Episode #004: ABRA-Cadabra: Always Be Running Ads
Today’s Episode:
Welcome to the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast! On this week’s episode, we are going to be talking about ABRA. ABRA stands for Always Be Running Ads.
I want to talk to you about the ads we run in our business that help us grow our following, engagement, advertising, and decrease our cost. I am also going to talk about the ads I recommend you run 24/7 as well.
Show Notes:
[00:55] Sometimes you can do things without them being totally polished and perfect and you can still get incredible results.
[01:56] You have to invest the time and energy into growing your Facebook ads knowledge. Start at YouTube University or try our Facebook Ads for Launching workshop.
[03:22] The Facebook Blueprint offers free online courses from Facebook directly about how to use their ads.
[05:06] Always be running an ad to grow your email list. Use Facebook lead ads to save on costs.
[07:47] Zach walks step by step through their process using lead ads.
[10:19] The next set of ads that we are constantly running are engagement ads. We are run ads for our Instagram followers.
[11:41] You run an ad for engagement from the Instagram ads manager to both people who have engaged with you on Instagram in the last 60 days and to people who don’t know who you are or are completely cold.
[13:43] You are going to continue to promote a new piece of content every 5-10 days to continually stay top of mind.
[14:09] The third ad we like to run all the time is another list-building ad at $5-10 a day maximum creating a lookalike audience of the 60-day engagement after we have done it for one or two months.
[15:20] We take the exact same content from our lead generation ad and we just repurpose it into the engagement lookalike lead generation ad.
[15:40] List building ads we are running to cold audiences and maybe warm to grow our email list. That is a lead generation ad using the instant form and lead ad experience on Facebook. We spend maybe $5-$10 a day minimum. You can spend more if you want your list to grow faster.
[16:08] The second ad is that two-step Instagram engagement and then creating a step two and running it specifically to all the people that are already in your engagement. That ad is maybe $3-$5 a day.
[16:37] In step two you want to spend $2-$3 a day on the step two Instagram engagement.
[16:57] Engagement audience look-alike ad, you run only if you have a leftover budget and you run it for lead generation with a Facebook instant form and lead ad to a lookalike of all your Instagram engagement.
[17:21] Start with lead generation. Lead generation is always going to be vital to your success. Then you jump in and add Instagram engagement.
[18:04] You DO NOT have to implement this all at once. As your business and income grow and you have more to spend on advertising this strategy makes sure you are always reaching new people.
[18:54] If we launch, we will have launch ads but we will talk about that in another episode.
[19:01] If you like this process and want support working through it, we have a new membership called Not Your Average Membership.
[20:03] You always want to be growing your business and getting new people in the fold. The best way in my experience is to have an ad campaign running in the background.
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, Episode 4. Hey, what is up listeners? I am so excited for this week's episode because I really feel like I'm starting to get in the groove with the new show and we're releasing it, and the reception has been great. You guys have been leaving such positive feedback and we really, really appreciate that. The only thing that makes me chuckle is, I was thinking before I started this episode, maybe I should do like a (singing) type thing, just because we don't have an intro yet. And we were so keen to get this show to the air that the day before it came out, we were like, oh my gosh, we don't have an intro or an outro and we don't want to quit. We don't want to call it. We don't want to stop what we're doing. We want to keep the momentum going.
And for that reason, we are functioning imperfectly and that's not what this episode's about, but I just wanted to throw that out there that sometimes you can do things without them being totally polished and totally perfect and you can still get incredible results. So on this week's episode, we are going to be talking about what I call Abra Cadabra. Okay. Sans Cadabra, just Abra, always be running ads. And I want to talk to you about the ads that we run in our business that help us grow our following, help us grow our engagement, help us grow our advertising, help us decrease our costs and the ads that we try to be running 24/7. And the ads that I'd recommend that you play around with running 24/7 as well. Now, the first thing I want to start with is Facebook ads. How do we actually get started?
So there are a ton of different ways that you can learn Facebook ads. And I talk about this all the time. I say, you can invest time. You can invest money. There's tons of incredible YouTube tutorials that'll get you started. There's amazing courses, memberships, programs, low ticket offers, high ticket offers. It doesn't really matter, but you have to invest the time and energy into growing your Facebook ads and knowledge repertoire, for lack of a better way to put it. And so, I'll give you a couple options that we have, like I said, number one is go to YouTube University, great place to start, totally free. Yes, it's going to take some time to sort through the info. You'll probably need to watch a couple of videos, invest a few hours, learn a few different strategies and then find what makes the most sense for you. That's pretty common.
