statement, but I'm there. I'm a believer. Definitely.

Shelby Fowler:
I'm with you on that. And I also will preface that we don't do Google Ads. However, if you are running Facebook Ads successfully, I would run Google Ads too, right? I think they both would work really well.

Richard Hill:
And they both help each other. And in fact, you've got the data from both, obviously, of certain things are working in one, certain targeting, potentially this may be similar targeting, or you've built a customer base from one. You can import those customer base from the other end to the other sort of thing.

Shelby Fowler:
Absolutely.

Richard Hill:
We're running our ads, but what metrics should a market to measure to understand the performance of their Facebook campaigns?

Shelby Fowler:
This is a great question. One of my favorite things to measure at first... Now keep in mind right now, Facebook is taking much longer to optimize ads. If you have been used to seeing results within two or three days, and then shutting ads off that weren't working, you really need to give your ads like about a week and a half, quite frankly, maybe even up to two weeks to really get going. Facebook's reporting is a little bit delayed, so you need to give Facebook time to optimize, right?

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Shelby Fowler:
And remember that it takes about 50 conversions if you're running a conversion campaign for Facebook to optimize. You need 50 sales or 50 conversions, right? With that in mind, when you're starting an ad, one of my favorite things to look at is the link click through rate. What this tells you is, is your creative good? Is your ad copy or graphic or video doing well? So here's our rule in our agency is we look and 1% is good. Anything under 1% is we can adjust it. What this means is that somebody sees your ad and is like, "Oh, this is interesting and clicks on it."

Shelby Fowler:
This tells us, is the ad doing its job, right? We want it to be at least 1%. Now, if you're over 1%, don't change anything. It's doing well. It's doing its job, right? I think a lot of times we have a tendency to like over tweak or change our ads. But if that's over 1%, leave it alone. It's doing its thing. And then I want you to look at if you are running a conversion campaign, you need to make sure that you're spending enough money, especially at first to get through that learning phase quickly.

Shelby Fowler:
If you're not spending enough money, just remember, it's going to drag out that process of Facebook, optimizing your ads. In many cases, maybe you have a set budget for your ads, but maybe you can push most of your ad spend up into that first two weeks so that you can just get through that learning phase quickly, because you really want that, again, that link click through rate to be at least 1%. That's going to really tell you if your ad is performing well. People are clicking on it.

Shelby Fowler:
But then here's the thing, I want you to make sure that your backend is converting. Because it doesn't matter if you're getting clicks on your ads, your ads could be doing their job, but maybe your website needs to be adjusted. I have found, quite honestly, with a lot of clients, it's usually like a very minor thing, a tweaker adjustment, on their website to get those conversions up. We want to make sure that at least 2% of the people clicking on the ad that are going to your website are buying.

Richard Hill:
Got it. We've got to have a 1% click through on the creative. Is your creative any good or not? Yes or no? If it's below 1%, then there's a problem with the creative potentially and we've got to get that up. We've got some very quick hit metrics there, that 1%, and then we're looking at getting those 50 conversions through. The quicker you can do that, the less time you're waiting to see what's working, what isn't working. And then obviously looking at that 2% conversion ideally, I mean, that's quite high I think for some stores.

Richard Hill:
You say some quick changes or changes to the site to improve that. What are some of the things that people can change on their stores to get a better conversion do you recommend?

Shelby Fowler:
And that's a great point too, because if you're running ads to a very cold audience, it might be closer to 1% and that's still okay. You're going to get a higher conversion rate, especially if they are warm, and there's definitely ways and strategies that you can warm up an audience before and send them several different types of ads. And that way, when they do hit your website, they're more likely to convert. And ultimately, it'll save you money and make you more money, right?

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Shelby Fowler:
Some things to make sure that you're doing on the backend, one of the biggest things that I see people not doing, and you'll probably agree with me here, is the abandoned cart emails. The amount of businesses that do not have those is astounding. Because on average, 68% of people will abandoned their cart. We all kind of know this, right? But not having that set up, it is going to affect, you because if you don't have emails going out to them... I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a website and I've been like, "Oh, let's add all this stuff to my cart."

