#RealTalk - Overcoming FB Ad Overwhelm | 37
No idea where to start or what to do when it comes to Facebook ads? Overwhelmed by all the campaign options? All the steps to setting up a campaign? All the data? I know exactly how you’re feeling! I remember the first time I opened Facebook ads Manager… I shut it right back down again. So in this episode, I wanna chat about how to get started with Facebook ads without the overwhelm. Without the confusion… without constantly wondering…
So, here are my tips for overcoming Facebook ad overwhelm.
1. Start with baby steps
Remember that you don't have to do ALL the things right now. It's a learning experience! Each time you run another campaign you will learn something new. You will become more confident. You will try something new. Slowly over time, everything will make more and more sense. Then before you know it, you’ll be creating ad campaigns like it’s nothing (or you can hire a strategist like me to help you out)!
2. Have a marketing budget that you're willing to spend
I truly believe most people wait longer than they need to before starting paid advertising. My recommendation is that as soon as you have a marketing budget, you should start. At first, you’ll likely be running brand awareness ads and building your list…. while these are the best option for long-term growth, they don’t have an immediate ROI (in most cases).
3. As always have reasonable expectations for your campaigns
Set goals for the key metrics tied to the steps the customer will take so that you know which parts of your funnel are successful and which need to be refined and worked on. By tracking the key metrics below and comparing them to your goals, you’ll feel more confident and whether or not your campaign is successful, you’ll be able to tell without second-guessing your choice to run ads in the first place.
Key Metrics to track: ad spend, number of leads, cost/lead, landing page conversion, cost/click, CTR
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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. Today I want you to go grab a glass of wine or hot tea or whatever drink you would be settling in with on the patio of a cute little restaurant or cafe where we are going to have some real talk. This episode has been on my heart for a while, and I really just want to have a chat with you. I want you to leave this episode feeling empowered that you can do it.
Facebook ads can be hard. I am the first person who will admit that, but it really, really breaks my heart when I talk to people and they say that they are just so overwhelmed, paralyzed by fear. They just have no idea where to start or what to do. It just, like I said, breaks my heart. So today I'm going to just chat through this with you as if we are BFFs sipping our Pinot Grigio. Yep. That's my wine of choice, and enjoying an afternoon, getting over the Sunday scaries. But in this case, it's a Facebook ad scaries.
Okay. So I, that you probably fall into one of these categories. You have no idea where to even start with Facebook ads, or you have no idea what to promote, or you are completely thrown off by ad copy and images, what you should pick and what you should write, and how you should design your ads, or probably the biggest fear of all that you're wasting your money. I promise you all of those are so normal. Facebook, their platform changes all the time. So you might watch a tutorial video or buy a course, and then when you go to the ads manager, it just looks completely different and you have no idea why. That's super overwhelming. Or you've tried to run ads, you boosted a post or you created an ad, but there's just so much data that you have no idea what to even look at to begin to process how successful the campaign was. These feelings, these thoughts are just normal. I want you to know that I've had them, other people that you see who are running ads have had them, and when Facebook changes things or you're looking at the data and there's just too many numbers that it's okay to take a step back, take a deep breath, and just remember that you can do this. It might be hard. It might be scary, but you can totally do this.
The first thing that I recommend is just to take baby steps. There is no need to try to do all of the things in your first ad campaign. Set up something that has one image, one piece of ad copy and go. Yeah, that is a perfectly acceptable place to start with trying things out. It will help you to understand the platform and how to set up the ads and all of the different pieces that you're going to need, because no matter how many checklists and tutorial videos that you watch and that you consume, you're going to miss something and you're going to forget something. Maybe you won't have the URL, or you will forget that you need to write a headline or you won't know what budget you want to spend, or the dates that you're starting. So it's totally normal that that first time you're just trying to piece things together. So take baby steps because the second time you'll know a little bit better. Then the third time you'll know even more. Then the fourth time you'll know even more. Each time that you try something new or that you run a new ad, you can try something new.
These are learning experiences and to approach it from the same way that a toddler approaches learning how to walk is your best bet. They fall down and they get back up and they keep trying to walk and then they fall down again and they get up and they try to walk again. That's the mindset that I want you to go into ads with. You're going to try something, a small ad for $5, maybe $20 a day, and what you're hoping to get out of it is to learn something and to feel more confident for the next time you're going into the ads.
My next recommendation is to, especially at the beginning when you're just learning and you're just trying things out, is to have a marketing budget that you're willing to spend and have no ROI on. So similar to how you can buy clip art and never use it or never make any money back from the clip art, that's how you can go into this as well. Know that you're going to spend that $5 on your ad or $20 on the ad or $100 on the ad. Maybe you'll make some money back from it, but maybe you won't and it's just money spent on a business expense. You need to, especially at the beginning, when you're trying things out and when you're learning, this is money spent almost like on a course where you're learning how to do the ads and you're learning more about them, and it's okay. If you go into it with the mindset of I'm spending money to learn more about the ads versus I need to make money back, I need to do this right, you won't have that same fear of wasting money because you're not wasting money you're learning.
