Episode #067: What’s Working Now with Facebook & Instagram Ads
What’s Working Now with Facebook & Instagram Ads
In this episode of the Podcast we dive into what's working now with Facebook & Instagram advertising - I'll share with you the campaigns that we're running in our business currently, and what strategies seem to be working well.
Tune in to discover how to leverage ads to grow you audience, engagement, and sales!
Links Mentioned:
Full Transcript:
Zach Spuckler:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing podcast, episode number 67. And in this episode, we're talking about what's working right now with Facebook advertising. So if you're an online course creator, coach, or consultant looking to get more leads, sales, and growth, especially with Facebook advertising or Instagram advertising, this episode is for you. So stay tuned.
Zach Spuckler:
Hey, hey, hey, Not so average marketer. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. Now I am really excited as always, because we get to talk about Facebook ads today. And for those of you who might be newer to the podcast or newer to these parts of the internet, I love Facebook ads. I mean, I just I can't get enough. You know, I love to pay Zucks and Meta money because I really find that it's the only strategy I've ever employed over the last 10 years of doing this that I have full control over.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? And you might argue that, like, no. You know, you don't know what the results are gonna be, but at the end of the day, I know I can pay money and put my content in front of people. And I don't always know how the content's gonna perform, or if it's gonna work as well as I wanted to, but I always know people are going to see it. And that's why I absolutely love talking about advertising because it's the only true guaranteed marketing method. Right? We pay for leads and then not everybody opens our emails. We post on Instagram and then, you know, not everybody sees our posts, our reels, our stories. With advertising, as long as you pay, you get to play. And I won't gush too much about advertising.
Zach Spuckler:
But I wanna talk to you today about some of the things that we're seeing start to work really well with Facebook and Instagram advertising, and what we're doing, both internally and with our clients, to get even better results, via Facebook and Instagram advertising. Now one thing that I wanna note that I think is important just to discern is that we say Facebook advertising, but Facebook and Instagram advertising are the same back-end platform. So whether you want to advertise on Facebook or Instagram, I'm only gonna say Facebook advertising for most of the episode. But just know the two are interconnected and interchangeable in terms of how you market. So I think the best place to start is to kinda tell you what we're doing with our advertising process right now. And I won't go too deep on this because if you didn't get to catch it, the last episode of the podcast - episode number 66 - I talked about our $15 a day Facebook ad strategy.
Zach Spuckler:
So inside that episode, I go deep in what we're doing to really market our ads consistently and really grow our audience both, you know, our email list and our social media audiences. But just to kind of touch on it briefly, what we're doing now is we're looking at a holistic strategy with Facebook ads. And, you know, a lot of people talk about, like, do your launch, or grow your list, or get people to engage with you with your Facebook ads, but what we think is important is kind of putting all those pieces together. And what I mean by that is we have kind of a 3-tier approach that we're now taking with Facebook ads. And that is number 1: We're growing our list consistently. So we always have a Facebook ad growing our email list. Right? 24/7, the email list has to be growing because if we want to launch our products and services to new people, we have to have new people on our email. The second thing that we're doing is engaging those new leads with content.
Zach Spuckler:
So if you opt in to our email list, you're going to start seeing content for our podcast or for our blogs or, you know, for basically our Instagram or Facebook, something that kind of brings you back into the fold of us on the internet. Right? So, you know, a lot of people stop at the list building. We say, we just got all those leads. Let's make sure that they're seeing us around the internet. And then the 3rd tier is that we're making offers. So we're telling people, hey. Here's how to pay us. Here's how to work with us.
Zach Spuckler:
Here's how to buy from us. And that's been a really, really powerful strategy that we've started implementing. So if you want the full breakdown of how we do that. Again, we'll link it up in the show notes, but episode 66 really goes deep on this kind of 3 tiered strategy. But I wanted to start there because that's kind of what we're doing 24/7. Right? What I wanna talk to you about today is what's working well that we're changing compared to if you've listened to the show a year ago or if you were advertising a year ago. Like, what are the big things that we're seeing that are working really, really well now? Right? So, the first thing that we started doing is playing with dynamic creative. So this is one of those times where I feel like I have to kinda put my foot in my mouth because I've always been so anti dynamic creative. Right? And if you're wondering what the heck is dynamic creative, well, if you've ever set up Facebook ads, you know that you can write copy, creative images, and you kind of put them together to build your Facebook ad.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? So you have, like, a set of copy, an image and a link. Right? What Facebook has done now is said, hey. In one ad, you can give us 10 images. You can give us multiple sets copy, multiple headlines, multiple descriptions, and we'll mix and match them to see what performs the best. Now I used to be really against this. The reason is number 1, it makes it hard to read the data. It makes it hard to figure out which combination is doing the best. However, one thing that we've found is that we're actually getting a really good cost with this strategy.
