180: Mastering Meta Ads for Creative Entrepreneurs with Laura Ball

Welcome back to the Professional Creative. I'm Bonnie and today we're diving into a topic that's on the mind of so many creative business owners and that is digital advertising. Specifically how meta ads can be a really powerful tool to grow your business. So whether you are an artist, a designer, or any type of creative entrepreneur, today's conversation will help you see how ads can fit into your strategy with insights that you can actually apply. Joining me today is Laura Ball. Now, Laura is my personal ads manager. She's an expert in meta ads who's helped clients achieve incredible results. From six figure ad spends to multimillion dollar launches, you're in for a real treat. Let's go to Laura.

I'm Bonnie. Christine. And this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life.

But when I first set out to

become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer.

Fast forward to today.

I'm not only licensing my artwork, also all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative podcast.

Laura has been in marketing and communications for over 15 years and she specializes in meta advertising. She works with impact driven entrepreneurs to help them grow their businesses through digital products, services and strategic ad campaigns. And Laura has been my meta ad specialist for My goodness Laura. Several years. Like four or five, I think.

Well, I think we're going on four. Yeah, four.

Laura, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited.

I am so excited to introduce you to my audience because I have just adored working with you so incredibly much. And they're going to just love you too. I think you make something that is overwhelming and complicated, so simple and easy to digest.

Oh, thank you. Yes, I try to because it is a little intimidating and it's a little scary, especially when you're spending your own money on ads and it's nice to kind of have a wing person, you know, in your corner kind of showing you the ropes and do this or try that and it's okay. And it's a little stressful, so I get it.

It sure is. Though I would not say you're my wing person. You are the pilot, Laura. So I kind of want to go back to the beginning. You've worked in marketing for over a decade. Speaking, specializing in meta ads. Tell me what first led you to doing this, what led you down this path and what drew you into helping creatives specifically amplify their reach?

Yeah, so, well, I've been marketing and communications is my background. I was in kind of corporate for a while and then I decided to be a stay at home mom and I got a little antsy and was wanting to kind of use my skill set and really kind of dive into marketing again. And I found Facebook advertising, believe it or not, through Amy Porterfield's first course called Jumpstart to Facebook Ads. Like, yeah, it was back in, I want to say 2017 and it was a little like $97 course. And I just fell in love. And I think the reason why I fell in love so much is because I'm very results driven and it gives, it gave me that, that opportunity to get results for people quickly, whether it's leads or sales or whatever it might be. And also the targeting which has changed since, was so robust. And I loved the fact that if you were looking for the 40 year old woman who liked yoga and shopped at Whole Foods, I can serve an ad to that person. I just, it excited me because I think my love of market, it has changed since then, but we can kind of get into that a little bit later. But that's kind of where I started. And I think it because I'm able to help creatives kind of share their message. I'm very passionate about education and mo. All of my clients are very impact driven and they want to serve their audience and help them have better lives through their businesses. And so by helping my clients educate people around the world, it just kind of is full circle for me. It just really, it sits very well with me and that's important to me. So yeah, that's kind of how I got started.

I think that's why I love working with you so much because we just very much have the same heart. We very much see the world in similar ways. And I'm super passionate about paid traffic because I, I spent 10 years growing organically, which I think is super important, still a focus, but also just the moment that you decide to take a bet on yourself, on your business and put a little bit of paid traffic behind what you're doing, everything changed, and it's at our fingertips. It's something that we all have access to, which I think is so incredibly powerful. But also I'm a big fan of not doing everything ourselves, especially when it's not in our zone of genius. And so while I did spend a few years tinkering with my own ads, having you come on board to do them has been the best decision I've ever made. So I think everyone would probably love to hear a little bit more about some of the projects we've worked on. And I was going to let you pick one. Like what. What has been one of your favorite projects with Team Bonnie that you've worked on?

