Episode #092: Our Core Ads Strategy for 2025
Our Core Ads Strategy for 2025
In this episode, I'm breaking down my complete Facebook and Instagram ads approach for 2025 and why the "old way" of advertising no longer works in today's "trust recession."
I reveal exactly how I'm structuring my ad campaigns for maximum long-term growth instead of chasing quick ROI.
Discover my four-part advertising framework that's built for sustainable growth (not just quick ROI)
Learn why I'm spending $150-$200 daily on list-building ads and how I plan to scale to $500/day
See how I'm strategically layering content engagement ads to build trust before making offers
Understand the "compounding phenomenon" that makes each launch bigger than the last
Find out how I balance evergreen funnels with quarterly live promotions for consistent cash flow
If you're frustrated with diminishing ad results or tired of launch strategies that worked in the past but fall flat today, this episode gives you a practical framework for 2025's advertising landscape.
Listen now to shift your perspective from short-term ROI to sustainable growth that compounds quarter after quarter!
Links Mentioned:
Full Transcript:
[00:00:01]:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing podcast, episode number 92. And in this episode, we're talking about our core ad strategy for 2025, what we're doing different, how we're running our ads, and how we're planning for some of our biggest launches yet. So let's get into it. Hey, hey, hey, not so average marketer. Welcome to another episode of the podcast.
[00:00:24]:
Now I'm very excited because I get to talk about one of my favorite things today, Facebook and Instagram ads. If you've listened to the pod for any period of time, you know that I just can't get enough of advertising. And what I wanna talk to you today is, about is our core strategy, the way that we are thinking about advertising going into 2025. And I think that the first thing we need to talk about is kinda what I call the old way of advertising. Right? So if you were to look back maybe three to five years or even, like, seven to ten years, especially around the pandemic when people were, like, really plugged into the online space and people were buying courses. We, in some of my circles, jokingly say, like, when people were stuck inside, it was like the gold rush for online business because everybody was online. Everybody was looking for things to do. Everybody was buying digital products.
[00:01:16]:
And what I want to point out is that what was working then doesn't necessarily work now. Okay? And so I call this the old way of advertising. And the old way of advertising is kind of like this quick cash injection. Right? I'm trying to generate multiple ROI on my ad spend over, like, five to seven days. And I'm not saying it's impossible to run a funnel and run ads to it and generate revenue. You can do that, but it's harder. Right? It requires good messaging, good positioning, good strategy, good copywriting. It requires a lot of skill sets to be able to go into the ads manager and drive traffic to a high quality landing page that generates sales.
[00:02:03]:
And so running ads directly to, like, just buy my stuff, it's not as easy as it used to be. Right? These rapid scalable funnels, even like automated webinar funnels or live webinar funnels don't work as well as they used to, and that's okay. What I think it comes down to is that we're relying or we have historically relied on, oh, I'll just run ads, get a ton of cold people in my audience to, or get a ton of cold people into my audience, make an offer to them, and they'll buy it. Right? This is the old way of thinking because there's a big problem that is kind of the elephant in the room that I don't think enough people are talking about. And I heard this somewhere, and I love this phrase, but I cannot, for the life of me, remember where it was or find it again. But I think the big thing is that we are in a trust recession. People are not trusting that products are as good as they used to be. Right? And so what that ultimately means is that you have to build a relationship with people for them to want to buy your products, programs, and services.
[00:03:10]:
Right? So we are realizing that you can't just say, oh, you met me on Monday, buy from me on Tuesday, profit off that sale by Wednesday. It doesn't work quite like that anymore. And the new way of advertising that I look at it is long term list building and long term nurturing and consistency in your offers and messaging. So let's kinda talk about that for a second. I think one big thing that I tell a lot of my clients and even my my members is, like, you didn't start your business to make a bajillion dollars and then quit. Right? A lot of you listening to this podcast, you have a long term vision for your business, whether it be three years, five years, ten years, or just that it sustains you for the next however long and creates a lifestyle that you wanna live. Right? And so don't get me wrong. I get it.
[00:04:00]:
We wanna be there now. We wanna be there now. Right? And the reality is you're just not, you you don't just wake up one day, start a business, and become a millionaire. Right? There's always an exception to that rule, but that's the generally, the average or middle road path or even even above average path is not that you start the business on Monday and a year later it's a multimillion dollar business. Right? So if we're thinking about our business in the long run, we wanna be growing this thing over and over, time and time again, compounding growth, then we have to be thinking what is the long term plan here, not what is the short term plan. Right? And, yes, the short term matters for sure, but when we're talking ads, I find that when people think short term, they're thinking, I want to go into a funnel on Monday and profit on Friday. And again, I think that's the old way of thinking. So the new way for me is about long term list building.
