Episode #007: 7 Major Advertising Trends of 2021
Join Zach on today's episode to learn about the major trends in advertising that we're seeing for both our agency clients, and for the students in our membership.
Come learn how you can take advantage of these trends to maximize the results you can get with your ads.
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, with your host Zach Spuckler. This is episode number seven, The Major Advertising Trends we are Seeing in 2021. Let's get into it.
Hey, hey, welcome to another episode of the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast. I am so excited to be talking to you today because we have been kind of in sandbox mode for the last few months where we've just been playing. We've been playing with Facebook ads. We've been playing with different strategies, different ideas, different concepts, different topics, and kind of seeing what works the best for our business, and specifically for our market. We do things for our business because we want to generate more revenue and get people engaging with us. But we also do things just to test what works and be able to share that with you guys.
So I'm really stoked for this episode because we're going to put together the seven trends that we are seeing with Facebook advertising, Instagram advertising. We're even going to talk a little bit about some outside advertising. Don't worry, we won't get too techy or complicated, but I'm really excited to share this with you. Now, before we dive in, I want to let you know that this episode is sponsored by our five day list building bootcamp. Starting October 11th, 2021, we are going to be hosting a five day training where we're going to teach you how to run ads to grow your email list all the time.
One of the biggest trends we're seeing in the industry not with just advertising but with sales in general is that more sales are coming from warm audiences than cold audiences, whether you're doing a challenge, a webinar, a video series, a launch, even a funnel. We're finding that they're way more effective with our warm audience. Now, that's always been the case, but lately we've noticed that in big launches, the majority of sales, even for bigger names, are coming from people who are already in their ecosystem, already on their list, already following them on Instagram.
So it's more important than ever that you be growing your list on a daily basis. So starting October 11th, we're going to work together for five days to actually write, create, set up, scale and track a list building ad for your business. Now, the cost to join the bootcamp is $10. You can get all the details at bootcamp.heartsoulhustle.com. Again, that's bootcamp, B-O-O-T-C-A-M-P.heartsoulhustle.com to sign up. We start the 11th and on enrollment, you also get instant access to a 45 minute Facebook ads crash course on the exact strategy we'll be covering over the five days so you can get started as soon as you enroll.
Now, with that sponsorship on the table, let's talk about the major advertising trends we're seeing. I kind of just alluded to this with the bootcamp that we have coming up. But the first thing that we're seeing is that lead generation 24/7 is now essential. When I talk to my friends who are doing really well with their business, are scaling their business, are getting results with their business, the one common trend that we're seeing is that they are advertising 24/7 to grow their email list. Now, a lot of people get a little freaked out about this because they're like, that means I have to be spending money every day. And you do. Realistically, here's kind of what I tell people. It's like, yeah, I get that it's a little stressful to be spending money every day, but you have to be growing your audience.
There's this big kind of trend online that like, oh, you don't need a big list or a big audience to make money. And that's totally true. I don't have a massive following. I don't have a massive email list compared to some people, but you do have to have an audience to sell. If you want to validate an idea or test something or sell something, you've got to have someone to sell it to. And while I love social media, Facebook is great, Instagram is great. We use both. We're actively using them right now to promote our Facebook ads bootcamp, but we're also running ads because we realize that there's more to the game than just, oh, I'll spend a ton of money, get a ton of leads and then sell them right away.
The long term relationship nurturing game is kind of what's in right now, and that's how people want to connect with you and that's how people want to learn from you, to build a relationship with you. Facebook and Instagram are great for that, but you're only going to reach 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, maybe 10% of your audience on social. Whereas with email, we actually checked our stats just a couple days ago and we found that 71% of our email list personally have opened, engaged, clicked, or read an email from us in the last 30 days. 71%! Y'all, you got to be building that list. And I know one of the things we hear all the time is like the money's in the list or build your list. I don't necessarily think, oh, there's a ton of money just by building a list. No, there's a ton of money in building a list and nurturing that relationship, and that's why you need to start building your email list. That's the first trend we're seeing.
The second trend that we're seeing is that with iOS 14, activity tracking and promotion on Facebook and Instagram is going to be more important than ever. Now, what do I mean by this? Well, just to give you some backstory, Apple basically rolled out this update where people could say, hey, make it so that I'm not being tracked across websites. Now, if you're newer to Facebook ad, that's okay. If you're seasoned, you probably know this. But when somebody goes to a certain website and you have your Facebook pixel installed there, it sends data back to Facebook about what activities, what pages, what content, what products people are buying, engaging, reading, connecting with. That's been limited on mobile and Apple devices. Less and less tracking across platforms, across websites is happening.
