Scale Facebook Ads: Marin Istvanic Interview

People ask me like, what's most important when it comes to running Facebook ads, and I always tell them it's product, you need to have an edge with your product. It needs to like either be better than the competitors. I'm going to play a little bit of it and then I'm going to play the rest of the song, so I'll see you in a little bit. Welcome to super entrepreneurs podcast. My name is Shahid Durrani.

Today we have with us Marin Istvanic, from managing over a hundred million dollars in Facebook ads to scaling brands like the odi and Vessi, hopefully I pronounced them correctly. Let's dive into Marin's strategies and learn how he's reshaping performance marketing. Welcome to our show, Marin. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. No, it's a pleasure. It's all mine, my friend. Great to have you. I love your calm demeanor. It's good to sense that. So that's a huge feat. A hundred.

Million plus, and that's been, is there a story how you got into this? Yeah, so there's a, there's definitely a story. I was on my senior year of college studying computer science, trying to like, figure out should I pursue with that or should I. Continue with football. Cause I was playing in second creation division, which is semi professional. So it was like okay, which route should I go?

But somehow I stumbled upon digital marketing and started learning everything there is about it. Like I went through the whole Facebook and Google support literature to find out how things are working. But then like I had this theoretical knowledge, but didn't want to spend my money just for the sake of learning and spending money. Luckily, I had one friend that was like probably the only guy in Croatia at that time.

It was doing facebook ads and I said to him like hey, like I just want to learn from you. Can I like Can you give me some tasks and stuff like that?

Yeah. Yeah, and he said like perfect I'm, just like looking for someone who's gonna do all those perfect like Tasks like on a daily basis that I don't want to like, you know Doing the reports finding the audiences checking the competitors and like it was a perfect way for me to see how it's actually How it's actually working to spend some money You Because he was working for some other clients. So basically that was like a entrance for me in this world. I got a grasp of it like pretty quick.

And I realized that like this job is suited for me perfectly. Cause I'm I'm very detailed. I'm good with numbers. I'm trying to find some way to hack the algorithm. Try to find some like shortcuts. And that's like what a great media buyer needs to be. So soon after that, like I graduated, but I never worked like any day in, in like my in computer science, I started freelancing with that friend of mine soon connected with the Matt, with Matt who's my partner at the current agency.

So basically I went from a freelancer to junior media buyer, to senior media buyer, to head of performance currently partner at the agency. So basically my whole journey is tied with the same agency. And I went like from the. Like the lowest lowest role to the partner at the agency. And I'm here like how I spent 100 million. That's probably due to the fact that we work with a couple of nine figure brands that already have high budgets they're spending on Facebook ads.

And it was just me who was trying to maximize the efficiency of those ad spends.

Yeah. That creativity for a media buyer is super important. I worked with someone in the past as well, and he was just naturally, gifted when it came to buying media and the per the cost that it would, that he was providing was at least 30, 40 percent cheaper than anyone else at that time. And it was really exciting.

To see that and someone to find, like you mentioned, those loopholes or not loopholes, but just the creative edge those details matter so much, especially when you're dealing with huge numbers like you're like you are. Yeah. Definitely. Like sometimes when I'm like looking at the ads manager, which is actually the dashboard that Facebook has for.

Running the ads, I feel like I'm in a matrix, that there are numbers running around me and I can see some things that other people not necessarily can see some definitely say that this is probably I'm super lucky that I stumbled upon this digital marketing. Although, like I wasn't young when I stumbled upon it, I was like 24. So it wasn't like that that I knew what I would do, like from the start when I started going on college.

So I'm definitely considering myself lucky, but then on the other side, on the other side, there's like a lot of. A lot of podcasts that I was listening, a lot of literature that I went through, a lot of trials and errors that like got me to this point that I can actually effectively scale an ad account.

You've been working with these brands and I personally haven't heard of them, but I know they're, I never heard them before you, cause I Googled them and I saw they're pretty big brands That, it's hard to keep up with all of them, but did I pronounce it correctly? The Udi? Yeah, you're exactly okay. The UDI and Vessi. So can you share what specific strategies did you use to scale them to nine figure revenues and, How do you adapt these strategies for different brands?

Yeah. So that's a good question. So for example, I could speak about duty cause I was working with them for three and a half years.

Although I was like an outsider, I was a freelancer that they hired. I was almost like as a part of their team. Because when we started working together, they were spending maybe 2k a day. On Facebook ads and it wasn't even their like primary brands. They had some other brands that like they were prioritized, but then I saw okay, this is an amazing product. This is a one size fits all. There's not much returns. You can do a lot of iteration with the different designs.

I also realized why people are buying and that it is mostly girls that are buying like for chilly mornings or like for their camping trips and for movie nights. So we started highlighting like in what situation you can use those you can use that product. So basically I did the customer review mining. So basically I went through the existing reviews that existing customers left to understand why people are buying. And then we started highlighting that in our ads.

So That kind of propelled us from two, two to 5k, then obviously I had my At that time, like Instagram story and Instagram reels became the new asset, new placement in the ads manager. And they were like very underutilized because mostly girls were like using it. Like the CPM was cheap and the conversion rate was good if you had a good ad. So like we create the native ads that are like nine by 16. That was like five years ago, but then we that was like a, one of the loopholes that we exploited.

