Episode #013: Should I Be Running Ads Through the New Year?
Episode #013: Should I Be Running Ads Through the New Year?
As the year comes to a close - we see a common question emerging from our audience (that's YOU!).
Should I be advertising through the end of the year?
In theory a simple question, but in practice the answer varies based on your unique business.
In this episode we'll help you decide if you should be advertising, where to focus your money if you do, and important things to consider before you start your ads.
Let's get into it!
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast episode number 13. On this episode, we're talking about holiday advertising. Should you stop your ads over Christmas? Should you keep your ads running? What about the new year? When is it time to start again? All that and more will be answered on today's show. So let's get into it.
Hey, hey, hey, not so average marketer. I am so excited to be coming to you today to talk to you about holiday advertising. Now, a lot of people in my audience, in my community, in our membership ask me, "Zach, when do I stop running ads for the year and when do I start running them again?"
I wanted to take an episode to talk about how you should approach advertising through the end of the year and into the new year, because the reality is that some things do happen in the especially Facebook ads world, but really in the advertising world as a whole. And that is that as we close out the final quarter, a lot of people do a big push for advertising for a couple of reasons. One, Q4 is one of the most profitable quarters out there for most businesses and two, we want to spend our money on something we can write off. And so a lot of people know, "Hey, I can write off advertising. I might as well push this last quarter to get some of the tax benefit in addition to the growth benefits of advertising."
So that leaves the smaller fish like me and you to say, "Well, do I compete? Do I not compete? What do I do?" So let's just get right into it. There's no right answer. Okay. So if you're listening to this going, "Zach's going to tell me to not advertise through Christmas or to advertise through Christmas or he's going to say you need to do this, or you need to do that." I'm not going to do that. What I'm going to do is walk you through a series of things to consider, depending on where you're at with your business, your budget, what you want to do in the first quarter of the year to help you think about should I be advertising or should I be stepping back for the last couple of weeks. Two to three weeks as the year ends and a week or two as the new year starts.
So the first thing I always like to ask people is what are you doing in January? Okay, so many people say, "Oh, I'm going to take Christmas off because it's super busy and I'm not talking about working. I'm talking about your advertising. I'm going to take Christmas off that kind of two or three week span, not advertise and then in January, I'm going to do a big launch.
And the reality is that you want to stay top of mind, especially going into a launch. It's really important that you pay attention to your audience and you keep them engaged. And so if you are saying like, "Yeah, I'm launching in January or I've got something big coming in January." Now is the perfect time to advertise especially if you're in a space like us, digital marketing, where some people do ease off the gas a little bit this time of year. This is a great time for you to double down.
But again, if you're not doing anything in January and you're like, "Hey, my costs are kind of high or not really amping up to anything." At this point, then it could make sense to just cut advertising for a little period of time. And that leads me right into the second thing that you want to consider, which is your budget. How much do you actually have to spend over the next two to three weeks. You should always be thinking about, especially when we're going into the new year and you might have a limited year end budget, or you crunch your numbers for the year. And you've said, "Look, I don't really want to spend anymore this year."
That's okay. You can be successful without spending money 24/7, especially during times when you're not going to be around. Something else that I want you to really consider is that if you have a limited budget and a limited timeframe, it can be hard to spend that budget and vice versa. It can be easy to blow through that budget and you may not have enough to really sustain a full couple of weeks of advertising and that's okay. So the next thing I tell people to consider is can you fulfill on what you're promoting without being at your computer?
This is a really important one. The reality is that look as entrepreneurs, we work. We work through holidays, we work through birthdays and celebrations and we miss dinners. We don't want to do that forever, but the reality is, I think for most of us, we've done that. We've stayed up late. We've missed sleep. We've missed an event. We've passed on something. We've stayed up late and that's okay.
I sincerely believe that to grow your business, you do have to make vices, but we don't want to do that forever especially around the holidays when we're going to be driving here and driving there, and we're going to have popup events and our family's going to want to see us, and we're going to want to be there Christmas morning. You don't want to have to be at your computer working. So I always pose the question, whatever you're promoting, whether it's a freebie or a low ticket offer, or a product, or a service, can the fulfillment of that be done automatically?
So for example, we sell our low ticket offer the challenge launch tool kit for $37. And when you buy it, everything is automated. You get the follow-up sequence, you get the login, everything is taken care of automatically. However, if I don't have that set up, that people can automatically get into anything. Let's say somebody signs up on Christmas Eve, because I'm still running my ads. And that's great in theory, but if I didn't have that automation in place, how long are they going to wait?
