Episode #045: Do Facebook Ads Still Work Going into 2023?
Do Facebook Ads Still Work Going into 2023?
In this episode of the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast we chat about the future of Facebook Ads and the changes we're seeing in the landscape that you need to know about.
When you tune in you're going to learn...
The big shift in the way ads should be leveraged now, versus in years past
The importance of ads that are growing your list month to month (even if they don't make you money, this is an important one!)
The different ad types and audiences that we leverage in our business to stay profitable
This is an episode you don't wanna miss, it's got all the deets on what marketers need to know about Facebook ads as we head into 2023.
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number 45. And in this episode, we're talking Facebook Ads. Do they still work? Should you be running them going into 2023? And what do you need to know to get the best results? So if you're thinking about or already running Facebook Ads, this episode is for you, so stay tuned.
Hey, hey, hey, not so average marketer. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. Now, today we're talking one of my absolute favorites, and that is Facebook Ads. Now, there's been a lot of talk online about Facebook Ads don't work, or Facebook Ads don't work like they used to, or costs are too high. And we have personally had a very different experience with Facebook Ads. And what I wanted to do on today's episode is talk to you about the changes that we're seeing in the landscape and the things that you need to keep in mind if you do want to get results with your Facebook Ads, and understanding our philosophy around Facebook Ads and how we've made them profitable and work for us in the bigger picture of our business.
This entire episode is centered around the big question, do Facebook Ads still work? And I will lead in by saying, yes, they do, if you leverage them correctly. So let's start with our philosophy around Facebook Ads, and that is that we are not trying with our Facebook Ads unless we're in a launch or a major promotion to create instantaneous profit. Okay? Now, I know that this might sound silly or daunting, or you might be like, "Well, if I'm not making money for my ads, then why am I running them?"
See, if you'd have asked me, maybe two or three years ago, I would've said, you can just run ads and turn it into money. That was what you did. You could do a webinar, or a challenge, or a video series, or even just run ads directly to a lower ticket offer, and you could immediately create instantaneous revenue. And the reality is it doesn't quite work like that anymore. And there's two reasons for that. But the biggest reason is that what we have noticed is that when we launch, most of our conversions come from people who are already on our email list.
Now, it's not to say that you can't run profitable funnels or that you can't convert people who sign up for your free webinar or your free training as cold leads, but what we notice is that the majority of sales are coming from people who already know us, like us, trust us. And this launch is just the conversion mechanism that they need to take the next step with us.
So our philosophy with Facebook Ads is not, how do I run a launch and get a ton of people and create instantaneous profit? Our philosophy is that we want to ABS, always be spending. We want to always be spending on Facebook Ads month to month. So, pretty much 24/7. Unless we're doing a launch or a promotion or we're transitioning to a new freebie, we are running Facebook Ads. We are always running Facebook Ads to grow our email list because we know, the bigger our email list is, the bigger our launches are going to be.
So we have systems in place in our business, and I just want to be super transparent. One of those is that we started a membership site. Now, that is a whole another beast. I don't want to get into the logistics of membership sites, but if you want me to get into those on another episode, let me know and I'm happy to do that. But we have a membership site that generates between 10 and $12,000 a month recurring revenue, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. It just depends on if we're doing promotions, if we have new people coming in, if we have annual upgrades, but we are always generating that revenue.
So the way that we think about Facebook Ads is not, ""Oh, I need to spend $3,000 this month and make 10,000." We say, "Hey, we've got our membership site. And what we're trying to do is make sure that the cost of our ads does not supersede the revenue of our membership." We have multiple arms of our business. We also have low ticket products. We have our group coaching program. We have our services. We have our one-on-one coaching. So we don't just make 10 to 12,000 a month. We do really well every month. But I share that because I want you to understand that the point of Facebook Ads is not to create instantaneous profit. In our mind is to spend money month over month, so that when you do go into a launch, when you do go into a promotion, when you do go into a training, you are set up to convert people at a higher rate. So that means that Facebook Ads don't quite work like they used to, but you have to be using them 24/7 or frequently to always be growing and warming your list.
