Top 5 Facebook Ad Tips (Part 1)

Hello, friends. I'm Amanda Barr.

And I'm Rebecca Lou Brennan. And welcome to Dance Principals United, the podcast.

Together, we are passionate about helping studio owners with the business of running their studio.

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This is the Dance Principles United podcast.

Hi, friends, it's Bec here from Dance Principals United. I hope you are amazing. We have the incredible Nathan with us today. So excited to chat to you about all the things, but first of all, Nath, how are you?

Hey, Bec. Always good to do a podcast with you. Yeah, doing really well. Obviously, like week two back here, we're recording this in. Back in New South Wales term, home school term, which means that for us kids out of the house, which means we're actually getting shit done.

Right?

So really good on that front and settling back into everything.

So, so good. So good. I always love doing podcasts with you. I feel like it's been a hot minute, though, I have to say.

Oh, yeah, I know. That's what I was thinking as well. Like, Mandate man is hogging all the. All the limelight with you, right?

She is, she is. But I'm super excited to chat today because I think those of you who are listening out there, this is a total game changer and has been for my studio. And it's something that Nath teaches so well in tribe and sgc and it is all things Facebook ads. And, you know, it's. I know a lot of our clients when they first come on with us, Natha always, like, I've tried Facebook ads, but they don't work and we know they do. Right. Like, we know that it's a definite.

Thing that works 100. And it's something that ties in. Like, we talk about so much that our members give us. Give us shit about it that we need to. That they're going to print T shirts. Oh, no, we did T shirts, didn't we? That it's all the things. And marketing for our studio is. It's a massive, big flywheel of all the things. And in 2025, paid socials is a huge part of that. It all ties in together. Paid socials ties in with obviously the organic socials that we do, and that ties in with having a good website and getting out the community and things like that. But we know that for brand awareness, for getting in front of people's eyeballs, that paid socials is the main thing that we can do to drive those. Those inquiries which turn into enrollments.

Yeah, well, one of the things that I always say to the. Our clients is the phone is where everyone's at. Like, everyone's scrolling every single day. I don't know if I've told you this, Nath, but I have an app on my phone called Be Present that tells you how long you've been on your phone for on the day. And, like. Yeah, but it also, like, says just really funny. Like, it just comes up with little funny text things all the time. Just kind of taking the mickey out of you of, you know, you've spent this long on it. You're now, you know, I don't know, like, making so much money for Pete, for social media or something. Like, it's just like your algorithms are out of control. So, like, it just says these funny banter things. But it's true. Like, we are on our phone more than anything else now and. And it's your shop window. Like, I know we say it all the time, but it is your shop window and it's so important to have that. That money behind it.

100. Like, you used to have to pay big bucks to get, you know, to get a main street, like, access to have foot traffic. Like, that's what advertise. That's why rents on main Streets and things like that used to be so exorbitant because it was all about getting the foot traffic, because that was such an effective way of getting people to see your business. Now people are carrying, like, you've literally got that shop front window with your Instagram and Facebook profiles. So if you're not utilizing that, then you're wasting potentially the biggest opportunity you've got out there to get in front of people's eyeballs. And having, like, I keep saying, like, having that strong organic game is important, but we know that that's not what people see, that that's like designing your shop window. But we need to be spending the money on the paid ads to get people to actually look at it. Because if we're not spending the money, then people aren't actually clicking through and checking out our socials a lot of the time, or at least new followers aren't. We know that what we're putting on socials that our current families. Now, current followers are saying, but new followers aren't seeing it if we're not paying to get in front of them.

Yep. Now, those of you who are listening to us right now, who are thinking to yourselves, yeah, but I put money behind it and I've done all of that, and it just doesn't work. Which was totally me, I have to say, before I learned about this and started doing it, prior to properly, I would boost a post and not get anything from it. Or I'd put an ad together without knowing what I was doing and surprise, surprise, wouldn't get anything from it. You know, what would you say to those people? Because like I said, that was totally me, guys. So no judgment here, but tell us what you'd say.

Number one, the biggest brands in the world are shifting a higher and higher percentage of their marketing budget literally every single week into paid socials. And so if those companies, and we're talking, like I said, like, think about any massive brand that you can think of that you buy from, they are, all the data's out there that they are shifting more and more of their advertising spend every week. They're not doing that on a whim. They're not doing that because it doesn't really work.

Right.