The other thing that you can do is we have a training program called Facebook ads for launching. So if you're looking to launch your course, you can go to launching.heartsoulhustle.com and we'll link you up. It's a $37 program and it teaches you the fundamentals of advertising and launching a campaign for either course launch or program launch and you can apply those same fundamentals to learning the basics of advertising. But my favorite way to learn is we are actually teaching Facebook ads for lead generation and advanced Facebook ad strategies inside our membership in September, which you can check out at join.notyouraveragemembership. We'll link out those all up in the show notes for you. But I think it's really important that I emphasize this. I want this show to stay like not a big pitch fest for all of my offers.
I really want to share or understand that if you're like, I don't have the money right now or I'm not looking to invest in a paid course. Totally cool. Go to YouTube. And the other place you can go is a lot of people don't know about this, but it's called the Facebook ads blueprint. So if you literally Google Facebook ads blueprint, the first thing that shows up in Google, that's not an ad is actually free online courses from Facebook directly about how to use their ads. Now the subtle nuances of strategy and things like that. I do recommend that you learn from people who are actually doing it, not just the people who profit from it. But just to be clear, I'm giving you two ways to do it free, two ways to do it paid.
And the flip side of all of this is you don't even have to listen to me. You could go listen to somebody else. There's lots of great podcasts on advertising. Like I said, YouTube channels, blogs, all that good stuff. So before we dive into the episode, I know I'm going to be a little technical today. I'm going to do my best to make sure that I keep it really grounded and connected for you. But if you're like, I have no idea what I'm doing. It's probably a good time to start investing energy and time into learning some more advanced strategies. Cool? Cool. So let's start with the one ad type that I am always, always, always running and that is a list builder. Okay. So in the last, I'm actually going to pull this up in my ConvertKit, we're actually going kind of slow right now and that's because we're rebranding and tweaking, but basically we add about 300 to 350 people to our email list every month outside of launches. Okay.
So that's not including like, we do a big launch with a challenge or a webinar and we bring in like 1,500 or 1,200, 2,000 leads. That's not totally uncommon for us depending on what our budget is. But in the last 30 days, just from running list building ads, and the organic marketing that happens as a byproduct of the podcast that we publish, the content that we deliver, we've added 326 people to our list. Now of that, a percentage of them are also buyers. And we'll talk about that in a minute, but I recommend that you always be running an ad to grow your email list. Now, some of you are probably noticing that after iOS 14, which was the big Apple rollout, that Facebook ads, if you're running them have actually gotten more expensive. And Facebook came out and said, hey, our ad prices are going up, but there's one thing you can do to combat the increased lead costs that we've been trying, that's reduced our lead costs by probably about 40% compared to where it was without these types of ads. And that is using Facebook lead ads. Okay.
Now let me tell you what a Facebook lead ad is. Okay. Traditionally, you would use Facebook ads to run traffic to your website, where people enter their name and email and then they go to a thank you page, right? That's what we've traditionally done with Facebook ads. But lead ads are a cool new way to run ads that basically say, hey, I'm actually not going to run ads to my website, instead I'm going to have the opt-in page happen right on Facebook. Okay. Right on Facebook. And so what happens is people click on your ad and then it pulls up what Facebook calls an instant form. Okay. And the instant form basically just says, enter your name and email.
Now what's even cooler is that you can choose to have that form auto-populate with their Facebook information. So they open this form. It automatically drops their name and email and then use something called Zapier, which is a third party app to connect the information they put into the form to your autoresponder whether that be ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, Flodesk, doesn't matter. But you do have to use Zapier to connect Facebook to your CRM. Okay. And that is really important. So, what does this all mean? Basically what happens is when people click on it, it's going to auto fill their information, which means more people are going to fill out your form. And also, because you're keeping them on Facebook, Facebook kind of rewards that by lowering your cost and you can get more leads for less money. Now there's definitely pros and cons here.
The big pro is obviously you get more leads, right? You get more leads at a better cost. The con is going to be that you don't get as quality of a lead in my opinion, because it's filling in their Facebook information. Right? And I know a lot of us, we don't use the same email that we log into Facebook. Now, generally speaking, if you have a good offer, people are going to put in an email that actually works so that they get access to that offer. Right? And what we do is after they fill out that offer, you can add a button to the last page of the lead form that takes them to a thank you page. So let me really cement this by walking you through our process. And that is that people see our ad, right? They click on our ad and it opens up the instant lead form.
And inside the instant lead form, it basically is for our ultimate guide to Facebook ads for launching. It's a 50 page PDF that we give away for free that walks people how through, how to launch with ads, they click on it, it pulls it up and it says, here's what you'll get inside. They click next. It asks for their name and email. They agree to our privacy policy. And then it says, we're going to send you an email with your guide, but you can also click the button below to get instant access to the guide. Now, where that takes them is to a sales or excuse me, not a sales page, where that takes them to is the thank you page. And on that thank you page, I have just a short little video that says, hey, thank you so much for downloading the free guide. Here's how it works. Click here to download it.
