Top 5 Facebook Ad Tips (Part 2)

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.

Well, hello everyone and welcome to the Dance Principles United Podcast. I am joined yet again by the amazing Nathan. Today it's Beck here. How are you, Nathan?

Hey, Beck. Another, another week going really, really well. We are ticking along. We've got lots of exciting things happening both in Dance Principles Tribe and Studio Growth Club Land welcomed lots of new members over the last month or so. So really exciting there, getting to know those new studio owners and all the things that go with that. How about you? How's everything going in studio life?

Yeah, it's great. We're doing Dance for Sick Kids this week, which is such a fun week. I love it so much and raising money for that. We had a really great call today with our new tribe members actually about employment and all the things but Facebook ads, which is what we chatted about last time, did up quite a few times, and I probably said this in the last podcast episode, but I'm going to say it again. You know, you. If you're not advertising on Facebook and Instagram, how are you thinking that new people are going to come into your studio? I think that's an interesting thing of we have to keep marketing. And what I said to them with their staff, I'm really ranting now, but what I said to them with their staff, Nathies, no one ever could be expected to have 100% retention. Right. Like you're never going to keep every single child in a class. It is absolutely not possible. So as a studio owner, you have to be then marketing to get those people in because, you know there's going to be that little drop off.

Yeah, 100%. And that's something that I've really been talking about a lot lately. Beck, what you were saying about we just can't expect like students to stay with the one activity. And we often see studio owners at the moment lamenting that, you know, things aren't working what they used to be, you know, when we were growing up and all those sorts of things. But there's been a March shift in the last five years especially, right. That students are jumping between activities more and more. They're not necessarily staying as loyal to one sport or activity as they used to. And whilst, yes, on one hand, for our studios that presents a little bit of a problem, but it also presents a huge opportunity. So if we can get more in the mindset of the huge opportunity that presents us and the amount of students that are going to be out there consistently looking for new activities, then there's an absolute goldmine there. And exactly what you were saying as well, that how do we expect people to find us? We know that there's lots of ways that are out there and that for so long, Organic Socials was, you know, a massive shot in the arm and we didn't need to do much paid work on socials. But Facebook and Instagram have turned off that tap now. They've got us all. They've got us all hooked, they've got us all addicted. We saw the power that it can have, but now they've just raised the rent on it. They were giving us free rent for years and years. And the reality of it in 2025 is that they're going to charge us for it now and we can still get such good value as local businesses by doing that.

I love what you just said, that it's an opportunity, because I think we need to change our way of thinking and really realize that and think about it like that. We always talk about it in our tribe and sgc, see, is that it's like your shop window, your social media is your shop window. And yes, people have a lot more choices because there's a lot more shop windows out there that they can see now. But at the same time, you have the same chance as everyone else to show everyone what the amazing things that you're doing and your shop window. Right.

Yeah. And it's such a cheaper way to do it, like I think I was saying last week, or I always say it, so I can sometimes forget when. When I've said it, when I haven't. But, you know, we used to have to pay, like you said, for the shop window on Main street frontage. We used to have to pay exactly exorbitant amounts in rent, whereas if we were sort of out in the industrial area, then we were at a bit of a disadvantage. But that physical location disadvantage has completely disappeared in 2025 and it's been replaced by what we can do with our websites, our socials. And the gateway to that now is having to pay for that access to our socials to get the kind of. The kind of reach that we want to be able to generate consistent new leads.

Absolutely. Now, one of the things that I noticed, Nathan, it kills me when I see this is that, you know, I'll be scrolling away on Facebook and I'll see an ad come up for a dance studio, and I'm like, yay, they're advertising good on them. And then I look at the location and it's the North Shore, which would be a good hour and a half from me at peak hour, but probably an hour in non peak hour. Obviously, I'm not looking for a local activity that's going to be an hour away. I don't know about you, Nath, but I tend to pick. Pick the swim school that's three minutes away as opposed to 10 minutes away, because I want to spend the least amount of time traveling in my car. So where are they going wrong?