So before we started the ebook, I would say launches, because I love launches. I love live launches, I love the excite. I kind of like thrive on the stress a little bit. It's a little stressful, but it's more excitement than anything. And again, knowing that we're gonna see these big results at the end, it just is really exciting. But when we started the ebook like that just kind of got underneath me, like seeing those instant results and the roas for these, for this off, I was like, oh, my goodness. Oh my goodness. Like, it's just it again, because I'm so results driven. I want to, I want to get the results for my clients and then I want to figure out how can we get them to be better, you know, not kind of, you know, sit there, but like, how can we improve them? So I love your ebook. And I think with your ebook, it's just, it touches everything. It's the perfect offer for the perfect person, for the perfect price point. It has all of the, all of the things and it works. And so that's been exciting me so much. And so I'm excited to kind of expand on that. Not only I'm not a funnel expert, but I'm like, okay, how else can we generate more revenue? Let's have an order bump. Let's have a one time offer. Let's do this, let's do that. And again, it's just kind of following it all along and tracking it and seeing where we're moving the needle and where we're not moving the needle and how do we improve that? So that just excites me. I just, I get nerdy when I look at that.

Yeah. So the ebook Laura's talking about is our licensing handbook. If you want to go look at it, it's bonniecristine.com handbook and we have been running paid traffic to this, and the goal has been for the ads to just pay for themselves. Like, if we could break even, right. We're happy and we've gone beyond that. So you, you mentioned Roas. Explain what Roas is.

Yeah, Roas is the return on ad spend. So if we've spent $5,000 on ads, what did we make? Did we make $10,000? So it would, you know, we're more than breaking even. So that's what we're really looking for. And with something like an ebook, it is important to, to mention because I see so many, like, I see so many ads saying, oh, just do this and you'll become a millionaire. And you know, like, have this little tiny offer and you can do this. And it. With small products like this, it is about, like you said, breaking even and really kind of creating a list of buyers. So that's the benchmark. But of course, with me, I'm like, I want to make money. I want to make, I want to make a little bit. Let's make a little bit more money. You know, how can we do that? So it's having somebody on your team that's not only like just okay with breaking even, but how can we increase it a little bit? So, yeah, yeah.

Like, what if you could just grow your email list for free because you're running ads to a small offer? We call that self liquidating. It's a beautiful thing.

It is, it is. And it's really trying and, and it's something that requires a lot of testing and tweaking. Yours out the gate just kind of like hit it like it really did. And so we're really proud of our handbook.

We're really, we're really mostly proud of the results it's giving.

Yeah, it's amazing. It is, it's amazing. It is. And so having an offer like that and it just, but for some people, it doesn't work that way. And so it is important to test and see where the bottlenecks are. What are they getting to the landing page? Are they, are they not converting? Are they getting to the checkout page? Where, where's the drop off? And, and kind of working through that.

So talk to me a little bit about your approach when it comes to creating ads for creative entrepreneurs. There's often these, there's two parts to every ad, right? The creative and the copy. Well, there's more than that too, like the headline and the CTA and all this stuff. But when I think about it, the biggest two, right. Are the creative and the copy. But I Would just love to hear from your perspective what your approach is.

Yeah, so I would say kind of depends. So I have a lot of clients that have creative teams, so they will provide me with copy. I try to provide them with suggestions. And I think the main theme with meta ads these days is variety. Any ad manager I talk to, meta rep, we now have a meta rep, which is very exciting. And so I've been learning a lot from them. And having a variety of different creative is key. So static images, reels, videos, B roll, gifs, anything with movement, having the messaging on the copy be something very like what's in it for them. So you want to, you want to kind of provide the, you know, what's, what's the transformation that this person's going to get when they download this freebie or buy this product. But variety is important because not everybody watches videos. So we want to make sure that we're appealing to people who like the static images like, you know, the reels, like videos like B roll. So variety is probably the, one of the biggest words that I've been telling clients as far as creative and copy and speaking is directly to your avatar so that you're, you're, you're, you're kind of getting in their feed and you're, they're saying, yes, that's me, that is me. I am the creative person. And you know, you're repelling people that are not your, your avatar.

We would never want to repel someone though, right, Laura? Well, I'm just kidding. I think that's something that's super hard for us to wrap our arms around. But one of the most important things right is. Well, I always talk about it as like, you want to be a magnet. You want to attract the people that are right to you and equally repel the people that are not right for you. And that can be, you know, challenging, but it's so important.

It is, it is.

Okay, so you talked a bit about how targeting has changed over the years, so I would love for you to just dive into targeting what is true today. I think probably one of the biggest concerns of our audience is like, how to figure that out, how to even get your ad in front of the right people. So talk to me about how that's evolved and what you're seeing today.