I'm probably not going to be online Christmas Eve. I'm probably not going to be online Christmas Day, and then as we all know between Christmas and New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, it's like a black hole. No one's working. No one really responds. It's crazy. It gets really, really crazy. And so if you can't fulfill on something that you're promoting, then it's probably best to just turn off your advertising. Okay. It's probably best to just take a break.
So let's just do a quick recap of what I covered so far and that is, have you considered what you're doing in January? Your January goals are contingent on your December actions. If you guys have ever heard the old saying like, "You sow the seeds today to harvest them tomorrow." I believe that's incredibly true. You have to be saying, "Hey, if I start in December, I'm going to have better results in January." That's just how it is. Also, consider your budget. Are you at the year end budget? Have you spent everything you want to spend or do you have a little more wiggle room to invest?
And consider fulfillment. Can you fulfill on what people would be opting in for or buying with your ads, even if you're not at your computer? So if you've gone through these questions and you're like, "Look, the reality is with what you're saying, I don't want to run ads right now. I want to just step back. Everything I do is live. I don't have a big budget. I'm not really doing anything in January." That's cool. You can listen to the rest of this episode for inspiration, but I want you to know I truly and firmly believe that your success in business is not contention on the advertising that happens between today and the first week of the new year.
Business is a long game. So if you're answering these questions saying, "I shouldn't be advertising right now." That's okay. Don't judge yourself. Don't question your own abilities as a business. Don't go, "Oh, but I would be more successful if..." It's okay. It's okay to step back and take a break. Take a break from advertising, from I'm spending, from working. It's safe and it's smart. So for those of you who are listening saying, "Yeah, I do want to run ads over the next few weeks because I've got a big launch coming up in January. I've got the budget. Everything I want is either a freebie that I can automate or is a product that has automated fulfillment." Great.
Let me talk about the first thing and that is that I want you to test, test, test, test, and test. A lot of people during December are going to be advertising and you have to have a good angle. You have to have good copy. You have to have good creative. I want you to know that you can absolutely integrate that in a couple of days. You could test a bunch of different copy and images and angles starting today and let them run for a few days and then amp up what's working over the really busy holiday weeks.
But it's very important that this juncture that if you are going to advertise, you test multiple angles. We took one of our freebies and we tested a couple different angles on it. We found that one was working exceptionally better than the other. We cut the one that wasn't working, we advertised it to a ton of different potential audiences and now we have really generated a lot of leads from it. I'll share with you some of those numbers a little bit later, but we've been able to get some really, really good lead generation from one of the busiest times of the year with a really great offer.
So you want to test multiple offers, you want to test multiple angles. And that brings me to the second piece, which is I recommend that if you don't know what to focus on and you're like, "My products might not be selling or I don't have a low ticket offer or I don't have a product that I'm pushing directly with Facebook ads." I recommend that you focus on lead ads.
Now, we talk about lead ads extensively in the September content of our membership, not your average membership, where we help people basically add tons of leads to their list in a short period of time to help them boost their podcast, boost their purchases, boost their YouTube channel. We do all kinds of stuff within our membership, but it's all tied to helping people get more traction with their email list.
So lead ads, just to give you context, are where people opt into your freebie on Facebook not on a landing page. This reduces your cost, it increases your conversion rate, it gets you more leads, it's a really exceptional tool to put in your tool belt. If you're wondering how these can work, how they can play out, we are getting leads for $1.69 in the business to business space and we've generated about as of the time I'm recording this, just about 1800 leads, 1786 to be exact.
So it'll probably be 1800, by the time we have published and we've added over 400 new subscribers to our email list because we advertise our new freebies to our old audience or our existing email list. Because we want to keep providing value, keep getting people opting in, keep getting people connecting. So in total, we created this little freebie. We promoted it organically. We promoted it paid and had over 1,850 people snag this opt-in.
So how did we do that? How did we get such a great cost? Well, at this time of the year, you need to be thinking about timely and relevant offers. So many people are like, "I'm just going to promote my thing." Well, what we did was we created a freebie for the end of the year on planning year 2022. And y'all, it has just been a massive success. People are like, "Yes, I want to plan my 2022." The opt-ins are cheap. The engagement is great. People are joining our membership from our sequence. It's been a game changer for us. Like I said, we've added over 1400 new subscribers to our email list in 18 days. Almost 100 people a day. I believe we're at like 80 people a day and we're continuing to scale that up.
