Episode #027: Facebook Ads for Listbuilding
Facebook Ads for Listbuilding
Want to grow your list with ease and speed - then you need to try Facebook and Instagram ads!
When you tune into this weeks episode you're going to learn...
-> What to make sure your freebie contains BEFORE you run ads to it
-> How to write a simple copy flow that converts viewers to clicks
-> The key types of images to create with Facebook Ads for testing
-> How to target effectively with ads.
This is one you don't wanna miss!
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
This is the Heart Soul and Hustle podcast, episode number 27. And in this episode, we're talking about Facebook ads for list building, what you need to know, how to run them and how to get success with list growth. So let's get into it.
Hey, hey, hey, not so average marketer, welcome to another episode of the podcast. Now, I'm really pumped for this week's episode because a lot of times people tell me, "One of my biggest struggles is, how do I grow my list?" And I'm really proud to say that in our membership and with our students, we've created a track record of really good list growth. I was just on a coaching call with some clients yesterday, and we had a client who 3x the size of their list. We have a client in our membership who went from 2,000 to 5,000 in a matter of a few months, we have people that are adding 100 leads a week to their list.
And the question becomes, how are they doing it? And for us, the answer is quite simply, running strategic Facebook ads. Now, before we get into this week's episode, I want to tell you that if you are trying to build your email list with Facebook ads and you find yourself saying, "I don't know what I'm doing, or I need support, or how the heck do I make this thing work? Where do I even start?", then I want to invite you to join us for a challenge called 100 quality leads with Facebook ads. Now this a five day training where I'm going to walk you through how to write, create, set up and run Facebook ads that grow your email list. Now, the cost to join the challenge is just $15 and over the course of those five days, we're going to cover really important topics like copywriting, design, set up, management, scaling.
It's going to be a really in depth training, and this is a training we've done a couple times before and we always get incredible results. So the goal is for you to generate 100 quality leads over the course of the week that we work together with Facebook advertising. So if you'd like to join the challenge, like I said, it's just $15, you can head over to 100.heartsoulhustle.com. So that's 100.heartsoulhustle.com, and you can snag a spot. So with that being said, let's dive into this week's episode. First things first, a lot of times when we talk Facebook ads for list growth, people kind of say like, "Oh, who do I target and what do I say in my ad?" And, and I say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Before we get to that, let's take a step back and talk about what you need to be able to run these ads successfully."
And the first thing is, you need to have a really good freebie offer. Okay? And I've done a whole episode on freebie offers that will link up in the show notes, it was episode number 19. So if you want a really in depth training on freebies, you can check out episode 19. But just to run through really quickly, you need a freebie offer, which is where someone gives you their name and email in exchange for something for free. It could be a PDF, a workbook, a checklist, an audio, a video, a training, but you need a good freebie. And for me, a good freebie has four key elements, it's relevant, digestible, desirable, and valuable. So just to look at each of these pieces, relevant, meaning your freebie should it be relevant to what people are trying to do. Okay? Or what you are trying to sell even.
So if you have a freebie and you say, "Oh, my freebie's on Instagram, but my paid program is on TikTok", that's not relevant, right? There's no congruency there. And you want to make sure that there is a clear flow from your freebie to your paid offer. Okay? The second thing is digestible. You want to make sure that people can actually get through your freebie. So sometimes we think that oh, more is more value, and that's not always true. Now, we have freebies that are 20 plus pages, but we make sure that people can get through them in a matter of 15 to 30 minutes. Okay? We want people to be able to get through our content because if people don't get through your free content, they're never going to ascend to the next level.
The third thing is it needs to be desirable. And what I mean by this is, it needs to solve a problem that your audience perceives themselves having. If you don't solve a really specific problem with your freebie, people just won't download it. So some of our freebies have been things like, plan out your 2022. Well, we only run that from mid-November to early February. Why? Because that's when it's the most desirable, people are planning their 2022 at the end and the beginning of the year. So we want to make sure that it's desirable to people in both timing and content. And then finally, is it valuable? I personally think that your freebie should be super duper valuable. I know it's easy to say like, "Oh, I don't want to give away too much for free, or I don't want people to get my freebie and then go, oh, that's all, I don't need anything else."