Yeah, this has been a very tough pill for me to swallow, and it's something that I have to kind of embrace and really lean into because Facebook is moving away from advertiser inputs for targeting and more algorithm driven targeting. And by That, I mean, it's using your pixel data, your ad creative, your ad copy to find the right people. So it's literally crawling the images and reading your copy and trying to use that along with your data on people who've already opted in or purchased to find more of those people. And it's less about the she follows Amy Porterfield or she follows Marie Forleo. Those are now going to be seen as more suggestions. So we really don't know where Facebook is. Kind of, we're having to trust Facebook and as an ads manager, that is so hard to do. We're trying. We have to, but we have to learn to trust this machine to find us the right people. Facebook is definitely getting a little bit more streamlined with their how people build campaigns. They want it to be simplified so they're requiring less inputs and they're saying, hey, let us do the job, let us do the work. We will find you the right people. And that's something that's hard to kind of wrap your head around because we want the control. And I am very controlling. And so for as long as I've been doing this, I've been trying to control who the audience, who the ads are being seen to. But now there is something called audience expansion. And even if you put specific detail targeting in there, audience expansion is on by default. There is no way to turn that off. So Facebook, if the algorithm feels you're going to get better results outside of that scope of the audience, it's going to serve ads to those people. Now, there are ways to, you know, exclude people still. So if, you know, somebody purchased this product before, you don't want them to see an ad, there is a way to do that, but it is getting a little bit more broader. And I can see them really going away with inputs and detailed targeting and moving over to just completely broad targeting, which is scary. But it does work because I've used it for your campaigns and we are generating sales, not just leads, but generating sales using the broad targeting. So I think advertisers really need to try to embrace it. There is a way to switch back where, you know, there's. In the ad set level, there's a way to switch back to the original placements. And most people are still doing that. But I'm trying to lean into those changes. So I think it's really important to dial in on that creative and have the creative we say it's gotta be scroll stopping. And scroll stopping could really is something that resonates very well with your audience. And for you, for your brand, it's seeing the fabric and seeing you designing something. And people are like, oh, I do that and I want to do more of that and I want to have a business that does that and I want to make these products. So really kind of a lot of video and B roll work very well with that. And that's going to kind of feed the algorithm and hopefully show it to the people that are interested.

I get lost in all of it in the best way. I love it so much. I was such a nerd with it. So when you, when you talk about creative and let's talk about copy too. So copy is the written part of an ad and, and the creative is the image or the video part of the ad. What are you seeing or are you seeing anything that just really seems to work? Is there like a type of copy or a hook or is there a type of image right now that you're seeing is just working, or is it truly a matter of testing?

It's honestly a matter of test. Well, it's a matter of testing because every client's account is so different. So I'll give you an example. Not necessarily on copy, but I have a client who's a pet photographer and I've been working with her for years and she does a summit every year. And so for me as a business owner who runs Facebook ads, when I see an ad for a summit, I want to see who's speaking, like, who are the speakers, what am I, you know, what, what, what, who's on there. But so we run ad creative that features all the speakers and then we run ads that talk about better high speed edits of, you know, like B roll. So what they're going to learn at the summit. So for, specifically for this summit, it was about editing. So we did a lot of before and after images. Like here's an image now and here's after the editing. And those images performed better. And I think it's because, you know, which is surprising to me because I would think it would be the opposite. So it's just a matter of testing. And now that we have that data, we do more of what is working and just kind of different variations. But as far as copy, I think I just recently got back from a conference and Ryan Deiss, who is the CEO of Digital Marketer, he was talking about problem statements and really dialing in on those problem statements that these people are having. They have a problem, you have the solution, what is the how? How is your product going to solve that?

Problem.

So, but we've tested various different hooks. We've tested urgency hooks, benefit statements, problem statements, any, you know, a lot of different. Create a lot of different copy hooks to see where we're moving the needle. And for one of your campaigns, the urgency one is definitely performing best. And it's that fomo, they don't want to miss out on this limited time offer or, you know, this deal. So I think, but I think having a variety of different copies and seeing, letting the data tell you what's working and again trusting that Facebook is, is serving it to the people that are going to eventually convert into a. As a buyer.

