EP 373: What's Working Now on FB and Instagram Ads For Paid Ads

6:10AM Nov 1, 2022

Speakers:

Tracy Matthews

Keywords:

ads

people

audience

opting

buy

marketing

advertising

copy

brand

creative

facebook

clients

strategy

customers

traffic

working

money

business

space

email

You might be wondering what is actually working on Facebook and Instagram for advertising? If that's you, and you're frustrated with the iOS updates, and you're not sure if and when you should be running paid ads. Well, you're going to love this episode today because we're going to be digging deep into paid advertising strategies, in particular, what is working now on Facebook and Instagram? I have a very special guest on the show today, her name is Nicole Diedrich, and she is the owner of Diedrich marketing. And I'm thrilled we're going to talk a little bit more about her in a second. But before I do, let me introduce myself. I'm Tracy Matthews, I'm the chief visionary officer of Flourish & Thrive Academy. I'm also the host of the thrive by design podcast and I wrote a book, How to stand out in a saturated market with a timeless jewelry brand. Actually, the book is called The Desired Brand Effect, the tagline is to stand out in a saturated market with a timeless jewelry brand. Anyway, I help jewelry designers launch grow and scale successful businesses from zero to multiple six and seven figures at scale. And if that's you, you are in the right place. I am super excited to be having this conversation with you today. So Nicole is a young marketer and had a passion for marketing at a very young age. She started a blog that got over 10 million views. And now she left corporate a couple years ago and is super excited to be helping people leave their nine to five and start successful online businesses selling products just like jewelry. So let's dive in to today's episode because it's awesome without missing a beat. Okay, we've been talking about traffic and sales and ads and combining organic and paid traffic strategies on this podcast for the last couple of weeks. And I'm excited because I have Nicole Diedrich here with me today, who is going to talk all about what's working now for advertising on Facebook. Welcome, I'm excited. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here, Tracy? Well, I'm excited because Nicole is also going to be one of the educators on our traffic and on fire accelerator, which is happening in the new year. And we're doing enrollment for that now, because we have limited seats. And we want to give you support through the end of the year and all the stuff. So you're probably gonna hear about it later in this episode. But I wanted to bring Nicole on to just talk about advertising, because I know that's what a lot of people are really stuck on. Like maybe you've run ads before and they didn't convert. Maybe you've had some success with ads. Maybe you don't know if you should or shouldn't be running ads. And so we're gonna dig into some of those things today. So let's do this. Before we dive in, though, just tell us a little bit about your history. How did you develop your marketing agency?

Yeah, so I'm pretty young, which is kind of the fun part, I guess, of entrepreneurship. But it also makes it a little bit difficult. I went to school for broadcast news and Production and Advertising with a minor in Spanish as my dad always says, make sure to say that this worked hard for that. But I went to school, I wanted to be in the news world, I really wanted to be like this famous anchor and reporter. And then I realized along the way that is dangerous, you also don't get paid that much. And you know, as adults, we kind of have to pay our bills. So I didn't want to move all over the place. And what I did was I graduated with into the news world, but into the marketing and creative studio space. So I was doing commercials, promotion, all of that. But during school, I actually was able to kind of buy my way through school with blogging, so copywriting content and social media was where I kind of saw an opportunity. And that's where money making money online kind of blew up. So from that point forward, I was like, Oh, wow, I can I can do these things. I can mark it, I can create a business. I was very entrepreneurial. Since I was young. I mean, I would do like lemonade stands like that was always, always like big. So it's been a fun journey. The marketing agency kind of came, I thought, oh, I can do this by myself, right? I was very, I don't, I'm very self sufficient. So I can figure things out. But as all of you small business owners know, it's very hard to be everything in your business and do it successfully as well as sleep. So when I decided to start bringing on a team that this was actually working, it was right before COVID hit. And that's actually when things will up for us. So I dove into advertising more, I'm very good with data and numbers. And I was able to make it make sense. For those of you in the jewelry world or even, you know, small business world. Sometimes there's pieces of our businesses that just don't make sense. And that was something that I was good at doing for everyone at any level. I was like, here's the data. So I dove into that more found some amazing team members to help us and so now I kind of get to run the strategy and the numbers and it just kind of help our clients accelerate. And it's been a dream come true. I mean, obviously a lot of tears and a lot of failures along the way, but loving it loving it.