Shelby Fowler:
I have two little kids, so I don't know, I get sidetracked all the time. Hey, make me a snack or whatever. I get off on track. And then I'm like, "Oh, I forgot that I wanted to buy those jeans or those dresses," or whatever it was. I get emails later and I'm like, "Oh yeah, that's great," and then I have maybe 10% off or something. It's not always because I'm just like, "Oh, this is too much money," or it's not that I didn't want it, it's just life happens sometimes and you forget to buy it.

Richard Hill:
To get a 68% increase in your Facebook AD conversion, make sure you've got abandoned cart emails. It's that simple. There's a headline there somewhere.

Shelby Fowler:
Yeah, right. Exactly.

Richard Hill:
But it's true, isn't it? I'm with you on that completely. It's one strategy doing XYZ on Facebook, but then you've got the people there, you've got to come, what else can you do on the store with your other tool set, your other tech stack? Everything comes with a tick box setup nowadays in terms of abandoned cart emails, just the basic abandoned cart email. I'm not suggesting you do a basic one, but just if it's not set up, get that set up. It's so, so simple. We've set the ads up, but let's say they've been running a couple of months.

Richard Hill:
We're a couple of months into the campaign and things aren't really working. They've gone up and then they're sort of maybe a bit of fatigue and whatever. What sort of things should we be looking at? What are the next steps or something? When we're a couple of months in, quite normal, there's been a lot of activity maybe with a new creative and this, that, and the other, but then we're two months down the line and things are just not working. What would we look at? What can we do?

Shelby Fowler:
I want you to look at the frequency. If you go inside of Ads Manager, you can see the metric frequency. What this means is on average, how many times is someone getting your ad? Now, everybody is going to have their own rules and it's going to depend on the type of ad you're running. For instance, if you're running a retargeting ad and let's say you're retargeting the people that abandoned cart, if they get that ad three times, that's okay, because it's usually a smaller group of people that are getting those ads and you're wanting to basically bombard them with your store now, right?

Shelby Fowler:
However, you want to see... If you're running ads and let's say they're working really well, like you said, and then all of a sudden, you see a drop off and you're like, "Okay, what's happening?" If the frequency is high, let's say it's two and a half, three, four times people are getting your ad, it's time to switch things up. And typically what we see is a correlation between that and your link click through rate anyways, because they're less likely to click on the ad if they've gotten it so many times. You need to freshen things up.

Shelby Fowler:
What I recommend doing is... There's really a few components here, because you may need to switch up your audience a little bit. You may need to target a brand new audience, or you can change up your video or graphics. It might require you to switch up some ads copy as well. What we typically do is then we'd go back into a testing phase because we want a quick turnaround, right?

Shelby Fowler:
We might have the same ads that had been working statistically for us for a couple of months, and then all of a sudden, they dropped off. Now let's try that with some new audiences and see if it goes back up. If we start seeing better results. And we will also run those same ads, the same.... We'll change up video or graphic, let's say, and we'll run it to the same audiences. So now we have basically two different campaigns running. Does that make sense? One that's going... Yeah. And that way, you can kind of see what the issue is.

Shelby Fowler:
Is it the targeting group, you've kind of tapped out on that, exhausted it, or maybe it's just that you need to freshen things up? If you've been running just graphics, try a video. .

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it.

Shelby Fowler:
That's my biggest tip. Try video. Do something completely different. We did this with a client recently. Same situation. We've been running ads for four plus months. Ads did fantastic, and then we saw a drop-off. Then we switched some creative up, and then they started going back up, and then they went back down, right? What we did recently was we created this video and the video's awesome. We ran that instead of graphics, and now our link click through rate is like 3.81% and their sales are through the roof.

Shelby Fowler:
Ads aren't just like you do it once and it always works. You have to constantly monitor them and tweak and adjust.

