Knowing You're Ready for Facebook Ad Campaigns

Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining me. It is the first day of Facebook ad blast. I'm super excited. This is part of a 10 day training series that I'm going to be doing right here on Facebook Live. And today we are going to be talking about knowing if it's a good time for you to run Facebook ads or not. That sounds a little counterintuitive for what we're going to be talking about in this entire series, training how to run your Facebook ads. But we want to back it up a little bit and make sure that you're ready to run Facebook ads, that it's the time for your business, that it's a good investment for your business because there's nothing worse than running ads and feeling like it was a total flop and not knowing why. A lot of times when people have struggled with their Facebook ad campaigns, odds are that one of these things wasn't in place before they started their campaign. So for those of you who don't know me, my name is Ali Bierk. I am a sales funnel and Facebook ad strategist and I specialize in helping talented and maxed out entrepreneurs who add passive income to their monthly money stack. But I also help train people who want to learn how to implement Facebook ads and funnels for themselves and also those who want to learn how to implement them for their clients. So that's where this training series comes in. A little different than what I do in my day job with helping my clients. But, you know, knowledge is power and I like empowering other entrepreneurs to learn this stuff for themselves too, before they're ready to hire someone to do it instead. So today's training, we are going to be walking through an opt in that I created for you with a checklist so that you know where you are and if you're ready to run that Facebook ad campaign. So I thought this was a good place to start. I've talked to a handful of different entrepreneurs who feel like they should run Facebook ads because it's just time or someone else told them they should do it without having a lot of these foundational pieces in place. They just start boosting posts or they start, you know, maybe running a like campaign. And there's. There are good times to do those things for your business, but without the strategy behind it and knowing your overall goals, it can get financially painful pretty quickly. So I did write a blog post about this. The link is I'm reversed. So I think it's this. No, this way you can click download the checklist for Yourself, print it out, start going through your different content pieces that you have in place. And other than that, if you have any questions, feel free to pop them in the chat. I am happy to go through them during the Facebook Live. Odds are don't be shy, somebody else might have the same question that you have. And so let's hop into our checklist. So basically like this is very 101 for if you've been running ads for yourself prior this whole Facebook ad blast or FB ad blast. The whole point of it is to help you learn how to run your best campaign yet. And a big piece of running an intelligent Facebook campaign is targeting people when they're ready to buy. So oftentimes that looks like targeting, retargeting, giving them a little bit of information up front and then seeing who reads it or who watches it and then moving to the next step, showing the group who participated or engaged another set of ads and then another set of ads based on their interest level. So that you're always relevant and you're always serving up the right content at the right time. But how you do that is having your Facebook Pixel installed and working. So I've talked about this before. There is a Chrome add on called the Facebook Pixel Helper, which I recommend everybody has installed on their browser. It will let you know if your pixel is firing. If the browser identifies, it's there. And basically you want to make sure that you have that Facebook Pixel installed on every single piece that your visitor will touch. Even if it's a third party tool like Click Funnels or Leadpages or something else that you're tying in to your overall campaign. We want to make sure we get it pixeled so that we always can follow that visitor. And to back up even a little bit further, the pixel is basically it's a literally, if you want to get technical, it's a one by one pixel. Like when you look at something and you zoom in really, really close, it's, you know, one color, it's a little square. That's what the pixel is. This code is just a piece of code. Well, repetitive, yes. This pixel is a piece of code that Facebook creates for you that you can find inside of your ads manager. You click on that hamburger menu and that's the three horizontal lines that go up and down on the upper left. You pull that down and you scroll over to the column that says pixels and then you find, you copy, you paste, get into the back end of your website, whether That's Squarespace or WordPress Wix, whatever it is, they all have a place for you to paste that code within the header of your website. That's the pixel. What it does is it helps identify who has visited your website. It's identified who has gone from your website to your landing page, your landing page, to your sales page to your thank you page. So then you can start doing some really cool things with your campaign. Like they hit the sales page but not the thank you page. I'm gonna serve them an ad that says something to encourage them to actually check out and hit the thank you page instead of just the sales page. If they, you know, abandoned ship before checking out, you can, you can get really strategic about, okay, I know if they watched this much of the video, I can retarget them based on what pages they visited on your website and different things like that. So the pixel is number one. You want to make sure that's in place before you even start running campaigns because you want to start getting an idea of who has visited your site. It really helps when you're doing look alike audiences retargeting based on what page they've been to. If you can get the pixel on your website before you even consider running ads, Facebook has that much more time to start figuring out who's visiting your site. What