Zach Spuckler:
And I had to have a real conversation with myself where I was like, yes. I wanna know what combination of copy and creative is working the best, but how much am I actually doing with that information? Right? Now, I've been running ads for a really long time, and so I kinda have a sense of what's working with my audience. Right? I have a sense of what they respond to, how they react to certain types of copy or certain angles, but it's always a test. Right? And with dynamic creative, here's how we're using it. Number 1, we're using it with audiences we know convert. Right? So I still recommend traditional split testing for kind of finding audiences that are gonna work for you. And when I say audiences, I'm talking about, like, people who like Heart Soul and Hustle, people who like Anthropology.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? Those pages that you can actually target inside of the ads manager, that's what I'm talking about when I say audiences. So I still do traditional split testing to see what's gonna get the best reaction and interaction from my audience. But once I have a sense of what audiences are working, I kinda had to have a real talk with myself and say, how much am I really using the data of which creative / copy in combination works the best? And when it comes down to it, I'm doing so much testing and split testing and retesting and new angles that it's actually really beneficial to use limit creative because it saves me time in setting up the ads, and it gets me better results is what we've ultimately found. So the big question then becomes like when are we using it? Right? So for us, we're using it in a couple of different places. Number 1, we're using it in our list building campaigns. So we are starting to use dynamic creative to grow our email list. The other place that we're using it is in our launches. So I use it with my list building campaigns, and this has been newer.
Zach Spuckler:
I haven't been doing it as much with list building campaigns, but we've been doing it for a few months now with our launches where we test dynamic creative because we can test more money in less time, which if you're launching, you know, you have a limited window to actually spend the money. We're using it when we have a paid offer. So for those of you who've been around for a while, you may know that we do our paid Facebook ads bootcamp live. And when we do that boot camp live, we run ads to get people to buy the boot camp. Right? So we use dynamic creative to basically test a ton of different images, copy variations. I think we tested 5 images and 3 sets of copy and 5 different headlines to see what we work the best with our audience. And what ended up happening was we got really competitive cost per purchase. We ended up paying around $34 per purchase of our boot camp, which for us, we wanted to be under $40 to see a front-end profit and we did.
Zach Spuckler:
So first things first, dynamic creative is where you can let Facebook do all the split testing for you within a single ad. We're using it to test out copy and creative more rapidly and efficiently, and we're using it specifically with list building and with launches. The second thing that we're working on now that's been really effective, we're doubling down on this list building thing. So I used to spend about $50 to a $100 a day on list building, just 24/7. I just always have a list building ad running. We take money into the business. We take a percentage of it.
Zach Spuckler:
We put it aside. We spend it on list building. Now we're trying to spend at least a $100 a day on list building. Typically, we're spending a little more. I think right now, we're spending about a $115 to a $125 a day depending on the day and how we're scaling and what we're testing. But our thing is, like, we want to always be growing the list. Right? And I've talked about this in some of my episodes in the past, but basically, we call this the new way of advertising. And the old way was like, oh, you've got a launch coming up.
Zach Spuckler:
Oh, you've got a challenge. Oh, you've got a video series. Oh, you've got a beta run. Ads get people to sign up, you know, do the whole shebang, and then that grows your list. Right? The problem is the internet is becoming saturated. It's becoming saturated, and it doesn't really matter what you teach or sell. There's a good chance that someone else is already doing it. Right? And so people are being more discerning. They're thinking before they invest. They're learning from you.
Zach Spuckler:
They're studying you. They're questioning what you know and how you teach. Right? So what we think is that we wanna double down on list building in between our launches. We wanna put more money into growing our list so that when we go to do our launches or when we go to talk about things or when we put our podcasts out there, more people are talking, downloading, listening, engaging, and buying. Right? Because it's easier to sell to an audience than it is to create an audience to sell to. Let me say that again. It's easier to sell to an audience than it is to create an audience to sell to. And in short, that means nurture, connect, build a relationship.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? That's what's ultimately going to get you the sales and revenue that you want from your email list and from your advertising. And then, of course, you know, everybody who joins our email list, we're doing sequences and sales page retargeting. So if you join our email list through, like, our $15 ad workbook, or I should say it's more of a guide less of a workbook. But if you join our email list through our $15 a day ad strategy guide, you're gonna get offered our $25 Facebook ads boot camp. Right? And if you buy it, awesome. We generate revenue. You get great information. Right? So it's not just about list building.