Yeah, absolutely. And that was like, you know, we touched on a few points, few key points in Facebook ads in part one of this last week. And definitely one of the key things we wanted to touch on this week because it's an absolute key pillar of running those successful paid Facebook and Instagram ads is making sure that we've got our audiences correct. To be honest, this has been, in the past, one of the things that has understandably caused studio owners and local businesses in general a lot of pain around it because the Facebook ads environment is just this huge, especially the back end where we set up this ad. Where we set up these ads is a huge tool, and there's just so many moving parts and audiences used to be a really, really confusing part of that. So people would go in, they try and set up their ads, they've watch, watched a couple of YouTubes or maybe listened to a few podcasts and heard about the importance of audiences and then just got a bit lost because it did used to be really complicated. But the good news is for us as dance studios, like you said, bec, like, you're only driving three minutes to a swim school. Right. We have a specific circle, essentially like a geographic net around us that the overwhelming majority of our clients are going to come from. Yeah. So that actually makes it a lot easier for us to pick the right audiences to show our ads to. We used to have to, like I said, like, even within our local areas, we used to have to get a little bit technical. We used to have to, like, do what they called retargeting and try and, like, warm our audience up by getting them to watch our videos and then doing all these fancy things. But the good news is with 2025, especially, sorry, with AI in 2025, we have been able to save ourselves a lot of time and money and Facebook's getting, and Instagram's getting better and better at showing those ads to the right people. Just generally. Right, like. And all the big companies guys are starting to clue in on this. I don't know about you, Beck, but I've noticed like, and look, I probably tune in more than others, but I've noticed that like, the quality of ads that I'm getting for like, products that I'm really interested in on my social feeds in the last six months just seems to have got more and more if I'm just a big nerd or if you've noticed something similar.

Oh, totally. I think there's always new stuff coming up on my feed that I'm clicking through to, which means I'm interested in it. And that's like, yeah, I've even opted into quite a few new brands lately because they're really targeting me so well. So I totally agree with that.

Yeah, 100%. And then when you click through, then their algorithm gets boosted, then they know that you're interested, then you're like, they're like, the platforms are getting better and better at doing that heavy lifting for us and saving us lots of time. So, yeah, with your audiences, the number one thing, like you said, Beck, is to make sure that, that we've set that specific radius around our studio. So when you're setting up your audience guys, the key thing is to make sure that it's not set still to all of Australia. Because you said like sometimes you saw one the other day on the north shore. The other day I saw one in Queensland. Now I'm two hours south of Sydney, so I'm obviously a long way from Queensland. So I'm not going to be taking my kids up to Queensland.

You're not going to take a 12 hour drive up to Queensland to go for a dance class. Maybe not.

Probably not. Probably not. But like I said, it's a very common and very easy mistake to make. And the problem with it is, is it just wastes you a lot of money. Because basically how Facebook and Instagram ads work is you pay for every set of eyeballs that get on that ad. So if you're showing your ad Australia wide, it's literally seeing thousands of thousands of sets of eyeballs that you're paying for, right. To see your ad that are never going to be interested in. So making sure, like I said, look for it in the locations bit. It defaults to Australia for everybody when you first go to set up it and it's done at the ad set level make sure that you can just, like, type in your town. But if you're going to do that, you make sure you type in all the surrounding suburbs. So what I always like to do and what I coach our members on is just to. You can drop a little pin and you can just like, set a radius of a circle to be 5km, 10km, 15km, depending on whether you're a metro or a regional area. So that's like, super, super important within audiences.

I love that. No, I love how. I know I always harp on about this with you, Nath, but I love how easy you make this stuff for our members. Because I know for me, like, I find this stuff really tricky. You know, give me an elite ballet student, and I can correct that any day of the week. But, you know, this stuff for me is really hard to understand. But you on the videos for our members just make it seem so simple.