And if you want to go deeper, I have a $37 training on Facebook ads that you can click here to buy. So I'm also leveraging my freebie ads to sell one of my low ticket offers. And we're going to do some episodes on low ticket offers because I know it's something that people want to know more about, and we will definitely talk more about that. But for right now, just know that what we do is we drive people to a page where they have the opportunity to also purchase something. And then we are setting it up on our back end that we follow up with them if they don't buy so that they get introduced to the product a couple of times, right? And it doesn't convert like crazy bananas, to be honest, it's not the highest converting ad we've ever run, but we do get purchases.
And that helps offset the cost of our advertising. And we get leads between $330 and $450, little lower, a little higher, but right around $327 as of this morning and our highest cost is $436 as of this morning. Okay. So the point of these is to always be growing the list, but also for us, it's generating buyers and that is a really powerful strategy. Okay. Now the second, and let me just pause for a second. So that's the first type of ad and that is a lead generating ad that we use Facebook leads for. We use Zapier, which is a software to connect Facebook to our autoresponder. People fill out the form, they're automatically added to our email list. And then we send them to a thank you page where we can ask them to do anything we want. And I do want to say that you can put anything on your thank you page if you like. I don't have a low ticket offer, I don't have anything that I want to sell yet, I just want to grow my list or my wait list. That's cool too.
You could even have another link on the thank you page to the wait list, if you're giving away a freebie. You could have a link to follow you on Instagram. There's no limit to what you can put on the thank you page. You just want it to be a nice, simple, low friction next step. Okay? Now the next set of ads that we are consistently running that have actually been working really well for us are engagement ads. Okay. So what we do is that we run engagement ads to our Instagram following. Okay. And we actually do two things. We run it to our Instagram following and we run it to an audience of people who aren't following us on Instagram. So what does that actually mean?
Well, what we do is we go into Instagram and we look at our most recent posts, right? So you can actually go into Instagram, go into your insights and you can look and see, okay, over the last, let's say, and I'm doing this in real time with you. The last 30 days, what has been my most popular posts and I'll look at what's been the most popular and based on what I've seen in the last 30 days to three months, I'm actually going to go three months, because we've done a lot of promotion for the podcast. I can see that I've got a couple of posts that are doing really well. Okay. What I will do is I will grab one of these posts and I will go into my ads manager and I'll run it as an engagement ad from the ads manager. Now it's really important that you know this, I'm not hitting the promote button inside of Instagram.
You can. And we're actually testing that. I have a friend who has a Instagram engagement strategy that we are personally testing to see how it performs. But basically what you do is you run an ad for engagement from the ads manager, to both people who have engaged with you on Instagram in the last 60 days. And to people who don't know who you are or completely cold. Okay? Why do we run it to both places? Well, one, as you know with Instagram, only a small percentage of your audience is actually going to see your content. So by taking your Instagram post and running it as an ad to people who are already engaging with your Instagram, it's going to keep you top of mind with your current audience. Now, what you're also doing is running it to like, for example, for me, I might do it to people who like Marie Forleo. What I'm doing with that is I'm also adding in cold people who don't know who I am.
So now they get this ad. They may like it, comment, share it, save it. And now they become part of the Instagram audience of everyone who's engaged with me in the last 60 days. Okay. So just to make this super clear, I'm not saying run an ad to people who follow you on Instagram. In Facebook ads, you can literally say, I want to connect with people who have engaged, liked, comment, shared, followed, clicked my Instagram in the last 60 days. When somebody cold then likes a post, they become part of that audience. And they'll see this post again. This is where it gets a little tricky, but it's super, super powerful. What we do next is on a, every 5 to 10 day basis, we take an ad, okay. We take a Facebook or excuse me, we take a Facebook ad of an Instagram post and we run it only to that engagement audience as what we call a step to engagement. Okay? What is that actually mean?
Well, basically you're going to attract all these cold people who like Marie Forleo, you're going to reengage all these warm people. They're going to come into this audience and then you're going to run another ad to them to stay top of mind. And you're going to continue to build this audience of 60 day engagement. And you're just going to continue to promote a new piece of content every few days, 5 to 10 is a great place to be, to continually stay top of mind. What that does is it grows your engagement, it can grow your Instagram following, it can grow your connection with your audience and these ads you can actually link to something. So it could grow your list, it could grow your sales, it could grow your podcast listenership. So be creative here, right? Have fun with it. Now, this leads us to the third ad that I like to run all the time, which is another list building ad at $5 to $10 a day, maximum.