So one mistake that I think I made, and probably lots of people do similarly, is that for many, many years I would run ads around surrounding a launch. And I used to think about it almost like a faucet. I turn the water on, I'd turn it off. And after, you know, we would run a campaign, I would just turn it completely off for months. And a couple of years ago we started focusing on at least a trickle year round is just having some, some paid traffic running in the background, whether we were actively promoting something or not. And so can you talk to me about ongoing ads? Do you recommend them? And then why are they so beneficial?

Yeah, I mean, gosh. So a lot of, a lot of things we. It takes, you know, I mean, you've heard this. It takes like seven to 13 touch points before somebody takes action on a product. So it takes time to nurture people that are, you know, new to this brand. A lot of times people might not buy right away. There are people that are ready to buy, but then there's people that are the thinkers that want to wait and want to get to know you and understand you and trust you. So running ongoing ads, whether it's awareness ads or list building ads or a combination of both. I know we do both. We do some podcast ads. Sometimes it brings in that cold traffic during the times when you're not launching and it allows you to nurture them throughout those months. So they're getting emails from you, they're opening the emails from you, they're seeing the podcast, they're listening to the podcast, they're engaging with your ManyChat bot. So they're taking those steps during the off times, the off periods, so that we're priming them and ready for that main offer. It also helps to reduce the cost. I will always run ads to your warm audience once we have your main workshop going or when it's starting. But. And the the lead costs are typically cheaper for your warm audience because they know like and trust you. They know you're going, you know, they know what you're about. And so when we bring those leads in, they're cheaper and they tend to convert at a higher rate because they've been on your list for a while. And we know that. I mean, I've had several clients that have had people on their list for years that haven't purchased and then finally they purchase. So it takes that time to nurture them. And as far as the types of ads that people could do, we've done just general awareness campaigns. I kind of have this waterfall strategy where we're bringing in cold traffic through a video and they're engaging with the video, they're watching it, they're clicking on it, they're commenting. And then after seeing that video, they see a series of other ads that are just. There's no call to action. It's just, this is who I am, this is my brand. It could be testimonials, it could be authority building ads behind the scenes. People love seeing you in your garden and your family just getting to know you as a person. Because people want to buy from a person and not a logo, you know, or a business or a brand. They want to buy from you, Bonnie. So they love seeing that. And so that those ads are generally run after immersion closes and we just bring people in and then eventually what I'll do is retarget them with hey, here's a free lead magnet, here's a guide, and then here's an ebook and things like that. So, yeah, I think it's just, it's just really important. Even if it's a very small budget, you can do an awareness strategy like that for, you know, $10 a day, $300 a month. And I think with marketing, it's part of your business. You have to market your business and you have to pay for that. I think of billboards like the beauty with Facebook ads is you can measure these results. You can see what you're getting or what you're not getting or where the issues are. You pay $60,000 for a billboard, you have no idea if people are, if that, what, what the return on ad spend is for that. So that's why I think I love Facebook ads and any kind of digital marketing ads really, because you can measure the results of it. So, yeah, I think every business just has to have a small marketing budget. Whether it's $300 for, you know, a month or $30,000 a month. You know, you have to kind of start somewhere.

So, you know, I think the person that has the hardest time with this are those of us who've been around for a while and we're so used to kind of building it and people just come and it actually just doesn't work like that anymore because of the way, you know, everything is built now. It really is worth adding a little boost to what you're already doing just to get it seen by more people. Like, it's kind of like working smarter, not harder.

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So let's talk to the person who's maybe never run an ad or they're they're convinced and they're going to consider it in the next 12 months. Can you talk about a handful of things, maybe three things that you would suggest they do or be have ready or prepare before they even get to like the campaign level.

Yeah. So the first thing I think one of the most important things is to lock down your business account. And when I say that, I mean, you know, you will create. You know, most people will have an ads manager, a business manager, and that's just the dashboard that you need to run the ads. You want to make sure two factor authentication is turned on for everyone in that business.

Yes, yes, you do. Been there, done that with you, Laura.