[00:04:54]:
I am growing my list 24/7. I always have list building ads running. If you're listening to this show or you visited the show notes page, you've probably seen one of my ads. Because the second thing is I'm always growing my list, but I'm always nurturing and offering value to the people that are growing with me. Right? So what that means is I produce episodes like this for the podcast. Right? And it's no cost, and you can listen to it and hopefully glean some value from it because you're on my email list. I am nurturing this audience with intentional advertising that reaches people who are on my email list. I'm consistent in my offers and my messaging.
[00:05:34]:
So if you follow me, you're like, hopefully hopefully, I've done a good job. You know, I'm the Facebook and Instagram ads guy, and I talk about launches. Right? So it's like this guy is gonna talk to me about how to run ads to grow my digital course business, and that's gonna be through the lens of Facebook, Instagram Ads, and launching. And then what I do in addition to that is I do a quarterly live promotion. Right? Now quarterly is subjective. You could do it more or less, but the reality is I'm doing regular live promotions. I think that there's been this big conversation of, like, evergreen is the way, and then the other side goes, no. You should only be doing live launches.
[00:06:10]:
And then they say, live launches are exhausting. And then the other side goes, oh, yeah. But evergreen is, you know, evergreen never works long term. Right? It's like we're always battling, and I think that there is this healthy middle ground of, like, yeah, run your evergreen stuff like we do. Build your list all the time, but then do something live, you know, a few times a year to create an influx of awareness and cash. So it's important that we start there and understand that there's the old way, the chasing quick cash, the rapid scale funnels, the completely cold audience, and then there's the new way, long term list building, nurture, value, consistently see, and mixing our evergreen with live promotions. So how does this boil down? How does this bake into our 2025 ad strategy? Well, I'm so glad you asked. The first thing is we have decided that if we are not launching, we are running list building ads 24/7.
[00:07:06]:
There is no negotiation on this. We always have an ad running in our business. Right? There might be a one or two day gap when we transition to things, but generally speaking, we are always growing our email list. Right? The second thing is when someone grows our email list, we're running an ad campaign to engage our audience. Right? We want people who join our list to see our content regularly and often. So we take blogs, podcasts, videos, and we run them to the people that are joining our audience. Then on evergreen, we're retargeting our core audience, the people who are joining our list, engaging with our content, joining our Instagram and Facebook. We are offering them products. And we love to have a low ticket product in the mix.
[00:07:56]:
I think it makes things very powerful. But we are just saying come buy our low ticket products. And then we do a quarterly live promotion. We have our Facebook and Instagram for Listbuilding Bootcamp that we run live on a pretty much quarterly basis. Sometimes we only do it three times a year, but pretty much quarterly. And that is a $25 live bootcamp launch. And at the end of that launch, we invite people to join our membership, the Facebook and Instagram ads membership that is called Not Your Average Membership. So those are like the four core pieces of our ad strategy.
[00:08:31]:
So let's really get into this. First is we are running list building ads 24/7, no negotiation. And right now, we're spending about $150 to $200 a day on average growing our email list. Now I was talking with someone in our membership the other day, and listen, I'm not saying you need to spend $150 to $200 a day on list building out of the gate. That is just not reasonable. That is not the goal. You know, start at $5 to $10 a day, but that's what we did and we scaled up over time. Because what I realized is that if my audience is always growing, there's two things happening.
[00:09:09]:
First things first is that when someone joins our list, when someone hops on our email list, we are making offers to them. So we have a tripwire, which means as soon as someone opts into our email list, the thank you page is gonna offer them a low ticket product and immediately turn a small percentage of our new email list joiners into customers. We also have an email sequence. Right? So if you don't buy the tripwire, you're gonna go through an email sequence once you join our list to get regular emails promoting low ticket offers. And when you buy our low ticket offer, you go into a funnel for our membership. Right? The second thing that happens is that if the audience is always growing, then our live launches are bigger and perform better. Right? So we're doing these quarterly live promotions and launches, but they're doing better and better and better because the email list is always growing. Because our big scary goal, if I can let you in on a little secret, is we wanna be spending $400 to $500 a day on Facebook ads for list building by the end of 2025.