Richard Hill:
I think this is what I see a lot. I think you set something up that works, not too bad to do it. It's not that difficult. Obviously we're an agency as well, so it's easy for us both to say that. Or to see something that was working that isn't working, and I think people get lazy. Things get forgotten, things get in the way like everything. I think having that routine in there, that's a dear too. Because at the end of the day, you are putting something in front of a real human being. And if they've seen it 15 times, it's going to be a problem.

Richard Hill:
They're not going to buy. They're fed up. Not just that particular product, but the brand. It's going to be feeling very tired and sort of not very spontaneous or not very sort of trustworthy. Yeah, absolutely agree with you there. With eCommerce, there's always a lot of talk around prospecting and remarketing, this split. Do you have like a go-to sort of mathematical equation of about where you should spend your split? You're doing, I don't know, you're doing five million quid a year in sales. You may be spending 10 grand a month on ads.

Richard Hill:
It's very difficult to give me an exact number, but if you're spending five grand a month on ads, is there some sort of equation that you look at in terms of splitting between prospecting and remarketing?

Shelby Fowler:
Yeah. I would say about 10% of your ad spend you can use for retargeting. Typically, your retargeting ads are going to be a lot cheaper because these people already know who you are to some degree. Some might know, some may have shopped with you before, right? They know you very well. Some have just gone to your website, but these ads are a lot less expensive. And typically your audience pool is a lot smaller. So you can run a reach campaign, for instance, which is my favorite type of campaign to run for any retargeting ads.

Shelby Fowler:
You can run those ads for very inexpensive. But I will tell you that for a lot of eCommerce business owners, retargeting ads can be very profitable. For some of our clients, they have done the best.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, no. I mean, I definitely say that as well. I guess it depends on the size of the remarketing, retargeting, pixel, that type of thing.

Shelby Fowler:
Yes. And you always, of course, have to be prospecting for new clients and customers, because then you have nobody to retarget in a couple of months if you tap out on that. You want to constantly introduce new people to your brand, to your business, and then retarget them. I've heard this a few times now in the last month. It's a reoccurring theme now. But I love this concept of just like... I've heard a few business owners say, "Once someone is in my funnel, I just want to be unforgettable. They cannot escape me. I'm just constantly bombarding them."

Shelby Fowler:
They're just like, "I'm there everywhere they go," right? I think that that's a really great way to think about your advertising too, but also keeping in mind that going back to not using the same graphics all the time, switch those up so that they're not seeing the same thing all the time, but they're getting different things, a video, a graphic, retargeting, all of it. So then everywhere they go, they're like, "Oh my gosh, I have to buy from the store because I keep getting their stuff." You're always top of mind.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, that's it. That's so true. The next question. I'm going to ask you, I want the listeners to with your answers be able to pause this episode, go into their Facebook Ad account, and basically make... Give me three things that they should go and do right now, go to their Facebook Ad campaign, three things that they should look at. As an eCom store owner, they maybe running DPAs, or they should be running DPAs. If they're not, they need to be sorting that out.

Richard Hill:
But they're running DPAs, they're running various prospecting campaigns, various remarketing campaigns. What's three things they should go and do right now in their ad space?

Shelby Fowler:
This is a really great question. Number one is if you are running retargeting campaigns, please make sure that you have the right campaign type. A lot of people will run a conversion campaign or traffic for retargeting ads. I don't think that those are the most effective. What I have tested and seen and I know a lot of other ad agencies that specialize in Facebook and Instagram, they will tell you and agree with me, reach campaigns are the way to go. And here's why, because reach campaigns will take your pool, your audience pool, and it assesses everything.

Shelby Fowler:
Okay, we got all this. These are all these people. And it's going to reach as many of those people as possible. Instead of conversion campaigns, remember that it takes 50 conversions in order for your ad to even get out of the learning mode, right? It's that time where you start an ad, and typically that first week usually is Facebook trying to figure out who likes your ad, if it's any good, right? It's called a learning mode. If you don't reach those 50 conversions quickly, you get stuck in learning limited, which is like jail.

Shelby Fowler:
It's like you're very limited on who's seeing your ad. Do not run conversion campaigns. I've been hired many times from larger companies. I've looked in their campaigns and whoever was running their ads before that were running conversion campaigns for their retargeting ads. Don't do that.

