The Three Pillars of Facebook Ads Marketing | 118
When a lot of business owners think about Facebook Ads marketing, they imagine sending people directly to a product, landing page, or course. But there is a better way to leverage your Facebook Ads.
In my course, Dream List Essentials, I teach participants my three pillars for Facebook Ad marketing. Think of it like a strategic digital marketing strategy specifically for your ads. The goal of these three pillars is to maximize your ad potential and keep you from wasting money on ads. These three pillars are a step-by-step formula, so I recommend following them in order!
Step One: Solidify your Marketing Foundation
Before you can dive into Facebook Ads marketing, you need to have a solid grasp of your audience and your messaging. This means you should know your audience really well: what does your audience want, need, desire, struggle with, and hope for?
Knowing this will help you get clear on your messaging. When crafting your messaging, you need to pay attention to what you say and how you say it. You want your audience to think, “Wow, how did you know that about me? Are you in my head?!”
If you’re struggling to get to know your audience, try sending out polls on Instagram, asking your email list, having conversations in the DMs, and sitting down for (virtual) coffee chats.
Step Two: Build Your Email List
Once you’ve got your messaging down and it’s well-received by your audience, you can now start to think about Facebook Ads marketing! The reason you need messaging first is because any ads you create will need to include messaging in the caption (and the visuals).
This will also ensure that before you start funneling money into Facebook Ads marketing, your lead magnets are able to perform well organically. Oh and also, you should be consistently sending emails to your list before you run ads.
This is important because I recommend you focus on lead generation and building your email list initially. In fact, I typically suggest at least 80% of your ad budget pretty much always be spent on lead generation ads (maybe even 100% if you have a smaller budget).
Lead generation is super important because it’s a leading metric that will determine your business's success 3-6 months down the line. If you aren’t sure what a lead metric is, check out Episode 115.
Step Three: Expand your Success
Once you have a handle on your lead generation ads and you are seeing success there, you can move to the next step in the strategic digital marketing strategy. It’s time to get visible, increase sales, and take your business farther.
This is when you can finally start running visibility ads. These are ads that promote your long-form content in order to nurture a current or warm audience. It’s one of those micro touch points that gets you consistently showing up and nurturing your audience.
These visibility ads should only use about 5-10% of your ad budget at one time! Before you begin visibility ads, make sure you are consistently creating fresh long-form content to direct your audience towards.
Lastly, sales ads! It might shock you that these are last on the list, but it’s because sales ads should only be run to a warm audience (and what better way to warm them up than with lead generation and visibility?). These ads can promote a membership, course, product, and so on.
Interested in learning more about Facebook Ads? My DIY course (with extensive support), Dream List Essentials, is currently OPEN! This is a six-week coaching program to help you learn the basics of Facebook ads, so you can confidently create a Facebook Ads marketing plan and implement it for your own business. Doors are open until April 26th, so join us TODAY!
Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @heyitsjenzaia and tune in next Saturday for more business tips and strategies!
xo, Jenzaia
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Episode Transcript:
Hey there - I'm Jenzaia and this is Market Scale Grow - a podcast created for ambitious teacherpreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, flexibility, and ultimately make more money. With weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you, my goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.
Welcome to this Saturday strategy session! Today we are gonna take a deep dive into the three pillars of effective Facebook ads marketing. This is what I do with my clients. This is what I teach in my course. This is one of my golden rules. I don't really know if that's the right thing to say, but there really are these three steps to building a successful marketing strategy and ensuring success specifically with Facebook ads, and in your marketing in general.
So we'll talk about the three different pillars and what the different steps are within that pillar. And it really, in my opinion, Is a step-by-step process. So you're gonna want to do step one first, which is to solidify your marketing foundation. And then step two, which is to build your list. And then step three is to expand your success.
Let's dive into step number one.
Step number one is to solidify your marketing foundation. So your marketing foundation is really, really important. If you're thinking about this like a house, the foundation is what ensures that the house doesn't start to sink, fall over, crack, or break. We want the roof to stay. And having a strong, solid foundation is really what makes it all work.
So it comes down to a couple of different things, and that is number one, knowing your audience, knowing your ideal client extremely, extremely well. And I don't really subscribe to the idea of naming your person and saying that it's a girl who is a teacher in their mid thirties with three kids. Unfortunately, a lot of that information is actually kind of irrelevant.
What you really, really need to do is think about multiple different people and what they would have in common, and those are…their hopes, dreams, what success looks like for them, how you can help them achieve success. And that also means knowing their fears, their obstacles, their pain points really, really well.
