Oh No! My FB ads are SOOOOOO expensive | 86
Gas prices are on the rise. The housing market is climbing. I wish I could say Facebook Ad prices were immune, but I keep hearing it from everyone, “Facebook Ads are getting more expensive!”
I totally understand the concern. As small business owners, we have to monitor our budgets closely. But before you have a breakdown, there are some things you can do to reduce the cost of your ads.
#1 Dial in Your Messaging
When we find ads that are running well, it can be easy to let them sit and run…and run… and run. Without ever looking at them.
When Facebook Ad prices increase though, it’s best practice to refresh your messaging and images again. By doing this, you make sure you’re talking to the right people, so you are not wasting money.
You want to make sure everything is up to date. Have your customers' words changed? Has anything changed in marketing/society that would affect your messaging or copy? Refreshing your images also helps.
Plus, the Facebook algorithm really likes refreshed copy and images, so it’s a win-win.
#2: Address Holes in Your Funnels
If you notice that there is a “leak” in your funnel, it’s time to fix it! You don’t want to miss any opportunities when you are spending more money. For instance, you might have an email in a sequence that’s performing really low - try to redo it!
By maximizing your funnels, you send your customers on your well-crafted journey and increase the likelihood that they will make a purchase.
#3 Bring in More Buying Opportunities
Freebies are great. We all love ‘em! But if you aren’t training your audience to expect paid offers, you’re doing yourself a disservice. If you are paying to get people on your email list, then you should want them buying!
Luckily, you can easily fix this. You can still send out freebies, but begin promoting more paid services. This might be talking about a product, including a way people can work with you, or hyping up a launch.
It doesn’t need to be a full-blown sales pitch… just enough that people know you also sell things (and what those things are). Because if they have no idea, they probably will never buy.
#4 Factor the Cost into Your Offers
Another way to make money back on your ad is by factoring in the cost of ads into your offer. This works especially well if you are promoting a webinar or course. Give the overall price of your offer a bump, so you can still have a healthy profit.
Another way to reclaim costs is with a tripwire. When someone clicks your ad for a freebie, they will get a series of emails (or at least, they should!). Add a tripwire to that welcome sequence. This increases the chance of someone buying (this will also help you recoup the money from ads), even if it is a lower-priced offer.
The bottom line is that Facebook is still one of the best places to advertise. As Facebook Ads goes through this shift in cost, make sure you have a tight handle on your ad and the series of actions that come after - so you can get the most for your money!
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:
[00:00:00] Hey there, I'm Jenzaia, and this is Market Scale Growth, a podcast created for ambitious entrepreneurs 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 dream. Okay, so before we hop into the episode, I just want to remind you to download my free guide to Facebook targeting audiences. It has been created specifically for teacher business owners and I go through the warm look alike and cold interest-based audiences that you need to have set up to be running Facebook and Instagram ads. There are checklists and brainstorming pages so that you know you have everything.
But as an exciting special, I'm opening up some audience audit calls where you can hop on to a 15 minutes zoom call with me and you'll get my eyes on your audiences so that you can make sure not only do you have all the audiences, but they truly are perfect for your business. So head to marketscalegrow.com/audienceaudit to book your free Audience Audit call today.
Okay, now into the episode.
Welcome friends. This is a Saturday strategy session and I'm super pumped that you are here with me today. We are going to be talking about something that I'm hearing more and more and that is yikes. My Facebook ads are so expensive. This is definitely something that's been happening over the last couple of years. When the Pandemic happened, a lot of big advertisers pulled out. There was so much uncertainty, so much like the unknown in the world, that a lot of big marketing budgets were just yanked. And what that did, because Facebook operates on like an auction piece and with anything that's supply and demand with more supply sorry, with more demand, costs go up. With less demand and therefore more supply, costs go down. Right? And so because people are pulling out their marketing budget with the uncertainty and having no idea add Costs just plummeted.
And then with everything else, groceries, gas, groceries, more gas, Costco. This is so unrelated, but I saw a meme that said my gas bill is now what my grocery bill used to be, and my grocery bill is now what my Costco bill used to be. And my Costco bill is now a mortgage payment. And that just made me laugh. We don't shop at Costco anymore.
There is just not a convenient one near our house. And since I only work two days a week at school, I used to drive past it every day. And now I just want to get home to my little babies when I'm at school. So I don't stop at Costco anywhere near as much as I used to. And actually, I think with the Pandemic, our membership lapsed. But anyway, totally irrelevant. Facebook ads have also gone up, similar to those grocery prices, gas prices, everything just the cost of living right now is going up.
