Thinking of using Facebook ads? FIRST STREAM THIS EPISODE. Look, I'm never gonna tell you NOT to use Facebook ads... They work, when you use them the right way. *But*, dear business owner, the fact is - they are not the secret to success and there are a lot of moving parts you need to have set up inside your own funnel, and your own business in order for ads to bring you clients.
Do Facebook ads work? Yes. Does that mean your business is ready to use them? No.
In this episode I'll tell you how to know if your business is ready for Facebook ads, and actions you can take now so when you are ready Facebook ads, your dollar stretches a heckova lot further.
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Hosted by Jenna Warriner, Creator of Magic Marketing Machine
Do Facebook Ads Work? How to know when your small business is ready to use Facebook Ads?
You want to sell more. You want to get more eyes on your business.
You want to get more customers coming in through the literal door or maybe the Figurative door if you're an online business owner like me and every time you open Facebook Facebook gives you a pop up that says hey, did you want to boost this post?
Hey this posted really good Do you want to boost? it. And every time you want to watch a YouTube video about true crime, you know, just to unwind at the end of the day, you're getting ads on there about people who will run your Facebook ads and how Facebook ads are the way to go.
Facebook ads, which is also Instagram ads, it's all under the umbrella company of Meta, but I'll say Facebook ads for short, Facebook ads seem to be the answer to all your problems. The only issue is they cost money. So now you're sitting here going, I will eventually... Get ads for my business.
I just need a windfall of cash. I just need a bunch of money to come in, and when that money comes in, I'll get those ads, then my business will explode. I'll have customers banging down my door. I won't even need to do anything. I'll just set them and forget them. And it seems like the perfect solution.
I get it. I've been there.
But what do we know about things that sound too good to be true? Exactly.
Here's the thing, Facebook ads totally do work, but they work for people who know what their offer is, who know who their target audience is, who have a solid funnel, who have businesses that are set up to have people roll in on autopilot. And maybe you have all of that, and if you do, great, go talk to an ads manager.
You'll pay the ads manager, you'll pay for the ads, and then maybe you'll get a really high ROI, which means return on investment. So every dollar you put into a Facebook ad becomes two or three dollars into your business. If that's your situation, then go for it. But I'm guessing since you're listening to this podcast, you're a newer business owner.
You probably do a lot of DIY. Maybe you're five years in, you don't want to just. throw 5, 000. It's something if you're not sure it's going to work. And in that case, when your business is at that stage, Facebook ads are not a magical solution. They're just going to eat your money. So let me give you more of the landscape.
Let me tell you more about how all of this paid ads world works, and then you can make an informed decision. I just want you to have all of the information before you decide what direction you're going to go in.
So I'm sitting in the living room with my mom and I'm trying to explain to her how targeting works. Now targeting means the target audience or the people you're going to ask Facebook to show your ad to. That's your targeting. So at first glance, you might say women who live in Toronto who are self employed.
Great. A lot of people tell me, Jenna, I did do my own targeting. I set up the boost to go to women who live in Toronto who are self employed. And I'm like, okay, sure. That cast a wide net. People who do Facebook ads for a living, people who are like deep in it, companies that are throwing a lot of money at it, they are so much more specific than that.
Because Facebook knows everything about you. Facebook knows what color underwear you are wearing right now, so targeting can get really specific. One of the categories is people most likely to adopt new technology. Some of it has to do with how much money you typically spend online or how much money you might earn.
There's all this information, so if you can get super specific about who your audience is, then you can send ads like directly to a person. And so I'm explaining this to my mom. And she's like, you know, shocked when she sees ads that are perfect for her. And also a lot of people, and if this is you, like, no sweat, but a lot of people think everybody's seeing the same ad.
So maybe every time you open your Facebook app, you see an ad for, you know, I get a lot for intermittent fasting apps. I don't know why. So every time you open your app, you're seeing these ads for intermittent fasting, and then you say to your buddy, Like, wow, they're really pushing this fasting thing.
Meanwhile, he hasn't got a single ad for that. This is all based on you and these qualifiers about who you are and the type of stuff that you interact with online. And also, Facebook owns WhatsApp. So it's not even just the information that you... put into Facebook when you made your initial account. Like what school you went to if you're married when your birthday is.
No, no. They are tracking everything that you do and making huge portfolios on like you, who you are, and what you... It's really freaky. So I'm explaining all this to my mom and she's like, okay, I get it, I get it.
I'm not kidding you, two minutes later, my mom opens her phone, two minutes later, and she's got an ad, and on the ad it's for a sweatshirt, and she goes, oh my gosh Jenna, look what this says! It says, Never underestimate a woman who loves camping and is born in December!
oh, should I get it? Like, it's not a coincidence when you get ads like this. It's because they know the information about you. They might even know that she's the type of woman who never wants to be underestimated because she's like a very powerful, fiery, spirited woman.
They probably even know that about her.
So can you make sales directly from your ads if you're only targeting was like this chick in Toronto who's self employed? , absolutely you can, but imagine how much more specific your ads can be and how much higher you could expect the conversion rate to be.
Conversion meaning somebody sees it and then they convert into a customer after clicking it. If you're only showing your ad to that super specific person, picture it like this. Uh, say you have a flyer for a garage sale and you put that flyer up in a neighboring town in the library. Okay? One or two people might say, oh, I'm free on Sunday.