Super excite me. Okay, so I just want to pull something out that you said there. It's so I'm much older than you. I'm in my 50s. But like, when I was in college, I didn't pursue it like you did. I didn't go down the path to learn it. What I always thought it was gonna be was like a news anchor. Yeah. Which is so funny. And I'm like, oh, it'd be like a great reporter. My dad's like, you should be an attorney, because you're very argumentative. But, yes, it was at that time of my life. Trying to get rid of that. I'm trying to listen better. It's funny, because at the end of the day, like, I'm like, oh, that's what I thought I would do. And now here I am, like with this podcast, and I'm always like, the, you know, on video. Yeah. Doing the

reporting stuff. It comes in handy. That was like probably the best schooling I could have gotten, especially for this route. Because I mean, communications, isn't everything. Right. So?

Well, my first question to you is, I mean, it's a big question. And also, I think that we're going to probably break it down a lot. But like, what's advertising has changed so much? iOS 14, like blew up the ads world? Facebook, you know, it's expensive now to advertise on there. It's not as affordable. And to get a return on investment is a lot and you run Facebook and Instagram ads. So what's working? like, Ooh, yeah.

Yes. So like you said, Tracy, it obviously depends on what you're selling, what your niche is, their Facebook ads are still working. But what I'm seeing really work no matter the level of your business is lead generation, lead generation has been crazy successful for all of my clients, no matter their level, no matter their spend. And the cool thing about this is, if we can be patient with lead generation, we are bringing in your perfect buyers, right. So that's the goal of these people who are opting in to either early access or your communities, anything that we're giving them, freebie wise. They're saying, hey, I'm interested, I would buy what you're selling, right. But at this point, I'm getting something free, I want to test it out, get to know like, and trust you. And I just did a post on this actually, on my Facebook page talking about, we as consumers are getting smarter, right we are, we're buying a lot more online, and we're wanting more of that personal connection with who we're spending our money with. Right? So lead generation is a great space, if we can be patient. And right now we're getting our clients to be able to convert those lead generations, whether it's for promotions, or freebies, between 15 to 40%. In 90 days, those people are buying something now,

so 15 to 40% of the people who opt in are buying something within 90 days. Yeah, that's really good. Because usually, what I see a lot of people do is that they want cold traffic ads to their products, and they don't see any return on investment, even after like, for 90 days. And they're like ads don't work. But the thing that people need to remember is that a good advertising strategy thinks holistically about how you're following people around the internet everywhere. So it's not just about advertising on one platform. It's about, you know, maybe lead generation on Facebook and Instagram and then being everywhere on the internet with like Google ads, or Pinterest ads or tick tock ads, and like following those people who actually opt in and your offer around, correct, would

you Yeah, okay. Yes, it's, it's like this full funneling strategy, which I love about marketing as a whole. But something that a lot of us do more starting our business. And I actually just saw a post that you posted today, we get into where we find one thing that works, and we just go for it, right, which is what we have to do when we're first starting out. But the hardest thing with marketing is there's actually multiple facets of it, that we have to do well and get the foundational basis of it, to be able to retarget and re hit our people. But that's what I love about Facebook advertising. Because what's really cool about this accelerator coming up in January is traffic is everything. If we don't have people in our space, right, social media, wherever that is email lists, mainly, they're not going to buy we're gonna have nobody to sell to. So what I love about ads and lead generation is we are bringing in your potentially perfect customer, right who have opted in Yes. into your space for way cheaper than conversion ads. Yes, they may take a little longer to say yea or nay. But the likelihood of you being a lot more profitable is there. And I think that that's what I love about what I do because we focus on new customer acquisition. So technically traffic, and hopefully with how we do our audience thing, it's traffic that will convert sooner rather than

later. Okay, so question for you on that. Cuz I know I know, I can assume what you're gonna say here, but I don't think that all of our listeners can assume that like after they opt in, like how are you how is the conversion happening? Like, is it in the email follow up, or is it somewhere else?