So the question comes down to, "Okay, if I need to always be growing my list with my ads, what kind of ads should I be running all the time, Zach?" And for me, there's a few types of ads that we like to have running most of the time in our business, and the first one is a lead generation ad. Now, I've talked about these on the podcast before, but I just want to recap that we recommend you run a Facebook ad that is specifically a lead ad. And this is what Facebook calls them, a lead, lead generation ad.
And a lead ad is where people often on Facebook with their name and email. So rather than sending them to your landing page, you send them to a Facebook form where they put their name and email on the Facebook or Instagram platform, they submit their name and email, and then software that you use takes them from Facebook to your CRM, whether that's ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, Kajabi. It doesn't matter. It moves them off of Facebook and into your platform. We like these ads because, number one, Facebook encourages you to keep people on the platform. They reward you with a lower cost to actually run these ads. Number two, we find that because these ads are on the Facebook platform, we get a much higher conversion rate of people that see the ad, click the ad, and sign up. We have seen as high as 80 to 90% conversion on the opt-in form, compared to what is typically 30 to 40% on a landing page.
Now, if you're thinking through this, you might be like, "Okay, that sounds great, but what does that ultimately mean?" Well, if you're paying less for the ad to show and you're converting more people who click on it, it means that your cost per lead is lower. Your cost per lead comes down. So you're always paying less to get the same leads that you would've paid to get on your landing page.
Now, I want to address the big elephant in the room, which is, you may have heard that lead ads don't bring in quality leads. And personally, that has not been our experience. But let's just play devil's advocate for a moment. Let's say that you're running lead ads and you think, "Okay, I'm not getting leads that are as good." Let's say 25% of the leads you get are just not quality leads. Well, if the cost is 50% lower, even if 25% of the leads are no good, you are still paying less for your quality leads.
What that means is that, if you're going to use lead ads, the other thing to think about, and this is something that we need to get better at, frankly, but we do, is cleaning your list and scrubbing your list, having good, what we call list, hygiene, which means, when people stop engaging, stop opening emails, stop responding, and engaging, and clicking, you take them out of your email list and you tell them, "Hey, I noticed you haven't opened in a while. If you want to stay on my list, great. If you don't, that is A okay too. But I just wanted to give you a heads up that we're going to take you off the list, basically." Again, that could be a whole episode topic, but list scrubbing and list hygiene is really, really important. So we have those ads, these lead ads running all the time. We're scrubbing our list on a regular basis, and what we're doing then is nurturing those leads. So I think it's really important to touch on the fact that it's not enough to just get the new leads. You need to nurture them.
And frankly, this is somewhere where I think we could also do better. We do a podcast and we've missed a few weeks over the year. And consistency is a real struggle for me if I'm being completely honest. But we try to release a podcast several times a month. We usually do. We've missed a couple weeks here and there, but we generally release podcasts every single month. And what we do is we connect with our audience by sending them the podcast, by sending our email list, our podcast.
We also do other things too. We might just send out engagement emails that are purely just value add. One thing that I do is, not every weekend, but some weekends, I send out an email that just says, "Here's what's on my mind this week," in the online marketing space, in the digital course space, here's what I'm observing and seeing. And we call it Weekend Ponderings. The point is, I'm letting people get to know me. I'm letting people get to connect with me. I'm sharing and being honest about what I believe in, who I am, and what our company stands for. And I'm doing that through the lens of the podcast and regular emails to my list.
The other thing is that you have to keep in mind that these launches that you do, whether that you do five day challenges, or you do video series, or you do webinars, can also really be a way to nurture leads. We notice that there's been people on our list for six months to a year who don't join our membership, and then a year later decide, "Oh, my gosh, I do want to join the membership." And they go through multiple launches, and multiple iterations, and promotions of the podcast. And we notice that sometimes it just takes people time, but that time is going to pass. And if you're not careful, if you're not smart, if you're not intentional... I don't want to say smart, let's say intentional. If you're not intentional about what's happening when you push your content out, if you're not intentional about the fact that, hey, I'm trying to get people to engage with me, to connect with me, to engage with my content, to get to know me, what happens is, when the launch does come around, they're not warmed up.
And I think it's just worth noting. I'm using the words warm and cold. A cold lead is just someone who has no idea who you are and has never connected with you. And a warm lead is somebody who is more likely to convert, because they know, like, and trust you. But it's like you just want to make sure that people know who you are.