Thanks, Bec. And look, to be honest, if I have the elite ballet student in front of me, then, you know, that's why we have different strengths. Right? But, yeah, and that, like I said, the key thing with audiences is to make sure, number one, we get that geographic circle right. And then there's not much else we have to do, really. We generally try, especially if you're in a metro area, we try and just, like, dial it in a little bit to show there's, like, these things called interests that we can pick. And a common mistake I see people making with interests is you can write things like that your potential audience is going to be interested in dance classes or jazz class or ballet or things like that. And if you do that, what you're doing is you're making your audience smaller and smaller. Now, the thing is, is that with a lot of new people that we're attracting through our social media, ads are often brand new to the world of dance. Yeah, of course, when they get into our world and we dazzle them and show them what an incredible community we are, then they're going to stay involved in the world of dance for a long time and paying us lots of money. But we're going to educate them on that over time. So we don't want to get, like, too narrow in the focuses. They might not even think about liking those sorts of things yet. So we just put like, one or two, like, little, little interests like parenting or children. Because what we want to do is we just want to give it the highest probability that somebody that sees our ads has kids and has kids, because if they have kids, they're more Likely to be a potential client of ours. And like I said, we used to have to get quite, like, technical and nitty gritty with these things. But the power of AI in audiences in the Facebook ads setup now just means that we can just be really broad and just show those ads to people within that area that are interested in pages to do with parenting or children, and away we go.

I love that. I love that. And so if we set our ad up, how should we be checking in on it? Do we just set it up, leave it, see what happens? Like, what do you think about that?

Yeah. And so this is, like, It's a. It's a massive, like, catch 22. We touched on it briefly last week, but it is something that is definitely worth chatting through again. The. The biggest mistake you can make is just putting them up and thinking done and letting them run for two weeks, three weeks without checking back in on them. Because. But then the other side of that is people that are like, well, I'm spending this money. I'm going to refresh the page every 30 minutes to see what's happening. Right? So we want to be. We want to be nicely in the middle. We don't want to be sitting there, sitting there refreshing the page all the time. But once we get our ads going, we want to give them a good sort of three to four days to find their feet. Because what the big algorithm is doing in the background is it's seeing what works and what doesn't. And this is why we were talking about last week as well, the importance of always having a couple of different things going on in your ads. So not just having one ad going at a time. So we set up a campaign with one ad set, but then within that ad set, right, we're right down at the bottom level we were talking about this last week is at the ad level that we put two or three ads up at a time. Because the beauty of that is Facebook wants to get feedback for itself as well. But there's also a chance that we might just miss the mark with what we think is a great ad. Just doesn't resonate with our audience. And you talked about it last week. I know as well, like, sometimes you've put up a video or a photo, you've put up, like, an epic one, an epic video and an awesome ad. And I'm like, beck, I need a third one place. And you're like, oh, I'm not sure about. I don't really like this one. But here, like, let's just put it up for now. And that afterthought, one blows the other two out of the park. So, like, it's. Yeah, it is. Sometimes it can be crazy. Look, a lot of the time, those awesome ones work as well. So, like, please make sure we're putting quality stuff out there as well. Please don't think that that's what I'm saying, but just making sure that we're always testing over those first three to four days. And so then the feedback we get from our ads dashboard, and it'll tell us, like, which one Facebook thinks is performing better. So it's really important to, like, yeah, to check back after a couple of days. Have your. Like I said, like, three's perfect. Like, we always talk about the rule of threes in, like, the Facebook coaching group that I'm in. So you might be testing, like, two images and a video as, like, three ads that are running at once. And then after four days, you come back in and you look at all your results and you're like, huh, okay, that video is crushing both the images. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn off the two images and just let all of my spend go to the video for the next few days and hopefully, like I said, then check back in after another two days. But, yeah, every couple of days, check back in and just see that feedback that you're getting from the market, from the people that are hopefully filling in your lead forms and contacting you about classes. Hopefully, that's what you're getting back. And we're listening to that feedback.

And what would I be looking for to know that an ad is being successful?