The reason it's working so well is it's a relevant offer. It's relevant to the time of the year. It's relevant to what people are focused on in their business right now. And so if you're thinking, "Hey, I do want to continue to grow my list this time of year." I'm not saying you have to go out and create something new. Maybe you already have something that's a great load ticket offer or a freebie. How can you adjust the messaging of the advertising to be timely to this time of year?
So ask yourself not just, "Oh, how do I promote this thing I already have?" Ask yourself, "How do I promote this thing I already have and tie it into the end of the year, the beginning of a new year." So for a really specific example, let's say you teach people, Instagram marketing and your big promise is I'm going to help you get your next 100 followers. That doesn't have to change. If that's your opt-in, great. But your ad copy could be something along the lines of, and I'm riffing on the spot. So don't judge this too harshly, but you could do something like, "Are you planning to grow your Instagram in 2022? Download my free guide that shows you how to get your next 100 followers in a repeatable scalable system that will help you have more followers in 2022 than you ever had before."
Notice how it's the same freebie. I didn't change the freebie, but I changed the advertising message. Now, if you want to go total gangbusters and you got the time and capacity, you could absolutely create a new offer. You could absolutely do that, but you don't have to. The last thing that I'll say about advertising is that if you have a low ticket offer that you're promoting directly with advertising, I find that this time of the year, people are still spending. People are excited to get more people to connect. They're excited to get more people to buy from them. They're excited to plan for their a year.
As a consumer, it means that people are still buying up until the last minute, especially with the mentality of Black Friday, Christmas spending. People aren't as, I don't want to say conservative with their money, but they're more free with spending. And so if you have a low ticket offer that you've been promoting, some people say, "Oh, I'm not going to promote that between Christmas and new year, because people are with family or spending money elsewhere." Y'all this is like the perfect time. People are trying to get those year end write offs, people get money for Christmas. People get gifts for Christmas that they want to compliment.
There's so much benefit to running offer ads this time of year, but that's only if you have existing proven offers. I do not recommend and I really want to make this clear, don't create a new low ticket offer the last two weeks of the year. Don't try to promote something brand new the last two weeks of the year. The reason is, I want you to notice that it's easier to sell something that has already been successful this time of year than it is to come up with a completely new idea.
What I'm really saying is don't force yourself in the last two weeks of the year when really we want to be resting and restoring and spending time with our families, be so tied into creating something brand new in an attempt to generate year end revenue. You don't get to enjoy your life. And yes, people are on Facebook and advertising, but I find that people are less tied into new ideas. The best way I can put it is if you've never put an offer out there before, people are going to look at that offer and go, "Yeah, this is great, but I don't really know what it's about and I'm too busy to investigate."
When you have an offer that's proven with copy and creative and a good sales page, you're not saying, is this a good offer? How do I refine this offer? You're just pushing out a proven offer. I know that might sound a little ethereal and not so grounded, but really I'm asking you to put some faith in me. I've done this for years. Whenever I try to push something out the last two weeks of the year that's new, it's hard to get traction.
So quick recap. I want you, if you're going to run ads to test a bunch of different angles. Focus on lead generation or low ticket offers that are already proven. Make sure your ad angles are timely and relevant to the end of the year and push out a freebie if nothing else, because that's how we added over 1400 people to our email list in just 18 days.
Two other things I want to talk about briefly and then we'll put a pretty bow on this episode is if you're listening to this and you're like, "I kind of have a budget, but I don't have a big budget, but I do want to grow my audience. But like maybe I don't want to spend too much money." That's okay. That's totally normal. We talk to people all the time who are like, "I don't know if I should. Zach, you're giving me all these thoughts to think about, but I'm still having a hard time making that decision, ultimately."
That's okay. What I would do is take a small budget and just focus on your warm audience. If nothing else, promote your offers or your freebies to people who are already engaged with you. And just to recap, I know I've talked about this in past episodes, but your warm audience would be like, people who have been to your website, people that are on your email list, people that have engaged with you on Instagram or Facebook, wherever you're advertising.
Just focus on the people who already know you. One, because it's an easier win. You're going to get lower costs. You're going to get better engagement. You're going to get lots of people connecting with you. But two, you don't have to worry about growing at a time that you're focused on relaxing. So if you're like, "I don't have a big budget. I don't have a lot of offers, but I want to stay top of mind." It's really easy to set up warm advertising, and it's really easy to just move through your audience and push content in front of them.
What I want you to understand about this or what is really important to me that you get is that yes, you might be advertising to people who have already bought from you or already on your email list, but it's about staying top of mind in a time where most businesses go quiet. That's the goal. It's not, "Oh, I'm going to make $1,000 a day with my warm audience remarketing. No, it's about these people have already engaged with me. I want to stay top of mind with them. How do I continue to do that?