Zach Spuckler:
We're still making offers. We're still running ads to buy our product, but for us, we're not thinking how do we get that instant ROI. We're asking the question, how do we build an audience where everything is relational, not just transactional. Okay? That's the second thing. We are doubling down on list building. Now the third thing that we've been doing with advertising more recently is really aggressively promoting paid offers to both warm and cold traffic. So I really want to stress this. Before we run a paid offer to cold traffic, we really rigorously test it on warm audiences, our email list, our social media. Like, we make sure that there's demand for the offer that we're gonna make.
Zach Spuckler:
We don't just say, like, I know this is a great product. I'm gonna run ads to it. Right? Typically, that doesn't work. There's lots of refining sales page revisions, offer revisions, content revisions. You know, we're just constantly tweaking and improving our messaging and our positioning, but I'll give you a really specific example. We have our Facebook ads boot camp that we're gonna start running quarterly, and it's basically how to grow your email list with Facebook ads. Right? And what we did, we just ran one in July. And what we said was, oh, you know, you can join us live, you have to pay.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? So it's essentially a paid boot camp, a paid challenge, a paid launch. Right? So we said, hey. If you wanna come join us, sign up. But this time, we ran ads to cold traffic. Right? Believe it or not, we actually didn't do as well as I wish we had growing the email list. So our warm traffic didn't convert as well as I'd hoped, but our cold traffic, as I mentioned earlier with the dynamic creative, ended up converting around $34, $35 per purchase to our boot camp. Now here is something really important to be aware of. If you're gonna run traffic to a paid offer, you have to know the life cycle and the life value of someone buying that offer. Right? So for us, we know that we do our Facebook ads boot camp.
Zach Spuckler:
And then at the end of it, we make an offer to join us inside our membership. Right? And the membership is $49 a month, $490 a year. A certain percentage of people will go yearly. We know based on all of the numbers that we can spend $40 per registration to the boot camp, the front end boot camp, and still make money by time the membership rolls around, you know, at the end of the 5-day boot camp. The thing I want you to understand is that we know our numbers. We know our metrics. We know our conversion rates, and we've been testing this offer rigorously again and again and again. We've tested it on cold traffic, warm traffic, affiliate traffic.
Zach Spuckler:
We've changed the sales page. We've collected testimonials, reviews, results. We've refined the challenge itself to convert around 17%. So I'm telling you this not to say, you know, oh, you have to have this perfect system to be able to run ads to paid offers. I'm not saying that. What I am saying is you're gonna have to spend money. It's not cheap to run ads to paid offers. We're doing it, but it's because we know our numbers.
Zach Spuckler:
And if we don't know our numbers, we have to be willing to spend money on ads to get to our numbers. Right? You can't just say like, oh, I've got fifty bucks, and I'm gonna spend it every day, and I'm gonna $2000 a month. Right? That's not really how it works. You have to be willing to say, okay. I've got $50 a day. So I'm gonna test this and see where we're at in a month. I'm gonna look at the metrics, look at the numbers, look at the results, and I'm gonna decide at that point what I need to tweak, change, and revise, right, to get a paid offer converting. It's not this instantaneous money on demand that the internet likes to sell us, right? That's like, you're just gonna run money to your offer, and you're gonna make great money from your ads, and you're gonna sail off into the sunset.
Zach Spuckler:
It's about refining, testing, and collecting data. Okay? But we are finding that it is working really well right now. So if you have that data, or you're willing to spend to get that data, running ads to paid offers can be really great. So that's the third thing we're doing. The 4th thing that I wanna throw out here, and you guys know me, I love to study ads. Right? If you haven't picked that up by now, I love to study and test and trial things but I have to give kudos to this one to my friend, Josh Coffy. We will link up his podcast episode that he did on YouTube for this full strategy, but I just wanna briefly mention it. Give him kudos.
Zach Spuckler:
Josh Coffy, he is a Facebook ads genius in the ecommerce space. He teaches a ton of stuff around ecommerce. So not quite the same audience, but he had this strategy where he runs a campaign for, like, 5 bucks a day to a really massive audience just for reach. Okay? And so what you do is you take, like, an Instagram post or an Instagram reel or a Facebook post, and you spend $5 a day run it to a really broad audience of, like, fifty million people by stacking all your interests. Right? So, like, people who like Amy Porterfield, people who like Michael Hyatt, people who follow Charlene Johnson. Right? And you stack them all together into this big audience of like 50,000,000 plus, and you spend $5 a day running it just for reach. Right? And you say, I'm okay if people see this ad, you know, 25, 30 plus times. It's just for reach.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? You're not gonna get traffic. You're not gonna get clicks. You're not even really gonna get that much engagement. Though, believe it or not, we've actually seen some traffic and engagement on this ad. The goal is neither of those things. What this does - I think this is so cool that Josh came up with this - is it lowers the cost of your other ads. It makes your other ads cheaper. Right? He calls it the CPM crusher campaign, but basically it's dirt cheap to run.
