Paid Advertising Won't Save Your Broken Funnel - Fix This First [Ep 53]

Welcome to the Thriving therapyneur podcast, the show for ambitious therapists who are ready to unapologetically make more money, scale their impact and build their dream coaching business. I'm Carly Hill, therapist turned coach turned CEO of a seven figure online business. I created the Thriving Therapeutic Podcast because I'm obsessed with helping big hearted therapists outgrow the office and build successful and sustainable online businesses. So if you are wondering how you can continue to make an impact without sacrificing the life you love, welcome therapreneur. This is exactly the place for you. Think of it like the business school we never had. I am so excited to dive in with you. Let's get started. Hey friends. Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Carly Hill. And today we're diving into a topic that I know so many of you have questions about and it's paid advertising. And I want to preface this by saying ads are not a magic bullet to business success, but when they're done right, they can seriously amplify your impact, grow your audience, and bring in qualified leads that are already warmed up and that are already looking for your support. So in today's episode, we're going to talk about what you actually need to have in place before running ads. If you want to run ads, we're going to talk about why ads won't fix a broken funnel, what metrics matter, and what to ignore some realistic timelines and expectations. When it comes to ads, this is probably the most important thing we'll talk about today because I think that there's a lot of unrealistic timelines and expectations and everybody thinks that ads are just going to be this magic wand. And then we're going to talk about how to stay empowered and strategic when investing in a visibility strategy so, such as paid advertising. So let's get right into it. First things first, ads are not a quick fix solution. I kind of alluded to this already. Basically, if your organic content is not converting, ads won't magically do it for you and magically start converting. Ads are an amplifier. They're not a miracle worker. Ads amplify what's already working. Okay. This is why inside my coaching programs, we don't start clients with ads right out of the gate. I've actually been in quite a few coaching programs where they taught ads right out of the gate and so many people just dumped money down the toilet. Can they work right out of the gate? Yeah, they can. And that's when you can scale really, really fast. But you have to have that super bomb viable marketable offer. And maybe they did already have proof of concept, but this doesn't really work for the masses. With my clients, we start with message clarity, offer refinement and organic lead generation. Then we move to ads once we've validated that people are actually engaging and converting. Because if you don't have proof of concept and they're not engaging in converting just with your organic content, then the ads aren't going to magically do it for you. Okay. We want to be smart about investing towards paid advertising and spending our ad dollars. And the smart way to do it is to test organically first. And the thing is too, even when you have paid advertising on your organic marketing doesn't go away. As the CEO of your business, you need to know how to do both paid advertising and organic lead generation. And if your funnel is not converting organically, if you just pour ad spend into it, you're just going to speed up your disappointment. Most people are expecting paid ads to replace their foundational marketing and they want to take a hop, skip and a jump, but they're actually just going to get themselves into some murky water. Ads are a way to scale once you have those foundations put into place. So there is a time and a place and a space for paid advertising. You need to know how to do organic marketing first, in my humble opinion. Hey there. Did you know we give away one of our incredible digital products every single week? All you have to do is leave a review for the show, then submit proof using the link in the show notes and you'll be entered to win. Prizes include amazing resources like our passive income course, the license protection bundle, top business trainings, my best selling book, and so much more. It's super simple and your review helps us reach more listeners just like you. So take a moment to share your thoughts, enter to win, and maybe you'll be our next winner. So organic marketing takes time and energy though. I mean, the reality is we're always going to spend time or money when it comes to marketing. So you don't have to spend forever on your foundations. You don't have to do organic marketing for years before you get into paid advertising. But we just want to know how to do organic marketing. Get that proof of concept. Okay, it's working. All right, let's move on to paid advertising. That's the vibe. Okay, so what do you need before you actually start paid advertising? Let's talk about that for a second. So, yes, number one, the clear messaging, the validated offer we've Talked about this. You need to know your niche. You need to know your ideal client, their pain points. What are you offering to solve this problem for them? Your message needs to be so crystal clear. No fluffy jargon, no flowery messaging, just straight clarity and resonance. I want you to think about it like a fire and gas, okay? Running ads before you have a validated offer is like pouring gasoline on cold wood. No matter how much gas you dump on it, it's not going to light. There's no spark, there's no heat. It's just soaked wood and wasted fuel. But when your message is clear, your offer is already converting organically, your audience is engaging. That's your fire. It's already burning. Woohoo. Now you pour gasoline on it and it's going to blow