Amanda Bond: Marketer & Facebook Ads Expert: The Bro-Marketing Takeover

Amanda Bond is a Facebook ads expert and founder of The Ad Strategist. She has served over 73 million ad impressions on Facebook, and her ads have generated over $10 million in revenue.

Amanda’s Original Story: The Bro-Marketing Takeover

Vanity metrics are a bro-marketer’s game. Need proof? Look at the Facebook ad industry.

If anyone knows and understands the landscape of Facebook Ads—the peaks and valleys, the potholes, the ripe golden fields, and especially the danger zones—it’s me. I have served over 73 million ad impressions on Facebook. My ads have generated over $10 million in revenue. I know what I’m doing.

So, when I say this landscape is seriously messed-up, I mean it. When I say it’s just one symptom of a larger problem, here’s where that comes from:

In just two short years (2016–2018), the total return on ad spend (ROAS) for Facebook ads went from 11.88x (meaning, for every dollar you spent on ads, you got back nearly 12x that amount) to just 0.66x. In other words, in two years, advertisers went from gaining back their ad investment in spades to flat out losing money.

How did this happen? The industry was built on toxic, bro-marketer tactics.

Hold on. Back up. First, what’s a bro-marketer?

Back when internet marketing was exploding (think 2014–2016), bro-marketers were there, shaping the trajectory of the industry in ways that reverberate to this day.

Their mantra? Sales first, clients second. They gladly sacrifice respect for their customers by abandoning lead nurturing and authenticity in favor of the holy, almighty money grab. Bro-marketers were (and continue to be!) laser-focused on funnel-hacking, sleazy lead generation tactics, and toxic marketing. They want to scoop up as much web traffic as possible, shove those hordes of people into their marketing funnels, and then spit them out once they wrest as much money out of unsuspecting pockets as possible.

They don’t care about their customers—at all. They’re not interested in building loyalty, relationships, or repeat buyers. They don’t want to help anyone—they want the money, and they want it now.

Imagine a Facebook ad delivered from a bro-marketer straight to your newsfeed. It would begin with the “expert” in question addressing you from the front seat of their slick Lamborghini, or poolside, from the immaculately landscaped garden of their California mansion. They eagerly promise you, as they lazily sip a martini and eye the camera from behind expensive sunglasses, that this lifestyle could be yours, too… with one teeny caveat: You just need to buy into their proven money-making tactics. You become entranced despite yourself, and when you click the ad, you’re taken to a pushy webinar which inevitably lands you on a sales page with a countdown clock—“HURRY, THIS OFFER EXPIRES IN 20 MINUTES”—which gives you immense anxiety, enough to make you take the offer, which funnels you into an email sequence that bombards you with commands to buy, buy, BUY or you’ll never make it big.

Whew.

It’s easy to see why so many of us buy into these ads. We’re mesmerized by the idea of fast money. Everyone dreams of spending their days in idle bliss while the money pours in somewhere in the background. This dream is normal. It’s human.

What’s NOT normal: getting scammed by a sleazy business owner who promised you this dream but only delivered anxiety and stress.

Many, many of these bro-marketers made a whole lot of money, a whole lot of noise, and therefore pushed their way in to make many of these toxic tactics industry best-practices.

• This is why so many ads from a wide range of business owners look exactly the same.
• It’s why there are so many pitch-heavy, automated webinars claiming to be “value-packed” but really are just one long sell.
• It’s why so many sales funnels are built on tactics like aggressive copy, fake scarcity, sales timers, price slashing, and high-pressure pitches.

Many of us blindly follow these “best-practices” because it’s all we know. It doesn’t mean we’re bad people. It means the ad industry is flooded with well-meaning people following in the footsteps of those who claimed unheard-of success with these methods.

The thing is, these very practices are the reason why the ad industry return on investment has collapsed. (Remember those ROAS numbers I mentioned?)

Bro-marketing is not sustainable because:

• The market is saturated. It’s not just a few people yelling about their get-rich-quick scheme, it’s thousands.
• You need to generate a lot (a LOT) of leads to get one measly sale. For every 100 leads that fall into your funnel, only one will buy in, because you’re scooping them up without regard for whether they actually need or want your particular solution. Grabbing any lead you can means that most of them are the wrong people. They’ll fall out of your funnel, land hard, and never look back.
• Bro-marketers rely on vanity metrics to prove their funnels work. The thing is, vanity metrics are empty numbers. So what if you got thousands of leads from an ad if only ONE of those leads went on to buy? So what if your video got millions of views if NONE of those viewers became interested enough to subscribe? If anything, focusing on vanity metrics is misdirection. They don’t add up to real growth or real steps forward for a business. They just look good. They dupe people into drinking the Kool-Aid. And the cycle continues.

You shouldn’t have to twist your buyer’s arm to get them to purchase. You shouldn’t have to doggedly pursue them with aggressive tactics and sleazy pitches. If that’s what it takes, that person is NOT your ideal buyer to begin with.

There’s a better way, and the foundation is putting your customer first. Earn their trust in you. Then back that up with a holistic strategy.

Instead of buying into bro-marketing, we should be focusing on its antithesis: customer-first, can’t lose.

Find more from Amanda Bond at The Ad Strategist and on Facebook.