They're getting access to much better data than any of us have access to and they're making decisions in the millions of dollars around this thing. So number one, we know it works. And number two, we can also only improve what we measure. I understand and have complete empathy around the fact that these, like when and when I say Facebook ads, I mean Facebook and Instagram because it's all under one platform. But social media, paid social media ads can be daunting. The don't get me started on how archaic and ridiculous the Facebook ads platform is. And it's hard to navigate. Right, I completely understand that. But once you understand it and understand that as dance studios we operate in a local area, we're only advertising realistically to people within a 10 to 15 kilometer radius. For most of us that Facebook ads in that setting is much, much easier than say the multinational company that has to try and advertise to the whole of Australia. Or even like I always talk about for Dance Teacher Expo, us trying to sell, find dance teachers to sell tickets to with Dance Teacher Expo from Australia and New Zealand is actually fairly complex and complicated and we have to use a lot more of the tools in the Facebook Ads Manager so that, that becomes quite difficult. But for local area advertising that we need to do for our dance studios, if we know where to look and if we know that small sort of subset of tools that we, we need to use, then it's definitely something that we can use to our advantage and get loads and loads of value out of.

Yeah, absolutely. Now I know that you are such a rock star in our tribe and SGC with Breaking it down for people like me who find it very difficult to understand this stuff, but you make it very simple for them to understand. But for our listeners out there, what would be like the first thing that you think that we need to know about with Facebook ads?

Yeah, and look, it's a thing. It's. It's always going to be a process. And with anything you've just got to start somewhere, right? And of course you're not going to be from like zero to ninja level within after watching one YouTube or doing one training. And that's okay as well. But the reality of it is, before I jump into the number one thing, I think it's probably important to note that why I'm so passionate about helping dance studio owners at least understand this themselves, is that it's a massive bugbear of mine that I see not just dance studios, but far too many small businesses. Look, I'm just going to call it for what it is. I've seen too many businesses get ripped off, okay? It is, it's a, it's a thing out there. There's plenty of great providers out there, we know 100%, but there's also lots of marketing companies out there that have taken businesses I've seen for a ride and they do that because of what I said, because it is quite technical, or it looks like it's quite technical, because the ads manager is. And they get in there and they try pretend to wow you and dazzle you with all this technical jargon and then tell you that, you know, you need to spend. Because to get a good Facebook ads manager, you typically need to spend northwards of 800 to $1,000 a month before you've spent a cent on ads.

Whoa.

Right?

And then they're completely right for those. Those advertisers are going to say to you, you need to spend minimum 5 to $600 on top of that then on ads, because they can't do their job properly without that sort of budget and they can't get the sort of data they need to make your ads the best they can be. So to get anybody in externally can be really, really expensive. So that's why I'm always really passionate about people getting it and understanding themselves. Now, if you happen to be able to grow and scale your studio to the size where you can afford to bring somebody in, fantastic. But if you at least understand it yourself, then you're going to, number one, get more bang for your buck and number two, you're going to be able to ask the hard Questions and make sure that basically you're not getting taken for a ride. Right?

Yeah. Nathan, I'm sitting here and I remember the time when I first got my ad set up properly and set it up myself and learned about it and started to get the leads in. And it's so exciting. I got so excited about it. You know, when you do do it properly, when you do learn about it, when you do understand it and you start getting those people actually coming through your doors, it's. It's so motivating, don't you think?

100%. Especially for people that are a little bit competitive. And you like to see what are you saying. And. But you also, like. I completely understand as well why people. That little fear of the unknown. And if you've done it before without much understanding around it, you feel like you've thrown money at it and you haven't got results. I completely understand why you're reluctant to spend more.

Right.

But that's why it's important. If we can work on your understanding of it, on doing it the right way for dance studios, then it's going to be an absolute game changer.

Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree. It has been a game changer in my studio. Absolutely has been a game changer. It's been incredible. All right, so back to that first thing that you think. Yeah. What do you think is the first thing that they need to understand or do?

As with anything, just going back to basics.

Right.

The first thing to really dive into and look at is the basic structure of how Facebook ads work. And when we're talking about that, I'm a dog person now, Beck, So it's okay that we've got the dogs going on in the background because, you know, like, in another life, I'm sure it wouldn't have been. But for those that are listening, like Manda and I are now dog people. So we completely understand.

I am still shocked by that. But anyway.

Amanda even took him for a big walk yesterday. Yeah, I know, I know, I know. Right. But yeah, the basic structure of how those Facebook ads work. So making sure, like, very quickly, like, we have campaigns, we have ad sets, and we have ads. That's the basic structure that we see all the way through everything we do in Facebook ads. And at each one of those three levels, we do different things.

Right.

So being able to just go and understand, like I said, what needs to happen at each level. That's the key to being able to set up your ads effectively from. From where you need to be and making sure. That you're spending your money most effectively.

I love that. I love that. And so what would your next thing be? So you know, they've, they've learned their basic stuff. What would the next thing be?

