Facebook ads with Sophie Walton

Welcome to the latest episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. First of all, I hope you're having a fantastic week and the year is starting out well for you. Now today we are talking all things Facebook advertising. This is something that I've tried myself and to be honest, not been very successful at. So I'm really excited to have my guest who is Sophie Walton, who is the owner of brand and social media agency 312. So let's dig in and learn all about Facebook Advertising.

Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob Da Costa.

Before we jump into today's podcast, I just want to share with you some really exciting news and that is that The Agency Accelerator 12 week online coaching program is opening for enrolment on March 26th. Now I'll only be open for just over a week for the next cohort of members and I really hope that you can join me. So head over to DACostacoaching.co.uk AgencyAcccelerator that's DACostacoaching.co.UK AgencyAcccelerator and register your interest and be one of the first people to hear about the program and grab one of the limited seats. On the Agency Accelerator page you can read all about the program and you can also listen to some of the 2019 members who share their experience experience of being part of the Agency Accelerator group. So I look forward to joining you there. Meanwhile, let's get on with today's podcast. So I am super excited to have Sophie Wharton with us today and she runs a brand and social media agency called 312 who focus on servicing service based businesses. So welcome aboard Sophie, and can we start by just having you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and what led you to running your own agency?

Yeah, sure. Thanks very much for having me, Rob. So yes, I've worked in the marketing space for all of my career. So approximately 15 years I've worked at several leading marketing agencies throughout the Midlands heading up a real range of accounts from new homes, builders to leisure companies, hoteliers. So a real, real mix of sectors and industries across multidiscipline marketing tactics and strategies. I started my business 312 just over three years ago last November. And the main reason that I wanted to start my business was because I've always had a very entrepreneurial spirit and I think that I knew some time ago that I would really like to give running an agency of my own a real good shot because I'VE just had so much experience within the sector and something that I'm really, really passionate about doing. Going well so far in a bright future.

Okay, good stuff. So today we're talking about Facebook advertising. But before we get into that, what advice would you give anybody who's thinking about starting their own agency? Because obviously that's something that you've done fairly recently, and I'm sure people would value hearing any kind of nuggets of wisdom that you might have to share with them.

Yeah. Okay. So the biggest thing for me, I think the biggest learning within, you know, the past few months certainly is to really focus on the tactics and, you know, the things within your marketing space that you are good at and that you're interested in and that you love doing and delivering. When I first started my agency, we were offering SEO, Google AdWords, website design, email marketing, you know, a whole host, a whole plethora of marketing activities as almost a full service agency. And what we've particularly focused on over the past few months is just offering branding and social media to a specific audience. And already that is paying dividends, kind of niching down and really honing in on the things that we're really, really blooming good at as opposed to trying to be something to everyone. So that's my big piece of advice for the moment.

Okay. And all of the listeners to this podcast and readers of my blog and so on will know that I am a big fan of niching your agency because when you have a clear niche, it's much easier to identify your ideal target customer. And when you can identify your ideal target customer, you can create really good marketing and sales messages that resonate with them and help solve the pains that they have. So how did you go about deciding where you were going to niche your agency?

So I have always been extremely passionate about branding. And that's from, you know, the experience that I've had working on huge rebrands for, you know, big blue chip clients, working at agencies previously. It's something that I really enjoy doing and something that I know that I'm good at. Similarly with social media marketing, something that I've always, always been really interested in, passionate about, got bags of experience in. I know we do a great job for people and it's something we get asked to do time and time again and then further drilling down, obviously into what we're talking about today. Facebook advertising in particular, lead generation through Facebook advertising is an area that we've had great success in. You know, who doesn't want more leads and more clients. So, yeah, it's stood as well over the past few months just focusing on those few things. And just as you said, things have become much easier in terms of speaking about our services, the sorts of clients that we are attracting, and also our marketing message. Things are just much more clear and clarified and are working kind of in a different way for us than before when we were offering absolutely everything to everyone. So I'd certainly recommend it.