The last thing that I'll say, we talked a little bit about this under fulfillment, but it's really important that when new people join your email list or your paid offer, that there's a funnel in place. It's really important that you have some sort of automated follow up system. I talked about this in another episode, episode number 12 on how to write an email sequence for new leads. It's really important that you take the time to send targeted emails to people who opt-in to your list.
When I say targeted, what I mean is it's focused on the product that you want to sell, the wait list you want to get them on or what you have coming up in your business, whether that's your podcast, your blog. It continues to get the new leads to engage with your business and drive traffic. That to me is vital. It's absolutely vital. If you want new leads to take any kind of action, whether it's following you on Instagram, listening to your podcast, buying a low ticket offer, you've got to instruct them on how to do that and a simple email sequence is the way to do that.
It'll carry you through the busy season, the Christmas season, the New Year season. It's going to carry you through all of that. So it's really important that you have a basic sequence set up for all your new subscribers and not just really important, vital if you ask me. I think it's vital to your success. So let's do a quick recap on the whole episode. Number one, if you're not sure if you should run ads or not, consider your January, 2022 goals, consider your budget and consider the automation of your fulfillment. Is that in place for you to actually automate? So you don't have to be at your computer every day, following up with all these new leads.
If you decide that yes, you are going to run ads, the goal is to test different angles, focus on lead generation if you have a limited budget, make sure your offers are timely and relevant. And if you have proven low ticket offers, you can continue to push those out. If you have a small budget, focus on just your warm audience. Keep yourself top of mind. Keep engaged with them, keep connected to them. You don't have to go crazy. Just run some engagement ads. And finally, make sure you have an automated sequence to grow your audience.
Now, if you're listening to this episode and you're thinking, "Oh my gosh, this sounds great, Zach. I love this. I do want to run ads." Or maybe you even want to run ads in January, 2022. And you're saying, "This is great, but how do I run these lead ads? What should my follow up sequence look like? How do I put a low ticket out there that converts?" Well, this is great question and I want to share with you that inside our membership program, not your average membership, we walk you through this in your first couple months of membership.
So this content is already waiting for you inside from September, October, November, and December. We are literally going to give you access to that as soon as you join. So we're going to teach you how to run Facebook ads to grow your email list, which is literally the strategy we've used to add over 1400 people to our list in 18 days. We also have clients adding 50 to 100 people to their email list per week. We've spent a really healthy amount ads. We spend a couple 100 a day, but we've got people adding 15, 20, 25 people a day to their email list with a small $15 to $20 a day budget. So it is possible to grow your list.
Then from our October content, we teach you how to write your first email sequence. We give you templates, samples, walkthroughs, everything you need to set up your first passive sales funnel. In November, we teach you about low ticket product launches. And in December, we help to plan out your 2022 business plan for the year. Now you might be like, "Well, September, October, November, and December already passed, Zach." Yeah they did and that's why when you join now, you have instant access to all the content.
The reason we do that is because every month we have two coaching calls plus an implementation week. You can learn more about that over on the sales page, but basically we do live elements every month. And so we think the benefit of the program and the membership is to be on those live calls, to engage with us to tap into our community, to ask questions. And our content is a byproduct of us supporting you. So we want you to have access all the content we've ever created and then coaching going forward from the time you enroll.
If you're interested, head over to join.notyouraveragemembership.com. It's $49 a month or $490 for the full year. We also have a 30-day refund policy and a cancel any time, two click cancellation process. So we want you to not feel like you're taking a big risk. If you don't like it the first month, you get a refund. And if you're in it for three months and you decide it's no longer a fit, two clicks of the mouse and you are canceled. No questions asked. We just want to make it simple and enjoyable. So that is join.notyouraveragemembership.com if you want to check it out.
In the meantime, we are going to put the show notes for this episode over at heartsoulhustle.com/nyap013. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap013 for Not Your Average Podcast episode number 13. We'll have links, we'll have content, we'll have everything you need, plus a full transcript of the show. We always transcribe our full show. Those that want to read, you can do that there. So I hope you got lots of value out of this episode. We will be back in the new year with new episodes because next Thursday is Christmas Eve, and then the following Thursday is nothing.
So we'll actually be back on the 30th and then we'll really year up with a lot of new content coming your way in January. So make sure to comment, like, subscribe, all that good stuff on our blog, on our content. Of course, subscribe to our podcast. I hope you have an incredible end of the year. I'll see you one last time on December 30th, and then we will kick off this new year with style, ease, flow and not so average marketing. I'll see you next time.