Amazing. So after you've gone and watched YouTube on setting up those absolute basics and like I said, I'm gonna diverge a little bit. But when you go in, guys, Obviously there's like 14 billion videos on YouTube on how to set up Facebook ads. And the problem with most of them is they try and often teach you everything in one go. And look at all those advanced tools within that first, you know, 15 minutes of the video that you don't need to. So if you're looking for some training that, yeah, YouTube and just look for basic Facebook ads set up and go from there. But then once you are feeling a bit more confident with that, then the next thing you need to really understand is the campaign objectives and how that works. At that campaign level, like I said, we start from the top and work our way down. And at that level we start. All we basically talk about within what we need to do for dance studios operating in a local area is we just talk about what is the objective of this ad. Is it to try and collect leads? Is it just to try and drive people to a website or a landing page? Is it to try and just get some brand awareness out there for like quite often we're not going to use this one. But a main purchase, a main objective that a lot of businesses use is called the purchase objective, where obviously you're trying to get people to. To buy something. So that was like for Dance Teacher Expo we would run purchase as a campaign objective trying to make people buy dance by Dance Teacher Expo tickets. So understanding exactly what that is is absolutely key because this is where I see a lot of studio owners unfortunately wasting, wasting a lot of money because they're doing things just like driving, putting a Facebook ad to send people to their website, which, you know, like that's okay. It is getting our brand in front of eyeballs. But once we get people to our website, there's just so many ways and places for them to go that it's just generally not. Not an effective use of our spend.

So what would be a better thing than taking them straight to the website?

So that's sort of like it ties into. And this is what we're big talking about with our studio growth club members a lot is making sure that we craft good offers.

Right.

So if lots of dance studios we know offer A free trial.

Right.

And yes, I know that you'll have like book a free trial from your website, but put just a very, a separate, we call it a landing page. So just putting a separate page on your website that has no other ways to get out of it. Basically there's no menu on, no menu bar on it. There's no buttons to like about us and contact us or they literally just. The Facebook ad sends them to a page and the only thing they can do on that page is book a free trial. Yes, of course we like, we're going to put a little bit of a blurb about the studio, some photos of, of some cute kids having a ball in our classes, but making sure that if our objective, if we want people to enroll, we want. Which generally sends them through that free trial that we're really clear on. Once they click that ad, there's only one thing that they can do. Well, they can click off as well, obviously, but we're just making sure that they don't get distracted once they do that. And then like another thing, for example, like, you know, we just had the offer that we did with our members as well around preschool, like the free uniform offer. And again, we did that and what we're finding works really well at the moment is the lead forms. Right, A Facebook lead form. We know that Facebook, the whole purpose of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and his billions is that they don't want people to leave Facebook or Instagram.

Right.

That's what keeps their revenue churning. So we think that they probably not penalize you. That's probably not the right word. But they reward you more if you keep people on their platform and fill in one of those Facebook lead forms, then send them off Facebook or Instagram to your website. So with our free uniform offer for people, we were just trying to collect their lead information. So we set it up as like a lead objective and within that we just tried to collect their information. They clicked it. There was only one thing for them to do was to claim that offer of that free uniform. So just making it really clear and laser focused that when they click on this ad, there's like, there's no distractions for them and they've sort of got. The only thing they can do is take that offer or opt out.

There's less friction for the client as well, though. I just think, like, I don't know about you, Nath, but as soon as I have to jump onto a website, I won't stay on there. That's too hard for me. As soon as I have to navigate through something, forget it. As soon as I have to put too many details in, I'm out. Like, you know what I mean? Like, the less friction there is, I think in today's day and age, the better. And I think that is creating a lot less friction for our consumer.

Oh, 100%. Because we know that there's. And there is good friction and bad friction within that as well. We know that exactly what you're saying, that there's a relationship between the amount of questions that you ask and the amount of leads you get. If you ask too many questions, well, then you're not going to get as many leads. But we also know that if you only ask two questions, if you only ask for name and email, sometimes you also get a lot of junk. So there's a, is a real sweet spot and that's why it's like really important to test. And I get feedback from loads of our members that for some, just collecting name, email and phone number works really well. And I get really high quality leads through that. For some people collecting name, email and phone number, they still get loads of what we call like junk inquiries. And so what a lot of them have done is they just asked for one more question like what style of dance most interests you? And just by putting that one extra question, it just adds that tiny little bit extra friction, but not enough that opts people out. So yeah, there's definitely that fine balance there within that.

And I love what you're talking about with testing it. Like, you know, you're teaching our people in tribe and SGC to actually try these things and see and get results and then know what works and what doesn't work. And you know, just knowing that, okay, we're not getting the best quality leads, let's try adding that question. Seems so simple, but it's. If you're not measuring it, how would you know that?