And so what that means is that when you say retarget people who visit your website, you may find that you're not actually picking up everyone who has been to your website because if they have that tracking disabled, which they explicitly have to enable it, then they're not going to see your content. This is why we're encouraging people to not just run ads to their website anymore. You used to be able to get away with, oh, I'm just going to run ads to my blogs or I'm going to run ads to my webinar or my video series or my opt-in and I'll just engage with the traffic as it comes through.
The reality is you're not going to be able to retarget all that traffic. So what we now recommend to all of our students is that you not just run ads specifically to grow your list, that you should be doing those all the time. If you've got the budget, throw some money into running Instagram engagement ads, Facebook engagement ads, and even Facebook lead ads where you actually collect the leads on Facebook. Why? Because if it happens on Facebook, Instagram, or even Facebook lead ads, Facebook has that data because it's all happening within the Facebook ecosystem.
For example, one of the launches that we work on for a client, they teach video marketing and we run a ton of video teasers to Instagram and Facebook before we open the doors to the program. And the reason that we do that is because once somebody watches that video or likes that video or engages with that video, we can run an ad back to them to get them to join us inside the paid program. Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't target your website traffic or you shouldn't upload your email list, but it is important that you keep track of what's working and what's not working. And for me, what's not working is all the external tracking, but what is working is the tracking on Facebook. So we just have to pay attention to that.
Now, right in that same vein, the third big trend that we're seeing is that because iOS has affected tracking, if you're spending more than a few thousand a month on Facebook ads, you're going to want to start investing in third party software to track your ad return, what ads are getting the best results. We are seeing in our ads manager that we're actually making sales of products that aren't even being tracked inside the ads manager. Like we have separate funnels set up for some of our offers specifically to ads. And when you go into the ads manager, you can actually see that the purchases inside Facebook do not match the purchases inside of our like cart system. We use ThriveCart. So there's a problem there because you're investing all this money into advertising, but you're not seeing where the sales are coming from.
And so as you start to spend more money, you don't have to do this right away. I don't think it's essential to start doing it like right out of the gate. But here's what I will tell you. It is important that as you start spending more money, that you look at something like SegMetrics. We love SegMetrics. We just started using it. And if you want to check it out, you can go to heartsoulhustle.com/segmetrics, but real talk, it's $175,000 a month. I'm sorry, let's try that again. $175 a month. I'm going to leave that blueprint there because that's funny. $175 a month, not $175,000. But what you have to realize is that if you are running ads all the time, you might be like, oh, $175 a month, that's going to eat into my ads budget. But here's the thing. Not knowing your data is going to eat into your ads budget because if you don't know your budget or if you don't know your results, the way you're spending your budget, you're not going to be able to figure that out.
What do I mean by that? Well, essentially like let's say you're running five different Facebook ads and you're trying to get sales. You end up with 20 sales in your backend, ThriveCart, Kajabi, CRM, whatever you're using for purchases, but you're only seeing five of those purchases in Facebook. Well, which ad do you put more money into? With iOS 14 tracking really flubbing things up, there's no way to know. There's no way to know. And so it really important that you get some advanced tracking in place. But again, this is a trend that I don't really think you need to invest or worry about until you're spending at least $1,500 to $2,000 a month. But when you are, think about taking 10% of that budget and putting it into better attribution tracking.
Let's pause for a second and do a quick recap of everything we've covered so far in terms of advertising trends. Number one, we said that lead generation is now essential because leads and email list bring in more sales proportionally compared to cold traffic in a launch. Number two, we said that it's more important than ever that you be engaging on Facebook and Instagram, both organically and with paid advertising because you can now track activity within the app with more accuracy than you can track data outside of Facebook. And in that same vein with iOS 14 affecting tracking, if you're in a more advanced spending level with your ads, you're going to want to invest in something like SegMetrics or another software to attribute your data more correctly.
Now, there's a few more trends that we're seeing and I want to cover those as well. The first one that we're seeing is that CPMs are rising. Now, I don't want to geek out too much in this episode or be too jargony, but CPM is something important to understand. CPM basically stands for cost per thousand impressions. A lot of people think with Facebook like you pay per click or you pay per conversion, but really you pay for an impression. You pay for your ad to be shown. Whether people click on it or not, you still get the charge. You still get the charge.
