When and How to Start Facebook Ads

Creating your first Facebook Ad can seem daunting. Which of my offers should I advertise? How do I set it up? Whats the best campaign to run? How much should I budget? In this podcast episode I’m breaking it down into simple steps so that your business can benefit from paid advertising!

Prefer to read? Here’s the blog version…

New York For The Holidays!

Welcome back to the podcast. I am recording this in the middle of a very hectic week, but a really exciting week, Ragz and I took a car ferry from Spain back to England. So I am currently in Cornwall and this weekend I will be flying to New York for the holidays. And I’m just so excited to start the festive Thanksgiving Christmas season and obviously to see all of my friends and family in New York. 

Business-wise, we are also preparing for Black Friday. So if you are a business owner and you still don’t have a strategy yet, I will link the Black Friday done for you bundle in the episode description and if you haven’t heard yet, doors to the Wanderlover Business Academy are also open for the last time this year. They’re going to be open until the end of the month. if you want to spend the new year building a freedom-based business that enables you to work from anywhere, build your personal brand as a coach or creator, and work alongside a community of like-minded, ambitious entrepreneurs. I will also link the Business Academy in the episode description, if you have any questions, obviously just DM me at any time on Instagram.

When And How To Start Facebook Ads

And now let’s get started with today’s episode that was inspired by one of our lovely listeners. So she sent me a DM asking: ‘When in my business should I start Facebook Ads? I just created my first offer and I’m not sure whether I should pursue organic marketing or if I should start setting up everything for Facebook’. 

And I think this is a really common question. I’ve gotten it a few times. Everyone’s situation is unique and so I want to take this episode, take the time to explain when it would be beneficial for you as a business owner. And if you’re thinking about starting your business, when you should prepare to start running Facebook Ads. 

The one thing I really, really want to emphasize is that Facebook Ads will only amplify what is or isn’t working in your business if you’ve never run them before. It can be really tempting to think that Facebook Ads are the solution to maybe some problems that you’re having, maybe not being able to get clients or customers. But the reality is, if you don’t have a working funnel or a working product or even a sales page that converts. Putting more money into that is only going to amplify how much it is or isn’t working. 

Test Organic Marketing First

So that brings me to the first point of you need to have something to sell before thinking about running Facebook Ads. (Want to figure out what to sell? Try my freebie here) And even going off of that, there are so many organic ways that you can drive traffic to see if your product or service will sell before you even need to invest in Ads. So in the Business Academy, this is where we get your first few clients and prove that you have an offer that sells before amplifying it with paid Advertising. And so if we go back to our listeners’ question, when should I start Facebook Ads? I just created my offer. Not sure if I should pursue organic or paid. You can totally do both, but personally I would focus on an organic strategy. Just get a few beta clients from your audience, from Facebook groups, from family, from anybody in your network on LinkedIn.

Get a few people to give you feedback. Offer testimonials, which you can then use to create a landing page or an offer page on your website with all of those testimonials. And then we can start building out a successful funnel from there. Amplifying it with Advertising. 

How Large Is Your Audience?

The second point to help you decide when you should be running Facebook Ads is dependent on how much your offer is, so what the price is and how big your current audience is. So let’s start with the current audience first. if you’ve started your business. You have a couple hundred followers on Instagram. You may have a couple hundred subscribers on your email list.

You totally can get your first few clients or customers using your warm audience. It just takes a few launch sequences, some discovery calls, and with this, you can then be able to create this working funnel and then drive ad traffic to it. However, if you are starting from scratch and you’re starting your business from scratch and you just created your first offer with no Instagram, no email list. You can invest in growing your audience faster instead of having to start from scratch and build it organically. You can direct traffic to a lead magnet to grow your email list and build your audience that way. While of course, building all of your online channels and your online brand organically at the same time. 

How Much Is Your Offer?

The next point is dependent on how much your offer is. So if you think about it, it’s probably going to be very expensive and very difficult if you’re starting out from scratch to drive ad traffic to pay for Ads to an offer that is more than a thousand dollars, something that is high ticket. One-on-one maybe takes time for your audience to get used to and to see you over and over and to learn what your coaching style is and to see if they need it. It takes a lot of time for them to decide, hey, I want to sign up, right?

And that’s why if you are selling a high ticket. one-on-one offer your organic audience who you’ve been nurturing, working with, showing up for over and over. Over time, it’s going to be easier to sell to them. But, if you have a, let’s say a low ticket offer, for example, I have the $7 Digital Nomad Society. It is low risk and high value, and so it is easy for me to directly send ad traffic to a landing page and get sales that way. 

The other option is to create a lead magnet leading them in to your high ticket offer, which is relevant obviously to our first point. You need to have an offer to sell, so then you can measure the return on investment. The other really important thing I want to emphasize is to focus on the customer lifetime value. So let’s say you want to invest a thousand dollars into Facebook Ads this month to get people on your list, but you don’t get any sales. I still would say that is a win because they are going to be on your list for all of your future offers and launches and emails, right? So you’re not necessarily measuring the impact of that campaign based on immediate returns. If it’s something like driving traffic to your email list, there is a long-term strategy there. 

Choosing Which Product Or Service to Advertise

So now you’re probably wondering, well, if I want to start running Ads, should I run it to a lead magnet? So like a free offer or should I run it directly to a sales page where they get to sign up right away? And again, this depends on how big you are online, what your brand authority is, how much your audience knows, like and trusts you, how good your landing page is. So many factors. 