Yeah, and without a doubt. And the worst, the worst thing you can do with your Facebook and Instagram ads is to set and forget them. Yeah, they're not things that should be put on at least initially. You can't just put them on and leave them for a month and sort of see what happens.

Yeah.

Nor do you need to be refreshing every 30 minutes and seeing what happens. The best. We've just got an amazing new group of members that we're doing some Facebook ads work with at the moment. And what we're talking about with them is that because a lot of them, it's their first sort of Time. Seriously, looking at Facebook ads, which is so exciting, and we're talking about that. We put these ads on and we just let them go for three or four days. Within these ads, we do the objectives and all those sorts of things that we'll talk about later on, but we do all those things and then we just let Facebook do its thing for a little bit. And then after three or four days when it's spent a bit of money and Facebook, like, picks winners for us and stuff like that, then we come in and we just make a few adjustments. We like, ah, well, that's working pretty well, but that's not working so well. Like, and we just let the market decide. And that's the biggest thing that too often as creatives, we get a little bit caught up in needing the video or the photo to be perfect and needing, like, if that. If that student's hanging upside down off the bar, then we can't put like. Or if this person's hair is out of place or the foot's not quite pointed perfectly. We can't put it up there. And look, maybe your audience resonates with that. And not putting. And, you know, not having that foot pointed might. Might not work, but you've just got to test it, because the only thing that matters. It's not what you like. That's not what me and Beck like. The only thing that matters is what a potential new parent is going to like. So if you put the. The perfectly pointed foot out there and it's the one that gets the leads, awesome. That's what you go with. But if you test that one against a kid that's not quite doing the right thing, and that second one gets all the leads, well, then you've got to take that feedback as well. The only thing that matters is the feedback.

Haven't we found that a lot with the ads that even with pause, like, I'll find that something that I think would never work has just worked so beautifully. And then other things that I think this is going to be, the gun thing that's going to work so well hasn't worked. Like, that's the thing. It's. There's. There seems to almost be no rhyme or reason to that in my head. But as you said, you've just got to trust the process and trust what is working at the time, right?

Yeah, without a doubt. And once you are more confident with understanding the setup and what you're doing, then all this testing stuff is actually just quite easy. That's one thing that the ads Manager does make it really easy for you to do like, ah, these two, these two photos and videos aren't quite working right now. Well, I'm just going to duplicate and just add a new photo and away we go. It's like it ends up being, once we know what we're doing and once we understand it, well then it ends up being a two minute process just to set something up and keep it going again.

I love it, I love it. And so people out there, Nath, you're just saying to check on YouTube, get your basics, start understanding it better 100%.

So like, just like, just start like you've got to, and you've got to commit to spending some money on it as well.

Right.

Like you've got to think, okay, like I'm willing to spend $250 to try doing a campaign properly and maybe that means spending $20 a day for 12 or 13 days, but getting something out there, having a clear objective around that and actually trying to, to achieve a specific goal with it rather than just, I'm going to put up, I've heard of need to put up ads so I'm just going to chuck them out there and hope that I get some inquiries. That approach probably isn't going to work.

Yeah. And I know that you're really big on teaching everyone in tribe and SJC about that side of things, like how much you know what sort of things you're going to get from how much you get. And all of those metrics are so crazy to know. And when you're knowledgeable on those, it makes a huge, huge difference as well.

Oh, absolutely. Like, and I think, look, to be honest, that could almost be a whole nother podcast.

Yes, I'm thinking that as well.

Should we, should we, should we? Because we, as always, we're like, do we have enough to talk about? Do we have enough to talk about? I think why don't we, why don't we pause here back for our audience and we will do the second half of that because there's loads more that I want to dive into. And rather than this being a big long 60 minute episode, let's do part two Facebook ads with Nathan and Beck.

I love it. I love it. Well, we look forward to chatting to you guys in part two. We hope you've enjoyed this and have been inspired. Of course. If you would like to learn from the amazing Nathan, you can certainly join our tribe. We would love to have you in there. It's $39 a week, which is a lot cheaper than those companies that you were talking about where they're charging, you know, thousand dollars a month. You can learn from Nath, step by step how to do this stuff, set them up and have the incredible success members have had. But we hope you have the most incredible week. And we will see you guys next week with part two. Thanks, everyone.

Thanks, everyone. Bye.

Bye. Bye.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dance Principles United podcast. If you'd love to learn more from us, we have a special offer just for our podcast listeners. Go to the link in the show Notes right now to get two weeks free in Dance Principles United Tribe. We would love to see you there.

Sam.