Top of Funnel Marketing Tactics: How to Use Facebook Ads to Grow Awareness & Interest | 28
An important part of growing your teacher business is bringing new people into your customer journey on a consistent basis. The best way to do that is with social media content and long form content (blog posts, podcasts & video content). By putting ad spend behind these posts, even as little as $5/day, you will see great growth over time.
In this episode, we discuss the best ad types to use at the top of funnel as well as my 5 tips for implementing these ads successfully.
This is part two of our four-part Customer Journey series.
Listen to the rest of the series Part 1
My fave three ad types for TOF ads
Post Engagement Ads
Traffic Ads
Video Views Ads
My top 5 tips for running TOF ads
Know your goals
These ad types are designed to get new eyes on your business and keep them interested in your brand. You may get new subscribers and purchases, but you may not, so it is important to have the right perspective before starting the ads.
Refresh your content often
These ads go stale pretty quickly… about 4-6 weeks, so switch up the blog posts or podcast episodes you’re promoting regularly.
Test a variety of creative
Often video will do the best, but testing images and soundbites when appropriate may be best. You’ll never know if you don’t try…
Longer ad copy
Unlike product and e-commerce ads which typically have very short ad copy, long ad copy is very powerful for awareness ads because it’s an added layer of nurturing.
Have a plan for the next steps
This is the most important step you can take! Make sure that there is always a plan for the next step. Once someone likes your IG post, what is next? For me, they get sent to a podcast episode. Anyone who checks out the podcast episode will then start seeing ads for my free lead magnet. Before starting your ads, make sure there’s always a next step so that people don’t find you and then never see you again. Because then they’ll forget about you and that’s the last thing you want.
If you want support setting up and running your ads, book a strategy session today!
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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. Okay, so before we jump into the episode, I am super excited to share a brand new freebie with you. It's my targeting ideas for Facebook ads. If you've dabbled in Facebook ads or you've done them and you've tried them, and you're just looking for some fresh inspiration for your audiences, this freebie is for you. I share my top Facebook ad targeting groups for you so that you can have inspiration and find those people that are perfect for what you have to offer. From warm audiences to cool lookalike audiences, to cold interest-based audiences. I cover all three in this freebie. Head to marketscalegrow.com/audiences to grab your copy today.
Hello, and welcome to Market Scale Grow. As you know, I'm your host, Jenzaia, and this is a Saturday strategy session. I am really excited. This is part two of our four-part series on the customer journey steps and how you can use ads to help walk your customers through that journey a little bit quicker. I talked about this in the last episode or the last Saturday strategy session, which was episode 26. It will be linked in the show note, the five steps to the customer journey. So just quickly, we're going to go over them now, and then we will start talking about those top of funnel ads.
So the customer journey first step is: aware, then interested, subscribed, engaged, invested. The top of the funnel for me is anything before people subscribe to your newsletter. So that's the awareness and the interest phases. The whole purpose of the top of funnel is to get more people aware of and interested in your brand. We do this with our social media content and our long-form content primarily. That's how more people get aware of and interested in you. Think about the last time you consumed a podcast. You may have found one that you love, scrolled all the way back to the beginning, and just started listening to as many episodes as you can because you got interested in the brand and then you just wanted to learn everything there was to learn from that person. That's what we want. We want to hook new people onto our long-form content so that eventually they'll get on our email list and then eventually, eventually they will buy from us.
Today, we're just going to talk about how to get more people aware. So that's the first two to three brand touch-points when they start to recognize you and your brand and your company. Then interested, which is another three or four brand touch-points where they're actually like, "Oh, I like this person. I want to learn more from them."
In this episode, I'm going to talk about three different types of ads that I like to run, and then I have some tips for you if you choose to run top of funnel ads. So let's dive in.
The three different types of ads are engagement ads, traffic ads, and video view ads. All three of these are great because you can run them for as little as $5 a day, and they're pretty easy to get set up and get going. So they're great for somebody who's interested in dipping their toe into ads and they're not ready for all of ads.
So the first one is post engagement ads, and you can run these on Facebook or Instagram. This is where you want people to engage with your posts. So an engagement is a like, comment, or share. I also am pretty sure that includes people who click on your profile and to read more or see the picture bigger. Any interaction will be considered engagement, in this case, I believe. I could be wrong about that. Posting ads are super great for getting more people aware of your brand because they're really low barrier to entry. When you're scrolling Instagram, this post pops up and you're like, "Ooh, this is cool." Double-tap, scroll, double-tap, scroll, double-tap, scroll. Most of the time, we're not really looking for ads, like where it says sponsored. We're just kind of scrolling mindlessly. So as soon as someone double taps one of your ads, they've engaged. Now we can put them in the customer journey and start helping them move forward through the journey.
Traffic ads and video view ads, I like to use to grow interest in people who are within my orbit, within my brand, who may have shown some sort of interest, but haven't subscribed yet. So for traffic ads, you're going to be running more traffic. You're going to be trying to get more people to your blog or your podcast show notes. That's really important to be sending it to your website that's pixeled. So if you host podcast show notes on your Buzzsprout or Libsyn or whatever other platform you're using, if it is not pixeled, then you can't collect those people as an audience to use throughout your customer journey. So I highly recommend that you have your podcast show notes on your website that you can pixel.