Okay, good. Thank you. Good, Good message for everybody. As I said, I'm a big fan of niching. It just makes life a lot easier. And of course, it means you can separate yourself out from the competition. So today we are talk all things Facebook advertising. And I was particularly interested in this topic because I have hands up in a space of honesty. I've been fairly unsuccessful in the few times that I've dabbled in Facebook advertising. So I'm definitely interested to hear what you've got to say today, Sophie. So my first question really is, why should agencies be thinking about Facebook advertising as part of their marketing and new business strategy?

Yeah, sure. So I think historically, Facebook advertising has been seen as something for B2C marketers only. And actually, if you have a good understanding of Facebook advertising and how to leverage and use it with a B2B audience and B2B campaign structure in mind, you know, there's some. There's some real, real exciting achievements to be made through through using this tactic. So. So, yeah, I mean, like I said, this does very much come down to your understanding of your ideal customer avatar. That's really, really important to know and to have defined before you set out on any marketing campaign. But Facebook advertising included, because there are such granular levels of targeting that you can achieve through a Facebook marketing campaign. So, yes, B2C historically is what it's been all about. But certainly if you're not trying it for A From a B2B perspective, you're potentially really, really missing out.

Okay, so you've kind of already answered my next question, which was going to be, isn't Facebook advertising just for the B2C the consumer marketplace? So you've answered that. How would you answer the kind of question that I get from a few of my clients when I've talked to them about doing Facebook advertising that they say, oh, I don't use Facebook for business. I just use it for kind of personal looking at family photos and fluffy dogs and all the rest of it? So how would you counter that argument that actually you can reach your target audience through Facebook advertising?

Yeah. So I think just going back to one knowing how to leverage all of the tools that are available within Facebook's advertising platform. So Facebook business manager and ads manager as well, if you haven't already kind of looked at this side of things, I'd strongly recommend that you go and do it. If you've got a Facebook page set up and you're already actively using that to promote your services and your products from your business, and then this is the first place to start. Obviously, if you're going to do Facebook advertising, you need to have a Facebook page that's representative of your business. And the first thing that I would do again before you launch any sort of Facebook marketing activity from a paid for media standpoint, is to install a Facebook pixel on your website. So what this will do is it's a piece of code generated from Facebook that tracks the visitors that come to your website and then follows them back onto Facebook to serve ads to them. So, so there you've already got a warm targeted audience that you can start to build on and use to market to that are already aware of your brand and your services.

Okay, so this is an example of what we call remarketing, right? So targeting people that have been on your website, they may have not engaged with you or bought anything, but you can use that audience through your Facebook Pixel to retarget them through a Facebook ad.

That's right, yeah. And you can set up the pixel in several different ways. So there's a, you know, a standard content view, for example, pixel that you can put on every single page of your website and you know, use that audience to retarget to with perhaps just almost like a brand awareness message. But if you want to further sort of drill down, perhaps you're, you know, an e commerce business or you want to retarget people that have landed on, I don't know, the social media marketing service page of your website. You can specifically build audiences based on people that have visited certain pages as well. So again, just going back to this idea that you can be really granular about who you're targeting. Facebook Pixel is an absolute necessity and, you know, will build the foundations of any successful marketing campaign that you're looking to run through Facebook.

Okay, guys, so that's the first thing we all need to do is get the Facebook Pixel up and running on our website. And I'm not particularly technical, but I know it's not that difficult to do that. I think Facebook sort of takes you through those steps, right?

It does, yeah, absolutely. So once you create a Facebook Pixel in Facebook Ads or Business Manager, it takes you through step by step how you can install that onto your website. There's also Facebook Pixel plugins that you can easily download to make the task easier. And obviously, if you've got a developer on hand that's able to add those snippets of code into your website, if you're not confident doing it, then obviously that's the best approach.