Right? And for me, I think that that's a mentality we need to change up. We need to stop saying, "Oh, I can't give that away because I want to charge for that." Right? I did a whole episode on this, episode number two, Free Versus Paid Content. And we'll link that up in the show notes as well, but I just want you to be thinking, it's not about giving all of your content away at no cost, but it is about actually helping people achieve a result. Right? So the value comes in, are you actually helping somebody achieve a result? Okay? So once you've kind of put your freebie through that litmus test, and you said, "Okay, I am going to run this freebie as an ad, and I'm going to get really great results. And I'm super excited about it."
The question becomes, what kind of ads should I be running? And I've talked about these before on the show, but we are a huge advocate of what are called lead ads, and lead ads are where people opt in on Facebook instead of on your website. So people go to your email list, but they don't go to your website to get on your email list, they do it all in Facebook. And this is what we call a Facebook lead form. Okay? So this Facebook lead form captures the name and email of people that are opting into your list, and then you do need a piece of software that sends them from Facebook to your email list. Now, if you use something super popular like convert kit or active campaign, I recommend a software called Save My Leads. It's $20 a month and it will automatically connect your Facebook to your autoresponder.
If you have something that's a little more niche or you don't see Save My Lead supports, you can also use Zapier to set this up, and that's Z-A-P-I-E-R, Zapier. Now, the only reason I bring this up is because when I first talk about these ads, a lot of times people have this resistance and they say, "I don't want to buy another piece of software. I don't want to spend that $20 a month because it's an expense, right?" But what I want you to think about is, if that piece of software with lead ads gets you cheaper leads, it might actually be cheaper to have the software in terms of how many leads you'll generate. So even if you're going to decrease your ads budget by $20 a month to compensate for the Save My Leads software, you're probably still going to generate more leads. Why is that?
Because we have found that Facebook really favors the use of lead ads. They charge you less to run them, they convert at a higher rate, and it almost feels like, in my experience, Facebook is rewarding you for keeping people on the platform. So even if you're a little resistant, I recommend that you check out lead ads and that you consider running them. And Save My Leads even has a trial that you can test it, check your costs, see how they're performing before you go fully committed to spending the money every month to get those results. Okay? So once you are kind of set on, "Okay, Zach, I'm with you, I've got a good freebie. I'm going to run these lead ads that you're talking about because they're cheaper and more effective, but what the heck do I do with my ad? What am I supposed to write in my ad to get people to click?"
Okay? So we have a copy framework that we like to use and it's really, really simple, but really, really powerful. And the copy framework that we use is hook, question, authority, content, call to action and optionally, you can have a close. Okay? So, that is the order that we write our copy in. So a hook is where you say something that grabs the attention of the audience and gets them to keep reading. It could be a stat, a question, a statement, or just a wow factor sentence. So for example, if I'm going to run an ad for my challenge, I might say something like, Facebook ads are the cheapest they've ever been, right? Because people are saying, "Oh my gosh, they're so expensive. Facebook ads, you have to spend so much money." And so I'm kind of grabbing attention by going against what everyone else is talking about, so that could be an example.
Once you've got your hook, then you want to ask a question. So I like to engage the person who's reading the ad with a question that helps them self-identify if they're a good fit. So I may say something like, "Are you trying to grow your email list with Facebook ads, but you find that no matter what you do, you're not getting traction?" Right? That's a question because they're able to self-identify. Yes, I'm somebody who's trying to build my list with Facebook ads. No, I'm not someone who's trying to build my list with Facebook ads. Right? So now at this point, I've kind of grabbed their attention, they've self-identified, now I introduce my authority, right? I simply share something about myself that helps establish my authority. This could be things like, how many clients you've worked with, years you've been in business, awards you've won, results you've created for students, right?