And Facebook ads are no exception. So in this episode this week, what I want to talk about is what exactly does that mean for you and your business, and then what you should do about it? So let's dive in. If Facebook ads are getting more expensive, then it means a couple of things. Number one, you need to be way more dialed in with every single piece of your funnel, especially your messaging, so that you're losing fewer people. You also need to be considering how to have a more holistic approach to marketing. I think five years ago, two years ago, you were able to rely more solely on Facebook ads because the cost was lower.
And now as costs have gone up, more nurturing, and more relationship building is needed to keep costs at a reasonable level. It also could mean that you have to factor that into the cost of your program. So you might have had like a $97 course that was profitable before, and now you may want to consider bumping that price up to 127, 147, whatever it might be. And that's just something that you have to play with and figure out. But it does mean that your profit margins if you don't increase your prices, your profit margins may be smaller. So what do we do about this? The first thing is that you need to be looking at your data and identifying any leaks in your funnel. So every single step of your funnel should have some sort of metric tied to it that you can look at easily and determine if it's working or not working. If there are any leaks in your funnel at any point, whether your costs are going up or not, you should be tweaking things, trying to lessen those leaks. The next thing that I'm going to recommend is that you do a refresh.
Anytime that ad costs are going up, the first thing that I consider doing is just refreshing the images and the ad copy. It is very helpful if you always have ad copy and images waiting in the background. Now, realistically speaking, that doesn't always happen, so there may be some turnover time. But if you do have ad copy and images just like waiting in the background when your ad costs start to go up, you can just like snap fingers, like go and do that update and refresh. And sometimes that refresh is enough. The algorithm goes, Oh, I like it.
That's the other thing you have to keep in mind with this the algorithm gets exhausted of old ad copy and images a lot quicker than it used to. You used to be able to run the same exact same ads, no tweaking, no changing, no nothing for like twelve months. Now I would say like six to eight weeks is a pretty long time. I've seen some go like twelve weeks, but many of my clients that we have on long-term ongoing lead generation or webinars or whatever, there is a repeating task in Asana that's just like refresh images, refresh copy, so that every like six weeks we have that new set that comes in so that we're ready for it.
When the cost increase, looking for the leaks in your funnel is really important and you should be doing that on a regular basis. If you do notice that costs are increasing, the first thing you should be doing is just refreshing the images and add copy the next thing you want to be doing. And I talked about this in the last episode and I talked about it in the episode about the three phases of marketing mastery. I am recording these episodes back to back to back. So it's very fresh in my mind. You need to be zeroing in on your messaging. You need to make sure that your business stays up to date every quarter.
You should be doing market research, speaking to your audience, talking to real people, building those relationships, but also pulling from them the words that you can be used in your ad copy, in your messaging, and in your images. That will really pull them in and really resonate with them and just like getting better and better and better and better at your messaging. The best messaging will win. So make sure that that is a priority, that you are speaking so clearly, so directly to your people so that they just feel like, oh, this is written for me, this Facebook ad was created for me. And then the last suggestion I have for you isn't going to actually decrease the cost of your ads.
The other things I just mentioned will actually lower the cost of your ads. Get rid of leaks in your funnel. Right now you have 1% of people clicking on your ad and you can get it up to 1.3% or 5%, then that is going to help lower your cost. If your landing page is converting at 30% and you can get it converting at 50%, well that's going to also lower your costs, right? Same thing as zeroing in on your messaging. That's going to help more people resonate. More people will do the thing, they'll go through the funnel. Refreshing the ad copy will bring down the cost per million of the CPM and that again will actually lower the cost of your ads.
So this last tip or strategy won't actually lower the cost of your ads, but what it will do is hopefully help you to recoup some of your ads spend right up front so that it's less of a burden. And that is by either adding in a trip wire or selling something during your welcome sequence. So let's talk about the tripwire first. A tripwire is on the thank you page of the opt-in. So you have your freebie, someone puts in their name and their email address, then you have the thank you page. Now instead of that thank you page being like thanks, now join the Facebook group or thanks, now check out my Instagram or whatever. You should always have a call to action. Instead of it just being a plain, straight-up, go join the Facebook group or whatever, call to action. You should be selling something or tripwire would be selling something. So you have your freebie and then you're like, oh, you like that freebie? Try this $37 toolkit or whatever it might be.
And so if 1% of people actually buy that trip wire, you're going to be recouping some of those costs to get them on your list, which is amazing. Plus you can have order bombs and a one-time offer. So if you have a bigger course or something, then you can there are ways to make these profitable funnels. But really your goal is to be recouping as much of your ad costs as possible so that instead of spending $2 per person to get them on your list, maybe you're only spending one dollar, right? And then the second strategy I said was to sell in your welcome sequence. And so this can be the same thing as the trip wire or if you don't have a trip wire, it can replace that. I would not suggest you sell two different things.