Richard Hill:
Reach campaigns instead of conversion campaigns. What's next then? That's the first thing they've got to go and check. What's next?

Shelby Fowler:
Yup. The next thing is make sure that you have your... Inside of Audiences, I want you to set up Instagram engagers and Facebook page engagers as two different audiences. You're going to create a custom audience for people who've engaged with your Instagram in the last you can say like 180 days. If you wanted to make it a shorter amount of time, 30 days, whatever. I usually do about 180 days. Do that for both Facebook and Instagram.

Shelby Fowler:
Because when you're running retargeting ads, just kind of following up on that tip, I would include people who also have engaged with Instagram and Facebook. I will give you a quick example. I went on an eCommerce Instagram page the other day, and I started looking through all of their clothes, clicking on their ads. I liked a few of their clothes. Oh, great, and guess what I got about 10 minutes later? I got ads on Facebook. And what did I do? I clicked on it and I was like, "Oh, you know what? I should go by that."

Shelby Fowler:
I'm a sucker, so I buy all those things. I wouldn't have bought it, right? Those are very effective. A lot of people miss out on that and they'll only do... They'll only retarget people who've visited their website or whatever, but don't sleep on the people who are engaging with your social media.

Shelby Fowler:
And then my third tip for you is to make sure, especially right now, this is a really, really important tip, so I want you to listen to this, right now in Facebook land, because Facebook is taking longer to optimize ads with all the iOS changes and of the adjustments, I know Facebook's coming out with tons of new updates, you need to make sure that your campaigns are as simple as possible. What I mean by this is that when you click on your campaign, you really don't want more than two to three tops ad sets underneath a campaign.

Shelby Fowler:
If you're testing under a campaign like six different videos or graphics and six different audiences, that's not going to work. It's spreading it too thin, and you're really doing it a disservice. Try to keep everything as simple as possible. Test less than you normally would. Again, I see this being a big problem with people is they just put way too many ad sets under a campaign, meaning they're just testing tons of different audiences.

Richard Hill:
I think a lot of software does that by default, doesn't it, where you'll put in seven interests and whatever it may be, and then it's created 48 ad sets.

Shelby Fowler:
Oh yeah. Try to simplify things as much as possible right now. And this might change in a year, right, because things always change in Facebook land. But right now I personally would recommend two to three ad sets at most under a campaign and make sure that your ad budget can fit that. And here's the thing too that people don't realize, in your ad sets is where your targeting is, right?

Shelby Fowler:
You need to make sure you're targeting groups in each ad set are about the same size, because by default, the larger audience, Facebook will favor it and push all your ad budget to that ad set.

Richard Hill:
Fantastic. Right. You need to go and pause, and you need to go and crack on and implement some stuff. There's some great takeaways there. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Where should we go now? Future crystal ball time. What should we be looking out for? What's coming down the pipeline next 12 months? I know even 12 months in eCom and Facebook definitely there are lots going to happen.

Richard Hill:
What would you say are some of the things that our listeners need to be aware of and need to be preparing for now, and they need to be implementing now and what's coming?

Shelby Fowler:
There's rumors that Facebook is coming out with a funnel system. Because of the iOS tracking catastrophe, Facebook is going to try to create basically shops on their platform so that people don't have to leave the platform in order to buy something, which would then help you with your tracking, and then Facebook will be able to optimize your ads a lot sooner, right? I think what you can expect, especially in the next six months, the rest of the year, is that there's going to be a lot of changes. We've already seen this.

Shelby Fowler:
We're in Ads Manager every day, multiple times a day, in many different accounts. And honestly, every week we find something new back there. You're going to see that there's a lot of new stuff popping up. Crystal ball time. I project that things are going to look very different in six months than they do now. And I think if you have an ads person, I would make sure that they're on top of stuff. If you have somebody in house, get them some additional training, if you can, and have them talk to other people who are running ads.