So the other thing I want to talk about just briefly is that when somebody becomes a new lead in our system, we also put them through a really simple onboarding sequence that offers a low ticket product. Because here's the reality, there's a lot of marketing research that says this, but once somebody buys from you once, it's easier to get them to buy again or to buy an additional product or to become a returning customer than it is to get a brand new customer. It's easier and it costs less. So what we do is we're always running these lead generation ads, but we also have a low ticket product in our lead generation follow-up sequence because the way that that works is we have people who are essentially brand new to us, but we give them the opportunity to join us as a paying customer. That is really, really powerful because it helps, number one, offset the cost of our ads, but number two, it creates immediate customers.
So I just want to step back because I'm covering a lot here. But basically, what we're doing is we're always running lead generation ads. Once somebody becomes a lead, we nurture them with a short series of emails that promote a low ticket product. And then, whether they buy or not, they're going to go through long-term nurture through podcast, regular emails, launches, and we're building a long-term relationship with people.
So the big takeaway here is that Facebook Ads used to be this quick, short turnaround. You could just run an ad, make money, move on. Now it's about the long game. And the people who are willing to generate leads and then play a longer game are going to ultimately do better. And I know that that can be scary because you're like, "Well, if I'm not making money on my ads right away, then what am I supposed to do? How do I generate revenue?" And so, that's why we have that really simple onboarding sequence that sells a product to offset our cost. We also work with a lot of clients who will have their onboarding sequence, maybe book a call with me, and you'll sell people into one-on-one.
Like I said, in our business, we have a suite of products. We have a membership, we have low ticket offers, we have high ticket coaching, mid-ticket coaching. We kind of offer different products that help us offset our cost of ads. But, and this is the big but, if you really want to grow your business, I think, in 2022 into 2023 with Facebook advertising, there's going to be some upfront investment that you have to make. And I know that that can be scary because when I started my business, I was a master student. I had $2,000 in my savings account. I put $1,000 into a course, and I hustled organically. And I do want to acknowledge that it was easier to grow organically back when I started, but there are still ways you can grow organically right now.
TikTok is the big one. When I started, it was Periscope. It's easier to grow organically on TikTok these days than it is on Instagram and Facebook. So there's always the organic route. But, but, but, but the thing about ads is that they work 24/7, whether you record a video, a dance, a lip sync, a talking head video or not. And that's why I'm such an advocate for ads because the reality is, for a lot of us, especially if you're still working a full-time or part-time job, or even if you're just getting started, you're doing so much in your business and life that ads work for you even when you can't work on them. And that is, to me, the big secret of acts, is that they're going to work whether you have the capacity to work or not.
So I'm always running Facebook Ads to grow my email list. There's three other ads that I think work really well right now. Number one is engagement ads for top of mindness, as I like to call it, which basically means, when somebody signs up to your email list, the cool thing about lead ads is that they are almost 100% retargetable. Everybody who fills out your lead form, because they went to a Facebook page instead of your website, they are 100% almost retargetable because it all happened on Facebook. Whereas, with iOS 14 and some of the changes that we saw there, you can't 100% track everybody that goes to your website, but you can track the people who fill out your form on Facebook because, again, it's happening on Facebook.
So what we do is we create a custom audience of all the people who have signed up for our form and we run them to an engagement post on Instagram. The point of this is, yes, we generate followers, but more importantly, we generate engagement. And engagement means that we are top of mind with our audience. They're thinking about us, we're showing up in their newsfeed, and we can build a custom audience on Facebook to retarget of people who engage with us on Instagram. So I'm always growing this engagement audience as well, and I'm getting people to like, follow, engage, and connect with me. That is a really powerful tool to have in your arsenal because now you're not just connecting with people via email, you're also connecting with them via your social. And that means that your social posts are going to get better reach, better engagement, better connection with your audience, and you're going to keep getting people to connect with you and be interested in who you are and who you serve. So that's number one of the additional ads that I run as engagement ads.
Number two is I may run ads directly to a low-ticket offer. Now, these are tricky because they don't work quite as well as they used to a year and a half ago. I tend to focus on my warm audience. So I have, for example, the Challenge Launch Toolkit is our $37 training on how to run five-day challenges to launch your digital course or product. That is a really profitable offer that we run. When we run into cold traffic, it does okay. When we run it to warm traffic, we two to three x our money all day long. The problem with that is that you always have to be growing your warm audience, right? Well, good news for us, if we're running lead generation ads and engagement ads, we are always growing our audience. We're always reaching people that we've warmed up.
