Lessons

Lesson Info

Organize Your Ad Promotion

We're going to kind of walk through a framework here that I would say, step-by-step, that you should follow and what I do in order to organize our ads promotion. So, I am systems girl so this is the real reason why I'm here, is to get to mention a little bit of a process with some pretty icons, right? (laughs) So the first thing is planning, the second is the creative elements, the third is targeting, then we will test. We will run the ads. And then finally, we analyze the results. So that's what we're gonna dig into today. So this first one here is planning and I think that this is the most important part of it because if you define the project incorrectly, you're going to end up with a project that doesn't do what you want it to do, right? It's so important to make some defining decisions before you jump in and play around. So first... I want you to think about what your business goal is. So just generally, not talking in any fancy ad terms, right? What is the goal that you want out ...

of this promotion? So do you want to increase traffic to your blog? Grow your email list? Sell more of your product? Increase webinar attendees? Sell live tickets? Just have general brand awareness? Offer a discount to your audience? Increase your video views? Like, what is it in your business that we're looking to solve? When I'm working with a client, my first question isn't 'well, like, what do you want from me?' It's more 'what problem do you have and how can I use the tools that I know to solve that problem?' Right? So consider this, because these goals will be connected to the ads objectives that we will determine in a few minutes. But each promotion really should have this one specific mission, or maybe a promotion has a handful of different ads that each have its own objective depending on the journey that you want the customer to go through. But it's so important to be able to talk about it in basic terms first, right? So what else should you know before you get started? So the first thing is, like I said earlier, what is the current status of your Instagram account? So I mentioned it when deciding if you should even be running ads, where does your account stand? But at the beginning of each promotion, where does it stand? So in terms of the number of followers you currently have what is the average amount of engagement you get per post? What are a few metrics that you can jot down before you do the promotion so that you can accurately understand what has happened from this promotion. What have your gains been? Right? You also want to know what important dates are related to the promotion on the business's calendar? So considering this promotion something that is of a finite schedule, just the first time that you're doing it I think it kind of helps to give you a deadline of when they absolutely have to start and when they should be assessed. What important dates are related to that promotion? So say you are selling a ticket to a live workshop, the ads have to turn off when the workshop is happening, right? You're done promoting. Because if not, the ad will say "Come join me on Tuesday" and it's Wednesday and that's confusing, right? But also, what dates will be when you want to remind registered attendees maybe through ads? 'Remember, we have something coming up and I'm excited to see you.' Or what important dates are when you should be starting the promotions, 'Oh I absolutely have to start selling tickets one month before the workshop in order to make sure that I'm organized,' right? So consider those things. Also, are there any noteworthy details about the promotion that will affect how you develop the content? So this is a one-bullet way to talk about a whole lot of things, right? But making sure you have jotted down... Who is this actually being sold to? What are their defining benefits of the product? What will they receive after they leave? Because those things will help you when you go and say, "Well, I want a video ad where I talk about this." "I want an image ad that reminds people of this." It's easy to do all of that hard thinking before you jump into when things get a little confusing with all your different creative and copy options, right? So I would suggest considering these details before you jump into our step two, which is Creative, and our step three, which is Targeting. Now that you have defined what your goal is, 'I want to get more email subscribers,' and you know what dates that are important, and things like that, we can dig into the actual terms that are on Instagram. For ads objectives, there are bunch here. I'll pop them up. But you can run ads that do a bunch of different things on Instagram. There are less ads objectives on Instagram than on Facebook. But this is still plenty of options, honestly, in terms of getting done what you need to get done. An ad objective is giving Facebook the information on what your goal is because then they will send your ads to people that are most likely going to do that action. Does that make sense? So Facebook is trying to work for you. When you are putting in that audience and saying that "I want conversions," they are going to put your ads in front of people that have converted on an ad or normally click things, or are active members of the Facebook society, before other people. So a couple of these objectives are kind of noteworthy to me. Reach is an interesting objective if you're looking to make sure your ad is exposed to as many people as possible in the audience group. So kind of like when I was talking about reminding attendees to come to the event, that's a small group on Facebook, 200-300 people that you want the ad to reach that whole audience, so that could be a good ad objective to use. Where Post Engagement is you're looking for people that are more likely there to 'like' and comment a post. Video views, things like that, Traffic is people that are most likely to click on an ad and head over somewhere else. And the one that I focus mostly on is Conversions and that's because I wanna know what I'm spending per the end-result action that I want people to take, right? So all these ad objectives serve specific purposes but when you're balancing a small business's budget, knowing what you're actually paying per the results that you wanted, I think is productive so that's what normally I lean into. So for example, if you have a boutique bakery, you may do a Traffic ad objective to promote a new blog post. You may do a Conversion ad and offer a free consultation on wedding cake design and so you're going to pay per person that signs up for that consult. You could offer a discount on their first custom order and you only want to send it to people that have visited your website before so let's do Reach for it to gain exposure to that smaller audience, right? So there's tons of different options in terms of ads objectives and they can all serve different purposes. I think also that during this planning stage, we're still at our little teal box there, you want to consider what you want to spend because that will help you determine how many versions of ads that you want to do throughout the time of the promotion. So the first question with budget is, you know, what makes you comfortable? When I first started doing ads for Sue B. Zimmerman Enterprise about five years ago, we were being pointed in the direction of 'well, you have to spend thousands of dollars a month, like, that's what we're doing, right?' And, so I became the anti-that because I thought that it was so off for the average business owner, right? So what is it that makes you comfortable that if, to start, maybe if nothing happened, you'd still be OK. Like, it was worth the test. Like, that's the first thing. Right? And then once you've tried it a couple times