Shelby Fowler:
I think the trick to making it through this time is really having your finger on the pulse of what's going on and having communication with others that are experts in this feel, because they know based on experience what's working and what's not too. I also think that, this is just my projection, but because of all of the iOS updates, what you're going to see is that a lot of businesses are pulling out of advertising because they don't know how to do it and things are changing.

Shelby Fowler:
They've learned that, oh, our tactics, our strategies that worked four months ago, six months ago, they're not working anymore, right? And by the way, this is with every platform. If you ran Pinterest Ads right now, same problem. What you're going to see, and you may disagree with me on this, maybe you agree with me, I think that there's going to be some people that pull out, and I think eventually add costs are going to go down because there's going to be less competition.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, I agree. I think this happens... It's like a cyclical thing that has happened in Google Ads a few times where... I can remember like Google Shopping. It was free, it was free, it was free, and then you had to pay for it. I'm not paying for it. Well, no, hang on a minute, 80% of people abandoned it and it's very similar now where, oh, we can't target the right people. It doesn't work. It doesn't work is the usual phrase, isn't it? Well, that just creates an opportunity for those that are willing to learn, those that are willing to really get into it.

Richard Hill:
Generally, costs go down after those things kick in or the returns go up, should I say really. You may spend more probably on ads because there's more opportunity, there's more to go out. A bit like in Google Shopping with CSS, you can save money with a CSS provider. But ultimately, that money you save, if you're getting a return, you reinvest it in theory. Most clients reinvest it. So therefore, you make more with your ads because a lot of people are not doing the newer things. I think that's very much what's likely to happen here. Yeah, I agree.

Shelby Fowler:
100%.

Richard Hill:
You mentioned training. I know you've got some of your own training. Tell us about that. But also, if I was a marketing manager and I was looking to get up to date with Facebook Ads, what are the best trainings out there or a couple of training? I know you've got your own, so please feel free to mention that, and then a couple of others as well.

Shelby Fowler:
Okay, perfect. I have done a lot of research in this area because I have found that a lot of people... As I'm running my agency, especially sometime last year, I really got bombarded with messages, I'd log into Facebook and it would be like 20, 30 messages from people in my community. They'd be like, "Hey, I really want to learn how to run ads. Do you have any recommendations for programs or courses," I should say. What I would say is that I wouldn't suggest buying a course because things change so often, those things are not updated.

Shelby Fowler:
I bought several courses, went through them to see if I could recommend them and feel good about it, right? And a lot of them like half of what they said was good and the other half was completely outdated. Facebook didn't even look like that anymore, right? I just know that that is going to confuse people. I did a lot of research on this. People were asking me, "Hey, do you do ads coaching? Can we hire you for strategy sessions?" I didn't have that available. So I created a program.

Shelby Fowler:
But I will tell you that for people who are marketing managers, you're running ads or your team is, another program... I'll tell you a little bit about mine in a second, but another program but it's specifically for those who are running ads for others is Digital Distillery's program is pretty good. They have weekly calls that you can hop on. They have some good updates. They're active in there. They're training in the backend is a little outdated, but again, you have access to other ad experts in live calls.

Shelby Fowler:
I think that that makes up for some of that. Access to me is the most important thing, because you can go through a course, watch a few videos, but not having a way to ask someone questions or say, "Hey, here's our issue. This is what's happening. Our ads have been working really well for three months. And then all of a sudden, in the last two weeks, it just dropped off. What's going on?" If you don't have access to somebody to ask those questions to, I just don't think that that's very valuable. I would recommend that program for sure.

Shelby Fowler:
For those of you who want even more kind of training or access, I do have a program for that. It's a 12 month program and you get three calls a week. We have a copywriter on Fridays. That was a big, I think, need in the market was that copywriting, right? Your checkout pages, the copy on that matters, right? Your ad copy matters. Your website copy matters. And having someone look at that who does it for a living for high-level entrepreneurs, that's invaluable, right?

Shelby Fowler:
And you're not having to pay extra to get a copywriter in to look at stuff or to rewrite things with you. We have access to that on Fridays. We have support calls office hours. You have an ads coach inside who runs ads for a living that you have access to weekly, and you have a one-on-one with them, plus all the access to our ad templates in all of our training.