So if you have a tripwire in the welcome sequence, you'd want to be selling that same thing. And so the welcome sequence is those emails usually like three to seven emails that go out once somebody's opted in that welcome them to your list, tell you a bit about them, and you can add in a sale there somewhere getting people to become interested in that trip wire or a bigger piece like a course or membership or something like that. And that's another way to help recoup the ad spend is by actually selling something directly to people once they are like immediately as soon as they come onto your email list. It also tells people, hey, I don't just give out free stuff. This is a business I'm running. And I had a really hard time with this as a teacher, especially when my TPT store was my main focus and I was building an email list for that. I really had a hard time wrapping my brain around asking people to buy things off of my email list, right?
In my mind that email list should have been supposed to be quote-unquote, even though nothing is supposed to be in business, it's whatever you want to make it. But in my mind, the email list was supposed to be just where I sent out freebies. Every single week a new freebie went out, right? And if that's how you do it, that's great, if that works for you and your business. But if you're training your people that you just send out freebies, freebies, freebies, freebies, then you're not training them to buy. And so by adding in a sale, whether people buy or not into your welcome sequence, it lets them know right away like, hey, I'm a business, I sell things. If you want to buy it from me, great. Here's what you can buy. Do not panic. The cost of ads is going up, but from everything that I can find, Facebook ads are still one of the best places online to advertise because people are there. People are using Facebook, they're using Instagram.
Also, the experience, I talked a little bit about this before, but the experience on Facebook and Instagram of like, people just scrolling and then something that may be of interest pops up in front of them and pulls them in is very powerful. And you don't get that same experience on Google Ads where you actually have to search. And then I also find that YouTube ads, especially more and more often right now, are becoming like TV advertisements. They don't feel personalized. It just kind of feels like we get car ones and shampoo and all the really big companies, they just don't feel personalized. Whereas on Facebook and Instagram, sometimes I don't even realize it's an ad. I mean, I do see the sponsored thing, but it looks like organic user-generated content that fits in with my feed. And so I'm not feeling bombarded by the ads. Also, we just bought a brand new car back in March. We're not looking for a car right now.
And so maybe we're still getting car advertisements from when we were looking back in March, but it's so irrelevant to me, right? So I don't want to watch that car advertisement, right? And so the experience on Facebook and Instagram is going to be better for not only you but also your user. And that's like your audience and that's what you want. And then the costs across all platforms are increasing. And LinkedIn ads, Google Ads, YouTube ads, have historically all been more expensive than Facebook ads. And so even as these costs are increasing, everyone's increasing. And so I highly recommend that you stay on Facebook and Instagram ads and use them in your business just because of the user experience and the cost. And then working within what you have.
And what I talked about today, looking at your data, getting rid of leaks in your funnels, zeroing in on your messaging, refreshing your images and copy more frequently than you're used to, taking all of these pieces in so that you can lower your costs in those ways. And then also a little bit, just a little bit, accepting that costs are increasing and that it is a part of the business. So I hope that this was helpful. I'm really sorry if your ads are increasing in costs and if it's frustrating you, feel free to reach out, and book a free discovery call. We can dive a bit into your data, I can give you some recommendations and we can talk about working together. This is something that I do for my clients all the time. Go and figure out strategies that we can use to decrease the cost. And it's like a puzzle and I love doing it. So if that's something that you're looking for, definitely head to the link in the Show Notes book your free discovery call and I look forward to chatting with you. There's a fresh episode. There's not a fresh episode coming out next week. I'm on vacation for the next two weeks, so the podcast is also going on vacation. We will be back in three weeks with a brand new episode. It is an interview. I'm super excited about it.
So I hope that you enjoy the next few weeks of summer. I know my family and I are going to we're going out west, we're going on a train ride through the Rockies. So I'm super pumped about it. And yes, I will be back in your ear three weeks from now. Yay. Have a wonderful day. And as always, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for listening to market scale grow. If you're ready to build your email list and generate consistent leads on autopilot, then we would love to partner with you. Our growth package is perfect for course creators, service writers, and coaches looking to inject their list with fresh leads so that they can amplify their amazing program and get it out to new people. This six-week package is perfect for you if you have a proven lead magnet that you're ready to turn into an established lead generation machine. To get started today, head to Marketscalegrow.com/worktogether, fill out the application, and someone from my team will be in contact with you to schedule a free strategy session to ensure that it's a good fit and to get you on the path to consistent lead generation with Team JD. Thank you again for listening and I look forward to working with you. Bye.