Yeah. So hackers will find a way to get in. So I think that's probably the biggest, most important thing. Make sure you're kind of locked down. Make sure the people that are in there are, are the ones that are either running the ad accounts or own the ad account. We don't want too many people in there because we also don't know what, what our team members have on the outside of their business. Like they might have multiple Facebook personal profiles, and that is sometimes frowned upon with Facebook and somebody can get in that way. And so I think just kind of keeping it really tight, knowing who's in there and also having a trusted partner, as you know, in your business as well. So God forbid you get, you know, something happens with your ad account and you have a way of getting into your ad account through your spouse or a business partner or a team member or things like that. So that is probably the biggest thing I would say make sure it's, you know, locked down and everything's connected properly. The other thing would be tracking. I'm kind of obsessed with tracking because again, I'm very results driven and I want to know for sure if we're spending this money, we're getting this money back, or we're getting these amount of leads back. And sometimes Facebook lies. I had, I was on a coaching call with someone and she was kind of new to ads and she was like, hey, you know, I'm seeing, you know, we're getting like, you know, 30 sales a day. It's great. You know, I've been reporting this back to the client and I'm like, have you checked in your CRM and your payment processor that you're in fact seeing those sales? And she was like, like she turned white. And I was like, don't always trust Facebook because the tracking, although we have the Facebook pixel and we have Capi, which is Conversions API, those are just two pieces of tracking, you know, where you can track the server, you can track data that comes from the servers, data that comes from the, the browser that helps. But it's always, it's not always perfect. So always go back to what you see in your client CRM to make sure that's a true, you know, return on ad spend and those results are definitely accurate. And if it's not accurate, you kind of have to figure out why it's not accurate, why is it over replaced, recording or under reporting. So, so that's one thing. That's the second thing is tracking. And the third thing I would say is just know what your, know what your strategy is going to be. Know what your goal is if you want to grow your email list. Okay, well how much am I willing to spend? And I'll get into this in a minute and lose possibly to, to grow your email list. So do you have historical data? If you have historical data and you've run ads before and you know, maybe your lead costs are $5 or $2, then you know, okay, well if I want to get a thousand leads, I need to spend X amount of dollars. So know what your goal is. Know that you're, whether you're list building or you're doing an slo, which is the self liquidating offer or if you're doing, you know, a sales campaign or a webinar, know what the have everything buttoned up. Not only just on the outside, but have your funnel buttoned up. What is the journey that this person is going to go through? They're going to opt in. Do you have emails ready for them to get to nurture them, to put offers in front of them? Have those things kind of laid out and literally you can just do it on a piece of paper like here's an ad and then they're going to go to this landing page and then this thank you page and then they're going to get a series of emails and and then track them throughout the whole journey to see where they're dropping off. So those would be the big things. There's so much more, but those would be the big things. I think just boosting posts is probably not a great strategy. Boosting posts because inside of Ads Manager there's different objectives. So if I want leads, I will select a specific ad objective. If I want sales, I want a specific ad objective. When you boost posts, the objective for that is to get eyes on it. So in some cases it's good. If you just want engagement or you want somebody to watch a video or make comment or share it, then that's great. But if you want them to take action like buy something or opt in for something, another objective would be better for that. So boosting posts is not always the best strategy. It can be used absolutely in the mix, but not the only thing.

Okay, that was really helpful. I love just, just mapping it out on a piece of paper to see what the flow even is to make sure that you've got all the boxes checked. Super smart. I want you to talk about data, a little bit more data. I, I love a data driven decision and I think a lot of people kind of stand at the edge of Facebook ads because they feel like they might be throwing money down the toilet and it's really not the case. If you track the right things, you can be assured that you're getting the results that you want, where you want them. So talk to me about what data you like to track. Facebook tracks absolutely everything and you can kind of pick and choose what you want to pay attention to. So what are like the top few pieces of data that you love to track for a campaign?