Okay, brilliant. So, okay, so we've got our Facebook Pixel up and running. So that gives us a certain audience. And if you're lucky enough to have thousands and thousands of people visiting your website every week, then obviously that can be your audience for your campaign. But obviously for a lot of us, we don't have that kind of traffic. So the big question that I had that I've really struggled with when I've tried on the occasion to use Facebook advertising, is how do you find your audience? So my audience is agency owners. And you can't go, as far as I can see anyway, you can't go into Facebook and actually say, I want to target marketing agency owners because you can't find that demographic specifically. So how would you advise people to start finding their audience when they are setting their Facebook ad up?

So there's a few ways that you can do this. Obviously, we've already spoken about our custom audiences that we can create via our website. You could also, off the back of using the custom audience data that's generated by, via your Facebook Pixel, create what we call a lookalike audience, which is basically Facebook taking that information from your custom audience pixel and recreating it. Recreating an audience based on the people that are in that audience, if that makes sense, and trying to find people that have similar likes, interests, demographics, and so on.

So let me just see if I can clarify what that means. So if I had a thousand visitors that the Facebook Pixel has identified from my website, then I can create a lookalike audience that will take that thousand audience and multiply up to say, 2,000, 10,000 people of people that look similar to that thousand.

That's correct. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. And what else can we do to identify our specific audience that we're looking to target our ads with?

Yeah, sure. Again, so if you think about your customer avatar and again, really think about, you know, what they might look like in terms of their education, their location, their interests, you know, are there specific titles that they might be interested in, like, I don't know, Marketing Week or the Drum, for example, if they're agency owners, all of these things, if a Facebook page, say the Drum or Marketing week for example, has over a certain number of likes, that will pull through as an interest based targeting into Facebook ads manager. And you can actually target people based on these specific marketing interests. So that will help to build up a profile of the people that you are trying to target. Facebook did take off the ability to target people by job titles some time ago, but the good news is particularly for us B2B marketers that that is reinstated now. So you can actually target alongside these interests by their job title as well. So if that person is on Facebook as the managing director of a marketing agency and it's clearly stated on their profile, you will be able to retarget and remarket to those people and build an audience based on this profile.

So, okay, so now we've put our pixel in place, we've researched our audience and we've created that audience. Now we need to build an ad. So how do we build an ad that's going to work on Facebook and resonate with our target audience?

As with any other marketing campaign, email marketing, lead nurturing and so on, you need to think about organizing a Facebook advertising campaign very much as a sales funnel process. So what you want to do is think about your campaign objectives for a start off. So typically Facebook campaign objectives are split into three categories, so awareness, consideration and conversion. So what is it that you're looking to achieve from your Facebook marketing campaign? So for example, if you're looking to increase awareness of your brand, you may choose the brand awareness objective when creating your campaign. You could be looking to generate website traffic, in which case the traffic objective would be appropriate. Or if you're looking for people to make contact via a web form or make purchases on your site, conversions would be the best objective to go for. If you're looking to get leads or build a database of people interested in your business. This is where you would look to manage a lead generation campaign which easily allows you to gather people's customer data actually on the platform. So think about, you know, as a customer, if you'd not heard of XYZ Agency before putting out some sort of a brand awareness Facebook campaign initially or a traffic generation campaign driving traffic to your website that you can then remarket to with a piece of value driven content and then perhaps on the bottom of that funnel retargeting those interested parties. So people that have interacted with your Facebook campaign or interacted with your website previously or indeed your Facebook page and targeting them with a Facebook generation ad. So to Perhaps to download a white paper or again another piece of value driven content in exchange for their customer information.

Where in the sales funnel do you think Facebook advertising fits? So let me just be a bit silly. For example, if I was an agency, it would make no sense for me to use Facebook advertising to try and get someone to sign up to my, you know, a six month campaign with me.

Sure.

So that's a bit of a silly example where you wouldn't use Facebook. Where do you feel like Facebook advertising fits in the sales funnel with or no like trust and that stuff?

