Interview with Dino Gomez from Funnel Consultant Society

Hey Dino,

I first met at the Chiang Mai SEO conference a couple of years ago now. You were incredibly helpful with advice on getting started in paid traffic for a supplement brand I have developed, and so was keen to sit down and interview you.

Having first been introduced to you as Dino the “dude who doesn’t like suits” Gomez, it was good to understand why and now it's clear you're very much a beach dude!

Your agency and events have been going from strength to strength in the last few years, yet you always look so chilled out.

You’re a busy man to pin down, so thanks again Dino for taking the time to answer my questions – let’s jump straight into this with my first question.

Can you give us a little background about you? For example, where you’re from.

First off, it’s a pleasure to be a guest in your interview, Adam. Thanks for having me.

Well, originally I’m from my mom's belly but was born in Phoenix, Arizona. All terrible jokes aside… Since the age of 3, I’ve lived the majority of my life in San Diego, California. I've tried a few cold-weather states but it’s official I’ll always need to live near a beach.

Like many of us starting to work for ourselves, you wanted to get away from the 9 to 5 grind of office cubicle life. How did you first get started working online?

I was in my fourth year of college when I started planning my inevitable future escape from the 9-5 job. I wrote out a list of all the occupations where I would be able to work remotely on my own schedule.

As I did a ton of research it became fairly clear that there really weren’t many positions available with this type of job freedom.

That is when I realized I will probably need to develop an online marketing skillset or sorts.

So, I launched a WordPress blog around my favorite sport, basketball. It became my excuse to watch Sportscenter religiously so I could have topics and opinions on trending matters for which to write about. This is where I really started developing a skillset for social media marketing and SEO.

As my blog traffic grew, so did my passion and hunger for master online marketing. I began absorbing as much content as I could. John Chow was the first podcaster that I would play in my earbuds as I walked around campus in my last year.

After college, I used my experience with growing my blog traffic to earn a position as the director of marketing at a local ad agency. 3 months into cubicle life there I was already planning my escape. It was at the 6-month marker I put in my two weeks notice and took off to start my own agency.

From there, the adventure really began.

I believe you first started with SEO but these days you are known as the Facebook Ads guy (I see you all the time on my feed ;). What made you transition to FB?

I was 100% an SEO guy and very much enjoyed it the first 4 years as an agency owner. But around 2014 I adopted this understanding that the online marketing industry was always going to change quickly and consistently.

That is when I really began testing different platforms as a means to drive traffic and leads.

Sometime in 2015, I sold a few of our SEO clients on the idea of testing Facebook ads.

To my surprise and more so to my clients, Facebook ads blew our SEO results out of the water. The number of leads that our ads generated in just a matter of days compared to the number of SEO leads that required months of work wasn’t even close.

When those clients started asking me to increase our ad campaign budgets after just 1 week of testing, I knew this was going to be a huge platform.

From there I’ve been a 100% paid advertising advocate.

I have met you personally and know many people who have worked with you, so I know you’re the real deal. But opening FB these days we're bombarded with so many guys promoting themselves as “closers”. How do you stand out from what seems to be a crowded place?

The easiest way to stand out is with case studies, demonstrating a further understanding of various strategies, and simply having an outrageously larger quantity of testimonials. [Not kidding the number of testimonials on your Funnel Consultant Society is insane! I counted 28 video testimonials and 11 Facebook testimonials – Adam]

Since I was on the Facebook ads platform long before the rest, I kinda have an unfair advantage here.

With that said, I welcome the competition and respect everyone’s hustle. This industry is in its infancy and there’s plenty of resources, clients, and income to go around.

You also run the Funnel Consultant Society, where you help entrepreneurs, as well as digital agency owners, master Facebook advertising & high ticket client acquisition. Clearly this program works with the sheer number of testimonials you have. Can you explain more about the program?

Yes! I’m beyond pumped about what our team and tribe have done with the Funnel Consultant Society. It’s truly been blood, sweat, and tears to create the type of program that FCS has become.

In short, Funnel Consultant Society is our flagship mentorship program that helps entrepreneurs and agency owners to add 5-6 figures to their business utilizing the latest Facebook advertising strategies.

We have over 800 members now are and growing very rapidly and as you mentioned, are quite proud of the 100’s of testimonials we have received!