Yeah, so it, and it depends on what I'm doing. So I track my clients ads daily, weekly and monthly. And I don't always make decisions on what to do with the ads on a daily basis, but it helps me see where things are dropping off. So if I'm running like a list building campaign where I'm just trying to get people to opt in my KPIs, my key performance indicators are what is my lead cost, what is my click through rate? So are they clicking on the ad, are they going to the landing page? And what is my landing page convers conversion rate when they get to the landing page, are they opting in? So those are probably the big three things that I'm looking at. If I'm getting a decent cost per lead, can I get that lower? You know, so then I look at other metrics like okay, well what can we try here to try to get that a little bit lower? If the lead cost is high, then I'm, I'm looking at, well why is it high? Is it the cpm which is the cost per meal, the cost to show it to a thousand, get a thousand impressions? If that's high, I might want to try a different audience. So there's, there's a lot of like if this, but that type thing. So if your click through rate is high but they're not converting on the landing page, then we know that it's a landing page issue. Maybe there's like a mismatch between the ad and the landing page there. They think one thing and they get there and they're like oh no, that's not what I thought this was. Or you know, if your, if your click through rate is low, okay, well maybe it's the, the creative or the copy or the image. Something on the ad is not resonating. So we might want to test a new image again doing different tests for one at a time to kind of see where we move the needle. Now when we're launching, we have to make these like quick game day decisions. So we're often like looking at data every day and kind of making decisions and we're often spending a lot of money so we have enough reach on our ads that we can make those quick decisions. But for list building, if you're just ongoing list building, those are the, the metrics that I would look for. And as far as, you know, what to spend on ads or you know, being maybe a little hesitant to spend money on ads, I think if you've never run ads before, you really are paying for data and you're paying to learn about your audience. Who is clicking on the ad, who is converting, are they then converting into a buyer? Again, that's always the end goal. So we want to build that funnel so that they are actually then seeing an offer. So not only just a lead magnet as a freebie, what does it take to get them to open up their wallet and buy something from you? So when you're doing a list building campaign, don't be shy to offer them something in an in your email sequence like hey, here's you know, my membership, here's a mini course and tracking those people to see where, you know where your sales, sales conversion rate is. So but yes, you're, you're absolutely kind of paying for data. And when I have clients that come to me or coaching clients specifically because sometimes my coaching clients, they're not in a position to have an ads manager so they want to have me as, you know, their coach. And I'll say, well, what are you willing to spend to get data to learn? And you know, we kind of reverse engineer. Well if we think your lead costs are going to be $3, we're looking and we want to bring in a thousand leads. We're looking to spend X amount of dollars and we just kind of work from there. And then again, if they're showing offers for products, I work with them to say, okay, well when, you know, at what point did people start buying through this funnel? Was it a 10 day funnel, was it a 5 day funnel and when was the offer made and did they buy and what does that conversion rate look like? And then we use that data to then test and tweak and test and tweak. And so it's a very long process. Sometimes, you know, if you're working with a smaller budget. But that doesn't mean you don't do it. You have to do it and you have to start Somewhere. And it's amazing the data that you can collect from Facebook and learn, you know, to just only enhance your, you know, enhance the ads the next time.

Well, I have a strategy that might help because budgeting was my next question, so we can talk about it a bit. You know, I used to decide how much I was willing to spend and then kind of throw it towards ads. But then I started doing some research on how much an actual business, like business out in the world spends on paid traffic. And it's kind of a big percentage of their gross annual revenue. And so that made me feel so much more comfortable putting a percentage to mine. So I don't even know if you know this, Laura, but I dedicate 8% of my gross annual revenue specifically to paid traffic. And that means that no matter how, you know, that just adjusts. So I'm not spending the same amount every year. I'm spending a percentage of what my business is making, and it's a percentage that I'm really, really comfortable with. It's actually kind of low. Oftentimes it can be like 15 to 30%. And so my question to my audience would be like, if you're not investing some of your annual revenue back into growing the business, do you even have a business? It's kind of part of owning a business is being willing to invest back into it. So let's talk to the person who's not sure how much to start with. They're on a limited budget. How much would you say is, you know, worth it? Like, it's worth it. If you can start with this amount of money to just start to get a concept of data and lead generation.