Then the third type of ad is the video view ads. This is if you have long-form content that's in videos, so YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram lives. What you need to do is repurpose. When I say what you need to do is, if you're interested in running these types of ads, to run them, you need to repurpose that video content from whatever platform onto your Facebook business page. Then you can run those video view ads from there. So it's a great way to get people to watch you and to learn more from you and grow their interest through your video content. One little note here is that there is a very large difference between someone who watches three seconds of your video and someone who watches like 95% of a 15-minute video. So just keeping that in mind, because it's pretty important when you're thinking about the next steps for people, which we'll get to when we're talking about the tips.
So just to recap, the three types of ads that I like to run at the top of funnel are post engagement ads, traffic ads, and video view ads. Generally speaking, I run these ads to cold audiences because we are trying to get new people aware of the brand.
Okay? So now I have five tips for you. If you're running these ads, my first tip is to know your goals and have the appropriate expectations. The goal of these ads is to get more awareness and interest in your brand. The goal is not new subscribers to your email list. The goal is not sales. This is super important because if you're expecting and hoping to get sales from these ads, you're going to be disappointed and you're going to feel like you've wasted your money. But if you go in knowing that you're trying to get likes, because that will put people into your little bubble and then you can move them through the journey, you'll be much better prepared to have a positive reaction to the ads. I really don't want you to feel like you've wasted your money because you haven't. More people know who you are now, and in the long run, it's like a snowball. As more people get to know you and are interested in you, it just grows and grows and grows, right? So that's my first tip.
Tip number two is you need to refresh your content frequently. Instagram posts that are being promoted and blog posts, podcasts, video content, it goes stale pretty quickly. I would say that has a shelf life of about four to six weeks before you just won't keep getting the same priority in the newsfeed or in the Facebook algorithm that's pushing out the ads. So refreshing that content is a really great way to just continue to get a good amount of traffic and to continue to bring in new people to your brand.
Tip number three is to test out different types of creative. Video, video, video. If you are not comfortable on video or putting out videos, I highly encourage you to confront your fear. I had to. It's terrifying, but it's the best thing that you can do because video generally speaking does well. So with my podcast, when I put out ads for it, I put out an image, a visual sound bite, which is a video but there's no actual image to it. It's just words. Then a video of me talking to my phone, super casual, no postproduction, nothing. Just outside, talking to my phone, super, super casual. So I highly recommend that you test out different types of creative to find out what works best for your audience and for your long-form content and for your situation and your business.
Tip number four is longer ad copy. So with products and in the e-commerce space, ad copy tends to be pretty short. One to two sentences, maybe a paragraph, but not much longer. So for these top of funnel ads, using longer ad copy can be a really great way to nurture more people. Even if they don't actually click on the link to learn more or double-tap to like it. If they read the caption, that is a brand point and it can be a great way to nurture them. So I definitely encourage you to type out some longer ad copy and test that out. Don't get rid of the short copy, but just keep it in your mind to definitely try the longer ad copy. It's on my to-do list. An episode about ad copy specifically, and what I mean exactly by long ad copy, short ad copy, micro ad copy, and everything between all of the pieces. So keep an eye out for that because it is definitely on my to-do list.
Okay. Tip number five is to always have a next step. If you're running an Instagram post engagement and someone double taps and likes, and then there's nothing set up for them after, they're just going to fall out, you're gonna fall off their radar. You won't be remembered. That brand touchpoint will be useless. That's part of what makes us feel like the ad wasn't successful. If 300 people liked my post, but then nothing. Right? So what I like to do is set up an audience on Facebook of Instagram engagement or Facebook page engagement for 7 days, 14 days and 30 days so that I can target those groups of people with traffic ads and try to get them to go to my podcast show notes. So after they've liked an Instagram post, now we're trying to get them to listen to the podcast. Then once they've listened to the podcast, my next step is trying to get them on my email list. So every single piece of the puzzle has a next step. I use those buckets of audiences to say, okay, they've engaged on Instagram now to the podcast. Then for my podcast, all of my podcast episodes have the word "podcast" in the URL. So on Facebook and the ads manager, I created an audience of anyone who has gone to a specific webpage that contains the word "podcast" in the URL. We'll start to see, they get put into a podcast listeners audience. And I have the same thing, podcast listeners 7 days, podcasts listeners 14 days, and podcasts listeners 30 days. So I can start targeting anyone who's listening to my podcast in those timeframes with those next ads for subscribing to my email list, which is what we're going to talk about next week with the middle of the funnel ads.
I hope all this made sense. Quickly, those five tips are: 1. Know your goals. 2. Refresh the long-form content often. 3. Test out a variety of ad creative, so the images and videos. 4. Try using longer copy. 5. Make sure that you always have a next-step plan for people.
If you have any questions about this, or you would like support with your ads, I do have strategy sessions available. You can head to marketscalegrow.com/booknow to learn more about booking a strategy session. I would just love to help you figure out your customer journey, how you're going to get people from that aware phase to be fully invested in you. Until next Saturday, when we're going to be talking about middle of the funnel ads, have a wonderful week, and I will be back in your ear then.
Thank you for listening to today's episode. Today was brought to you by Dubsado, my absolute favourite customer management tool. If you're looking to streamline and systematize your service-based business, I highly recommend Dubsado. For 20% off of your first month. Head to marketscalegrow.com/dubsado that's D U B S A D O and use the code Jenzaia at checkout. And don't forget to head to our community at marketscalegrow.com/community where you'll find inspiring, ambitious teacherpreneurs who are looking to grow and scale their businesses just like you... See you soon.