Yeah, sure. So definitely, you know, all three, you know, obviously the know like trust pieces. Certainly from a brand awareness point of view, it's great for shouting about your brand and your business obviously to, you know, specific and predefined audiences. But also, you know, looking at strategies like I said about like the, you know, the lead generation aspect of Facebook marketing and getting people's customer data that way and begin to put them into a lead nurture sequence once you have an email address from them or their company information. Or perhaps you could look at some sort of a different tactic, you know, once you've kind of gone through the brand awareness stage and warmed people up to your branding and your, your services and think about offering a 30 minute strategy call via a lead generation campaign or similar where you can get people to start to interact with you on a much more personal level.

Okay, great. So I guess we're sort of saying top and middle of the funnel, but not bottom of the funnel.

Sure.

In other words, you're not trying to sell people your product or service, you're trying to get them to engage with you so that you can build absolutely no like trust journey with them. How do you measure success? I've now identified my audience, I've done the creative for my ad, I've worked out what kind of campaign I want to run and I've got it up and running. How do you measure the success of the ad once it's up and running?

Yeah, sure. So another thing that's really, really important when you are launching your Facebook advertising campaign is to split test different copy and creative. So I would always recommend doing before spending any money on Facebook is to start with a very, very small budget and split out your campaign into several different ad sets targeted at different audiences across different placements. So set up, although it's a little bit time consuming, it will pay dividends. Set up different ads for both mobile and then desktop placements so that your ad will just filter to either mobile or desktop audiences to certain demographics, all the audiences and so on that we mentioned previously. And just leave it alone for 24 hours. As hard as it is to not touch it and you know, mess with it. Just let those ads just run for that amount of time, small amount of budget. It could be, you know, three, five, ten pound a day and just see which one is getting the most interaction after that 24 hour period. Whichever one is getting most interaction, you know, this could be impressions, engagement clicks through to your website is the one to then put more budget behind. And those are the ones that you want to optimize and carry on working with throughout the duration of your campaign.

And how long do you think you should run a campaign for before you decide whether it's successful? So I get the A B testing, but at the beginning you said 24 hours. How long do you run a campaign before you decide Facebook is, is working for you or isn't working for you?

Obviously it depends on your budget and how much you want to spend testing out your Facebook advertising campaigns. But you know, the things to look for within the ads manager or business manager reporting tools is, you know, frequency. So if people are being served your ads more than three times and you are not getting any response from it, then yeah, definitely time, you know, cut your losses and move on. Or think about changing your advert copy and creative and getting that frequency level down or upping your budget a little bit so that more people are seeing your ad and trying to see if that alters the frequency and the level of interaction that way as well. So, you know, it really is, I say how long, how long is a piece of string sort of a thing. But you know, certainly sort of after a week, if you're not seeing the results that you want to be seeing from your Facebook ad campaign, then you know that there's something wrong there and you need to look at either trying something else or just stopping, full stop.

Sure. Okay, good advice and kind of leading on from that. And I know the answer is going to be how long is a piece of string? But how much should people be thinking about spending on Facebook advertising?

So Facebook advertising, when you are paying for media on Facebook, you're fighting for real estate. So you are up against, you know, all of the probably millions of advertisers all around the world competing for space on Facebook. So I would say to be in at least with a competing, fighting chance of your advert being seen, you want to be looking at a minimum of 10 pounds per day budget. Once you've Kind of gone through your initial, what we call, I should have said that rapid fire testing at the start of your campaign and seeing which ads are working best. But at a minimum, I'd say at least 10 pound a day.

Okay, great. So another question that's kind of a personal question is I. Last time I ran a Facebook ad I struggled surprisingly to get Facebook to approve it. They kept coming back and saying it wasn't approved. And so have you got. And obviously I wasn't doing anything obviously wrong. But have you got any tips for people when they are creating the creative bit and they're writing the copy, what they can do to ensure that they don't go through that same frustrating cycle of doing it. Facebook not approving it, trying to tweak a few things. They still don't approve it and they don't seem to give a ton of detailed feedback. So you're kind of left in the dark or like as me, as a non expert was left in the dark a bit.

