Our Journey to Facebook Ads: Part 1 with Abagail and Emylee
Episode 086: Show Notes
For part one of ‘Our Journey to Facebook Ads’, we are diving into all the creative nooks and crannies of Facebook ads. Here, we look at the specific ads that we’ve run and how they performed to ultimately answer the fundamental question you’re all wondering about: Are Facebook ads worth it? Today, we’re looking at what worked for our campaigns, what types of Facebook ads performed better for us (video or graphic), targeting cold audiences versus establishing warm audiences and tons of tricks and tips to maximize your Facebook ad spend.
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We went from knowing zilch about Facebook ads to knowing so much that we had to break this episode into two parts. If you are someone who is easily freaked out by Facebook ads, don’t be, because after this episode, you’ll realize it’s way easier than it seems and it’s worth every darn penny! But before you even start running your ads, let’s take a look at a few of the things you need to establish first.
Why You Need To Be Doing More Video
We have done a big mix of video ads and text graphics and every single time, video has outperformed text, graphic images and photographs. Every time. What we’ve realized is that you have to make something that moves in order to catch people’s attention when they’re scrolling. You are spending your cold hard cash on these ads, so you want them to convert in the best way possible, right? For our last launch, we ran a few videos. Our first one was a video with long copy and a link to sign up, and our second was a video ad with more info about the program we were selling. We later ran two testimonial ads and a Facebook Live that we turned into a video ad. Lastly, we had a cart close ad which was just a graphic. For our main video ad — the main ad for our entire program — we only spent $354. We reached a little over 31,000 people and we had 467 people click to the website/sales page. That meant that we spent just 75 cents per click. Yep, video is key, people!
What Is The Difference Between a Cold Audience and a Warm Audience?
A lot of people think, “I’m just going to run an ad to people that don’t know me and they’re going to go from not knowing me to, ‘My God, I want to buy everything this girl ever makes, ever.’” But the problem is that these people don’t know you and so they don’t trust you yet. What you have to do is warm the people up. In Facebook ad land, you can send an ad to a cold audience or a warm audience. A cold audience is made up of people that have not yet interacted with your content. They have nothing to do with you. A warm audience is made up of people that have somehow engaged with you. Maybe they’ve been to your website, looked at a certain blog post etc. and you can track them in a bunch of different ways. What people don’t realize with Facebook ads is how they all work together. And you can use Facebook ads to first grow your warm audience and THEN target specific ads to this expanding group of people.
We go into this in far more detail in the podcast, but for now, in Facebook ad land, ads that are performing well should be costing you around $1.50 to serve to each person. $1.50 or less is a good number to aim for. If you have some of those cold audiences that are running at $5 or $3, then those are the ones you’re going to want to turn off. If they’re at $1.40 or even like 97 cents, then those are the ones that you’re going to want to throw money at. If you’re looking at click throughs or engagement, you want to look at ads that are performing around 50 cents per person. If you’re feeling confused at this point, don’t worry, because we’re about to talk you through two of our own specific ads and unravel what this all means.
Let’s Take a Look at Our Ads
On our most recent challenge, we spent (and you’re going to think we’re crazy) two-thirds of our budget, which amounted to $2,099.27, on Facebook ads. If you’re brand new to Facebook ads, do not spend $2,000, by the way. I would say that two-thirds to three-quarters of that was to cold traffic. The other quarter was to warm traffic. We sent our ad to three-quarters cold people, one-quarter warm and got 2,250 people to sign up for our challenge. Outside of the Facebook ads for the challenge, we only sent two emails to our list and we shared on Instagram. That’s it. The ads that we spent money on for that challenge played a huge role in how many people we ended up getting to sign up for the challenge.
What we really mean by “warming people up” is that we wanted to deliver amazing value for cold people who had maybe never heard of us before or who might have heard of us but just not participated in anything with us yet. We not only wanted them to say yes to signing up for the free thing, we also wanted to make sure we were exponentially delivering so they could see the value and why it was awesome hanging out with us. We warmed them up, we got them excited, and all of a sudden, all the cold people that signed up for the challenge were converted, so to speak, into warm people.