We got cheaper clicks, but still strong conversion rate that again, took us to the next level, let's say 20k in spend. Then the COVID hits, and this is a product that actually you can use at home and it's perfect for home. So during the COVID we went like from 20 to 50k, just because more people were at home. Then obviously it's not me who's responsible for the growth of this brand. I was just like trying to maximize the Facebook side.

Then the Davy, who's the founder of the brand, he got into touch. He actually got like some licensing deals. So we had Udi with the Disney patterns, UDI with the Harry Potter patterns, which we tapped into the, not necessarily the audience who is interested in the oversized. But into the audience and interested in Harry Potter. Good. And it's interested in, I don't know Batman or like basically those licensed deals, so that kind of propelled us to the next level.

Then we started adding other products because you cannot sell the same product like 10 times, although we had some customers that like. Showcase does the collection of duties.

They had 10 different oversized hoodies, which was crazy to me So you have to sell them another product then like it's important how you're gonna frame that in your facebook ads Hey, you like the comfort of duty here like I know sir our ox boots or like he's the here's the softest Pillow there is so basically we try to connect the dots and actually cross sell people So by the time when I left it was like we were spending 100 K a day on Facebook ads.

And the team was like probably 70, 80 people in house. Although when we started, it was me, David, who's the founder and the girl that did customer service. So that was definitely like quite a journey. So that uniqueness probably is not available in every type of brand out there, yeah. Obviously. People ask me like, what's most important when it comes to running Facebook ads, and I always tell them it's product, you need to have an edge with your product.

It needs to like either be better than the competitors. For example, our product was more softer and longer, and we had those licensing patterns. So it needs to be either better. It needs to save you time, save you money, or it has to have some deep, some feature that other competitors don't. That would allow you to actually. Spend more on your Facebook ads because you have a superior product. That's number one.

If you're just selling a random stuff, like that, you can drop ship from Aliexpress to the States. Like you're not going to make it. Yeah. You'll get some sales, but it's not long term. So definitely the product is most important. Obviously, depending what kind of what kind of category of products you have, you, we use different approaches in our ads, right? For example, for brands that are into clothing, into apparel or into jewelry, we mostly run catalog ads.

So like you can swipe and see different products right away on the, on, on the ad without actually going to the website. The most important thing there is like that the product is appealing, that it looks good while on the other side. Where we have products that are problem solving, then we use some VSL ads. We use personal story advertorials. So people can identify with the problem that they potentially have. Let's say we have shoes that are helping with the plantar fasciitis.

So then we create a story, how one nurse or like someone else had a problem with plantar fasciitis because they're working for 12 hour shifts. So then if you're reading that and you're a nurse, then okay, that's me, like I need this product. Okay. So basically depending what you're selling, your approach needs to be different.

Yeah. And that's what typically is done in e commerce, investors look at products that are out there and look for a, an angle where the top sellers can become better as a product and they kind of piggyback on that success. Yeah, definitely. That's 100 percent true. I know some people. In Europe that took a product that's that's selling well in States. They took the same product, just name it differently.

They source it from China and they're selling it and they have major success in Europe just because they took a product that they know there's a demand for, and then they just localize it to the languages they are selling. So that's definitely a sign that that like you'll have the biggest success.

If you actually exploit the existing demand, if you create a product that there's no demand for, and you need to educate people about it, what's the product, how it's used you're going to have a hard time to actually sell that product, unless you become like an industry trailblazer, and then but that's like a very lengthy and very expensive process to get to that point that you're like recognized as a household brand.

Marin, do you partake in coming up with ideas and investing and creating a product and marketing it? For our clients, no. My agency, yeah. I'm a media buyer and I have an agency, so I run ads for other people. Yeah, so basically when they're like at certain level, they reach out, Hey, we want to scale, I think we can help us.

So that's where I come in and my team on the other side, we realized that we scale so many brands with Facebook ads and that running Facebook ads is like one of the most important things that you can leverage to scale an e com brand. So we then realize, okay, why are we scaling other people's brands? Why not start our own brand? Exactly. Two years ago, we start our own brand. In our second year, we hit 15 mil on this. On this year, we are on a path to. Do 30 mil.

So like you're doing, I would say extremely well, to be honest, we are a bit surprised how well we are doing. We did not expect this. But it's a combination of Facebook ads of influencers of a great product. For our internal brand, yes, I'm participating in that stage of finding a product but for other clients, no, I'm just selling what they are selling on their websites. Yeah, that's good.

That's good, Marin do you have some sort of a system or an open door policy for anyone to come to you with an idea that you partner with them? I had a couple of suggestions like that when someone like launched a brand, they don't have necessarily success, but they think it could be successful. So then I can evaluate, but truth be told I'm a bit too busy with agency and with our brand to start a new project because you get like.

Like everything else in a life, you need to be focused, you need to be devoted to that project. And at this point I'm already juggling between the roles on the agency and the internal brands. So I did not take. So the internal brands, you're capped on it. So whatever you have right now, that's what you're working on. Exactly. So we are not going to start like five brands. And then okay, let's try five. Cause then the focus is divided.