up. It's going to roar to life, okay? That's what ads are supposed to do. They're supposed to amplify that existing flame. They can't start the flame from scratch, okay? So before you light that match, you have to make sure that your fire is already going, even if it's small. That's okay. Otherwise you're just going to waste your time, your money, your energy. You're going to try to force something that's not ready yet. So number one, what do you actually need? You need that clear messaging. You need a validated offer. Number two that you need is an optimized funnel. This doesn't have to be complicated, okay? It could be as simple as having a free Facebook group. You could not even have a funnel builder. And you could still have an optimized funnel, but you need somewhere to funnel your ideal clients into. It could be a lead magnet. It could be a quiz, it could be a webinar. It could be a video sales letter. It could be a challenge. Somehow, some way, it just needs to be a journey for your people to go to once they click. That's how paid advertising works. You're shown an ad and they click. So where's the click going to lead them to? What optimized funnel are you going to have when they click? And again, it could be as simple as just your free Facebook group. That's one of the easiest ads to run. You could do like 10 bucks a day. Okay? So you don't have to go farm people and spend all of this work trying to get people into your free Facebook group. You can just run ads to it. But ads only work if they're somewhere solid to land. Make sense? Okay. Number three is a warmup strategy. This is one people Miss a lot because cold traffic needs nurturing. And if you're not familiar with cold traffic, warm traffic, go read the marketing chapter in my book. Cause I talk and I break down all of this in much more detail. Okay? But people miss this because cold traffic needs nurturing. They don't know you yet. And asking for the sale too soon, that's like proposing on the first date. Massive red flag, turn off, not gonna work. Your funnel needs to warm them up. You need to have this warmup strategy before you pitch anything at all. You need to warm them up and you need to build trust with them. Then when all of this is in place, then your ads are gonna become a super powerful tool in your business. I love paid advertising. I didn't love learning it because it is a pretty big learning curve, I'm not going to lie. But it can be magic once you have all of these things in place. And it can save you so much time and so much energy. And time and energy is money. So let's talk numbers for a second. Because people get obsessed or overwhelmed when it comes to the metrics and what metrics actually matter. And if any of this is Chinese to you, then just let it be. But if anything, I'm planting seeds and kind of future pacing you to when you get into paid advertising, what some of these metrics actually are. Because when I learned paid advertising, I had no idea what a CTR was or a CPL or roas. I had never heard of any of that shit. So if you're just hearing this for the first time, that's cool. Okay, I'm planting a seat CTR click through rate. We want it to be 1% or higher. That would be considered a healthy click through rate. This basically tells you if your ad is stopping the scroll and it's getting interest. A CPL is a cost per lead. This is really going to vary by niche and by your offer. But generally like under $10 is a strong CPL. We have our landing page conversion rate. You want at least 20 to 30% of people who click on your ad to actually opt in to actually enter their email address. For example, if it's lower, if it's not your ad, it's probably your landing page. So we have to. It's kind of like a mystery where we're constantly figuring out, well, is it our ad, is it our video, is it our image, is it the copy that we have, is it the caption that we have, or is it our landing page? Like, where are they stopping? That's why we need to know these metrics. We need to know what's working, what's not working. So we need to know our booking rate and our show rate. So if you're running ads to a booked call, well, how many leads are you booking? How many are showing up to the call? How many are converting? This is going to tell us the quality of our leads and do we need to send our ad to a different audience if these are not quality leads we're getting? And then we need to know our roas as well. What is our return on ad spend? That's what ROAS stands for. This is your bottom line. So, for example, if you spend a thousand dollars and you sign a $3,000 client, your ROAS is 3X. That's pretty solid. So I want you to remember this is all data, not drama. We don't have to get really overwhelmed or obsessed about all of this. If some of your metrics are low performing, it's not the end of the world. Okay? Ads is all about testing. It's not a failure. We're just constantly optimizing. We're getting feedback, we're optimizing, we're getting feedback. We're optimizing. That's all we're doing with ads. We're testing, we're ab testing, we're split testing. We're getting the data, we're getting the feedback, we're tweaking, we're changing. It tells you what needs to be tweaked. That's all the data is. Okay, so let's talk about some myths in the paid advertising space, because a lot of people think you need to spend million dollars. No, not really. But, like, they think that you need to spend at least $10,000 to get results. And that's not the truth. But you also can't expect magic from $50 either. I would say a good testing budget is around 500 to $1,000 a month for your beginner campaigns. And this is going to give you room to gather that data. You're going to pay Facebook or Meta. Okay, you can run Facebook or Instagram ads. You can run them at the same time. You're going to pay meta to get you data. You're going to pay at first to just test. You're going to