[00:10:14]:
And that's scary to to think about, but we know if we can get to a place where we're spending even more money on Facebook and Instagram ads, then our our live launches are bigger. Because what we have come to realize is that cold traffic is getting harder and harder to convert, and warm audiences, essentially people on your list, visiting your website, engaging with your content, Those are generally speaking easier to convert to a paid offer. And so if I'm growing my audience all the time, yes, I'm generating evergreen sales with my tripwire and my email, but really the play is we have this quarterly promotion that really pushes the needle forward and generates profit. And we'll talk a little bit about that too today. That's like the first core fundamental piece of our ad strategy. Ads 24/7 to grow the list. Now the second fundamental piece of our strategy, and I think this is where a lot of people skip out and, admittedly, we don't always do the best at this, but we're working on improving it, is we reach our audience regularly with content. And so, essentially, what we realized is that if we want people to trust us, whether it's in a live promotion or, you know, even in evergreen promotions or even just opening our email list in an ongoing basis, we need to connect with them.
[00:11:35]:
We need to send them regular emails. We need to push out content to them. We need to connect with them. The content has to be relevant and helpful, which means the last thing is that content has to be valuable. Right? So I always, when I create content, look at it through the lens of, is this actually creating value for people? Right? My hope is that when you listen to this podcast, you're not listening to it going, okay. You know, that was cool. You know, like, great. I enjoyed it.
[00:12:06]:
But, you know, I want people to go, wow. That was so helpful. I really got value from this. And so it's really important that you create value with your audience. Now this is where I think people fall short, not not just on creating the content like and I'm not saying you have to create content constantly. A couple times a month really is adequate. I email my list on a weekly basis, but I try to create content at least a couple times a month. But what we do is we run engagement ads to our podcast, blogs, and videos.
[00:12:38]:
Right? So once someone joins our list, you can create an audience on Facebook of people on your list, people joining your email list, and basically say, once someone joins my list, I want them to see my content. Because the reality is when someone sees you more frequently, regularly, and you're providing value with your content, they're more likely to trust you when it comes time to make an offer. Now just as a fun little aside, what we've been doing is taking some of our podcasts. So, like, I'll potentially take this podcast. I transcribe it using some different softwares. We like Castmagic, has been great. It transcribes the podcast for us. I give that transcription to Claude, which is a Google, it's like Google's ChatGPT.
[00:13:25]:
I just find it does really well for this specifically. And I turned into blogs and blog outlines that I can post to to target different type of learning types. Right? Some people want to read, some people want to listen, some people want to watch, and so we use podcast videos and blogs to run as ads to people joining our list. Right? Because remember, this is the newer way of advertising. You're not gonna see a direct ROI on these ads, and I think that's why people kind of panic or leave these ads on the table as they go, well, I don't see money from engaging people. And it's like, no. But you see this long term deepening of the relationship, and that is the value. Right? Okay.
[00:14:05]:
So that's our second piece of our strategy. So super quick recap: Strategy piece number one is list building ads. Second is retargeting the new subscribers with relevant content. And then the third piece of our strategy is retargeting our core audience with offers and funnels. So one thing that we do is we try once a quarter on top of our live launch to do what I call, like, an internal promotion. And sometimes this is just pushing out one of our low ticket offers consistently. Sometimes it is running people into a funnel.
[00:14:38]:
Like, I I just recently recorded a podcast episode where I talked about how we wanted to do a promotion, but I didn't wanna do, like, a live webinar. So we set up an automated funnel that ended up doing, like, $7k in sales. But the goal is generally, we want to, a few times a year, reach our warm audience and make an offer and see if we can convert some of our email list to buyers. Right? And if you have multiple offers, this is a great way to do this. You might not wanna launch multiple offers a quarter. And just to clarify, when I say a launch versus, like, a promo, to me, a promotion is, like, internal. In this in this specific case, I call it an internal promotion. My focus is on my warm audience.
[00:15:17]:
I'm not trying to pull in cold people and convert them immediately. I'm saying if you look at the first two pieces of the strategy, the list building, the engagement, when you go to make an offer, there's gonna be a segment of this audience, you know, 90-95% of them who didn't buy something on that initial touch that maybe you've built a deeper level of trust, connection, and value with, they're gonna be likely to buy your stuff. So in this case, I may drive warm traffic through an evergreen funnel. I may do a flash promo. Like, there's all kinds of ways to do this. But here's the key. When I do that, when I do these promotions, I'm running an ad on top of the email promotion to the audience that is seeing the emails. Because here's the thing.