This is just to kind of perform a proof of concept with the person reading your ad. Does this person actually qualify as an industry leader before I commit to working or clicking, right? Then I have the content and this is where I dish on, what's going to be in the opt in that they're signing up for? So this can be three to five sentences that just talk about, here's what's going to be inside, here's the transformation it's going to create for you. Or it can be a simple sentence with some bullet points, right? Use your writing style. Right? I personally haven't seen long form text versus short form bullet points perform better or worse. I lean towards bullet points because it's easier to write and it's my style, but you can absolutely write long form sentences.
And then you wrap your ad with a call to action. So the call to action is basically, click the link below to get your free, whatever. Right? You want to make sure that you have that call to action. I know it sounds silly and you might be like, "Yeah, but people know what to do." Don't assume that people know what to do to take the next step. The call to action will always increase your click through rate. And then optionally, you can close out with your name and a PS. So you could say something like, "PS, this guide is so juicy, you don't want to miss it. It's current, it works and it has a track record of success. So click that link now." Right? It's just for people who kind of skim and make it to the bottom, you can absolutely do that. So again, the copy flow that I use for all of my lead ads are hook, question, authority, content, call to action, and then a close.
So now that you've got your freebie offer, you've got the type of ads you're running and you've got the copy, the next step is to figure out, what kind of image am I going to use in my ad? And for me, there's really four types of images that you can do for your ad. There's selfie or casual photos, there's brand photography, there's text based photos and there's stock photos. So a selfie or casual photo is, this is a picture of you that you take with your iPhone, right? It could be a selfie, it could be you hanging out in your living room, it could be you working at your desk. It's just a photo of you, but it's not overly stylized. It's very much, quote unquote real life. Okay?
The second one is a brand photo and this is where you hire a brand photographer, you maybe wear your brand colors, you go to a location, you have your hair and makeup done and you really make these stylized photos. Okay? Sometimes these work great, sometimes they don't, it depends on your audience. When you have a highly visual audience like Instagram audience, these can work really well. When you have a more sophisticated audience, sometimes they don't care what the image looks like. Right? So not to say that one is more or less sophisticated than the other, just something to think about. The next type of photo is a text photo. Okay? And this is where you put a bunch of text on your image that conveys what they get when they opt in. For us, these crush it every single time, they just crush it. Okay? A text photo is really simple to create, but really, really powerful.
And you might be thinking if you've run ads before you might be saying, "Zach, what about the 20% text rule? I can only have 20% of my photo have text on it." And that used to be a rule that Facebook had, where you could only have 20% of your photo could have text on it. They've done away with that. So you can have 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80% of your image have text on it and they freaking work y'all, they work so well. So generally, I'll have 60, 70% of my image has text on it and I'll run that as an ad to get people to take action with me. Okay? And then the last one is a stock photo and I think this is the most underrated. We worked with a client a couple years ago where we tried the brand photos, and the text photos, and the brand photography photos, and the casual photos and nothing was working.
And then we said, "Let's try a stock photo just to see what happens." And y'all, it converted like crazy, we got really good results. So don't underestimate the power of a simple stock photo. You can use Unsplash, Pexels, Canva to find your stock photos, but they're really, really powerful when you use them. They can be a really, really powerful tool. Okay? And one thing I should mention before we move on is that, if you're not sure which image to use, test it. So we use a really specific split testing strategy where we're testing multiple sets of copy with multiple different images to see what performs the best. Okay? We don't just go, "Oh, how do I know which one's going to work the best?" Well, you test. And so don't be afraid to split test, don't be afraid to try different copy and image combinations to see what works, all right?