Yeah, without a doubt. So this is. This is the most important part. And what, understandably, again, gets so many people thinking that Facebook ads aren't for them, because there is literally hundreds and hundreds of data, like specific individual data points that you can look at for one ad. And when you're a multinational company or if you're an advertising executive, of course, you might be tapping into 30, 40 pieces of those data at a time. But good news is, as local business owners, we don't. I always talk to our guys about, there's really four that I look at. Okay. And it's all about, like, what are the things that we want our ads to do? Well, the first thing we need our ad to do is, is we need to capture people's attention. Right? Think about how you yourself scroll your phone. Right? How do you, like, scroll your feeds? Do you sit there and, like, have, like, five seconds, looking at each individual post. Absolutely not. We all like. And I'm doing it like, if you're watching the YouTube, maybe you'll see, but, like, I'm flicking, like, my thumb, like I'm scrolling my feet. Right. We all just like, if something, like, literally fraction of a second most of the time, if something doesn't grab us, we're onto the next one. Right. So you've got to be thinking, that's how your potential audience is doing it. So what we need our ad to do is to stop the scroll. So the way that we do that is there's a metric in there called clicks, and then in brackets next to it, it's got the word all a double L. So I look at clicks all, because that tells me, okay, like, how effective is this ad at stopping the scroll? Because when we click, that means that, you know how, like, you can click, see more on the text.

Yeah.

And it blows it out to read the whole text. Or maybe you got to swipe across or you want to look at the image a bit bigger. You tap and you click on the screen. So every time that you do that, it's recording that as a click. And so that's why that. That number for me tells me how effective it is at stopping the scroll. Now, you're going to need to run a couple of ads before you get a baseline for that number, because everybody's just going to be a little bit different. Because then next to that clicks all, you'll get another metric called cost per click. And that really tells us. That's what gives us. When I'm looking at ads that I'm running, that's what tells me. Right. So is an ad effective like a campaign. The last pause campaign back, we were getting about a dollar per click. Right. And that's what I look at for pause ads.

Yep.

So anytime we're going better than that, I'm like, sweet, let's keep it running. Once that cost per click starts to rise a little bit, that's telling me maybe people are getting a bit tired of seeing this ad. Let's get some new stuff out there. So that. That cost per click is the key one. Because that tells me, all right. How engaged are people and how effective is my ad at stopping people scrolling past and actually taking some interest?

Love it. Is that all four?

No, no, that was two. We're only halfway. That's okay. But then the most important one now, we talked about last week that there's lots of different objectives that we can set up with our Facebook ads. But for most people, I'd love you to start setting up leads campaigns. So whether that is, we used to run messages campaigns, but we've seen the effectiveness of those come down Facebook lead form ads at the moment is what all lead formats they're called because we can do them on Instagram as well. Obviously lead form ads is what we're seeing being the most effective and efficient for bang for your buck at the moment. So obviously key one you're going to look at is just how many leads have you got in? If you've spent 200 bucks in the last 10 days, how many leads have you got in? Nice and simple, right? And then off the back of that is the other metric that's that ties in with that is the cost per lead. So if you've spent 200 bucks and you've got 10 leads in, well, your 200 divided by the 10 leads means you're getting about $20 per lead, right? And again, like people always ask, like, you know, what's a benchmark? What's a. It varies place to place, right? So Paul Studios is in Western Sydney, highly saturated market with not only loads of dance studios, but remember with our Facebook ads, guys, we're competing against karate schools, music schools, swim school. Like anybody that's vying for kids activities, they're our competition in ads land as well. So the amount of those things in the Penrith area is ludicrous. So if we can get $20 per lead for the pause ads, then we're stoked. But some of our members in more regional areas get $10 or less as well. So, like if they were getting $20 a lead, we'd be like, what's going on here? Like, there's something not working here. So you've always got, like I said, with all of these things, you've always got to like run a few yourself to get your baseline and then just be consistently trying to improve it.

I love it. And I know as well, like, I know some people will think that that's a lot of money and it is, but when the math on the fact that that person then enrolls and how, you know, even if they say for a term that you've just made $180, even if they do one class, it's just like, you've got to, look, you've got to spend money to make money, right? Nathan, I want to really say that to everyone out there. You must spend money to make money. It's just so important to do that.

Like I said, like that Example where it was $200 and people are like, oh, I only got two enrollments from that. Like you own, you got two enrollments from that. Like you said, like that means you spent $200 two times. 180 is $360 just in the first term. So you're already in front. Like that ad spend is almost double, like paid for itself. And so like imagine what like once you get forced, you if you got four or five enrollments from that, like that number just starts getting exponentially bigger. And it's like I said, like, hopefully as a business owner, guys, if I said to you like, hey, like, if you just give me $200 today, I'm gonna give you $360 back in two weeks, I hope you'd take that on because like, that's what it is, right?