[00:16:00]:
When you think about it, most people don't open your emails. Generally speaking, the majority of your list does not open every email you send, and so they might open one or two emails in your promotion, but you want to set it up so that they see the offer when it's happening. And so I layer in a conversion ad that's designed to get my warm audience to buy my offers. Okay? The fourth piece of our ad strategy is quarterly live launches. And so we do a five-day, like I said, a live boot camp. Our next one's gonna be April 28 to May 2, the Facebook and Instagram Ads for Listbuilding Bootcamp. And this is just a five day live training. I love five day challenges, and it really is designed to move people into our membership.
[00:16:48]:
Right? And the way that we've structured it is that you learn how to run Facebook ads for list building. And if you join and follow along, you will have ads up and running by the end of the week that are growing your email list. The core part of our, the the I should say the first part of our core strategy, we teach people how to set that up. And then we offer up the membership where we go deeper into some of these additional ad strategies that you can use. Right? And what's really interesting about this is we look at this as our big revenue builder for the quarter. So where most people are looking at their ROI on ads from like week to week or month to month, we're looking at our ROI quarter to quarter, which can be a little stressful admittedly. But I'm not saying I need an ROI every single month, though we typically do get one. I'm saying I want a big ROI once a quarter from all of the work that I've put in over the first four, or sorry, the prior three months.
[00:17:44]:
Let me say that again. So if I've been doing all this promotion for the quarter, email list, engagement, low ticket offers, now when I move into a launch, I have this audience with built-in trust. Now admittedly, during this promotion, I still run ads to cold traffic for sure. I'm still gonna test cold audiences. I'm still gonna see if I can convert some cold audiences because I'm thinking big picture. Right? So even though I know some people will join my launch and not buy right away, some people will join my launch and they will buy, you know, two months down the road, three months down the road, six months down the road. I'm gonna continue to engage this audience even if they don't buy in this launch. Right? So what's really cool is it becomes this compounding kind of phenomenon in your business.
[00:18:30]:
Right? If the list is always growing, then the launches get bigger. If the launches get bigger, then our membership grows. If our membership grows, then we can spend more on ads. And if we spend more on ads, the list grows faster. And if the list grows faster, the launches grow faster. And if the launches grow faster, the membership grows faster, and it cycles and increases over time. Right? So it's this very compounding nature, and you don't have to have a membership for this to work because our membership is $67 a month. Right? And so if you think about it every, you know, three months, we're generating, like, 210ish dollars per person.
[00:19:09]:
Yes. We have people go annual and semiannual. But really, if you have a, you know, $300 or $500 or $1000 course, the concept is the same. You take money and rather than having, like, the month to month cash flow, you have the quarter to quarter cash flow and payment plan cash flow that you're putting into your monthly ad spend. Right? So super quick recap. First piece of our strategy, list building ads 24/7. Second piece is reaching that email list that we're growing with content regularly and often. The third piece is making offers and funnels, leveraging the power of ads.
[00:19:45]:
And the fourth piece is quarterly live promotions that we run to both the warm audience we've been growing and to cold traffic because it all compounds. And as the list grows, the launches grow. As the launch grows, the the revenue grows, and you can put more revenue into the ads and it cycles and increases over time. So I hope you got mad value from this episode. If you're listening to this being like, okay. This is great and I love this idea, but where do I start? I just wanna offer you this. Start with the first piece of the strategy. Start with the ads that grow your list because, yes, all the other stuff is great, and I'm highly going to encourage you to think about it long term.
[00:20:18]:
But you have to think about, like, you need to take it one step at a time. You don't have to, do it all at once. You can start with simple list building ads and grow the email list, communicate with the list, talk to the list, connect with the list, and over time, you layer in the rest of these ads. Will the rest of the ads make your business stronger? Absolutely. But I always say this to my students, shoot for B-. It doesn't have to be perfect. An ad that runs, even if it's just for list building, will always outperform the ad that you're constantly thinking about running but never hit publish on. An active ad always outperforms an unpublished ads.
[00:20:57]:
So just something to consider. So again, I hope you got massive value from this episode. If you wanna check out the show notes, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/nyap092. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap092 for Not Your Average Podcast, episode number 92. And do me a favor, DM me over on Instagram, @zachspuckler, and let me know what you thought of this episode. I love hearing from you guys. I love to know what you think, especially about our ads episode. And if you did enjoy it, don't hesitate to leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
[00:21:35]:
We love hearing from you guys whether it's in the DMs or in the reviews. And all of that goes a long way into helping us know what content is valuable and what else to create for you. So I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, week, month, and year. And until next time, stay not so average.