I really don't spend more than that. Creating a, this is going to be a little wordy, but I want you to stay with me, creating a lookalike audience of the 60 day engagement after we've done it for one or two months. Okay? So basically, what you can say is, hey, all these people are engaging with my Instagram. You can run ads directly to your Instagram engagement, but what we've found testing things is that actually creating a look-alike of your Instagram engagement creates ads that come in at a comparable cost within 25% to 30% of the lowest cost that we see. Okay. Now just to clarify, a lookalike audience is basically saying, hey, Facebook, I have this audience of people who have engaged with me on Instagram in the last 60 days. I'm going to give it to you. And I want you to spit out the 1% of the population that's most similar to this audience. Okay?
Don't ask me why the lookalike does better than the actual engagement audience. We haven't figured that out, but I'll tell you what works, and that is the lookalike engagement. We take the exact same content from our lead generation ad and we just repurpose it into the engagement lookalike lead generation ad. So these are the three ads that we want to always be running. Okay. And let me recap them and talk a little bit about budget. So list building ads, we're running to cold audiences, maybe warm, but we're running ads to grow our email list. Okay. And that is a lead generation ad using the instant form and lead ad experience on Facebook. We do that. We spend maybe $5 to $10 a day on that minimum. You can spend more, if you want your list to grow faster, obviously we're spending about $3 a lead and we get 300 leads a month. So we're spending $900 a month, about $30 to $35 a day.
The second ad is that two-step Instagram engagement. So bringing cold people into your engagement, re-engaging your audience, and then creating a step two where you run an ad specifically to all the people who are already in your engagement audience. And then the third ad that we're, oh, sorry. And that ad I would run for, you don't have to go crazy, like $3 to $5 a day. And if you're going to do $5 a day, I recommend $6. And I recommend you spend $3 on the engagement audience and $3 on the cold audience. And then step two, you want to spend about $2 to $3 a day on the step two Instagram engagement. Okay. So, that's about $6 to $10 per day.
And then the last ad that we like to always have running is the engagement audience lookalike. You run that, only if you got leftover budget and you run it for lead generation with a Facebook Instant Form in lead ad to a lookalike of all your Instagram engagement. So priority. If you're like, okay, this is great. That sounds like $25 to $30 a month, about $900 bucks a month. And I'm just not there yet. That's okay. Go in order that I've presented these and bring them out one at a time. So start with lead generation. Lead generation is always going to be vital to your success. If you want to sell more, you have to have more people to sell to, or you have to have more offers. And it's harder to make an offer than it is to just run an ad to grow your list. Okay? Then if you are like, I'm spending $10 a day, I'm getting leads. Maybe they're even starting to buy my products.
Then you jump in and say, okay, now I'm going to do some Instagram engagement for $10 a day. That's going to start to grow your audience, it's going to increase your engagement, it's going to get more people connecting with you. And then if you do that, and you're spending $20 a day and you're like, I could go up to $750 a month. Then you spend another $5 to $10 a day on the Instagram engagement lookalike audience for leads. Okay. You do not have to implement this all at once. So please hear me. I am not saying always be running these ads from day one of your business. I'm saying as your business grows, as your income grows and you have more to spend on advertising. And you're saying, I feel like I'm hitting a plateau, or I feel like I'm not growing, or I feel like I don't know how to reach new people.
This strategy makes sure that you're always reaching new people. You're always connecting with audiences. You're always finding new interest and connections and people that are coming to your brand, coming to your list, coming to your products and potentially taking action and moving down the path that you want them to take to become loyal fans. So I'm going to wrap this up here and just say this three simple ads. List building, engagement, and engagement retargeting, that's it. Okay. Those are the ads that we're always running. And then of course, if we launch, we will do launch ads, which we'll have another episode on, but for now, all you have to know is these three types of ads that you can run. So I hope you got lots of value. I do want to throw this out there, if you're like, this sounds great, but I need some additional support.
How do I actually set up these ads? I want an over the shoulder walkthrough. So this month in the not your average membership, which is our signature membership program, we are actually walking you through how to set up these lead ads. We already have that at the time that this episode dropped, we have a 45 minute training in there that walks you through how to that these ads up. And on September 30th, we're also hosting a bonus live class that all of our members who joined before the 30th will be invited to live, will also be recorded. And we're going to walk you through some of the advanced strategies, like the two step Instagram engagement setup and the Instagram engagement retargeting. So if you're like, this is great. I can run with it. Awesome. Run with it. My goal is that you can take notes and take action, right?
But if you're like, hey, I'm just so early in the game and I want to learn Facebook ads. Go to join.notyouraveragemembership.com. You can join our membership. It's $49 a month. Cancel anytime, 30 day refund policy. And we would love to have you in there. So I will wrap up by saying this, you always want to be growing your business. You always want to be getting new people in the fold. And the best way in my experience to do that is to have an ad campaign running in the background. Yes organic, yes email, yes podcast. But if you really want to amp it up, have an ad campaign going in the back that's always growing your audience. All right. So get out there, grow your audience, grow your campaigns. And until next time, this is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast.