Lead Generation Campaigns

But a baseline of what I think would apply to the majority of you is to start thinking about a lead generation campaign. So getting people onto your email list in exchange for a free offer related to one of your higher ticket offers, and to include a trip wire. So after they subscribe, redirect them to a one-time offer landing page for a low ticket item under $30 and if you see around five to 15% conversion on this page it should fund part if not all of your Ads. When you are funding a hundred percent of your Ads. We call that a self-liquidating offer because you’re not really paying anything for it and you’re getting the leads and you’re getting income to cover reinvesting into the Ads. So this is a great campaign, it’s a lead gen campaign, gets you some sales, and it’s just really good to build out on the back end so that you have a sustainable way to grow your business and to fund email list growth. 

Conversions Campaigns

The second type of campaign that we will probably focus on is directly to a product under $97. So that is a typical conversions campaign for this type of campaign. We need to perfect your landing page. And this is something I teach in the Academy. On our Ads tracker, we have your landing page conversions. We also have how many people you know see the Ads and click through it, how many people click through it and land on the landing page, how many people land on the landing page and then choose to check out how many people check out and then abandoned cart or how many people purchase, right? And then we also have how many people purchase and upsell afterwards. 

So all of these things need to be tracked and they need to kind of be front of mind when you are creating these offers. The other thing I don’t wanna see is for you to think, okay, let me create an offer and it’s automatically going to sell all of my other offers, which doesn’t happen if you don’t have an email sequence to those other offers. Do you see what I mean by Facebook Ads only amplifies right what is or isn’t working? And so that’s why for all of my private clients, we test out the funnels, we test out the entire sequence before deciding, okay, now it’s time. If it’s not optimized, then you’re just kind of losing money.

A Strong Landing Page Is Important

The last thing we need to make sure is in place, and the last point I have for you is that your landing page if you are running traffic to either a form to sign up or even a product to sell your landing page is so important (check out some website tips here). You really need to build it out so that you are speaking directly to your ideal client directly to their pain points and their pleasure points. I provide a landing page template to all of our students in the business Academy. So if this is something that interests you, I would go check it out. You can use it on your website or you can literally, you know, copy and paste it and just change the text. And your landing page is going to be sometimes the driver of what gets people to sign up or what gets them to kind of like click away.

So if you have all of that. I would say now is a really good time to start thinking about running Facebook Ads and go through the process of setting it up for your website. if you don’t have any of that and you’re thinking about starting a business. Know that this is a really powerful tool that is accessible to you that you can incorporate into your business at any time as a starting point.

How Much Should I Budget?

If you are thinking about budget, like how much to budget for Facebook Ads, you set it day by day. So you can start with a daily budget of 15 to $20. You can increase it, decrease it according to how the campaign performs. And like I said, there are campaigns out there that are self-liquidating. So you can spend $50 a day, a hundred dollars a day, $500 a day, and it will be self-liquidating. So don’t let the budget part scare you. if you have the long-term strategy in mind, but 15 to $20 a day, that translates to roughly four to five leads per day that are all going through your email sequence to maybe book a call or to sign up or to buy. Of course this depends on your industry, but I would say three to $5 per lead is really, really good. 

Get More Ads Training In Wanderlover Business Academy

If you are like, hell yes, this sounds great. This is what I need. I wanna get started. How do I get started? I have walkthroughs and tutorials in the Wanderlover Business Academy, but just as an overview of what you need, and I just realized I should have mentioned this before, but when you run Facebook Ads, it also applies to Instagram because Facebook and Instagram are the same company and you run them together.

The one thing you need to keep in mind is you never want to run Facebook Ads through the Instagram app. So you know when you have that little boost post button under your post and you’re kind of like putting in money to expand its reach, we’re not doing that. We want to go into Ads manager.facebook.com and this is where you are going to see all of your campaigns. You can manage the budget, who you’re targeting, the age, the location of people you’re targeting. There are so many cool audiences that are really effective when you are trying to get new leads. You can be really, really specific. This is also where you upload your ad creatives, link, your website. So this is where you manage and it’s like the centralized hub for your ad performance.

How To Download The Facebook Pixel

In order to get this working, you need to download what’s called a Facebook pixel and have that linked to your website. So any person that visits your website, it fires like a little note back to Facebook being like, this person just visited and this is how your Ads are performing. And so in Facebook Events manager, we want to create a pixel and link it to your website. We also want to download what’s called a Chrome extension. So if you use Google Chrome for this. You specifically need Google Chrome, you need to download the Facebook Pixel Helper to be able to test if everything is firing correctly, if it’s all working and linked properly.

So after you connect your pixel, you should be able to see on the Chrome extension whether or not it is firing correctly, whether it’s tracking leads and purchases on your website. I know it sounds like a lot, but the tech is just a one-time thing. And after you know you get it set up, it’s mainly just tweaking the creatives and the targeting. 

The other thing I love about Facebook audiences is you can target what they call a lookalike audience. So if you give Facebook, let’s say a hundred, 200 people who have previously bought from you or even you know, visited your Instagram page, it’s going to go out through, you know, the billions of people on Facebook and find lookalikes. So people with the most characteristics, interests, you know, demographics similar to people who have bought from you or visited your page, and they’re gonna find millions more who are equally as likely to buy or to visit your page. So it is so powerful when you are able to use it correctly. 

So don’t let this seem daunting. It is totally doable. I help every single one of my clients set it up and run campaigns. So it’s nothing that you can’t do either. If you have any more questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I am actually thinking one of my 2024 offers will be something that helps you create your first Facebook ad campaign, build out your first funnel to give you time freedom, and to build out either your email list or to build out your first passive income stream.

So stay tuned for that. It is still in the works and I’m really excited, obviously not only for the end of the year, but for next year as well. If you are interested in joining us in the Business Academy, make sure to click the link and I will see you inside. Have a fabulous week, my loves. I will see you in the next episode!

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