Yeah, sure, it is difficult and certainly frustrating and you know, Facebook support is very sort of automated and robotic so you can be a little bit left at sea. So yeah, if you are not getting enough information about your advert and why it has been disapproved back from Facebook, unfortunately the only way of kind of counteracting that is to keep testing different adverts, different creative and you know, kind of work, work through the problem from there. What I would say is that it is really, really important to have good quality creative in your ads. So high res images or high res video assets that are seen to be low quality will get flagged with Facebook and you'll be seen as a poor advertiser or you know, someone that's not put in a good level of effort into the creative that they're putting into their Facebook advertising campaigns. Similarly, you shouldn't have too much text on images, so no more than a third over an image. That's often why adverts get disapproved. So you just want to be using nice, clear imagery, minimal text on your image, if none at all. And you know, really, really work on crafting some good copy as well. That makes sense. No grammatical errors in there and that speaks and resonates with your target audience. A few other things just to be aware of and you know, to test yourself on kind of being a good Facebook advertiser. Make sure that you have a privacy policy on your website and all of the landing pages that your Facebook advertising campaign leads to. Facebook's very hot on that, so they want to know that you are doing your due diligence as an advertiser and that privacy policy is really, really important on any, yeah, landing pages that you're leading your campaigns to. Similarly, with cookie notice bars, make sure that you've got those on your website as well. Any disclaimers from where you're making, you know, claims on your, on your advertisement, make sure there's clear links from your adverts to these pieces of information so people can review those and make sure that your ads are optimized correctly for each of the placements that you're looking to put them on. So when you launch a Facebook advertising campaign, again, one advert might look very different on desktop to what it will in WhatsApp and so on and so forth. So again, that can be a red flag with Facebook that your advert isn't suitable for the placements that you are looking to put your ad on. So don't just allow Facebook to auto allocate your adverts across its myriad of placements because it just won't work and it just won't be targeted and your ad could end up appearing, looking really bad in some corner of the Internet somewhere that Facebook owns. So those would be my tips.

Okay. And of course, every time it's placed somewhere that doesn't look very good, you're paying for that. So.

Yes. So wasting your money 100%. Yeah, definitely.

I guess the other thing about getting your ad approved, which I think was my problem, is you need to be careful about some of the words that you use. So I think the issue I had last time I ran an ad was that I had a sentence that said, you know, increase your profits. And I don't think Facebook like the word increase your profits or the sentence because they felt it was like making claims that weren't substantiated or realistic. And I think that's why my ad first of all got disapproved.

Yeah, that's 100% true. So Facebook doesn't really like the use of words, you or your. Because in, in that space, you are more than likely, you know, sort of like you said, making claims about your businesses, which may or may not be true. With the best will in the world. I think it's, you know, important not to promise something that you potentially can't achieve within the context of your Facebook advertising campaign copy. For example, you know, if you're a weight loss company and you're showing like before and after photos that are, you know, totally unrealistic or you know, saying that you're going to load up, lose 14 stone in, you know, a year or whatever else, just things that aren't achievable and going to happen. Facebook will not allow that sort of content on its platform from an advertiser's point of view.

So the sum total of this kind of leads us on to why should we think about outsourcing the Facebook management and the content creation to an agency like yourself? Here's a soapbox platform in a way to sell your services of why people should not try and do it themselves, but why they should outsource it to an expert agency like you guys goes.