And potentially we could not get to the level that we could get with this one. We had two other brands, but then we realized, okay, it just doesn't make sense, let's like focus on this one. Let's go all in on this one. And it's growing to be working at the moment. And you could potentially flip them as well, and then finally once. Okay. So what advantages do you see, running a boutique agency compared to larger agencies? Can you share some advantages? Yeah, definitely.

So basically all, I have a brand and I know a lot of people that have brands

and their main objection and potentially running, trying or working with an agency is that's hey, like I hire you, I pay you a lot of money, but then like I'm in, I end up working with some junior media buyer because you just sell me the service, but you're not actually the one that's delivering the service. So brands don't want to get their job of the running the ads outsourced to some junior, like maybe from even some other countries.

So basically the approach of us having a boutique agency is that we have only three media buyers. All three are seniors, and two of them I trained from scratch, and they're working with me for the past four or five years. So basically when you work with us, you get a senior media buyer and there's no junior media buyers. You know that this is someone who already scaled the brand.

It's not someone who doesn't know like elementary stuff, like how to take the post ID, how to put exclusion of the buyers, because that has a very big impact. And that's what a lot of these agencies are doing. Imagine like agency with 20, 30 media buyers. There's no way that anybody who's like remotely good would be like working for a salary. He would open up his own agency. So that's one thing. The other thing is we have a limited number of clients.

So basically I know that none of my media bars is. Over overwhelmed with a number of clients and with a number of daily optimization and the communication he needs to be doing. So even if I get inquiry, I'm not going to onboard if I don't have a slot because I don't want to grow with more people. I don't want to grow with more clients. I don't want to grow with more services. This is a sweet spot. I know what we are best at. Facebook is like bread and our bread and butter.

That's what we are best at. We know can, we can do Google ads. We can do TikTok ads. It's not our specialty. Like we want to deliver what we are best at. And like, when you work with us, you get a specialist in that area. We are not a full service agency. And I don't think there's an agency that can be superior in all of those fields. So yeah, like when you work with us, you get a specialty and you get a full dedication. Cause like we are not just a random agency. We are extension of your team.

Extension of your team. That's wonderful. It's a, that's how you can scale, when you bring on an extension. Yeah, exactly. Cause we are 100 percent focused on growing you. Can you share any particular innovation or a technique? that you use as a go to when it comes to media buying that could potentially help someone? Yeah. So there are a couple of things that I could share.

I could share that like most important thing when it comes to running the Facebook ad account after you have a product and like product market fit. It is actually your creative because even Facebook told us that creative has 56 percent impact on the performance of the ad. So basically that's your image or a video. So ad copy, headline testing, audience testing, those are irrelevant. And I still see people Running the ads like they were running, I don't know, five years ago.

And you want to test like a lot of different audiences. Then you want to like small budgets and like incremental change, like small changes, like it's not the same. So basically you need to focus on your creatives.

I also found out in couple of tests that when it comes to video, it's super important to test the thumbnail of your video, because Facebook algorithms sometimes favor certain part of the algorithm, let's say, close up of a face, close up of a product something like weird or something something different that catches the attention. Although most videos on, your timeline are played on autoplay.

So basically users don't even see the thumbnail necessarily, but for some reason Facebook is favoring that one. So I would say the biggest impact that you could have in your ad account is actually testing creatives. Usually I'm a fan of doing a custom review, mining to actually understand why people are buying, then testing those angles. Each angle is a new ad set and then we have four variation of each creative because that actually maximizes our chances of finding a winning creative.

So when it's a video we test first three different seconds which is called hook. When it's an image we test different text on the headline or we test different layout of different colors because that way we can see okay this hook is working let's double down on that. Because for me Facebook ads are just an assumption.

You have an assumption, you test it, you get the data, and then you iterate on a winner, then you double down on a winner, and that's how you're actually getting the learnings fast, getting the learnings on what's working, and that allows you to scale, because otherwise, you're just like playing a lottery game and hoping that something would stick. So you need to have a hypothesis, you need to analyze the numbers, and you need to double down on what's working.

So when you systemize it like that, running Facebook ads seems pretty easy. Great, Marin. Thank you so much. It was wonderful speaking to you. I think you added some good value for people. The information that you shared is needed a lot of people try to, hold on to the information, but the more we share, the more we give out there, the better it is for everyone, and then we are part of something that is as much grander, Then we can visualize or see.

So helping another human being, helping each other it definitely adds a boost to what we do. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me. I appreciate that. I'm used to sharing the value for free. Cause like you would find on my Twitter or my YouTube, pretty much. I'm going into details of all the stuff that I'm running in the ad accounts, what it's working, what's not working. What are some strategies? What are some tips?

Tips and tricks because like I was the guy that like when I started I want some I wanted some actionable tips Yes, I can try into my end account right away. I had going on the conference and like just getting general Advices, so that's why i'm okay, let's give back and people love that so i'm like doing that for two years now, so I appreciate you giving the opportunity to share it on your podcast as well. My pleasure Thank you so much marion and keep in touch