Yeah, so depending on what we are opting them into right because there's multiple options, we could be doing a freebie that they're getting, we could be doing early access. This is honestly, especially for the jewelry niche, perfect because a lot of you guys are handmade makers, a lot of you have, you know, a certain quantity amount. And that's what helps get urgency. So we're putting them into these funnels based off of what they're opting into. And then we're sending them flows. So we're creating strategic, like a strategic welcome flow that you guys already have for all of your potential perfect buyers. But we're doing this based off of people who've already opted in, yes. And we kind of build that out based off of what has worked for your welcome flow will most likely worked for these flows as well. And again, it's really making sure that our strategy is working together, not against one another. And that's what we love about this, because I can tell you, on most of our email lists, that we're marketing organically, some of those people are going to be you know, Aunt Sally, grandma, Joe, you know, not gonna be a perfect buyers. But think about oh my gosh, yeah, like loved your email today. With these people, we know they're your potential perfect buyers. So we're able to kind of storytel and sell much quicker. And that's what I love about this, you get people in your space to maybe take a year organically to buy. But with lead gen. They're converting that much quicker in 90 days.

I love that. Now what I want to talk about one of the things is ads are so visual, right? And what is working now for like how first of all, first question is How important is creative? And then also I want to know what's kind of working right now for creative in the ad? Yeah, the creative job is to be the copywriting to

Yes, yes. So creative wise, it isn't usually your So think of this, I learned this in psychology, because obviously all my marketing classes, we need to stop the eyes, the eyes of the first thing that see things and then our brain absorbs what our eyes are seeing, right. So if our creative can stop the eyes, our copy is what sells. So the most important thing of your ads, it's always going to be copy. But if we have audience down, I love I love to use this analogy. I use it everywhere I go talking, if you guys are selling dog collars, right? But we are we our audience is only hitting cat owners or other pet owners, they're not going to buy the dog collars, no matter how good the copy is, the creative is. So as long as you have your audience down, the thing that's going to be most important is your copy because that's what's going to sell them on it right. Emotion first logic second, especially if your audience is women, I would say men are even easier to get in with a motion, which is really fun. And they their logic is like past it they've already paid. They're like, Ah, I'll figure out a reason for why I bought this, which is fun to kind of play around with to depending on your audience. But a lot of us put a lot of emphasis on creative. A lot of us struggle with creating that for social organic, we worry about it. The thing is, is when you dive into your creative and you say I like this, this feels like my brand, go with it. Don't stress about it. I mean, make sure grammar and spelling is correct. But other than that it's really that how can we sell your perfect people into this? And it's onto the copy?

How many variations of like a single ad like a visual the imagery or video and stuff like that? Do you put with copy because I know Facebook and Instagram there are I was saying Facebook, but what I mean is Facebook and Instagram because it's all part of the suite. You can like rotate they tasks like which copy headline and an image works the best. Right? So let's talk about that. Yeah. So

dynamic. So this is what dynamic is. and dynamic. Creative is where we can say okay, here are three copies, I want Facebook to test here are three headlines, and then like creative, right, we could put them into dynamic. Something that I don't use dynamic is when we get bigger. And I know that this copy converts already this creative. And I just want Facebook to go out and do the job. For me. This is usually for my clients that I've had for over a year, they're spending multiple 10s of 1000s. The reason I like to not do this when we're starting out is because it really tells us what is or isn't working. So I am a variable tester. So if we have multiple variables that we're testing at one time, we can't tell what actually is working or not working. So something I love to do is create campaigns. And you guys, if you've been in the back end of ads managers, you know, there's three sections, we have a campaign section, an ad set section, where we put our audience and our budget. And then we have an ads, which is where we put creative copy headlines, everything. The campaign section, what I love to do is if we have, let's say, a collection or wanting to promote, and they're brand new to us, and we're supporting them with ads, I'll go in and I'll test out different audiences. But I will have the same creative in each of those audiences. So the same copy, and then that way I can actually go and diagnose one which audiences performing the best and then see, okay, well, now that I know this, now that I'm seeing sales from this, I can then test out copy and creative I have this little calculation that I've made that works. If you aren't getting sales on your ads, right, you're not getting any engagement, any sales at all. It's an audience problem. It's not a copy or a creative problem. If we are getting sales, sales slow down, it means our creative has fatigued. So our audiences seen that too much their eyes are glazing over. Now, if we are, what is it, I'm trying to remember the copy one. Now for Okay, here we go for getting good engagement, good click through rate everything's working. But we're not getting the buys that we should be getting based off that engagement, it means our copy is not hitting the way it needs to be for our customers. So they're reading the copy. And when they go to that landing page, it's not resonating, something's off, so we have to tweak the copy. So these three things is kind of how I analyze all of our ads to make sure what do we need to tweak, especially when we're testing a new business or a new client?