Also being able to evoke emotion and making your audience know and realize and understand that you get them, that you get them on such a deep level, that you can speak directly to them, and that you can really help them to solve this problem - this struggle that they are having.
When I say knowing your ideal client and having an ideal client avatar, it really is kind of forgetting the demographics. Does it really matter if this person is a male or female? Does it really matter if they're in their twenties or their forties? And I mean, there are some businesses that their age or their gender or their location will matter, but in most cases, if you can help this person solve their problem, then that's really what you need to identify. And again, you're gonna do that by knowing their hopes, dreams, fears, obstacles. And what success and failure looks like to them. Being able to speak directly to that.
And then the second piece of that marketing foundation, which really ties into the first one, is your messaging and being able to use the words that they are using. Using the phrases that they're using, and this is how they're going to say like, oh my goodness, Jenzaia is in my head.
Everybody hates it when I say this. Even my coach was telling me that I needed to do this and I got this feeling in my stomach like, I don't want to. So it's market research. Talking to your people, whether that's having coffee chats with them, 15 minutes to just chat, whether it's sending out a survey, whether it is doing polls on your Instagram stories, whether it's through DM conversations.
There's so many different ways to do market research, and it doesn't necessarily need to be sitting down having a conversation with somebody. Although I would argue that is one of the best ways to do it. The more frequently you're doing this and the more part of your routine that market research becomes, the easier it becomes and the more in a habit you are of doing it. It's just so much easier.
Those are the two biggest parts of having a solid marketing foundation. And again, it really is the most important part. If somebody's Facebook ads aren't doing well, the first thing we look at is the messaging, because typically the lead magnet has converted before people have said yes. Or whatever we're trying to sell, whether it's a course or a membership or a program or whatever it might be, has sold before. And so we know that people want this freebie or that people want the course or program.
So it isn't typically the offer itself that's a problem. Typically, it's just the messaging surrounding the offer. Unfortunately, what I've seen happen is people burn down the whole thing. “Oh, I only got one sale. It's garbage. I need to make an entire new course from scratch.”
That's not what you need to do!
What I really recommend that you do is lean into it and you really try to find the right messaging so that you can speak to your people and evoke emotions. And having that solid marketing foundation, having done the market research, knowing your ideal audience is really what's gonna help you to speak more directly to your ideal client.
Pillar number two is building your list.
So once you've solidified your marketing foundation, the next step that I recommend you move onto with your Facebook ads is building your list. And this is your lead generation where at least 80% of your budget should be spent. And when you're first getting started with Facebook ads, a hundred percent of your budget will probably go here until you're spending over $1,000 to $2,000 a month.
Now, it does depend on your business model. I have clients that have more product-based businesses that we are running product-based sales ads. But all of the money is going to lead generation because it's so important to creating a sustainable business.
Leads coming in. If you listen two episodes ago to 116, I talked about leading and lagging metrics. Leads coming into your business is a leading metric. The number of email subscribers that you have is a leading metric that will help to determine your success three to six months down the road. And I have an episode coming up that's all about the delayed effects of today's actions on your marketing - because buying cycles are getting longer. That's why lead generation is just so important. Having a consistent stream of new people coming into your business and then seeing your emails, is what is going to help you to grow sustainably over a longer period of time.
There are a few different ways that you can grow your email list. The first one is organically, and this would be promoting your lead magnet, your freebie on blog posts that have SEO going on. And through potentially pinning if you want to. I don't use Pinterest, but it is a great search engine. Highly recommend it if you have the time and energy to figure it out. Pinterest is another great way to organically build social media posts, promoting it through your stories and pinning it all. Those are really great ways to grow your email list organically.
The second one is collaborations and to grow your email list by sharing your freebie with somebody else's audience because they've already built that audience, they've already built trust with that audience. And so typically, you'll do a presentation of some sort, whether it's a podcast episode with the host or through a conference or a summit. Typically at the end of that presentation, you'll have a chance to share your freebie, and so collaborating with others is a really great way to share your freebie with their audience and hopefully get some new subscribers through that.
Then the final one is paid advertising. So something like Facebook and Instagram ads where you are paying to show your lead magnet to more people. And then once they see the lead magnet, they have the decision whether or not they're opting in or not. I never, ever, ever, ever, ever recommend buying email lists. Pretty sure it's illegal, probably depends on where you are, but highly do not recommend.
I also highly do not recommend giveaways to grow your followers or follower loops or anything like that. You really wanna make sure that people have chosen to opt in. And so when you're paying for advertisements, you are paying to grow your list. You're paying to present your lead magnet to more people so that they can then self-select yes or no.