Yeah. And it's, it's not seeing it as an instant thing either. Like, you know, that student will most likely stay for two, three terms, hopefully for a lifetime. They'll buy costumes. They probably buy uniform. They probably opt into. There's so many other things that people opt into. Then maybe they tell their friend about it and their friend comes along and it's just that effect of that. I was saying that to tribe members today, Nath. Like, you just have to realize the follow on effect of really nurturing that lead, understanding that that person is probably going to bring so many more other people in.

Oh, you were talking about from your perspective going to your gym, right?

Yeah.

Like how many people have you taken along to your gym?

Well, I'd say there'd be more than 10 at $65 a week. So, you know, there's probably 650. Interestingly, Nathan, he's a smart business owner. He knows the power of, you know, having the local dance studio person there. And he's asked to interview me for an ad for his. Yeah, smart. Of which of course I've said yes to. Yeah, but I think that's exactly it. Like, and I see this even with some of our preschool parents, you know, they bring their preschooler in, their preschooler starts loving it, then the cousins start coming, then their friend from down the road starts coming, and then their, you know, sibling comes because they turn two now and they started. That's what I'm talking about. Like there's just so many people that come into the world because of that one person. And I was saying to the tribe members today, like, just nurturing that lead when they come in and really talking to them, because that's what BFT did, they picked up the phone and spoke to me for an hour. They spoke to Tim separately for an hour. And we're so invested.

Surely Tim's conversation would have been closer.

To three hours, because I'm sure it was especially, especially about a gym. Can you imagine?

Yeah. And then like, like you said, like, it's just like, so, so important. And this is what, like, get your Facebook ad started. But this is what we really love diving into with our members to then zoom out and look at the whole bigger picture of like something that you're super passionate about is consistently doing this back. Because sometimes, you know, sometimes they don't click directly through the ad and fill in that form. And so we don't get the little like plus one in our, you know, leads in the Facebook ads manager. But once we start zooming out and looking at our studio as a whole over three months, six months, 12 months, and we look back and you're like, okay, I've spent consistently over this last six months, Facebook says I've got this many leads through. But when you actually zoom out, because what so many people do, and like, I'm sure so many people listening to this as consumers, you don't necessarily click through the ad, but you click through to the Facebook or the Insta page. You have a little bit of a stalk around there. Maybe you drop them a dm, maybe you get on over through via their profile. You get on over to the website and you put in a form through there instead. Like, so, like, sometimes it's not all about that number that shows up in just in the ads manager. It's the amount of growth that your studio then starts having over those 3612 month periods by staying consistent with it.

And we've seen so many incredible results with staying consistent. And I was just gonna shout out to Robin from Prodigy, because I know when we first started working with her, I think she had maybe 150, 170 kids. And she told us the other day that she just hit 700 and it is. And I know when we first met her, she didn't think that Facebook ads work. She wasn't using them consistently. And it is. And her area is so saturated, it's crazy. I think it's worse than Penrose. She has I don't know how many dance studios over there, but there would be at least 20 or 30 within a tent.

She's got one in the same complex as her.

Yeah.

As well.

Yeah, yeah. Crazy, like huge. But that consistency of marketing and she is doing all the things. We always say that do all the things. But that consistency of marketing has just been such a game changer for her. And not just for her, for so many of our members that are just, you know, getting it right. First of all, you've got to learn and in my opinion, nice, the best person to learn from and he does videos in tribe all the time. So getting it right, understanding it and then just continuing to be consistent with it is the key.

Yeah. 100. 100%.

Well, thank you so much friends. I hope you have really enjoyed today's episode. If you are interested in learning from Nath on all things Facebook and Instagram ads, jump into tribe with us. We would love to have you come along the ride. It is an amazing group of studio owners and yeah, we love supporting everyone and helping them out. So thanks Nath. You are the best and a world of knowledge.

Thanks so much Bec. Always love chatting. Thanks everybody.

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.