Wow, that's a lot. That's cool. I had another question for you. Oh, audiences. So how like, what's your process for determining like how to pick the audiences because there's so many ways that you can go about this. And the one thing that the easiest piece of advice that I've always given to people is that you want to think of brands that other brands that your customer is buying that are big brands that you can target. Because you know like you think about it, like if we're thinking about retargeting ads, which retargeting ads are just ads for the traffic that land on your website. If I land on like a fitness website called bandier, I'll start getting hit up with ads from carbon 38. Yeah, because they have they like are targeting each other's body. Yes. Let's talk about that.

Yeah, so there's actually two different options that we go with now. So iOS has changed the game for ads, which in my opinion, is really good, because it now means actual marketing strategists have to do their job and ads, which is more detailed targeting, we can't just go full broad AI unless you have millions of dollars, go for it. But I like to do detailed targeting. And what we do is we actually do a competitors broad, detailed audience, and then a personal detail audience on like their best or like most revenue, bringing in Avatar, right for that clients. And then we test the two, something I am finding is the one that is more detailed to our avatar actually works better, it brings in higher revenue, because it's more customized to them. But we do test that out. And it does work, right. This is all cold audience thing. If you're in a space, and you know, as jewelry brands, we all have different vibes and different competitors, I mean, out there that we can definitely bring an audience thing. But I love the detailed aspect of it, I use a tool called Kinect do.io. And it is like the back end, I guess, the Soros or dictionary for finding detailed targeting options that Facebook has, when you go into the ads manager to put an interest. Facebook is showing you the top two used with whatever, you know keyword that you're searching. It's not showing you all of them. So whatever your competitors are using, right, and they're using them a lot that's just going to show up for you if they're using missing keywords to search, connect to shows you all of it, which has been very foundational for us helping our clients, build them strong audiences, but also when I'm teaching people how to do ads themselves, build audience successfully as well and kind of weave themselves out of just competing for the same space that their competitors are.

That's awesome. That's amazing.

I love that tool. And you can buy it like I think you can buy it for a lifetime of like 199. And it's not Oh, that's it? Yes. Oh, wow.

And it just always works for those audiences. Yeah. How do you How important do you think a content strategy is like paired with an advertising strategy?

Um, that's huge. I think having, like we were talking about earlier, the full understanding of where your customers find you, right, like, Where's the place that makes you the most money organically. And building off of that to build your ads is super imperative to growth, but also, it's super imperative to being able to scale ads are not a tool that are going to make you millions of dollars overnight. Now, I have had crazy good success with super niched business owners do well, right, but it didn't make me a millionaire overnight. But what it does allow us to do is it allows you guys to scale, which I think is the most imperative thing as a business owner, is we are overworked and we are underpaid. But we love it. Right? That's what makes this so fun and so different from every other life that we could be living. But what I love about ads is it's that extra asset to your business that can allow you to scale without you having to do anything extra, right? Yes, you have to put in some money, but other than that, if you have somebody doing it for you, it does help you kind of alleviate that stress. Something that I get asked is a lot about with like the content and the ads and when am I ready? Right? How do I know, the biggest thing is you don't want ads to be over, like, I would say, 40% of your sales a month, because ads are kind of that back end thing, right? They shouldn't be the full reason that you're making sales. Because ads fluctuate a lot during the year, that's great. And I think too much of us, we put kind of that pressure on ourselves that, oh, I need this to be doing that. No ads is like, I love it. When it's at 25% or 33% of my clients monthly revenue, I feel really good about that. It's a scalable number. And when it fluctuates, I can help my clients with their email strategy or their organic strategy and making sure we're bringing in more, right. And I do think that that's something that's not talked about enough, like people like, Oh, I just want to move everything over to ads and everything. No, that's not how it works. And it's not, it's not safe. You know, it's not something that is strategically smart for us to do with our marketing. And with your money.