Richard Hill:
Fantastic. Obviously a couple of options there, but I think a lot of the listeners are probably running ads to a degree. Most of them, I would say. Obviously hard to say, but I think the scale of a lot of our listeners, I think a lot of would be running ads. They're may be at that point where they're thinking, "You know what? We need to look at outsourcing this. We're doing it ourselves, but let's look at an agency or look at an outsourcer." What sort of thing should they be considering?

Richard Hill:
What's the sort of things they should be looking at when choosing an agency, when choosing to outsource? Maybe taking it out of the in house team or from the owner, quite often, or the marketing manager, taking out away from them and looking to work with an agency. What sort of things should they be looking for, do you think?

Shelby Fowler:
Yeah, that's a great question. I would look at testimonials and case studies, number one. You want to work with somebody who has proof of concept, right? They have worked with others and gotten success. A good question I tell people to ask when they are on their consult with this ad agency is, what other businesses like ours have you worked with and what has been their results? I always look for like...

Shelby Fowler:
When I'm on sales calls with any sort of service provider, I always like them to share a story about a client experience, or if they can relate my situation to another clients. That always gives me a lot of confidence that they know what they're talking about.

Richard Hill:
There's nothing better than a proper case study is there from a similar business, similar person in a similar situation.

Shelby Fowler:
Yeah. I think the thing here is that there's so many different types of ads and niches that you can go into. So make sure that you're hiring somebody who specializes in your type of business. I have a friend who owns an agency that specializes in lead gen for real estate agents. She wouldn't be able to run your ads, but she would be able to run her type of ads a lot better than I would because I don't have a lot of experience in that. Make sure that you pick somebody who specializes in what you do and has some history.

Shelby Fowler:
I guess here's my last tip for that is because this is the pain point I hear the most when people get on the call with me. They say, "Hey, we have worked with other agencies in the past." The number one thing is communication. They feel like their other ad agencies didn't communicate well with them. They didn't really know what's going on. They wish they were a little bit more involved or kind of had an idea of what was happening. It took a long time to get a response.

Shelby Fowler:
I would make sure that they have a system or process in place that you are able communicate with them more quickly.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. It sounds so obvious, but I think the amount of conversations we have with eCom store owners where they basically might get a report once a month and not even a phone call, let alone an hour or two on a Zoom, or whatever it may be, an actual visit back in the day when we did those. It's just an automated report from some reporting tool, which is ridiculous in this day and age. If you're building and scaling campaign ads for a business, it's a huge part of the business. You've really got to understand that business, haven't you?

Richard Hill:
If you're not spending time with the client or the prospect, either way, it's very difficult to make that campaign successful. Well, thanks, Shelby. It's been a pleasure. I always like to end every episode with a book recommendation.

Shelby Fowler:
Ooh, I have so many. Okay.

Richard Hill:
You can have one.

Shelby Fowler:
A book I read recently that I, oh, it's so good, it's called Excellence Wins and it's by one of the founders of the Ritz Carlton. I have it right here on my desk. It's really great for those of you who have teams. It's good for customer service skills. It's really a great book. In fact, I told myself it's probably one of those books that I will have to reread every year too just to make it stay top of mind for myself.

Richard Hill:
Oh great. I've not heard of that one. I mean, it actually sounds fantastic. That sounds right up my street. I'll be getting that ordered straight away. Well, thanks so much for being a guest on eCom@One. For the listeners that would like to find out more about you, Shelby, and reach out to you, what's the best way to do that?

Shelby Fowler:
You can go to my website, fempiremedia.com, and find all of the things.

Richard Hill:
Fantastic. Well, good luck with everything, and I'll see you again. Thanks a lot.

Shelby Fowler:
Thank you.

Richard Hill:
Thank you for listening to the ‎eCom@One eCommerce Podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please hit subscribe and don't forget to sign up to our eCommerce newsletter, and leave a review on iTunes. This podcast has been brought to you by our team here at eComOne, the eCommerce marketing agency.