The members are simply awesome to work with day in and day out and become kickass marketers. It’s insane to see their progression just over the initial first few weeks and to hear how much the program and community are impacting their lives completely.

Then there’s the coaching staff to thank that hustles consistently to ensure each of our members has all of their questions answered, is up to date with cutting edge strategies, and supported on weekly calls.

But perhaps the best part is the live events where the entire tribe gets a chance to hang out, share new campaigns, funnels, and ads, and otherwise enjoy drinking together. Entrepreneurship can be a lonely road at times which is why we love hosting events for our group to meet in person. That is where the magic really happens! Our recent San Diego event was a blast.

I think we’ll see this group grow to 2000 members by the end of 2020.

Your recent Funnel Consultant Society live event in San Diego

Do you still work directly with clients are do you mostly teach?

Good question.

Our agency still manages a large pool of client campaigns. Everything from local businesses to large brand name clients. I’ve always felt the best way to lead is by example s without our client campaigns, I feel we would lose our competitive advantage to lead our members in FCS.

Like many guys moving from SEO to e-commerce, I am new to paid traffic and FB marketing. What would you say is the best way to gain traction with FB Ads for a brand with a $10k budget?

The first thing I would do before running any paid traffic to an ecomm store would be to optimize the up-sells, cross-sells, followup emails, and the checkout process. You’ll want to maximize average order value as much as possible before sending paid traffic there. This allows you to spend more on the acquisition of a new customer and potentially outspend your competitors.

When you’re store is complete with testimonials, secure checkout, reviews, great messaging, and you have feedback on the user experience, then I would start with a small advertising budget of $10/day.

In particular, if you have any traffic to your ecomm store, I would start primarily with retargeting ads and dial these in. You need to get your retargeting ads profitable first (this would be your warm audience) before thinking about cold traffic. If your warm audience isn’t converting… then you’ll struggle with your cold audience.

With your retargeting ads in place & profitable, I would budget $1000 in the first month to acquire new customers with cold traffic. If you have a list of current customers you can use this list to build a lookalike audience for which to run ads. I would also test ads against various “interest-based” audiences that are related to “healthy eating” and or “entrepreneurship” in the case of a superfood & brainpower food brand.

The key is to test heavy and fast in the first few weeks so that you can have the data back quickly as to which audiences/ ads/ and ad angles are working best. Then you can optimize from there.

I would aim to discover your winning ads, audiences, and ad angles within spending your first $2,000. If you are near breakeven after 2k of ad spend then you are going to have great potential to scale considering the average lifetime value of a customer and return purchases.

A 10k budget gives you a nice runway to acquire new customers from ads, deliver a great product, and have them come back as return buyers. You should watch your cash flow carefully and calculate your LTV so you know the profitability of your campaigns and when you will break even or otherwise profit from the acquisition of new customers.

Soon you will be jetting off to Bali for your Tropics Mastermind. This looks awesome and wishes I could make it (to many “business” trips away this year!). What is this event about?

The Tropics Mastermind event is something I’m very excited about. It will be our first event hosted in Bali, Indonesia this November.

This is an extension of the accelerator events we host for members of Funnel Consultant Society and is an opportunity for the coaches and myself to work very closely with a few select members. The goal of these events is to add another layer of coaching to those agency owners who want to grow their business even faster and is a chance for our community to have a ton of fun in a tropical setting.

Tropics Mastermind Event November 2019

I'd like to Mastermind in Bali with Dino!

What’s in store for you going forward? Do you see yourself concentrating on FB or do any other platforms interest you? How do you see your business developing over the next 1-2 years?

Over the next 2 years, I see our team continuing to build out the Funnel Consultant Society in order to serve new entrepreneurs and agency owners who are looking to grow their business with social media advertising.

We have been extensively testing several other paid advertising platforms and are seeing great success so our strategies & findings will soon be added to FCS for our members to capitalize on.

In short, we will always continue to grow FCS as our goal is to have it be the last paid advertising program anyone would ever need.

We also have great insight as to the opportunities that FB ads will present in the future. I’m predicting advertising in virtual reality very soon and want our students and agency owners to be prepared for the opportunity that will present.

A lot of exciting things are coming down the road!