It's also not sustainable. Well, here's, we've been running ads for like the majority of the time that we've been here at flourish and thrive. In the beginning, it was just usually when we were doing a big launch emails landed in the inbox, so it wasn't as big of a deal. Now, there's so much more competition for email, inbox space, and stuff like that, which is also a consideration. But the whole idea behind like, even what you were saying before lead generation ads is to get people on your email list, and then you pay for that content, talk to once and then hopefully you provide them enough value that they want to stay. And it's really about acquiring like spending the money to acquire a first time customer, but turning them into a repeat customer because that's how a business grows. It's not about getting hundreds of new customers all the time, the way you scale is getting people to buy from you more than once. Correct, right.

100% Yeah. And it's that's the thing that I'm finding working really well with ads lead gen, but also conversion is a lot of people we have the stigma that ads are bad or that we're wasting money or that Facebook's too expensive. Facebook is still the cheapest advertising platform out there with the most data that we can find using other tools Facebook back end tool, not my favorite. But there are amazing tools like Hieros that I use, and then UTM tracking, which is a little bit more manual. But with that being said, still the cheapest would you rather write and this is the thing, pay some money to know that you're bringing in perfect customers, right? That are going to buy again, they're not one time buyers or spend a lot of time and are most likely money on social media content, and emails, and have those people coming in organically to you joining your email list and not being buyers are only being one time buyers. So that's the benefit of ads, too is you know that these people who are being bought brought in right now for my clients were averaging between a 25 to 40% buyback rate within 90 days. What does that mean customers are. So that means they're, so they're a first time customer. So they bought and then 90 days later, or within that 90 days, they're buying again, for that client. Okay, so it's out there, it's doable. Everyone can do this. Obviously, ads are a strategy. It's hard. There's a lot of technicality to it. But we teach people how to do that all the time. Obviously, clients come to us and we do it for them. But it is doable to make sure that we're bringing in your right people, and that they aren't just one time buyers, they are buying back again, and hopefully being lifetime cheerleaders of your brand and business if we're telling our story correctly. And we're being genuine and authentic.

So I forgot to ask this when I was asking you about the content strategy. But how does SEO tie into content ads and everything else? You got to tie

it all together. So and see this is interesting, because I think a lot of people focus on SEO. And the biggest thing with SEO is it takes time, right? It's not something that is instant, like I can start an ad for you and get a lead for you today, right or multiple leads for you today. SEO is a continuous game of making sure that we are top of mind and staying in the organic search top of mind. So it's a lot of keywords. The cool thing about what we're doing with ads strategy and content marketing is if we stay in our lane, and we're like these are our brand words, these are keywords, these are our mottos. These are what our customers are searching for. This is how we're going to stay in front of them. It's showing us it's actually planning out how we need to do ads, and we can hit those people again. So if you use PPC, which is usually Google advertising, what's awesome is if you have Facebook ads and Google Ads going at the same time, it literally tracks those people. So if they're on Facebook, right, and they're engaging with your ad, Google can be like a ha because Google can still take all the information and be like, I'm going to show them again this ad for them too. Yeah, so it's been It's just like it completes the funnel, when you are being strategic when you are like, and honestly, this is a learning curve for everyone. So some of this may be going over your head right now, which is completely fine. Because I want you to know, this is a process, right? Each of us have these things that we implement. But if there's one thing you can start doing on your website, now, it's making sure that the keywords that your customers are searching, right when they're wanting to buy your product you're putting into plugs onto your product pages, descriptions, and in your website. So great.

So great. So that was so much information. Gosh, I feel like we crammed so much in such a short period of time, which is fantastic. I think my final question for you, is really well, I have two questions. Number one, when is the right time for someone to invest in an agency versus DIY? And then what are some things that people can do if they're not ready to join an agency to start getting ads set up themselves?