So I can run certain ads. And generally, I don't run them 24/7 to be completely candid. I build up my warm audience for a couple months, then I run them for a couple weeks, generate some sales, come back, and it's an influx of sales and engagement. But the other thing that you want to consider is that, with low-ticket ads, you can create a return instantaneously. But again, the goal may not be, just to reiterate, instantaneous profit. It might be instantaneous customers who are likely to buy additional product services, upgrades, upsells.
The last ad type that I just want to touch on is launch ads for promotions. We run launch ads for our promotions. And that means that if we are going into a promotion... For example, in mid-November, we're going to do a five-day Facebook Ads training, which we'll share more details with you on the podcast as we get closer. But we're going to be doing a five-day training on how to run Facebook Ads to grow your email list and how to automate your sales process and your onboarding process so that more people engage with your content and get warm for when you launch.
Any time I do a promotion, I run ads. At the very minimum, even if I'm only marketing to my audience organically, I will run cart open retargeting ads to my list saying, "Hey, this product is available. Come buy this thing. It's available right now. Doors are open." I will always run that to my audience. But ideally, I also run lead generation ads for the challenge, the webinar, the video series, whatever mechanism I'm using to sell my product. So I want to just put a pretty bow on this and just kind of recap everything that we covered.
First, our philosophy is that month to month you want to be spending on Facebook Ads and have multiple offers, or products, or services, or coaching if you're just getting started, that offsets the cost that you're investing in Facebook Ads. We want to spend less than we make in a month, but we want to be growing our email list 24/7, and that's where Facebook lead ads come in. We're always running Facebook lead ads in our business, which are ads that are specifically designed to have people opt in on Facebook, and then it moves them into our CRM through third party software. These ads are cheaper to run. They do super well, and they're always growing the list 24/7.
We also run engagement ads to stay top of mind with all the people who are opting in. And we also use those to grow our following on social so that when we do social posts, they reach more people. We also then will sometimes run low-ticket offer ads to our warm audience just to boost and generate some sales of low-ticket products, but more importantly, to generate customers. And then when we go into a promotion, we run our ads to generate leads for the promotion, but we also run our ads to generate sales for the promotion. And even if I don't run ads to generate leads, I always try to run ads to generate sales.
So I just want to wrap up by saying, look, I am a huge advocate for advertising in your business. And I know that that can be scary, and daunting, and challenging. We have tons of resources around how to run Facebook Ads on our podcast, on our website, heartsoulhustle.com. We want you to understand, myself, and my team, and I think the advertising world as a whole who's pushing for more advertising, is we want you to understand that you can get really great results even if you can't be online 24/7.
I'm the first to tell you that I'm not consistent on Instagram. I struggle with consistency on my podcast. I have a hard time being consistent, and that's not a good quality. I'm not saying do that, but what I am saying is that my ads are working for me in the background 24/7. So even if I forget to post, even if I forget to record an episode, I'm still seeing growth in my business. And we can see a direct correlation between our lists growing and our revenue growing.
And so, if you're listening to this and you're thinking, "I'll just do it organically," you can do that. But if you want to accelerate it, if you want to generate more growth, ads are the way to go. And you just have to be thinking about them a little bit differently. You have to be thinking about the long game. You have to be thinking about how is this going to work out in the long run? What's the play here? How am I seeing a return on this down the road, even if it's not today? And it requires you to think a little bit differently, and that can be scary, but sometimes that's where the growth happens.
So I want to wrap up with this. If you are thinking about running ads, stay plugged in. Head over to heartsoulhustle.com/NYAP045. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/NYAP045 for Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number 45. We will have the complete show notes, the entire transcript of this episode, and we'll also link up a couple resources we have around Facebook Ads just to support you.
So get out there, try some ads. The cool thing is you can start for five, 10, 20 bucks a day just to get your feet wet. See if it's something you want to use and give it a shot because the only thing you have to lose is a few bucks, and the only thing you have to gain is growth of your business. I hope this inspires you to take action. I hope you have an incredible rest of your week. And I will chat with you next time on the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast. And still then, stay not so average.