How Did Our Ads Perform?
We had 821 people specifically sign up to the webinar, and 420 people show up live to the webinar, which is significant. 25% of the people saw the entire webinar, 90 minutes, start to finish. That resulted in 129 clicks to our offer and over $30,000 in sales during and directly after the webinar. We’re talking in a couple of hours. We spent a little over $3,000 and we made $30,000. Then throughout the rest of the launch, we spent very minimal money because, after this point, we only targeted warm audiences. For a while, it was a larger pool of people but as we got closer to the cart being closed for our launch, we only targeted the people who had specifically gone to our sales page. That resulted in a $97,000 launch in seven days. We want to reassure you that you don’t have to spend 1K, 2K, 3K every time you push out an ad in the hopes of making money. There’s a strategy to it and there’s a funnel about it and you just have to pay attention to the steps!
Is Paying For Facebook Ads Tacky?
We used to be so against paying for ads, paying for reach, and paying to get in front of people. We thought it was sleazy and inauthentic. But our opinion soon changed, and here’s why... We got to a point in our business where we plateaued. Hard. We were going to have to jump, and jump hard, if we wanted to grow, and that meant changing a lot of things about our business. We established that if we were going to make some changes, that they needed to be easy and they needed to be something that would give us a little more breathing room because for so long, everything we had done just involved more hustle! For the first time, the idea of running a Facebook ad allowed us to breathe. The amount of work we would have had to do (more blog posts, emailing, sharing) in order to get the same reach that we did with Facebook ads would have just been astronomical! The reason Facebook ads or paid promotions in general are different is because you are able to target who you’re telling Facebook to show your ad to. A blog post is on Pinterest in front of everyone, but with Facebook ads, you can be specific. With our Rock Your Biz launch, we spent about $1,400 and we made $37,000, and then we spent $3,600 on this launch and then we made $97,000. We think that is pretty phenomenal for back to back launches, tripling your launch budget and tripling your sales. So, no, at the end of the day, if done right, Facebook ads are not tacky, they’re smart.
Part One Round Up
Our aim for part one was to give you a little bit of a peek into the types of ads that we ran and, like, what the heck a video ad is, and a little bit of an insight into audiences. We know this episode is only the tip of the iceberg that is Facebook ads. But if there’s anything you can take away from this episode, it’s that being successful at Facebook ads is more than just throwing money at Facebook ads. It’s also making sure your page is optimized, making sure you have a great content calendar, making sure you’re being present and you can engage and all of that good stuff! Stay tuned for part two, where we’ll be breaking down a little bit more of what the heck Facebook ads are and the different types of ads (i.e. a conversion ad versus an engagement ad).
Quote This
We had to jump and that meant changing a lot of things about our business if we wanted to grow.
Highlights
Understand why you need to be doing more video and how it outperforms, every time. [0:04:40.1]
The difference between a cold audience and a warm audience, and how it can work for your business. [0:07:53.8]
Learn more about our process of doing Facebook ads by going over our previous campaigns. [0:07:53.8]
The results of our Facebook ads campaign, and how to adjust your strategy. [0:11:58.0]
Find out whether or not paying for Facebook ads is, in fact, tacky [0:30:33.5]
Round up of part one of this episode. [0:36:22.0]
#TalkStrategyToMe [0:39:33.8]
Head to thinkcreativecollective.com/fleek and sign up for Courtney’s free challenge.
Stay tuned for part two of this episode where we break down a little bit more of what the heck Facebook ads are and the different types of ads.
Make a list today: If you were to run an ad campaign of more than one ad, what would your end goal be? And then work backwards from there.
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Video ads, Targeting warm audiences vs. cold audiences, Facebook ad overview, How our last two launch ads performed, Are Facebook ads worth it