Yes. So I would say if you are not over the 10k mark a month, I wouldn't look into an agency yet. But that is totally time for you to look into DIY buying it. How you can do that is of course, follow me go to my courses, I have courses on how to do this. And we can help you with that as well. But the reason I wait till we're at six figures before you hire an agency is because it is a lot of money, whether you hire me or whether you hire somebody else. It's an investment that has to be prepared and have budget behind it, right. So you can only have I can have my agency, but I can only put 1500 and ads, and your agency fees more than what you're spending on ads, it kind of deprives you of the growth that you need, doesn't really make so if you can, doesn't really make sense, right? But if you can do it yourself are kind of lead generation really great place to start. And it's really easy, it's much easier to do yourself and conversion ads. And so what you can do is you can say, Okay, I'm gonna start out with a $500 budget a month, the biggest thing that people make mistakes with is you're just not consistent. And they don't figure it out. They bootstrap it right, they don't do a course or not in a membership, or they're not in a supportive space that knows how to do it properly. So where then they they give up and they don't see that success. Most of the time to a lot of people start with conversion ads. And I want everyone to know, lead gen is where to start. Because it's going to boost your confidence, you're actually going to see people joining your lists. And that right there kind of helps you see, oh, okay, I can see how ads can support my growth. And then once you start seeing those sales, too, is phenomenal. I actually have a member and one of our marketing memberships that I have that went through my course she's doing her Legion by herself. And she wrote to me the other day, she's like, I just want to let you know that I've gotten 150 leads. And I've only spent like $500 Oh, wow, that's great. Seven of those people have already purchased. And I'm like she's like I'm not running any conversion ads or anything. So to me, that's a win, right? I want everyone to know that this is doable. It just takes a lot of time as you get bigger. What takes time is understanding where the sales are coming from. So you can scale. So that's why the six figure mark, even if you're doing some of it yourself, hiring an agency comes into play. What we do differently to is we don't just do your ads and your numbers, we actually strategize your full marketing strategy, so that we can make sure we're working in line with what you're doing with organic what you're doing with email and funneling it. But the biggest thing is knowing where those sales are coming from. So you can scale that appropriately. Is it Google? Is it organic? Is it email? Is it social media and Facebook ads? And that's what is really hard currently, because of just all of the rules and the opting out of being tracked.

Yeah, that's true. The opting out of being tracked? And does that does that affect retargeting ads?

Yes, but the cool part about this is everything that is ours. So anybody who puts their information into clay, VO or whatever email marketing tool you're using, we can actually retarget those lists so we can export those CSVs put them into Facebook and retarget those people

that they land on your website, can you retarget them?

Sorta, yes, it depends. So pixel data helps with that. So yes, and domain data, but pretty much what Facebook says that they're off track with is once they get onto your website, they can't fully promise that they're tracking those people accurately. So what I like to do is I use outside tools like Pyros that helps me kind of scrape emails that I can then use and retarget with ads, and I know that those people were on the site. So we use a little bit of everything first party data pixel data and create these middle of funnel campaigns that work really, really well. The cool thing too, if you have Klaviyo if you have like mailer Lite, and Omni send, I think as well They're lists can actually integrate into the back end of your ads manager. So they're always building. And what that Yes. And what that data does is Facebook's pixel actually takes that information. And that's how it's building look alike audiences and things now, and so it's always growing and scaling and adding these people in. So it's very helpful because of everything we lost lost with the iOS 14 update. So that has been phenomenal for my retargeting ads.

I love that. That's so good. And we're so excited to have you be one of our trainers on our traffic in our traffic on fire accelerator, which is going to be amazing. Nicole is going to be teaching content, she's going to be talking about Facebook and Instagram ads, and so much more. So we're really excited. If you're interested in learning more about that you can head on over to flourish, thrive academy.com, forward slash momentum and check out the accelerator and also apply for the program, which is going to be assets work and everyone find you. All right.

Well, I have multiple places. But I have an amazing Facebook group and podcast. It's called Master making money with your marketing Facebook group and the podcast. I just released it. This is my first year doing it in June. So I have 15 episodes all about how to make more money with your marketing. So we'd love to have you guys join me there and within our Facebook group, and of course the accelerator. I do think that now is the time more than ever to make sure that we're growing your guys's traffic and creating these options that each of you have that you can find different sources of new customers into your space.

Amazing. Thank you so much for being here today in a call.

Yes Thank you Tracy.

Thank you so much for watching this episode of Thrive by design is been a thrill to have Nicole on the show today. If you haven't done so yet, I want to invite you to download chapter one of my book for free, head on over to the desired brand effect.com forward slash chapter one all spelled out and download the first chapter for free and let me know what you think. And then if you like it, make sure that you pick up the full copy