did they like, what did they click on? Who's going to convert out of this group of people who's visited your site? Their algorithm is brilliant and they can figure out these things about people. But you have to have your pixel in place for them to be able to start gathering that data. You also want to have step two on the checklist is making sure that you have a landing page that's designed and up to date. Some people when they're starting out say, well, I'm just gonna run ads to my homepage. You know, I've got an opt in on there. I've got different things about my services on there. They'll figure it out. I'll just run apps to my homepage. You don't want to do that because a landing page in an ideal world and we can do a different training on a different day about what a landing page should look like. But basically you don't want them to be distracted when they're on your landing page. They have one job when they get to the landing page and that is opting in for the thing that you want them to download or the thing that you're offering, whether it's a coupon or free download or you know, sign up for a Webinar. You want them to have one thing on their brain and not be like, oh, look, these are her services. Oh, this is what you do over here. You want them to have one job, sign up, and then, you know, then they can look around. Once they get to your thank you page, which is step three, you want to make sure that you have a smartly designed thank you page and that it's up to date. This is often one of the last things that people think about when they are designing their Facebook ads or their funnels. The thank you page can be auto created by your email sequence provider. But there's so much opportunity on the thank you page. Like, you can, you know, tell them what to expect as they move forward in receiving content from you. How often you're going to email them, what's your best video they might like to watch that's related. Like, it's just that next opportunity for them to start getting to know you and starting to trust you as the expert that you are. So that's a really intelligent place to put a lot of focus in. Even more so than the landing page, the thank you page can really get people to trust you and take that next step as you move forward. The other thing a lot of people, before they even start thinking about Facebook ads, is like, oh, I'm just gonna create an email that delivers the thing. Well, there's also an opportunity there to start emailing them from frequently because they're so interested when they just sign up. They know who you are, they're familiar with what they just downloaded from you. There's no reason not to have an email sequence directly following the signup that goes every single day even, because that's when they're most interested and when. Depending on how your sales funnel is set up, that's when they're gonna be highly engaged with what you're offering. If you send them something for free that they've downloaded and then like three weeks later you say, oh, hey, by the way, now I'm gonna send you an engagement series, or now I'm gonna try to get you as my email on my email list that they may have forgotten who you are at that point. I mean, from the ego, we all want to believe that everyone knows and loves everything that we put out, but there's a lot of noise out there. And if you aren't making an effort to get to know them and get on their list, their memory list, right away, you could lose the opportunity. So this is a big thing. Make sure not only do you Deliver your thing and then follow up to make sure that they downloaded it, but also make sure that they're being motivated and encouraged to take that next step towards your goal. Which number seven on our list is goal setting, but we'll talk about that in a second. Number five is that you've created UTM links and this gets a little bit technical. There is a training video that I've linked to from the blog. But basically this assumes that you have Google Analytics installed on your website. It helps you figure out what people are doing once they get to your website. Are they clicking over from the link and then bouncing right away? Are they getting distracted and like googling you and looking coming in from a different direction? Knowing how they're using your website after clicking on your ad will help you optimize your campaigns, optimize your website even and figure out what content people are most interested in. So to create those UTM links you can literally Google like UTM URL creator or develop. I think it's creator, something like that. But you click on the first link, it's usually from Google and you just put things into the different form fields that they have available and then you copy and paste the link and paste it right into your Facebook ad campaign. This creates a special area under campaigns in Google Analytics so that you always know how each individual campaign performed. So it's super important to include in each one of your campaigns. It won't kill you if you don't do it, but if you're somebody that's interested in looking at the data and always improving and making sure that your things are just getting better and better for you as you're running ads, that's a no brainer that you should include that. Another thing that I recommend for people is knowing or having the ability to predict how it's going to perform. And that can come from understanding your organics statistics. I'm totally tripping over my words. Organic stats. So basically if you paste your opt in into a Facebook group or if you put it on your Facebook page, if you share it with people, if you mentioned it on a Facebook Live, like how do people convert? Are they actually downloading it? Are they visiting it? You know that helps you understand how to how you should put money behind your Facebook ads with knowing what that's going to turn into in the long run. So one thing that I've always heard about entrepreneurs is that you can either invest in and that's why this is where it gets a little controversial because a lot of people will use Ads to test out their brand new opt ins or their brand new offers. Just test it out and see how it converts. But there's two ways to think about it. You can either