And it's important to understand that those are going up. The average CPM on Facebook, the average cost to place an ad has gone up. What that means is that it's more important than ever that you focus on creating ad that get clicks and creating pages that get conversions. It's super easy to go, oh no, my ads aren't converting. But the question is, are people clicking and are people converting when they get to your landing page? If you're going for opt-ins on your website, you need to be converting at 30 to 40% of people who click on your ad. And if you are doing purchases, you need five to 10% of people clicking on the ad to make a purchase. Like that has to happen. And you really want to have your click through rate above 1%.
Now, you can improve from there, but the key is that in the past you could kind of advertise and it was cheap enough that you could get away with not having great conversions and still get good costs per conversion. You could have a lower conversion rate on the page, you could have a lower clickthrough rate, but at the end of the day, you'd still get a good number. That's not happening anymore. So the easiest way to say this is dial in your system and messages. Dial in your system and messages. You've got to make sure that people actually opt in and buy something or else you're just spending money; because with lead generation being essential 24/7, if you're generating leads but they're not buying anything, you are spending money, not making money. So real simply, the cost of Facebook ads are going up, which means it's more important than ever to have quality messaging, quality opt-in pages and quality conversions.
The next trend that we're seeing is this big resurgence in static outperforming video. Now, all the video marketers in the world want to say, oh my gosh, video always does better. Video does better. I have personally found that video crushes organic engagement, but when I'm running ads for conversions, opt-ins, purchases, static does so much better, like static just way outperforms our video. And here's the big trend that makes this work. Static images with like 50% of the image being text. Now, if you are a Facebook ads veteran, you're going, "Zach, you can't have a Facebook ad with more than 20% text, I thought." That rule is gone.
So what we have found crushes it for us is Instagram images one to one ratio with a ton of text on them that really describe what's going to happen. And when I say a ton, I'm talking like 50 to 60% of the photo is text. Those just crush it for us. They really, really crush it. And because that text rule is gone, it's worth testing an image that's highly text based. We find that for ourselves, for our clients, for our agency clients, our students inside our membership, that just crushes it. Now, you can still test video. But for the majority of our clients, we found that static just works better.
The next trend is that I want you to realize that testing your ads is now vital and takes more budget. I've said this before on the past iteration of the podcast, but the reality is that this $5 a day Facebook ads strategy is kind of out. Like really, I think you need to be spending at least 10 to $20 a day on Facebook ads. And I know that that can feel a little daunting. That's three to $600 a month right around that 4, $500 range. The reality is you just have to spend that if you want to make a dent in the market really, because you're going to spend some of that on growing your email list and you're going to spend some of that on engagement like we talked about.
If you're not spending enough, with the CPMs going up like we also talked about, you just won't reach enough people. You're just not going to reach enough people. And if you're trying to reach the masses with your message, even if you're in a niche, the masses with your message in a niche, you've still got to have the budget to do it. I'm not saying, hey, don't run Facebook ads. What I am saying is if you want to start running them, you really need to start budgeting a few hundred dollars a month, not $150. That just doesn't work the way it used to with the cost, with the conversions, with what it costs to make things happen. It's just not a long term solution to spend $5 a day.
Now, what's great is that you could set up a really simple email sequence on the back of your new leads for a product that's like $50, $60, $90 or lower, you can go a little lower. Like we have products in our follow up sequence that run between $30 and $50 to offset your cost. So you only need to sell 10, 15 products a month, but you're growing your list every day and you're making them an offer every day to grow your audience. I just want to really hit this home. It's like if you're looking to invest in ads, be willing to invest enough that you can see results.
The last trend that we're seeing is what I'm calling cross platform advertising. Now, we haven't been super vocal about this because frankly we're still testing and we're still learning. But at the end of February, I want to say it was, might have been a little sooner than that, maybe April. Doesn't really matter. We did a joint venture webinar with a friend of mine, Michael Alaniz, who teaches Google ads. I went into his course and I studied along with it. We started running Google ads to some of our products, specifically one of our products actually. We started running Google ads to our product that drives people to our Challenge Launch Toolkit.
Now, you can check that out at toolkit.heartsoulhustle.com. It's not a pitch. I just want to give you the context of it real quick. It's a $37 training on how to launch a digital product with a five day challenge. We've sold over 1,300 copies of it over the last year. And we have a Facebook ad running all the time. So like in the month of September, just to kind of give you some statistics, we spent about $450 on Facebook ads. I'm sorry, on Google ads. We didn't run any Facebook ads in September specifically to our challenge product. And we essentially doubled that in sales. We had about $900 in sales of the Challenge Launch Toolkit.