Zach Spuckler:
And there's, you know, we're not totally sure why it works so well, but we can kind of infer that because people are seeing your content, Facebook is basically sussing out, like, who's stopping to read it? Who's clicking? Who's engaging? Who's commenting? Like, how are they interacting? Who is it reaching? And it's also creating brand awareness of your content to this big broad audience. So when you go to run list building ads, engagement ads, dynamic ads, product ads, it's going to people who have kind of seen you before. And Facebook rewards that by lowering what they call the CPM, the cost per 1000 impressions. So I won't spill all the beans on that just because it's not my invention, but we are using it. And y'all know I love to take you behind the scenes. Josh shares this publicly on his podcast. I'm giving him full credit. That's why I feel okay sharing it here. But we will link it up in the show notes, his YouTube video on the full CPM crusher campaign.
Zach Spuckler:
So those are 4 big things that we're playing with: dynamic creative, doubling down on list building, running ads to paid offers and launches, awareness campaigns to lower our CPMs. And really what this all comes down to is that we're thinking of ads as a growth engine, not a profit engine. Right? We're thinking, how do we create long term growth of the business with advertising? And the reality is you can listen to this and go, no. I'm gonna go chase, you know, the perfect evergreen webinar funnel, the perfect self liquidating offer funnel. The perfect mini course funnel, and you could spend your life doing that. Right? But what I'm suggesting is rather than trying to chase this instantaneous ROI, why not build an audience and a relationship with them? Because if you do that, if you build an audience and build a relationship and connect with the people who are interested in your and build true valuable relationships where you can actually connect with people and actually figure out what they want and actually serve them you're gonna get better results in the long run. Right? And business isn't about how you make money tomorrow. It's about longevity.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? And I know it's, like, really sexy to say, like, oh, I'm gonna help you create a 10x ROI on your ads instantly. Right? But the reality is, it takes testing. It takes money. It takes time. It takes offers. It takes positioning. It takes messaging. Anyone who says they can teach you how to run it out and double your money in 24 hours is only giving you half the story because there's so much more that goes into it.
Zach Spuckler:
What I like about what I'm talking about today and specifically about our $15 a day strategy from episode 66 too, that I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, is that we're just growing your list. We're just engaging your list. We're just making offers, and we're just doing it every single day. We're letting Facebook help you build your muscle of creating true connection and authority with your audience. So all that being said, if you are listening to this and you're like, man, this sounds great, you know, a lot of what I talked about is doubling down with list building and even leveraging dynamic creative. If you wanna learn how to do that, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/bootcamp. And we actually have an on-demand version of the boot camp that we ran in July 2023, available for 25 bucks. We update it, you know, pretty regularly, but it's current as of July 2023, and it teaches you our exact strategy for growing your email list with Facebook ads.
Zach Spuckler:
These are the exact ads that we're running internally in our business to add new people to our email list every day, to make offers of our boot camp, the one I'm out right in this this promotion right now, to get new people buying our products, and the bottom line is it's working. So if you wanna learn how to grow your email list consistently with ads, you wanna double down on list building like I'm doing, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/bootcamp and snag an on-demand copy for just 25 bucks. Now as we wrap up, I just wanna leave you with this. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test.
Zach Spuckler:
See what works. Right? Try dynamic. Try list building. Try paid offers. See what works for you and your audience, and what works for you and your personal business. Right? My goal with advertising is always to create long term growth, not instant ROI. And if you're open to that concept, testing just comes second nature. So if you enjoyed this episode, please do me a favor. Head over to your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review.
Zach Spuckler:
We love receiving them, and we love hearing from you. If you would like a full transcript, show notes, links mentioned in this episode, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/nyap067. Again, that's hartsoulhustle.com/nyap067 for Not Your Average Podcast, episode number 67. We'll have all those links for you to previous podcasts, that YouTube video for my friend, Josh Coffy, the bootcamp, that good stuff waiting for you. I hope you got mad value this week. And as always, till next time, stay not so average.