invest time in understanding the people that are behind your business and your fans, or you can invest money into doing that. So the Facebook ads are where you would test out a new audience and then you're not going to be able to predict how people are going to react to that specific opt in. So you can either invest your money in trying to figure that out, or you can invest your time in organically waiting for people to think about, hey, Erin, thank you for the likes. So you can have both. You can either invest your time in going organically or invest your money and figuring it out and knowing that it may not be an automatic slam dunk home run with your audience. So that's the caveat to number six. Number seven, you have to have a strong understanding of your campaign goals. Facebook makes it so easy for you to say, I'm just gonna boost this for like 8 bucks. It's no big deal. You know, I don't know who's really gonna see it, but I'll give it a shot. Or Facebook makes it really easy to run a like campaign where, you know, I guess I could use some more likes on my Facebook organically. Nobody really sees what you're doing on your business pages these days unless you have a strategy behind it. But it's way too easy to just waste money on Facebook ads without knowing your campaign goals. So I always say, like, start at the end and work your way backwards. So if you're a coach and you want to sell your high end package, start thinking about your campaign, your Facebook campaign in terms of like, no, I'm not going to run ads to my $2,000 coaching program to cold traffic. What should I do so that they can go through a journey with me and start to understand why I would be the best fit if they have said problem? So then you just start reversing your way through and at this point of the campaign, you know, okay, I want to run goals that go to this opt in or I want to run ads that target people that downloaded the opt in and now they might want to attend something live with me, like a live webinar or something like that. But if you don't understand the very end goal of the campaign or what you want them to do, you don't have your landing pages in place. You probably don't have any sort of retargeting strategy in place, you might just be doing a one off campaign and those can get pretty painful financially. So always have your campaign goal in mind for any ad that you run. Number eight is know your budget. And this goes back to number seven. And as if you know your goals and you understand what you're selling in the long run and you know how they're converting, pretty much these all stack up on each other, right? So you know how much you're spending. If you understand your goal, you understand how people are converting and then you can start working like, okay, what do I need to spend? Do I need to spend $5 to make $10? Do I need to spend $20 to make $100? Like as soon as you understand your overall goal and your budget, well, that's when you can set your budget for the campaign. When you're just doing these one off quick like, oh, I'm just gonna boost this post about what my kids did on Friday night. Like there it doesn't play into any big picture of your business and it probably won't benefit helping people, new eyes get to know like and trust you. Right? Because that's, that's what ads are all about. It's just getting more, it's a numbers game where you're just getting more people into seeing your business and downloading your stuff and signing up for your services. So that brings me to point number nine. There are definitely break even points in everything that you're going to run for your business if you have your goal. And you know, if I set up an opt in and 20% of the people sign up for that opt in and then of that 20%, you know, maybe 20%, well, it starts breaking down into a funnel, an upside down pyramid, right? So you start with 20% that make it to downloading your opt in. Then of the people that downloaded your opt in, maybe another 20% actually sign up for the landing or the webinar that you're doing. And then of that webinar, attendees usually, you know, like 20% will purchase it. So you're getting to smaller and smaller groups of people, people that you're reaching and you will hit a break even point where you've spent, you know, if you spend $1,000 on your ad campaign and then you get to that point, you need to know what your product should cost in order to make your thousand dollars back. Knowing that you're going to lose, you know, 80% of people right off the top of each different step. Obviously different funnels convert at different rates, but those are pretty standard numbers for what you'll get for opt ins and open rates. It all varies a lot. But basically track your numbers and know what you're getting into and that you know at what level your ads are no longer worth it for your business. And then it just becomes an investment in understanding your audience versus selling something. So you just need to have that mentality, knowing what you want people to do, knowing where your money is going to end up. If you're paying $20 a lead, does it still. Is it still worth it? You know, if you're paying $100 per lead but they're converting or signing up for your paid program like gangbusters, yeah, it's worth it. But there's a really good calculator that I will link up in the blog post from HubSpot that helps you figure out if I'm selling something for this amount and I want to spend this much on ads. Here's what type of conversion rates and what cost you're going to be looking for per lead. And until I have that custom programmed on my website, which I will at some point, I'm going to send you to HubSpot's calculator because it does a really good job making sure that you're making intelligent decisions about how you're spending your ad dollars. So if this was helpful in getting you to understand what needs to be in place before you start that campaign, I certainly hope it was. You can head over to the blog to download and print out that checklist for yourself. And if you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments and I would be happy to answer them. Otherwise, I will see you back here tomorrow for day two of the training. I can't wait to talk to you then.