So now that you've got copy and images set, the question becomes, who do I run my ad to? Right? This is such a complex question because I can't simply be like, oh, run it to people who like Amy Porterfield. Right? It depends on your niche. It depends on who you want to target. It depends on the results you're trying to create. Okay? What I can tell you is that we like to do a low budget and spread it across multiple targeting options. Okay? So what we do is, we start at five to $10 a day and we run it to a bunch of different people. So I'm going to pull up my ads account and actually give you a very specific example of what we do. I'm going to read off the screen. Not that you can see or know that that's what I'm doing, but what we do is we say, "Okay, I don't know for a fact who's going to convert. I don't know who's going to convert the best."
So when we set up an ad, we run it to people like Brendon Burchard, Amy Porterfield, Female Entrepreneur Association, Michael Hyatt, Marie Forleo, Lewis Howes, James Wedmore, Chalene Johnson, Kim Garst, Ryan Deiss, plus we'll run it to our lookalike audiences of people on our email list and people who have visited our website. And then we'll also run it to all of our warm people if we're trying to reengage our list. So what's the point of all that, why do I tell you all that? Because I want you to understand that I'm not just saying, "Oh, I know Amy Porterfield has my target market so I'm going to spend $5 a day there." I'm going to spend five to $10 a day on Amy, but I'm also going to spend five to $10 a day on all these other audiences to see what's going to perform the best, right?
Now, you might be saying, "Okay, this is great, but how do you find these people?" Well, you have to do some research on your audience. Who do they like? Who do they follow? What are magazines, shows, publications, people, influencers that they already follow? And the reality is, not everyone that you think of is going to show up in the ads manager. There's kind of this quirk about the ads manager that you can't actually target everyone that you want to target. And yeah, it stinks, but the goal is to find five to 10 targets and test them. Now, if you're doing the math and you're like, "Zach, that means you were spending $130 a day on ads. I do not have $130 a day right now to spend on advertising." And that's okay, you don't need to. You only need to spend $5 to $10 a day for 24 to 48 hours to see what audiences are doing the best.
Okay? That's what you're doing with this. You're really just testing a bunch of different targets with different copy and different images to see what works the best. Okay? And that's the name of the game with Facebook ads, is testing. See what works, you're never going to know until you try it. Okay? Now, if you're listening to all of this and you're like, "Zach, this sounds great, but how do I actually go into the ads manager and set all this up?" Well, that challenge I talked to you about at the beginning of the show, if you head over to 100.heartsoulhustle.com, that's 100.heartsoulhustle.com, we will have an access to that bootcamp for $15. As soon as you register for that bootcamp, we have a 40 minute video that walks you through how to actually run and set up these ads.
So even though the bootcamp doesn't start until April 18th, as soon as you sign up, you're going to get instant access to a training that's going to teach you how to set up everything that I talked about on the show today. Now, the thing that stinks about podcasts is that I can't show you my screen on the podcast, right? But on the challenge, when we work together, we can absolutely show you my screen, show you how we set everything up inside the training, right? So if you're sitting here thinking, this sounds great, I want to grow my email list with Facebook ads, I highly recommend you check out our 100 quality leads with Facebook ads challenge. Now, as we wrap up, I want to leave you with this thought. If you haven't already, try Facebook ads, right? Take $200, throw them in, give it a shot.
And if you're not sure how to do it, you can YouTube, you can join our challenge, you can study from someone who's done it. You can read up on how to run them, right? I'm not saying have to join my challenge to get results, right? We'd love to have you, but if you're sitting here going, man, this sounds great, but I don't know where to start. Start, just start. Right? Find someone you can study, myself, another expert, a YouTube video, and just get out there and start running ads. You'll be so greatful that you did. Now, we'll have a full transcript of the show, the show notes, the links, everything we talked about over at heartsoulhustle.com/nyap027. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap027, for Not Your Average Podcast, episode number 27. I hope you got mad value out of this episode. I cannot wait to give you another one next week. And until next time, stay not so average.