So building your list is a really, really important piece of the marketing puzzle because not only do you have more people that are aware of you and in your circle, but you have the opportunity to nurture them regularly, build those relationships and to sell to them. And that is through your consistent weekly, biweekly or monthly emails that you are sending out. And they're a really great way to nurture your audience and also sell to them. I don't do this personally, but I do love the idea of nurturing and selling in every single email. So if it makes sense and it's appropriate based on what your business model is for you to have some sort of connection point in the email so people get to know you better.
hey know a little bit about your life and your business and who you are. And then it also segues into a sale of some sort and not in a “buy now or forever miss out”, but in a more natural way of serving your people. That's the really great thing about building your list. If you are going about it in that direction of telling the story, nurturing your audience, connecting with them, then you're gonna be building those relationships through nurture so that when people are ready, then they'll buy from you. And if you're consistently selling, maybe not in every single email, but regularly, then people know you have something to buy and are more likely to buy.
As just a little bit of a caveat, I do not recommend you paying for ads to grow your email list. If you're not sending out consistent emails, you can start growing your email list organically and through collaborations. If you're not quite at the point where you want or you're able to consistently email. But once you start putting money in and even collaboration, sometimes your list is going to grow pretty quickly, or at least that's the hope. And if you're not consistently emailing your list, then these people might not remember who you are.
You want to, as soon as you can, get in the habit of constantly emailing your list so that your efforts to build your list are actually like, you can enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Pillar number three.
Step number three is to expand your success, and this is where you are going to get more visible, get more out there, make more sales, and really go further. So with my clients, after a lead generation is up and running successfully, the next type of ad that we add in is nurture or visibility ads. And this is where we're sending traffic to long form content typically. So most of my clients have blogs.
I personally have a podcast. That is the long form content, and that is super, super great for nurturing your current warm audience and also becoming more visible to new people. So when they find you and they click, they're not just being sold something, you're giving them value.
The goal is that when they listen to this podcast episode or they read the blog post, they're getting something of value. Whether they buy from me or not, I'm giving them value and that’s creating more of a bond, connection and a relationship with the person. That's the next type of ad that we're adding in. Typically this is gonna be like five to 10% of your ads budget; nurture and visibility ads.
Now, of course, you can't run these ads if you don't have long-form content. So you do want to be consistently creating content so that you can promote it, so that you can be nurturing people. And then the last type of ad that I typically add in with my clients is sales ads, and these are the ads where we are promoting a membership or a course or something like that.
And so they all kind of layer together. We're building the list, we're nurturing the list, bringing in more people. That's the other piece that I kind of missed. If somebody new sees my podcast episode ad afterwards, it's almost like a slinky, if you will. They go down that first step, which is seeing the podcast episode, and then the momentum continues and they start to see list building ads and they get on my email list.
There's also a next step after, and that's the other reason why I like to set up the list building ads first before the nurture ads, so that once we do the nurture ads and we're promoting the blog post or the podcast episode or the video content, whatever it might be, there is already the list building ads up and running. So they see the content and are like, I really like this person!
And then a day or two later, they see your list building ad and they're like, that was such a great blog post! I'd love to see their freebie - I'd love to get on their email list. And then again, the final ad, and this goes into the extending your success pillar. The final type of ads that we add in are sales ads. Typically we're only sending sales ads out to warm audiences who have shown an interest of some sort in whatever we're selling. So that might be registering for a webinar, going to the sales page, clicking on an email of some sort. So there is some sort of trigger action, if you will, that triggers the sales ads to start happening.
Those are the three pillars of effective Facebook ads marketing. Just as a bit of a recap, we solidify the marketing foundation, work on the list building, and then expand success. If this is something that you are interested in, Dream List Essentials (my signature course - It's a D I Y Facebook Ads hybrid group coaching program), is currently open for the next couple of days. They are closing on April 26th at 11:59 Eastern Standard Time.
Sign up and join us for this next live round of Dream List Essentials, where we go through these three different steps and we solidify your marketing foundations. Then I walk you through the start to finish of setting your list building ads, and then there is a final module that talks through the expanding your success ads so that once those email list building ads are set up, you can continue on, get those nurture ads set up and get the sales ads set up.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Market Scale Grow. I'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey. If you love this podcast, don't forget to share it with your friends. And then head to your favorite podcast app to subscribe so that you won't miss next week's episode or any of the upcoming ones. And if you loved it, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcast so that other people can find this podcast and we can impact teachers and teacher business owners around the world!