Now we have slowed down promoting it. We're not driving traffic with Facebook ads right now. We're not promoting it too aggressively on social because we've been focused on our membership and our low ticket offer into the membership, the bootcamp that I told you about at the beginning of the show. But just to give you even more context, we actually haven't run ads for the Challenge Launch Toolkit in about three months. What we found is that over the last three months, which is essentially just to give you an exactness here, July through September, we spent on Google ads $1.37000, about $1,370. And we brought in $4,705. We essentially 3Xed our money.
Now, the reason that our revenue went down last month is a couple things. We've been promoting other products. We haven't been driving as much organic traffic to our website. We're repositioning. We haven't spent as much time invested into those other things. But I tell you that because Google is basically driving sales to our website every single day. And you might be like, I'm not ready for Google, and that's okay. I just want you to start thinking, hey, our Facebook ads for our Challenge Toolkit were getting expensive, but when combined with Google ads and organic traffic that we've been getting over the last several months, we're still generating revenue and it doesn't have to be Facebook.
Let me just recap all seven major trends that we're seeing super quick, and then we'll wrap it up and let you get back to your beautiful, beautiful day. Number one, lead generation is now essential 24/7. You have to be growing your list. Number two, creating activity on Instagram and Facebook with lead ads, engagement ads is now more important than ever because of iOS 14. With iOS 14, if you're spending more than $1,500 to $2,000 a month, you need a third party tracking software to get accurate data about what's happening. Number four, static ads versus video ads. We're finding that text heavy static images are doing the best. Five, CPMs are on the rise, so you absolutely have to dial in your offer and your systems. You've got to make sure you've got good click rates on your ads and good conversion rates on your landing and sales pages.
Number six, it takes more budget because CPMs are up. Spending $5 a day on ads is out. You really want to be ready to commit between three and $600 a month to really start to see results. And number seven, consider cross platform promotion. Consider starting to learn YouTube ads, Google ads, Twitter ads. You don't have to dive in tomorrow, but start studying and paying attention because I think that cross platform engagement and promotion is going to become the secret to success in the future.
Now, as we wrap up, if you are listening to this going, oh my gosh, Zach, where do I even start? The reality is I want you to start with list building ads. And again, we are hosting a bootcamp October 11th through the 15th where we're going to walk you through setting up an ad that drives leads to your email list every single day. The cost to join the bootcamp is $10. We've already got some incredible results.
We tested out this bootcamp inside our membership and y'all, the wins that people were putting out, we had Shuna who got 312 leads in six days at $0.57 a piece. We have people like JC who got 115 leads in four days, Simone who got 120 leads in 48 hours, Frankie who cut her lead cost in half, Nina who added 106 leads in a month at $1.50 a piece in the B2B space, Christina who got her lead cost down to $0.53 a lead and brought in over 150 leads in a week. Y'all, we are just crushing the results and we want to help you do the same. So if you want to start growing your email list, getting affordable leads and doing it consistently, head over to bootcamp.heartsoulhustle.com.
Now, as we wrap up, I'll leave you with this thought. Advertising is vital to the success of most businesses. Advertising could be word of mouth advertising, it could be organic marketing. But when we talk paid advertising, we are guaranteeing that you put yourself in front of your ideal customers. If you are like, I just feel like I'm on the social media hamster wheel, or I post all the time and I'm not growing, y'all, now is the time to advertise. It never gets easier. It only gets different and it changes and evolves. And so if you're listening to this thinking how do I get more customers, start advertising.
I really want to push you to try it. Try it at the least. And if you're totally stuck, come join our bootcamp. It's 10 bucks. And if you walk away without ads, we actually have a guarantee in place. But if you were to walk away, it's like it was 10 bucks to try it out. And if you love the strategy, you run with it. And if you don't, that's okay too. But dip your toe in the water. We want you to start getting results with your ads.
I will leave it there. I hope you guys have an incredible rest of your day, week, month, year. As always, you can check out a complete transcript of the show over at heartsoulhustle.com/NYAP007. That's heartsoulhustle.com/NYAP007 for Not Your Average Podcast episode 007. I will see you or talk to you, maybe you'll hear me, next week on the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast.