test multiple different creatives, you're going to test the copy, and then you're going to adjust. So 500 to $1,000 a month, I would say, is key. Now you can turn things off at any time so you don't have to be scared. And we have to get that data to optimize, to get the return on the ad spend. Okay, ads are a long game. I would say you need 90 days minimum to see some traction, refine your funnel, optimize, and then build momentum. So I would not panic if week one doesn't turn into an instant sale. Again, it's about learning, optimizing, playing the long game. Which is why your organic marketing is really, really foundational. When you do start to turn paid advertising on, start to enroll clients, start to organically and have a bucket where each percentage of, you know, an enrollment that you get, you put towards your future paid advertising budget so that you can work on scaling. So common pitfalls, mistakes I see coaches making when starting ads is one, they expect ads to fix everything. They have that broken funnel. They have that misaligned offer. Their niche is super fuzzy. It's not going to fix everything. Two is they give up too soon. I see this a lot. Oh, I spent, you know, $10 a day for a week and nothing happened. All right, well, you need at least 30 to 90 days to test, gather data, refine. Did we look at the numbers from that seven days that you spent $10? Let's talk about that. Oh, you're not getting any clicks on your landing page. Oh, you had something broken. This wasn't even optimized properly in the first place. Okay, so we have to figure out what the missing puzzle piece is quitting at week two because you didn't get a sales like quitting at the gym because you didn't get abs by Thursday. Don't give up too soon. The third is not tracking your numbers. You have to look at your data. If you're flying blind, then it's not going to work because we need the data to optimize. So you have to track your ad spend, your leads, your clicks, your bookings, your sales, your everything. You have to have a spreadsheet. If you don't have a CRM system. Number four is treating ads like magic instead of a strategy. Kind of same as number one, where you're expecting them to fix everything. Ads are a science experiment. It's a game of testing. You're not bad at ads. If something doesn't work, you just need to tweak it and you need to test it. And how do you know what to tweak and test? You have a mentor who teaches you. How did I learn ads? It was by having multiple ADs coaches. I was in business coaching programs that had ad coaches and I would go to their call Every single week, I would book one to ones. I had three ad coaches at once at one point in my entrepreneurial journey. And it was so interesting, actually, because they would give me different advice, all three of them, and none of them were wrong and none of them were right because it's all about testing. So I would take all three of their advice and then I would just pick one. Or intuitive. Intuitively know what was best for my business. Or just take a gamble and kind of test. And then I would learn and I would optimize and I would refine. Okay, because again, it's like a science experiment. But going at ads blindly is risky. I would say ads is not something you should try to diy because they're pretty complicated until you understand them fully. And then once you understand them fully, Meta changes things because it loves to do that. Like, if you ever see the interface of Facebook, you know, it's constantly changing. So even still, I was gonna say they do get easier, but. And they do. They do get easier. But you still should have a mentor. Then you can outsource completely. Do not outsource too soon just because it's a headache, one you could get taken advantage of. This is what I see happen a lot. And you need to know enough before you outsource so you don't get taken advantage of. Plus, outsourcing is going to cost you, I would say, a minimum for a good AD strategist of $3,000 a month that is not including AD spend. So it usually doesn't even make sense to outsource too soon because you're not spending that much on your ads to even get that much of a return for it to pay for itself. So my advice would be get a mentor first who can teach you ads. You don't have to be an expert or invest in a business coaching program that has an ad specialist. Or you can take a course and you can do a bit of it yourself. So it's like a bit of DIY and then a bit of do it with you before you completely have it done for you. Closing Thoughts Ads are powerful. They're not a shortcut. They're a strategy. Like anything else in your business, it requires clarity and tension. Patience. You really need to focus on your messaging, the client journey, your testing process, your willingness to learn. This is what I'm talking about. Don't outsource too soon just because it's a headache. You have to have willingness to learn. If you are willing to play the long game and stay consistent, you're going to see results. If this episode was helpful for you, share it with a friend. A therapist Hit me up on Instagram. I love hearing your takeaways. If you want my support mapping out your visibility strategy, you know where to find me. Check out the show notes for ways to work together. Leave a review. We give winners digital products courses of ours. Check out the show notes for all of those details. My love is with you and I will see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening to the thriving therapyneura podcast. I hope that this episode has inspired you to reduce burnout, work smarter and see the freedom potential you have as a therapist. We would love to have you inside the Therapist to Coach Accelerator Facebook group where we have live trainings and cheat sheets on all things marketing, sales and adding coaching ethically and legally. I am here cheering you on and I'll see you around.