You know, they go to the library and they see the flyer. They, I'm free on Sunday. I'll drive one town over. Versus putting that flyer , right on a tree next to a different garage sale the week before in the same neighborhood, right? . Because the people who see that flyer are way more likely to come to your garage sale. Because we already know they frequent the area. We already know that they go to garage sales. on the weekends because that's where they saw the flyer, so they are way more likely.
So, if you were paying a dollar a person for everyone who sees that flyer, you can see how you'd want to put it in the best possible location.
Now I'm gonna take this a hundred steps deeper. Stay with me, because I think that this is also important for you to know. Instead of creating all of those factors. Okay, people who like garage sales, who live in this area, who go to garage sales on the weekend, who were in this area within this time frame.
I think that actually might be one of the things too. You can say like, you can target the ad to people who have visited a certain location. I'm pretty sure. Anyway, I haven't done ads in a long time. I'm not an ads expert. I'm an organic social media expert. I help you create content . Today I'm just talking about ads because I do have a lot of experience with them.
I just don't offer it as a service anymore, and I get asked about this all the time, so that's why I'm talking about it. Anyway, and I don't want you to waste your money. All right. Instead of you having to think of all of the criteria to identify this person,
you can create what is called a mirror audience or a lookalike audience. What that is, is you have a collection of... 100 people is the minimum, but Facebook recommends 1, 000 to 5, 000 people. The more people, the more information.
You're going to take this pool of people and you're going to give it to Facebook and you're going to say, analyze these people's similarities and create another pool of strangers. who are similar to these people. So instead of you having to guess what attributes these people have and how they behave online and how much money they have and all of that, Facebook is going to look at all of the data points they have on those people and find you more people that are similar to them.
Why does this matter for you right now at wherever your business is at? If you plan on one day running ads, you can start collecting that pool, which means your ads will be more likely to convert higher because you have all these people that are super specific to draw from. So imagine this now, you're hosting your garage sale, and you take a picture of everybody who comes, and then next year, You send out invitations not only to those people who came last year, but a whole bunch of people that are just like those people because they're most likely to be interested in your garage sale.
Am I breaking this down? Are you with me? I hope this is clear.
The more people that you can get attracted to your organic content or your free content, so just like the posts you make for your business on Instagram and Facebook, the more specific your ads will later be.
There's another reason why creating organic content or free content right now by yourself at home is going to serve your ads later because
when you eventually go and work with an ads manager they're going to start testing and you are going to pay for all of that testing you're going to pay for the person to run the testing and you're going to pay for every eyeball that sets its sights on the ads that are tests Actually, as soon as you launch a Facebook ad, Facebook itself will tell you, please let this run for a couple of weeks before you give up on it because they need to test it too.
So all this testing will happen. They're going to test different images. They're going to test different lines of text. They're going to test different calls to action. They're going to test all sorts of things. But you can start that testing now. For free with your organic content in marketing. We've got words like messaging and positioning.
And if you're not familiar with those words, don't worry, but it's basically like, what can you say to someone to make them want to work with you as quickly as possible? So if you could get that down to a. sentence,
in your organic content, you can be testing all of those sentences. You can be trying different ways to get people to work with you in saying different things and really figuring out what resonates with them so that by the time it's time to run a Facebook ad, you can do less testing because you know what your clients need to hear in order to want to work with you as quickly as possible.
That's something you can and should, in my opinion, start doing right now. You're going to test posts for free. If you post something and nobody likes it, that is not the end of the world. That's actually zero skin off anybody's back. If anything, it's net positive because you now know what doesn't work, which makes you that much closer to figuring out what does work.
And then when you have posts take off, you're going to start getting better and better and knowing exactly what to say to make people want to work with you.
Another thing that it is so important that you understand about facebook ads Is ads managers aren't out there running one single ad for people That's like a flyer in the library.
Like I mentioned before that people click and then they book and then they give you money and then it's done. What they create for you is an ecosystem of ads. Some ads are going to be designed to introduce you to new people. Some ads will be designed to warm those people up. And then After people have interacted with multiple ads, maybe they've given you their email address, maybe they've taken something that you give away for free, then they're going to work their way through your funnel all the while you're paying for every bit of content that they see until they work with you.
And excellent ads managers can do that. Beautifully. They can send consistent traffic into your funnel that become paying clients and it's beautiful and then it seems to run on autopilot but really it's your ads manager that's running it and you can make a ton of money marketing your business that way.
But it's not cheap. And if you don't already have information to pull from, like who your ideal client is and what they need to hear from you in order to want to make a purchase. Then it's going to take even longer if it's even possible at all. I've had clients that boost a post and they get clients coming to them from it.
Like, it's definitely not impossible. But I've also had clients who come to me who say that they just dumped thousands of dollars into ads and got nothing back from it and that just breaks my heart.
So there you go. There is your introduction to Facebook ads and some things to think about if you plan to use them in the future or if you plan to use them now. You have a little bit more information. I hope this helps. If you have any friends in business who have been thinking about running ads and you want to send this to them just to make sure that they understand a little bit more about how this all works and what to be wary of, I would definitely be thankful. 📍 I'm thankful every time you share the podcast. It is late summer 2023 and I also wanted to let you know that there's going to be a really special Magic Marketing Machine promo coming up. So if you're thinking about joining Magic Marketing Machine and working with me to get clients directly from Instagram and manage your Instagram in 15 minutes a day.
Keep your eye on my social media because we have a really cool promo that's about to happen and that's all from me, darling. I'll see you next time.