Then my final recommendation is possibly the most important one. If you've listened to my podcast before, you've definitely heard me say these words before, but you need to go in with expectations, reasonable expectations for this, for running ads. Let's use an email list builder as an example. So you have a freebie, a free lead magnet that you want people to exchange their email address for and then they get the freebie. You know, that this opt-in works well. You've had people opting into it for a while, and now you want to run some Facebook ads to drive more traffic and grow your email list. The data on Facebook can be really overwhelming. So instead of trying to look at everything, I'm going to give you just a couple of different data points that you can look at in these first few campaigns that will give you a good idea of if it's working or not, and if it's not working what you need to do to fix it.
So the first thing is to set your marketing budget. For this email list builder, we're going to run it for five days at $20 a day. So that's $100 is your budget. Industry standard for teacherpreneurs, most businesses will be able to get leads for anywhere from $1 to $2. We're going to go with $2 for this example, because it's the high end of the budget and it makes for easy calculating. So if I'm paying $2 per person who joins my email list, then that's going to be 50 new people. So at the end of the week, I can look and say, did I get 50 people? Yes or no? If I got 50 people or I got 55 people, or I got 100 people, then the answer is, yes, this campaign was successful. If I didn't get 50 people, I only got 40 people or 20 people. Then the campaign has not been successful. So that's the first metric that you want to look at. You want to figure out how many leads at the end you should be getting based on the industry standard cost per lead, and then go from there. Now, if you've run ads before, or once this is campaign four or five or six, you can say, well, I normally get leads for $1.25. Or I normally get leads for 45 cents. Or I normally get leads for $3, and you can put your cost per lead in there. But if this is your very, very, very first campaign, then use that industry standard of $1 to $2 per lead.
The next metric that you're going to be looking at is the conversion rate of the landing page. So the conversion rate of the landing page is if 100 people visit the page and 30 people sign up for your lead magnet, then the page has converted at 30%, and 30% is the target that I usually go for with my lead magnets. So if less than 30% of people opt-in, then we need to test and tweak and update the landing page. If more than 30 people have opted in, you can still do that testing and tweaking and try to increase that percentage, but at 30% is kind of where you know, okay, it's doing a decent job.
The final metric that you can look at to see if your eye campaign is successful and is in the ads manager, you're going to be looking for the CTR link click. This metric tells you the percent of people who actually click on the link of your ad to go to the landing page. You want that to be at at least 1%. So if 100 people see your ad, 1 person at least is clicking to go to the opt-in and to see the lead magnet page. This metric tells you how effective the images are and how effective the ad copy is. If not at least 1% of people are clicking on your ad to go to the form, then you need to test out new images and test out new ad copy, maybe try some video instead of images, mix things up and test things out there.
Those are, especially when it's your first few campaigns that you're running, those are the three metrics that I would look for. Number one, the click through rate is at least 1% of people clicking on my ad to go to the landing page. Metric two is the conversion rate of the landing page are at least 30% of people who land on my landing page, signing up for my lead magnet. Then the third metric is did I get the number of leads that I was hoping for? To figure that out, again, you take your budget divided by the cost per lead.
Of course, there are more metrics that you can look at and that you can use to determine the success of your ad campaign, but in those first few campaigns, when we're taking the baby steps, those are the three that are really going to give you a quick snapshot of how well this email list-building opt-in campaign was running.
I really want you to feel like you can do it. I really want you to feel like you are capable. So just a few resources for you. Number one, if you are concerned about your ad copy, I did an entire episode on ad copy. It's episode number 35. You can go back and listen to my tips and tricks for creating effective ad copy. I also have an episode coming up, I haven't done it yet, but I have one coming up about images and ad creative. So video as well. So be on the lookout for that one, and that will help you to feel more confident in creating your ad images and ad creative.
If you're looking for more information about the data you should track, I have an episode on that as well. I talked about the six different data points that I look at when I'm doing an email list-building campaign. So I talked about three of them, but there's actually six of them in total that I at. So baby steps, again, start with those three that I talked about in this episode. Then when you're ready for more data, check out episode number 19, where, as I said, I go into more detail about those data points.
I do offer strategy sessions, so if you would like someone to help you set up your ad account or set up a campaign to look through your ad copy and ad images, or to look through data after a campaign is done, I would absolutely love to help you with this. The link to book a strategy session is in the show notes and make sure that you use the discount code "podcast" to get $50 off of the strategy session.
Okay. That's everything I have for you today. Thank you so much for taking some time out of your weekend and hanging out with me. I hope that this has helped you feel like you can try your ad campaign. Maybe it's your first one or your next one, but I really hope that you feel empowered and that you can do this because I know, I really really know that you can. Just making those small mindset shift changes will have such an impact on your confidence. Remember that running Facebook ads every single time is a learning experience. Even if you're just learning one thing you shouldn't do, or one thing that went so well, over time, your confidence will continue to build and you will see the most amazing marketing success. Thank you again for spending this time with me. I look forward to being back in your ear next Saturday, and until then have a wonderful week.
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.