Yeah, I would say probably at a minimum, $500 for the month, maybe, you know, the more the better, I guess, you know, but again, I always go back to clients, well, what are you comfortable spending? What? That. Knowing that you might not see an instant return on adspend. And so they kind of have to come to me with that, with that number. But I would say $1,000, 500 to $1,000 would be a good starting point. And then within a couple of days, I can probably tell, hey, we're getting $2 leads. Let's like ramp this up, you know, because if their goal is to get X amount of leads and stay within, you know, the two to five dollar range, if we're there, you know, right out the gate, then let's start to scale. And because sometimes you just, you need volume. You need to get a lot of people into, in through this Funnel to, you know, sign up for the webinar, sign up for the workshop, whatever it might be to then see what your sales conversion rate is when they, when you pitch the offer. So again, the first time out, it's kind of like a test. So you might say, look, I'm going to spend $10,000 on this launch and then I kind of work with, okay, I'm going to spend probably about 85 to 90% on lead generation to get all those people in. Then we're going to see, okay, well how many people converted? What was your show up rate? Well, you know, we kind of go through all of those, all those numbers together and then we have that data to, for the next launch and we can say, okay, we converted at 3% for the last launch. Okay, so now we know that's what we're going to convert at. How many leads do we need to bring in and then convert at 3% to get the revenue goal that you're looking for. So it's a lot of math, but

also like reverse engineering a bit. You can move through it with confidence, not just a guessing game. So.

Right, right, right, exactly. But yeah, okay, you know, I like to have that, I like to have a healthy amount to start and, but I can quickly tell, you know, what's working, what's not. And again, working with a good ads manager that's communicating with you regularly to say like, hey, this is where we are on day three or day two, you know, are you good? You know, this is what I think. And so again, having that kind of partnership.

Okay, so you mentioned your coaching for those who want to potentially work with you directly. Can you share a little bit more about the services that you offer and what's the best way to follow you? Get in touch with you, Laura and I know you offer like several different options. Yeah, yeah. I'm a little hesitant to open you up to my audience just for the record, but okay, here we go.

Well, honestly I don't, like I said earlier, I don't take on a lot of clients, a lot of one on one ad management clients. So I have a couple of arms of my business ad management where I'm just work on retainer and I just run your ads like I do with you and Nick and, and I like having a small client base. So I might not be open for ad management but I do offer coaching and I think that works really, really well for someone who's might not be ready to start, you know, outsourcing ads, but they want somebody to kind of hold their hand through the process. And so, so I have, I'm actually running a special starting in November where it's like five coaching hours plus a Slack channel, a private Slack channel with me and for 30 days. So it's just kind of a special offer and I might extend that through the new year. I don't know. I love coaching and I love, love helping people run their Facebook ads for the first time. Because if you have someone like me or any other great ad manager, I work with a lot of great ad managers. It's just so reassuring to know that they're not just wasting their money and they have somebody who can really look at the ads before they hit that publish button. So. But I ongoing, I offer, you know, hourly packages, one, three or five sessions. We get on a zoom call, we screen share. I provide like a recap, you know, on what to do next. Well, actually, we can build the ads together. I mean, we can do everything from checking pixels to ad strategy to targeting to creative and copy understanding what the funnel is like. But I'm just kind of like your wingman when it comes to paid traffic for, for meta ads. So. Yeah, and you can find me Laura Ball Co. I'm on Instagram and Facebook as well. And yeah, just, you know, DM me if anybody has any questions. I'm, I'm a giver. My husband's like, you, you can't keep giving away the, giving away the farm. I'm like, but I don't want anybody to make a mistake. So hit me up if you have any questions before you turn on ads.

Laura, we've got all of your information over at the Show Notes today, so head over to professionalcreative.com if you want clickable links. It's Laura Ball Co and hello, Laura Ball on social. Laura, I think to just summarize this, I love and prioritize working with people who love what they do. And it just seeps from your every, like your very being that you love this work. And it is in turn makes it just such a joy to work with you and, and get to talk strategy and everything in between. And so thank you so much for pouring into us today. Thank you for being here.

Thank you so much for having me. I love it. I love working with you and I love marketing.

For anyone that's listening who's ready to take the plunge into meta ads or if you're looking for a way to scale your creative business, I highly recommend connecting with Laura. You can reach her again at lauraball Co. You can follow her on Social at. Hello, Laura Ball for more tips and insights. We've got all of these linked up there over in the Show Notes. As always, thank you so much for tuning in to the professional Creative podcast. Be sure to follow Laura for ongoing tips and keep an eye on our Show Notes for resources mentioned. Next week, we'll be back with more ways to help you grow your creative business. My friends, create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world. And remember, there's room for you.