and you know what your average cost per conversion is, know what your average click is, then you can determine, kind of reverse engineer what it is you want to spend for the number of results that you want. So at the end of the day, that's our goal. But first, what makes you comfortable. And, like I said, start low if you have to. Five dollars a day, ten dollars a day still is you trying ads. I'd rather you do that for a handful of leads a month than not try this at all because this is where social is going, right? Organic reach is down. Down, down, down. OK? And on these platforms, you kind of have to pay to play now in order to be exposed to the number of people that you want for it to be machine for your business. And so if you need to boost a post a week by five dollars as the way that you start because you're like, 'Morgan, I don't have any money to put into this. I am already dealing with other stuff, right?' Then watch that post because it will get to 2,000 people instead of 20, or 120. That happens organically, normally. Right? And that will help grow your business. Consider what your cost per conversion is. So if you haven't done ads before, you kind of have to think about it not as, someone asked me earlier, "well, what should I be paying per lead? What should I be paying per click?" Well, honestly it's kind of specific to your industry and what service that you sell. If I am going to sell someone into a $1000 conference I think I'm OK with spending five or ten dollars for them because they could come into a $1000 ticket, right? So when we host live workshops at https://suebzimmerman.com/ and we run ads for those workshops and the average sale is about $40. So paying seven dollars for that conversion, I've profited. I profited significantly about paying for it and that's how I get the number of sales that I actually end up wanting so consider what you're comfortable with paying for a lead in your business and I have an example for you as well. Also make sure that you check in to maintain your ads. The silliest thing that someone can do is turn on a bunch of ads and then forget that you turned on those ads and then come back and realize that you spent hundreds of dollars over the last few weeks and you had no idea, right? So make sure that if you're going to commit to an ad strategy, commit. Put it on your calendar, that you're checking on it a couple times a day, or Facebook has these awesome automations around rules where you can schedule first of all when you want your ad to stop, so that's an easy way to do it and I'll show you that in the Ads Manager. You can also have it only run through a certain lifetime budget a day. So instead of saying, like, 'run it for five dollars a day forever,' you can say, 'this campaign gets $100 and use that, and that's it.' Then there's all these automations in terms of rules where you can have it give money to campaigns that are doing well or take it away, which that's kind of something more complex that we won't dig in to today. But, considering that if you're running an ad that you should be responsible for that ad so you don't end up wasting money, right? So we're back at the bakery. If the average wedding cake purchase is like $ or something, which it's probably a little more, and the average conversion at a consult is 50%, so you know that when someone sits down with you that they love you, and that most of the time you're closing sales, and they don't wanna shop anywhere else, and so we're saying, "Hm, OK. I think I'd be comfortable with paying ten dollars, twelve dollars, fifteen dollars for that lead because 50% of the time I am going to end up making $500." That would mean that if the boutique had a goal of selling four cakes, then we're looking to close eight consults because on average you're closing 50% of the time and so we could spend $100 for those eight consult leads and potentially make two grand in sales immediately and who knows what the lifetime of that customer is? You do well, you end up doing their kid's first birthday cake and the graduation party and everything, right? So if your main problem is you're amazing at doing your service and you just need more people to get how amazing you are, that's why you do paid ads, right? Because it's like, 'I just need people to see that I'm so good at this. Let me impress them. So let me find those people that I get to impress.' Right? So I think it's important that you know the success of your ad depends on a lot of different things, right? So when we're doing paid ads, there's so many different things to review. At the end of my presentation I'll talk a little bit about metrics, but the full experience that a person has is really important. So the success of your ad can depend on the product that you're selling. Like, is that offering a good offering? Do people want it? Right? It could depend on the people that you're putting the ad in front of. Is this the right audience? Do they want what I'm selling? Or should someone else actually be getting it? It depends on the physical components on your ad, which is what we're going to talk about today. But it also depends on the place that you're sending them when they click the ad. So know that this is kind of a project in your business. Right? It's determining, maybe your product that you sell does phenomenally and you know that person, that's the right person, and so we can just focus on the components of the ad today, right? But it also helps you kind of evaluate where you're at in your business and what could make an offer make more sense, 'how can I more clearly position what I do?' or 'what's a new audience group that actually would be interested in what I do that I haven't tapped into yet?' We're going to talk about that a little bit in Targeting. But it's always important to make sure, are you prepared for what happens after that click? Right? Because so much of an ad's success could depend on what the landing page looks like. What is the conversion of that landing page? Is there no information? Are you putting that it's consult that's in person but you don't have the address of the business and so someone doesn't know that they have to drive 20 minutes to get there? You know? You have to make sure that you're putting in the information, that a person who knows nothing would know because if we're sending our ads to people that don't know us, they need those details right? And it's smart to have someone who is not directly involved in your business review this stuff for you. So if you write down the person that you're going to have look over your stuff, maybe it's your partner, maybe it's your friend, maybe it's your mom. If they know nothing, they'll say, "Well, where's the bridal shop that you're trying to get consults at?" right? So put all your stuff where you're having someone click and your ads in front of someone that doesn't know all the details and see if they understand what's going to happen. In Sue B. Zimmerman's business, we are often directing people to online trainings or downloads, educational content because we teach marketing, and that whole process I actually spoke about in our Social Selling course so if you're looking at Lead Generation go check out our other programs because I did a whole sequential thing on that. But so far, we have covered the planning process so are you already over this? Oh goodness, OK. So, understanding the promotion goal, we have defined what campaign objectives are available for us in Instagram ads specifically and we have also talked about things to address when setting your promotional budget. There are so many complex parts of this ads program, so and things layer on top of each other and so make sure that you set aside time to plan because then everything else will come a lot easier if you have made decisions beforehand.