Without saying that whilst Facebook is a fantastic platform to, you know, market to a target audience and, you know, hopefully get some customers through the door and start to speak to you, if you do not know what you are doing, you are likely to fail very, very quickly and could end up spending a hell of a lot of money and a hell of a lot of time with very, very little results. So we are trained Facebook marketers and I have access to a team of world class Facebook marketers that I can go and speak to to troubleshoot any campaigns that we are running for any of our clients. So we know what we're doing. We've got a great deal of experience in running Facebook advertising campaigns mainly for service based businesses and yeah, absolutely, we can offer a plethora of support from, you know, campaign setup and producing Facebook advertising blueprints, creating custom audiences, creating a sales funnel in line with your business objectives and running effective campaigns for you. That's not to say Facebook advertising is for everybody, it isn't. So we'll always be very, very honest and transparent and upfront about, you know, whether we think a Facebook advertising campaign is going to work for you and your business. And we'll spend the time with you looking at what could potentially be achieved are your target market audience on Facebook and how can we attract them and speak to them and get them to interact with your business.

Fantastic. So it all sounds really good. So if people want to get hold of you, Sophie, how do they do that? What's the best way of reaching you?

Yeah, sure. So you are more than welcome to check out our website, which is three12.co.uk, three word12.co.uk have a look around. We've got some great case studies and testimonials from previous clients and current clients on there. So feel free to make an inquiry through there or contact me personally on Sophie@3:12 co UK I'll be more than happy to help.

Good. And we'll include those contact details in our show notes. And I'm also going to include a link to customer avatar tool that can help you create your customer avatar, since we talked about the importance of identifying your ideal target customer in order to create engaging Facebook ads. So my last question that I ask all of my guests is if you could go back in time and give some advice to yourself when you were first starting out in your career, what would it be?

A couple of things. Very much harking back to the niching concept, Rob. I wish I'd have done that kind of FromFrom Day. Rather than come across as an agency that offers something for everyone and also huge thing. Don't be afraid to charge what you're worth. That is something that I have really, really struggled with from starting my agency. Certainly in the early days I was afraid to charge XYZ because I had massive imposter syndrome and wasn't confident enough in myself to charge the fees that I wanted to, which in short attracted some clients that weren't great for me or great for my agency. So be strong, be confident and know your worth.

Brilliant. Yeah. So Sophie's kind of banging on the second drum that I always talk about, which is value pricing and value selling and making sure that you're not making judgments on how much you're charging because you're not the person that's paying for it, the client is. And if you can focus on the value you deliver and the impact you make for your clients and it becomes much easier to charge higher fees that represent that value and impact and obviously you communicate that value and impact to your clients. So those are good pieces of advice. And if you're just starting out, then think about that niching and think about the pricing. Get it right from the beginning and then you won't fill your order book with low value clients that don't necessarily appreciate what you're doing. And if you're niche, you'll also find it much easier to identify your ideal target customers. So guys, I hope you found that useful. Sophie, some really good nuggets of advice there that I've learned some stuff today about Facebook's advertising. So if you are going to try and step into that, then you obviously get some good advice here. But also you can hear that it can be potentially quite an expensive way of advertising if you don't get all the components right. So there's quite a lot of arguments to say you should be outsourcing. It to an expert agency that can manage that process, monitor and make this tweaks in order to make sure that you get the best return on investment. So Sophie, thanks so much for being a guest with us today on the Agency Accelerator podcast.

It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much Rob. Cheers.

So there you have it. Some really practical advice if you're thinking about using Facebook ads as part of your marketing strategy, your awareness strategy, or your lead generation strategy. Now I think no matter what business you're in, Whether it be B2B or B2C, it is worth thinking about whether Facebook ads do work for you. As I mentioned in the podcast, I have tried Facebook advertising in the past to different levels of success. So I think having an expert like Sophie helping manage that campaign so that you are working out how to identify your ideal target audience and creating creative copy and images that really resonate with that audience across all the different platforms is really important. And I know even when I come to do some more Facebook advertising, I will look to someone like Sophie to help me out. So I hope that was really useful for you. Please share this podcast and if you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a review since it would really help me reach a wider audience. And make sure you join me for the next episode where we have more exciting content for you.